The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for May 2011
This weekend, May 28 & 29, there are a whole bunch of taster classes going on in the Bay Area. Here’s a tiny sample of what’s going on:
See the whole catalog, go to WhatWillYouLearn.com!
A couple weeks ago I went to Paolo Salvagione’s closing event of his “Competitive Swinging”. It was great fun*. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Sarah Adler was there and interviewed me :-)
Here are bits of the article archived locally
Sarah Adler took some nice photos of us on the swings. Thanks Sarah!
Former artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, conceptual artist and sculptor Paolo Salvagione was invited back in April to activate the gymnasium space. Calling it “Competitive Swinging,” he created a sculpture for the old military barrack by utilizing the existing ceiling hardware once used to hang climbing rope for military exercises. He combined that with the basketball court’s geometric grid to hang and linearly place 10 swings (five on each side).
Recalling the squeaky swing set of his childhood, Salvagione designed the swings to avoid any audible reference; rather, participants swing in silence, feeling the breeze off the Marin Headlands.
On the last day of its installation, folks gathered to swing as pendulums and relive the playfulness of their own childhood swing sets.
– Sarah Adler, sadler@sfchronicle.com
…
David Calkins, 43
Profession: Robot builder
Neighborhood: Mill Valley
When was the last time you were on a swing?
A few weeks ago because Emma (his 2 1/2-year-old daughter with him at the gymnasium) loves to play on the swings.
What is your first swinging memory?
In the park by my grandma’s house growing up. There was a set of swings with big tall metal posts – you could get really high up.
How do you feel when you are swinging on a swing?
You get that almost flying sensation. But it’s hard if you don’t swing on a regular basis; you’re surprised by how many muscles you don’t normally use.
Other favorite piece of playground equipment?
My favorite is whatever Emma’s favorite is. Right now, she likes big slides. (Danger is her middle name.)
Lee Sonko, 41
Profession: Teacher and artist
Neighborhood: Mission
When was the last time you were on a swing?
Three or four years ago in the middle of the night. Before that it was 25 years.
What is your first swinging memory?
In my West Milford, N.J., elementary school playground. We had a giant swing set.
How do you feel when you are swinging on a swing?
A little dizzy. A lot free. A little in control. A little out of control. Ridiculously silly.
Other favorite piece of playground equipment?
There was this spinning table thing; sort of a merry-go-round. It was a 4-foot circular table that you spun around and it always felt really dangerous to be on that because you’d spin so fast and then fly off into the mulch.
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*except for the great/crashed OKCupid date, but I digress
And I have to say thank you to to Simone Davalos of Suicidebots et all for posting the event to Squidlist. It was just my kind of event :-). Paolo and Jennifer are terrific.
6 years later, I helped Zach Coffin and friends bring Colossus out of storage and into the hearts of Maker Faire attendees.
Colossus captured on real film (!) by Brody Scotland
Reuben Margolin is a Bay Area kinetic artist. He designed and built Nebula with the help of many people including my friend Michael Prados, who is a licensed mechanical engineer. Here is the first of a 4 part video on the design and construction of this beautiful and huge kinetic sculpture.
Where will Real Bread in 10 Minutes be taught? Click me!
I’ll be doing a brief 30 minute version of my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at Maker Faire on both Saturday and Sunday!
Find me at the Maker Square Demo Tent (located in the Homegrown Village, West Lot)
Saturday, noon to 12:30pm
Sunday, noon to 12:30pm
Real Bread in 10 Minutes Lee Sonko
Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! Lee will talk about and demonstrate techniques minimizing the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making bread at home. We’ll talk about: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit!
Real Bread in 10 Minutes on the Calendar
See My Maker Profile
Last night I taught my “Real Bread in 10 Minutes” class at the Institute of Urban Homesteading. It went splendidly. At the beginning, not one of the 9 students felt comfortable baking bread. At the end Ruby, the owner of the school asked, “Do you think you can bake bread now?” There was a rousing, smiling “YES!” from every student!
If you use WPBook to push your WordPress posts to Facebook, this is for you.
I followed these instructions and it worked in no time.
But just to be brief, here is what I did:
I added the following text to the functions.php file of my WordPress theme:
add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 50, 50 ); // 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall, box resize mode
Then, whenever I upload an image, there is a little button next to the “Insert Post” button that is labelled “Use as featured image”. I click that on the image I want to show as the thumbnail in Facebook.
:-)
It would be nice if it just automatically selected the first image in the post as the Featured Image, but it doesn’t. I have to do it manually. If I forget, it uses an image from the sidebar of my post. :-(
There are no limits to what you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else.
– Words to live by – stolen from Someecards.com when I should have been working on something else.
I wrote and sent this off today:
Mystic Pizza Food Company
PO Box 427
Mystic CT 06355
Dear Pizzapeople,
Fantasy
I bought a Mystic Pizza 3 Pack Mediterranean Style from Costco in San Francisco on about May 1st, 2011. It reads “Best if used by Dec 24 11 12:40”
I wanted to enjoy your pizza, but I’m sad to say it was very disappointing.
The directions say to bake for 10-12 minutes at 450. Clearly a pie this thick won’t be done in 10 minutes. We were further surprised that the pie still wasn’t cooked through after 24 minutes. After all that time, the bottom still wasn’t brown or crisp, and the center of the pie was still gummy and underdone. My oven is well calibrated, it was cooked on the middle rack with no cookie sheet under it.
Reality
The toppings were spread very poorly. The comments from my roommate say it well, “The vegetables are all lumped in a frozen pile in the middle. Who wants lumps of soggy spinach on their pizza?” One slice had a pile of peppers, another slice had a pile of olives that should have been chopped more. None of the toppings were mixed in with the pizza, they sat on top in great heaps. My roommate and I differed about the feta cheese; she enjoyed it but I thought it tasted and had the mouth feel of cream cheese, which does not belong on a pizza.
Maybe it was just the poor toppings, but after a few bites, I wanted to go out and buy some real pizza to wash the taste out of my mouth.
Keep trying!
Lee Sonko
San Francisco, CA 94110
