Getting Out of Your Head

October 8, 2018

...“We need more welders and less philosophers.” Matthew Crawford in his 2015 book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction proves why it’s important to be a welder and a philosopher. Crawford’s believes that certain unquestioned philosophical assumptions dating from the enlightenment are at the heart of our current malaise, specifically the notion that we are all independent and separate logical beings with the...

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Saturday Linkages: Pallets, Ladybugs and Portlandia

Mr. Homegrown

August 30, 2014

Saturday Linkages

5 Comments

...chicks wearing muffin wrappers as tutus! http://www.recyclart.org/2014/08/little-chicks-wearing-muffin-wrappers-tutus/ … The Flight of the Ladybugs http://www.theawl.com/2014/08/the-flight-of-the-ladybugs … The Portlandia Activity Book http://boingboing.net/2014/08/25/the-portlandia-activity-book.html … World made by bigots http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-08-27/world-made-by-bigots … For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter:...

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Trading our Home for a Dome

Mr. Homegrown

July 29, 2014

Design

20 Comments

...in the US) and leak like crazy. Lloyd Kahn, who wrote a bestselling how-to book on building domes in the 1960s, became so disenchanted with them that he pulled his own bestselling book from print. That said, they have an otherworldly and transcendent vibe that, in the case of the pictures that accompany the real estate listing, seem to have inspired the seller to paint some trippy outsider art. The kitchen, on the other hand, looks like a ten minu...

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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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RIP Michael Brooks

Mr. Homegrown

July 24, 2020

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...now in. My writing beat, what has, for lack of a better term, been called “urban homesteading” is poisoned by that individualism which manifests in a concept of self sufficiency whose ultimate destination is a lonely existence in a doomstead bunker. I’ve always tried to point out that we’re all in this together, that we need to build up our households and our communities. It’s not one or the other. Michael was just beginning to formulate a strateg...

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