I love typography. If I had not been an engineer, I would probably have chosen to be a graphic designer. And when great typography combines with great texts, it can be very impressive.
In this case, impressively funny.
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
(shamelessly borrowed from Cori)
Those of you who have not done any blogroll or feed reader cleaning in the past six months will be glad to know I am still alive and well. It’s just that I have been very busy in the real world (and the francophone voluntary simplicity blogging world). Since my previous post here, I have :
That’s all for today - I have to catch up with my blogroll. Next post hopefully before March 2010…
So, here’s where the LETS project is right now: we’ve had the first information meeting yesterday evening, and there were around 50 people. Among those, 30 are sure to join the initiative, and the most important success is that there are 10 volunteers who want to be in the launch team. I was right to bet that I was not the only one considering that starting a barter network was a good idea.
The next step will be to define the structure of the network (especially the legal aspects of the association), as well as the name, the ambitions, etc.
Meanwhile, there is an awful lot of work to be done in the garden to put it in its spring tracks before we have to leave for two weeks (we fly across the Atlantic to visit NYC* and Martha’s Vineyard in late April, because my brother is getting married in New England). Therefore, as far as wisemandarine.com is concerned, it’s going to be a thin dotted line for a while.
(*) we’ll be visiting Emily, Dorr and Hobs (and apparently we’ll miss Becky).
Remember that great audio-book I wrote about recently? Well, it’s out in print. And I am in it. Or more exactly on it. Or more precisely on the back cover.
Maybe it’s a modest beginning as a writer, but remember that back covers are far more perused than inside pages - as soon as someone picks up the book from the shelf, there is a 50% chance that my praise (which started out as a comment on the author’s blog and was then promoted to an authoritative literary review) will be read.
And guess what was in the mail today? My very own signed copy. As I always say, compliments are a great investment, especially when they are meant.
I cannot wait to find out whether the characters are still great without Susan’s and Joe’s voices - I’ll probably be making those voices in my head anyway.
I know you all have ToBeRead piles that reach higher than Neptune’s orbit, but please consider adding this book near the top if you want to be reconciled with mankind (and tools).
See? I cannot really stop posting.
The forest is burning. All the animals are staring blankly at the blazing fire, paralyzed with stupor, watching their world come to an end. Alone, the little hummingbird is flying relentlessly back and forth, each time sipping one drop of water from the river and spitting it over the flames. One of the animals finally says: “your efforts are useless; you are much too small to make any difference.” The hummingbird replies: “I know, but I am doing my share.”
Maybe not everybody is conscious about it, but our world is coming to an end. Runaway global warming in a few decades; peak energy in a few years; economic collapse in a few months. Nobody can deny that most things we’ve grown used to will stop. If this is true, why hold on to our little habits and carry on our little routines pretending, and then watch the world fall apart, aghast and helpless?
I will be putting all my efforts in my community, starting a Local Exchange Trading System, so that we have a local, social and economic safety net, as all I am seeing from our governments is bailout plans and unconditional support to the very system which brought us here. I hope they succeed in slowing down the fall. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and I believe I should devote every minute of my free time to this project (while I am gradually stepping back from my wildly funny, unjustly well-paying, and insanely useless job of inventing space machines which will never fly).
Maybe I’ll be back in a couple of months/years, when my project is up and running and I see the end of the world is not as near as I had thought. In the meantime, it is au revoir everyone.
Amicalement,
Mandarine
Charlotte has tagged me for some sort of bread-making/donation challenge to alleviate poverty in Africa. Part of the rules is to publish the recipe.
So here you go: the simplest sort of bread, the one I make every other day now, because it tastes much better than the one from the local (i.e. 7 km away) baker, and I can make it with organic flour (bought in 25-kg bags).
