The house sausage dish at Cellar Door Provisions is the proportion of things we should be eating: mostly veggies. The sausage patty is made with Mint Creek lamb and pork, local and undoubtedly one of the best producers in America.
Tartine: sourdough country loaf, house kefir, local vegetables: beet, radish, carrot
Poetry found on the side of a “suggestions” box, in a West Side co-living warehouse.
Diagram of how one company retrofit an old barn to meet Passive House standards.
Ohio bike touring partner Laurenne departs to crash with a Warm Showers host.
Tiny-house construction in the Beaver Brook community in the forest of upstate New York. Thanks to the photographer, Jace Cooke, for the Creative Commons license.
Head over to cabinporn.com for a real show. (Not that kind, you sex addict. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The folks behind the site, the residents of Beaver Brook, posted this quote recently.
It’s my experience that artist communities are almost always camps because they appropriate space that nobody else wants (at the time), but by virtue of a creative progressive view of neighborhoods they create a demand from others that ultimately marginalizes them, so they are forever transient. – James Lynch, founder of Fforest camp.
While not much has happened here recently, the same can’t be said for my non-digital life. To wit, a list.
Been listening to more and more tunes from northwestern Europe. Soaring digitals and orchestration coupled with a hint of nihilism? Count me in.
Visited a couple times at FreeGeek Chicago. Getting to know some of the regulars. Good people; good organization. Oddly, its basement headquarters, with bare bulbs and chainlink fence for “walls,” feels like home. Maybe I should have been a hacker.
Riding often. Always, rather. Unofficial goal: 360 days this year. Above, my pants hang dry after a wet ride last night.
Learning more about restaurant work every day. So far I’ve kept mum about my part-time employer, a pretty big player in the local-sustainable food scene here. I’m either gonna remain silent or introduce it with a bang. Haven’t decided which yet.
Following Matter Magazine, a Kickstarter-funded online place for good long-form science journalism. Or, as they like to call it, “journalism about the future.”
Trying to please those editors who like my deep/long work while trying not to scare away those editors who only need me to churn out short ephemera.
Eating some really great food. In the past few months I’ve been to Yusho, Mana Food Bar, Au Cheval, San Soo Gab San, Trencherman, Sixteen, Avec, Tavernita. And Lula Cafe, my perennial favorite, more times than I can count. There’s a reason I live down the block from them.
Two nights ago, at 56 glorious degrees fahrenheit, I explored the Loop, Grant Park, and Streeterville by bicycle between midnight and 2 a.m. My new header image shows Streeterville in all its money-soaked sparkle.
I’m writing this as much to record my wish list as to tell you about it.
Kickstarter helped fund two of these three outrageous-cool bike accessories. From left to right, the Blink Steady rear light; the TiGr titanium lock; the Hövding helmet-as-airbag, which, unless you’re in an accident, looks like a punk scarf.
The light’s all the rage because it eliminates human interaction with it. No more switching modes, turning on and off, or even removing it from your bike to prevent theft. If only they incorporated solar charging; maybe that’s too much to ask. With fundraising successful, the question isn’t if but when they’ll release a front light.
The titanium lock sparked a do’h moment: why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Stronger than a U-lock and one-third the weight. Not to mention that I carry two U-locks—to protect both wheels—for the job that a single TiGr unit does. Sign me up.
While the airbag-helmet ($600) and lock ($200) are for sale now, the light will be available soon. Pre-orders cost $125.
I can’t see myself spending $600 for a slightly more pleasurable ride… but $125 to save a couple minutes every day? Sure. And $200 to shave nearly a dozen pounds? It’s so worth it.
It’s time I move this site into line with reality. I left Ohio journalism at the end of May, after exactly a year with the Springfield News-Sun and, sporadically, the Dayton Daily News.
Since I had accepted an offer to be Springfield’s permanent city hall reporter only a month earlier, my colleagues were surprised to hear my decision. When I told them where I was going — Chicago — they all smiled. (All but those tasked with ensuring the paper’s coverage.)
It would have been an honor to cover government in a city with such an important past. But after talking to several older friends whose bylines appear in places I covet, I found I had probably taken what I needed from the Ohio position. Anything else was just gravy. I needed to cast a wider net.
It helped that my wife got a job offer in Chicago at an exclusive hotel downtown, and that I scored part-time work in a kick-ass restaurant. More on that later.
But now, as dust settles in a one-bedroom in the Logan Square neighborhood, my desk is coming into shape. My magazine subscriptions will soon roll in. And I’ll be writing about what I want to write, in the timeframes I want to write.
It was scary to leave the pension, the 401(k). But if I was gonna do what would tickle my soul, I had to.
Below is the trailer for a forthcoming documentary produced by some good blokes from nearby Wilmington, Ohio. My sentiments exactly, boys. My sentiments exactly.
Roger Dean Gillispie leaves a bus with supporters to face his parents’ home, which he hadn’t seen in 20 years. According to a U.S. district court decision six days ago, Gillispie was wrongly convicted of nine counts of rape in 1988. Photo by Teesha McClam, used courtesy of Dayton Daily News.
Though he likely could have gotten out sooner by feigning guilt, Gillispie maintained his innocence throughout his imprisonment. This persistence would seem to make him an even more valuable advocate for The Innocence Project — in Ohio, an arm of the University of Cincinnati law school — which helped free him.
An Ohio attorney-turned-politician, Jim Petro, has been behind Gillispie for several years. Petro’s book on wrongful convictions has been making waves in the world of law enforcement and is dedicated to Gillispie.
After the jump I’ve pasted my notes from the initial meeting in the bowling alley. (Edited for space, the article above leaves out the small details of Gillispie’s first minutes of freedom.)
Brandon Smith 