Eric Smillie | Writer

Nerd fights

Seems like everything gets turned into a competition these days. I wrote about four unusual battles royale for the March issue of Wired. Artists hustle before a live audience to draw the best pictures and the winner basks in the light of glory (as in the photo above) at Super Art Fight. Do-it-yourselfers race handmade and hand-powered cars down railroad tracks while wearing period costumes at the Great Handcar Regatta. Butchers hack up a steer into valuable steaks at the Eat Real Fest. And hardy crazy people run all night and day in the mountains of Vermont with breaks to chop wood, reconstruct Lego sculptures, and translate Greek into English while standing waist deep in freezing water at the Death Race.

They say you might die during that race. For more on that, here’s an entertaining video from the New York Times:

Surviving the Death Race

Built to destroy buildings

Who says insurance isn’t exciting? In this picture, the Institute for Business & Home Safety’s new research center is hard at work, blowing a house to smithereens with 140-mile-per-hour winds generated by 105 5.5-foot fans. I wrote an article in Wired magazine about the facility and the hail bombardments, inundating rain, burning embers and radiant heat, and Category 3 hurricane winds it is subjecting buildings to—all in the name of safety and reduced insurance claims. Think of it as crash testing for houses.

Want to see the winds in action? Watch this video:

There’s another video with audio, plus more photos, at the IBHS site.

So how large of an array of fans is that, and how huge does this place have to be to fit two houses so easily? I could tell you it’s half an acre, but just look at this picture by Ian Allen:

That’s one of a series he took for the slideshow with the article. For some extra large versions, check out Ian Allen’s portfolio.

Beer’s tasting rooms

One of the benefits of being a home brewer (see more about that at my other site, awesomepickle.com) is that you have license to try a lot of beer, and a lot of different kinds of beer. In the last few years a new kind of store has popped up to help beer lovers discover beer’s many styles, a lot like wine bars and tasting rooms have done for wine drinkers. I wrote an article in the New York Times about five such tasting rooms for beer.

Say you want to know more about what distinguishes a Kolsch (which is in the bottles above, photo by the inimitable Phil) and a Helles than Wikipedia and BeerAdvocate can tell you? At these stores you can taste the difference. With education as their goal, they stock hundreds of kinds of bottled craft beer and keep a constant rotation on the tap. They’ll recommend beer and food pairings and they tend to be liberal with the free samples, too. But don’t tell them I told you that.

The Crap Caper and other GOOD writing

I have been writing, mostly for GOOD magazine. For starters, I wrote about a group in Chicago that has saved 1,500 gallons of precious human waste and is turning into compost. It’s not legal, and if you read the Crap Caper, you’ll discover a technique for hiding a barrel of poo in plain sight. The project’s mastermind, Nance Klehm is a renaissance woman. Please go to her website because she’s doing loads of cool stuff.

I had a lofty plan to create a one-page how-to that urbanites could use to compost their business. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed. Making humanure is complicated and I’ve never done it, so I couldn’t draw on experience to make my own guide. Check back with me in two years, which is how long it takes to turn human waste, mixed with sawdust or other carbon-rich material, into rich, loamy soil that is free of human pathogens and other bad things. (Nance can do it in a year, because she’s good at it.)

Done right it is safe. But do be careful. If you do want to try your hand at it, you can get started here:
-A general how to in MAKE magazine.
-The Humanure Handbook, the ultimate guide.
-The Handbook on the sterilizing effects of heat and time.
-How to make a sawdust toilet and a box for it.
-Some dos and don’ts.

While I failed to produce a soil-making onesheet, I did write close to half a dozen other how-to stories for GOOD’s past two issues. In the Slow Down issue, read my impassioned defense of time off and find cooking tips and ways to take a vacation from digital communication. May Wired’s editors forgive me; some days I just don’t want to be a cyborg at all.

For the Neighborhoods issue, I learned how to share my yard with the neighbors without getting into a shouting match and how to be a regular. Lastly, I talked to artist Ted Purves about the Reading Room, a storefront he opened with Susanne Cockrell in Oakland, California, to distribute free local fruit and collect local history about the neighborhood’s origins. The place took on a life of its own and Purves’s advice on how it happened falls somewhere between tips for a small business owner and tips for an art experiment. For more on the project, go here.

My sauerkraut in a San Francisco art show

My homemade, unpasteurized sauerkraut (and photos of it) will be on display and up for trade at the exhibition Non*Mart at Y2Y Gallery in San Francisco from November 6 till January 15, 2010. See more details about eating some at the opening at my post about it on awesomepickle.com or at the show and gallery links. Click the pic for a bigger flyer.

Pickles are awesome

Friends, I have another website on this fine internet of ours. It’s called awesomepickle.com and it’s dedicated to the awesome world of fermented food and drink. The contents are mostly recipes for pickling food at home with the help of live microorganisms Food prepared this way is very healthy. It also tastes delicious and never fails to impress friends and strangers alike. I recommend you go to the wbsite immediately, make some sour dills or sauerkraut, brew some beer, and then enjoy the fruit of your labors with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Although I haven’t had much to put up here for the past few weeks, I swear I’ve been working. Editing doesn’t deliver the bylines the way writing does. There are some articles are in the works, though.

