Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

It's not normally the sort of thing I mention here, but I really like the work that I've been seeing on people here from Jon Clue; click the pictures below to jump to the owners' pages where you can see more examples. As you can see in my pictures in the entry below this one, as much as I've got really nice sleeves now, the old tribal work down my side really blows… I think a decade ago when I got it maybe I had an excuse for getting a bad tattoo, but these days there are so many artists doing amazing work that I just don't get the volume of bad tattoos that continue to be produced.

Frank has some nice work by him as well but I don't believe there are pictures on his page.

Anyway, I still think constantly about Project Drop out, Tune in, so I've got all these fantasies about having a big estate down at the bottom of the Baja where artists and fringe engineers can gather and create freely, as long as they help keep the windmills maintained and do their share of help in the garden. For those interested in pura vida, try searching for phrases starting with “America's Other…”

That link above will take you to “OtherPower.com”. The picture I've ripped is a home made (even the generator blades are made from trees that fell over near them!) wind turbine that can put out 1.5KW using nothing but so-called junk. They've got ideas and examples for all sorts of other power generation schemes using low-cost low-tech materials and devices. It's refreshing to know that if the bombs start dropping and/or the oil runs out, we just get knocked into the Ozarks, rather than into the stone age.

Getting back to my reality, in my wholly ignorant (as I've not been there yet) mind right now the biggest “problem” in Mexico is a lack of fresh water… but if you build even a simple windmill, you can power a desalination system like this one which outputs 160 gallons of water daily. If you're running it electrically you need 12 volts at 18 amps, which is really very little, and a lot less than a little windmill generates. It only weighs 36 pounds so you could easily just mount it in the windmill, use the excess power to pump up seawater, and then store it at the top of the windmill so the whole thing is gravity driven.

Hopefully no one with a sailboat will pipe up and tell me why I'm wrong about this system… But if I am wrong, do let me know!