How to knit a plastic bag

Reusable bag titan Rajiv Badlani points out that because you can’t convince every shopper to use cloth shopping bags, there will always be some plastic bags out there. He plans to recycle these into textiles.

You can do something similar at home, with shopping bags or the plastic bags they put your newspaper in on rainy days. All you have to do is cut the bags into ribbons, twist the ribbons into a sort of yarn, and then knit or crochet the yarn into whatever you like. This is an inexpensive way to make holiday gifts for the environmentalists on your list.
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Basil Pennington’s suits and other Items

  • I agree with Elwood:

    “I love my president, but he doesn’t love us.”

  • Pie and Coffee contributor and cinemaster Adam Villani started a personal blog last week. The next day he was namechecked by Boing Boing. Auspicious.
  • Father Basil Pennington was a Trappist monk who died in June at St Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer. Many know of him because of his work with the centering prayer movement, revitalizing the contemplative tradition among Catholics in America.

    Tom Lewis happened to go to mass at the Abbey the morning after Fr Pennington had died, and saw him lying in state.

    Mike: So his body was there in the chapel?

    Tom: He had enormous feet.

    Dom Basil was in many ways a giant of a man. Even physically, he looked like someone who stepped out of the Old Testament with his huge frame and long beard. He was also interiorly a giant in the sense of one of those rare people who is filled with many, many, many ideas. Big ideas.
    (from a homily by Abbot Francis Michael Stiteler)

    I stopped by the monastery last week to pick up a donation of food for some shelters and soup kitchens in Worcester, and they also gave me several boxes with Fr Pennington’s clothes. It was like being handed a crate of holy relics. After sorting through it, a lot of the clothes went right to the thrift shop—there aren’t many homeless people in Worcester who are that big. His suits were size 50L.
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South Bend Catholic Worker DOESN’T lose zoning vote

Update: The South Bend Catholic Worker has a good chance of winning its zoning battle. The article cited below says that they “lost” yesterday’s zoning vote because it was a tie vote. But all this really means is that it will go to another vote at the next Common Council meeting, when the missing councilor will be there and break the tie.

When I was in SB a couple weeks ago, the feeling was that few people in power were willing to support the CW. So this tie vote represents powerful momentum. One hopes that they can work something out with those neighbors who oppose the zoning change, and get a 9-0 council vote on the compromise solution.

Here’s the story, via WNDU-TV:

A public hearing was held on whether to re-zone a Catholic group home and took nearly four hours Monday night. Ultimately, it was defeated due to a tie vote.

A tie vote is much better than people were expecting.
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Task force recs “would violate federal law”

Headline in today’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette: Social service plans decried: Worcester taken to task.

WORCESTER— A Washington, D.C., mental health legal advocacy group says the recommendations of the Mayor’s Social Service Task Force would violate federal law if they were adopted.

The Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, since 1972 a national legal advocate for people with mental disabilities, produced a legal analysis that said the recommendations, released Oct. 10 by the 14-member task force appointed by Mayor Timothy P. Murray, would violate the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 if adopted as city zoning or funding policy. People with disabilities and social service agencies would then have standing to sue in federal court under the Fair Housing Act, according to the group, formerly known as the Mental Health Law Project.

The text of a memo from Bazelon with their legal analysis follows.
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An Interview with Zack Berger

A few years ago, Zack Berger and Celeste Sollod self-published Zack’s Yiddish translation of “The Cat in the Hat,” Di Kats der Piyatz. Following the success of that book, they’ve come out with Zack’s Yiddish version of “Curious George,” George der Naygeriker. We caught up with Zack via e-mail.
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How to make 2,000 crosses

2000 crosses on Worcester CommonTo mark the deaths of 2,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, 2,000 white crosses were made and installed on Worcester Common. Here’s what we learned about making crosses.

Step 1: Materials

Ideally you’d find some scrap latticework, or some white, waxed corrugated cardboard. If a cemetary-supply company sells crosses cheap in bulk, that would be even better.

I was stuck using wood.

I used “pine strapping,” boards 1″x3″x8′. I could haul 50 boards in my minivan at a time.

I cut the boards in half widthwise, then into 1-foot sections, then cut these in thirds by thickness. I used a table saw. Some of the cuts were tricky.

Mike Leslie: You’re cutting the house in thirds?

Mike Benedetti: I’m cutting the halves in thirds.

The pieces are thus about a foot long, 1.5 inches wide, and 1/3 inch thick. (Actually, they’re a little smaller, because as you know a 1×3 board is not 1-inch by 3-inches. You knew that, right?)

One person with one saw can cut enough wood for 2,000 crosses in three solid work days.

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Items

Today: Homeless camp, South Bend CW zoning update, Pit Stop Ploughshares, Dwight Smith talks, Massachusetts parish comes out against Iraq war, Darfur, artists abroad.