bookofjoe

Could you live in a 70-square-foot house?

Hannah Bloch introduced me to Jay Shafer, founder/owner of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, in her September 10 New York Times story (it's page 2 of 4).

Above, Shafer is pictured outside his new home in a valley near Sebastopol, California.

The cedar and pine house measures 8 feet by 12 feet (that's 96 square feet total) "and features a loft bedroom, front porch, fireplace and gabled roof with a Gothic window."

Shafer's houses, which range in size from 70 to 850 square feet, cost between $20,000 and $90,000.

Get in touch with him at info@tumbleweedhouses.com; he'll build one for you.

The Times article follows.

Downsizing, Seriously

Could you live in a 70-square-foot house?

For most Americans, bigger means better when it comes to home size. But for a small number of people, the extreme opposite is true. They prefer to live in tiny dwellings that are to normal-sized houses what bonsai are to trees: miniaturized but not diminished. These super-downsized homes are eco-friendly, affordable and built with an extraordinary attention to detail.

For the most part, these minihouse owners are single and idealistic. They aim to live simply, help the environment and cut down on costs. Jay Shafer, a 41-year-old art-professor-turned-designer, is one. For the past seven years, he has built and lived in houses smaller than 100 square feet — a teeny fraction of the average 2,439-square-foot American home. He’s currently putting the finishing touches on a new, jewel-like home, set in a valley near Sebastopol, Calif. It measures 8 by 12 feet, is made of cedar and pine, and features a loft bedroom, front porch, fireplace and gabled roof with a Gothic window. There’s a 4-by-5-foot kitchen (smaller than a full-size mattress) with a cooktop and minifridge, and a 2-by-4-foot bathroom dominated by the shower. Shafer says this kind of house suits him perfectly. “You should feel the space is taking care of your needs and not demanding a lot in return,” he explains. Beyond that, he adds, “Making it small is the best way to make a house green.”

Shafer’s six-year-old Tumbleweed Tiny House Company (www.tumbleweedhouses.com) offers homes ranging in size from 70 to 850 square feet, with prices from $20,000 to $90,000 per house. He says he has sold 10 tiny houses, and half those orders came in the past year. That’s partly thanks to Hurricane Katrina. For a few who lost everything in the storm, tiny houses have become a practical solution. Shafer sold an 8-by-16-foot house to Julie Martin, a hurricane survivor from Bay St. Louis, Miss., who liked it so much she’s marketing one of his designs as a temporary home for other survivors.

Shafer’s very first customer, Gregory Paul Johnson, 42, has been living comfortably for the past three years in a 140-square-foot house on wheels in Iowa City that cost $15,000 to build. Johnson started the Small House Society, whose mailing list has expanded to 400 members. Technology, Johnson says, has helped make tiny living feasible. He saves space by watching TV shows on his iPod and using his laptop as a stereo. The thoughtful design of his house also helps. “Because everything’s proportional, your brain doesn’t think you’re in a small space,” Johnson says, adding that he can imagine living happily in his “mobile hermitage” for a long time. But, he concedes, “if it was much smaller, I’d feel a little cramped.” And how small is too small? Says Shafer, “As long as I have elbow room, I’m O.K.”

Best cartoon of the month

By Tom Toles, it appeared on the editorial page of yesterday's Washington Post.

Google Food and Drink Directory

Who knew?

Lots to explore here, for sure.

Iron Man Ironing Board

From the website:

Iron Man Ironing Board

Here's the best way we've ever come across of getting a man involved in the ironing (even if he is lying down).

It may sometimes feel like one requires super-human strength to make it through the piles of ironing, and the Iron Man Ironing Board is aptly named to reflect this, echoing the strength of the 1960s crime-fighting 'Iron Man' and generally standing proud as an ironing board that takes no prisoners.

The board itself is man-shaped — or rather, 'man-after-steamroller-accident'-shaped — and comes with a striking red cover.

Just as most men need dressing, he has a wardrobe choice, and you can also buy an interchangeable navy board cover for him.

The Iron Man Ironing Board breaks free from the hum-drum floral ironing boards that seep into even the best households, and looks so good you'll want to keep him out of the closet, so to speak.

