How to make a lower flow toilet
April 17, 2010
Americans, according to the American Water Works Association Research Foundation, use about 18.5 gallons of water in their toilet daily. This is quite a bit of freshwater, and there is a very simple and easy way to diminish this rather high water consumption.
Step 1: Find a container that fits behind your toilet
Step 2: Fill it with water.
Step 3: Open back of toilet, put the container into the back of toilet, making sure that it does not disrupt the pump mechanism.
Step 4: Close the back of toilet. You are now displacing X amount of water per flush, where X equals the volume of the container you have placed in the back of your toilet.
I had a number of thoughts watching “Breaking Away” the other day, and there doesn’t appear to be a truly logical way to concatenate them, so you’ll have to settle for something in between a notes post and an outline (and no, I don’t generally write with outlines—though I did recently start holding my pen between my index and middle finger).
1. “Breaking Away” could only have been made during Carter’s America and, as such, can be considered emblematic of Carter’s America. Consider the context: weak employment market, declining industries/natural resources; the entree of Globalization (here: Kids pretending to be Italian and later French; the beginnings of expanded presence of foreign cars); and most importantly, the energy crisis.
A used car salesman tries to tell a customer that a car gets 30mpg (in the words of Walter Sobchak: hardly, dude), while the sport the film takes as its subject matter is bicycle racing. Movies about fringe sports are great (see the great rowing epic, Oxford Blues), but they don’t come about very often, and the sport has to be chosen with great delicacy. Crew works for Oxford Blues because most Americans think rowing is elitist and old fashioned, but in that charming way that the Brits rock so well.
Bicycling works for the late 70s because no one has any money for gas.
2. What fringe sport represents today’s America? Or, what sport would a film about Obama’s America feature? The movie(s) and sports that best represented the Bush era were “The Dark Knight” (torture) and “There Will Be Blood” (pursuing Oil! at all costs). But Obama’s America?
Clearly the sport of choice would have to be curling. Cricket is too Netherlandy while trivial pursuit is too erudite. No, the answer is curling. Perhaps fat schlubs team up with Wall Street bankers to defeat Communist North Korea in the final? CNBC will broadcast.
3. Pretending to be Italian only works in the mid-West. Especially if you have a bad fake accent.
Black Penguin!
March 11, 2010
Pseudo-philosophical economic theory to follow!
On the fine art of covert reading
March 10, 2010
Yesterday’s Salad has a respectable history as a literary blog. In the past featured a word of the day column, and its contributors routinely discuss topics of urbane interest, ranging from the print margins of the New York Review of Books to the lesser-known declamations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Yet, apart from a few stray mentions of the Kindle, and the occasional discourse on what can be defined as a “text” nowadays, Yesterday’s Salad has had little to say about the act of reading itself.
Let it first be said that Yesterday’s Salad is in favor of it. If there’s one thing that Yesterday’s Salad and Dora the Explorer have in common, it is the deeply held belief that literacy is important (and if there are two things, the other is that a so-called “spirited dissent” should not abrogate stare decisis). We endorse reading simply because it is pleasurable, meaningful, and enlightening.
How we read, however, is in a state of upheaval. There have probably been more blog postings on the death of newspapers than there have been newspaper articles in the last year, and predictions about the Kindle and the iPad have run so rampant that the consensus may be that reading be done via some sort of cerebral wi-fi connection by the next Apple product roll-out. Whether the number one title will be Sarah Palin’s mad-libs version of The Audacity of Hope, or the classic mash-up Crime and Punishment and Predator remains to be seen.
One question that has not entered into the debate over reading in the future is “when?” Namely, at what points in time will reading change. Since the introduction of the paperback, books have been an eminently portable medium, and enterprising and literary-minded people have read them at nearly every point in the workday, from the train to the treadmill. Obviously, if books are downloaded straight to the cerebrum, the answer is at any time. However, for those of us not yet plugged into the matrix, there would seem to be huge gaps of time in which we cannot read: those times when we nominally give our full attention. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey, Asshole with the Hamburger!
February 26, 2010
Ciceronian: Salve, fine sir, could you stop eating that beef?
Crassus: Why ever would I do that?
Ciceronian: Not only is it good for you (two beef meals a week are an independent risk factor for heart attacks), but it will do great benefits for our planet. Meat (and especially beef) is probably the single largest per capita contributor to carbon emissions. You would be eliminating the massive amounts of fossil fuel associated with beef production 54 kilocalories of fossil fuel to one calorie of nutrition that you are eating. You would also be restoring an area the size of Russia and Canada combined to forests, which is now pasture. This could mitigate climate change by as much as 70 percent, because of regrown forests that would serve as a carbon sink.
Crassus: But its so tasty!
Ciceronian pulls out gun and shoots himself in the head.
I go through some variation of this conversation at least twice a week. How is “its so tasty” an argument? Not that I even want all to be vegetarians (though this would not be a bad thing), but do you really need to eat beef 12 times a week? How about 1 or 2?
Pure Evil for the environment.
TJROB
February 25, 2010
I have really, really enjoyed the first issue of The Jewish Review of Books. I’ve especially enjoyed reading the 11X19 print edition, particularly since Abe Socher’s introduction to the publication talks about the presumed death of print as prophesied by Dr. Egon Spengler. It can still be enjoyed online of course.
The content is quite varied, with contributions as disparate as Harvey Pekar, Dara Horn (writing on Isaac Rosenfeld and the death of the luftmentsch) and Hillel Halkin (who just strikes me as a baller).
