Ornae Archives
Testing hard disks on Mac OSX
the emergent property seems to be crap
Apple's iDisk network traffic is encrypted
Boneless country ribs, experimental recipe,
Humans, natural organizers to a fault...
All across the changes in six throws.
Political labels, meaningless?
The writing zealot has a new friend, and some silly sentences...
Lily Allen: chirpy brutality. Nice work if you can do it...
Trance, downbeat, brazilian, funk, and jazz? That's a genre?
An obsession with flags
Afraid of "Big Government"?
Curated computing", WTF?
Fire under mountain, PI/Grace
hearts's desire
Finally, sensible thoughts about terrorism from a bomb disposal guy who should know.
On Apostrophes
Who wants an overgrown iPhone?
Christians and creationism.
decision
new rule ... no more throwing bears at people.
Drowning
She was looking for "The Door Into Summer"
..under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world...
On community...
On time...
On Spelling
The History of Tolerance
Motives
...The tug of the future. The reason you tried...
...political posturing gone horrifically awry.
...and she was determined not to be afraid.
...finite horizons of predictable problems and predictable joys...
...There is only a gradual wearing away of the sharp edges...
Code as literature, the most important element of style
Deconstructing Wall Street Newspeak
Requiem
Fake Steve Jobs, backfiring?
DRM, Denial of Rights Management
Bill O'Reilly, John Edwards, and racial slurs.
The widening economic disparity
Oh man, here comes Rita
Katrina slams New Orleans. Is There Blame?
Apple users have another tempest in our teapot.
Carving up trees as therapy.
If a tree falls in a hurricane, does it make a noise?
Torturing your customers, A Business Model
What! Bean mush again mom?
Automatic poetry on eBay
Flaming on Miami Beach
Cautionary tale
It won't die Jim!
Fresh Timber
More on Music
Almost Worthless Music
E-Commerce
Formalisms, Frames, Footstools
The Opposite of Minimalism
Lots of Photos
Repairing breaks
Beasties
Period influences
Sweat shops and consumer goods
Galloping furniture
Calm Interiors
Ode to Keith Haring
Good junk
Broken chairs
Floors in Florida
Shoji in America
About Ornae
Broken chairs · Monday March 8, 2004
Sometimes you can save them. But often not.
My neighbor asked me to look at a fully upholstered dining chair with a broken leg. She’d had a set upholstered with a fabric she’d found and held onto, looking for the right chairs. The chairs she found were entirely upholstered, right down to the legs, but not bulky or overstuffed. Poking around to see if I could fix the leg I saw that internally, the chair frame was so light that there was nothing to repair.
The only way to fix the leg would have been to rip the chair apart and rebuild the whole side and back frame from scratch, then re-upholster the chair. It was part of a lovely set that had a lot of family history, but it just wasn’t good enough to warrant that much repair.
There’s a great huge can of worms here: the value of craft, the cost of third world labor, the disposability of modern artifacts, the much greater availability of new stuff over fixed stuff….
I spend a lot of time poking around that can, I’ll get back to this.
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