Bizarre Stuff You Can Make in Your Kitchen

Last week, a baseball player I’d never heard of (I understand he plays in the American league, which uses a freakish set of rules for the game) made news by signing a contract that will pay him a quarter-billion dollars (or, one “A-Rod”) over ten years. Jenn, of Whim & Vinegar, has composed a socialy conscious list of what one A-Rod could fund.

The Atlanta Thrashers host the St. Louis Blues tonight, and I’ll be there. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to get tickets, so a few people’s Christmas presents might be late this year (once a month paydays mean budgets get juggled sometimes).

NPR has collected several songs poking fun at the presidential elections, called them “modern folk songs,” and put them on-line in Real Audio format.

Western China is primarily Islamic, with ethnic Chinese definitely in the minority. The difficulties of living a devout religious life within an officially athiest communist country is leading to quiet murmurs of discontent, and CNN is there, giving us a well-written colorful article.

Lunehaven Farm is “dedicated to providing a resource for interested individuals to rediscover traditional earth-based living. "

I came across this rather moving story about mouse-catching and focus, which is followed by an embarrassingly amusing story of a woman forced into urinating into a cup while driving. At the end of the story, I found that it happened here in Athens.

Did you ever read Ray Bradbury’s story, There Will Come Soft Rains? I read it when young, and it had a profound effect on me. I was obsessed with nuclear obliteration (although it was probably good for my psyche, I was rather upset I wasn’t allowed to watch The Day After), and this story is set shortly after a nuclear catastrophe. The main character is a robotic house, something else that fascinated me. So, this story took a technological utopia and set it in a terrible, terrible time, and it grabbed a hold of me.

I’ve taken the first step toward my own technological utopia, a robotic home, today. My first order from X-10 arrived today. If you read through the marketing gloss, past the webcam, surveillance, and MP3 talk, you’ll see that what they’re offering is a way to program your house. Everything electric, from appliances to light bulbs, can be programmed or remotely controlled. I’m starting simple, merely beaming the audio and video from my most excellent TiVO to two separate TVs without wires. But thanks to the oddly discounted pricing scheme, I also received a couple remote controls and a few appliance and lighting modules. Mere baby steps toward what I see pictured in my head.

You see, I want to be an ecopoet. That’s a term coined by Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars books, and it’s a broad word, but it means what you think it might. Technically, ecopoesis is the act of introducing a biosphere into an arid, unhabitable environment with the intent of transforming the environment into a more hospitable one. Putting plants on Mars to change the carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen, for example. But Robinson stresses the poet aspect of things to mean living harmoniously with the ecosystem, creating beauty. And not just pretty floral arrangements, either. This is what I mean by broad… beautiful meals, beautiful animals, beautiful vegetables. (See this previous post for more examples) And in my mind, it doesn’t mean being a Luddite, either. I want to live in a farmhouse (well, I do now, but I mean my own farmhouse, on my own farm), grow plants and animals organically, use my own muscles for labor, but I also want to be as intertwined with technology as I can. A nearly-invisible, behind the scenes technology. Some examples: sensors in the garden that can tell when specific plants need water and water them; a voice activated digital cookbook in the kitchen; a fireplace that comes to life when I sit in my reading chair.

I’ve longed dreamed of a fusion of “the old ways” and new technology. Today, I start my journey.

CNN is talking fruitcake. I made four loaves over the weekend, following Alton Brown’s recipe from his Good Eats episode It’s a Wonderful Cake. He’s right – it is a wonderful cake.

The American Chestnut, wiped out by a fungus early this century, may return within ten years. Just in time to get cut down to make room for more strip malls, I reckon.