Monthly Archives: April 2011

Cake in the Mail

IMAGE: William and Kate’s official royal wedding cake. The British fruit cake may not taste quite as delicious as Prince William’s favourite chocolate biscuit cake, but its alcohol-soaked sultanas and rock-solid royal icing give it an impressive shelf-life and the sturdiness to survive extensive handling — two qualities much more necessary to the core functions […]

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Another Reason Not to Get a Tattoo of Your Local Liquor Store

25-year-old gang member Anthony Garcia spent years adding detail to the drawing of a Pico Rivera liquor store on his chest, including a loop of Christmas fairy lights strung along the ceiling and the bowed street lamp and sign across the way. But this is no body art homage to a favoured alcohol purveyor.

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Strange and Beautiful Seeds From the Atom

At her blog, Garden History Girl, Paige Johnson (by day, a nanotechnology researcher at the University of Tulsa), describes the inception of the Atomic Gardening Society:

In March 1959, an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x,’ ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations.

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Designing a Restaurant for Plants: An Interview with Jonathon Keats

On Saturday, April 16, the world’s first photosynthetic restaurant for plants opened for business. Located outside the Crocker Museum for Art in downtown Sacramento, the new dining establishment is a project of experimental philosopher and artist, Jonathon Keats. This is not a restaurant for humans to eat plants; rather, it is an exercise in creating a dining experience for the plants themselves, with a menu of enhanced sunlight that is designed to appeal to their sophisticated sensory apparatus, providing them with not only energy, but also a satisifying, piquant, and delightful experience.

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Sprawl / Growth

IMAGE: Matthew Moore’s farm being eaten by sprawl. All images via Matthew Moore. Over at GOOD, I published a story by Thomas Gorman, a Berkeley News21 Fellow, about farmer and artist Matthew Moore’s Lifecycles project. Moore is a sculptor and fourth-generation family farmer whose property is destined to be swallowed by sprawl from the city […]

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The Architecture of Opium Production

These colour lithographs were originally made in 1850 at the request of Walter S. Sherwill, an army officer who served as a British “boundary commissioner” in Bengal. According to Ptak Science Books, these particular reproductions were taken from an article exploring the economic and infrastructural marvels of the Indian opium trade in an 1882 supplement […]

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