Art for woodland hermits

No title: Erland Nilsson. Photo by Lars Tunbjörk

At a wonderful exhibition called "Other Art" I saw this. The theme was "outsider art". All around the place, it seems, there are madcaps with no formal art education churning out stuff like this for their own satisfaction.

If this isn't wonderful, I don't know what is.

The heat is on

Here's my wood stove, a 1960's cast iron "Jøtul #4". When it was designed there was a rage for all things Pacific and "tiki", and this is reflected here. The "Jøtul #4" is obviously inspired by the statues on Easter Island. It has that convex eye ridge and stoic expression. The statues didn't have nose rings but some artistic license should be tolerated.

A great boon with this model is that the front door slides downwards and under the oven, so it doubles up as a fireplace (below). This is real luxury mode, the wood burns quickly and the room is not heated.

That's a water heater on top of the oven, great for washing off all those blood stains after a quiet afternoon spent splitting logs. The oven is not much good for preparing food apart from long-simmering stews. You'd just end up heating up the room to sauna-like temperatures.

There's a whole world of theorizing about how to improve the efficiency of a wood stove. Chop enough wood, sit comatose long enough in front of glowing embers, and this kind of speculation comes naturally.

The burning wood sucks in the air from the room, and then promptly sends it up the chimney. Certain industrious people have been upset enough about this state of affairs to create an air intake to their oven from the outside of their homes.

Another trick is to extend the stovepipe horizontally under the ceiling for the whole length of the room. I've seen old Scandinavian and American school houses with ovens fitted out this way. There is a limit, however. At some point you have to accept loosing some heat up the chimney as the heat transports the smoke.

You can also attach fins to the stovepipes, increasing the heated area. And there are fans to put on top of the ovens, that start rotating "on their own" (actually from the rising, hot air) and disperse the warm air.

Since the 1980's wood stoves have improved immensely in terms of efficiency, and also pollute a lot less than they used to. There is a ghastly irony in that when people really needed these things they didn't work all that well while today, when wood stoves are not as vital, they're much better.

An eye for it

Pregnant women recognize other pregnant women all over the place, I'm told. A bike fiend friend can spot a Campagnolo derailleur a mile away.

Me, I sure got an eye for outhouses. Here's a communal one I saw this summer on a ferry landing. I'm not sure why it says "Baron", but there used to be a barony close by.

Aye, the common people will arise as one, one day.

Also, I'm not sure how it works, as I didn't have a chance to check. Most likely, it's either closed or they've carved out a hole so everything just plops down into the fjord. Any other technology would require maintenance, which in general is just not in vogue.

Building with tarps

A couple of months ago some friends held a performance in the courtyard of a renaissance house. A good rule of thumb in this area, of course, is that no matter what the weather man says it will probably rain, so tarps were suspended over the area.

As anybody who has built with tarps knows, they will collect rainwater and eventually burst unless somebody applies some real engineering to the project. In this case, the problem was solved by attaching hoses to the lowest-hanging parts of the tarp, thus diverting the water. If I can only figure out how this was done, it might be practical in the construction of temporary sheds and the like.

Below is a tarp-and-rain-related accident waiting to happen. Note the water-filled bulge above the bed:

This is the now abandoned home of my former neighbor Mo. The picture is taken some days after he was sent to the hospital, and I was asked to collect some of his stuff. He was what is normally called a "homeless guy", except that he did have a home, this shack made of birch poles and tarp and scrounged odds and ends, situated quite close to the local train station but out of sight of everyone. I hesitate in calling Mo a friend, as he had some real serious issues and could be sort of scary when high or drunk.

I imagine what he would normally do about that rainwater catchment above his bed was simply push off the collected water after each rain. He didn't quite have his act together to make a more maintenance-free solution, though there was nothing wrong with his skills or potential.

You'd think just building a roof with a really steep angle would solve all problems, but it would need to be so steep that it for all practical purposes would be a wall. And you'd be back to square one. A method I've used (example below) is making sure ridges below the tarp create grooves that lets the water flow downwards.

