When I was a kid one of my favorite museum tours in Paris was the Musée des égouts de Paris – the sewer museum. Paris’ sewers go back a long way; they were semi-open rivers of effluent, like the Thames in London or the Cloaca Maxima in Rome; often these were rivers that were thoroughly ruined then built over and forgotten as long as the nasty stuff flowed the right direction.
If you like being a nexus of weirdness, you can subscribe to Atlas Obscura’s email alerts, and wake up every morning with something new and obscure in your in-box. It won’t cure you of the Trump blues, but it goes well with your first cup of coffee. [atlas, go to the bottom of the main page]
Kestrel made me a neck gooby out of the mokume-gane I sent her!
I’ve spent a bit of time in search for steel wire rope to weld into sharp, pointy things. It’s been a fun quest. I assumed for a long time that the stuff would be all over the place, up here, because of strip-mining and logging.
I’ve been slowly noodling my way through a project, in which I am trying to make some large ornaments, using the water-jet CNC machine at the fabricators’ in Clearfield. It came to me when I was watching Michaelcthulhu make giant swords, and thought, “No, but a giant sword-guard would be kind of neat!”
As I mentioned [stderr] my first attempt at feather damascus was a bust, and left me with a half-split half-welded block of many-layered metal. Some gears in my subconscious clicked and I realized there was some symbolism there in the metal.
Macarons (which are different from Macaroons) are these ridiculously expensive little meringue and almond flour cookies. There’s a secret, which is that the are ridiculously easy to make.
Mind-boggling surrealism is the order of the day.
Heaven is everlasting and earth is enduring.
Alec Steele is a young British blacksmith who does charming videos about his adventures with making stuff. He and Ford Hallam are single-handedly changing my attitude toward youtube; it’s not entirely a cess-pit: it’s what we take from it.