That’s pretty impressive. No, I’m not referring to building a house with a giant toothpaste tube full of mortar. You know, right after building a space village starship dock around the building site, and a giant factory to pre-fab anything that sticks out of the walls. When I said it was impressive, I was referring to anyone willing to move in and try to dust a concrete house with corrugated walls. Or hang a picture or something.
All the problems of construction that involve actual construction were solved decades, if not centuries ago. It’s vanishingly straightforward to build a lot of inexpensive houses quickly.
I’ve had a hand in building everything from a birdhouse to a football stadium. I’ve never had anything in my way but the government, and the occasional boulder in the cellar hole.
A monolithic pour, all concrete house is nothing new, either.
Florida’s full of concrete houses, I gather, built from CMUs (concrete blocks), which the guys in the second video no doubt could also handle just as nimbly. It’s pretty easy and fast for a few guys to build a single story house’s walls out of concrete block, and they don’t need a crane and a Cray computer to do it. I’ve done it for a wood frame house in a day or two, working along with only two other guys. And I could barely pull my weight back then.
You can always spot the “Tell” in these “new method to build a house in a day” schemes. They manage four walls in a day, or maybe two, after twenty weeks of preparation, using enough equipment to build the Hoover Dam. Then they call it “a house.” Four walls is not a house, guys. Well, I guess it’s a house, you know, except for the foundation it sits on and the utilities and the floors and the roof and the finishes and electricals and the plumbing and the HVAC, spangled with 24 building inspections, plus the occasional required bribe or gangster threat if you’re working in a city.
You can’t order a house from Amazon, built by Apple, no matter how hard you wish for it, kids. I suggest that you learn how to bang a few nails, and get busy.
Well, it’s Wuesday everyone. I just invented it. It’s when you have so much to do on Tuesday that you end up doing it on Wednesday.
Now at first, I’ll grant, that inventing a new day might seem extreme, but I’ve been busier than an adult diaper kiosk in a nursing home for the last few days. Besides, if Homer Simpson can discover a meal between breakfast and brunch, I can write eight days a week, can’t I?
Upon reflection, that last sentence might be unwise, and could bring about a big lawsuit from Yoko Ono. Forget it, and proceed to our usual, unusual Wuesday Trash Day roundup. A day late and a dollar short is better’n nothing.
You might remember him from such roles as Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz, but in the years before legendary comic Phil Hartman shaved the second ‘n’ from his name, he was designing album art for some West Coast rock bands.
Funny dude. Died less humorously, IIRC. Lots of actors were waiters before they found a Weinstein soft spot and became household names. Looks like Phil skipped restaurant work altogether, and had additional talents besides getting laughs, although his album design work is pretty funny, too, if you ask me. Take a look at this one:
Every girl in America had one of these on the shelf in her apartment next to her Janis Ian LP and Cat Stevens disc. That makes it instantly familiar to guys who were desperately trying to make time with said girls, while assiduously avoiding mentioning how much you hated America, Janis Ian, and Cat Stevens. You know, lest you find yourself out on the welcome mat with the door against your nose. So you’ll forgive me if I never noticed this before:
America did a cover of “Muskrat Love”? That Muskrat Love? You know, the Capstan and Toenail Muskrat Love? I shudder to think of it. Or maybe it was just a joke by Phil, and nobody noticed. Because I definitely would have noticed, and ended up out in the hallway, holding my clothes, if a girl had put that record on the turntable on side two.
Google Search will stop its continuous scroll user experience where Google loads more results as you scroll past the first page of the search results. Instead, you will see see the classic and old pagination bar at the footer of the Google Search results.
I do believe Google used to call that Mobile Results, because pagination on a cell phone was considered too tough for your fat thumbs to handle. The article struggles to explain the reasoning behind the change, so I will. On searches for important keywords, Google puts four ads at the top of the page, and three more at the bottom. They ram in Maps results, and “people also asked” stuff, too, and other Google litter. So Google has dropped the mask, and the entire front page of Google results will be GOOGLE RESULTS, and that’s that.
There’s an old joke in the search engine optimization industry:
For decades most Western intellectuals with an interest in cinema (generally regarded by academics as an inferior art-form) praised the movies of Eisenstein as daring and innovative , while rejecting the animated work of his near-contemporary Walt Disney as puerile, commercial and superficial. But the Russian director idolised the movies of Disney, whose style and technique can be seen especially clearly in Part Two of Ivan the Terrible, for which Snow White and the Seven Dwarves served as inspiration for some of its imagery.
In the early 1930s when Eisenstein visited Hollywood he became friends with Disney, whose work he continued to admire until his death. Disney, the Russian believed, “achieves absolute perfrection [sic]in what he does.”