Features:

• A super-quirky ironing board shaped like a man

• The ironing board comes with a red cover

• A separate navy cover can be purchased, slotting over the board and lacing underneath

• Suitable for ages 16 years+

• Ironing Board Felt Mat/Cover: 139 x 51 x 0.7cm

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£99.99 (€149; $189).

Is Chang Lianjun the most stubborn person in China?

Above, her home in the heart of Beijing.

The immediate neighborhood leaves something to be desired, but that's only because it was razed three years ago to make way for a shiny new development called Capital Garden.

The several thousand other residents of the neighborhood, which covers an area the size of about a dozen football fields, meekly did as they were told and left.

Mrs. Chang (below),

who's lived there for 17 years, refused to move.

She told Jason Dean and Karby Leggett, in their story on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal, "I have no other place to go."

Here's the article.

As Chinese Towers Go Up, Mrs. Chang Makes a Last Stand

Beijing's construction boom leaves many stranded, so she stays amid ruins

Behind a 10-foot wall in the heart of Beijing, tall weeds cover an expanse of rubble the size of about a dozen football fields.

Three years ago, the area was home to several thousand working-class residents who lived in a warren of 1950s-era apartment buildings. Last year, dozens of the structures were razed to make way for a glitzy new complex called Capital Garden.

But construction, nearly a year behind schedule, hasn't begun. The reason: a woman named Chang Lianjun. After living in an apartment borrowed from a relative — which she has called home for 17 years — Mrs. Chang refuses to leave.

"I have no other place to go," says the 43-year-old woman, sitting on the steps of what remains of her brick building. It sits alone in the middle of a field. All that is left of the apartment house is her second-floor unit, the emptied one below it and a connecting stairway. With the utilities long shut-off, Mrs. Chang uses candles and battery-power lanterns to see at night and cooks with a burner using canisters of gas.

Millions of Chinese have been forced to relocate to make way for new roads, luxury apartments and gleaming office towers. The change has ripped apart families and neighborhoods and has raised anger against the government.

The upheaval has been especially dramatic in Beijing, where huge swaths of the city have been demolished to make way for new construction in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. From 2002 to 2005 alone, 315,000 households were relocated, or about a million of Beijing's 15 million residents, according to the Center for Real Estate Law at Peking University Law School.

The government is trying to take a softer line toward some who have been forced to relocate. It has tried to strengthen residents' legal recourse and require developers to settle all disputes before building — moves aimed at appearing more responsive and, ultimately, ensuring its citizens continue to accept Communist Party rule.

"Instead of its old focus on speed, the government is putting greater focus on justice and social stability," says Wang Cailiang, a prominent Beijing lawyer who has handled numerous relocation cases.

In the end, residents like Mrs. Chang who fight relocation often lose. For two decades, the South Sanlitun neighborhood offered her a stable and comfortable life that is proving difficult to replicate in the new China.

The daughter of a postal worker, Mrs. Chang was born in 1963. After high school, she landed a job at a government-owned pastry maker. In 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square uprising, she married Liu Baocheng, who also worked at a government factory. The same year, Mrs. Chang gave birth to their only child, a boy.

At the time, the vast majority of Chinese lived in government-subsidized housing. Neither Mrs. Chang nor her husband had been assigned an apartment yet. So, in a common arrangement here, Mrs. Chang's mother-in-law let them live in an empty one provided to her by her government employer. (Her mother-in-law no longer needed it since she lived with her husband in his state-supplied apartment.) The unit was small and the family shared a bathroom with neighbors. Rent was only a few dollars a month.

In 1995, Mrs. Chang's life began to unravel. Her husband lost his job amid a push to close or retool state-owned enterprises. The same year, their son was diagnosed with cancer. Distraught, her husband began drinking heavily, Mrs. Chang recalls.

The couple burned through their meager savings to pay for their son's medical treatment, Mrs. Chang says. Her husband grew more desperate. Late in 1999, Mrs. Chang returned home one day to find him passed out after a heavy day of drinking. She rushed him to the hospital, but doctors couldn't revive him and he died.

