from Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Moist von Lipwig is a character from Terry Patchett’s young adult novels Going Postal
Moist is the guy who also said: ”Luck came to those who left a space for it.”
Thanks Holto!
gifts
‘wing it!’ (moist von lipwig)
‘where good ideas come from’
Steven Berlin Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Read Johnson’s book from beginning to end, and/or open it anywhere to find a nugget, like why, for example,
“Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces us to explore.”…
…and why
“Ideas rise in crowds”…
…and just what is
“the adjacent possible”…?
Where Good Ideas Come From will launch on October 5th. You can preorder it at Amazon.
dishtowel as….
John Merkl/Remodelista
At Mill Valley Beerworks in California, they use .49 red-striped cotton Tekla dishtowels from Ikea as cloth napkins. They are reminiscent of classic French provincial tea towels. You can’t get any cheaper than that for a good-looking resource that invites improvisation: placemats, gift wrapping…stitched-together to become a pillow cover or… mapped with stripes going horizontally and vertically to make a curtain or tablecloth…. read more…
a gift for the last day of summer
We were looking for a little gift to leave on the blog this last day of summer and thought The Wilderness Downtown would be just right…It is one of the very best things we’ve seen on the internet: crazy beautiful, imaginative, really surprising and moving…
…click here, have patience while it loads, and watch to the end…
Wishing you a wonderful Labor Day!
perfect little gift: cool usb flash drive ‘keys’
We have a whole list of things that fall under the heading of “Practical but Ugly”, and wonder why it can be so hard to find good-looking, affordable versions of certain everyday items…dish racks, for example, or file cabinets. USB Flash drives are one of those handy items whose ugliness we’ve marveled at and put up with because we need them. Then we saw LaCie’s wonderful flash drives shaped like a key, and thought “want one!” Like many well-designed objects, they cost more than the norm – roughly $10 bucks more by our figuring. And since we’re hard-pressed to hack our own usb flash drive design, we just might treat ourselves to one…
For sure, we will buy them to give as unexpected little gifts to give..say to the host of a dinner party, or a friend we want to thank…about $18 for 4 gigabytes, $27 for 8…and up, in round
via Core 77
canal house cooking Vol. 4 for summer’s bumper crop
Christopher Hirscheimer + Melissa Hamilton
A bumper crop of summer vegetables, fruits and herbs might well take us into early October this year, and there is no more inspiring guide for enjoying it than Canal House Cooking Volume N°4
emergency medicine
A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially difficult situations.
Standing in a storage room amidst broken cardboard boxes and forgotten stuff, I listened and talked and listened, as my friend’s tears gradually subsided. “But, how will I make it through?” she asked. “What will I do if I start to panic on the long flight, or when I am in another time zone?”
I wondered what I could offer right then and there? What would be totally portable, that she could look at any time she needed to, to remind her of other ways of seeing things, the opposite of fear and sadness?
I found myself saying: “Get a pen. Now draw a heart in the palm of your hand. read more…
cool round kitchen tools: knife holder + dish drainer
Todd Selby/The Selby
We were scrolling through The Selby when we spotted these round magnet knife holders in a house in Connecticut. They are a nice sculptural change from the usual foot-long-or-so bar knife holder – the knives look like they’re floating. We hunted them down online here
And then almost immediately we came across this re-thinking of a dish drainer by Paulina Deltour for Alessi: another round tool that has traditionally been a rectangle. read more…
how to see what’s there
Although the title of this video is Jessica’s ‘Daily Affirmation’, we see it as a video of a little kid counting blessings. Not only does she list the stuff she has, she really LOVES it. Her fierce, slightly-playing-to-the-camera soliloquy is quite a celebration of the GREAT ordinary.
We find that counting blessings, though seemingly New-Agey, works: the practice changes your view from NOT (“enough”…”able”…”worthy”..) to appreciating the A LOT that’s there already, that has the potential to be used in different ways, to support what we want to do…
Don’t take our word for it. There are many studies that affirm this idea including one published in Journal of Personal Psychology and Social Psychology called Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life:
“The effect of a grateful outlook on psychological and physical well-being was examined… The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.”
How do you count blessings? Just look around and name what’s in your life that you’re glad to have. Like Jessica does…HOUSE…HAIRCUT…COUSINS…
You can do it anywhere, anytime, in secret or out loud…it’s a good subway practice when you’ve got nothing to read…
impromptu gift wrap with built-in card
Maria Robledo
Maria Robledo sent us this snapshot of a gift a houseguest left for her, with very rough-and-tumble improvised wrapping with built-in card. …Wonder what book they gave her, wrapped so straightforwardly and oddly-festively, with clear love.
