Bored? Too much money? Too many people you know into eco-tourism and adventure travel for it to be cool any more? Need a new, more extreme way to spend money on distracting yourself from your normal, day-to-day distractions? Looking for new ways to forget your ennui, anomie and accidie for a few precious moments [...]
A Big Kitchen
If you look in architectural magazines or cooking magazines, kitchens have become enormous, high-tech wonders; ads show monster appliances, triple ovens and fridges big enough to park a cow in. I will admit to having been drawn into big kitchen lust — taken in by kitchen porn. I spent quite a bit of time complaining [...]
Large Houses
By the second quarter of 1999, 17 percent of new homes constructed in America were larger than three thousand sqaure feet, the size at which a house generally becomes unmanageable by the people who live in it. By the fourth quarter of 2005, this had become almost 19 percent.
Why exactly have so many people crossed [...]
www. is deprecated
www. is deprecated
“Necessary” by Design
Dan Lockton writes about “architectures of control“:
Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.
I personally find the list of products he has talked about to be [...]
Discardia
Metagrrrl has gone and created a whole new holiday for Unnecessary Things; Discardia!
Discardia is a floating holiday to celebrate letting go… The exact days vary. It takes place in the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. Sometimes it’s short and sometimes it’s long.
Discardia is celebrated by getting rid of stuff [...]
Lawns
Why exactly is it so important to have some area around ones house covered in non-native turf grasses? Why would a sane person cut down all of the native trees and bushes in order to plant “ornamental” species in their place?
I would much rather live under the canopy of native tree and take my chances [...]
Suburban Uniformity Vehicle
The SUV, that station-wagon-on-a-truck-chassis that is all the rage with aspirationally minded suburbanites who think that cheap ladder-frame trucks with solid rear axles and the aerodynamics of a shipping container are some sort of status symbol, and an appropriate conveyance for around town driving.
Every time I see one, a Superman-esque scene plays out in my [...]
“Real Simple” Magazine
I find it quite amusing that a magazine with a tag line such as this:
Life, Made Easier
is sixty percent blatant advertisements and forty percent barely disguised advertising. In the interest of truth in advertising, I think they should change their tag line to:
How To Buy Crap You Don’t Need, On Credit
Cubicles
Fortune magazine is running an article called Cubicles: The great mistake. It’s as if I am playing tee-ball here with Unnecessary Things…
Highlights of the article include the inventor of the cubicle, Robert Propst, calling them a “monolithic insanity”, the history of the cubicle from Hermann Miller to now, and the hilarious observation that
It is the [...]
Senator William M. Napoli
In solidarity with Bitch | Lab, may I present the sexist asshat, Senator William M. Napoli…truly, he is an unnecessary thing.
Paper Towels
It has been more than two months now since we last had paper towels in the house, and I can’t say that I miss them. Not only are they a complete waste of money and just one more thing to fill up our dumps, they kind of suck for what they were intended for anyway.
Like [...]
Vacuum Cleaner
It is my opinion that people own vaccum cleaners for, primarily, one of two reasons; either they don’t like keeping their house clean, or they don’t feel as if they have time to without this modern convenience.
Taking the second reason first, let me posit that if you do not have time to clean all of [...]
Microwave
By way of the microwave, fast food culture broke free of its traditional confines along roadways and into the center of our homes. As it became ubiquitous during the seventies and eighties, it became a primary beachhead of frantic consumer culture in our kitchens. By its constant presence, we are reminded that we are too [...]
Dishwasher
As Maricar wrote over at Keeping The Castle, the dishwasher is not the labor/time saving device many people think that it is. As a matter of fact, as I have learned, it actually costs more money and time to own and use one than it does to wash our dishes by hand.
Invented by Josephine Cochran [...]
Unnecessary Things
When I first began looking at how we could live well on less money, one of the first things that I noticed is that a lot of “modern conveniences” instead of truly being conveniences actually cost you more in both time and money than simply doing them an “old-fashioned” manual way. I cataloged quite a few of these, and will be writing about them individually in the future. For now, I want to explain how I began to think about these supposed necessities of modern life.
These are the ramblings of 