Author: Aurora Almendral

Aurora Almendral is a Philippine-born freelance writer based in New York City. As a Fulbright Scholar to Morocco and Spain, she researched and filmed a documentary on entrepreneurship and illegal immigration in Madrid. She previously worked as a research assistant at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and has written for Filipinas Magazine and New America Media. She is currently the editor for a website focused on design.

Other Voices and Readings

Bookmark and Share

Picture of a raccoon on a man's back

Not ready to be made into a coonskin cap. Image via Old Chum.

1. Carry it around every day. A lot of people who are invested in what little space there is in their pockets make room for a pocket knife. Pocket Dumps, Everyday Carry.

2. Be wholesome. Mumbelty peg is a game of knife feats. It’s competitive and skill-driven, and the loser is punished heartily by having to pull a peg out of the ground with his teeth. The American Boy’s Book of Sport has diagrams of the knife-flipping tricks one must accomplish in order to be crowned winner.

There are other variations of mumbelty peg, including an ill-advised one that requires a pair of duelers with more stupidity than skill. The one who throws a knife closest to his own foot wins. Stick your own foot and you win automatically.

3. Skin a raccoon. If you come across a furry friend that’s given up the ghost, this guide teaches you how to turn that fresh road kill into a pair of fur socks (or cap, or pouch), using only nature’s tools. Which means the animal’s own brains.

4. Whittle. Art of Manliness’ guide to whittling takes you from knowing nothing to knowing something about how to fill up your time with little more than a tree branch and a pocket knife.

5. One thing you can’t do with a pocket knife is use it as a weapon. If you think through defending yourself while getting ambushed in a back alley, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that you will have to get very, very close to an attacker before you can scratch the surface of the person’s skin with a pocket knife. If you’re thinking of attacking someone, you better hope that person is already in a coma, because you’re likely to get a knee to the balls before you can set your pocket knife in action. Here’s a run-down by an expert on why knife fighting is a crazy myth that, if executed, will end in tears and/or prison: “Knife Fighting Lies,” No Nonsense Self Defense.

1 Comment

Flour

Bookmark and Share

Rita Hoyworth cutting into a cake

Errol Flynn, Nora Eddington, Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles enjoying the fruit of 10,000 years of human technology.

For a single ingredient wheat flour has an amazing number of iterations. It can be gruel or wedding cake, Wonder bread or baguette, croissant or hot dog bun. Flour seems simple, but it can give the occasional baker some anxiety — what exactly separates a good pie crust from a bad pie crust when it’s just flour, fat and water? Why is this cookie recipe calling for bread flour, and should I care that I don’t have it?

Read on for a primer. A little de-mystifying means better sweets for you.

READ MORE…

1 Comment

Cocktail Recipes: Punch

Bookmark and Share

vintage 1960s dinner party

Languidly drinking without interruption.

Punches are originally from India (panch in Hindi), and were taken around the world by the boozy merchant sailors of the British East India Company. The idea of a cocktail you don’t have to make one at a time is good, so where ever it went, it took. The undiscerning rabble stuck by a charming rhyme to make their punches: “One of Sour, Two of Sweet, Three of Strong, Four of Weak.” Easy to remember if you’re already three sheets to the wind, but also handy when the kinds of alcohol and available mixers changed at each docking.

Lucky for us, we’re not limited to what can be dredged up at the port. Here are four punch recipes, dug up or invented (and taste-tested) by Lydia Reissmueller, who’s made cocktail magic in legendary bars from New York to Moscow. Right now, she’s running Tender Bar out of Portland, Oregon.

READ MORE…

5 Comments

Dieter Rams

Bookmark and Share

A television set designed by Dieter Rams

Not a knob more than what you need. A TV designed by Dieter Rams. Image via Life as an Architect.

“Weniger, aber besser” — less, but better.

Industrial designer Dieter Rams, born in Germany in 1932 (and still alive), was concerned with the chaos going on in the world around him: chaos as a result of the Wars, the Great Depression, and later, the more subtle, but also pernicious chaos of disposable design and planned obsolescence that was the purview of his trade.

READ MORE…

2 Comments

Other Voices and Readings

Bookmark and Share

Spider webs cocoon a tree in Sindh Pakistan

Spider webs are stronger (and spookier) than kevlar. Photo by Russell Watkins via the UK Department of International Development.

