More on flickr.

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

There’s been a little trend brewing in the world of kids’ bikes: skipping the training wheels and getting the kid to ride a “balance bike” or “runbike” instead.  It’s a pedal- and chain-free kids bike with a low seat so the feet can comfortably touch the ground.  Here are pictures of two: a fancy one for $329, and a functionally similar one I made recently for $5.

Here’s why I made the second balance bike, and how: …more

I thought I had gotten over pitying Windows users (I’m bigger than that now), but then I read “How I learned to stop worrying and tolerate Vista.”  It is the saddest piece of tech journalism I have ever read.

The author, Stephen Williams, has been so worn down by experience that he has no positive expectations of Windows anymore, but no willingness to try alternatives either.  He projects a kind of bovine acceptance …more

The American tradition of fine political rhetoric has an eloquent new starlet.  For the full artistic effect, watch all three segments: one, two, three.

[UPDATE! The starlet's performance was so spectacular that the writers of this comedy sketch decided they couldn't do any better by way of satire: they just quoted her verbatim.]

In milestones: after 13 months, the last shrimp “econaut” in the Sparks Research Group tabletop biospheres has passed on to that great biosphere in the sky.  A simple mix of plants, microbes, and minerals, with the addition of energy in the form of light, kept this ecological explorer alive for more than a year in a sealed 2-quart jar.

It’s been so heartening to watch people doing this project, but Sparks’ was especially successful.  13 months is an amazing demonstration of the effectiveness of ecological cycling.  Of course we experience ecological cycling every day, whenever we breathe or eat, but it’s so easy to forget that every breath and bite depend on forests, plants, insects, oceans…   I hope this kind of demonstration shows how powerful and tenuous those cycles are.  The cycles can and will go on, but whether they will serve to support our species (or another one, with strange new priorities) is another matter. :)

As Bob Costas once said about another grand spectacle (the opening ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics), “sometimes words add nothing.”

Imagine a unicorn appearing at your door, in the flesh, and asking to hang around a while.   That would be pretty weird, because you always thought unicorns were mythical creatures like succubi or centaurs.  But it would be a hell of a lot weirder if your new one-horned lodger turned out to be mild-mannered, always helpful, impressively strong when the occasion demanded, and a total natural with the kids.  (Of course Teddy can come, sweetie. :)

[photo by Patrick Barber, aka hen power -- thanks!]

That’s the way I feel about my family’s new Xtracycle setup.  It’s a bicycle I never thought existed in American reality: a bike that is actually a useful and flexible form of family transportation. One that can carry a kid and six bags of groceries without creaking, tipping over, or making the steering go googoo.   It eliminates the need for dozens of car trips each week — and it’s fun enough it eliminates the desire for those trips too.

The Xtracycle is that rare thing in today’s world: a green product that could actually make a difference.  It could allow thousands of two-car families to switch to one car, and one-car families to switch to zero cars, and have more fun than they did before.  Right now my family doesn’t own any cars.  We have an Xtracycle, several personal bicycles, and a subscription to a carsharing service.  It’s working well and it’s really cheap.  Plus kids love Xtracycles.

[photo by carfreedays under Creative Commons]

Initially I was cynical about the potential of the Xtracycle to really change things.  …more

[photo by flickr user amyrod]

Point your loudspeakers out the window and listen to this while you ‘cue: JFK reads the Declaration of Independence. [download may take a few minutes]

Or here’s the text.

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, …more