Tag Archives: free

Free Urban Foraging: Fallen Fruit is a great site for finding fruit to pick

June 11, 2012   admin   No comments

Double the health benefits of your daily walks with free urban foraging.

“Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world.

“By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship to ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation.

“Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject matter.

“Theoretically, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.” — from the website.

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Download a classic short story every week

April 25, 2012   admin   No comments

A nice break for detourists: sign up for Library of America‘s free story of the week and have it sent to your e-reader. Perfect airport reading. Free.

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Happy Hour: Haute cuisine, faible budget

January 14, 2012   admin   1 Comment

When in a new town, one of the surest ways to eat well without breaking the bank is to dine at happy hour. Although typically happy “hour” falls between 4 pm and 7 pm, competition and a troubled economy have inspired a surprising number of eateries, including some of the best, to expand the discounts “until 10 pm,” “until closing,” or even “all day.”  A little searching for “happy hour” on the internet will usually turn up plenty of choices.

Offerings vary, though, and it often pays to call ahead to double check hours and menus (some happy hours are every day, some Sunday-Thursday, a few one or two days a week). Speaking generally, happy hour choices are limited: the bar Happy Hourmenu and selections from the list of dinner appetizers, plus a couple of wines and well drinks  — expect to pay half the regular prices or a little more, although occasionally you will run across a place discounting its entire menu, usually at prices similar to the difference between lunch and dinner for the same item.  Many locales offer breaks only on alcohol, another reason to call ahead. And, believe it not, there are still a few spots with free food during happy hour, an amenity that was commonplace once upon a time ( see, Free Happy Hour Food in LA, Denver and the Bay Area; Splash Ultra Lounge and Burger Bar and Sissy K’s in Boston; free tapas at Il Moro in West Los Angeles, as long as you order a drink — call ahead: these things change).

Typical sources for happy hour recommendations include foodie social media sites (Urbanspoon; Yelp!); urban guides (Where magazine; Citysearch; Metromix); local periodicals (New York magazine; LA Weekly; Miami New Times; TimeOut);  and specialized portals (GoTime; Daily Happy Hours; Happy-Hour.com; and for international links HappyHour.net).

GoTime (“37,889 happy hours nationwide … and counting”) offers a handy mobile app that uses a smartphone’s gps to find the nearest restaurants and bars currently hosting happy hours.

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Let Me Stay for a Day: an inspiration to detourists everywhere

April 15, 2011   admin   No comments

If anyone deserves to be called The Godfather of Couchsurfing, it’s Dutch author Ramon Stoppelenburg. He grasped earlier than most the personal networking opportunities made possible by the world wide web.

One of the first Dutch bloggers, in early of 2001 Stoppelenburg started a website called Let Me Stay for a Day with the intention of cadging free places to crash as a means of underwriting his travel ambitions. Ramon Stoppelenburg, The Godfather of CouchsurfingThe plan worked out better than he could have anticipated: in short order, he had 3,577 invitations from 77 countries.  Leaving home with no more than “a backpack filled with clothing, a digital camera, a laptop, and a mobile phone,” for nearly two years, as he writes in Dutch-inflected English, he “traveled the world WITHOUT ANY MONEY, visiting people who invited me over through this website. I crossed distance with my thumb or with help of sponsors and supporters. In return for all support I wrote about this all in my daily reports on this website.”

By the time he shut down the project in 2003, Stoppelenburg had visited The Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Austria, The Isle of Man, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Spain, Hong Kong, Australia  and Canada, with all expenditures — even airline tickets — sponsored or donated by his followers: the former student, then in his mid-twenties, had found a way to become a seasoned world traveler for the cost of a $35 website domain registration.

During his travels, Stoppelenburg published columns weekly in the Dutch daily newspaper Spits, in addition to the 7,000 photos and over 550 reports he posted to his website. You won’t be surprised that Letmestayforaday.com turned into a book that the author is currently translating into English.  Since June 2008, he’s been conducting walks up Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain. And in September 2010 he relocated to Phnom Penh, where he runs a movie theater showing American and European pictures and is organizing a European Cooking Trip for the summer of 2011. He posts updates on his activities to his current blog.

Some of the American media may think of Ramon Stoppenlenburge as “the notorious Dutch freeloader,” but out here on the road he’s a hero to detourists and armchair adventurers all.

Site: Let Me Stay for a Day

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Roadside Assistance: Starbucks book exchanges – Call them Starbooks

June 10, 2009   admin   1 Comment

If you happen to be passing through Concord, New Hampshire, you can drop off books you’re finished with and pick up something new to read at the local Starbucks book exchange.

A good idea you usually see only in independent coffee houses. Hope it’s picked up by every Starbucks (and Peet’s and Coffee Bean) in the universe. (Starbucks, 242 Louden Road, Concord, NH; 603-223-2395.)

Addendum:
Here are Starbucks book exchanges in Napa Valley and near the Washington-British Columbia border:
Book exchange at Starbucks, Napa Valley, CA Call them Starbooks
Addendum II (July 2012):
Meanwhile, another successful book exchange, at the oldest Starbucks in Los Angeles (at Main Street, Santa Monica), was removed by a new manager after the district manager sat next to it and was somehow offended. The Starbucks company trades on the idea that it provides community. This is marketing, of course, but in many parts of the world the corporation actually does support communitarian endeavors: not just book exchanges, but neighborhood bulletin boards, special events like puppy adoptions, and seasonal activities like pumpkin carving contests. In the district administered by the office in Los Angeles, not so much. In SoCal, the bulletin boards are swept clean of anything that could narrowly be described as controversial (that is to say, in the stores where the boards themselves haven’t been removed entirely and replaced by product promotion cards), there are few seasonal and special events, and in the case at hand, the active book exchange at Main & Hill was removed. The neighborhood had created it, supplying both the original book case and a steady supply of books and magazines. You might wonder why Starbucks would remove an amenity that builds traffic, community and goodwill, and costs it nothing but the donation of an unused wall behind a door, but what you are seeing is that masked by the smiling baristas and everybody-knows-your-name vibe, Starbucks is just another giant, impersonal corporate entity.

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The Santa Monica Mountains: Catch a free ride to paradise

May 27, 2009   admin   No comments

…the National Park Service (NPS) [has] a public shuttle service called parkLink: alternative transit designed to connect visitors to beaches, parks and trailheads through the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (SMMNRA).

Eco-conscious NPS is moving forward with the vision in order to improve air quality, protect the environment and reduce vehicle impact. “We want to bring more people into the parks while limiting the number of cars driving through the canyons,” says Jean Bray, Public Affairs Officer with SMMNRA.

On weekends and holidays, park for FREE at an NPS site along the route and catch one of the shuttles departing every 30 minutes. With nine stops on the agenda, consider lunching in chic Malibu, surfing at Zuma or picnicking with the peacocks at Peter Strauss Ranch. The clean-diesel shuttles have space for all your gear: trip bike racks, storage for coolers and surfboards, wheelchair lifts and room for 20.

The multi-agency partnership, which includes NPS, California State Parks, Santa Monica Mountains conservancy and LA County Beaches and Harbors has high hopes for the parkLink project. “Together we can contribute to the greening of American by using the shuttle,” effuses Bray. You’ll also spare yourself the repetitive motion of hitting the brake pedal all the way down PCH.”

Visit <NPS shuttle> for scheduled stops and complete info on how to use parkLink.

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