Sharkey's blog

I live out in the woods and my closest neighbors are trees, so if the title is taken literally, it can mean only one thing:

Put the forest on wheels and drive it away.

At the beginning of this year, I pointed interested viewers at the Building Miss Mary blog post that gave a link to Paul's epic housebus project. He obviously has a tap on some large vein of cosmic vibrational energy, because he appears to get more monumental tasks accomplished than the rest of us mortals. This time, it's replacing Ms. Mary's engine with a herkin' 427 cubic inch V8 with 4 bolt mains. Read all about it at the new page: Miss Mary's New Engine.

Back when I repowered my Housetruck, someone asked why I was only installing a 305 cubic inch V6, an engine that was of industrial quality, instead of something like a Chevy big-block 396 "rat motor". Well, I found out pretty fast that there is no replacement for displacement, the V6 was an over-square, low compression engine that was meant to run forever while putting out only a modest amount of horsepower. Something with more grunt would have been a better choice, but after investing all that time (and money) in the rebuild and installation, I was pretty much stuck with what I had.

Well, the circle of old housetruckers has once again shrunken.

On June 18th, Dave Durant, an old friend from the Oregon Country Fair moved along the mortal coil and now travels infinite space and time as a released soul.

June 17 When I moved from the city almost six years ago, I knew I was leaving a bunch of annoyances, only to have new and/or different annoyances out in the countryside. Although some things never change from location to location (barking damn dogs, for instance), I knew I wouldn't have hazards due to vehicular traffic, urban violence and crime, air pollution, etc. On the other hand, storms are more severe here, I'd have a much longer commute to the grocery, and instead of nosy neighbors, I'd have wildlife management issues.

The latter exercised itself pretty early with stupid black bears raiding my apple trees and antlered rats (elk) eating my landscaping and crapping all over the lawn. There were many different birds to see and hear, moles, voles, and rats to deal with, Pacific jumping mice to discover, and I even had my Converse All Stars attacked by miniature weasels in the carport once (I was wearing them at the time). I've spotted a lone coyote a couple of times.

There were a couple of more elusive native residents that I knew must be around, but until a couple of weeks ago when I saw a lynx (bobcat) running away from the hill where the house is, I wasn't sure that these species were active in the neighborhood.

Way back when I first started building the web site, actually before I even knew it was going to be a web site, I used a graphics manipulation program called "Graphics Workshop", along with one called "LView Pro" to touch up scanned photos, add compression to .jpeg images, etc. I had always thought that the documentation of Graphics Workshop was cleverly written, and the logo was a neat line drawing of a medieval-looking unicorn.

Fast-forward to the era of Windows 98. By then, with the domain name purchased and many graphics to attend to, I was seduced by the attraction of Photoshop, and let my older programs wither and die as old hard drives were replaced in my ever-upgraded computers.

Last week, I was cruising though a blog by Grace, the proprietor of the Domythic Bliss blog, and came upon a link to "Indecent Images", which promised to explain how the new legislation of online decency would prevent the posting and viewing of some of the most cherished favorite classical artworks. Imagine my delight to find that the link led to the still-active Graphics Workshop web site in addition to the aforementioned indecent images.

Noodling around a bit revealed that the software's developer is a bit of a gadfly, and has interesting and strongly held opinions on a variety of topics, including food additives, spam, telemarketing, free satellite TV, and more. Of course, with opinions come the possibility of offending someone, and it's probably guaranteed that you'll find something offensive on the site. I had trouble believing that someone so knowledgeable and entertaining should be SO WRONG about a couple of topics, but there you have it, like life, the internet is messy sometimes.

If you have some time to kill, or you are looking for information on making spammers or phone solicitor's lives more miserable than they already must be, drop on over and have a read, a lot of it is top-notch entertainment. Don't forget to be offended by something so I won't be disappointed....

All those years ago, way back before I got into housetrucks, even before I left the cradle of Los Angeles, I was deeply into Geodesic Domes. I read everything about them I could get my hands on, built popcicle-stick-and-thumb-tack or soda-straw-and-tape models. Leading the popular movement in the stead of R. Buckminster Fuller was Lloyd Kahn and the Whole Earth Catalog crew.

Then something happened that threw my fascination off the tracks. Lloyd penned the now-prosthetic "Smart But Not Wise" in his book Shelter, presenting it early in the chapter "Domebook 3". In it, Lloyd disavowed domes, railed against them, in fact. I was heartbroken.

I got over being crushed by the demise of dome allure, partly (mostly, actually) because of some photos and descriptions of housebuses and housetrucks in Shelter "that flipped-my-trip". But that's another story, one told elsewhere.

"Smart But Not Wise" is still a good read, available on the Shelter Publications website. Some of the descriptions of computers and such seem a bit quaint, but otherwise, this missive, penned in 1973 is as relevant today as if it were written last week. Take a few minutes and read it, then consider how it relates to the "tiny house" and "green building" movements that are currently popular. After re-reading it just now, I remembered where I picked up the term "chemically rearranged oil" to describe windows with plastic glazings.