We own two copies of Gaia's Garden. Oddly enough, I didn't start reading it until I downloaded the Kindle version. I'm hoping it gives me enough of a background to be able to slog through the Permaculture Designer's Manual, which has been mocking me from the shelf for about a year now.

Paul has six pictures of himself in the header at permies.com. Six pictures. Six. Not only that, but when he wanted to tell the world about how to save money on heating costs, he didn't build a rocketmass heater, despite espousing their virtues on three podcasts and two videos. No, he launched a jihad against the compact flourescent lamp and bought a heated mousepad.

I think I really lost patience with him when he posted a video about how to thresh grain at home, using lengths of chinese zinc-plated chain and a Home Depot plastic bucket, and then gave some poor canning company shit for using plastic lids on their jars because even though it's food-grade plastic, "you just don't know about these things." He's just not a "practice what you preach" kinda guy, and he's more interested in self-promotion than problem-solving. The smackdown was due any day - I had a long discussion with him when he tried to use permies.com to upvote his heated mousepad video and I told him that he was totally violating Reddit's TOS and could get his account banned. It wandered to "who do you know in Bellingham that I could take to lunch to talk about permaculture" at which point he gave me a name and then said "but you shouldn't take him to lunch, you should arrange a meeting and invite a bunch of people because I get really angry when people try to monopolize my time with the paltry price of a meal." When I said "....uh, why did you give me his name if you thought me asking would make him mad?" he just sorta spun off on some direction about how ungrateful most people are.

I had a long discussion about rocketmass heaters with my dad - we're both mechanical engineers, he's got more background in thermo than I do. He pointed out that you could make it work with a computer-controlled thermostat, but that with the simple setup demonstrated, you wouldn't be able to run the contraption in the "sweet spot" for much of its burn and that you'd likely end up with a pretty smoky house most of the time. It's observations like that that I'm more interested in - "how to domesticate a rocketmass heater so that your mother in law doesn't think you're crazy" and less of the "people who think CFLs are a good idea are ENEMIES OF THE STATE" vitriol.