flip-flapping in the breeze

... actually, currently flip-flapping in the basement...
It's:
My latest finished project!

Good thing, since that's what this thing was pretty much intended for. The cultural criticism and nature writing is well and good, but I'm supposed to making stuff. I have been, and I'm gonna tell you about it.

Hobby Lobby. I don't know quite what it is about Hobby Lobby. I don't quite like going there. Some of it is that it's a chain store, but there just aren't many local craft stores of that sort around. There's a nice yarn shop a mile from my house, and local places to get paint and assorted art supplies... but I think all the fabric shops are chains of at least some size. Anyway, there are certain things for which Hobby Lobby is indispensible. One of these, for some reason, is yellow rip-stop nylon... about which more in another post or two. Two of these is scrap leather. They get these bags of cast off bits of a variety of shapes and sizes and colors from... I dunno, saddleries and cobblers and purseries and whatnot. They stick a bunch of bits in a bag and I go and pick up a bag or two and try to decide what to do with 'em all.

First thing I've done now is to make up a pair of leather mudflaps for one of my bicycles. The venerable Brooks of England makes leather mudflaps... they cost $30 a piece. One can also get some through Velo-Orange, for cheaper. Now you can get them from me! I decided, since I had the leather, some punches, knives and leather treatment stuff made out of bee secretions I should just make some myself.

First I figured out a good size based on measuring my fenders and checking the listed sizes for the Velo-Orange and Brooks styles, figuring it's best to copy what's out there first of all. I also was limited by the sizes of leather pieces I had in colors that roughly matched one another (for front and rear flaps). So I came up with a pattern, and made a template on some lovely green paper.

That's the negative shape of course, I traced the positive shape on the leather, but either would work, I think the positive shape was probably wandering around somewhere out of reach when I took this blurry photo though.

So then I cut out my trapezoids (not trapeziuses... that would hurt), and punched holes for mounting, like so:

I also needed some mounting bolts, so I went to the hardware store (the little local one) and got these slick and shiny fellas. They're SAE, not metric, but come close enough that I can use my metric bike tools to mount them without ruining everything.

Aren't those lovely? They did have that type in metric, but only in black, and I'm a sucker for shiny bits of metal.

Next order of business was cleaning and weather-treating the things since they're going to be catching lots of mud and dirt and water and gunk and stuff and ambiguous goo. Behold the stuff:

Yeah... that's all. And then the flaps looked like SO:

but rather less blurry...











And then I drilled holes in the fenders to match the holes in the flaps like SO:














And assembled with the bolts like SO:












(with and without flash)




And that was it really.

Now they are sitting in the basement because the bike they are intended for is in a hundred pieces in the basement as well. But they're pretty cool I think and I wanted to share.

Hope you've enjoyed it.

On missing the point.

So, I'm diverging a bit from the primary focus of this blog as I vaguely envisioned it, which was to be a platform for sharing my various arts and crafts and food projects. I never have been very good at sticking to a particular format however (those who recall my college radio show may remember that though I initially billed it as goth/industrial in focus, it wandered all over pop, classical, experimental, humorous, blues, jazz, folk, spoken word... pretty much anything that could be played over the radio that was of interest to me - it's just my nature to be eclectic I suppose). Therefore, I have plans for including creations of the mind here (observational essays, theorizing, metaphors), and things I've seen about the place, such as ant swarms, and also cultural criticizms... verging into political commentary. I've gotten partway through a post in that latter vein, in the middle of which I was distracted and haven't returned yet to complete it. Here now is another post of that sort.