Extension IV

Area hermit expands spartan cabin into sumptuous luxury palace.

This just makes me so incredibly happy. Pottering around, hammering a bit here, sawing a bit there, seeing it all come together. I realize I'm acting as if I was Trifon of Solovetsky or something, as if I built something monumental and impressive.

But there's that crisp autumn air, I have most of the materials and the tools that I need, and pretty soon now, I'm going to put up the doors.

A guy who actually knew what he was doing

This is Richard Proenneke. He thought it would be cool to build a cabin in Alaska and live there for a year in 1961. And stayed until 1998. He was insanely resourceful and built his cabin using almost only stuff he found on the site. That dutch door he's leaning through, those hinges: All's made from local wood using nothing but hand tools. He even made a hinge and a lock out of wood, too.

All this is documented in a film called "Alone in the Wilderness". Proenneke shot a lot of 16 mm film about his life, which has since been edited together. He's almost blogger-like, when a bush pilot friend arrives with two pairs of socks, Proenneke drags out his 16mm Bolex and films them, so he can show them sometime, somewhere, to someone. My friend, mushing comrade and, alas, ex-neighbor Jaass gave the film to me but I only managed to get around seeing it yesterday. It is mind-bending. The stuff this guy could build with hand tools.

He seems to have been a short man with a funny gait. If you get to see the film, look at his enormous biceps as he saws!

Somehow he manages to build, fish and hunt without any kind of macho swagger. Just a careful guy minding his own business, with a bent towards perfectionism. Me, I'm a tall, confused guy with no discipline. But I can still be inspired.

Excerpt of the film below:

Extension III

"Well," I think to myself. "It might not look like much now. But just you wait until I paint it!"

My ride

Extremely professional: The rig, that is. The photographer, on the other hand, didn't even see his own shadow.

This is my off-season sled dog training rig, the closest thing I've got to a car. That seat in front is for passengers or load carrying, the driver stands up behind it and clings for dear life to the steering bars.

It's got drum brakes in front, hydraulic disc brakes behind. And a wicked parking brake made of serious spikes that you kick into the ground and lifts the back wheels up.

There's a whole micro-industry around mushing rigs, though most dog drivers still make do with assorted junked ATVs, bolted-together car parts or the like.

Some just wait for the snow, and let their dogs do other stuff off-season.

For a while, I trained four dogs at a time with my off-road bicycle. I must have been out of my mind. If I had met someone walking their poodle I would still be in prison. There was no way I could stop for the first miles, and I changed my disc brake pads every week. Another disadvantage of bicycles in this context is that if you put it down to check the dogs, untangle them from the gang line or whatever, they might run away with the bicycle rattling behind them.

Purpose-made rigs are expensive, but not more so than top-of-the-line bicycles. And they're made by guys who don't have the advantage of an efficient assembly-line production behind them or a large market in front of them. So actually I'm surprised they're not even more expensive. If I ever tried making a rig that would actually last instead of disintegrating the first time I applied the brakes it would end up costing much more.

Cat on a hot tar roof

Here's Felis, licking her genitals on my roof. You can also see how I should spend some time improving that roof, instead of just building more stuff.

Homebrew DC LED lamp

Spread the light: Actually, the funnel is just for looks. The LED lights up a pretty narrow area.

The hardware store where I get my weekly fix has started stocking 3w DC LED bulbs which emit "warm white" light, 3000 kelvin. This is astonishing stuff. Just a couple of years ago the best I could get were 1w LED bulbs with that eerie, sf-like bluish white light. It was either that, or solder together a whole bunch of small LEDs by myself, still emitting that creepy alien hue.
Below is the bulb, intricately engineered with an integrated heat sink, as it were. To the right is a "bulb socket", just a way to connect the bulb to wires.