Around the same time, Mrs. Chang's employer went bankrupt and she was laid off. Then, in 2002, her son died.

The hardship created a rift between Mrs. Chang and Du Xiulan, her mother-in-law, who was grappling with the death of her own husband, both of them say. With both sides laboring under growing financial debts, they stopped seeing each other regularly.

Mrs. Chang plugged away at life. Her father pulled strings to get her a job at the government post office across town where he once worked. She earned enough to pay the bills and chip away at her debts.

Early in 2004, she learned that the city planned to replace South Sanlitun with a ritzy new development. Because the apartment still was in the name of Mrs. Du, the developer approached her — not Mrs. Chang — about a compensation package. In September, Mrs. Du signed a deal giving her the equivalent of $37,000, or enough to buy a modest apartment elsewhere, in exchange for vacating the apartment. The money was to be paid only after Mrs. Chang left.

Mrs. Du, the mother-in-law, says she tried to contact Mrs. Chang to discuss the agreement but didn't get a clear response. Mrs. Chang says her mother-in-law assured her she would be taken care of but never provided details. Mrs. Chang, who believes she is entitled to some sort of concession because of her 17 years of residency there, decided she wouldn't leave the apartment until she was given a new home or money to pay for one.

While Mrs. Chang dug in, most of her neighbors moved on. By the end of 2004, wrecking crews got to work. In January 2005, they turned toward Mrs. Chang's complex. On the evening of Jan. 25, as Mrs. Chang was preparing for bed, her electricity went out. She stepped outside to find the main power line into her apartment cut. Suspecting an attempt by the developer to ratchet up the pressure, she called the police. A few hours later, the lights went back on.

Mrs. Chang stayed, and watched her neighborhood vanish. Her own building, which once housed 30 apartments spread over three floors, came down around her.

By June, Mrs. Chang was the last resident left in the area. Amid growing tension with the developer, she says, a group of workers arrived outside her door one evening and began banging and yelling, apparently seeking to intimidate her.

The developer, Beijing Topwin Real Estate Development Co., says it hired an unidentified outside company to handle the relocation and compensation work, and had no direct contact with Mrs. Chang.

An uncle of Mrs. Chang's recruited two unemployed farmers to stay with her, fearing another confrontation. When the same workers returned and tried to open Mrs. Chang's front door, her two protectors scared them off by hurling stones. The workers never returned.

In July 2005, Mrs. Chang's electricity was shut off for good. The water was cut the following month. Mrs. Chang switched to bottled water and battery-powered lanterns. Without heating, she wore extra layers that winter to keep warm.

The developer, Topwin, also was under pressure. Construction on the complex of ornate buildings was supposed to start last year and be completed before the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Last November, Topwin sued Mrs. Chang's mother-in-law for failing to vacate the apartment. At a January district court hearing in eastern Beijing, Mrs. Chang's mother-in-law argued the developer should compensate both her and Mrs. Chang, according to court papers. Mrs. Chang says she was too upset to speak clearly.

The court sided with the developer, saying Mrs. Chang's mother-in-law had entered a legally binding contract. It ordered her to empty the apartment within seven days, according to the court papers.

Mrs. Chang appealed, arguing that she couldn't leave because she had no place to go. At a new hearing in June, the court judge upheld the original ruling.

The split between Mrs. Chang and her mother-in-law has grown sharper. The two haven't seen each other since their last court appearance. Mrs. Du insists she deserves the full compensation. "That money will take care of me in my old age," she says, sitting in a tiny two-room apartment she shares with her son, his unemployed wife and their twin children.

Nearly two years after she began her battle, Mrs. Chang remains defiant but also is increasingly desperate. Topwin last week gave her written notice of the appeal court's decision and told her she had to leave this week. A spokeswoman for the company says it has followed government rules by offering compensation to Mrs. Du only.

There are other signs Topwin is preparing to move ahead. It recently erected giant signs, three stories tall, along the outside of the lot to promote Capital Garden. "A dazzling city of fortune," it reads. A Topwin executive says the company still hopes to complete the project before the Olympics, although she acknowledges that might be difficult.

