Scrap house video

Great video about building a house completely out of scrap and trash. We usually steer clear of these produced "reality" shows, but this one at least shows what can be done with a little ingenuity and a lot of scrap. It's unlikely that just an average Joe could go into a scrap yard and walk away with twenty thousand bucks worth of steel, but who knows, anything is possible when people just don't have the space.

QUESTION: When educational shows skip over the most important processes and just show the finished product, does it do more harm than good? When somebody actually tries to do this and they are hit with cost and fees that were not even mentioned in the “how to” video, does this discourage real implementation? Does it just amount to entertainment?

Cork or Screwtop?

Why does wine with cork in it cost more than one with a screw top? Bottles with screw tops will never become corked, right? After a little research, I found out that there is really no significant advantage to a cork. Everything lies in the experience, which we are definitely fans of here at Thief, but only when it is not based in inherited customs and/or ignorance. Basically, the action and sound of a cork being pulled is just too much to give up, even if the only person generally experiencing it is the person opening the bottle. The use of plastic corks eliminates the problem of tainted wine, but brings with it the need to increase dramatically the numbers of consumers who will actually recycle them.

Why do you buy corked wine instead of screwtop?

- CABOOM SHOW WAS CA JOKE!!

Thief finally decided to participate in a trade show after much debate, and boy did we get what we asked for. The CABOOM show in Beverly Hills was like licking a cactus. Yes, it was that bad. Either (1) the organizers of this year's event were completely distracted by missing a Shepard Fairy sighting in Los Feliz, or (2) they had no idea what they were doing. We think the latter. The choice to have a boutique style trade show the same weekend as a major trade show produced by a national brand such as DWELL is the first on the list. Spillover was the idea. Uh yeah. At $25 bucks a pop and a fifteen mile spin down the lovely 10 freeway in June, on a weekend. Strike one. Giving half of your booths away at next to nothing last minute without so much as an apology to the vendors that paid full, thinking they would not find out. Always the best way to build vendor trust. Strike 2. Not advertising the show in the LA Weekly the weekend of the show. Let's see, the paper is free and it hits newstands on Thursday mornings. Why pay to advertise an event when you can keep the money and hire F-bomb dropping 19 year old DJ's! Strike 3.

We should have stuck to our gut feeling and spent our money on building something. And if anybody reading this even gets a little bit of an idea to ever go to or participate in a CABOOM show, call us or come on down. We can smack you one and save you a ton of cash at the same time.