Six Million Little Pieces

Writer Admits Holocaust Book Is Not True:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080229/ap_on_re_us/holocaust_book_hoax_2

Oh look, It's this old knee-slapper: "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality..." Hurf durf it was a post-modern experiment.

(And yes, readers, the bit about the wolves is absolutely the best part. Ha!)

Don't worry, though, it won't be an issue...

John McCain was born on a military base in Panama...can he still be President?

Of course he can, right? Don't think so fast:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=144404&f=77

Affluenza: February 27

The Ron Gilad's Dear Ingo chandelier is simply mindblowing. Wow!

http://www.unicahome.com/p21795/moooi/dear-ingo-by-ron-gilad-for-moooi.html

But: "biomorphic overtones?" Fuck off.

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Areo has a TON of fall-down beautiful matchbooks:

http://areohome.com/matches.html

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An actual store in Korea:

http://flickr.com/photos/mishamc/2174716455/in/set-72157603575774721/

The first entry in the official Affluenza shopping guide, coming soon.

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Tetris ice cube trays...

http://martin.zampach.com/detail/tetrice-ice-cube-maker

...combined with a description of a microwave oven, for some reason.

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"Sustainable" BS aside, I really like this bath caddy...dig the slot for your wine glass:

http://www.delight.com/Sustainable-Bamboo-Bath-Caddy-w-Book-Stand-Wine-Glass-Holder

Elegant manservant not included.

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In a shamless bid to be featured on Affluenza, Renata Quintela has disguised her Phone Concept as a Toaster Concept:

http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_file.asp?from_url=true&sort_by=1&portfolio_id=827002&individual_id=179897

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Gwen Stefani continues her tireless efforts to get women to dress like security guards:

http://eluxury.com/estore/browse/product_detail.jsp?id=11737796

I know, I know, it's a "schoolboy blazer," but look at that picture: if you saw that rather odd-looking woman walking towards you, wouldn't you just assume a fairly large portion of her day was spent in a golf cart?

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Clever computer speakers:

http://www.insound.com/search/showrelease.jsp?from=&p=INS42198&from=37020

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Salt and Pepper Maracas:

http://designmuseumshop.com/whats-new/salt-and-pepper-maracas

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Nice to see designers taking their cues from Flea's pants in the "Bust A Move" video:

http://www.mossonline.com/product-exec/product_id/29623/category_id/9

Oh my god, when my sister was 8 she was an avant garde chair designer!

The website says "price available upon request," which is designer-speak for "get fucked," but seriously: couldn't you totally make this with a cheap papasan and thirty bucks of Dollar Tree stuffed animals?

Desiree Palmen

Desiree Palmen's impressive camouflage photography:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=517634&in_page_id=1770

"People always react strongly when they see my work. They have mixed reactions: confusion, surprise and interest." ... "Mostly people like the idea of wearing garments that make them invisible."

It's so refreshing to read comments from an artist who doesn't hide behind empty MFA-speak about the themes she's "exploring" with her "experiments."

White Like Us

The Los Angeles Times on Stuff White People Like:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rodriguez25feb25,0,1952462.column

Quote:

By "white people," Lander doesn't actually mean the more than 221 million Americans who check that box on the decennial census. But that's part of the fun. Lander is doing to whites what scores of journalists and politicians do to non-white minorities every day, "essentializing" complex identities -- that is, stripping away all variety and reducing them to their presumed authentic essences.

Book Club update

I've finished Emma (and posted my final thoughts in the thread), so I'm one book away from finishing the Jane Austen endeavor.

I'm pretty far ahead of schedule...I have basically a month to read the fifty chapters of Sense And Sensibility. The original idea was to read two chapters a day for the next twenty five days.

HOWEVER, I find the idea of starting yet another Austen novel tomorrow absurdly upsetting, so I'm taking a couple of weeks off. Instead of reading two chapters daily for a month, starting on March 9 I'll be reading five chapters a day for ten days. Probably.

I know this is disappointing for the dozens of people who read along with me and contribute to the lively long-ranging conversations in the threads, but I'm so far behind on these Yu-Gi-Oh novelizations I may never catch up...

Orthorexia Nervosa

Orthorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder defined by an escalating obsession with eating "healthfully."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia

The term was coined by Dr. Stephen Bratman, who identified a fixation on a diet that can be perceived as morally pure. "Where the bulimic and anorexic focus on the quantity of food, the orthorexic fixates on its quality."

