tickling the shogun’s tongue

when you think of japanese poetry, i suspect the first thing that comes to mind is the haiku — a surprisingly-modern invention in a country with more...

deeper within language

the difference between art and craft is not form but purpose. art has a single reason to exist, to convey emotion, typically through a search for beauty and...

thirty-two days of creativity

we’re in the middle of october and it’s fall. it’s miserable and dark and the nights are closing in on us. it’s time to huddle under a...

fuck school

there is a problem with modern education. it is neither modern nor does it educate. this, indeed, is an issue for our society. we are creating a future where...

a simple plane

let's build a smoothing-plane. this smoothing-plane, in fact…

there are many, many, many ways to do this but i believe this is the simplest. a few things before we...

a simple bench

i've been away from my usual life for a couple of days to get some medical treatment i've been waiting for and all the time traveling to and...

being without making

something that’s been on my mind lately is the practical side of hobbyist and student woodworking. i have the advantage of a significant amount of shop-time in a...

an ode to informality

no, i don’t mean you should talk like a hick. or write like an uneducated fuck. i mean you should stop writing (or reading) formal poetry. formal...

diy is the enemy

don’t do it yourself. seriously. buy ikea furniture.

i know what you’re thinking. i’m a woodworker. for fuck’s sake, i’m a woodworking teacher with decades of experience. i...

fake letters

english has the most unnecessarily-complex spelling system of any modern language. while spelling is not necessarily-simple in many european languages, it is usually complex for a reason — mostly...

aquatic woodworking

if you cut a lot of dovetails, there is a tool you may be missing from your kit — a fishtail chisel. of course, this might be old news...

the language of more-than-one

the english language is famous for many things, most of them bad. it is evolutionary and cumbersome. it has tense, number, gender, myriad useless pronouns, more punctuation...