Daily Archives: November 1, 2008

I’d like to find a chance to get to NYC soon, just to get one of these jackets

Sadly, New York is the only city with Muji stores in North America, and they have five!  Here’s hoping one lands in Toronto soon.

For more details, see the very useful blog post at The High Low on the  Muji Jacket (for $139.95!)

I think slow cookers are a great idea. Too often, though, I find the end result is boring.

This recipe, with the not so interesting name of Slow-Cooker Pot Roast from marthastewart.com, is anything but.

I think the secret is the scarce amount of liquid that goes in at first (a few tablespoons). Most of the final sauce comes from the carrots and the onions.

Not only do you not get too much sauce — in fact, it’s perfect — but you also get nicely glazed vegetables because they start off in so little liquid.

In the future I am going to try cutting back on how much water, stock, juice, etc. I put in my  slow cooker: I am thinking I will see better results.

I replaced some of the carrots with parsnips and served it along side mashed sweet potatoes. Perfect for busy fall weekends.

Oddee.com is my guilty pleasure. It is a contemporary “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” (another favourite of mine since I was a kid and they had small TV segments on during lunch.)

This piece, from a post called 10 Amazing Contemporary Sculptures is a scuplture of the King from 50,000 matchsticks!
All ten sculptures are truly amazing, and the Oddee site is truly fantastic. Go see! You won’t believe your eyes. 🙂

Bruce Nussbaum is onto something he terms ZipCar Capitalism at BusinessWeek. He is…

“…off to the World Economic Forum conference in Dubai on Tuesday night after I vote. Some 700 folks, including Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine, are going to brainstorm about making post-crisis world a much better place. I spent time on the subway this morning thinking about what a new economic model might look like and what might have any chance of succeeding and came up with ZipCar Capitalism. Treehugger calls it Rentalism but that doesn’t ring well in my ears. Actually it’s Tamara Giltsoff in Treehugger who did the fantastic article.”

I think it is a great idea, but I wonder if it is “new”. The use of the Commons, of communities banding together to accomplish something, and many more cooperative ideas, aren’t necessarily new. But it may be a new time to revisit these ideas. More sharing and cooperation wouldn’t be a bad way to tackle the many economic and environmental issues we face.