Here's his original article on the subject, called Health Food Junkies. It's insanely interesting.

http://www.beyondveg.com/bratman-s/hfj/hf-junkie-1a.shtml

“And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.”

Charles Dickens' incredibly touching obituary for William Makepeace Thackeray:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_W._M._Thackeray

"I remember his once asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had been to Eton where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give him a sovereign? I thought of this when I looked down into his grave, after he was laid there, for I looked down into it over the shoulder of a boy to whom he had been kind."

Southwestern Beans And Couscous, a Baby Ruthless original recipe

[Recently my mother sent me a "Diabetic Cooking" cookbook. Can you imagine? Anyway, here's a recipe I adapted pretty loosely from that book. It's not too similar to the original, but it's yummy.]

1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can chick peas, drained and rinsed
1 cup frozen corn
2 jalapenos, cored, seeded, and minced
2 shallots or 1 small onion, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon black pepper
3 cups of water
1 chicken bouillon cube
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro
10 oz of uncooked couscous
Salt

1. Place beans, corn, jalapeno, shallots, garlic, cumin, black pepper, water, and bouillon cube in the crock pot. (Everything except the cilantro, lime juice, and couscous.)

2. Stir, cover, and cook on LOW for 3 to 4 hours. (Probably less, really...you're just cooking the onion and jalapeno.) (And of course you could probably just cook this in a pot on the stove for maybe an hour? I don't know.)

3. Ten minutes before you serve it, add the cilantro, the lime juice, and the couscous. Stir and cover.

Petjafied

The venerable Something Awful has an occasional feature called Fashion SWAT, which began as two guys riffing on ridiculous haute couture and has morphed into two guys riffing on "street fashion" sites like The Sartorialist:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/fashion-swat/

Yeah, a lot of it is shooting fish in a barrel, but their snark can be pretty quotable ("I would have to define this look as timeless. There is no time where looking like this has ever been appropriate.") and in general it's a lot smarter than one would expect from an SA product.

Recommended If You: used to love Vice's Do's and Don'ts, but feel like they've become lazy and inscrutable. [Vice recently ran a Do that was just a picture from one of their own fashion spreads...what the hell?]

Anyway, recently they took on Hel-Looks, a street fashion site chronicling the looks on the street of Helsinki:

http://www.hel-looks.com/

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/fashion-swat/hel-looks-swat.php?page=1

Anyway, I told you all that to point out their take on Petja, "the most awesome motherfucker I have ever seen" who designs and makes his own clothes:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/fashion-swat/hel-looks-swat.php?page=11

Everything about this--from the guy himself to the hilarious commentary--blows me away.

[Thanks, Molly!]

Affluenza: February 20

Unrelated: there's a total eclipse of the moon happening in a couple hours:

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/LEmono/TLE2008Feb21/TLE2008Feb21.html

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An alarm clock that gives money to your enemies every time you hit snooze:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/snuznluz.shtml

(Thanks, Ben!)

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A very clever Murphy bed set-up:

http://www.clei.co.uk/clei/atoll.htm

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Bocina Watering Can:

http://www.roadsidescholar.com/2008/02/18/bocina-watering-can/

I like this, but the more I look at it, the more it looks like one of those things hippies use to clean out their sinuses.

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OMG WTF:

http://www.mossonline.com/product-exec/product_id/42972

Two candles in the shape of Classical sculptures, wearing sunglasses for some reason, and only...eight hundred dollars!

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Hamburger-shaped lunchbox, with three compartments:

http://www.shophappytrails.com/Hamburger_Shaped_Lunch_Box_p/burger.htm

Elian

There are lots of invented writing systems out there. They replace our Latin letters with letters of the inventor's own design, creating a simple cypher:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/conscripts.htm#english

Most of them, as you can see, are impractical or, worse, ugly.

Elian, however, is a shorthand that's quick to learn, easy to write, and simple to remember. Even better, it was designed to be beautiful:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/elianscript.htm

Its simplicity also allows it to be incredibly versatile, resulting in gorgeous calligraphy that's also easy to read:

http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html

(Study these two links well...beginning tomorrow, Baby Ruthless will be exclusively written in Elian.)

The Voice Of Music

The Danish composer Carl Nielsen, writing as the voice of Music:

"I live tenfold more intensely than any living thing, and die a thousandfold deeper. I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it."

