Click street view… then turn to your left, and be ready to see awesomeness!

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

(Click on image for larger version.)

The Alabama Theatre is one of two surviving grand movie palaces in downtown Birmingham. (The other is the 1914 Lyric Theatre, built as a vaudeville house and located across the street from the Alabama.) Built in 1927 by Paramount Pictures in a fantasy Spanish/Moorish/Arabesque/Baroque/Art Deco eclectic style, the Alabama is still in operation as both a performing arts theatre and a movie palace. Spouse and I have seen everything from the Moscow Ballet to Gordon Lightfoot in concert to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra to Jaws and Mickey’s Christmas Carol and The Godfather here.

It fell into disrepair in the 1970s as movies moved to the suburbs. In the mid 1980s, with the bankruptcy of its owners, the Alabama was threatened with the fate of the demolished Ritz and Empire and Melba Theaters. Two entities were entirely responsible for saving the Alabama: Cecil Whitmire and Big Bertha.

Bertha is the original Wurlitzer pipe organ, one of only 25 of this model and the only one still in existence, installed to provide music and sound effect accompaniment to silent movies. The American Theatre Organ Society, which had been lovingly maintaining Bertha, asked for permission from the foreclosing bank to remove her from the building before it was sold or demolished. The bank refused, saying that the organ was the most valuable thing left in the building.

Cecil Whitmire, who had been the house organist at the Alabama for some 15 years at that time and was a member of the Theatre Organ Society, was determined to save Bertha, even if he had to save the whole building to do it. He set up a non-profit corporation, Birmingham Landmarks, Inc., spearheaded a fundraising drive, and raised enough money to buy the dilapidated building from the creditors. The Alabama was saved from demolition.

The last twenty years has seen an ongoing restoration project which is nearly complete. As much of the original structure and decoration as possible has been maintained and restored, with replacements and upgrades only where necessary — or, in the case of projection and sound equipment, where it would enhance the usefulness of the theatre for performances.

Cecil Whitmire is still intimately involved with the theatre and its day-to-day operations. He longer plays Bertha at most functions, though he still holds Mighty Musical Mondays several times a year — a free hour-long concert at lunchtime on the first Monday of the month. At regular movie showings and most other functions, the Mighty Wurlitzer is given voice by one of several house musicians. And every few months, the Alabama chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society holds a free concert on a Sunday afternoon to which the public is invited.

On the first Sunday in December, 2008, the Alabama held an open house with behind-the-scenes tours and wonderful photo opportunities. I took these pictures — and many others — on that day. Stay tuned for more.

well, there isn’t anything to say. Just light a candle for New Orleans and hope the people I know there are safely on their way northeast. Hope that everyone affected has a way out and takes it.

At any rate, this morning I saw this nifty little solar energy calculator on Weather Underground. Put in your address or your latitude-longitude, information on size and efficiency of solar panels you are considering, and it will tell you how much energy you can expect to generate. Cool!

Wear it in good health.

So here it is: Cities are for People: The Limits of Localism

Anyway, back to the cynicism of which I have in abundance. I am not one to believe capitalism is a cure to all that ails us: that we can, say, buy our way out of global warming by purchasing a solar panel or two, a hybrid car, a few canvas shopping bags. As you may know by now, I think we’re all quickly approaching the shores of an entirely different world [...] Currently, I do seed-save some of the threatened and endangered vegetables, and I intend to breed a few crucial animals over the next few years. My cynicism comes in (and again, it’s hard to keep up!) when everyone just HAS TO HAVE x cool endangered item. Is creating a market for them a good thing? I suppose if it brings something back from the brink of extinction, it is.

Either way, it’s nice that some people give a damn.

Ah, a farmer after my own heart. The links and pics alone are worth a read.

This is not someone who is doing it because it’s the latest thing, like a new pair of shoes or stylish car. This is not someone who’s doing it because they think it will bring them fame and fortune.

This is someone who’s doing it out of love and commitment.

If managing in a catastrophe were just about growing your own food, many (but not all) rural people would probably be just fine. If it were about repairing your machines, maintaining your roof, keeping the well running, a good many rural people would be okay.

But there’s a lot more than that involved in running the kind of society we all demand, things like public health systems, communications systems, transportation infrastructure, energy supplies, banking and finance, good governance innovations, an effective legal system, etc. Places with these systems do a heck of a lot better than places without them, and these are systems many communities are in a poor position to provide for themselves. In much of rural America, those systems aren’t even working very well today.

That’s the reality.

And, boy oh boy, is there ever a wealth of information on passive solar heaters.

In my less busy days, I bought the plans for this: Mother’s Heat Grabber. Unfortunately, though, I never got around to making it, in part because my neighbors had made me so self-conscious about doing anything. Long story, but …

… this was about the time I was planting trees out front at my old place. Mind you, I lived on pure rock, or so it seemed, and digging a hole deep enough for a tree required I use a hammer and stake. Now, just try sitting on the ground out front pounding away with a hammer and stake without attracting the attention of cowboys and bubbas and lay-abouts everywhere determined to stop you in your tracks. If it wasn’t “You shouldn’t be doing that, let me help you!,” it was the piling on of totally useless tools and advice, the worst being the post hole digger. Oh, yea, right, a 5’2″ female is going to bore right through a boulder with a post hole digger.

I swear, they about drove me crazy.

So perhaps it isn’t my lack of engineering expertise — more likely it was my fear of cowboy and bubba interference, and their determination to get me to stop doing whatever I was doing as quickly as possible because otherwise someone might expect them to do something.

But here: I have a privacy fence! Even better, I have relatively industrious neighbors!

