Friday, January 16, 2009


A former city employee in the Fukushima prefecture town of Koriyama has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria. Bothered that perfectly good wood was going to waste after a single use, Shuhei Ogawara whose job at city hall involved working with the local forestry industry spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria. An experienced canoe builder, Ogawara spent over 3 months gluing 7,382 chopsticks together into strips to form the canoe shell, to which he added a polyester resin coat. The canoe weighs about 30 kilograms (66 lbs), which is a bit heavier than an ordinary cedar canoe, but Ogawara is confident it will float. A launching ceremony is planned for May at nearby Lake Inawashiro

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bean update, north woods logging camp circa 1900:

Beans and brown bread were the breakfast staples, but these as served at Freneau's were not considered first-class, for they were baked in the stove oven. Most camps have a bean-hole -- an excavation three or four feet deep in the ground just outside the log dwelling. A fire is built in it, and when the wood is reduced to a great heap of coals the bean-pot is put in with some tins of brown bread on top. Then the pot is covered with coals, and ashes and earth are heaped on. It is left thus through the night, to be exhumed the following morning, and the woodsmen all agree that bean-hole beans are far superior to the oven product.

http://www.greatnorthwoods.org/index.html

Anonymous said...

Fish Hook Removal

http://break.com/index/nasty-fish-hook-removal-from-hand.html?matchid=?matchid=

Anonymous said...

Just one question.

Who's shima and what's the prefecture got against them?