Strangely, there are hardly any lamps around that this bulb would fit in. There are some hideous low volt-lamps for RVs, but they look like something you'd get free with a stick of gum.
I found a steel funnel, some heat shrink tubing, a cigarette lighter plug, wire and a switch which I think I got from some car shop, and strung it all together.

That picture on the wall, by the way, is from one of my former lives as a frame maker. I had a friend who was a budding artist who would come by after closing time with prints and I'd frame them for him, and get some of his works for my trouble. Much to my chagrin and surprise, he has become an art teacher instead of a fabulously famous artist. Those swaps would have made a good story.

Come to think of it, it's a nice story anyway.

Here's the lamp in action above my bed. The candle on the right seems just as strong, but that's just the camera talking. The light from the lamp is more than strong enough for reading.
It draws so little electricity it does not even register on my control panel, but if I turn on my 1 w LED table lamp too, they draw 0,6 amps put together.

Downscaling

I've had between one and eight sled dogs for the last eleven years. For four memorable months, I took care of two German Shorthaired Pointers for a friend who was traveling, so there were ten dogs on my lot.

Now I'm down to four. I found it harder and harder to train a large team. So I've sent away the most athletic mutts to happier lives with more dedicated mushers. And by now I realize I'm never going to run a team of eight again. At least not eight of my own dogs, which was the whole point. I have no need to be a tourist on somebody else's sled.

I still can't make myself burn all those doghouses, though. So they're stacked up, like some sad Doggy Manhattan.

Things change. Go with the flow.

Kerosene addiction III: How to use an Aladdin lamp

According to the internet, and if you don't believe the internet, what are you going to believe, Aladdins are the "Cadillacs" of kerosene lamps. This makes a lot of sense. They are big, beautiful and the company's R&D department have obviously been on vacation for a long, long time. The Aladdin lamps also need constant attention and use a whole lot of fuel.

Some of the parts for this contraption are still labeled as "Made in Tennessee". How often do you see that these days?

They are really wonderful things and easy to fall in love with. But they are not easy. I used to hold courses in "Aladdin care 101" when I went away and surrendered my place and dogs to other people, but I would see their eyes glaze over and could almost hear them thinking to themselves "How hard can this be? It's a lamp, for chrissake." Before I managed to get to the train station they would invariably call and tell me the lamp was sooting like hell.

Now I simply tell dog sitters to never mind about those lamps. Stick to the other ones.

Aladdin lamps are round wick type, but with a twist. Above the wick, there's a mantle covered with thorium. And that mantle, in some way or another, reacts to the flame beneath it and lights up something fierce.

Step I: Fill'er up! I have a small funnel with a bent stem that makes filling less messy. You can fill the lamp even while it's burning, it's not going to kill you unless you do something stupid. If your dogs are like mine, this is the moment they will choose to flip your arm up with their snout. So I normally do this when I'm alone.

If the wick has been dry for a while, let it soak for half an hour.

Step II: Trimming the wick. Most lamps are delivered with a small plastic trimmer. Remove the flame spreader, a perforated thimble-like device inside the wick, and turn that plastic doo-dad clockwise on top of the wick. I do this every third or fourth time I use the lamp. I keep the trimmer on a nail on the wall, otherwise I would certainly loose it.

Step III: Insert flame spreader.

Step IV: Light it up! You want a blue flame. If it gets yellow, it will start to smell.

Step V: Add the combined glass chimney/mantle thingamajig. Twist it on. And now do this, I mean it: Turn the wick down until you here a throbbing/humming sound. That's too low. Turn it slightly up. You want to be able to see the woven pattern in the mantle, if not, it's too bright. Now let it alone for a while. After some time, you can consider turning it up.

If you do the homo electricus thing and just crank it up to max at once, it will start sooting horribly. This is because the kerosene's viscosity changes with the temperature around it. If it gets real hot, it flows easier, and you get too much kerosene which is then not properly combusted.

That's my theory, anyway.

