Yuban, a blast from the past

I was sitting in the sun today enjoying an iced double americano in a travel mug, and next to me I spied this coffee can being used as a cigarette butt bin. It was like finding an artifact from some ancient civilization that has long-since crashed and died, their cities paved over and the ruins drilled through with fiber optic cables and bullet train tunnels and 3G reception towers.   Yuban? Coffee from a can? A huge can? I vaguely remember lore about that…

The brand wakens memories of a time when coffee was something you saw advertised on TV (remember TV? I think we still have one in that armoire, haven’t checked in a few months), when coffee was something you mixed with hot water and powdered creamer, or as we did in our house when I was a child, let it percolate, glub glub glub, on the counter in that funny plug-in percolator contraption with the clear knob on the top that allowed a view of the glub glub-ing coffee as it grew ever more strong and bitter.

Yuban. Apparently you can still buy it (“Unadorned, undiluted, uncompromised coffee.”) Who would have thought.

The Pull of The Moon

In Egyptian mythology the left eye of Horus symbolizes the moon.

Today is the Strawberry Moon, a full moon pregnant with the promise of summer, which will arrive in just two weeks (on our twelfth wedding anniversary!). In Seattle, the sunset is creeping later and later; today the sun will not set until 9:05 PM, with a rich umber dusk that will keep the sky light until 10PM.

As the most readily observable celestial body, the moon has always been a potent symbol. But it’s one thing to ponder the moon from afar as a god or totem, a sphere passing through the night sky in a monthly cycle. It’s another thing entirely to think of it as a destination. To ponder the mythology of the jet age, when a “voyage to the moon” is not a shamanic interior voyage, but instead has the potential to be a rockets roaring, heart pounding, breath-inside-a-helmet, gravity deprived, crunch of pebbles underfoot experience.

These amazing images from NASA put you right in the experience, giving you eyes of Horus for the modern age.

Surfed recently:

• Australia: Target bans plastic bags next month saving 100 million bags a year from the landfill.
• Mexico: Seeing them everywhere gets me wondering about mermaid symbolism.
• New Haven: Urban chickens fall into a ‘Don’t Cluck, Don’t Tell’ grey area.
• Scotland: Danny McAskill wows on a bike. (Three million views as of this posting, and well deserved!)
• And back to an oldie but a goodie, inspiration from Jan Von Holleben’s “Dreams of Flying” images.

A Backyard Chicken Coop: The Hip Accessory of The Season

The henhouse is framed up and awaits siding, fencing, and a tin roof.

Sunday morning I was at a brunch and the topic of discussion quickly turned to backyard chickens. Everyone within earshot had chickens, was considering chickens, was coveting chickens, or in one case, had just attended a Chickens 101 class at Seattle Tilth.

I realize that Seattle is a little different from other places, and our tradition of backyard chicken coops long predates the current econo-crisis. Still, it seems telling that recently in my circle of friends at least, when men gather to chat, the talk quickly turns to chicken coops or bike commuting. (And occasionally we even migrate to the basement or the yard, to check out the engineering of an Xtracycle, or the features of a cool coop…)

Never ones to be left behind as our peers all become urban hayseeds, our chicken coop started going up yesterday, thanks to a 2-day visit from my indefatigable 70-something father-in-law, who got the posts in and the coop framed and roofed before he ran out of time today. The plan is our own design, six feet by three, on posts two feet above ground, with a corrugated metal shed roof and a chicken yard around it (both yet to be added). The coop will feature a normal 1-foot-square hen door (eventually automated?) with a ramp down into the fenced chicken yard, but also a trapdoor with a ramp down into the cage beneath the coop. If we’re leaving overnight? We’ll just open the trapdoor, allowing the hens the ability to get some exercise in the under-coop cage, but not to venture any further (chicken Guantanamo!).

I’ll post a fuller set of photos when the project is complete.

Short, Fun Video on Mobile Phones in Zanzibar and Beyond

Melubo texts. Near Monduli Juu village, Rift Valley Escarpment, Tanzania, 2008.

