I Spent a Year Making a Bed

...bait title? But I really did spend almost a year on this with most of that time eaten up teaching myself how to do marquetry and inlay work. As I mentioned before, my first attempts didn’t go well and I spent a lot of time searching for advice on how to do this particular style of Art Nouveau work that almost nobody does anymore. Sanding and finishing metal and wood right next to each other also proved difficult and I’m not entirely satisfied with...

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The Frog Notices It Is Getting Boiled

Oops. It’s been a week of conflicting curfew alerts. Each time my phone buzzes with these alerts my already simmering anger boils over, mainly because I think that this mess we’re in could have been easily avoided. Rather than simply stew in my own anger this morning, I thought I’d sit through the Los Angeles Police Commission’s emergency Zoom meeting held, ostensibly, to address the unrest that’s taken place over past few days. The meeting remin...

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The Elysium Delusion

...nate Mars reality show participants, I say we haven’t been spending enough time looking down at our feet. The fact is that earth is a paradise, space is a vacuum and Mars is a hell. We have to work with what we have. In my cranky opinion, the future is in down-to-earth appropriate technology, not space stations.We need to plant gardens here on earth not in the vacuum of space. I’ll note that the farms in these space colonies look an awful lot like...

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We Grow Houses

The last time a television news crew showed up near our domicile we were living in San Diego for a brief stint in grad school and those dozens of microwave relay trucks that showed up were beaming vital information about the former apartment of Gianni Versace assassin and spree killer Andrew Cunanan. So when we spotted a NBC news truck near the Homegrown Revolution compound we assumed our Los Angeles neighborhood had produced a new celebrity kill...

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I Made a Coffee Sandwich

...I used to speculate about what a “coffee sandwich” would consist of every time we went past the place. It took may years but I decided this month to bring some closure to this idle speculation. I based my prompt on the dessert sandwiches I ate on our recent trip to Japan. Typically, those sandwiches consist of a fruit and whipped cream filling served on fluffy Japanese milk bread called Hokkaido (北海道). I guess I could have invented a savory coffe...

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