I agree with historian Paul Johnson. Walt Disney was the only true genius that Hollywood ever produced. It’s easy to forget that, because the house of mouse is such a shabby wreck these days.
We’ve been operating in San Francisco for years now, deliberately scaling our service over time. With tens of thousands of weekly trips, our Waymo One service provides safe, sustainable, and reliable transportation to locals and visitors to the city alike.
You can imagine the sort of hijinks that the denizens of San Francisco will get up to in the back seat of a car with no driver present to tell them to knock it off, but if I were you, I wouldn’t. Nightmare fuel. Perhaps Waymo can go into a partnership deal with some chemical company that makes those disinfectant wipes. Because you’re going to need them.
Besides, Seinfeld solved the problem of interacting with a driver years ago:
“It will be almost impossible to tell. It will feel like you’re in a simulation. Because everything will look manufactured, everything will look produced. It’s very important that you shift your mindset or attempt to shift your mindset to verify the things that you feel you need through your experience and your intuition.”
Well, since we’re of a traditional frame of mind here at the Cottage, I’ll point out to “Smith Brother” Jack that we’ve felt that way about everything already, even before the first time we saw a pickup truck explode on the news. So we’re good, thanks. Do try to keep up.
In the early 20th century, a unique and mobile form of housing emerged —the so-called wooden homes on wheels.
These structures, colloquially known as mobile homes, offer a captivating glimpse into a bygone era, when flexibility, craftsmanship, and the open road beckoned to a generation yearning for adventure.
Great photos at the link. Make sure you scroll down far enough to see the “Jungle Yachts.” Man, I want a Jungle Yacht!
Half of the sins of humankind, Bertrand Russell wryly quipped, are because of our “fear of boredom.” Russell’s observation holds true: boredom avoidance is causally correlated with things like addiction, overeating, gambling, student misconduct, poor academic performance, and dropping out of school. Boredom avoidance also prompts subtler moral infractions, including half-listening—often as we check our phones—and frittering away time on trivial pursuits.
I can’t work up the enthusiasm to say anything pithy about the article. But I will point out that you can just drink booze to make other people more interesting, and forestall boredom. It works for me.
Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by music and political writers ever written. It’s as if MTV never existed.
Well, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “journalism,” but still, it does seem a shame. Where will future generations go to find out about asymmetrical hairdos?
Well, that’s the Wuesday Trash Day links for today. Er, yesterday. Bah, whatever. Feel free to make fun of them in the comments. I have to paint the porch railing. Ed in Texas told me to.
That quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” is generally attributed to Mark Twain. He’s had more stuff attributed and misattributed to him than Yogi Berra, as well as plenty more pithy stuff he uttered and scribbled that never made it into everyday discourse. I’ll bet even his laundry lists were Rosetta Stones of wit and wisdom.
So I got to thinking about the “kids these days” discussions that permeate the greybeard portions of the internet. These appear far away from the “OK boomer” environs. These twains never meet, except to yell at each other.
People of a certain age often remark that the younger set don’t like to get their hands dirty as much as the generations that preceded them. It’s a fair comment, generally. I have two adult-ish children, and while they’re willing to hold their nose occasionally and help dad bang on our house, they really aren’t into the manual arts like I was at their age. But does that really mean that my generation is hands on, and they’re all hands off? I’m not so sure.
Here’s an example. I made these, because I can. They’re Adirondack chairs:
There are some clues on display in the picture. The various colors of the pieces of wood betray their pedigree. They’re all the same kind of lumberyard pine. The pieces are different colors because they’re made out of little scraps of this and that I had hanging around the workshop. Sunlight has darkened some pieces of them noticeably.
There is a real fetish for making furniture and other items out of wood pallets nowadays. The internet is full of videos about how to this and you can do that to arrive at objets de meh made from pallets. I’ve always found them to be sorta silly. Pallet lumber is mostly pretty nasty, and lumberyard pine is pretty cheap and not full of staples and lord knows what that spilled from the barrels that the pallets once carried. So people my age make Adirondack chairs from scrap lumber and younger folks make coffee tables out of pallets, and history rhymes a bit. Hey, pallet projects are no sillier than the hippie coffee tables made from cable spools that were popular in apartments in the sixties and seventies, or bookshelves made from planks and concrete blocks.
