New book. Looks like another century! There’s a great Flash mini-version of entire book so you can preview every page: https://www.blurb.com/books/31099
“The 60s happened in the ’70s.”
We now have a flock of about 24 bantams, maybe 7 of which are these Silver Sebrights. We have one Golden Sebright. I fell in love with these beautiful birds a few years ago when I saw a 10-year-old girl’s flock at the Mendocino County Fair. They lay very small eggs, are a bit skittish, but oh those white feathers outlined in black! We get all our chickens from Murray McMurray Hatchery; they come via the U.S. post office overnight.
Here’s a good blog with a lot of practical hands-on tips for raising chickens in urban or suburban areas: https://urban-agrarian.blogspot.com/
Just published a few days ago, this new book by Wired mag “Senior Maverick” and CoolTools founder Kevin Kelly is, as I speak this morning, #56 on Amazon’s bestseller list (!). Reviewer Thomas King writes:
“What Technology Wants offers a highly readable investigation into the mechanisms by which technology advances over time. The central thesis of the book is that technology grows and evolves in much the same way as an autonomous, living organism.
The book draws many parallels between technical progress and biology, labeling technology as “evolution accelerated.” Kelly goes further and argues that neither evolution nor technological advance result from a random drift but instead have an inherent direction that makes some outcomes virtually inevitable. Examples of this inevitability include the eye, which evolved independently at least six times in different branches of the animal kingdom, and numerous instances of technical innovations or scientific discoveries being made almost simultaneously.…”
Check out Kevin’s writeup on getting his first hard copy (hard cover) of the book, and ruminations on hold-in-hand books vs. eBooks: https://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
I ordered a copy yesterday. Lets see what Kevin thinks is going on tech-wise on the planet these days.
We published Shelter II in 1978, 5 years after Shelter. At the time I felt that I’d misled people with the Domebooks, then shown them a great variety of ways to build in Shelter, and now it was time to show step-by-step design and construction of a small house. That’s at the heart of Shelter II: a condensed 24-page instruction manual for the novice builder for building a stud-frame home: foundation, floor, wall and roof framing; roofing, windows, doors, interior finish, as well as plumbing and electrical work. Much of this applies also to cob, straw bale, etc. buildings, because just about every home needs a wood-framed roof.
There’s also a lot on indigenous builders all over the world and on techniques and designs of past years; the rehabbing of abandoned buildings in cities; and my diatribe against the then-planned “space colonies.”
Shelter was a hard act to follow. Shelter II has no color pages, and it doesn’t have the irreverent joy of Shelter. But it’s a solid book, with construction details our other books don’t have, and we’re glad to have it back in print.
https://www.shelterpub.com/_sh2/sh2_book.html
If you thought Carly Simon’s and James Taylor’s version of Mockingbird was pretty good, listen to the original from 1963. Whew! Inez’s got super-powered pure energy like Tina Turner at her best (when she was backed by Ike). I buy very few CDs these days, what with Sirius radio, but this was one: Charlie and Inez Foxx: Mockingbird, COL-CD 5301, Collectables Record Corp. The title song here is just brilliant singing, nothing quite like it.
I have to admit (sheepishly) to having played the song 5 times just now. Hey, after a week laid up in bed, things are lookin up. My operated-upon knee feels good. I’m back to working on my tiny house book (wow!). It’s a sunny day, some caffeine, ganja, good rhythm and blues, and stylin is the word.
Everybody, have you heard,
He’s gonna buy me a Mockingbird,
Oh, if that Mockingbird don’t sing
He’s gonna buy me a diamond ring…
“Thanx and a tip of the Hatlo hat…” to Stewart Brand/Kevin Kelly for turning me on to Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.
“CM: The key secret hit me like a thunderbolt. It was so simple, yet such a jolt. It was this: everything I’d been taught about running was wrong. We treat running in the modern world the same way we treat childbirth—it’s going to hurt, and requires special exercises and equipment, and the best you can hope for is to get it over with quickly with minimal damage.
Then I meet the Tarahumara, and they’re having a blast. They remember what it’s like to love running, and it lets them blaze through the canyons like dolphins rocketing through waves. For them, running isn’t work. It isn’t a punishment for eating. It’s fine art, like it was for our ancestors. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.
The Tarahumara have a saying: “Children run before they can walk.” Watch any four-year-old—they do everything at full speed, and it’s all about fun. That’s the most important thing I picked up from my time in the Copper Canyons, the understanding that running can be fast and fun and spontaneous, and when it is, you feel like you can go forever. But all of that begins with your feet. Strange as it sounds, the Tarahumara taught me to change my relationship with the ground. Instead of hammering down on my heels, the way I’d been taught all my life, I learned to run lightly and gently on the balls of my feet. The day I mastered it was the last day I was ever injured.…”
https://is.gd/fXmoL
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6ngq7edWBNc/TIZmhfJ4VZI/AAAAAAAAAPY/YW7t_0Ij92I/s1600/100_3822.jpg
Quote from gun-slinger writer Mark Morford’s latest column at SFGate titled: “You want the good news, or the bad news?” Check out his 3 links here as well.
“…Every single one of the tiny-brained Republicans on the mid-term election sheet this very year are full-blown, moron-grade climate change deniers, rejecting any notion that humble little man and his seven billion voracious frogspawn has had any real, lasting effect on planetary ecosystems.
Should these GOP lugnuts get into power, expect obscene amounts of push-back against any significant environmental legislation, much fellating of Big Energy and the intellectually constipated Tea Party, lots of new muttering about nuclear power, oil exploration and how the severity of the BP spill was way overblown by the “liberal media elite.…”
https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/10/06/notes100610.DTL
