Bop shoo-wannee-wannee

Not official.
Official.

Yesterday I drove to the parking lot of a restaurant to read the second book. There's just too many temptations and diversions here, which, when I really need to get something done, are all the more glittery and alluring. At about 4:30, with three chapters left, I got out to go to the bathroom. With the truck door swinging shut, I realized that the keys were in the ignition.

I may have burned a few bridges in my day (heck, maybe even one or two in the last week), but I haven't physically locked myself out of anything in a while.

Fortunately, the rocket-scientist father-in-law was almost ready to leave work by then, went and got the Dearest One's key, and had me all fixed up within the hour. First thing I did was walk across the parking lot to the auto parts place in the strip mall (next to where the remaindered-book place used to be - grief, sorrow, wail) and get another key made to carry in my wallet.


Last night I dreamed that Jeremy helpfully suggested that I use the word "deem" a little too often. I was surprised. And now, awake, I can't find any evidence of that. Interpretation? Some sort of subconscious speech impediment?

Where's my cow?


Subject: Syllogisms
From: the.king@of.moo (King of Moo)
Newsgroups: alt.cows.moo.moo.moo

--- Hypothetical Syllogism ---

1. If Buttercup mooed, then she is a cow.
2. Buttercup mooed.
3. Buttercup is a cow.

--- Disjunctive Syllogism ---

1. Either Buttercup or Daisy mooed.
2. Daisy did not moo.
3. Buttercup mooed.

--- Categorical Syllogism #1 ---

1. All cows go moo.
2. Buttercup is a cow.
3. Buttercup goes moo.

--- Categorical Syllogism #2 ---

1. No horses go moo.
2. Gertrude is a horse.
3. Gertrude does not go moo.

--- Categorical Syllogism #3 ---

1. Some of the animals on our farm are cows.
2. Cows go moo.
3. Some of our animals go moo.

--- Categorical Syllogism #4 ---

1. Some of the animals on our farm are not cows.
2. All of our animals are in the barn.
3. Some of the animals in the barn are not cows.

The uncorrected proofs of the second book I'm to review just came from Chelsea Green, so I requested and got an extension on the deadline. Which was originally in a couple days.

Better get crackin' so I can finish those up and start working on a story pitch to Natural Home. (And if they don't want it, there are others.)

Having alienated or bored most comers, there's really only four or five people (give or take some nominal sum) who actually visit the main page here regularly anymore - yet I persist. It appears that this month will have the fewest site-wide hits of any since I went live.

This doesn't bother me all that much.

Particular individual entries, as the Seat Cover noted, are another story. As it was last month too, the biggest entry page this month has been After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction. This is almost entirely due to websearches, though in February there was a gratifying mention on the bulletin board at michaelmoore.com (which is "temporarily closed.. [d]ue to excessively high traffic...")

The second biggest entry page? Yep, it's still Terror, 9/11/01. Despite rather prominent links from sites like The September 11 Digital Archive, We Must Never Forget, and kottke.org, again the vast majority of hits come from search engine queries.

Third place, Babylon Revisited. (Fitzgerald said, "An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." I suspect it's the schoolmasters behind the hit count on this page.)

Fourth place, inexplicably, is the very first entry: Why this? Why now?

And in fifth place, with just 80 hits, is the non-blog page "A strawbale retrofit and addition in Maryland."

I don't know the song that goes "Lassssssssssssst Niii-iiiite..." - so the only thing it ever makes me think of when I keep seeing it is "ROX-anne..."


(Check out the rockin' collection of MIDI tunes at http://breaktru.com/midi.html, such as "frkstn/Winters"; "machine/Floyd"; "kashmir/Zep"; and "aqualung/Tull".)

"i love this site. i am a poor little teenager trying to make it my school as a goth. i live out in the middle of no where and i have no money. maybe you could post some cheap things or tell me how to be totally goth on VERY little cash. a question, do you have to wear makeup to be goth? i hate wearing anything even lipstick."

- http://www.vamp.org/comments-06-99.html


(Found via following a search logged in my stats.)

"If your grandmother were two years older, she couldn't use this tax program. But if I were married to a baby, that would be fine."

- the Dearest One

I wish I'd written this. It was written in 1973 by Russell Baker, Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist (retired) for the New York Times. It's lifted from the book The Best of Modern Humor, edited by Mordecai Richler; published by Knopf, 1983.

Wearing his Secretary of Defense hat, Elliot Richardson gave Congress the other day a fascinating glimpse into the mathematics of saving the hearts and minds of remote peoples from whatever our bombers save them from when they bomb their countries.