ORGANIC

Indeed, it's all the rage now. People have actually started to care about what they put down their throats, and many have come to the conclusion that, though it may cost a dollar or two extra, they'd rather have some assurance that what they are eating is not actually poisoned, thank you very much, and that it maybe even didn't damage fragile and valuable ecosystems while we're at it. The idea of organic agriculture is pretty new... you had that big push in the 70's, which got going really in the 60s, or before, about sustainable agriculture without use of massive doses of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. I'm not going into the whole history lesson here, but I want to point out that that sort of lower impact agriculture was going on for, roughly, 10,ooo years before the 'organic' label was applied. What is now considered 'conventional' agriculture is only a hundred years or so old, and has been practiced on a wide scale only since around World War II. And even only a few decades after the big uptick in such practices people started to realize that maybe this wasn't the best way to grow our food. Of course, the 80s hit and organic was 'out' and, except for a few holdouts, the whole thing took a bit of a hiatus. Now it's caught back on and the organic food industry is growing by leaps and bounds... and it has become an industry. Another term sometimes substituted for 'conventional agriculture' is 'industrial agriculture'. Now there is 'industrial organic', not relying on the chemical products of factories, but relying on industrially processed naturally occuring pesticides, large machines, massive scale fields and processing facilities and so on.

I'm trying not to get too involved here in my discussion since you can get all this stuff from Michael Pollan and such folks. I just want to bring up the fact that once big companies start getting in on organics and environmentalism, the tendancy is for them to do the very least possible to meet the requirements to get the label to be able to charge the premium price and attract the customers attracted by those ideas. There is an ongoing attempt to dilute what it takes to be organic, allow certain synthetic products into the mix, make it easier (and more profitable) for the big guys, so they can better compete with those little guys who've been farming small, sustainable acres, but don't have massive advertising budgets... it's all about open competition right? Anyway, it's a quick step from there to complete perversion of the idea of organic, if not the strict USDA definition (getting less strict). The idea is that it is simpler, healthier for us and the planet, something more like the food our grandparents or great grandparents ate... When you start veering away from those ideas, you sometimes wind up in complete absurdity.

See:


Yep. It's pancake batter in a squirt can. You can make pancakes with just the spritz of a nozzle. And it's organic! It contains all certified organic ingredients, which according to the website is all that is needed to be organic (their definition, cribbed from Merriam-Webster, is on the 'Product Information page). The fact that it comes in a can and is absolutely absurd seems not to phase the makers of this product. The fact that you can make pancake batter yourself with very little effort, out of all organic ingredients if you like, or largely local ones if you like that more (which I do), with far less energy waste (in production as well as transport) and materials waste to boot also does not give them pause. They bring out the old 'convenience' claim, which gave us boxed cake mix and microwave snacks of all description and various degrees of disgustingness.

Really I'm not trying to make much of a point here. This is just a rant against what I see as a stupid and wasteful item cluttering up the supermarket shelves, as well as a mindset that is continuing the same destructive philosophies of the recent past with a shiny new package that people are supposed to feel good about. See also: catalogues full of all the many things you can buy to be more environmentally friendly... I'll save that rant for another day.

AAAAARGH.

they came out of the earth and rose up into the sky like amber snowflakes

I was just sitting here minding my own business, doing a bit of scrabble on the computer. Looked out the window and didn't know what I was seeing... something floating... upwards. It looked for anything like snowflakes viewed while standing on one's head (not that I've tried that, my balance isn't quite that good). I got up and went and looked closer, out the window. I was thinking it might be some cottonwood type seed fluffs caught in an updraft, but as I looked more carefully it really was more than that. These things, whatever they were, were rising up from the lawn and up up up into the air. Peering through the old wavy glass and the screen I could just about make out some sort of movement on the ground. This seems interesting, I thought and went outside, grabbing the digital camera before I did so. What I found was, ants. Pouring out of the ground and taking off, uncountable, big, winged ants. This was new to me, so I took some pictures and video, and did some research on the internet and am here to report. I dunno what sort of ants they are. I've found it's nearly impossible to identify a species of insect via internet searching. The closest I got was that they seem to be some type of yellow ant.... that's the common name for the group, not just me making something up. Anyway, more interesting than my rambling are probably the images, so here you go.



And I took video too!




I went out again after typing here for a bit and the exodus had finished. Just a few odd stragglers still hanging about. The event was as fleeting as it was astonishing. Insects get up to a lot more than we usually think. For informational purposes, what was going on was that the sexually mature males and females (future queens) were getting booted out of the colony to mate and try to set up colonies of their own round about the city. I had some familiarity with the concept from playing SimAnt. It's also the similar to what happens when bees swarm.

If you see this happening some summer day, stop and check it out. Be prepared to give a few ants a hitch to wherever you're off too. It's worth it.