Thanks Maria!
cookware as pattern breaker (almost)
We’ve long advocated the pleasure that comes from cooking in a well-made pot: one with good balance when lifted or moved it around the stove, made of material that conducts heat evenly, that feels right to whatever your particular style of cooking is. Some pots actually shift the experience of cooking altogether – for us that happens often with French copper. Heavily made, with beautiful lines, they have a certain something about them: they are both ancienne and modern, and make you feel you are part of a tradition, of artisan cooks and chefs, cooking with the seasons, with inventiveness.
Then we saw Dutch designer Aldo Bakker‘s new collection of copper. His saucepan instantly changed the way we looked at cooking vessels. We imagined cooking in this beautiful piece of sculpture that makes us think like an alchemist…what rarefied little concoction could we make?…the completely OTHER experience handling it would be. Which is, of course, what Bakkers copper is meant to do. Writes Dezeen:
“Bakker allows his products to take shape on the basis of analysis so that they can question their usage and, where necessary, give rise to new rituals or break existing patterns. The almost endless process of their realisation give them a sense of ‘inhuman’ belonging, questioning their own existence.”
“questioning usage, giving rise to new rituals, breaking existing patterns” are such amazing qualities for a pot – or anything – to have, if only Bakker had taken them a step further… read more…
anthony giglio’s secret weapon: a china marker for home entertaining
Tara Mann
At a dinner party at wine writer Anthony Giglio’s house one evening, we saw him scribble the name of each guest on their wine glass with a white marker: a chic way of helping guests keep tab of their glass in a crowd (and avoiding unnecessary pours – and washing – of fresh glasses).
There’s a brilliant idea, we thought. So we asked Anthony what that marker was and where to get it.
Here is the story of his big fat improvisation, and the many ways you can use it :
“The China Marker is my secret weapon: I bring them to dinner parties as host gifts.
It is not really a marker; it’s a wax or grease pencil - sort of tacky when you write on paper with it – and writes perfectly on glass or china.
The idea was born at our office for the Food & Wine Magazine’s Wine Guide 
canal house cooking: home cooks as indie publisher
The other day, Maria Robledo sent over some cookbooks with a note: “2 women are doing this lovely diary type home cooking book and one is CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER.”
Maria and I both worked with Christopher years ago when she was the food editor of Metropolitan Home and then Saveur. Christopher is famous for having become a superb photographer, with no formal training, just…like…that! having been a highly regarded editor and writer. (How she did it is a story in itself which we’ll post later.)
Christopher, along with her friend and colleague Melissa Hamilton, has again defied the usual notions of how things work and created an ongoing series of utterly charming, absolutely usable cookbooks without a mainstream publisher. It’s called Canal House Cooking.
“We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks…Everyday we cook. Starting in the morning we tell each other what we made for dinner the night before. Midday, we stop our work, set the table simply with paper napkins, and have lunch. We cook seasonally because that’s what makes sense. So it came naturally to write down what we cook…”
The books are so compelling and such a pleasure, and so beautifully produced, that I called Christopher up to find out the story behind them (which I want to know whenever someone does something amazing, in a completely unexpected way). read more…
happy birthday, maria robledo!
Looking for a way to wish our friend Maria Robledo a belated Happy Birthday, we found this clip of Wynton Marsalis and a friend improvising on that simple tune…building and building on until it became some big joy…
(…at the end he says “You see all the many ways we were conversing with each other?“, reminding us the improvising is always a conversation…with something…)
…That led us to other wondrous renditions of that tune, like this sweet little homemade video made by two sisters … read more…
alt-gift for mother’s (and other) days
Jim Dine "Optional Autostar"
The sentiment around Mother’s Day is a nice one but we’ve never been crazy about all the marketing of flowers, cards, candy that can go with it; they often seem in contradiction to the gist – of honoring and thanking your mother – by blending in the desperate shelling out of $$ to buy a token, fueled by guilt and/or obligation (We’re talking about grown-up kids, here; the little ones seem to delight in making breakfast-in-bed and homemade cards and gifts…)
We were delighted to see The Robin Hood Foundation‘s great idea for an alt-Mother’s Day gift that is easy-to-send, personal, and speaks volumes: a beautiful card telling your mama that you’ve given a donation in her name to a charity. read more…
