John Borwick's blog

Check out this neat chart that shows which major company owns which “small”-feeling organic company. For example, Coke owns Odwalla.

Kitten War!

1. Go to the sand game and begin playing. Do not bother looking for instructions; there aren’t any.
2. After you have played for a goodly amount of time and tried to do everything you can do, listen to the falling sand song.

I just wanted to say that Greg Brown, a van Guard driver for A-1 Freeman (a division of northAmerican), did a great job moving my grandmother from Dallas, Texas here to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. You can request him for any interstate move by calling 1-800-654-9286.

He had to move my grandmother’s stuff to her new apartment, my apartment, and my mom’s house. He came on Sunday because he owns his own truck and works every day of the week that he’s on the road. He was very nice and I hope to be able to work with … Continue Reading

If you have some Biblical quandries you need to solve, maybe you can gain insight from these lego vignettes of the Bible.

Last year I gave two one-hour talks on “appropriate technology” to some entering WFU students. They went pretty badly, because I treated them as lectures, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to talk again.

Now, though, because of Derrick Jensen, I’m thinking if I get the chance next year I could give a talk along the lines of “why do you want to go to college?”

I just read Derrick Jensen’s Walking On Water, an indictment of Western Civilization’s educational system as a tool to create slaves for capitalism. The book’s principle vehicle is the story of Derrick teaching creative writing to university students and to prisoners. Through these stories Derrick analyzes how schools create commodities rather than creative, realized people, how classrooms and grades teach subservience to “higher authority” above self-reliance, and most interestingly for me Derrick analyzes whether he himself should be a teacher within the educational system and what students learn from his classes.

In light of Derrick’s stance as … Continue Reading

Mom and I flew to DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth) Saturday to help grandmother pack up the four-bedroom house she’s lived in for most of her life so she can move to Winston-Salem. We all began driving back in her car today.

If you think of grandmother’s possessions as ten lots, one lot went to grandmother’s church, two to the Salvation Army, three to the trash, one for mom and me, and three for grandmother. I saved a commemorative turtle from 1898 and a leather folder from a Building Inspector convention in the 1920s. I threw away an official copy … Continue Reading

I’m trying out Amazon’s “wish list” function to keep track of books I want to read. Anyone, if you have a better tool for tracking books to read, please let me know. Anyways, I added Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, and got the below recommendations:

• Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization
• Elements of Refusal
• Future Primitive & Other Essays
• The Culture of Make Believe
• Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
• A Language Older Than Words
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• High School Musical
• Apple 30 Gb iPod!!!

Three of these things are not like the others…