WORD: Bricolage

PREVIEW: 'Bricolage'

Dalene Plasket lives by a simple mantra: don’t buy anything new when you can make it yourself. Her frugality shows in the way she talks about her home. She’s designed the place around the land, using and reusing wherever she can. There is little sense of urban imposition. In fact, that Miriam Makeba song about ground comes to mind. Dalene’s own piece of ground is a retreat for everyone who steps on it. While her husband Lester may be in the demolition business, the joy of creating things is a mutual passion. 

 








 

Check out 'Our Own Piece of Ground' in the upcoming issue of Magpie for tips on how to live a little more simply, featuring Dalene's top 10 ways to greenify your home as well as excellent home DIY tutorials from her portfolio.

Miriam Makeba's 'Piece of Ground', written by Jeremy Taylor - download it here

HOW TO: Salt Your Own Bokkoms

Bokkoms, affectionately known as fish biltong, is a West Coast delicacy and a commonplace sight along the coast. Fishing micro-economies like Paternoster rely on the bokkom trade. Hundreds of them can be seen hanging out to dry in silver bouquets, slowly preserving in the hot Cape wind. The distinctly fishy smell and unsophisticated preparation method make bokkoms the perfect pescatarian addition to any local dish. Pan-fry between thick slices of farm bread, spread on toast garnished with a coriander, tomato and corn relish, or simply eat them as they are with a side of black coffee and apricot jam.

Here's how to to prepare your own bokkoms the West Coast way:

From Our Twitter Feed

 Even A.A. Gill, The Sunday Times’ very own dyslexic, micro-blogs. On Twitter, Gill is almost as magnanimous as he is in print, declaring that ‘print media is 4 looozers. tmblr 4 lyf!’ 

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.” I can feel it, too.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Read (or at least attempt) the rest here 

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What the Font!


What The Font! at Apple iStore

At last, a detective kit for the dedicated fonto-phile. Satisfy your lust for beautiful type with this font identification app and leave no font unnamed. Simply snap the font within the app with your device's camera and let it do the rest. If you don't have a built-in camera, just transfer your saved fonts via Safari browser or Mail for instant identification.



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FREE via iTunes
Requires with iOS 3.0 or later.

CLICK to view the app in the iTunes Store.

The Birdie's Online!

Magpie has gone live and we're very busy collecting a shiny assortment of objets d'art for the upcoming issue.  This quarter, we're look at the up-cycling trend in all its glory, bringing you a collection of home projects, design innovations and global consumer trends to inspire the Magpie in you. Click back soon for more quick updates and info-bytes on all things innovative!