Building the Pink House

The Pink House house is made of rammed earth, and heated by geothermal energy – through in-floor water pipes. The floor is concrete, which is the best conductor for in-floor. The heating is supplemented by a Tempcast masonry stove, the latter the greenest cheapest way to heat a house, its radiant heat used in pre-electricity Europe. For the first year, we only used the masonry stove, and it kept us warm, despite the 12 foot walls, and massive central hall.

The cost savings of geo-thermal were substantially less than advertised.

The Diseases of Aging Can Be Eliminated and I will show you how.

February 22, 2020

This week Jamie dragged me to an Otomi village, Indian descendants of the pyramids near us in San Miguel Allende in Mexico. We watched the women grind corn and make tortillas, ate some of their food and did the usual virtuous tramp around an indigenous village, spreading money everywhere. All Good. What interested me rather more, since I have visited lots of indigenous villages, were members of our tour, all of whom had let aging ...

The Real Real Reason Why American Dirt is being blacklisted.

February 7, 2020

I read Lionel Shriver’s piece in the US Spectator this morning and while I thought it was smart and well informed – Shriver had her own run in with the purity police, it did not get right to the point of the novel’s piling on, mostly by writers of colour, particularly the Latin community who call themselves, Latinx. Jeanine Cummins did put herself through an extraordinarily strenuous period of research, and indeed, ...

Tyler the Creator

January 30, 2020

Break my heart, why don’t you? Just gorgeous male energy. The Prince tribute sent me rocketing back to those fifteen years I spent having fun, drowning in sensation, in the visual, my own sensuality, entirely out of my (cerebral) comfort zone, never out of love, not for one moment. This is the reason I will (and can) work into my 100’s. Forever young, yo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJilkMPqvs0

Whither the female Nietzschean mensch?

January 29, 2020

Trying to broaden my reading I came across The Millions, a newsletter belonging to Publisher’s Weekly and in it, a piece by Sonia Chung, called “Bon Courage” about women STILL not being allowed to “…in 2020 anywhere in America—mindlessly, without cost, inhabit and manifest her Alpha dog, her Nietzschean mensch.” This is true. Or is it? Are the women screaming at the sky at Women’s Marches, not inhabiting their Nietzschean mensch? Hillary, ...

The Semiotics of sexy…baby…tiger*

January 23, 2020

We are well into the self-improvement months. There is a new wrinkle to the diet and suffer thing, stopping drinking and suffering, suffering at the gym and so on. But no worries, there is still pain involved. It is about manipulating your face to make it look the way you want it to look. Younger women want to look like Kylie Jenner, a heavily sexualized siren presenting as much older than her actual ...

You have GOT to be kidding me. Another?

January 21, 2020

Indelible in the Hippocampus; Writings from the #metoo Movement

January 21, 2020

The title of the #metoo book is taken from Christine Blasey-Ford’s memory of the boys laughing as they tumbled her onto the bed and tried to take her clothes off. Her story sounded plausible to me when she testified, entirely teenage behavior in the ’80s, post-sexual revolution when women were supposed to be as extractive of sex as men, as avid, as careless, anticipating no harm. If she’d had a couple of witnesses, or ...

No HRH but a Leap of Faith

January 21, 2020

I wish them both well. Most people I know would like to see them permanently humiliated, but it is the nature of every generation to flout convention, try something new, and just maybe, succeed. Here’s the reason, the only reason they gave, in Prince Harry’s voice today “But the media is a powerful force.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQgdloE3GOc Harry mentioned once finding his wife sitting on the end of the bed, weeping over some cruelty or another. Little ...

Snakes and Ladders in the Housing Market

January 18, 2020

The Daily Mail reports that half of Manhattan’s luxury apartments are going begging as commie oligarchs realize the world is changing and not in their direction. In Vancouver, house prices have dropped 16% as taxes on foreign ownership skyrocketed. As in all the mega-cities, low-income housing is at a critical shortage and no one knows how to fix it. Hence, in the richest city in the world, Los Angeles, there are a hundred thousand ...

Bullshit

January 17, 2020

I am never ever going to write about global warming which is bullshit and is not happening. I am just going to publish this chart every time there is new propaganda like this week’s report from NOAA and NASA, screaming that this past decade is the warmest in living history. Yeah, by a few hundredths of a percent since the Little Ice Age. And frankly, I even doubt that. This graph is from a peer-reviewed journal: ...