During one quarter of this year (February, March, April), he said, the United States dropped 145,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia and Laos.

Population of the two countries is about 10 million persons.

Changing tons to pounds, we begin to see light. Territory containing 10 million people has been struck with 290 million pounds of bombs, or, to put it another way, the United States has been bombing at the rate of 29 pounds per person per quarter.

Extrapolating over a full year, we get a more useful mathematical formulation; to wit, that the United States is bombing the average Laotian/Cambodian at the rate of 116 bomb pounds per year.

The interesting question then arises, What is the weight of the average Laotian/Cambodian?

Here we lack data. We know them to be small people physically. We can only guess at what proportion of them is too young to have attained adult weight. Conceding these data deficiencies, it is still not unreasonable to hypothesize that our average Laotian/Cambodian weighs 87 pounds - or three-quarters of the annual bomb poundage used by the United States to save his heart and mind.

Secretary Richardson suggested that the bombing has done its job (which is to preserve the Government of a man named Lon Nol) and says it must go on in order to continue preserving this Government. Thus, for those of us interested solely in the mathematics of the thing, Mr. Richardson may fairly be said to have stated the proposition that the present bombing level is sufficient for the saving of hearts and minds.

If so, then we may state a general mathematical formula for determining the bomb poundage the United States will have to drop to save the hearts and minds of any given nation.

This formula is: HM = (4W/3)P, where HM represents hearts and minds, W represents weight of the average body containing the heart and mind to be saved and P represents total population of the bombed country.

Example: Suppose it is necessary to save the hearts and minds of Italy. How many pounds of bombs will we need? To get the answer we multiply the average Italian's weight (111 pounds) by 4 and divide the result (444) by 3, which gives us the hearts-and-minds-winning factor number, 148.

To save the hearts and minds of Italy we would have to drop 148 pounds per year per Italian, of whom there are about 55 million. This means we would have to drop 8.14 billion pounds of bombs or, to put it more manageably, about 4 million tons.

"All very well," the taxpayer will say, "but what will it cost me?" Here Mr. Richardson's figures are helpful.

The 63,000 tons dropped on Laos in three months he reported, cost $99.2 million, or $1,574 per ton.

In Cambodia 82,000 tons were dropped at a cost of $150.5 million, or $1,945 per ton.

In short, it costs 97 cents a pound to bomb Cambodia, but only 79 cents a pound to bomb Laos.

Of the two countries, Cambodia is relatively more advanced economically and has much the larger population. Thus, it appears that per-pound bombing cost must increase in proportion as size and economic complexity of the target country increases.

The bombing of Italy, which is much more advanced than Cambodia and much more populous, might cost as much as $2.50 a pound. At this price the 4 million tons needed to save Italy's hearts and minds for one year would cost slightly over $20 billion. Expensive perhaps, but who would say it is not worth it to save Venice for the free world?

These figures may improve taxpayer morale, for they give a clear idea of the useful tasks performed with the money we pay our Government.

If, for example, you have paid taxes of $1,000, you may very reasonably tell yourself that your contribution has made it possible to drop 1,266 pounds of bombs (at 79 cents per pound) on Laos, thereby saving the hearts and minds of 10 and 53/58ths Laotians for a whole year. (It takes 116 bomb pounds per year, remember, to save a single heart and mind there.)

With figures like these, you do not have to ask your country what it will do for you. You can tell Laos and Cambodia what you have done for them.

"The man who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."

- Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in the book Advice to Writers, compiled and edited by Jon Winokur; published by Vintage, 1999

Jeremy wrote, "Shout-outs to Timo, like janeforshort sez... That's some good-ass writing, and I'd say so even if I (or someone with my name) wasn't namechecked."

Yes, it was indeed good-ass writing. Better-ass writing than I ever muster. And I ought to have told Tim so (not to mention the horizontally-challenged-named one, and there are many days when King k Dazy Rusty v Velour strikes a powerful chord, and Jeremy of course, and a growing list of others as well), because when somebody writes something that good they really ought to be told. It's the least reward they deserve. So, in that regard, I suck for being such a sucky suck about that sort of thing. You are all in your times soulful and masterful wordsmiths. (I almost wrote "hamstermall'" there instead of "masterful" somehow.)

But what's most troubling me at the moment, besides the "hamstermall" thing, is that Jeremy used the word "namechecked" and I don't know what it means. Is it like hipcheck? Aircheck? Soundcheck? Jeremy was cited in Timo's lovely piece - but he apparently wasn't "namechecked." Which, to be honest, at first didn't particularly bother me... except for now there's this niggling matter of somebody named Mark also having been cited, and it would seem then that this Mark also was not namechecked.

