111 Cardoons, Medlars and Hipster Toilets

...Angeles Bread Bakers (sign up for an invite to the monthly pizza party) Our 2010 post on cardoons. Our original post on medlars and a follow up post. All you need to know about Toto’s Eco Promenade toilet (with elongated bowl–round bowl version is here). If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitc...

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I Ate 100 Power Bars

...latest buzz-phrase by large food companies. Every natural food product is labeled either “pro-biotic” or “pre-biotic.” If one could distill all those booths down to one item you’d end up with a pro-biotic turmeric, kimchi, kombucha, paleo sports bar grown “regeneratively,” whatever that means. But I’m getting cranky again. On a more positive note I met a nice Root Simple reader who works for Q Drinks, an Oakland, California based producer of toni...

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Camping on Halloween Night

...on the street with a bucket of candy, holed up in the house with a pumpkin beer or out in the woods. It’s said that the veil between the worlds is thinnest on Halloween night, and I’m willing to buy that, because somehow the air always feels full of potential. This Halloween night, I was camping at 6,300 feet in the Angeles National Forest. The weather in Los Angeles has continued depressingly hot and clear and dry, despite the arrival of autumn....

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Solar Eclipse 2024

...operate in most of Texas anyways so we would likely have ended up drinking beer on our friend’s couch, not necessarily a bad outcome. Instead of a trip to Texas I decided to stay put and participate in a physics experiment run by HamSCI out of the University of Scranton that is attempting to answer the question, “How do solar eclipses impact ionospheric structure and dynamics?” To answer this question HamSCI uses data collected though amateur radi...

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Toilet paper in the woods: a rant and some advice

...I clean it up when I can, just like I pick up the empty water bottles and beer cans and pint bottles of booze and cigarette butts and those damn plastic flossing devices and everything else people see fit to leave behind whenever they visit nature. I suppose we all have our different priorities and beliefs, but to me, the wilderness is sacred, all of it. Not just pristine wilderness, but parks and roadsides and beaches. I’d no more throw toilet p...

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