The article doesn’t really do Tim justice. He’s a bodger who is basically a genius for what I can only describe as Goblin technology. His projects are as much about fun and experimenting as having a result. In the first windmill video he acknowledged that he could just buy a small electric windmill, but that’s not the point.

I mean, this is the dude who made a narrow gauge railroad and a compressed air locomotive to transport wood to his terrifying biochar chopper and crucible.

Every time I’ve gone to a beautiful place, (Kauai/Virgin Islands/Moab etc) I’ve run into former insurance salesman types who just said fuck it, and stayed, and now live in an old school bus and fix outboards or whatever. Often it was precipitated by a big life event like a divorce or a child leaving the nest but sometimes they just bounced. I get it.

Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn’t turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.

Same thing happened with “VitaminWater”, a product in the category of “enhanced water” (a term reminiscent of “enhanced interrogation technique”). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it’s actually healthy. They settled.

You’re right. I used to be “no mow” when I lived in the city and the burbs, but now that I have a rural acreage, I’ve realized that you have to use every trick in the book to even have a chance against invasives.

Tomorrow I’m renting a brush mower to take out an acre of 8 foot tall Himalayan blackberry that’s completely choked out a meadow. It’s flowered, but hasn’t set fruit, so I need to get it now. I’ll have to follow that up with herbicide application in late summer because it has vigorous root energy storage. That’ll be year one of at least three years of restoration. This is on top of wineberry, tree of heaven, stilt grass, japanese honeysuckle, and autumn olive. It physically blocks animals, consumes all the sunlight, and none of this shit supports native lepidoptera so it totally fucks up the food chain.

I wish I could just let it be and it would be fine, but that ship sailed a hundred years ago. The upside is in areas where there’s been active remediation the forest looks fucking fantastic.