I’m a bit of an Africa guy, spending between one and three months on the continent each year for the last few years.  And I’m a bit of a technologist – not a developer, but a dabbler, an observer, a media studies nerd. So this video about mobile phones in Africa tickled me. And it tickled me even more because I’ve spent time on Zanzibar where it was shot, in Stone Town, Jambiani, and environs. I’ve even enjoyed my own moments with digital Masaii. Hiking out of Monduli Juu village last year, after observing giraffes in the wild, and learning about the native plants and their Masaii uses, we reached the edge of the rift valley escarpment and our Masaii friends all whipped out their Nokias. Reception!!!

Three Radical New Chicks

We got chicks. Three awesome little fluffball chicks, peeping away under a heat lamp in our back entryway, promptly named Lucy, Esmerelda, and Chrysanthemum by Lyanda and Claire (and blogged about promptly by Claire as well). This Barred Rock with the eye markings is Esmerelda.

Unlike the chicks in the awesome poultry dioramas I found at the Evergreen State Fair last year, our chicks do not seem to have a penchant for playing grunge, or snowboarding, though maybe that will change over time.

This is our third batch of chickens, after a gap of about 4 chickenless years. Tomorrow the coop-planning begins in earnest around here, with just a few more weeks of hand-raising left before these girls will be ready to set up housekeeping in a place of their own. We’re perusing flickr and other sources of back yard coop design inspiration; Pa Haupt comes on Monday to lay the coop cornerstone so we need a design pronto. We’ll be keeping it simple with a small coop structure and a small enclosed aviary so we can leave the girls alone for a few days. And, maybe, later in the summer, and automatic door opener for those of us who like to sleep in.

We’re going to be raising these girls up right, to be friendly, happy layers. Now if we can just keep them from bungee jumping till they are a little bigger.

Two Marvelous Little Web Films

Catching up on blogs and the internet after a blissful unplugged week here, and came across two marvelous little web shorts. One is a stop-motion short film made from 1300 individual digital still prints, with a great ending (found via Zefrank). The other, with an even better ending, is a palindromic film that reverses midway through (found on BoingBoing).

Pondering the Electric Car

Our VW Jetta is five years old. Last year  we got rid of our second car, an even older Subaru, and I made a deeper commitment to bicycling. And for our next vehicle, when the day arrives, it’s pretty tempting to invest in a vehicle with as low a carbon footprint as the market offers. After all, the vast majority of our car trips are less than ten or fifteen miles, taking C to school or going to appointments downtown. Why spew carbon for those trips?

Electric cars look increasingly intriguing; the NY Times is reporting that Nissan plans to introduce one next year, to be first released in Oregon. In fact there’s a heck of a lot happening to our south in Oregon, including plans for a network of charging stations, and agreements with several carmakers. Why?

Governor Kulongoski is currently pushing a plan before the state legislature to cut some hefty tax breaks for electric vehicle manufacturers who choose to come to Oregon, as well as provide huge tax credits to purchasers of electric cars. (NYT)

The technology is progressing fast, but still, our electricity in the northwest, while cleaner than the coal-produced power back east, is coming from dams. And dams are bad. But this is intriguing – a carport with integrated solar panels!

Even in misty, foggy Northern England, the company estimates each parking space could generate about 1,100 kilowatt hours of electricity annually. The canopies are linked to the electric grid so energy “can be generated for use in the associated buildings when cars are not being charged,” Webster said. “No electricity is wasted.” (Wired)

Not sure about the robin’s egg blue, though, and our car wouldn’t be red, that’s for sure. I can just imagine the conversations around here as the three of us tried to settle on a mutually agreeable color…

Street With A View

Street With A View is the first-ever collaboration between Google’s Street View team and artists staging tableaux for the benefit of the roving cameras.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

It is also probably one of the only places on Google Street View where pedestrian faces are not blurred. Here it is in Google Maps.

More on photographic repetition

I was thinking more about photographs taken in series (no, I was not obsessing, thank you very much!) as I cycled across the Duwamish twice today.

It seems to me these series of image fall into a number of rough overlapping categories (self-portraits over time, regular portraits over time, landscapes/places over time, everything you eat, etc). I was looking at more of these projects on the internet (what did we do before the internet?!) and I got fascinated by the subcategory you might call “typologies.” Variations of a thing, like doorbell signs, or wide right turn signs.

Then I came to Exactitudes, a portrait typology project that pretty much blew me away: the styles and dress codes of various social groups. Wow. Wow. Wow.