I usually keep my Aladdin lamps turned down pretty low, and then turn up the one I use for reading or sewing or eating. And I keep an eye on that bugger. If a dark spot appears on the mantle, I turn the wick down, and it disappears. By now I have developed an intense pavlovian reaction to the smell of sooting kerosene.

These lamps must have been a real revolution for people in rural areas. They were invented around the same time people in cities had gas lights, and just before they got electricity. But for millions of kids in the boondocks these lamps erased the link between "doing your homework" and "going blind".

They give off a whole lot of heat, too. Comparable to a 1000w electrical heater, I'm told. This is nice to know, when comparing with stuff in civilization. I sort of know what "1ooo watts" is. Actually, if I stay at home all day during winter, four of these will keep me toasty without lighting up the stove.

If you turn up the light, it corresponds to a 60 w incandescent light bulb.

On this site:

Kerosene addiction I: Flat wick lanterns

Kerosene addiction II: Round wick lanterns

Extension II

Going nowhere fast. But even the slightest progress makes me fantasize about all the cool stuff I could build. Someday soon.

Hard Core

Somewhere in the distance: You could here the banjo plucked.

This is my friend and neighbor Iv. His living conditions are to me what my living conditions are to everybody else. Until recently he didn't even use propane, but lit an open fire every time he felt like coffee.

Extension

First impressions: Sometimes that Unabomber thing just goes too far.

Squaring it: Extending the extension, ever so slightly.

There's never enough storage space. I am currently extending my shop (itself an extension of the cabin), so I can get a place to stack up a whole lot of firewood which I can then retrieve during winter in a leisurely way while still in my slippers.

This is one of those little things I've learned up here. Comfort is, to no small extent, about minimizing the number of times you have to put on your boots each day.

I am also planning to work more from home, so I will have to eat humble pie and drag my gas generator up here. And this is where I'll put it.

I bought the generator some years ago, and then, without ever having used it, promptly lent it to a friend who needed it more than I did. Now he's moving to town, so it's my turn to rack up my CO2 score. Some people build designated, sound proofed generator shacks, but I can't see myself using it all that much. The intricacies of hauling gas up here will keep use down.

Crossing

To get to my place, you need to cross a bog. This is, of course, maddeningly inconvenient.

But it's nice too, in a sense. It's like having a moat.

Mostly, though, it's a nuiscance. If you don't pay attention, you sink down to your thighs. Some parts of the year, If I have guests, I have to go down and greet them with spare rubber boots for them to use. And then, like some american native in a western movie, tell them to step exactly where I step.

I've spent quite some time trying to figure out how I could cross the bog while keeping my boots dry. Walking around the wettest spots makes no sense as you just end up turning ever larger parts of the bog into hideous, muddy ruts.

I could drain the thing, I guess. But this is the lowest spot in quite a large area.

In the end, I just smacked together some pressure treated boards and let them float on the softest spots. It doesn't look great, but hopefully it doesn't attract too much attention, either.

Why maths is fun

Hey, Nanok! There's some oil here! Greenlandic dogs. Photo: DN.

According to a recent piece in Times Online, there might be a whole shitload of oil off the coast of Greenland. 50 billion barrels, their sources claim.

That's a lot of goop.

Nowhere does the piece mention what 50 billion barrels actually means.

But if you know your maths, you know we're talking about the equivalent of seven years of US consumption. Or less than two years' worth of global use. Provided, of course, we don't produce more babies than dead people and somehow manage to avoid increasing our consumption of oil. Oh, and these numbers also rest on the provision that all the oil down there in that icy sea is, for some bizarre and unpredecented reason, extractable.

Norway just cut it's estimation of the amount of oil in the Barents Sea with 20 percent. So let's imagine the claims about oil off Greenland are exxagarated, too. And that only some of it is extractable. And that population increase and the desire for increased economic growth leads to a greater demand for oil.

You get my drift.

More stitchin'

Darn it! One of my perpetual socks.

