John Borwick’s blog

Neat stuff John likes.

March 24th, 2006

Who owns your organic food company?

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

March 24th, 2006
March 19th, 2006

Sand Game

  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.
March 19th, 2006

Excellent move thanks to Greg Brown of A-1 Freeman

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 him again.

March 12th, 2006

Like Legos? Like the Bible?

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

March 8th, 2006

Pre-School Conference

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?”

March 8th, 2006

Walking on Water

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 an anarcho-primitivist, it is awesome that I just blogged about his book.

update: The Memory Hole: The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile.

March 8th, 2006

Moving grandmother

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 of the Dallas Fire Marshall code from 1911, a half-dozen WWII-era do-it-yourself photography books, and every tool and item in the garage.

We hired A-1 Freeman, a moving company affiliated with North American Van Lines, to box and haul what’s coming to Winston.

I recommend the company with the concern that you must call to confirm your work will be done. The packers did not come yesterday until we called: I think our representative forgot about us. I called this morning and was told “your driver hasn’t come in yet [pause while rep asks around] oh wait yeah he’s coming over now.”

The staff that came to the house has been very friendly and extremely efficient. We may have everything unloaded as soon as this Sunday!

March 7th, 2006

Inapproriate Amazon recommendation

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…

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