My assumption until now has been that that reference was being made to a different Mark, since the comment was made in conjunction with the word "brilliant." Even in my fart-lighting days everything was sort of dim; and that illumination was long ago, not to mention temporary. But now, now, older and more bitter and trembling and paranoid, if I can somehow create an injustice where none exists - that's my unfortunate talent. I'll shrug off anything that might be a compliment - unless I can somehow twist it into a slight.

How stupid is that?

Habitrail of Tears: "...I am at home in these damp tunnels where echo and shadow are more real than what they distort."


I would like to request that Jeremy tell the story of the Bettenburg Habitrail. It's not so glum.

"Send me a word or a phrase, and I'll write for ten minutes." - jane for short

It's me! I am today's winner! I don't win very often. It's exciting.


"I am the winner." - Aunt Lottie, Stranger Than Paradise

>How did we ever write before
>computers and the Internet?

I remember what it was like to write in the days before computers. I recall a big hot object in the sky, like... a BIG PENNY!... and the sky... blue... or so I recall... and... other creatures... very like myself!... using their lower appendages to travel... and funny noises came out of the upper cavity... and the women were... so, so beautiful!... well, some of them were, anyway. It was a long time ago. YOU MUST DESTROY THIS WHEN YOU G

"For example, this thing looks colorful when it spins if you are looking at it. If you photograph it, it just looks black and white. In real life, it's black and white. It pleases me that there are things that only really work if you are looking at them in real life."

- Jessamyn

Hanging in a hallway at Liberty High School in Eldersburg, Maryland

Tomorrow we leave this campground for a different one for a couple weeks or so. No hookups: no electric, freshwater, dumpwater, phone. Not even a lobby with a modem hookup. It's the advanced part of figuring out how best to keep things afloat before we hit the road fulltime.

The new campground is much closer to the Dearest One's mom's house, though, so we may find ourselves popping in over there more frequently. (I know that I'll have to for a couple-three days to get some sitework done.)


Happy birthday to Cathy! Happy Birthday (in a couple days) to Chris who doesn't read this! Happy Birthday (in a week) to Salami!

We went to Sam's Club to have 37 rolls of film developed (yes, thirty-seven) that the dearest one has taken over the last couple years. And there we found a flatbed scanner for $30 (yes, thirty dollars) to replace the one that crapped out. It's the fastest scanner I've ever used.

To test it out, I grabbed one of my clipboards from a former life and scanned the back of it.


The back of that clipboard got me reminiscing about my basement-studio days. It made me want to dig out the Oblique Strategies cards Jeremy made for me years ago. (Some of you may have noticed that I've been quoting an awful lot of Eno around here lately - and the thread continues, obliquely.)

I was inspired to scan the other clipboard, too.


The Oblique Strategies cards are somewhere in the dearest one's mom's basement, along with a refrigerator magnet poetry kit made of text taken from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - another handmade gift from Jeremy.

Jeremy's so cool.

"I know Mark Piepkorn is listening to this right now, but I don't care. Tomorrow he's going to erase the beginning of Wisconsin, but that doesn't matter either. It's going to be blank tape, but that's what it always was: blank tape."

Once again, Brian Eno as quoted in the book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound by Eric Tamm:

It quite frequently happens that you're just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It's like a crystallization point where you can't detect any single element having changed. There's a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly.

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can. There's no point in saying, "I don't have an idea today, so I'll just smoke some drugs." You should stay alert for the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another.

A lot of factors go toward creating a work: technological considerations that suddenly are a little exciting to you, some feeling or mood, a nice day, you just had a talk with a friend. All sorts of things will coincide - and that moment doesn't last for long. It's like things in orbit; they'll move away again.

The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very infrequently - once or twice a year, or even less.

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to he doing Something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you're apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It's the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you're constantly awake workwise you don't allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.

Original citations for this quote-compilation include an article titled "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno" by Rob Tannenbaum from the September 1985 issue of Musician magazine; an article titled "Brian Eno Against Interpretation" by Stephen Grant from the August 1982 issue of Trouser Press magazine; and an article titled "Eno" by Kristine McKenna from the July/August issue of Wet magazine.

We went to Gettysburg the other day, since it's just up the road a few miles. I wanted to go. It was my idea. I don't know what I expected... something awful like the Mall of America, I guess. Instead, it was a little old city that has seen better days, and a bunch of fields with statues and monuments all over them.

