I Made a Mallet

...ut a higher power that can only be found in the form of a shop class. So I build a mallet in the course of an entertaining three week class at Community Woodshop. Even their safety orientation was full of useful information and hands-on learning. The mallet class was a great way to pick up skills involving measurement, sharpening, the use of hand tools and elementary joinery (mortise and tenon). Because it was just a mallet I didn’t feel attached...

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For the Locals . . .

On that foot sign Alissa Walker, one of my favorite journalists, covers urban design here in Los Angeles. She wrote a great piece on our nieghborhood’s iconic podiatrist sign. Walker agrees with me that we need much more than kitschy signs to mark our neighborhoods. She concludes, We need more reminders of what history predates our presence. We need more streets that are designed to connect us instead of being fast-forwarded through in cars. We n...

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Weekend Linkages: Smoking Chickens

...piece Cosmic House (Thanks for the link Nic!) One Work: Gelatin’s The B-Thing Meet Thatcher Wine: the ‘celebrity bibliophile’ you didn’t know you needed The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias (Thanks Daniel for the link!) How To Build Your Own Trippy Meditation Pod Insects are vanishing from our planet at an alarming rate. But there are ways to help them Improving tiny urban greenspaces causes huge boosts in insect life If Holl...

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Saturday Tweets: 12 Hours in an Ikea, Bike Helmets, How to Fix Drywall and Much More

...elmet debate: 'You don’t make it safe by forcing cyclists to dress for urban warfare' https://t.co/TVjtv9SdrK — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 21, 2017 Behind Lucky Peach’s Closing, Colliding Visions https://t.co/jU5RJ7rsMm — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 22, 2017 Fix a Hole in Drywall https://t.co/qxcZfgBxbk — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 23, 2017 Turkey splits up fight between roosters https://t.co/xPqOPqRgMU — Root Simple (@rootsi...

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What is a Swarm of Bees and What Should I Do About It?

...y a swarm that has landed in a tree can’t find a home and decides to start building comb right where they are (here’s what this looks like). This is a warm climate issue. Honeybees in the tropics build colonies like this. In our Mediterranean climate the odds are they won’t survive this strategy as it’s a little too cold here in the winter, and the rain can cause the comb to break and fall to the ground. When you have one of these freak exterior b...

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