…How Things Don’t Work, by Victor Papanek and James Hennessey. (This is not a new book; it is from the Seventies, by the same authors as Nomadic Furniture.)
I expected to find a book with insightful design criticism of many of the objects ubiquitous in modern life, and I wasn’t disappointed. The authors start [...]
Our next baby should be showing up sometime next April. I’m just about into the second trimester, morning sickness is starting to lessen and I am getting a little energy back. Except for today; it’s too warm in the apartment for me.
Meanwhile, TLG has been on a pooping spree, sometimes five poopy diapers [...]
Even books that I don’t like can have some useful ideas. I’m reading Speed Decorating, by Jill Vegas, whose decorating focus is on staging houses that are going up for sale, and getting houses ready for serious entertaining. So the book’s focus is on easy and fast ways to make your house look [...]
The book ends with profiles of the families that the author interviewed for the book. Most have incomes that are very close to our household income; I found it amusing that we were living more frugally, in the suburbs, than most of the families in the book were in the country; most of these [...]
As far as I can tell, given that I’ve never played one before, it sounds nice, once MFH passed me the hint that rosin needs to be roughed up for it to go onto the bow. It sounds surprisingly nice considering that the soundpost (a crucial little stick wedged inside the fiddle) is made [...]
I just finished putting the tenth coat of shellac on my fiddle, and it looks very nice, as long as you don’t look closely; a nice amber color. I chose shellac because I wanted quick drying and few fumes. (I got Rockler’s 8-oz shellac kit; it comes with four 2-oz packets, and I [...]
We went to the Science Museum and saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, fragments from six or seven different texts, plus a lot of stuff to explain the historical context.
What came across differently from the pictures of the scrolls is how tiny most of the writing is. I’d have a hard time writing that [...]