furniture making

I Blame The Podcast

So there I was working away during my Gragg Chair Challenge, deep in the midst of the most tedious part of the entire project — fitting the seat slats into their dovetailed open mortises.  At that same moment I was completely engrossed in listening to an Econtalk podcast wherein host Russ Roberts was interviewing statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the latter’s observations about Covid-19 (Taleb’s observations cause me to stop and pay attention; I cannot tell sometimes whether he is a man of rare insight or a BS-spewing grifter.  As Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  Taleb himself vacillates between statistics-as-analysis and mathematical-esoterica-as-intimidation).

It must have been a particularly compelling exchange between Roberts and Taleb because I sawed the slat cleanly on the wrong layout line.  Try as I might, I cannot seem to stretch the piece longer to fit the space it is supposed to go.

It’ll go into the growing pile of kindling that is left after every Gragg chair.