On Living in Los Angeles Without a Car: A Debate

May 21, 2013

...elters here. Bus stops are ill-marked afterthoughts in an already unlovely urban landscape. I stand in the pole shade, wondering if the bus will ever come, and I seethe about the way this city treats its pedestrians. Erik: It’s a stereotype that LA is car-centric. If I had a dollar for every time some out of town journalist drops in here for a weekend and files a report repeating the “nobody uses public transit in LA” mantra I’d be a millionaire....

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Bee Fever in Los Angeles

Mr. Homegrown

June 14, 2013

Animals, Bees

8 Comments

...the radical “backwards” approach to beekeeping advocated by LA’s maverick urban beekeeper Kirk Anderson, Anderson learned from apiarist Charles Martin Simon, who invented the concept of “beekeeping backwards.” Simon’s approach was stupidly simple: Give the bees a clean box, put them in it and leave them alone. If they get sick? Don’t medicate them. Let them die. Then get some more bees. Amen. Selecting for strong bees is an approach that, in my o...

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I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

Mr. Homegrown

October 24, 2023

Design

6 Comments

...wood to make any dimension that I need, so we were able to make the 25mm x 50mm stock Mari calls for from our larger “2x6s”. But if you’re not fortunate enough to have these expensive tools, I think it would be easy to make this same table with slightly thinner wood, fresh from the lumber yard, without any significant sacrifice in strength. Mari’s designs take their inspiration from American house framing which replaced earlier timber framing met...

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