On a recent hot night, Mrs. Chang sat outside her apartment and pondered her options. In the glow of a fluorescent lantern, she said she plans to stay until her demands are met. "It's either that or a life on the street," she said.

Cruzin Cooler — 'My other car is a brewski'

Can your cooler do 13 mph?

Didn't think so.

From the website:
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Cruzin Tailgate Cooler

All the Cruzin Cooler™ needs is a designated driver.

When the party is quite a ways from the parking lot, don't struggle with the cooler — drive it!

Cruzin Cooler turns a large cooler into a motorized scooter, complete with power steering, disc brakes and foot pedals.

Built-in drink holder

doubles as a convenient access door

to cooler.

It's the easy way to transport food and drinks at sporting events or the neighborhood barbecue.

It maneuvers easily, clipping along up to 13 miles per hour.

Cruzin Cooler has a 24-can capacity (with ice) and a 30-mile range.
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Don't drink and drive?

With this puppy you drive your drink.

Blue or Red.

Powered by a gasoline 2-stroke engine: $499.

Electric power (300 Watt): $399.

Both here.

'What is Art?' – by Karl Zipser

Long story short: It's moving the goalposts so hoi polloi are always in the "red zone" but never score.

Here's his essay.

What is Art?

In our time, the answer to this question is under the control of the art elite. The answer to the question is simple:

"Art" is x,

where x is a variable. The value of x is approximately "something that an ordinary person could never understand."

The reason that x is a variable, and not a constant, is because its value must continually change. If ordinary people begin to understand what x is, then the value must change, so that they do not understand what x is. The reason for this is simple also: If people understood what x was, then they could answer the question "What is Art?" themselves, and there would be no need for the art elite. Thus, the art elite must continually change x, as a matter of survival.

Even though ordinary people cannot understand art (by definition), they can still see it. True, the art elite has developed a form of art called "conceptual art", but even this is given a physical manifestation. The art elite has not yet, to my knowledge, succeeded in selling tickets to an empty museum.

To continue, ordinary people can see art. But what they see puzzles them, and often they do not like it. In general people are content with things they do not understand, if they like them. They may even be tempted to think they understand the thing that they like. In order to prevent this presumption, the art elite has found it necessary to further refine the definition of Art. Thus,

"Art" is x,

where x is something an ordinary person could never understand, and and also something that an ordinary person does not like.

It is clear that the interests of the art elite do not coincide with those of the ordinary person. An ordinary person would like to be able to go to a gallery or a modern art museum and see something he or she likes, and perhaps even understands. The art elite must not allow this to happen.

How can we escape the power of the art elite? It might seem like a good idea to abolish the word "art" altogether. Consider the following situation: you are in a modern art museum, and a member of the art elite points to a pile of plastic dog shit on the floor and says, in a reverent tone, "This is Art." If we abolished the word "art", then the sentence would be reduced to "This is . . ." The member of the art elite would be left with an embarrassing silence. And what would be left except a plastic pile of dog shit?

To abolish the word "art" would throw the art elite off balance, but it would not take away their power. The reason is that "art" is only a word, and abolishing the word does not abolish the concept it refers to. It would only take a short time for the art elite to confer and settle upon a new word or symbol (perhaps even x) to refer to the same meaning (or lack of meaning) that the word "art" used to refer to. And we would be no better off than before, except that we would have x museums instead of art museums.

The best way to deal with the art elite is to attack the very source of their power, the control over the question, "What is art?" The way to do this is to make a new definition:

"Art is what [fill in your name here] likes to look at."

This might seem too simple to be useful. But please, take a moment to think of the implications.

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Full disclosure: I don't pay Karl Zipser to retain me in his address book — but I should.

It's still a minor mystery to me how it is that bookofjoe should somehow have overlapped Venn diagrams with him such that he continues to keep me around.

Maybe, kind of like me with Humphrey, Karl just likes my treadmill style.

[via Karl Zipser's Art and Perception at zipser.nl, and Hanneke van den Bergh]

Music Labels

From the website:

Personalized Music Note Labels

Sending a "note?"

Show your love of music by attaching this treble clef and staff with lined background.

It's music to their eyes!

2-1/2" long x 1" wide.

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250 labels are $5.99.