La Casa Grande Colectiva

Category: events

  • The Moustache Dreams (of a moustache competition)

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

    more about “Mustache Dreams on Vimeo“, posted with vodpod

    Go Puppets! Theater, last Monday June 22, presented The Moustache Dreams or The Dash of the Stache at the annual Mike n’ Molly’s Moustache Competition in Champaign.  While the judges deliberated (selecting one moustache-bearer to hold the honor of supreme moustache & to host next year’s uproarious annual pageant), we four took the stage and performed for myriad adoring fans.  They had no idea what to expect from us, & neither did we from them.  Judging from the exuberant [drunken] cheers, it seemed to go over well!

    Written & performed by Lorene Anderson & Michael Iscariot.  Additional performers: La Casans Andrew (on the left) & Jacob (center).

  • Late Spring Bee Checkup

    Ed, a local beekeeper, came to check out our hives for a three week checkup last weekend. Robby is out of town, so he arranged to have some members of CEIBA help keep an eye on the hives. We had gotten a late start with our bees but each queen came with 5 frames of brood and honey. In just a few weeks, the bees have really established themselves and Ed determined it was time to add the second box on the hive. This will give each hive 10 fresh frames to build comb and expand the colony size.

    Capped Brood

    This frame is full of capped brood.  Brood is the general name for combs that have eggs and larvae.  The worker bees feed the developing larvae before sealing them in with a cap .  In a few weeks these bees will hatch and the process will start over again with the queen coming around and laying eggs in each comb.  In this way, the colony will double and triple in size very rapidly.

    Bee emerging

    In the center of this photo, a bee is hatching from the comb.  We watched as the bee ate away the cap.  Like eating corn on the cob, she went back and forth chewing her way out.  After she leaves, the workers will clean out the comb and get it ready for another egg.

    Honey Combs

    This is what the comb looks like when the bees decide to store honey instead of brood.  This looks like it was a fresh frame to begin with since you can still see in the lower left that the comb hasn’t been fully drawn out by the bees.  There must be a lot of nectar flowing now because even though the comb isn’t finished, the bees are already storing and capping honey.  In the upper right is capped honey.  To process the honey, the bees sit over the comb and fan their wings to evaporate off the water.  Once the honey is sufficiently concentrated they seal the comb off.  You can tell the difference between capped honey and capped brood by the color.

    I took lots of photos so we could inspect the bees in depth without keeping the hive open for too long.  Click the thumbnails to go to a flickr set of the event.

    more bee pics

  • Bloomsday Greetings, 2009.

    If you haven’t heard, certain jolly folks all over the world celebrate Bloomsday today, named after Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s epic experimental novel Ulysses.  The events of Ulysses take place on June 16th, 1904, in Dublin, Ireland, so every June 16th, Joyce fans dress up, recite from the good book, have a drink in a pub, & do things Joycean.  At the very least, I recommend getting your hands on a copy of Ulysses & checking it out.  I read it a few summers ago, & very much enjoyed it.

    If you’d like something to do in Champaign county to celebrate Bloomsday, consider this event at the U of I, taking place in the daytime, & this Facebook event, taking place later in the evening.  I don’t know the organizers of either, but hope to appear at one, two, or zero of them (leaning toward two).  La Casa doesn’t have anything Bloomsy going on this year, but maybe I can turn some fellows into Joyce fans & see about next year.

    –We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said.  Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination.  We were never loyal to the successful.  We serve them.  I teach the blatant Latin language.  I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money.  Material domination.  Dominus! Lord!  Where is the spirtuality?  Lord Jesus!  Lord Salisbury.  A sofa in a westend club.  But the Greek!

  • The Unknown, a local hypertext novel

    Heather took Jacob & I on a date last night.  First, we hit up a reading of a classic hypertext novel written by Urbana folks; then we nommed on some coconut ice cream from the food co-op & caught a show by Trutheater Theater at the IMC.  Yay.

    The Unknown, written collaboratively in the 1990’s, tells the story of a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour.  I happened to find it a few years back, in connection with 20-consonant poetry, a quirky poetic form that has its writers use every consonant in order before repeating any & produces texts such as “I quit my job: a crazy wage slave, dead hunk of pox.”  When I moved to Urbana, I composed this 20-consonant poem in an email to Rob Scott:

    for urbana, you doozy:

    how you pique my vox kit.

    joy:

    i juggle la casa

    I had no idea, when I got interested in constrained poetry & the work of William Gillespie, that I would eventually move to his town & hang out with his friends.  A nice little surprise, that.

    So William & Scott hosted this reading (the third author, Dirk, not present), with the book projected on a screen.  The Unknown consists of several short chapters connected by hyperlinks, telling interweaved fictional stories of the three authors in no particular order.  Scott did the clicking; William dinged on a glass to accent the hyperlinks.  They both read aloud.  We, the audience, shouted out hyperlinks when we felt so inclined, & we navigated the book together.  Sometimes, we’d happen to come back to a page we’d been to before, & the authors would pick up in their reading where we left off.

    Afterward, the authors fielded some questions, about “electronic fiction” in general & this book in particular.  I enjoyed a little reminder that this work exists, & surely enjoyed hearing it come to life in a group setting.  Check it out & see what you think; the whole novel is available on the web, & has been since it was first composed.

  • Wot?

    IMG_1023b

    Tired feet after the May 13th House Concert VII.

  • house concert – This Must Be The Place

    Last Wednesday, May 13, we put on House Concert VII (seventh in “recent memory”), the final act of which was all of us La Casans covering the Talking Heads, This Must Be The Place.  Heather got the whole thing on her point-and-shoot; thanks Heather!

