A Brief History of Cat Art

...oot Simple reader Annie tracked down Burbank for me. She says, I believe “Burbank” is J. M. Burbank: “A Favourite Cat” “The Gourmand” There is a bit about “A Favourite Cat” here: And this book has a section on Burbank Thanks Annie! Beyond the cat-centricness of this post, if you’re looking for a few hours to kill I can’t recommend The Studio enough. You can find the whole shebang here. Notable is how seriously the editors considered the art of cas...

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Seat Weaving for Fun and Profit

...2-pound rolls since I correctly anticipated making some mistakes the first time and I’m planning on making more of these chairs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQkE05DD9_Y I found a helpful seat weaving tutorial on YouTube by Ed Hammond a.k.a. Peerless Rattan. Hammond has sixteen videos on how to weave and cane a variety of chairs. Please note that in addition to ladderback chairs there’s a lot of mid-century Scandinavian chairs that have a sligh...

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Starbucks Moderne

...n and ignored, Generation X. We’re the last generation that can remember a time of lounging in curlycued, overstuffed post-modern furniture, a time before the gig-slave economy. Now we’re hunched over in misery contemplating eking by on Fiverr and Mechanical Turk while the fat-cat masked billionaires enjoy slices of pie and a cup of coffee on the way to their Eyes Wide Shut parties. Further evidence of the age of the artist or, more likely, that t...

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Saturday Linkages: Gaslighting the Quarantine Cats

...nitize their food and kitchens 3 Reasons Your Chicken May Display Red Legs Time to Get Blueberries in Your Freezer? Strawberry Feijoa Jam Your wedding’s been cancelled by the coronavirus lockdown? Good Inside NextDoor’s Karen problem What It’s Like to Get Doxed for Taking a Bike Ride Writer Lane Moore condensed my mood in a Tweet, is anyone else feeling gaslit all the time lately? I’m wearing my mask everywhere I go, I don’t touch it, I don’t pull...

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I’m Fed Up With Amazon

...ans that I can no longer use their affiliate program on this blog. For the time being I’ve stopped adding new links to Amazon products. For years Amazon provided an ever decreasing affiliate income that, partly, pays the hosting bills for this blog and podcast. I’ve written about my ambivalence about Amazon before back in 2015 and many of you said, at the time, that you didn’t mind. I suspect, in the years since, many of you may have changed your...

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