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Year 2011

Entries 5 Total

The Fort Builders Handbook

Sep 14, ’11 7:11 AM

My roommate Bannack and I have been throwing a sheet over his little table and chairs to make forts in the early morning. He likes being inside the tiny space we make and I like that I get to lay down for a few minutes more, even if it’s on the floor.  So I was delighted to read my friend Marissa’s fort-centric how-to post on her new blog.

Critical Thinking for Amateur Fort Builders

…Finally, you will want to photograph your fort when complete. If you’re feeling real-estatey, create a walk-thru video of your own, OR hire a third party production company that can create a  360 virtual tour of your fort. This is all good to share using social media. Your friends and family will enjoy seeing something you built, but scaled to fit a small person. You will get comments like, “ummm, that’s amazing and beautiful/luxurious!” and “Nice moat!.” These are all great things to hear, but you know that once you’ve finished this fort, it must be destroyed and replaced by a better one.

The subject immediately reminded me of the delightful architectural criticism parody: Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis Part One and Part Two

At first glance the composition appears unintentional and the construction shoddy. But further investigation reveals a clear delineation between indoor/outdoor space with a design focus on protection through the use of barrier. Planes are shifted off the orthogonal to accommodate function; as a side effect it relieves inhabitants from a harsh Euclidian geometry. Grade B

If you’d like to know more, here is a very expensive book: Ottoman Forts

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La Blogotheque

Sep 13, ’11 8:39 AM

Chris’ brother Mike told us about this great series of music videos produced by a French music blog called La Blogotheque. They produce wonderfully casual videos like this one of Andrew Bird walking through Montmartre.

You might have to sit through a 15 second long commercial to see the embedded video. Here’s a link if you don’t want to wait.


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Bath Time

Sep 13, ’11 8:28 AM

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Unreasonably Good Donuts

Sep 11, ’11 9:01 AM

Sara guided us to the waterfront yesterday afternoon to visit Williamsburg’s weekly flea market-style food fair Smorgasburg. There were lots of tempting food stands, each one filling a very specific gourmet niche.  Out of all there was to offer we sampled mole tempeh tamales and smooth Basque gazpacho from Txikito, but the best in show were the killer donuts from DOUGH, a donut only bakery on Fanklin Avenue.

We ordered one cafe au lait, one toasted coconut, and one candied blood orange for us grown ups and Bannack got a dollar’s worth of cinnamon sugar donut holes. I’m going back because we still have to try lemon glazed poppy seed, hibiscus, or passion fruit with chocolate nibs.

The cupcake revolution is over, long live the donut.

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Redeployed: Afganland VI

Sep 10, ’11 10:02 AM

My old friend Sgt. Butler redeployed to southern Afghanistan this summer. We’ve been in touch lately and he’s send me some great photos of the rural world he’s been living in and what exactly he’s been up to. We even got to video chat this week for almost and hour. It’s still surreal to be able to open a little portal from New York to Afghanistan so my sister and I could talk to Kenny as he ate his gross cafeteria dinner.

Kenny is in the part of the army they used to call PsyOps. That started sounding little too video-gamey so they changed it to the innocuous sounding “4th Military Information Support Operations Group” even though they do the same work they used to. And although I like to imagine Kenny participating in some Manchurian Candidate operation or dosing village water supplies with LSD he says what he actually does is pretty boring, “I watch TV and movies on my computer all day.” He would occasionally get assigned as an RG-33 driver when the Special Forces guys need to get Kabul. Kenny says:

The first time that I was put on a mission to drive I got in and told the truck commander, that’s the guy who sits shotgun and calls the shots, that I had never driven before he had me switch out with someone else. Then they just kept putting me on missions as the driver and eventually I just had to drive.

But lately his group has been focused on preparing to wrap up the bigger Afghanistan mission and that means training local police forces so they can take over when our army finally leaves. Ken sent these photos of some of the local police recruits. Check these dudes out!

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