    More videos from Heather’s youtube:
    A New Inspired Poem, by Snow Leopard.
    This is the Title of the Story, read by Michael Phelps.
    Hoprock, by Jacob Barton.
    5 songs of fish (but in this instance, four), by Nodal Nim.

  • Archery Range in the Yard

    Cody, a friend of La Casa, has set up an archery range in the backyard. It’s realllly fun.
    DSC_5324web

    DSC_5326web
    This is the target, several bales of straw.
    DSC_5333web
    And this is Cody’s beautiful puppy, Payton.

  • now for something totally different

    have you guys heard of this?  i had heard about it awhile back and it sounded cool, but the description left me wondering what it looked like.  now there’s this video out.  i just watched it and it        blew       my        mind     … the future, now?  will it [gasp] change the world?  its based on this guys ideas put down in this book about seven years ago.  whaddya know, they’re located in Champaign, IL.  we are at the center of the universe.

    its supposed to go live to the public tonight

  • after the flood

    We got soaked yesterday and most of the garden is now underwater. yikes.
    Water logged garden
    from some news article… “In Illinois, a range of windy storms dumped as much as 3 inches of rain within 50 minutes. National Weather Service meteorologist Ed Shimon called the accumulation “unbelievable,” comparing it to heavy rainfall in the tropics.”

    today – dry
    tomorrow – more rain

    let’s hope this dries up soon.

    update: went out and snapped some photos with my “good” camera.  click thumbs below to see ’em.

    floodthumbs

  • an urbana community garden

    My great friend Drew, an environmental philosopher, has been working hard on getting more community gardens started in Champaign-Urbana.  Over the weekend I helped out at one of the locations for an eco-ecumenical group that formed this year.  Here’s some phoneCAM photos that I snapped to document the day.
    Mulching watering

    Raspberries were planted along the wall.  A generous amount of straw mulch was put down.

    Planting

    Peas, and flowers were planted along the front rows.

    Planting tomatoes

    A variety of tomatoes were planted in the middle of the plot.

    Mulching approved

    Nice mulch, Gretchen approves.

    Drew and Brian

    Drew and Brian, the site organizers.

    Workdays are Saturday mornings from 9-12 at different sites around town.

    To learn about how to get involved visit:  http://www.ecoecumenical.org/

  • neighborhood pancake breakfast

    Block By Block, a group of neighbors, organized a potluck style pancake breakfast this morning.  Before our house meeting, a few of us made it over for some delicious food, complete with maple syrup that was tapped from maple trees in the area.  I forgot to bring my nice camera, but I brought my phoneCAM.

    Community pancake breakfast

    It was great to meet and chat with so many neighbors at once.  I had some really great conversations, and we went home with a cucumber plant!
    Local syrup

    Block By Block Cooperation is a group of neighbors in unhistoric east urbana (the historic part starts north of Washington).  They are organizing people and raising awareness of local food issues.  Its really exciting to see such things happening only 2 blocks from La Casa.  There are so many projects that we can work together on.

    neighbor Sam tapped the local maple trees to make syrup for the pancake breakfast, thanks Sam!
    neighbor Sam tapped the local maple trees to make syrup for the pancake breakfast, how f-ing cool! It came out really delicious. what a treat, thanks Sam!

  • OPEN FORUM ON BROADBAND IN C-U

    There was a very inspiring event this weekend where a group of community members got together to talk about getting broadband to the entire C-U community. YES!  I believe internet access is an important factor for inclusion in the emerging 21st century culture, especially a sustainable culture.  The forum was built off of a project already underway by CITES (the campus technology department) to apply for stimulus money (read: Obama money).  The stimulus package included 9 billion for getting broadband to rural and low-income communities and CITES is writing a proposal that will ask for $25-30 million.  Here’s the current draft of the map that was passed around by Mike, the project lead and panel member for the forum.
    Urbana Champaign Big Broadband version 7

    The yellow, blue, and pink areas north of campus are the low-income neighborhoods that the plan is specifically targeting. Although much of the talk during the forum focused on creating access models that include some sort of FREE access (as in beer) Mike was very clear that the proposal that he is writing won’t be FREE because the stimulus money stipulates that the plan must be “sustainable”. This is where the meaning of sustainable means different things to different people. It is still unclear what the final proposal will look like. A lot of the community members, church leaders, teachers, etc, were very clear that the digital divide is stopping many sectors from fully embracing online resources. For example, a teacher couldn’t assign online homework if they couldn’t be sure all students could get online. The librarian from Urbana Free also got up and lamented that her public access stations were constantly backed up; a sign of the times…

    Open Access Forum
    From left: Danielle (from UCIMC), Mike, (CITES), Anne Bishop, (GSLIS community informatics), Abdul (GSLIS), and a church organizer (can't remember her name, sry)

    I can envision a compromise being a network of free wireless nodes that reach every home. The wireless would have some bandwidth limit if needed. If you want your own wired connection, you’d have to pay a certain amount. This would enable everyone to have some sort of access, and also allow people to have the super-sexy-mega-bandwidth. The mega-access really makes the whole project enticing to a lot of the more affluent parts of town already getting screwed by Comcast, but don’t realize it.  Mike was saying he wanted 100 MBPS… damn.

    There is a website up to coordinate the whole effort.  (Champaign Urbana Open Access Coalition) Anyone interested in OpenAccess for Urbana-Champaign should think about signing up.