Small Streams

I Got Mine

The P-G's gardening editor Doug Oster made a great offer in the March 13 Post-Gazette. Send him a SASE and he'll send you a packet of heirloom tomato seeds. I planted twelve of them in an egg crate, and still had about the same amount left over for Liz send to her mother. Here's Liz sitting in the backyard today, one of the first mild days of spring. You can just barely make out the little plastic bag of seeds.

Doug does ask you to send the fruits of the first born.

All I ask is that they send back seeds from the first tomato so we can keep this great variety alive. Last year, I received more than 140,000 seeds in return. I stuff all the envelopes with the help of the Penn Hebron Garden Club.

A truly viral marketing approach to broadcasting the source of one of my favorite love songs.

Historical Succession

One of the concepts I'd like to showcase in the Pittsburgh Signs Project is something I call historical succession. I'm not sure why I don't just call it "preservation." Maybe because preservation has connotations of keeping the same things the same. In What Are People For? (p. 193, "Feminisim, the Body, and the Machine") Wendell Berry talks about transformation of things and places, but adds this idea of respect for context:

The well-crafted table or cabinet emodies the memory of (because it embodies respect for) the tree it as made of and the forest in which the tree stood. The work of certain potters embodies the memory that the clay was dug from the earth. Certain farms contain hospitably the remnants and reminders of the forest or prairie that preceded them. It is possible even for towns and cities to remember farms and forests or prairies. All good human work remembers its history. The best writing, even when printed is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of the quality of the handwritten page; it is a palimpsest.

Something of this undoubetdly carries over into industrial products. The plastic Clorox jug has a shape and loop for the forefinger that recalls the stoneware jug that went before it. But something vital is missing. It embodies no memory of its source or sources in the earth of any human hand involved in its shaping. Or look at a large factory or a powerplant or an airport, and see if you can imagine -- even if you know -- what was there before. In such things the materials of the world have entered a kind of orphanhood.

Defense of Marriage

Just finished listening to "A Prairie Home Companion". At the end of the show they mention one of their real sponsors Sleep Number bed from Select Comfort. You know, the one where couples can have their own settings for firmness, comfort, and support. And I'm wondering if the bed is qualitatively different enough, is the couple sleeping together? And if they're not sleeping together, are they really a couple? And if enough of these beds are sold what will it do to the state of marriage in America. If we feel threatened by gay couples marrying, shouldn't we feel threatened by the married millions who won't be sharing the same "bed." Don't forget that Select Comfort is supporting public radio, and we should be aware of the agenda they're pushing.

Light Hacking

Have started thinking about how to make a cool sign and one of the first things to do is to figure out how to add light to a sign. LEDs would be a cool way to do it.