How FilmLA Blocks Bike Lanes

May 24, 2019

...block the Spring Street protected bike lane. To set the scene here, so to speak, I’ll note that the Spring Street bike lane is rare in Los Angeles in that it is a fully protected lane (recently made two-way), and separate from traffic. The bike lane is in the gutter and next to it is a set of flimsy plastic markers that separate it from the parking lane. Next to that are three one way travel lanes. After a few minutes on hold I was connected to a...

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The Institute of the Present

Mr. Homegrown

April 1, 2019

Appropriate Technology, Water and Power

7 Comments

...while your mouth is full of dental tools. But then I asked myself why am I making fun of people who work with their hands and minds for long hours in order to alleviate suffering? If anyone deserves good pay and days off to golf, it should be dentists. Instead I thought I’d discuss what should be an April Fools Day joke but isn’t. And that is Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti’s appearance at a party last week with Lyft executives to celebrate their...

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Hoshigaki Season!

Mr. Homegrown

November 7, 2023

Food, Food Preservation

1 Comment

...of red and yellow leaves that comes elsewhere. In our house we believe in making hoshigaki in the fall with persimmons from either the market or, better yet, a neighbor or friend rather than chugging those pumpkin spice lattes. We’ve got a row of seven store bought persimmons hanging in a south facing window and plans to start more. Here’s what they look like when completed. If you’ve never tried making hoshigaki, a kind of transcendent dried fru...

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2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

Mr. Homegrown

December 31, 2022

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...ones and replaced the hard drive of my old iMac, which now runs like new. Speaking of tech–Kelly and I spotted this ridiculous “robot” which is just a remote controlled cooler operated by some underpaid gamer. This is what happens when you burn venture capital money. When I went to Kaiser to get one of countless COVID booster shots I spotted their security “robot”. I looked across the street and saw a man in full joker makeup and that was when I v...

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William Morris is the Marie Kondo We Need

Mr. Homegrown

June 30, 2021

Design, Thoughtstylings

4 Comments

...serable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit daylong year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen who, not daring to call their souls their own, retail them amidst numberless insults which they must not resent, to the idle public which doesn’t want them, but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of t...

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