Brendan Vaughan

It's fairly amusing and mostly pleasant to read some parts of WhatWouldMacGyverDo once. My plan is to read it once, let my grandsons read it, and rehome it. The anecdotes remind me of 20th century first person tales from Readers Digest or 21st century clickbait culled from Reddit. Whether it's because the editor reworked them or because he had a lot of material to choose from and managed to choose a book's worth of stories that all sounded similar, the voice doesn't vary much. They're all perky, self-deprecating, and extremely competent wordsmiths. Some describe trivial fixes ("I wore my wife's bathrobe to get our baby to take a bottle of breastmilk" -- I read that life hack in a mainstream book on parenting in the 1980s and it didn't take two pages to get to the point), some are more complex, and some are utterly pointless. The travel section is the worst, jammed with anecdotes that ... are anecdotes, but not remotely ingenious or MacGyverish. Get your friend to rush your missing passport to the airport, drink your own urine on a hike, overhear a repairman's lost walkie-talkie: really, Brendan Vaughan? And a section on romance? Only the story of the bridal suite door is remotely related to the supposed theme of the book, and the rest? Not all suitable for work, let alone junior high. I begin to question whether it actually is anything I want my grandsons to read. The chapter on evading the authorities and getting away with lawbreaking is, perhaps, even less suitable.

Before the editor lost the plot mid-book, however, there was at least one idea that could seriously help human comfort and energy conservation. Geoff Milburn, the fellow from Waterloo who invented the low-tech low-energy air conditioner, is a genius (as are most students from Waterloo, an engineering school famous for its high standards) and although I could not find his invention on UWaterloo's website at the 2006 web address in the book, I did find it on Wired dot com (and via Pinterest, on the Instructables site). https://www.wired.com/2011/07/diy-ac-heatwave/ This is something that I could and would most certainly do, the only important improvement being a way to make sure the water is reclaimed for reuse (rain barrel, drip irrigation). There's an excellent diagram in the book, too. Maybe it's a keeper after all! Or not.… (meer)

I have had this book for years but today was the first time that I read the write ups on the restaurants, which are great.
I have done many of the recipes including a warm artichoke salad de with white beans, aruguoa and salsa verde, a fish dish with bluefish, slaw plantains and salsa verde,, cast iron chicken with shallots and sherry gravy and others.Almost all of these places are still with us.
We have visited many of these places, including Grocery, Number7 Rose Water, Saul, the Goof Fork, Al di La, Dressler, the onoy place that has closed, and 'Vinegar Hill House and Ici.… (meer)