Socks are the new candy. Stand in front of the counter at most sports shops, and you will find an array of supposedly extremely advanced "technical" socks. Some are made for running, some for walking, and some for cross country skiing. And so on. On the packaging you will typically see exploded diagrams of the interior workings of these socks. More r&d have gone into these than the space shuttle, it seems.

The psychology behind all this is very transparent. In a super market, you see candy and magazines right in front of you while waiting for your turn, and you think to yourself, boy, some sweets would be nice. Socks work the same way. Wouldn't it be nice to have really, really good socks, I mutter to myself while waiting for the opportunity to pay for ski wax or whatever.

Buy ten pairs of these socks, and you've spent as much as you would for a small computer. I'm not making this up.

I'm not really that upset about the money part. Though I'm not rolling in moolah, I earn much more than I deserve and I could probably buy all the socks I want. I'm just upset that normal, and just as comfortable and durable socks, can now only be obtained in army surplus stores and those places that sell work clothes. The high tech socks are not particularily long-lasting, and of course the companies that make them haven't really made socks that are fine-tuned for snowboarding or running, they've just played around with the colors and different types of synthetic fibres.

So as one of rather few employed western males, I darn my socks. I'm so vain about this I even use contrasting colors on purpose. Not that a lot of people ever see my socks, and if they did, I might not really blow their minds. But I get a kick out of it, and I'm not hurting anyone.

A method I find works well is to stuff a thermos in a sock while darning it. This way you make sure you don't end up darning both sides of the sock together. There are specialized "darning eggs" out of wood out there, but I'll need to make myself a lathe before i ever get one of those.

The simple life

Flipped through an old issue of National Geographic yesterday, and read about the Greenlandic mummies of Qilakitsoq. The lungs of the females contained three times as much soot as the lungs of average city dwellers today.

The reason is that these women spent their lives tending blubber lamps, the only source of man made light available to the Inuit at the time.

I need to be reminded of these things. I have a tendency to believe that simple lives are healthy lives, but it is never that easy.

So go easy on those blubber lamps.

Packing

I have this recurring dream about a greenhouse. So do neighbors and friends Ø & M, who salvaged these windows from a construction site, but later came to their senses and decided to get a commercial greenhouse instead of building with these.
"How could we be so stupid, and end up with a ton of useless windows?" they asked themselves.
And then they called me.
As usual with stuff that is so heavy that you can barely lift it, these windows were also just big enough to make it almost impossible to get a good grip on each side.
I have a backpack with a sturdy frame that comes in handy for these kind of things. I removed the pack itself, and used a bed roll for friction and padding, and used a trucker's strap to fasten the window.
Sometimes freighting stuff up to the cabin can only be done through sheer pigheadedness, but this time it went ok.
Why not use the dogs, you might well ask. The path up to my place is just too difficult for any kind of cart. And I'm not going to build a road.
There actually is such a thing as a wheeled back pack out there. Imagine.

Musher Nation

Walked down to the valley with dogs Gill and Bibi to pick up provisions and post a friend had brought me, and passed neighbor G. on a run with his team.
Anybody who lives within ten miles is a neighbor.
G is a very competent and successful competitive long-distance musher, which takes the kind of dedication and mania you would need to invade a medium-sized country on a regular basis.
If he was a bicycling pro, I'd be the guy who uses a three-speed to get to work. But because mushers are so few, we still have some fat to chew when we cross paths.

This is all normal to me. Walking far to pick up mail. Chatting about mushing with other dog drivers on the way. Looking out for some nice mushrooms. Fifteen years ago, I would have thought this was either impossibly romantic, or the kind of life only other people, more clever and strong than I, could lead.
On one hand, this life is no big deal. On the other one, I feel blessed.

