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Today, we had Coworkout at Shofuso, the seventeenth-century Japanese house in Fairmount park

I arrived first, a few minutes before the house is opened to the public. I walked around the fenced garden, watching volunteers dig holes for new azalea bushes. The house looked IMPOSSIBLY, UNBELIEVABLY, INCREDIBLY awesome. This is the photo I took with my iPhone:

Once the gates opened, but before the other folks arrived, I walked all around the house, looking for power outlets. I mean, I know there were not power outlets in seventeeth-century Japan, but this house was designed and built in 1954, and assembled in MoMA’s courtyard in NYC. Even though there are no nails in its construction, I thought there might be utility plugs hidden away somewhere for use by someone.

I did not want to ask if there were outlets, because I was afraid that the answer to "excuse me, is there an outlet around?" would be "HA HA HA, YOU IDIOT! SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY JAPANESE HOUSES DIDN’T HAVE POWER OUTLETS."

“But I thought maybe you wanted to vacuum?” I pictured myself asking, followed by them guffawing in my face: “HO HO HO YOU FOOL! SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY JAPANESE HOUSES HAD NO VACUUM CLEANERS!!!“

So I didn’t ask. We sat on the veranda, smelling the sun on the cedar, the sweet-hay smell of the Tatami mats, and enjoying the shade under the deep eaves:

I worked as long as I could on my mostly-charged battery. Finally, when the last ounce of battery juice was gone, we started packing up, and struck up a conversation with Prudence, the friendly executive director of the house. I got comfortable enough to ask:

"Say, there’s no, you know… power jacks or anything hidden around here, are th…"
I was so afraid that I was about to get ridiculed, I trailed off.
"Oh, power outlets? Sure! You were sitting on one!" she said.
"Ha ha ha", I agreed shamefacedly. It was a stupid question, and I felt silly for asking. I’m not surprised she answered sarcastic —
"No, seriously, you were sitting on one!" she said. She cheerfully pointed at a teeny tiny little metal dealie in the floor, which clearly (I thought) was a part of the door hardware:

We all stared at it.

Jon Bettscher slowly reached down and twisted the little tiny middle of the dealie — a metal disk the size of a quarter.

Two familiar little slots appeared.

BECAUSE OF MY FEAR OF GETTING LAUGHED AT, I had spent two hours carefully marshalling my laptop battery. Dimming the screen to the point where I could barely read my screen. Composing only short emails, and using only antialiased fonts, to conserve electrons.

ALL WHILE I WAS LITERALLY — literally, as in "my bottom was touching it" — LITERALLY SITTING ON TOP OF THE POWER OUTLET.

I bet there’s a life lesson in here somewhere.

Too bad I’m too afraid of looking like an idiot to ask what it is.

I’m going to do some hyperventilating here.

For a while, I’ve known that there’s a Japanese house in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park called “Shofuso” (literally, “Pine Breeze Villa”), and I knew it was built in a traditional sixteenth-century style, and I wanted to hold a coworkout session there, or maybe show “Ran” for the Guerilla Drive-In, but I had never visited. Lydia and I went there yesterday, and OH MY GOD I’m suffering from Stendahl syndrome trying to process all the amazingness that we found there.

Probably the best way to do this is just to dump all my impressions, plus a late night of Wikipedia-ing and reading the house’s excellent website, in no particular order:

• The house was designed and built in Japan in 1954 as a goodwill gift to the people of the United States. The house and garden were built for a two-season display in the courtyard of MoMA in NYC.
• The rocks in the garden come from Japan. Once they were selected, they were WRAPPED IN PAPER to preserve the lichen and moss.
• The house was re-assembled, and the garden was re-created, in Philadelphia in 1958, on the spot where the Japanese pavilion had been in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. There had been a temple gate at the spot since then; this corner of Fairmount Park has always been Japanese.
• You take your shoes off and put them in a rack before entering. The tatami mats smell sweet, like hay in the sunshine. Together with the smell of waxed cedar in the veranda, and the flowers in the garden, it smells WONDERFUL.

