Book Review: The Machine Stops by E.M. Forester

November 12, 2012

...perhaps, to the discomfort I suspect many people were experiencing at that time, as the world rushed into modernity. We don’t hear much about that discomfort, because Progress is our modern religion, and those who once held out some concerns about its cost don’t tend to get much stage time in our cultural narratives. This little story is like finding a message of dissent in a dusty old bottle. Now, to be sure, the dystopic themes he’s working on i...

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Worm Composting

Mr. Homegrown

July 25, 2006

Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture

2 Comments

...ust also sift and separate the worm casings from the worms themselves from time to time. One advantage to worm composting is that you can theoretically locate the worms under your sink, providing a close destination for disposing of your kitchen scraps. However, you can find yourself with unpleasant smells and fruit flies if you add too many scraps for the little buggers to digest. We had problems maintaining the correct moisture level in the bin...

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What Preparedness Lessons Did You Learn From Hurricane Sandy?

Mr. Homegrown

November 2, 2012

Preparedness

12 Comments

...his I learned a few more things: 1) don’t assume power will be restored anytime soon. I should have bought an emergency radio/flashlight with a hand crank generator that a phone can be plugged in to. Until I find that deli, I was concerned I would lose touch with my mother and a few close friends (I know no one on this island and very few in NYC). 2) Make note of places that have outlets. Since I was able to get on Facebook, I was able to see what...

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2013 in Review Part II

Mr. Homegrown

December 31, 2013

Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...than harvesting tomatoes, summer here is not the best time for gardening. Time to contemplate closed vs. open floor plans and catch a crappy Hollywood movie. “Crappy Hollywood” is a redundancy, of course, as all Hollywood movies are crappy. September Mrs. Homegrown complained about my flour storage mess. I just bought a Komo mill and so this mess should diminish in the next few months. In the further interest of cleanliness, I blogged about the s...

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How to Store Bulk Goods

Mr. Homegrown

April 22, 2020

Food, Preparedness

8 Comments

...t the Japanese introduced into the labor process in the 1970s with just-in-time production, the tight scheduling of flows of goods in space and time such that you had almost no inventory anywhere in the system. This was the innovation which gave the Japanese car industry its competitive advantage over all others during the 1980s, and the Japanese raked in the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value until everyone else caught up. The downside of t...

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