How to make holes

Making holes in stuff is intensely satisfying, some say even more so when there is a purpose to it. As most people, I presumed drilling by hand was hideously difficult and so have always relied on battery powered drills (right on picture, above), an invention that came in the wake of the NASA space program, I have been told.
Only when I moved off-grid did I get acquainted with the hand brace (left, above) and was shocked to discover that though one does sacrifice some speed in using a hand brace, one gains an incredible amount of torque. The whole battery drill thing is a scam! Except, perhaps, when it comes to assembling large decks, say, with one thousand little screws. And as there is a borrowed battery drill in the picture here, there are obviously occasions when the hand brace doesn't quite cut it.
The place where I buy most of my tools no longer sells hand braces, the closest they get now is the "egg-beater"-drill (center, above). This implement is nothing but an insult, hardly powerful enough for papercraft, and gives hand-powered tools a bad name.

Hermit's verdict:
Power drill: Ok for some applications. Unsustainable in the long run.
Hand brace: Excellent, low-maintenance
Egg-beater style drill: Worthless piece of shit

Kerosene addiction II: Round wick lanterns

Round wick lanterns are considered a step up from their flat wick counterparts. While flat wick lanterns are usually intended for use outdoors and in sheds, outhouses etc, round wicks are made for being used in the manor proper.
This said, though they are invariably more expensive and the technology is seemingly more advanced than flat wicks, they don't give out that much more light. But if you use these rather than flat wicked storm lanterns in your parlor, you will give the impression that you have a degree of gumption and your ducks in a row.
After having used them for a while, the wick in these will end up being spent unevenly. Homo electricus will react to this by turning up the wick, leading to incomplete combustion, lots of soot and not noticably more light.
To trim a round wick, take the burners off their oil houses, and let the wicks dry out for a day. Turn up the wick until a millimeter of the wick's lowest part juts out, dip the protruding edge of the wick in kerosene and light it up. Let it burn out, any loose threads jutting up can be scraped away with a knife.
Gear for trimming below, the dish is for dipping the top ends of the wicks in.
In books written today but set in a a non-electrified place or period, one will sometimes read about lights being trimmed while in use. Even the otherwise very clever Philip Pullman makes this mistake. This is entirely normal. It only takes a couple of decades for one set of skills to be almost entirely lost.

There is currently an astonishingly harshly worded entry on kerosene lanterns on Wikipedia. The subject does bring out the activist in some.

See also on this site: Kerosene addiction I: Flatwick lanterns

Bitchin' stitchin'

Mushers, to the degree we manage to formulate full sentences at all, enjoy bragging about how we need to be not only athletes, but also animal psychologists, veterinarians, carpenters, nutritionists, survival experts, mechanics and tailors.
I am none of these, of course, but by Jove, I've improved in all these areas since dogs entered my life.
I am now repairing assorted harnesses that the dogs, in their excitement at the start of a run, have bitten into pieces. The first time I tried this I stitched the loose parts together, but no thread or twine on earth can stand the kind of pressure applied here, not anything outside of what you might obtain at space agencies, anyway. The trick is to apply a strip of webbing over the part that needs mending, and sew along it's entire length. A lot of repair works like this, distributing stress over as large an area as possible.
Harnesses are the one mushing related thing I never considered making myself. They should be made to spec by people who know what they're doing. A bad harness can destroy a dog, just like a shitty backpack can screw an man for life.
Mushing is one of the last few non-globalized zones, where almost everybody has to make half their gear themselves, and rely on friends and acquaintances for the other half. Naturally, this results in stuff that is either so expensive or has so much emotional value that you end up repairing and repairing before you chuck it out.
Pretty much the way everything should be, actually.

Week's small chores reviewed

Above is my so-called "sports utility bicycle", strapped to it's side is one of those plastic boxes used to transport dogs on airplanes. I'm taking it to the office so I can bring a dog with me to work every now and then. I have my own office with a proper door and everything, so I don't really need an extra enclosure, but it took up space at home and might provide some sense of security for a four-legged, furry office temp.

I've also finally inserted some windows on the north side of my doggy kitchen. I liberated these from an office I rented four years ago, the place was going to be torn down anyway. Still have heaps of them lying around. While the Lord may work in wondrous ways, I work in very, very slow ones and I spent years before I finally recaulked, stripped and painted four of them to put up here.