I’ve often encouraged everyone, regardless of age, to take an interest in building or repairing the house they live in. This mostly falls on deaf ears with people much younger than me. To them a house is like an immutable, permanent, plastic unit that they should be able to buy on a Starbucks salary. The idea that maintaining one would be kind of gratifying, interesting, and borderline fun sounds strange to their ears. So instead of This Old House, you get Dexter’s laboratory. This is sort of project that’s popular on these here intertunnels with people whose fresh sale date isn’t bearing down on them so hard:
Integrating your doorbell into your smart home is a very logical step to take. Making your doorbell smart, allows you to do cool things with it, for example:
Turn the chime/bell off after a specific time, when the kids or you went to bed. Also, turn it on again in the morning.
Send out push notifications to your phone/tv/watch/smart speaker, on the doorbell button push.
Take a snapshot from a front door camera, on the doorbell button push.
Stream your front door camera to your TV, on the doorbell button push.
Ring the doorbell continuously in case of an emergency (e.g., smoke detectors triggered).
I’ve done small electronic projects in my yute. None of the instructions in the tutorial is obscure to me. I just don’t give a shiny shite about making my doorbell do any of those things. I’ll go further, and testify without fear of contradiction that if my doorbell did those things, I’d publish a tutorial on how to make it stop doing those things. You know, like this:
But I also subscribe to the worldview of different strokes for different folks. Frenck wanted to fuss around with his doorbell, and I wanted to make some chairs my wife and I can sit on in the afternoon. The urge to tinker, and make something out of materials at hand, is nearly universal. That’s history rhyming, or chiming, or something.
There is danger here, though. Modify things too much, and it’s easy to lose sight of what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. Here’s a picture of my front porch:
It has a doorbell that chimes to alert people inside the house that someone is at the door. I installed it, and it works. But I also have two chairs that allow us to sit next to the doorbell, and greet people before they even get a chance to press it. And the chairs also work fine, even when the power goes out.
So I acknowledge that history rhymes constantly, although most people are too hidebound to notice when it does. This leads to kids these days diatribes or OK boomer derogations at the drop of a hat. But I’d also be remiss, and a disappointment to my generation, if I didn’t point out that the rhyming these days usually adds up to a really shitty poem. With push notifications.
The title Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood sounds like an ambulance-chasing office full of lawyers, but they sure don’t sound like a court date. We love Jon Scofield here at the Cottage. He’s very original. He’s playing an Ibanez guitar, a sort of knock-off of a Gibson ES 335, or maybe a 330. The only difference is the peghead and the small detail that it’s a much better guitar than the Gibson. Back in the day I played an Ibanez solid body guitar that was more or less a poor man’s Les Paul, only with two cutaways instead of one. It’s the nicest guitar I ever owned, or ever will own. It’s kind of a shame that I never learned to play it properly. But I’m nothing special. Most guitars are wasted on their owners. Scofield’s isn’t.
Well, the driveway’s done. Er, I mean the dooryard’s done. It’s not really a driveway, if you ask me. I ordered 10 cubic yards of reclaimed asphalt paving, and there wasn’t a teaspoon left when we were done. But then again, we weren’t a teaspoon short, either.
It took three days. I got off easy on the third day because my neighbor Rich wandered over on the second day and shoveled along with me. Good neighbors like that are hard to find. They’re especially hard to find when you’re shoveling reclaimed asphalt into a wheelbarrow and it’s ninety degrees out. Hide and Go Seek was perfected at such times. But you don’t have to find the very best neighbors. They find you.
The new reclaimed asphalt parking area isn’t perfect. It’s way more solid and put together than a gravel driveway would be. It’s somewhat less put together than a hot asphalt paving job would be. But good enough is good enough, I guess. A good plan now is better than a great plan later, and all that.
We’re broke-ass losers ain’t got no moneys, but we do our best. I coveted a flat, orderly place to park the chariots outside the front door for many moons. That crossbuck railing on the right hand side keeps you from falling to, if not your death, at least the installation of a second set of ankles if you tumbled over into the driveway. It leads down to a paved area out back. When we moved here, that right-hand side looked like this:
As you can spy with your little eye, the old railing lost interest about fifteen feet short of the corner, and the parking surface was a maze of pits and cracked asphalt and busted concrete. We’ve changed a lot of stuff there over the years. The new parking surface is just the last installment. It looks like this now:
So if you’ve got more gumption than sense, and a good neighbor, you too can buy a plate compactor for $350 or so, and get 10 yards of recycled asphalt pavement for about the same price, and have a pretty good driveway. The dump truck driver who delivers the material will shake his head when he shows up, and snicker all the way back to the yard after he sees your wheelbarrow and shovels, but if the world isn’t laughing at you these days, all it proves is that you’re as crazy as everybody else is. I’m not. I’m an entirely different kind of nuts.
Month: June 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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