• The house is surrounded by a wall with a moat. Because this style of Japanese architecture runs seamlessly from indoors to outdoors (there might not even be any external walls during hot months, just room, then veranda, then garden), the wall around the garden kind of is the outside wall of the house.
• The portion of the veranda outside the kitchen is carved into a non-slip surface, which is just about the best thing ever in the whole entire world

• There’s a small separate structure across a very short bridge.
• A BRIDGE. OVER A STREAM. IN YOUR HOUSE. EXCEPT THAT IT’S ALSO OUTDOORS. OH, MY GOD.
• The structure on the left is the teahouse, where tea ceremonies are held. The house is very small, almost hobbit-sized, and clearly not for standing up inside. It has the vibe of a playhouse, but it’s a sophisticated, grown-up playhouse vibe. Lydia was so excited by this little teahouse that she started visibly vibrating.
• Oh, did I say Lydia? THAT WAS ME.
• The Japanese started building small standalone teahouses in the Sengoku period, when the entire country was going to hell in a handbasket. Earthquakes, famines, armed uprisings — who would not want to build a small, simple rustic teahouse and sit in it, concentrating deliberately on small actions? Oh, MAN, I totally get this appeal.
• The Japanese aesthetic of simplicity and appreciating imperfection, wabi-sabi… oh, that’s seductive. In many ways, it’s already very similar to Quakerism, and many have already drawn the line connecting Shaker aesthetics. But I did not know how much emphasis was placed on the natural world, and on embracing rusticity imperfection. I just finished reading “Shoes outside the Door“, about the San Francisco Zen Center’s troubles in the 1980s, and I read about Richard Baker’s expensive antique bowls, but I had imagined translucent eggshell china, not pottery that’s imperfect and asymmetrical and TOTALLY COMPELLING. OH, WOW.
• I know what Thorstein Veblen would have to say about all this: “You’re looking at an aesthetic of curation built upon free time that in turn depends on economic oppresion!” But Veblen can stick his wet blanket WHERE THE SUN DOES NOT SHINE. Looking at the careful, clever, and irregular repairs made to the edges of the veranda brings to mind the “Repair Manifesto” that modern nerds are promulgating. Beautiful materials, carefully cared for, in a small, lovely environment? It’s totally amazing.
• The reason it’s totally amazing is due to the dedicated work of a nonprofit group that took over a vandalized, under-maintained structure in the seventies and eighties, and loved it into the jewel that it is now.

You can see a few more pictures that I took on Flickr, and you can read a lot more about the house on its website at shofuso.com. I’ve reached out to them about visiting for Coworkout, and I really really hope that we can spend a day pretending that it’s actually where we work.

I’m not quite sure how you manage yourself and your laptop when you can’t lean up against the wall, but I look forward to figuring it out!

Nin hau ma, y’all? *tips cowboy hat*:

What does “NYOU-lo KARR-szha” mean?

Meatcards appeared on G4TV’s “Attack of the Show” yesterday. Their verdict? “Tastier than most business cards!”

Chris had made a prototype just for them, before leaving for Florida to watch the shuttle launch. Will is waiting to hear back from the USDA to see if we have to comply with the Full Weight of Government Regulation regarding meat manufacture (a USDA inspector on-site every day we make cards!), or whether this is a “not picked up on radar” kind of a thing, since all we’re doing is marking and repackaging already-manufactured jerky. We’ll see!

Lydia discovered a jump rope at the drugstore yesterday; when I came home, she was jumping, five-year-old style in the back yard.

So we spent some time googling for “jump rope” and then “Double Dutch”, and sure enough, YouTube did NOT disappoint:

Check out the amazingness that starts at 1:14 in this video (though the whole thing is great.) I feel like I’m matching a movie about competition Double Dutch, where the scruffy young upstarts bring their LOVE OF THE DUTCH to the game, taking on the established, well-funded, cynical and jaded corporate team:

I spent about a thousand years in high school learning to juggle devil sticks. If YouTube had been around then, I might have learned a whole different set of skills instead.

