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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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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Baker Creek Invites and Un-invites Cliven Bundy to Speak

...etting people be heard, even if we disagree with their ideals. But at this time, due to security and other issues raised by many of you, all parties think it would be better to research the situation, read the information that has been sent to us by customers.[sic]” Given that an interview of Bundy, posted on Baker Creek’s blog and posted to YouTube, took place at the Nevada Southern Detention Center and noted a “nationally publicized dispute,” it...

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The Virtues of Gerard’s Herbal

...Queen Elizabeth. Gerard was one of the most respected plant experts of his time, but, strangely, he was not the primary author of the famous herbal that bears his name. Except for the additions of several plants from his own garden and from North America, Gerard’s herbal is simply an English translation of Dutch scholar Rembert Dodoen’s highly popular herbal of 1554. I appreciate Gerard’s (Dodoen’s?) Herbal for two reasons, first the beautiful ill...

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Rain: A Journal of Appropriate Technology

...tury. Hell, we even made a stab at this when we wrote our books around the time of the 2008 economic meltdown. But somehow the allure of shiny consumer objects sends us all back into destructive spasms of consumption and waste and publications like RAIN get forgotten. Rain featured a lot of articles by E. F. Schumacher, as well as covering such topics as energy efficiency, permaculture and alternative schools. One topic I’d never thought much abou...

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