1 kg hard bread flour (organic)
20 g salt (knowing what we dump in the se, I doubt there is such a thing as organic salt)
42 g dehydrated organic levain (find it here)
600 ml warm water
Mix all ingredients with your (clean) hands, then knead for fifteen minutes. I put the dough on my bench and sit on the bench with my legs on either side to lean on the dough and have more kneading power.
Leave the dough to rise under a damp cloth for half an hour (room temperature 22°C or one hour if your room is at 18°C like mine yesterday).
Knead again and shape your breads. Then leave to rise for one to two hours.
Bake in very hot oven (250°C) for 20 minutes. Do not forget to put a bowl of water in the oven so that the hot air is saturated in moisture. For a thinner and crispier crust, you can wet the breads with your fingers before baking. Oh, and you have to make cuts with a rasor blade so the dough can expand nicely while baking.
Et voilà. Bon appétit.
Compliments are a good investment, and nobody should keep his/her admiration for someone else hidden: ever since I wrote this dithyrambic piece about Emily’s blog, she has been consistently checking here for new material, commenting on every other post, and sending blogging awards my way. Apparently, the effect has still not worn off, because she just confessed she loved my blog. That means I have to name at least seven blogs I love, in an exponential series of compliments.
Unfortunately, I have been too busy recently to make new blogging friends, so the list will have to revolve around the usual suspects.
I’d love to put Emily’s Telecommuter Talk on top of the list, but apparently, the rules require that I name seven other blogs, so here we go:
Charlotte’s Web is where I go first when Emily fails to post for two days in a row. I love the sense of humour, the writing, the family anecdotes, the viewpoints on Germany (I have been to Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Nürnberg, Darmstadt, Würzburg, but apparently, Charlotte will only write about Berlin and Mannheim) and the rest of Europe, and above all the pieces on her South African upbringing (Charlotte, any clue as to when your award-winning I am From post will find its way to the audio world for real?)
Tai’s Aerophant is a collections of quotes, aphorisms, short musings, accompanied by an unexpected picture or otherwise graphical material. Very refreshing. Sometimes absurd. Always contemplative. And she’s a writer too.
Healingmagichands’ The Havens is the blog of a dream garden (and an indimidatingly romanesque life), by a woman from Alaska that the other woman from Alaska would probably have burned a few hundred years ago (did I hear ‘magic hands?). Forget the other woman from Alaska and read what Ellie has to tell us. As we French people say: she does not keep her tongue in her pocket.
Cori’ Pirate’s Library is outside the usual suspects. Her blog revolves around all her magnificent Librivox projects. If you are looking for free audio versions of classic works, go to Librivox advanced search and enter ‘cori’ as the reader’s name. You will certainly not be disappointed.
Smithereens is almost a professional book review blog. Apparently, I am not the only French person out there reading books and writing blogs in English, but she’s much more assiduous than I am at writing down about the books she reads. Unfortunately, as with most bloggers who publish often, I have fallen behind in the past few weeks (months?). I will try to correct that.
What we Said is nobody’s blog in particular: that’s where we bloggers write about everything feminism. Please have a look, and if you want to join as an author, we’ll be flattered. And for those like me who have not written in a while: what are we waiting for?
And then there’s always BlogLily - but as she’s been very busy with real writing, we have been missing her a lot lately.
This mosaic is on the wall next to my bathtub. This time of the year, while floating idly in warm water, I can contemplate the rising sun bringing extra orangeness to the hues. And I am proud. Because I know we made that mosaic. We made it with leftovers from the terracotta tiles once the bathroom floor and bathtub wall had been tiled. It took us two days to complete, deciding on the design, cutting the little dice, sticking them on a fiberglass netting with tile cement, fitting the net on the wall while filling the joints with lime mortar.
The net result is that it cost us two days of fun work (the materials were virtually free) for an endless supply of pride (and compliments when visitors happen to spot it on their way to the bathroom). I do not count the capital gain because I cannot imagine that I will ever sell this house.
This mosaic is already three years old, and to me it has become a symbol of my house and of my life : hard work, lazyness, and pride.
