Just a few years before the turn of the century (1998), American woodworkers began to be obsessed with weight.  A picture appeared in “The Workbench Book” by Scott Landis.  The picture showed Rob Tarule, planing away on a reproduction of a “Roubo Bench”.  It was weighty and nicely joined – the race was on.

Since then, weight has been the watchword.  But, alas, as with so many things in life, we may have allowed ourselves to be mislead.  And, I’ll say it now, me too.  Three hundred, fifty pounds sounded like a good weight.  We appear to have identified weight with stability.  And, believe me, brothers and sisters, they’re not the same thing!

When one looks at the illustrations in “L’art du Menuisier”, it becomes obvious that these were to provide information about how the work was accomplished in Monsieur Roubo’s atelier.  Note that there are no dimensions on the benches…

About 5 years ago James Kennedy, an amateur fossil collector, found a nondescript scrap of bone near Vero Beach, Florida.  It seemed so ordinary he went home and promptly stuck it in a box under his sink.  But a few months later he took it out of the box, cleaned it,  and discovered it was not nondescript at all–there was an engraving of a mammoth on it.  Paleolithic art on portable objects such as bone, antler, and rock are common in Europe but before this discovery unknown in North America.

Up close view of the mammoth engraving.  The domed forehead indicates it depicts a mammoth, not a mastodon.  The fossil is mineralized and has no DNA left for species identification. The whole scrap of bone is just 16 inches long.  The engraving itself is about 4 inches wide. 

This fossil is an incredible and rare find from a site that has produced a bounty…

Remembering Edward Abbey, an opinionated author, and a controversial environmentalist (ahead of his time). Today would be his 88th birthday.

I think many of his observations and proposals were brilliant and unpopular, like banning automobiles from National Parks. To give you a flavor of his razor sharp pen read the following excerpt on our basic premise of economical growth:

“The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth – with a capital G. ‘Progress’ in our nation has for too long been confused with ‘Growth’; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better – toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the…