The Best of OBSOLETE! Magazine is ON SALE!!

The Best of OBSOLETE! Magazine

Highlights from the first six issues of OBSOLETE! Magazine, along with original, never before published material. Essays, fiction, poetry and artwork from the newsprint tabloid published in the tradition of the International Times, OZ, The East Village Other, The Berkely Barb, The Chicago Seed, The Whole Earth Catalog, PUNK! and the other great underground rags of days past….

This anthology features an exclusive interview with Cory Doctorow, original fiction by the late, great Mick Farren, poetry by Todd Colby, artwork by Hyena Hell and much, much more!!

The book is ON SALE now, at obsolete-press.com!

Propagating Forest Medicinals

A few snapshots of some wild yam and black cohosh I dug this week- my medicinal forest garden also includes American Ginseng, Comfrey, Blue Cohosh, Goldenseal and Bloodroot. For more on forest botanicals and their uses check out the Peterson Field Guide

The KC Sports Writer's Suicide Blog, and His Final Prank

 Read the Story at CNN.com

Buried in this story is the fact that this guy left GPS coordinates in his suicide post that sent 20 people running around a park with shovels looking for his buried gold coin collection, ala "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World". Great final prank- cheers to you, Martin Manley.

"...And it appears Manley may have even played a practical joke to tweak the greedy in his long farewell. In the section of his site detailing his collection of gold and silver coins, a random set of GPS coordinates appears, along with a tiny thumbnail image of Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens.

Police say about 20 people, some with GPS units, metal detectors and shovels, showed up at the gardens and started digging. But the joke was on them -- Manley's family told police he had given the gold away."

Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights

Semaphore, Aldis Lamp. Morse Code–what are these arcane technologies of which you speak? Python knows....

From Homepower Magazine, 1999

Blue-Collar Bodhisattva of the Month: Joe Rogan!

Comedian and no-neck philosopher Joe Rogan is a true blue-collar bodhisattva. His podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is a rambling, weed-induced journey into science and pseudo-science, the arts (including mixed martial arts), current events, pop culture and techno-wierdness.

Rogan is a master of geek machismo. He is an unapologetic bro and addresses his podcast listeners as “you dirty bitches”. He refers to violent historical figures as “totally gangster”. Yet, he quotes Terrance McKenna as easily as he quotes Anderson Silva's UFC stats, and is probably the nations most high profile advocate for the psychedelic experience. 

From each of his weekly podcast guests, he extracts knowledge– not just a talking head interview, but digging deep and grokking their experiences and stories. He attacks learning with the same spirit that he pursues physical fitness- with focus, but with a playful attitude and an open mind. He is one part Timothy Leary and one part Jesse Ventura.

Later this month, Rogan launches a new TV series on the SyFy Network called “Joe Rogan Questions Everything”, in which he will dig into some of the old pseudo-science standbys like UFOs, Bigfoot and Conspiracy Theories. It is my hope that his inclusion of fellow comics and a healthy does of altered reality will allow this series to transcend other  tinfoil-hat TV shows. I'm not sure basic cable producers are ready to let Rogan go as far down the rabbit hole as he does on his podcast, but it should be fun none-the-less.

So here's to you, Joe Rogan! Our first Blue-Collar Bodhisattva of the Month!

It's that time of the year- Dumpster-Diver Gardening!!

from ObMag#1...


We began dumpster-diver gardening sometime in the early 90's, when we came across a vendor at the Brooklyn Terminal Market tossing flats of slightly wilted bedding plants into the trash. Neither Wildgirl nor I were strangers to dumpster diving (a proud trash-picking tradition that is now fashionably know as "Freeganism"), and W.G. immediately hatched a plan for me to distract the shop owner by buying a bag of peat moss while she filled the trunk of her '74 Valiant with rescued greenery. "It wasn't so much about wanting the plants," she recalls- "It was about the waste. It was about the disposable society."

Fast-forward 10 years. We no longer live in New York. We have a small organic farm, and grow a lot of our own stuff. On a blistering July afternoon in Coralville, Iowa, I noticed one of the seasonal garden centers set up in a grocery store parking lot was breaking down for the season and again, they were dumpster-izing flat after flat of sad, leggy, brown and bolting tomato plants, squash, peppers, herbs, and flowers. A lot of the higher-priced organic and heirloom stuff was left behind. I took as much as the old Subaru GL would hold. What I have discovered in the last few years that throughout the Midwest (indeed, much of the country), is that huge numbers of plants get dumped, given away or sold for next to nothing sometime in the last part of June to first week of July. If timed properly, a pickup truck can be filled with blueberry bushes, roses, prairie plants, perennials, and lots and lots of vegetable plants for less than twenty bucks- often for nothing more than the price of gas. If you are a non-driver and really hard-core, you can do it with a cargo bike, shopping cart, hand truck, wheelbarrow or travois. The keys to success are timing, speed, and a modicum of stealth. Despite the fact that the stuff is being jettisoned, employees, particularly middle managers, can tend to flex-out on people who want their trash. In most cases, though, if you time your arrival properly, the peons who got exiled to the sweltering parking lot to haul the stuff to the dumpster are more than happy to have you lighten their load.