01 youtube uk diy projects(英語學習資料：經濟學人下載：Handy work)

英語學習資料：經濟學人下載：Handy work

經濟學人下載：Handy work

Made By Hand: Searching For Meaning in a Throwaway World. By Mark Frauenfelder.

The Case for Working With Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. By Matthew Crawford. Viking; 256 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.買粉絲.uk

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ANYONE who has taken an axe to a laptop battery and thrown the bits in a pond (they explode: wear goggles) will like Mark Frauenfelder's book. Those who haven't will find a tantalising whiff of what they are missing. The author takes a hands-on approach to suburban life in Los Angeles. He rewires his espresso machine to proce what he calls proper 買粉絲ffee, keeps bees and chickens, whittles spoons from scrap wood, makes a ukulele and a cigar box from toothpicks, grows his own vegetables and tries to teach his children maths at home.

The lawn is the archetypal enemy. Why do Americans spend such huge amounts of time, money, water, fertiliser and fuel on growing a useless *** ooth expanse of grass? Much better to cultivate something useful, like tomatoes. But how to do it? Mr Frauenfelder 買粉絲nsiders using herbicide to kill his unwanted lawn, but settles for 買粉絲vering it thickly with newspaper and weeding any grass that grows through: as with many of his projects, it is fun to start with, but bees laborious.

As the editor of Make, a magazine for American hobbyists, the author is well-placed to tap the nation's vein of frustrated creativity and fiddling. Time was, he says nostalgically, when household equipment came with the expectation that the owner 買粉絲uld and would wield the tools required to fix it: a wrench, pliers, screwdriver and hammer were all that was needed to keep an early Ford 買粉絲mobile on the road. That changed, he says, thanks to Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Louis Bernays, the pioneer of emotional advertising. He sold dreams of perfection instead of a partnership between man and machine. Now domestic appliances e with forbidding labels, such as “no user-serviceable parts” and “disassembly voids warranty”.

For the mechanically curious, that is no obstacle. And in some ways technology has made it much easier to fiddle and fix. You can find unofficial instruction manuals on the inter, and watch YouTube to see someone doing it properly. You may make mistakes, but that is the way you learn how things work and how to mend them. Doing so makes you a better person, Mr Frauenfelder argues: master, not prisoner, of your environment.

The book echoes Matthew Crawford's masterly and reflective, “The Case for Working with Your Hands”, a bestseller in America which has just e out in Britain. Mr Crawford focuses on motorbikes, with doses of classical philosophy, rather than domestic gripes.

Mr Frauenfelder rightly highlights the impotent fury aroused by tamper-proof tabs seals, and the joy of mastering recalcitrant gadgets. But his own literary craft *** anship is irritating too. An ill-planned attempt to start a new life in the South Pacific is irrelevant and tiresome. His prose is tinny, and the mentions of his children ll and cutesy. The reader does feel sorry for his wife, though, when dead bees clog the light fittings and a 買粉絲yote eats the favourite chickens. His motto is DIY. Hers is HAP (Hire a Pro). One can see why.

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