Birds Before The Storm

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Earlier on Birds Before The Storm, I posted about Big Dog, a military-friendly quadruped robot that is kind of frightening. But fortunately, our attention has been brought to Lrry-1, the video of which appears above, by the boulevardier: (from our comments)

we have our own robodog too! and it is bigger and scarier than theirs and made entirely of scrap metal… i wasn’t savy to mutoid waste until kanye west (of all people) introduced me to this video and they are fucking rad! They were organizing illegal parties in the 80’s, fleeing from police raids in the 90’s and now are building giant monsters, i sort of have a crush going!

So yeah, this is where it’s at. Scrap-metal DIY monsters that spit fire, ridden by mohawked mad scientists, and in real life. Yes.

Lrry-1 is the product of Lyle of the Mutoid Waste Company. A bit more information about them is available on their wikipedia entry and through a documentary on youtube. Other videos of Lrry (including LRRY2 or possibly 4!) are available on youtube as well: 1, 2.

It was raining today, so I didn’t really feel like going anywhere. Fortunately, my friend decided to skin the mouse that the cat had killed. I took pictures of the process. Note that these pictures are not for the squeemish, like me.

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I think the first time I ran across the idea of living in a shipping container was the film Mies vailla menneisyyttä [The Man Without A Past], a finnish movie about a man who gets mugged, loses his memory, and has to start over from scratch. It’s a pretty good movie, too. Poor guy has to actually rent a plain, boring shipping container.

Then the latest Rolling Thunder (crimethInc’s magazine) came out, and they had an article devoted to clever swedish radicals who got together and built their own autonomous space, Kulturkampanjen. Pictured above, it uses four cargo containers as the basic structural support to build off of. Pretty neat.

Then today I ran across Treehugger.com’s exposition of container houses, and it’s pretty amazing, with a lot of different approaches introduced.

I love the re-use and recycling of industrial byproduct. I do wonder, though, how terribly hard these things would be to insulate. Perhaps the coldest night I’ve ever spent was in an empty gondola making its way from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, cause that thick steel just sucked the heat right out of us. Summer must be even worse. Still, a cheap, neat house is a pretty awesome thing.

Today I had the pleasure of meeting a friend of mine’s mothers. One of them pulled out a bag she was crocheting, and told us with pride that she had made it from reused plastic bags… in this case, newspaper bags (at the top) and grocery bags (forming the bottom). The thing is quite sturdy and remarkably ingenious. She of course demurred and has pointed out that she’s not the first to do this. But we were super excited and she graciously let us photograph the process of making plastic yarn.

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I’m glad to know that we anarchists aren’t the only ones a bit excited by all this financial melt-down. Author Douglas Rushkoff has written an excellent analysis of the financial melt-down and what it means in the way of opportunity to get beyond capitalism (but not necessarily beyond money).

I don’t recommend going out and paying $6000 for a wood-fired hottub, but Dutch Tub is a pretty genius idea for anyone looking for sustainable decadence. Works on simple convection: you build a fire inside the spiral of pipe, and the warmer water rises. Cooler water gets sucked into the bottom. You can insulate the fire for additional efficiency. Temperature is controlled by controlling the height of the fire-basket that is inside the spiral: raise it and less of the heating coil is heated. Granted, wood, while renewable, isn’t a resource that an entire global economy should depend on. But anyone who knows me knows I’m not interested in having a centralized global economy anyhow.