Autumn re-runs: A history of western art in under three minutes

This post ran originally on 13 June 2009. Oh me oh my do I love art history and I'd forgotten all about this fantastic video. The point of my weekend re-runs is to give a second chance to some of my old material and bo-baby does this video need to be seen again.

Check this out. Someone posted this on Twitter this week and I've been watching it ever since. For the life of me I'm not exactly sure who posted it though. I think it was @leonagaita or @verdigrisvie though. If it were someone else I apologize and ladies, if either of you were the original poster, thank you.

I haven't gone off on an Art History tear in a couple of weeks and this video will do it for me. This thing's a brilliant, animated survey of the last 500 years of western portraiture. I love, love, love how this video's producer got to the 19th century and kept going up to the present. Far too often, people gloss over the last 100 years because they don't quite know what to do with it. That's unfortunate because even though it may not be immediately obvious, all art rests on the shoulders of the art that came before. This video drives home that point brilliantly and it does it in less than three minutes. Bravo!

If you're having trouble with this, follow this link. This video came from the great website GUBA, and it was posted by someone who goes by the name jun129. Thank you jun129.

Autumnal reruns: Apartment Therapy makes my head hurt

This post ran originally on 29 August 2009 and I'm running it again to keep up the educational tone of my reruns this weekend. I can't repeat it often enough, science is your friend. There is no other method to understand the world.

It's Saturday and I'm feelin' the need to pontificate.

Against my better judgement, I logged onto that doggone Apartment Therapy the other day. I have no excuse other than I was looking to read something inane, and what better place for a fix of inanity than AT?

I found this:

Over the weekend we read about some recent studies showing that plant essential oils from common herbs—specifically rosemary, thyme, clove, and mint—can be effective as natural pesticides. Apparently just a few drops of the plant oils mixed with water can repel or kill destructive aphids and mites. This seems like great news for those trying to grow veggies and fruit at home without the use of harmful chemicals...

Uhhhhhh, the plant extracts mentioned here; rosemary, thyme, clove and mint, are most definitely harmful chemicals. If they weren't harmful chemicals, they wouldn't kill aphids and mites.

All plants are engaged in an arms race with the creatures that eat them. Plants defend themselves the only way they can, they evolve chemical defenses. Some of these defenses are aimed at a specific predator and some defenses are more broad spectrum. Human beings aren't usually the intended target in this arms race, and as a species we reap some really tasty rewards. So even though I happen to love the taste of rosemary, thyme, cloves and mint (to maintain the theme of the AT pablum I quoted above), I never forget that the taste I'm so drawn to in these plants is essentially a pesticide. I'm not the intended target, but if I eat enough rosemary it'll make me as sick as a single bite of rosemary does a katydid or an aphid. Rosemary's taste comes from a chemical made by the plant to act as a pesticide, and rosemary's certainly not alone in this. These foods and flavors aren't bad and I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat cilantro or mustard greens any more. Toxicity is a matter of dose. Period. A toxic dose of cyanide is surprisingly small. A toxic dose of water is significantly higher, but it's still a toxic dose.

The following is an excerpt from a lecture given by Richard A. Muller, a professor at the University of California at Berkley. He makes some great, though counterintuitve points about this whole natural/ unnatural division. I LOVE this kind of stuff.

Life is rarely, if ever, an either/or proposition. Divisions between natural and unnatural are arbitrarily drawn. Natural is a meaningless label applied by marketing departments. The current vogue for "organic" foods may have standards behind that label (for the time being at least), but it too is an arbitrary line in the sand.

Have you ever noticed that the bug spray Raid smells like chrysanthemums? It does because its active ingredient is pyrethrin. That's chrysanthemum extract. So what's the difference between spraying Raid on a tomato plant and growing a chrysanthemum next to the same plant? One may make you feel better but at the end of the day, there's no real difference.

I say it all the time, science is your friend folks.

Designer's confessional: I don't get Halloween

OK, I'm taking a break from my usually scheduled reruns to make an earth-shattering confession.

 I don't get Halloween.

I liked it well enough when I was a kid but after the age of about 12 I just stopped understanding its appeal. I like who I am and I like the life I lead. So why should I dress up like somebody else for a night?

Autumnal re-runs: How to clean a grout joint.

Let's get practical, practical. I wanna get practi-cal. Let's get into practical, practical... OK apologies to Olivia Newton-John. This post ran originally on 13 April 2009. Cleaning white grout joints is never fun but this trick may work. Along the way I thought it would be a good idea to lay some household chemistry on everybody. There's never a bad time for a little chemistry lesson, you know?