If I actually knew anything about the Civil War, I'd probably have been into the whole thing more. I know it was about slavery - what I mean is that I'm not versed in the names and places. It was like, drive a little bit: Here's a plaque on the edge of a field littered with ten-foot-tall stone monuments, and it says that the Battle of Gettysburg started on this ridge over by that barn. Drive a little bit more: Here's another more distant part of what seems to be the same big field littered with ten-foot-tall stone monuments. Drive a little bit more...

And so it was that the gauche, idiot tourist in me was actually disappointed with the driving tour of battlesites.

On the other hand, the information center across from the cemetery (which had some tremendous trees in it, big old ones) was interesting, chock full of guns and cannons and uniforms and all manner of old-timey war accessories at once grotesque and barbaric and lovely and artistic.

Like the bullets.

Imagine that the people who do Smack Down made the movie The Piano. That being the case, it naturally takes place in America and not some weird foreign land like New Zealand. And then, instead of Holly Hunter's finger being cut off, it's her big toe. So of course Harvey Keitel fashions her a metal toe. Then ping, the revolution starts. Patriots first and foremost and patriots to the end, they take that big toe, and they sharpen it - and then they shoot it from a long gun into somebody's face. That's what them bullets were like. Big bastards, and just mean.


Only now, writing about it a few days later, am I beginning to be struck by the fact that a lot of people died violently and brutally for causes in which they evidently believed strongly enough to die violently and brutally... dying exactly where I was driving: driving without reverence, without thought, without a clue, over the death-sites of scared boys and proud men.

Wendell Berry, 'distinguished Kentucky farmer-poet,' on Edward Abbey, quoted in the book Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist by James Bishop, Jr.:

...this is self-defense and self-conservation of the largest and noblest kind; for Mr. Abbey understands that to defend and conserve oneself as a human being in the fullest and truest sense, one must defend and conserve many others and much else.

What would be the hope of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded, and poisoned, or personally enlightened in an age illuminated only by TV?

"Everyone is wrong and everyone is right about everything, and I agree with them always. We acquiesce and do not acquiesce on freaking EVERYTHING! And we all live by our Creed(s) until somebody pisses us off; never acknowledging we've faltered, although we might admit to it."

- kv, Wednesday, March 6, 2002

"Each thing you add modifies the whole set of things that went before and you suddenly find yourself at a place you couldn't possibly have conceived of, a place that's strange and curious to you. That sense of mystery, learning to live with it and make use of it, is extremely important."

"Of course modern architecture looks the way it does because it has to be done that way. It's naturally going to look extremely regular and inorganic, because you can't specify an organic thing in advance. It's too complex. You couldn't specify a mud hut with an architect's drawing. It's too complex an entity."

Both quotes by Brian Eno, taken from the book Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound by Eric Tamm, where they were requoted respectively from an article by Kristine McKenna titled "Eno" which appeared in the July/August 1980 issue of Wet, and an article by Jim Aikin titled "Brian Eno" which appeared in the July 1981 issue of Keyboard.


I've been working on an update of a website called Surfin' StrawBale that I created in 1996 but haven't had time for in recent years. It's nothing but an annotated compendium of links.

From an introduction at the site:

Surfin' StrawBale started on June 4, 1996 in St Paul, Minnesota, on MJ Epko's used-gum-and-cellophane-tape computer. MJ Epko is now a memory, relegated "back into the recesses from whence he came" by his evil twin Mark Piepkorn. Over the last few years this compendium has undergone significant updates and excellent facelifts, thanks principally to the artistic skills and loving guidance of Sara Mock, who spent more time and effort shepherding this thing than the guy who started it. Also, for its entire life, Surfin' StrawBale has been co-hosted at the excellent Masonry Heater Association's website, thanks to the goodness of Norbert Senf.

In early 2002, MJ Epko came back from the grave bitchin' and swingin' to do another update: the first significant overhaul this site had since 1999 - and it was a retrogressive overhaul, at that. (Wherein the classifications were removed, and everything put back on one huge page. Why? "Because it's so very much easier for me to do it that way.") And furthermore, that was probably the last significant overhaul this site's ever going to have...

And a cheeky rant in draft:

What started in mid-1996 as an "exhaustive" list of something on the order of twenty websites fairly quickly turned into a massive and unwieldy pile of links as strawbale construction and the internet both exploded in popularity. Within a couple years of its humble beginnings, Surfin' StrawBale had mushroomed into a dozen pages with hundreds of links.

Fast-forward to 1998: I somehow wound up as, among other things, editor of The Last Straw (a position I've since vacated)... and Surfin's other guardian, Sara Mock, was working on bringing her strawbale dream into reality. Consequently, neither of us had enough time to maintain this site appropriately (if at all), and there wasn't anybody willing to take it over. Linkrot set in. Things here languished.