1. “Animals and plants build structures of incredible complexity without the energy-hungry high temperatures, pressures and toxic chemicals with which we process raw materials in this fossil fuel age, and without generating useless waste.” From Inspired, Naturally, Financial Times.

2. A spider’s web is “made with an input of only dead flies and sunlight, and yet is 5 times stronger than kevlar.” Edible Architechture, Design Observer and Spider’s Dragline, Biomimicry.

3. Sharklet Technologies is inhibiting bacteria through pattern alone. Hospitals are using it on medical surfaces to slow the spread of illnesses, and the revolutionary idea all comes from the skin of the Galapagos Shark. Technology, Sharklet.

4.  A waxy Namibian bug who drinks water from fog, inspires a British architecture firm to try and build waxy buildings that gather water from fog. King fisher birds solve the sound boom issues of hyper-futuristic bullet trains. A cement company is harvesting carbon dioxide for building materials, just like their heroes, coral reefs. Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in Action, TED.com (video)

5.  If we’re using nature as inspiration for the future, then: Is the real fountain of youth delicious with clarified butter? Science Says Lobsters can Live Forever, but are Still Delicious, Planet Green, Discovery.

Leave a comment

Museum of Obsolete Objects

Bookmark and Share

Here at Kaufmann Mercantile we can really get behind some tried and true technologies. Coffee makers that don’t need to be plugged in. Pens, pencils, paper. Wood instead of plastic; sea shells instead of plastic. Enter the Museum of Obsolete Objects to remind us of the technologies that have fallen by the wayside. Some of them are irretrievably obsolete and happily so (even if you could get into a time machine to the 1980s to pick up a floppy disk drive, would you want to?).

READ MORE…

2 Comments

Other Voices and Readings

Bookmark and Share

A drawing from Merriweather Lewis' field journal from Fort Clatsop, Oregon

Notes and a fish from the Clatsop, Oregon, field journal of Merriweather Lewis, February 24, 1806. Image from Brain Pickings.

1. Cursive is dead: “That cursive-challenged class included Alex Heck, 22, who said she barely remembered how to read or write cursive. Ms. Heck and a cousin leafed through their grandmother’s journal shortly after she died, but could barely read her cursive handwriting.” The New York Times.

2. Handwriting shrinks as desperation builds: “To Whom It May Concern,” from Assorted Street Posters, Outsiders, UbuWeb. Collected in New York from 1985 to the present.

3. Halfway between font and handwriting: hand-painted signs just won’t die. “Sign painters,” Imprint.

4. Just a little ink on one piece of paper and a transaction for the ages: The Sale of Manhattan, Letters of Note.

5. Five Voyeuristic, Cross-disciplinary Peeks into Great Creators’ Notebooks, Brain Pickings. (via a Design*Sponge tweet.)

6. Take Care of Your Little Notebooks, New York Review of Books Blog

1 Comment

Cricket Trailer

Bookmark and Share

Exterior shot of the cricket trailer

The Cricket Trailer at work looking space-age and efficient while inventor Garrett Finney plays the Ukulele. Photo by David Bates.

I’d been chattering for a week about spending the summer in a trailer dropped on the smallest patch of grass  and wildflower somewhere Upstate when I came across the Cricket Trailer over at Men and Women of Industry. (If you’re not fantasizing about camping now, you will be once you’ve seen their childhood snaps.) The lightweight, angular trailers were designed by Garrett Finney, an architect who came to camper design by way of NASA, where he worked on the International Space Station’s “Habitation Module” (astronaut-speak for “home”).

READ MORE…

5 Comments

Other Voices and Readings

Bookmark and Share

Erik Heywood keeps the outstanding blog Books and Bookshelves, where we found a lot of books we wish we’d known about sooner. Erik was nice enough to compile a list for Kaufmann Mercantile. There are peeks into the fascinating mundane of a tragic artist, a chronicle of the realities beyond romantic notions, and a page-turner on what happens when you do your homework with a notebook and a ship. His picks and a few words about reading after the jump.

The Natural House by Frank Lloyd Wright

"The Natural House" (1974) by Frank Lloyd Wright.

3 Comments