I love the concept of the tiny house, and clever alternative housing in general. So I was intrigued by this story from the Hartford Courant: a soon-to-be Yale forestry grad student is building herself a mini-house, complete with solar array, instead of moving into student housing. Check out the video tour! (Via Apartment Therapy: Re-Nest.) […]
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Amanda
Partly because of my train commute back in Philadelphia and partly because one can't knit and read simultaneously, I've become a fan of audio books, and of LibriVox in particular. My most recent on-the-way-to-and-from-work listening has been LibriVox's recording of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I'd only previously encountered through movies.* And one of the first […]
So I've had this lovely, slightly iridescent Blue Heron Rayon Flake yarn (in more or less this colorway) in my yarn stash for ages and ages, always planning to make a shawl out of it, but never getting very far with my plans for it. That's just changed, for two reasons: regular knitting time with […]
I've become completely addicted to Cake Wrecks, a blog dedicated to documenting examples of cake decoration gone horribly, horribly wrong. Some of the cakes are just ugly; others reveal startling levels of literal-mindedness on the decorator's part; others are wrong on so many levels that one is left murmuring "Oh dear God in heaven" as […]
Several days ago I had an idea for an article: a study of humanities scholars' social and professional networks, using names mentioned in the acknowledgments sections of scholarly monographs. If you assembled enough data, I bet you could build a network graph, and if you had some way of representing people's areas of specialization, you […]
I finally made it out to Saeed's International Market on Ocean Avenue, and was overjoyed to find a reliable source of decent olive oil, linden tea, rosewater, Cafe Najjar with cardamom, red lentils, and various jams (gooseberry, rose hip, fig) not easily findable at the main grocery store. Also baklava and za'atar bread. This made […]
Actual book summary encountered today while I was selecting new books: "Poetry consisting of found text from Google search results." And I find myself surprised, not at the fact that someone would publish a book of found poetry from collaged text, or that they'd assemble it out of Google-fragments, but that the resulting poems would […]
I think I’ve previously blogged about the Reading Experience Database, a project based at the Open University in London; as the name suggests, they’re building a big database of evidence of what (and how) people read in Britain, from the advent of printing to 1945. When I last looked at the project site, the database […]
The biggest surprise of moving here: even a couple of miles upriver from the Long Island Sound, I can still smell the sea, especially downtown, especially if the wind is blowing in the right direction. And there are always seagulls flying around over downtown. At some point I’ll have to try taking the ferry across […]
I have a hard time not quoting Virginia Woolf’s short story (almost a prose poem) “A Haunted House” in its entirety. But instead I’ll just quote the beginning and end, and point you towards the University of Adelaide’s e-books collection where you can read the whole thing. Whatever hour you woke there was a door […]