Alpacas, just about the softest creatures you'll ever touch, tend to look like Muppets when rained upon. They are always, in the words of Cluckin Awesome Coops owner Reece McClung, "very unlikely looking creatures."

The Mother Earth News Fair is an odd duck.  I write that rather than “strange beast” because the fair, held at a verdant ski resort an hour east of Pittsburgh last weekend, was far more plucky than beastly, and not just because torrential rain and wind walloped the thing all through Saturday.  The “fun-filled, hands-on sustainable lifestyle event” was awash, as could be expected, in exhibitor booths hawking bee keeping products and heirloom seeds and energy efficiency technologies.  There were over 240 pretty fantastic workshops, hour-long sessions with titles like “How to Cure Your Own Bacon,” and “Homesteading the Suburbs with the Kids,” and “Hand-Milk Your Goat; Make Feta, Chevre, and Ricotta; and Stay Out of Jail.”

But there were also exhibitors demonstrating for rapt middle aged men the newest and greatest development in drill bit technology, pens of alpacas, and a wildly popular booth selling slim plastic devices that allow women to pee standing up.  The event was slammed with people.  When the Continue reading →