Photo (and title) by Jess Dolan.

It’s human nature to personify dogs, to relate to them like they’re people.  They have so many qualities we’d like to see more often.  Their joy is unfettered.  They have a positively inhuman alertness, protectiveness, and devotion (except possibly when the thief has brought steak tartar).  All for pennies a day! We forget they’re a different species, with their own expressions and rituals when they’re not playing Zelig.

Photographer Michael Crouser is doing something remarkable in his new book, Dog Run.  He’s showing us dogs being dogs when they’re not paying attention to humans.  It’s a glimpse into an utterly alien world — beautiful, scary, strange.

(Of course I am a little biased since Michael took the photographs for a book about knitting I co-wrote — check this pretty-as-heck shot out.  Anyway the guy is versatile, and — do I even have to say it? — both our books are so obviously perfect Christmas gifts :)

Photo by Eden & James.  Don’t forget to vote!

I’ve never been one to agree that thrift — as in trying to live “simpler” and “cheaper” on a purely personal basis — is much of a solution to global environmental challenges.*** Still, nothing motivates me to get thrifty more than planned obsolescence.

It just offends my cheapo scion-of-a-depression-era-farmgirl-and-WASP-engineer sensibilities when perfectly good, or even quite nice, product designs are made of crappy materials and/or nonrepairable parts.  Many products seem designed to fail precisely 1 day after the warranty expires — take the nonreplaceable Apple iPod battery as the most famous example.

My LCD HDTV seemed to be on a similar plan — failing for an obvious reason, just a few weeks after the warrranty expired.  Damned if I was going to be a victim and go out and buy another one.  Here’s how I fixed it. …more