Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...the far-reaching beneficent effects of this civic housecleaning and garden-making campaign. The general conclusions arrived at by the committee are: that the chief lesson of the garden-paying for things through work-is within the understanding of even young children. A contestant, a girl of thirteen who had had three years of instruction in a school garden, when asked what she was going to put in her home garden replied: “Well, my father is out of...

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Misadventures in Laser Cutting

...l wood box. Laser cutters can also cut entirely through thin materials so that opens up more possibilities to do things that would be difficult to do by hand. I’m intrigued, for instance, with the possibilities for making three dimensional folding paper cards. You could also use the laser cutter for screen printing, making stencils, wood inlay or marquetry. Many thanks to the knowledgeable staff of the Octavia Lab!...

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Eating the Void: On Making a Raw Café Gratitude Chocolate Hazelnut Pie

I have a small collection of odd cookbooks that have, for the most part, gone unused which is probably a good thing. One that’s collected dust for years is I Am Grateful: Recipes and Lifestyle of Café Gratitude. Friends who have been to this oh-so-California restaurant say that’s it’s good while simultaneously a parody of itself. As the intro to the cookbook notes, The Café Gratitude menu gives you the opportunity to start practicing saying somet...

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Making Mistakes and an Update

A big thanks to Erik Volkman who let me know that I had accidentally re-released episode 127 of the podcast (an interview with Fr. Mark Kowalewski on apocalyptic thinking) instead of episode 128 (an interview with James Heard and Ashton Hamm of UXO Architects). I’ve fixed the problem but due to the kludgy way that podcasts propagate your podcast app may still play the audio from episode 127 instead of the interview with the architects. You can he...

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Adventures in Extreme Making: The White Rose

For reasons I can’t fully articulate, I often think about an obscure film by the artist Bruce Conner called “The White Rose.” Conner’s film documents the moving of a huge and mysterious painting by the artist Jay DeFeo. The painting is so large that the moving company had to cut a hole in the wall of DeFeo’s second second floor apartment to get it out. Perhaps the appeal of this film is the problem solving or the obsessiveness of DeFeo. Or maybe...

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