by Harry Haller at 1:35 pm | 2 Comments
Soon after I posted a link to the Financial Times article about a mass-produced “Kyoto Box” my site was hit by dozens of people looking for how-to instructions.
The best DIY version I could find online comes courtesy The Food Guys: “The ‘Minimum’ Solar Box Cooker’.” I hope this helps those seeking to build one.
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by Harry Haller at 11:24 am | 2 Comments
Years ago, when Mad magazine was worth reading, its “usual gang of idiots” regularly spoofed the do-it-yourself articles from Popular Mechanics and Popular Science with features like “How to Build Your Own Nuclear Submarine” and “How to Build a Skyscraper in Your Basement Workroom.” Fun stuff.
A piece in the UK Financial Times, “Solar-powered cardboard cooker” brought those parodies to mind because, at first blush, it seems ludicrous, and looks a good deal like a pair of nested of cardboard boxes covered in duct tape, black paint, and saran wrap.
But apparently the system works — using the greenhouse effect to boil and bake — and more power to it. As Jon Bøhmer, the Kyoto Box inventor says, “It’s all about scaling it up. There’s no point in creating something that can only help a few million people. The needs are universal — everybody needs to cook.”
UPDATE: The Kyoto Box has won first prize in a Forum for the Future contest promoting green ideas.
Those interested in building a solar cooker should read the next post, “Building a Kyoto Box.”
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by Harry Haller at 8:05 pm | Comments Welcome
If humans are truly descended from apes, then the whole business of prostitution has been going on for millennia. It may well be a survival instinct: “By sharing, the males increase the number of times they mate, and the females increase their intake of calories,” said Dr. Cristina Gomes of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
I could easily wax on about this at length, but all the places the article leads me are certain to generate controversy. Some things are best left unsaid.
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by Harry Haller at 1:54 am | 1 Comment
For years after I first heard Sketches of Spain I put people into two categories: those who “got” Miles Davis and those who didn’t. During the same period, his music was the measure of my chauvinism. I simply could not befriend anyone who would not sit still through the entire first side of Kind of Blue.
Now I’m a bit more tolerant. I’ll talk pleasantly with such a person. I’ll even buy them a beer. But if a bar fight breaks out, it’s every man for himself.
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by Harry Haller at 4:05 pm | Comments Welcome
Let’s be clear: I write because I love the written word. I blog because I believe the Web has the potential of democratizing society in as powerful a way as the Gutenberg press helped democratize the society of its day. I’d like to be a part of the process.
I participate in social networks because people fascinate me, and because I believe it’s a good idea to be exposed to a broad spectrum of thought.
I’m not young enough to still believe love will conquer all, but I support those who do, partly because youth is supposed to believe love is invincible and partly because I am not so old I have lost hope it might.
I am not at all intimate with many of the people in my social network, and I don’t really care to be — not because I don’t appreciate you, but because my real life and my flesh-and-blood network is a full-time responsibility.
Love isn’t about cuddly dust bunnies, it’s about concrete. Although an “I love you” might give you warm fuzzy thoughts, blow up your skirt, make you feel studly, or crank your tractor, it means absolutely nothing if it’s only words.
As I said, I don’t really know all of you. I’m not even sure I like some of you. Don’t take it personally. At heart, I’m something of a misanthrope. Or I like to play one on TV.
But if you turn up on my doorstep hungry, tired, and despondent, I’ll feed you, find you a bed for a night or two, listen to your tale of woe, and try to get you help that will last longer than the few days of rest I can provide.
For me, that’s love. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. So yes, I love you. Every mother’s son and daughter of you.
Now let’s get back to the real Narcissistic business of social media.
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by Harry Haller at 10:00 am | Comments Welcome
This is one of my all-time favorite Chuck Jones cartoons: Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny take a wrong turn on their way to Florida and wind up in Nepal instead, encountering an Abominable Snowman who might have stepped off the pages of a John Steinbeck novel. Bugs had an abysmal sense of direction and was always going left at Albuquerque when he should have taken a right. (Perhaps it was his political bent.) I call the resulting mirth a happy accident. Forget deliberation: Some of my most blissful moments have been the result of similar happenstance, of my turning left and wandering down the path less taken, George.
by Harry Haller at 7:28 pm | Comments Welcome
What a strange day to discover “Cherchez L’Erreur” by Donovan and Zouzou, especially when the past is a poignant ache and the evening sky is pondering tornados. I have no idea what one thing has to do with the other. I’m simply the observer.
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by Harry Haller at 4:52 pm | 1 Comment
Ben Brantley’s stellar review of Diane Paulus’s “thrilling” revival of “Hair” makes me wish I lived in New York right now:
That there’s nothing of the museum — or, worse, of the vintage jukebox — about Ms. Paulus’s production isn’t because she’s reinterpreted or even reframed it. She does what Bartlett Sher did for “South Pacific” last year, finding depths of character and feeling in what most people dismissed as dried corn. It’s not so much what Ms. Paulus brings to “Hair”; it’s what she brings out of it, vital elements that were always waiting to be rediscovered.
(Okay. The truth is I wish I were young enough to perform in the show on stage — and the real truth is I’d like to be eighteen again and experiencing for the first time all the things, good and bad, straight and high, the characters in “Hair” are discovering. Today I miss being that young and that wild. Sometimes 53 sucks. (Object or no object.))
Mostly I’d like an opportunity to put the counterculture in the face of authority again like a gigantic cream pie. That was the most fun of all.
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by Harry Haller at 6:45 pm | 1 Comment
I once lived in Japan (well, in the Ryukyu Islands) and I will tell you without hesitation that it is paradise. While North America remains my continent of choice at the moment, if I had the opportunity to live again in Asia, I would not hesitate. The thought was reinforced this afternoon when I learned Japanese women are reviving the loincloth as a fashion accessory. As anyone who has seen Maureen O’Sullivan in Tarzan the Ape Man opposite Johnny Weissmuller knows, loincloths are hot. Oh, to be in Japan, now that loincloth season is in bloom. To borrow (completely out of context) from “Hamlet,” “Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
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by Harry Haller at 10:17 am | Comments Welcome
As part of my daily slog through world events, I get a “Morning Brief” from Foreign Policy magazine that touches on news highlights from around the globe. This morning’s email contained the following paragraph:
A feisty Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to walk out of the conference if he can’t get an agreement on aggressive financial regulation. The French President will hold his own press conference in German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who he described as being on the “same wavelength,” later today.
Now, I’m not sure whether this is an April Fool’s Day joke or whether an editor was asleep at the wheel, but the concept of Nicolas Sarkozy, curled in a fetal position, microphone in hand, inside the womb of Angela Merkel, is a little too creepy for words. Not that I doubt her womb could contain Sarkozy and the entire foreign press corps, but for the love of God there are some lines journalism should not cross.
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