Putting up a whole bunch of windows on the north side of any structure rarely make a lot of sense in this hemisphere, but I hadn't thought this part out too cleverly when I built the thing.

A large part of the materials for the whole dog pen and doggy kitchen started out as a bike shed at a place I lived five years ago. After I dismantled the shed, the materials had a brief intermezzo as a rain-proof scene for musicians at some friends' wedding, before that was taken apart (even the nails were salvaged this time!), dragged up to my cabin and given a new lease on life as a place to keep dogs and kibble.

That's a whole lot of carrying. I try to think of it as a free upper body work-out.

Is less more?

Born to run: Turn-of-the-century Tarahumara. Photo: Carl Lumholtz.

Expensive shoes will fuck up your feet. It's true! The more expensive your shoes are, the more injuries you're going to get.

There also seems to be proof that the more expenisve bicycle equipment you got, the more prone you are to injuries.

There's a good reason to be skeptical about statistics that proove the above. People who use helmets and expensive bicycle equipment surely have more miles behind them than those who ride barehead, and people with expensive shoes probably run more than those with cheap ones, right? So maybe if you calculated miles pr. accident you'd get some different numbers.

But still.

To me, this "less is more"-stand still makes a lot of sense: The more advanced shoes you got. the more grief they will cause you. They will make you run in a way your creator never ment you were supposed to run, and you will suffer the conseqences, not he. The more expensive and sophisticated your bicycle is: The more accident prone you will be. You will go to fast and imagine you are invulnerable, and for this you will pay.

Something similar seems to be the case for beekeeping, too. The ones who advocate the rather primitive "Warré-type hives" feel they have much less problems than their cousins with the more technologically advanced Langstroth-hives.

Less diseases. Less stress on the bees. Less work, all in all.

Amiong other things, ecological beekeepers feel that the dreaded honey bee pest, varroa, is simply meant to be. The bees will sort it out themselves.

This reminds me of the mentality of the few people I know who are reindeer herders. They scoff at authorities and "farmers" (people who are not nomads) for being so obsessed with ticks, flies and mosquites. "Take away the current pests," they say, "and you bet your ass something much worse is going to take it's place. That stuff about nature hating a void is true."

Then they will get drunk. Aboriginal people will do that.

Again: This about removing mosquitoes and getting something worse sounds sensible. After decades, even centuries of comabitng the honey bees' varroa, it's still with us. Sort of like the congenital diseases of pure-bred dogs. Just start cross-breeding, and they'll disappear. But instead you got lots of concerned people trying to eliminate certain traits through strict, selective breeding, even though that is precisely what caused the problems in the first place.

The Tarahumara indians (above) of Northwestern Mexico run barefoot or only with some very modest sandals. No Nike for them. I just read about them in a wonderful book called "Born to Run". There is a whole movement of barefoot runners around, one of whom is a character called Barefoot Ted, who's points concerning the benefits of running barefoot makes a whole lot of sense.

So why do people insist on vaccinations against pests, on expensive running shoes, on multi-geared bicycles? My idea is it got something to do with scale. If you need five hundred hives to make money, you want something predictable, rather than semi-feral bees. If you make shoes, you have to make them seem more comfortable than your comopetitors'. Who cares if they cause more injuries, nobody will notice when they're trying shoes on in the store.

And on and on.

But read "Born to Run". You will not use running shoes again.

Solar cooler

Two cans of beer with a damp towel wrapped around them. In theory, the sun heats up the water and the water evaporates. But to evaporate, the water needs to suck out energy from it's surroundings, however that works, and does this by robbing heat from the beer.

The towel is wrapped around the top container and wicks water from the container below. This way the towel doesn't dry up, and the beer is not surrounded by water that just gets heated by all that sun.

Might be hard to see on this picture, but why would I lie about something like this.

Astoundingly, this does work. and the principle here has been used all over the place for a long time.

I'm not saying that I ended up with near-freezing temperatures here. But it was sort of cool, in two ways at least.