Kate went with Lydia on a field trip today, to Springton Manor Farm. Here, the kids are scooping muck out of the pond, and watching all the tapoles wriggle (and dragonfly nymphs! and all sorts of other stuff!)

Just a few minutes from West Chester, Northbrook is the pinnacle, the apotheosis, the ne plus ultra of summertime: Northbrook Canoe Company

Northbrook is absolutely everything you could possibly want in a canoe-rental outfit. Headquartered in an old stock-feed depot on the banks of the Brandywine, every sign in the place is a hand-painted one-off made by one of the many affable art students on staff, and BURSTING with Tripper Harrison bonhomie. Big, brawny schoolbuses pull trailers full of canoes — each with its own name — up the Brandywine, where you put in and float back down the river to the Northbrook Food Shack.

The Brandywine is cool (but not cold!), shady, and shallow (but not annoyingly so!) It’s the perfect river to paddle on with a five-year-old, with occasional stops to jump out of the canoe and splash around in the water, like we did today:

The West Chester Guerilla Drive-In showed the Bill Murray summer-camp classic “Meatballs” in the canoe barn at Northbrook on a rainy May night in 2007, and the atmosphere could not have been ANY better:

Oh, and did I mention? The Northbrook Canoe Company is also the home of the Brandywine Scenic Railway, that will take you and your canoe ON A FLATBED TRAIN CAR up the river ON A TRAIN. For the past ten (twenty?) years, Northbrook has been trying to get the rights to do this once again, and it is my fondest wish ever that they are able to make this happen.

I’ve gushed about Northbrook several times before, but that’s just because it’s so fantastic. They open on May 3rd, with canoeing, kayaking, and tubing trips available. If you go, please be sure to say “hi” to Ezekiel C. “Zeke” Hubbard for me, who founded Northbrook in 1977, and is just about the awesomest guy ever. I’m warning, you, be prepared to come home humming “Are you Ready for the Summer?” the whole rest of the week.

Previous reasons why you should move to West Chester:

• Secret Mobile Robotic Pipe Organs
• Rescue robots
• Secret Skate Parks and Awesome Tack Shops
• …and many more reasons still to come.

Tuesday, April 21st, 11:40 AM EDT, in the Tikaro Interactive campfire chat room:

Randy S: My brain isn’t working today, what is the popular on-line place to get biz cards printed?
Chris C: overnightprints.com
Randy S: oh, nice, thanks!
Randy S: I was having trouble thinking of what to google for 😦
Chris C: yeah i had the same trouble a few weeks ago; hehe
Will R: “sweet business cards”
Randy S: OMG EDIBLE BUSINESS CARDS!
Will R: You would want to make them out of beef jerky or something, so they would keep.
Will R: Hmm
John Y: BEEF JERKY!!!!!!
John Y: WE CAN DO THAT ON THE #$@#$ LASER TABLE!
John Y: *Pages Chris T.*

Wednesday, April 22nd, 10:00 AM EDT:

• Master laser prototyper Chris Thompson completes the laser-etched beef jerky prototype, with his Twitter handle on it. We consider calling it “Tweetmeat”.
• Chris describes the taste of the etched parts as “dry, kind of scorched, like burned meat.”
• John registers “meatcards.com” and “tweetme.at”

Thursday, April 23rd, 12:00 PM EDT:

• Randy shows off the meatcards prototype at Independents Hall show and tell
• Worldwide launch of meatcards.com. Tagline: “Two ingredients: MEAT and LASERS.”

Friday, April 24th, 12:22 AM EDT

• Meat cards dot com appears on BoingBoing. “Been Boinged” nerd merit badges all around!
• UPS reports that four pounds of Giant Slab Jerky are on the way from Tillamook, Oregon.

TO BE CONTINUED

PS. Does anyone have one of those vacuum-sealer bag thingies? And do we all have to get, like, food-handler certifications before we can re-sell cured meat…?