Natural Beekeeping Conference this Saturday and Sunday

...part of Honey Love’s Natural Beekeeping Conference at USC. In honor of the memory of Susan Rudnicki, I’m going to discuss bee removal scams, corruption in bee academia and pesticide astroturfing campaigns among other incendiary topics that Susan tirelessly pursued for the sake of the bees she loved so much. I’m humbled to be a part of a roster that includes all of the knowledgeable voices in the natural beekeeping world: • Michael Bush • Les Crowd...

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Happy May Day! Boycott Amazon, Whole Foods Target and Instacart

...upport of an eight hour work day. Today, 134 years later, we can honor the memory of those who gave their lives for better working conditions by supporting Amazon, Whole Foods, Target and Instacart workers and not crossing their picket line. Workers at these dystopian corporations are walking out during their lunch break to ask for protective equipment, hazard pay, paid sick leave, cleaning supplies and contact tracing. Chris Smalls, a former Amaz...

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Thomas Pynchon on Pizza

...silly post on cooking out of the Café Gratitude cookbook which triggered a memory of a passage in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. I don’t remember much about the novel but I do remember Pynchon’s spot-on description of 1970s era California health food cooking, Prairie worked at the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple, which a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California p...

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Twilight of the House Flippers

...es. City & Soul (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 2 p. 141. Spring Publications.) Why cede beauty to the right twitter architecture bros, the ones with a Caesar portrait in their bio? They correctly identify a problem, “stuff is ugly” but misdirect the criticism to some kind of moral failing on the part of architects or house flippers, or worse, they blame immigrants or, inevitably, “the Jews.” They never name the actual culpr...

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Out Of The In Box

...ew with Isaacs recently: After I complained about hippie aesthetics in a previous post, an astute reader countered that hippies are the only people who have done grassroots building in recent memory. Good point. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, during the “great recession”, we’re revisiting books such as this one rather than heading to Ikea....

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