But people have kept coming in increasing numbers anyway - sometimes hundreds, daily - wanting to find out more about strawbale construction. Despite all the dead links, despite being something far less than up-to-date, it's served many thousands of people.

How extraordinarily gratifying.

And, as it turns out, even though I kept feeling worse and worse about the sorry state of it as time went by, once I had the chance to get going on this update I finally realized that I actually was OK with Surfin' being filled with dead ends and broken links: it was an unintentional, but accurate, metaphor. I don't want strawbale to perpetuate the insidious "impulse-purchase" mentality of modern society. I don't want strawbale to "enable" unexamined existence. I don't want strawbale to be part of the "immediate gratification" lifestyle.

For me, strawbale represents the unending quest of active seeking and learning. It represents individuals improving themselves and their world by becoming nobler and gentler and stronger and more compassionate and understanding. It's about encouraging thought and the recognition that all of our decisions have consequences. It's transformative. It questions the status quo. It's not about business-as-usual. It's not about one-size-fits-all.

I do realize that my view is utopian.

If strawbale construction and other more sustainable, minimally-processed, non-manufactured materials and techniques suddenly became astonishingly fashionable and insatiably desirable, new housing could very quickly become immensely more sustainable for the planet. But it seems to me that without changing minds, that opportunity would be corrupted like so many opportunities have been before. The wealthy would still be living in poorly-designed, inappropriately-implemented 6000-square-foot McMansions with gold-plated fixtures in all four bathrooms, and unused rooms piled high with rainforest-wood furniture turned out by third-world children for slave wages (if that), and wall-to-wall petroleum-derived offgassing carpet... and the middle-class would still be emulating the wealthy... and the poor would still be scrambling for survival... and we as a species would still be just as vacant.

If the world I envision is to come to pass, it seems that it will require a period of transition - probably needlessly long - during which ever-increasing numbers of individuals become actively thoughtful, mindful, caring.

Read me.

And so it has come to pass that strawbale is firmly entrenched in the expanding consciousness of the universal mind (*snicker*... I get such a kick out of saying things like that). Surfin' can now back off from its attempts to be a totally comprehensive compendium - and indeed must, lest I go completely nuts.

You'll find a lot of links here, but you will not find every link to anything strawbale. Used to be that was almost a possibility; but without an underwriter, or a webster as independently wealthy as they are dedicated, them days is gone. Surfin' StrawBale, as it always has been, is a place to start - or continue - your search.

So, how do I determine what's included? It's a little bit arbitrary, and a little bit kismet, and a whole lot dependent on you. Some sites are listed simply because they were already on the list. Others are listed because I found out about them myself somehow. Most new ones are here because somebody suggested them to Igor.

The one thing they all have in common, though, is that I think they contribute something meaningful to the knowledge of the commons. Surfin' StrawBale is not here to provide an advertising platform. There are plenty of sites included here that are selling stuff, but the only reason they're included is because they have information about or photos of SB that are (in my estimation) somehow useful and inspiring, and different in some way than the usual stuff starting to clog up the internet.

If you're a professional with a website that doesn't do anything but sing your own praises and you're wondering why I haven't included you, the answer is in the question. First thing I'd encourage you to do is run your business like a business: pry a few bucks out of your pocket and pop for listings at strawhomes.com and Sustainable Sources. Then add some good illustrative photos, add some teaching material that isn't already covered in a hundred places on the 'net, and ask me again to add you here.

Or perhaps you're a new enthusiast and you've made a personal website that consists of photos and information taken from other websites. Why would I include a site like that? (And why would you make it in the first place?) Like that.

But it's also entirely possible - probable, in fact - that I don't even know about your site. I don't hit the search engines anymore looking for this stuff; that's a swamp I just don't care to wade through anymore. If you've made something brilliant, or found it, and would like others to appreciate it as well, give us a holler.

Disagree with something I've said? Want to change my mind about it? I'll listen. Write me.

"Succumbing to competition from the superstores, 40 percent of America's independents have failed since 1993, and their overall share of the business has fallen from 33 percent to 15 percent. The attrition slowed in 2000, in part because 1,200 stores joined BookSense (www.booksense.com), a national marketing program sponsored by the American Booksellers Association that lets consumers buy online through any of it members."

So saith the Editors of Consumer Reports.


Also see Big Brother in the library.

(Via Jeremy, who is cool whether or not he has email.)

From the article: "Among the act's broad definitions of domestic terrorism is 'acts [that] appear to be intended to... influence the policy of government by intimidation.'" It is, of course, okay for the government to "influence" its citizens by intimidation.