Saturday Linkages: Strange Times

...the Gentrifying Neighborhood’s Coffin? Loved the 80s? You’ll love this house How to use your Apple AirPods Pro as hearing aids (via GardenFork) On damsels and influencers World’s worst tiny house A fungi film fest How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America Introducing friend of the blog Doug Harvey’s Less Art: Reviews and Commentaries of Movies, TV, Books, Music, Radio, and Art...

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Weekend Linkages: Not Enough Trains

...A mini Red Car at L.A. Train fest Plant-based meat once seemed unstoppable. What went wrong? Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again? Pruitt-Igoe residents exposed to government testing seek compensation. ‘What about us?’ ‘Rat tours’ boom in rodent-infested New York Building Myself a Reading Tracker App with Airtable and Deno Fresh, Part 1...

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A Lecture on the Connection Between Cats and Grain

...uld we have bread? On Saturday June 4th at 2 p.m. at the Los Angeles Bread Festival at Grand Central Market I’m going to deliver a talk on the connection between cats and grain. The connection is a basic one: store grain and you get vermin. Then you need cats. But, in the course of preparing for this lecture, I discovered that the commonly held narrative of cat domestication is an unsubstantiated fiction. That narrative goes something like this: i...

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The Ultimate Earth Bed: A Mattress Made of Sand

...a post called “A Homemade Mattress?” It was just an off-the-cuff complaint fest on my part, but the response to it revealed a vast population of deeply dissatisfied bed users out there in Internetland. It remains one of our most visited posts, and the lengthy comment section is filled with tales of people who, in desperation, have made, modified or improvised their beds in an effort to avoid the mattress industry entirely. It seems many of us are...

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How to save tomato seed

...are bone dry, transfer to envelopes or glass jars for storage. Be sure to label! *I just lost a batch to germination. I blame the heat. It didn’t seem like they’d be fermenting that long, but after I drained my seeds I saw the tiny little white nubbins poking out of the seeds. Now I have to begin again. This is one reason why you should not wait ’til your last tomato to think about saving seeds. Also, this is a reminder to keep a close eye on you...

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