Just Fucking Google It

One of the more useful websites I've seen lately:

http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/

"Using http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=foo+bar will show this page and then redirect users to the Google page for searching on 'foo bar', as will many other variants on that idea."

God, engineers are terrible writers. What he's trying to say with that 'foo bar' nonsense is, if someone asks you the difference between i.e. and e.g., send them the above URL, but replace 'foo+bar' with 'ie+eg'.

Stuff White People Like

This might be my favorite website of all time:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.org/

A good criteria for Baby Ruthless: is the website Johnny wants to link to so well done and funny that it makes him angry and depressed? It is? Then post it on the blog!

Affluenza: February 13

Get out the smelling salts, these two-tone boot are about to knock you right the fuck out:

http://www.notcouture.com/post/1576?goto#1576

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Roman Candles:

http://www.worldwidefred.com/romancandles.htm

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John Denver's dresser now for sale:

http://www.bobbyberkhome.com/product/occasional-tables-bookcases/9792/bobby-berk-home%99-rustic-3-drawr-dresser.html

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It's A Log You Idiots, part of a continuing series:

http://www.iloveuma.com/detail.aspx?ID=1107

http://www.stlloftstyle.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=969

(I actually really like this second one. Massive!)

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Affluenza, definition of: mattresses from Vera Wang...

http://www.serta.com/vw/index.php

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Drop dead gorgeous suitcases from Alstermo Bruks:

http://www.belowtheclouds.com/2008/02/08/klassiska-vaskor-fran-alstermo-bruk/

I could not want these more.

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I'm not sure if making the front slanty counts as a "toaster concept," but here's GE Houseware's attempt:

http://www.contemporist.com/2008/02/05/slanted-toaster/

Hey, GE! *This* is how you fuck up a toaster:

http://www.madeindesign.co.uk/prod-Toaster-Virages-refb2244n.html

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CoutureLabs' cool leather coat rest:

http://www.couturelab.com/products/product-2166-127.html

The Slide No. 5

Miuccia Prada has a slide in her office that whisks her to her car:

"It's hard to tell from the outside of the Milan-based headquarters that Prada is one of the world's most successful luxury brands. You enter Prada through an anonymous portal-like oak door—there is no name, no plaque, nothing—and are greeted by a security guard dressed in gray. Everything is gray: the security office, the cobblestone courtyard, the various factory-like buildings surrounding it, and many of the cars parked in it. The only thing that gives the place away is the guard's uniform: it is not the typical formless security garb but tailored Prada with its stark—some would say neofascist—lines.

"I was taken to a room I had read about often. It is officially Miuccia Prada's office, and it is as stark and contrived as her designs: poured concrete, a slew of orange and yellow molded plastic Eames chairs; and, sticking up in the center of the floor, a metal tube slide—by artist Carsten Holler—that runs three floors down to the parking lot and is titled The Slide No. 5. Prada has whizzed down it when asked to by reporters."

from DELUXE: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, by Dana Thomas

Affluenza: February 6

GumDesign's cool Swing wine glass:

http://www.dezeen.com/2008/01/31/swing-and-shadow-by-gumdesign/

(That Shadow wine glass on the same page is fucking retarded, however.)

Wouldn't a better name have been Swirl?

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Not quite a Toaster Concept, but close enough:

http://www.mcphee.com/items/11806.html

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The Go-One enclosed recumbant tricycle:

http://www.go-one.us/index.html

Eleven large!

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Keyaki Wood Tea Cups

http://www.raredevice.net/item.php?item_id=207&page=1&category_id=19#

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The Nestt (sic) car seat, from Think Thing:

http://thinkthing.net/products.html

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Great photos of the Thomas Pink shirt-making process:

http://www.debonairmag.com/luxuries_exposed_-_custom_shirts_by_thomas_pink.htm

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Why?

http://nickpapageorgia.blogspot.com/2008/01/karine-arabian.html

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WHY!?

http://www.virtualshoemuseum.com/vsm/o.php?id=138&col=person&sub=54

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Octopus Studios' "Silverfish Aquarium:"

http://www.octopusstudios.com/aquagallery.htm

Pretty cool, but as Joel Johnson rightfully points out over on BB Gadgets, I'd feel a lot better about paying three large for an aquarium if the base didn't look like something you'd get at Wal-Mart...

Hemingway's Six Word Short Story

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.