2022-12-18

🟩Introduction

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Crow’s Curios!

My intent is to gather the shiny things I find interesting from around the web, and share them on a semi-regular basis. I expect that the contents, format, posting cadence, and everything else will evolve over time.

Enjoy my collection from this week.

-crow

🟩Writing of the Week: Lawns & HOAs

Lawns make up one-third of the country’s 135 million acres of residential landscaping, according to the ecologist Douglas W. Tallamy, who calls the velvety carpeting of bluegrass or ryegrass “ecological dead zones.”

They Fought the Lawn. And the Lawn’s Done.

by Cara Buckley for The New York Times

An article that dives into one couple’s fight to have more natural and healthy plants in their yard, instead of turf grass. Amongst the horrors of typical homeowners associations, the wasted water and ecosystem damage caused by lawns is up there.

This inspired me to write my state legislature representatives to see if we can get similar protections for homeowners to plant ecologically beneficial yards where I live.

🟩Factoid of the Week: Wooden Streets

I came across the map above on Reddit, and was surprised that a lot of the roads were highlighted as “wood”. I had assumed roads were either dirt, or some sort of “hard” material (brick, asphalt, concrete, etc.).

Turns out that not only were wooden blocks once used to make roads, there’s some still existing places that feature this type of construction. This post from Urban Explorer goes into more detail about some of Chicago’s “Wood Block Alleys”.

🟩Video of the Week: The Stickman Euro Coin

How is it possible that one of the world’s reserve currencies has a stickman on the face of one of its coins? The video below explains:

🟩Mastodon Post of the Week: Personal Libraries

I joined Mastodon this week, prompted by the current Twitter dumpster fire. I was never a prolific Twitter user, but check in periodically. I’ve found Mastodon so far to have a much more organic, “early web” feel, which has made it much more fun to engage with the platform.

The Twitter turmoil is a great reminder that web services are not forever, which @lolennui@mstdn.social points out in reference to digital media:

Over the holidays I’ll be planning to kick off the ebook backup project I’ve been putting off for a year.

🟩Afterword

Hopefully you enjoyed the content. Please feel free to share this if you found it interesting, and I’m also happy to chat about any of these topics on Mastodon: crow (@crow@lonely.town) – lonely.town

-crow