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December 10, 2006

Plant walls; Words; Holiday mp3s and bad '50s recipes

Living walls: Vertical Garden: The art of organic architecture: Amazing photos at the Japanese design site pingmag of my kind of wallpaper.

The living wall at right is inside the home of French botanist and creator Patrick Blanc. (This all-Flash site is worth the irritation to watch the slideshow of his public and private living walls. )

Pingmag asks how. Blanc answers,

The Vertical Garden is composed of three parts: a metal frame, a PVC layer and felt. The metal frame is hung on a wall or can be self-standing. It provides an air layer acting as a very efficient thermic and phonic isolation system. A 1cm thick PVC sheet is then riveted on the metal frame. This layer brings rigidity to the whole structure and makes it waterproof. After that comes a felt layer made of polyamide that is stapled on the PVC. This felt is corrosion-resistant and its high capillarity allows a homogeneous water distribution. The roots are now growing on this felt.

Watering is provided from the top with the tap water being supplemented with nutrients. The process of watering and fertilisation is automated. The whole weight of the ‘Vertical Garden’, including plants and metal frame, is lower than 30 kg per square meter. Thus the Vertical Garden can be implemented on any wall without any size or limitation of height.

The key is to select the right plants. in the right climate, this is also stunning. Below, the facade of the famous daily market at Les Halles in Avignon.

For the love of words: 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names at Canongate. Too easy? Try 23 Obscure and Obsolete Words

This one set my husband off on a round of quibbling with the definitions, and alternate meanings. Who knew?

Darfur day: Micro-donations for Darfur at Wise Bread.

Perfect headline at Wired: Me Translate Pretty One Day. Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code.

Holiday mp3s: PCL LinkDump: Christmas Audio 2006 is a giant list of mp3 links.

Sing and eat badly: Back before corporate America discovered the Web, there were lots of sites as weird as this. Now, it's amazing to stumble on it. Swankola's Audio Advent Calendar offers a tune a day, complete with a "festive recipe" from the forgettable cuisine of the '50s. (If all that clicking on the right square slows you down too much, just keep hacking the URLs -- edit the location field of your browser to change http://swankola.com/advent/dec01.html to ...dec02.html, etc.)

John Prine, Christmas in Prison, comes with instructions for Cheese Puffs and Hot Cheese Balls -- whose ingredients include 1/4 teasp. monosodium glutamate.

The tunes tend toward weird, too. They're not all Christmas songs, although many of those seem to be Hawaiian. Many are simply odd vinyl the blogger has picked up this year. But the recipes...

I could only gawk at something called Bouchées Grenelle that includes "1 package frozen sweetbreads, 2/3 cup dry white wine... 1 can frozen shrimp soup" and a bit more that all ends up in patty shells.

Most of the recipes are awful, canapes that involve rolling something into balls and poking them with toothpicks, or salmon and bacon on toast, or tongue with scrambled egg and cottage cheese. Carefully culled, these might be worth considering from this trainwreck:

The Yjr Canadian quiche and the leek pie might work; the tray made of bread pictured above offers art potential.
Grilled Coconut-Rum Shrimp with Curried Peanut Dipping Sauce and vegetarian Hell Turds beckon.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 6:43 PM | Permalink