From boingboing this morning
“The slums of the Philippians are getting an extreme home makeover in the form of two liter bottles in their ceilings. The bottles function as 60-watt lights powered by 100% solar energy. Refraction is an amazing thing, if you drilled a hole in your ceiling light would drop directly through the opening in a straight line casting a shadow on the ground in the shape of the hole. By placing a bottle filled with water into the hole, the light is refracted by the water and emitted at 360 degrees like a light bulb. Light bulbs are taken for granted in America, yet are luxury item for the Philippians slums. The two liter bottles filled with water and a small amount of bleach to keep algae from growing, act as a light in the often-unlit slums.…”
https://community.greencupboards.com/2011/07/14/2-liter-bottles-of-light/
These guys looked somehow alive in this light.
For you people familiar with chickens: we have all bantams — Silver Seabrights and Auracanas. Unlike full sized birds, you can’t tell if bantams will go broody. For example, full sized Rhode Island Reds or Auracanas never try to set. With bantams, you can’t tell. The non-broody genes sometimes don’t get get transferred. (Bantam Rhode Island Reds are persistent and pesky setters.)
This Auracana decided to hatch some eggs, so Lesley put 6 of our Seabright eggs under her, since we have a Seabright rooster (and don’t want to get Auracana/Seabright half-breeds). 4 of them appeared a few days ago and they look a lot healthier than the 1-day chicks we get in the mail. Within 2 days their mama had them out in the yard running around like punks (and dodging the pecks of the big girls).
Shelter (published in 1973) has sold over 250,000 copies. Here’s an excerpt from our forthcoming tiny homes book by Maximillian Godino, who was inspired to build his $1000 cabin in the woods by Shelter:
“Since I was a little kid growing up in a house made of railroad ties on Tennessee Valley Road in Mill Valley I have thumbed the pages of Shelter. Before my dad died he presented me with the well-worn copy you see here and it has given me tremendous satisfaction to be able to construct something inspired to a great extent by your research and photos.”
There was an excellent article by Penelope Green in the NYTimes Home section yesterday
on a straw bale builder in the Catskills. Penelope writes:”Originally deployed by late 19th-century homesteaders in the Nebraska plains, straw-bale building techniques, though much refined, have essentially remained the same for the last century: hay bales are sliced into blocks, tucked into a frame and finished in plaster. (You can visit many of the early Nebraskan straw-balers, but not the first documented one, an unplastered one-room schoolhouse, because it was eaten by cows.)
Nobody paid much attention to this hardy Plains vernacular until the early 1970s, when Shelter, the building bible of budding counterculturalists, was first published. Included in its tour of zomes, yurts and treehouses was an essay on the “baled hay” houses of the Plains.”
She’s referring to the photo of a straw bale barn on page 70 of Shelter, BTW, Bill Steen, who co-authored the best seller The Straw Bale House in 1994 with his wife Athena and David A. Bainbridge, told me that this photo was what got him started with straw bale in the first place.
Click here for article: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/garden/in-the-catskills-building-stone-by-stone-bale-by-bale.html?hpw
Photo by Raeanne Giovanni-Inoue for The New York Times
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by AOL in New York. They wanted to do a 1½ min video on me skateboarding. I met the producer and camera man in Golden Gate Park on a hot Sunday (when the park is closed to traffic). We spent almost 6 hours, filming, talking, setting things up. Jon mounted a GoPro Helmet Hero HD video camera on my board, and at one point a microphone on the board to pick up wheel noise, and he shot tons of footage with a big Sony video camera. Above is the result.
Here’s the direct link to AOL Video: https://aol.it/oz2Fkp
This was salvaged from a wrecked ship and is now used as a water tank in Pt. Arena, California
Coming down the coast Saturday, I went down to a cove on the beach. To get there you had to rappel down a rock face on a rope. Here was this guy fishing out of a kayak, with his dog waiting on a rock. I don’t know how he got dog and kayak down there, but more power to him. He waved, and in the 20 minutes or so I was on the beach, I saw him pull in a nice size Greenling rock fish. It was a beautiful day, clear water and good ocean smells. I’m going back to check it out for abalone.
Lloyd House was the featured builder in Builders of the Pacific Coast. Michael McNamara, who introduced me to Lloyd in the first place, just sent me these really nice photos he took of Lloyd’s Leaf House. Michael says: “…I had an occasion not long ago to take some photos of the interior of Lloyd House’s Leaf House…. It has always impressed me as such a perfect little place. So complete. So minimal.
Right now it’s uninhabited… But it doesn’t feel empty or raw. Very peaceful and complete, even without the usual trappings of living. Just a few cushions and anyone could move in. It’s being maintained rather well as part of the park.
Thought you might be interested in seeing a different angle.”
(Note how the ridge beam (found on beach) cantilevers way past its supporting post.)
“The slums of the Philippians are getting an extreme home makeover in the form of two liter bottles in their ceilings. The bottles function as 60-watt lights powered by 100% solar energy. Refraction is an amazing thing, if you drilled a hole in your ceiling light would drop directly through the opening in a straight line casting a shadow on the ground in the shape of the hole. By placing a bottle filled with water into the hole, the light is refracted by the water and emitted at 360 degrees like a light bulb. Light bulbs are taken for granted in America, yet are luxury item for the Philippians slums. The two liter bottles filled with water and a small amount of bleach to keep algae from growing, act as a light in the often-unlit slums.…”
