An apolitical political video

This made me laugh with haughty abandon.

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I added another design blog to my blogroll

I found Susan Palmer Designs by way of Kelly Morriseau's Kitchen Sync. Susan Palmer Designs has a great website and she maintains a design blog there. Check it out. Susan's blog is another great site for design ideas and advice that's specific to kitchens and baths. Her blogs are good-natured and informative. Her passion is palpable and her design sense is impeccable.

So between Kelly at Kitchen Sync, Richard Edic at Richard Edic Designs, Ann Porter at KitchAnn Style, Susan Palmer and me, there are five resources run by designers who blog and maintain a web presence as a public service. This is a pretty cool development. Feel like doing some research? All five of us maintain pretty extensive archives. Want to ask a specific question? Ask!

Between the five of us too, there's a wide diversity of opinion and experience. Each of us works different ends of the market and in locations from Honolulu to Naples, from Northern California to Upstate New York. Imagine, five great minds at your disposal. Ain't the Internet cool?

Amusing video

A friend of mine sent this to me yesterday via MoveOn.org. I have been howling ever since. Watch through to the end and there are instructions on how you can get one of these for yourself.

First person accounts of the Great Depression

Now, before I get accused of spreading panic, I don't believe we're on the cusp of another Great Depression. Although to use the parlance of the day then, hard times is comin'. I doubt I'll find myself on a breadline any time soon but it's good to keep in mind that the economic growth and stability that the US has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War is both unprecedented and a historical anomaly. Hard times are the usual course of of events, not peace and prosperity. We're incredibly fortunate to live in the times we do and it does a body good to review what life was like for the people on whose shoulders we're standing. 

With that said, the online magazine Slate has a finance-themed spin off site called The Big Money. The Big Money got their hands on a diary written by a Youngstown, Ohio attorney named Benjamin Roth. Roth started keeping a diary in 1931 and did so until his death in 1978.

Benjamin Roth was born in New York City in 1894 and moved shortly thereafter to Youngstown, Ohio. He received a law degree and moved back to Youngstown after serving as an Army officer during World War I. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had been practicing law for approximately 10 years, largely representing local businesses. After nearly two years, he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, and in June 1931, he began writing down his impressions in a diary that he maintained intermittently until he died in 1978. His perceptions and experiences have a chilling similarity to our own era, and The Big Money believes that Roth's words—though they are 75 years old—have much to teach us today; we'll be serializing several excerpts.

The Big Money ran the first installment last week and you can find it here. The second installment posted this week and you can find it here.

Despite my Steinbeck-fueled romantic notions of that era, it had to have been a horror to live through. It's interesting to read Roth's usually dispassionate descriptions of his daily life. Check it out and count your blessings.

Glass knobs from Restoration Hardware, response to a reader

A reader posted a comment yesterday after my posting about Restoration Hardware's glass knobs. Ming wanted to know what kind of a design would dictate the use of glass knobs. Well, here's a look at a rendering of the project where the glass knobs will go.

This is a butler's pantry located between a formal dining room and a kitchen in an older home. It's a true butlers pantry because it will be used to store dishes, linens, silverware, and serving pieces. Technically, a butler's pantry is a small room used for storing the stuff you'd use to entertain, and they're also used to stage and clean up after dinners.

This one has a dishwasher and an icemaker in it and so that real china can be stored in the wall cabinets, each of the wall cabinets is 16 inches deep. The standard depth of a wall cabinet is 12" deep and that's not enough depth to be able to stack large plates. If you're planning a remodel some time, add some deeper wall cabinets, butler's pantry or no butler's pantry. You'll be glad you did.

Those wall cabinets have a pretty distinctive, Mission-style mullion over clear glass. The cabinetry is an inset style from Medallion Cabinetry called Winslow and they have been painted an off-white color called white chocolate.

When it's up to me, I always put knobs on doors and handles on drawers. If it's a wide drawer, I'll use two handles per drawer. So in this case, here's that knob again:

And wouldn't you know it, those clever kids at Restoration Hardware have a companion handle:

Now because the butler's pantry is in a room separate from the kitchen, it's in a different, though somewhat complimentary style as the kitchen. The kitchen sort of looks like this but not really:

That photo is from Medallion, the kitchen and butler's pantry I'm working on is still in the concept phase though the construction ought to start on it at some point before Thanksgiving.