Saturday afternoon nirvana

Even in these times of layoffs, shrinking page numbers, and general gnashing of teeth, new magazines are born. Here to the right is the cover of the first issue of Afar, a new international travel publication. What’s the story? This magazine caters to travelers who search for the local character of the countries they visit. If you like to climb the walls of the resort, sneak off the bus tour, meet local people, and get yourself invited to dinner then this publication might be worth picking up. In fact, you can order a free copy of the first issue and see for yourself if you like it.

My own contribution to the magazine is an article on the Czech word pohoda. One of those words that doesn’t translate easily into English, pohoda once meant pleasant weather and in recent years has come to describe those especially blissful moments in life when all is well. It’s the sort of feeling we have all had the joy to experience, most likely on a Saturday or while on vacation, when we are totally relaxed and unworried. In other words, pohoda is when you don’t have a care in the world.

It’s a popular word with Slovaks, too. So popular that it’s used as the name of the country’s largest and most beloved summer music festival where, as a newbie journalist, I managed to score an interview with the stupendously soulful Detroit techno producer and DJ Carl Craig. Listen to something nice by him here. I took this photo of him, too, and just couldn’t understand why the design department of The Slovak Spectator didn’t want to publish it. That clip helped me land my first freelance story outside of Slovakia, for a music magazine. Definitely a moment of pohoda!

Come to think of it, a lot of my life in Slovakia was pohodlny (that’s pohoda as an adjective). I had a fun job, no real responsibilities, and almost every Slovak I encountered was psyched to meet me. The scenery helped too. It’s pretty darn peaceful over there:

Mankind’s largest excavation

Click photo for larger version. Image courtesy of Kennecott Utah Copper.

The Colorado River spent 6 million years carving the Grand Canyon. It’s taken Utahans only a century to dig Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine. Ok, so the Grand Canyon gets as deep as 6,000 feet and Bingham only reaches a bit past three-quarters of a mile. But consider this: The pit you see here used to be a mountain, which tacks on at least an extra 1,000 feet. We’re gaining on nature, and quickly.

In the latest issue of VIA magazine I’ve got a story on the open pit copper mine, which is the largest man-made excavation on Earth. Everything is oversize here, from the fleet of 80 haulage trucks taller than two-story houses and costing $2.8 million a piece to the 82 million gallons of water sprayed annually for dust control. And the mine runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Sound like a monumental waste? Take a look around you before you wish it closed—everything from fridge to phone works thanks to copper. Come to think of it, the story of copper mining, accelerating from the first urban electrification projects to today’s massive resource extractions, is the story of modern America. Perhaps that’s why this hole is a National Historic Landmark.

For more crazy details on just how big this operation is and to learn how it is we can turn a ton of rock into 13 pounds of copper sheeting, watch this video. Spoiler alert: it involves a five-mile conveyor belt.

I’m spending most of my time working as a contract editor at VIA these days, so my freelance writing has slowed down a bit and I haven’t had as much to report here. I’m enjoying seeing the other side of the writing game, though, and it’s giving me the opportunity to go after breathtaking travel destinations like this one.

Rebuilt bike

I mentioned in my last post that I was rebuilding a bike in the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, and here it is, about a month after I finished it. A Raleigh Record from the ’80s that I got at a garage sale around the corner. It’s got 14 speeds now, and new wheels, derailers, and chain. I cleaned and greased everything else, starting with the bottom bracket. Not exactly a restoration that’s true to the 10-speed tradition, but those extra gears should come in handy on the hills of the bay area. Not that I’ll be riding it; it’s too big for me. But now that it’s out of the basement I have room for a project that’s my size.

Seven burgeoning bike scenes

Photo by Phil Yip.

In the three weeks it’s been online, my latest story for GOOD magazine, a primer on the best burgeoning bike scenes in North America, has earned a lot of comments. Many readers wrote in other cities as candidates and it would have been nice to include them all. While reporting the story I learned, as at least one commenter noted, that you can go to any city in the U.S. and find a burgeoning bike scene. That’s a wonderful thing.

Everywhere I looked I found community repair shops where people could build and fix bikes at little cost. Every town has formal and informal clubs that organize fun rides and races. And, thanks to rider activism, many cities are planning to expand their networks of bike paths and are considering bike-rental systems like the Velib program in Paris. Or at least they were at the end of last year, before the economy pooped out on us.

I’d guess that the strong showing from these communities is the result of the fairly small number of bikers relative to drivers on the road. When you’re part of just a tiny percentage of all commuters, you feel a sense of camaraderie with your fellow cyclists. At least I always do.

One last thing to say: All that thinking and talking about bikes inspired me to haul one of my old, broken-down bikes out of the basement and into the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, which is full of friendly geniuses who have helped me fix it up from the bottom up.