Our hypocrisy revealed

..., and the house is about to be re-sold at a 100k mark-up. Yet when it came time to finally install a handrail on our staircase (just in time for the holidays, to appease our family, who for some reason find our treacherous staircase problematic) we discovered that arranging the boards horizontally worked best. In short, due to a combination of laziness and skill deficiency and general expediency (the usual deciding factors in our design decisions)...

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Le Phone Freak

...ook is eerily prescient, seeming to foresee an era when we’re all monitored and controlled by a enormous electronic loom in the form of the interwebs. Not that I’m in favor of going backwards, but sometimes I can’t help but be nostalgic for my simpler, less mediated, 60s/70s childhood when Western Electric was still around making sturdy, oh-so-beige gadgets like this thing....

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A Question About Freezing and Canning Home Grown Vegetables

...s sort of preservation. Frozen berries, for example, are fantastic for jam making. If I need to make some peach jam out of season, I head straight to the frozen fruit section of the grocery store. Your caller was asking about vegetables, of course, and there would be some nuances. First, they will want to be sure to freeze the vegetables properly, such as blanching certain veggies to set color and stop enzymatic reactions. Following the guidelines...

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Saturday Linkages: On Sunday!

...The revived art of the Orkney Island chair Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze I tried the Light Phone for a week – could I survive on just texts and calls? Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable King Arthur: fable, fact and fiction...

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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

...e things you like to read about on this blog: gardening, beer brewing, jam making, beekeeping etc. Or how about a world in which teachers, nurses and caregivers made more money than tech CEOs? Sadly, we don’t live in that utopia. Instead we have an economy that often rewards people who either do nothing all day or whose work degrades our lives. Anthropologist David Graeber takes up these questions in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Judging from...

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