Asides

There are 659 posts filed in Asides (this is page 3 of 66).

Body Modification: Will Foot Binding Make a Come Back?

I’m not a piercing fan. Some of it looks nice but some looks too far gone. I’ve seen stretched ears where the flap of skin is dry and pulled tight. It turns my stomach. The little bit of ear skin left at the edge looks like thin leather about to snap. I can’t deal with people who have this – my focus is on their ear rather than what they are trying to tell me. I’m not against body modification, I just don’t want to see it when it looks painful or like it’s about to require stitches/ surgery to fix it.

Futurology

Are you Afraid of the Future?

I don’t see it that way myself. I think things will go on, changing as we evolve. Overall, I have hight expectations for people to change for the better and make things work. I don’t think the worst of the destruction and mayhem will really happen. Why would we let it? Why would our future people (the children now and their children after them) let things end? We all want to live, to survive. People seem to lose track of that basic fact when they get into creating end of the world scenarios.

So, I look at the apocalypse art, the end of the world stories as fiction, creative and imaginative and a warning to those who can make decisions to keep the really bad things from happening. Actually, that’s all of us, in case you were in doubt. We all make big and little decisions which can cause change or leave things the way they are.

What are you Doing About It?

Are you littering or recycling? Isn’t that such a small thing and yet it’s a choice each person can make everyday, several times a day. On this planet we live on, are you a recycler or a litterer? Do you keep things going, care about what you’re doing or do you casually throw it all away expecting someone else to come along and clean up your mess? You might be waiting a long time for someone else to clean up your mess… maybe right to the end of the world.

Think about that next time you flick a cigarette butt out the window or onto the grass. Think about that next time you throw out paper instead of recycling it. Think about that next time you’re shopping and buy items you don’t really need and then think about it again as you throw out all that packaging from the thing you didn’t really need. War isn’t the only thing that can end our world, one way or another, it’s all about the people in the world and what they do with it.

growingCities: Finding Food + A New Balance in the City

A growing number of foodies are seeking out new hidden spots in the city that have nothing to do with the café or restaurant scene. From gathering edible greens in a park to digging for clams along the coast, urban foragers harvest a surprisingly diverse range of fresh (and extremely local) foods in cities across North America.

In New York City, naturalist and “Wildman” Steve Brill leads foraging groups through several public sites in the area: including Central Park, and Prospect Park. His tours span from March to December (at a suggested donation of $15 for adults). Finds of course vary by season, and include a huge range of plants – many of which you may not have heard of. More familiar species include: apples, apricots, peaches, strawberries, cherries, plantains, wild carrots, garlic, walnuts, and a variety of mushrooms.

via growingCities: Finding Food + A New Balance in the City.

Men, Who Needs Them? – NYTimes.com

Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put into what he called an “artificial cell.” This was actually a bit of press-release hyperbole: Mr. Venter started with a fully functional cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can.

When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.”

Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.

via Men, Who Needs Them? – NYTimes.com.

Mobile Homesteading: Sustainable Living

Once you find an old single-wide mobile home, dirt cheap or even free and in need of some TLC, you can set up your own homestead in a rural area. Not so different from people homesteading in the cities, taking over abandoned and derelict areas and bringing new life to them.

Trailersteading is taking it to the rural places where there isn’t a large population (or options for jobs) and making your own self-supporting homestead (or as near to it as possible). Running a trailerstead is a chance to live without debt, growing much of your own food. Living off the grid is possible too. You can create your own green living homestead, living out of a trailer with a very small carbon footprint.

Anna Hess Writes About Trailersteading

  • Trailersteading – The Walden Effect
    Old single-wide mobile homes can often be found for free (and installed for a couple of thousand dollars) in rural areas, so trailersteading is akin to dumpster-diving.

What Urban Exploration is Not

Urban Exploration is about Exploring

Urban exploration is what it sounds like – exploring urban areas. We take photos so we can:

  • get a better look at what we have seen
  • remember what we have seen
  • share what we have seen with others

Urban exploration is about history and photography.

Graffiti, destruction of property, salvaging from old places and setting fire and otherwise causing harm is not part of urban exploration. Also, explorers do not skywalk. Rooftopping is one thing, but the intent is to get a photograph safely, not to risk you life hanging over the edge of a building and getting a photo to prove you did it and dare others to do the same.

Urban exploration has some grey areas. Some explorers are very rigid in what they consider the rules. However, everyone who truly goes into this wanting to see old places does not want to see harm come to them. We don’t want to cause the property owner or management trouble or expense. The idea is to see the places and then leave as if we were never there.

This means we don’t move things around. We don’t leave garbage. We don’t break things. We don’t paint on things. We don’t try to jump off things.

Take only photographs and leave only footprints. It’s a great rule. People who don’t stick to it cross the line and become vandals.