Archive for the ‘Item of the week’ category

Hipster Martha Stewart: Uncanny plant/animal hybrid for your bathroom wall

“Well, the blog is finally gone,” says Parrish. “Gone; done,” says I. We sip our Scotch in memory of blog posts of yore. And yet. Wrestling with words and abstract concepts all day, a body’s got to have hobbies. One of my current ones appears to be PLANTS! And today’s plant cried out, not literally, […]

Brussels Sprout Jesus

Bench

I finished the bench made from the nice piece of wood. It was’t that hard, but it took some time. Sanded down the wood with several grits of sandpaper. (An orbital sander made this SO much easier than just using sandpaper wrapped around a block of wood.) Then wipe-on polyurethane, one of the least hip […]

Draft Liz?

I was in Iowa this weekend where apparently nobody can get enough of presidential nominating politics. There was a group of people outside my hotel handing out t-shirts and getting email addresses. I’m not going to say that Warren would solve all our problems. But when I think back on the Bill Clinton administration, and […]

Compact OED

Borges dreamed of the infinite book, and although I wouldn’t have taken the description to that metaphysical extreme, so do I. It’s easier to let that dream go now that I’ve gotten used to infinite network nodes and am never more than a couple of feet from an access point. But the electricity might go […]

A nice piece of wood

This piece of wood was cut in the 1910s from an old-growth redwood tree. It became part of a big barrel for brining olives. Many years later, someone took apart the barrel and sold the wood to a wood store in Berkeley, and this weekend I came along and bought it. Here it is after […]

Bay Area weather forecast

There is a range of temperatures that’s expected and safe — mid 70s as a high (if it’s hot), upper 50s as a low (if it’s cold). Beyond that, Bay Areans see danger everywhere. Today, it might get up to 88 degrees (84 in San Francisco). Seek shelter and drink plenty of liquids, people. You […]

Sanctimonious coffee filters

As I discovered about a year ago, this is the only brand of coffee filters available at the local Whole Fountainhead. I didn’t want to buy them because the manufacturer/brander/purveying-corporate-nexus clearly holds me and everyone else who buys them in contempt. Either the manufacturer doesn’t “care” but thinks I can be manipulated into buying these […]

Jennifer

Six decades of the most popular names for American girls, state by state. via.

Sunday WTF: Out of the closets, into the increased quarterly earnings expectations

A bizarre blog post at the Harvard Business Review suggests that bad business practices are basically the same thing as being a closeted gay: The new Microsoft Surface tablet reportedly rips at the seam where keyboard cover meets tablet. Was it tested for durability? If not, why not? If it was, why was it allowed […]