I get asked how to clean white grout all the time and my answer is usually, "Don't have white grout." Seriously, short of regrouting your tile every six months, white grout joints are nearly impossible to clean and keep that way.

However last weekend, I came across this article in the St. Pete Times. It's written by Tim Carter, a general contractor and syndicated columnist. Carter runs a website called AskTheBuilder.com and it's chock full of advice and how-to videos. He tackled the problem of white grout joints in a way I'd never considered.

His method involves the so-called oxygen bleaches that seem to be all the rage. Oxygen bleaches do use oxygen to power away organic and some inorganic matter, so I suppose I shouldn't use the expression so-called. However, how they're pitched is so laden with inaccurate descriptions of how they work I feel compelled to continue to use the so-called moniker for them.

So-called oxygen bleaches are made with sodium percarbonate. When sodium percarbonate is dissolved in water It breaks down and releases elemental oxygen that then bonds to whatever it can grab. Sodium percarbonate is hardly a benign substance. If it were benign it wouldn't work. As it breaks down, it leaves behind oxygen and carbon it's made from. These elements are less harmful than the leftovers from other cleaning compounds, but still, none of this stuff is non-toxic. While it's true that you need oxygen to live, pure oxygen will kill you believe it or not.

File this under the for what it's worth column, but chlorine bleaches also use elemental oxygen to do their thing. Household bleach is a solution of sodium hypochlorite and water. Sodium hypochlorite is made from table salt. Dissolved in water, sodium hypochlorite breaks down into elemental oxygen and hydrochloric acid. The atomic oxygen is what does the bleaching, but the hydrochloric acid goes looking for carbon bonds to break. This is not always a bad thing, hydrochloric acid is also the active ingredient in your stomach acid. The hydrochloric acid left behind by chlorine bleach may help you digest your dinner, but it does the same thing to the grout joints on your floor. That's why using chlorine bleach on masonry, concrete or grout is a bad idea.

Anyhow, here's what Tim Carter recommends to clean grout joints.

To clean floor tiles, all you need to do is mix any high-quality oxygen bleach with warm water and stir it until it dissolves. The next step is to pour the solution onto the floor tile so the grout lines are flooded, as if you had spilled a glass of water. It's best to apply the oxygen-bleach solution to dry grout so the solution soaks deeply. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes to allow the oxygen bleach to work. If it completely soaks in, add more solution, making sure there is always plenty on the grout.

The longer you let the solution sit, the less work you have to do. The oxygen ions work for up to six hours. To get maximum cleaning results, scrub the grout lightly after 30 minutes. Always pour new solution onto the grout as you scrub. You have to always scrub a little, but that's how anything gets clean.

Once you have clean floor tiles, keep the grout looking good by adding oxygen bleach powder to your mop water. Apply a liberal amount of mop water to the floor, scrubbing the tile surface with the mop. Leave the mop water in the grout joints without rinsing the floor; the oxygen ions will clean the light dirt in the grout without scrubbing. Come back 30 minutes later and rinse the floor with clean water. Do this each time, and you can avoid scrubbing the floor altogether.

Don't worry if your tile floor is installed next to carpeting. The oxygen-bleach solution will not hurt the carpet and can clean it. In fact, to clean carpeting with oxygen bleach, simply mix up the solution and use a sprayer to saturate the carpet fibers. Let the solution soak for 30 minutes, and then use a regular carpet shampoo machine to finish the job.

You also can mix up small amounts of the solution to handle small spills, such as wine or cranberry juice. It's always best to work on stains while they're fresh, but tile floors that have been dirty for years will come clean in no time with oxygen bleach.

I was over at a previous client's yesterday and he'd read the same article. In a miracle of timing, he was in the middle of cleaning his floors with Oxy Clean so I had the chance to see this at work. And it did work. If you have a dirty grout joint problem, give this a try. Sodium percarbonate doesn't work as quickly as sodium hypochlorite, but it does work.

Welcome to the blogosphere JAX Does Design!

A great friend of mine and a great friend of this blog is Kelly James, the premiere residential designer in Ottawa. Kelly was one of the founders of Design Ties back in the day, but she's recently gone out on her own with the blog JAX Does Design.

Kelly has a rare combination of great design sense and a great sense of humor. I should spell that "humour" in deference to her Canadian-ness.

So if you're looking for a new blog to read, check out Kelly's new endeavor and join me in welcoming Jax Does Design to the blogosphere.