Only a few weeks ago I was confident that government take-over on the banking and financial front was going to halt the downward spiral of the financial crisis. Now that I have watched the fabulous documentary Money as Debt [update: I absolutely disagree with the conspiracy theory advocated towards the end, but the beginning is still great at explaiing how money come about], I am convinced that the fall will not stop short of a global monetary (and thus economic, and thus social) collapse. Here’s why.
I already mentioned that one’s money was someone else’s debt, and that when the someone else becomes insolvent, money loses its value. What I (and probably you) did not know is that today’s money is highly leveraged debt. Which means that the banking system essentially turns one thousand dollar of debt into roughly ten thousand dollars of money. As soon as there are doubts as to whether the debt will be paid back, the whole pyramid of leverage collapses.
Do you know the famous pyramid-scheme ? This century-old con consists in talking several people into giving you one dollar each, and then send them forth to do likewise with any number of fresh recruits they can trick into the scheme. In an infinite world, this scheme is great and endlessly concentrates money up the pyramid. In a finite world, however, the scheme always ends up collapsing when the bottom levels of the pyramid realise they will never get their dollar back from nonexisting lower level recruits, and understand they have been tricked by the upper levels in the pyramid.
This is exactly what is happening to the financial world (and economic world too, because let’s face it: there is no such thing as a financial vs real economy separation). People have been selling leveraged debt, and the scheme was holding only because the sky was the limit. As long as there was the promise of always more, as long as we could count on sustained exponential growth, paying back a debt with a new debt was nothing to be worried about. The runaway race of leveraged debt was sustainable as long as there was somewhere to runaway to.
I believe that the bursting of the housing bubble is just the first symptom of something far more ominous: the planet is becoming insovent. For centuries or even millennia, the world had relied on the fact that there was always going to be more tomorrow than today. More production, more commodities, more people, more money. The housing bubble burst when the commodity markets had given very clear signs that we were running out of planet to rape. The fact that oil production was peaking sent oil prices skyrocketing. For the first time in a long while (who remembers peak whale oil or peak seal fur?) the planet was sending a signal of exhaustion down the economic pipes. Where everything in the economic world was based on the bet that things were going to be ever cheaper, ever more abundant, now came the news that there was not going to be more oil. This is called a shock, and something had to break somewhere. The economic fabric had to give and it gave where it was weaker: hence the bursting of the housing bubble.
I believe it is not going to stop there, whatever the government bail-out initiatives. These initiatives are merely an attempt at preventing the middle of the pyramid from melting by transferring more debt to the bottom (government guarantees are taxpayer’s children’s debt). Now that everybody realizes that the planet is bust and that there is far more money (and stocks, and bonds, and such like) around than stuff to buy with it, money that was engineered as a bet on an ever expanding future will just vanish, and we’re in for a complete and global monetary collapse.
The collapse can take many shapes, and a historian of economics will be able to depict at least half a dozen. The smooth option is by way of double-digit inflation over a decade. The hard option is by a complete collapse of corporate, then state credibility worldwide, with the very rich trying to be the first ones to jump ship with anything they can snatch from the people down the third class deck.
There is no liberal take on what should be done. Letting the pyramid fall is not a option. Just think what happens when the guy working for the electricity or the water distribution company stops working because he has not been paid in months (remember the collapse of the Soviet Union?). If I was the king of the world, I’d take the following measures:
Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. (Silvio Gesell)
What’s the good side of the recession? It will probably achieve the CO2 emission cuts that give a chance to our children. After all, it’s only fair to say ‘game over’ to the ones who did not play nice with the planet, and not those who come after them.
If you think I am just nuts and that everything is going to be all right, I am glad. Especially if you can come up with convincing data and arguments against these guys, who were my inspiration.
[update: there is another fabulous slide-show that you want to watch to get to grips with the big economic / environmental / monetary picture.]