Which means that, here, I can finally build my passive solar heater, unless, of course, I really am an engineering doofus!

In any case, there are plans for sale here. They were a mere $10 a few years ago and, hopefully, they still are reasonably priced.

I love my solar oven. I’ve had it since 2003 and have cooked countless meals in it. True, it’s a bit glitchy — I planned to use it today to to roast a nice buffalo chuck roast, but storms moved in last night and it’s too cloudy now. And it does require moving every few hours so that it catches the best rays.

Still, it does the trick, all the while saving on electricity and helping to keep the house cool on 95 degree days.

And, unless you’re insistent on technical sheets, it doesn’t require special recipes, at least not in my experience. I just put everything in it and go. True, as a result of my devil-may-care approach, there’ve been a few things I’ve been unable to replicate. For one, I was making a fantastic kind of upside down shepherd’s pie a few years ago, and danged if I can remember now how I did it.

But even my recipe memory lapses don’t stop me. My general approach is to just pile it in and go.

And food poisoning? Meh. I remember trying to have solar oven conversations on dKos and being besieged by Nervous Nellies horrified by the prospects of food poisoning! zomg, they would never, not in a million years, what am I thinking??

::pained sigh::

It boils down to this: if you know how to cook without landing yourself in the hospital with food poisoning, you know how to cook in a solar oven.

It’s why I only use mine on sunny days when I can be here to watch it. I simply put my ingredients into a covered Pyrex casserole dish, set the casserole into the solar cooker, aim the cooker at the sun and turn it however often is needed.

But, if you need further reassurance (which, if you’re reading this blog, you don’t need), this little article might help. Ultimately, though, it boils down to this: you don’t leave a nice roast in a crockpot overnight unless that crockpot is on. You don’t stew a chicken on the stovetop, then turn the flame off and leave it sitting ’til tomorrow. And you don’t cook a brisket in the solar oven, then let it sit for hours and hours when clouds move in, then evening approaches, then oops, it’s midnight, let’s see how that brisket turned out.

Common sense and knowledge of simple cooking techniques will ensure that botulism isn’t lurking around every corner, ready to chew you up and spit you out.

And, of course, you can make your own solar oven. I’m a bit of an engineering doofus, though, so I’ve never tried. If anyone has, though, your hints and guidance are most certainly appreciated!

The Urban Homestead: your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city
by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
$11.53 from Amazon

I can’t recall where I first saw mention of this book, but the subtitle convinced me to check it out. Then I saw that they included a chapter on stealth backyard chickens, so how could I not buy it?

I hadn’t had a chance to read it until yesterday, which was spent chauffeuring to yet more doctor appointments and the associated waiting in various rooms for medical personnel to do their thing. I also carried a C J Sansom novel in case this one was too dry or uninteresting, but I needn’t have bothered.

This book, while not an in-depth “how to” guide to everything, is lively and very funny in places. Skimming through the three-page section on composting toilets, I came across this little sidebar:

If you have the space, stash away an old five-gallon bucket with a lid, filled with sawdust or peat moss, just for this sort of event [failure of the sewage disposal system]. It might be difficult to find a sawdust source while simultaneously fighting off zombie hordes.

To paraphrase some movie or other: You had me at “zombie hordes.”

Then I read the chapter on backyard chickens. I live in a small municipality that prohibits most kinds of livestock except dogs, cats, pet birds, fish — the usual suburban family pets. I would love to have four or five chickens in my backyard to lay eggs and to eat the ticks that are thick as blackberries back there. But not only am I fighting City Hall, I have a very anti-animal husband to contend with. The dogs are okay because he is attached to them, but NO ANIMALS, he says. How to overcome this prejudice?

The chapter was fun to read and gave good information on the most important step to keeping chickens (or ducks) in your urban back yard — win over the neighbors. Don’t keep a rooster. Hens make little cooing noises and only a few breeds cackle when they lay, so they tend to be relatively quiet and unobtrusive. If you tell the neighbors and allay their fears of noise, smells, filth, and negative impact to their property values, you are very likely to be able to glide under the official animal control radar. Bribing the neighbors with fresh eggs doesn’t hurt, either.

Unfortunately, it didn’t address the problem of the uncooperative spouse, and it specifically warned against keeping chickens in the same space as dogs, which tend to look upon them as play toys and/or prey. For the time being, then, chickens on my urban homestead are a no-go.

There’s a lovely bit on very small houses that would appeal to biscuit and to Anne, I think. Chapters on food preserving and cheesemaking are also good introductions to those subjects.

In general, the book is full of terrific ideas but does not always go into great detail on how to accomplish a particular goal. You’ll need more in-depth guides to gardening and energy conservation; they touch on these topics but there is much that was omitted. Some topics, such as water conservation and graywater harvesting, are covered in more depth, but even here there’s a sort of magical Jedi hand-wave that tells you to hook up a pipe to divert the washing machine water to your garden without telling you how to do it.

Pros: Excellent list of sources in the back of the book. Upbeat, optimistic tone while at the same time acknowledging the imminence of peak oil and the realities of the current unsustainability of American consumer culture. Solid suggestions on What We Can Do to help the situation and how to prepare for the future.

Cons: There is no index. The extensive table of contents is helpful, but an index would have been more so.

Many of the boxed sidebars and additional information pages are reverse printed using white text on a particularly vivid acid green background and are quite difficult to read. Black on light gray would have set off the text as well and been much easier on old-hippie eyes.

All in all, this is a fun introduction to the topic of urban homesteading, and a useful addition to your TEOTWAWKI library.