Why You Should Have a Cat Fountain

..., won’t drink anything but water flowing from a tap. While cats are desert creatures they still need water. For our cat’s wild ancestors rodent blood (yum!) provided supplemental hydration. The ideal diet for a cat would be a mouse a day, but we’d get in trouble with the PETA folks if we started a mouse farm at the Root Simple compound. So we’ve got to get them to drink water. Our two cats drink happily from our cat fountain and from bowls of fres...

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Anima: Animals, Faith, Compassion

...ts meat or not is just part of the issue. Right relationship to our fellow creatures is what is important. Home gardeners, chicken keepers and permaculturalists well know the difference between stewardship and dominion, the difference between working with as opposed to our culture’s mad control freakery. A personal note. I had, in the past few months, fallen off my ethical eating wagon and taken to occasionally consuming what I knew to be factory...

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Midnight in the Desert

...hole: the power to restore life to deceased animals, birth mysterious seal creatures from within the carcass of lambs and produce impossible objects such as 1943 Roosevelt dimes. During a commercial break on Water’s first appearance on Coast to Coast, listeners started searching the area around Ellensberg on an early internet satellite service called Terraserver. Mysteriously, Water’s property seemed to have been blacked out. Bell later claimed to...

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Thinking Local

...ates who promise to, so to speak, drain the reservoir of its current swamp creatures. For those of you not in Silver Lake, the problems with our council, I think, are at least in part part of a general inability to work in groups, a byproduct of the triumph of individualism and consumerism. In the past most people belonged to some sort of community group such as a club, synagogue, church, lodge etc. In those groups we used to see each other social...

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There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale

...ow vegetables without also considering their relationship to other plants, creatures and human beings. Bale, pomegranate tree and mess I need to clean up. Please note the raccoon poop zone on the slightly subterranean garage roof. Our vegetable garden right now is just one straw bale in the process of conditioning and our philosophy has always been that vegetable gardens need to be surrounded by a native “hedge row” that supports beneficial wildli...

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