How to Catch and Eat a Rat

January 18, 2008

...We certainly have rats around our little Los Angeles compound, but we’ve never considered eating them. Thankfully potty-mouthed survival expert Cody Lundin, author of 98.6 Degrees The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive, shows you how in this youtube highlight. If you enjoyed the squirrel melt video we posted some time ago, you’ll love this one as well. And the kids will dig those rat pelts!...

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Simple Tech

Mr. Homegrown

July 6, 2007

Thoughtstylings

...offer advice to the locals but don’t bother to take any lessons back. Sometimes this arrangement goes bad when the technology developed by the “experts” breaks down when the parts can’t be sourced locally. There can also be a considerable amount of arrogance in asking poor folks living in places decimated by the legacy of colonialism, and our rapacious WTO/World Bank/global economy to “make do” while we in the first world bleed them dry for the r...

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Save the World–Poop in a Bucket

Mr. Homegrown

January 30, 2008

Humanure

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...human waste, a number of other stories on the subject came out at the same time: Wasteland: A Journey through the American cloaca in Harper’s Magazine. Journalist Frederick Kaufman traces sewage from New York’s North River Solid Waste Treatment Plant to . . . [spoiler here!] bags of soil at Home Depot. A Mother Earth News reader submitted a photo and description of a handsome sawdust privy made out of an old garden hose box. Very clever! Science D...

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Out of Water!

Mr. Homegrown

November 5, 2007

Preparedness

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...Power on Friday and it was Monday morning before anyone showed up. By that time, mysteriously, the water began flowing again. The DWP worker checked the pressure, said it was fine, and shrugged when we asked what the problem might have been. We welcome comments from readers who want to speculate on the cause of this outage as we like to know how things work or fail around here. While we have a few gallons of water around in case of an earthquake t...

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Doing the doo-doo with you

Mr. Homegrown

November 10, 2007

Composting

4 Comments

...udy to suggest that “the right rhyme for the right crime will get you less time.” For us we’re hoping that Dundon’s compost will give life to the dead soil excavated and spilled out on the front slope of our house during extensive foundation work that we had to complete earlier this year to keep our 87 year old house from sliding down the hill. Dundon says that his “Doo Doo” becomes a sort of life-giving satellite of the Garden of Eden he has crea...

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