Kevin Kelly in Mongolia

October 31, 2017 at 5:53 pm


“…The wildness is a deception. Scattered in nearly every vista of Mongolia are the round white tents of nomads. We know these tent houses as yurts; they call them ger (pronounced gair). They are the primary home to about 1 million nomads. Today’s nomads retain a lifestyle relatively unchanged from that of their forebears in important ways. Living as I do—in a world teeming with smartphones and Wi-Fi, smart TVs and self-driving cars—it is a remarkable thing to travel among them.

The nomads are herders and typically own about 1,000 animals—mostly sheep and goats, but cows, horses, dogs, camels, and yaks as well. You could think of them as ranchers who move their ranch seasonally. They set up their ger in spring for maximum summer pastures, then they move it again for winter feeding. This movement is not north to south as might be expected, but from lowlands to highlands, or even from open valley in summer to hidden hilly nook in winter to escape the wind, which is more punishing than the cold.…”

-Kevin Kelly

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From “Modern Times,” a B&W masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin.

October 26, 2017 at 8:30 pm

Paulette Goddard, Charlie’s beautiful waif girlfriend has found them a house. “It’s not Buckingham Palace,” she says. Charlie walks in and a beam falls on his head.

One of the funniest movies of all time. It’s a silent film, but made when sound was available. Charlie apparently felt that the Little Tramp wouldn’t work with sound, so this is silent. In the end the Little Tramp and Paulette walk off into the sunset, and this was the end of this character.

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Basque Shepherd’s Trailer

October 23, 2017 at 7:59 pm

I went to the 65th (!) reunion of my class of 1952, Lowell High School, San Francisco, on Friday. About 80 people out of a class of 250 attended. Even though I’ve taken a different direction (wealth, politics) than most of them, I still love seeing these friends of 70+ years.

It was held at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco, and this wagon was parked out in front. The curved roof, with bed at one end is, I believe, an excellent configuration for a tiny home, far better than the poster boy for tiny homes, the steep gable roof with ladder to loft for sleeping — a bad design, in my opinion, for many reasons. Here you can have drawers under the bed, and the curved roof gives you a feeling of spaciousness, as opposed to the claustrophobia of many tiny home designs.

This is also the basic design for the vardo of the Roma people in Europe.

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