Team Human

...here will be no podcast this week due to the fact that I’ve spent too much time glazing windows and too little time booking guests. Rest assured that you can look forward to future Root Simple Podcast episodes involving topics as varied as climate science, lard and rum. If you are glazing windows today and want a podcast to listen to, let me suggest Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human. While you struggle with the putty, Rushkoff struggles with our troub...

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How to Design and Fabricate Homestead Projects

...nce lots of high and low culture. I drew on those experiences when it came time to come up with a cage for the veggies. Due to my fascination with out-of-favor 80’s postmodernism, I remembered Robert Venturi’s Franklin Court from an architectural history class I took as an undergrad: Impressed that I remembered a small detail from a slide show in a class I took 30 years ago, I Googled Franklin Court and showed it to Kelly. She countered with Wonde...

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A Guilty Pleasure: The Mid-Century Menu

Back in my time-wasting grad school days I made somewhat of a hobby out of thrift shopping. Along with the mandatory copy of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream, every thrift store would have a collection of post-war, space-age cookbooks. Recipes, in this period, are a kind of recombinatory matrix of industrial ingredients. You take some cocktail wieners, a dollop of mayonnaise, some ketchup and a surprise ingredient, say dried prunes and roll them all u...

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Leisure The Basis of Culture

...and rediscovered in hard work. Fr. Mark Kowalewski, who tipped me off to Pieper’s book, describes this state of leisure as “profoundly counter-cultural.” And yet I hear Gmail calling me. Time to update my Facebook profile and get out some tweets. How do you deal with life’s distractions? How do you carve out some time for true leisure?...

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Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...that I could do more how-to posts, but the fact is that they are the most time consuming. We did manage to do a few good ones: Stuff you Learn When the Power Goes Out (with El Niño storms approaching, it’s time to review this one), Restoring a Built-In Ironing Board, Three Things I’ve Learned from Baking Bread with Whole Grain and How to Make Hot Sauce. Podcast Comments Due to the nature of the medium it’s difficult for me to gauge the reaction o...

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