YouTube commenters debate the merits of Dita Von Teese:

-She is very elegant & knows how to leave something to the imagination.

-i like her, but i dont. she needs a new act.

-She's a gorgeous, divine, fascinating being.

-she is soooooooooo boring

-Her face looks like the faces in the black and white photos from the early 1900's. It is kind of scary to me now for some reason.

Four Nineteen

The Nigerian spam I just got was allegedly from a brother and sister whose parents were poisoned (!) at a party by rivals, though the father lingered just long enough to reveal an immense fortune hidden in a foreign bank account...

I sorta want to send them money just for the literary ambitions of their tale, which I see as a gothic step above the usual 419 spiel.

What's next?

"Dear kind sir, my name is Violet Baudelaire, and along with my siblings Klaus and Sunny, I need your help in keeping my murdered parents' fortune from the
clutches of Count Olaf..."

Baja Chicken

"This guy is not a pimp, nor is he 'pimping'..."

http://viceland.com/int/dd.php?id=437&country=us

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The Celebrator is an innocuous rubber sleeve that turns an electric toothbrush into a vibrator. (This link probably has NSFW ads...)

How efficient! Who wants a bunch of vibrators laying around?

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Speaking of toothbrushes, here's one that creates a water fountain in a really ingenious way:

(Read the bottom of the page...it's only eighteen hundred dollars! WTF?)

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Momiji Friendship Dolls, designed by Joanna Zhou:

http://www.chocolatepixels.com/momiji.html

(I know it's really American of me to be suprised that there are Chinese-Austrians, but still...)

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Une série de photos réalisées de manière insolite, à partir de magazines, livres et êtres humains:

http://www.fubiz.net/blog/index.php?2007/08/08/1231-magazine-illusions

Excerpt from Scott Spencer's MEN IN BLACK

After years of trying to make a go as a serious novelist, the narrator, Sam, has agreed to write a quicky book about UFOs under a pseudonym. This book, though, has become wildly popular, earning what Sam--after years of scraping by--calls a "fortune." (His brother Allen sets him straight: "It's not a fortune. I don't make a fortune, and I'm an oral surgeon. What you're making is called a LIVING.") In this section, Sam has to go on yet another book tour to promote his UFO book:

Inside the store, there was a large crowd, mostly of the sort of people I was coming to expect-not for me the girls in their summer dresses, the sultry women in their black leotards, the grad students with pulsating eyes, the latter-day bohos in berets. No, my readers had casts on their feet, Ace bandages on their ankles, patches on their eyes; they received radio signals through the fillings in their teeth; they needed to lose weight, gargle; they had lost their meager inheritances in pyramid schemes; they wouldn't mind selling you mail-order shoes or Amway kitchen cleansers; they rattled around the country on secondary roads where the gas and food were cheaper; they tested their cellars for radon; they called the Culligan Man; they watched the Christian Broadcasting System; they looked for stores that still sold eight-track tapes; they lived near electric-powerline towers the size of the Washington Monument; they had guns.

TIny Polaroid

Tiny Polaroid

"Have any picture turned into a miniature crumple-proof, water-proof, live forever acrylic Polaroid."

Video Bulb

"A lipstick-shaped tube that you plug into your RCA jack on your tv... and along runs this black and white pixel movie. Apparently great for parties, and a fun screensaver." Here's the video.

Airstream 75th Anniversary Edition
These campers are insanely gorgeous.

Mobi
Ziplock bags by Todd Oldham.

Topoware
Portion control dishware.

Poltrano Frau
Look at this amazing collapsible desk!

Videos II

Modest Mouse - The Ocean Breathes Salty

Kid 606 - Sometimes

Bright Eyes - First Day Of My Life

Rude Boy

Today, on a whim, I researched the term Rude Boy and its origins, discovering that all three leading theories are phenomenal:

THEORY 1
"The term 'rude boy' may have been associated with an extremely potent rum-based drink called Rude to Your Parents."

Rude To Your Parents! That's so great. The next theory is just as good:

THEORY 2
"Disaffected unemployed urban youths sometimes found temporary employment from sound system operators. Wearing sharp suits, thin ties, and pork-pie or Trilby hats, they would gain admittance to competitors' dances, then proceed to disrupt the event by acting rude."

Oh. My. God. Is this still a viable employment option?

THEORY 3
"It may also be related to the term 'rudeness,' which was used in Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s in reference to sexual intercourse."

The term has seen a resurgence of late, which has been traced to a cabbie's frequent use, beginning on the evening of July 25, 2007 and continuing for the next four months..

Rudeness!

La Fin Absolue du Monde

I thoroughly enjoyed 200 Bad Comics. I hope you do, too.

I also like the guy's prints, even though one of them features a robot hobo (!):

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Seven days of outfits in the life of Matthew Josephs, who is apparently a dude:

I'm not *too* crazy about his outfits, I'm mostly just interested in the "seven days" thing being applied to men's fashion. I know it's a staple of women's magazines, but I've never seen in done on an alleged guy.

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Andrew English Wedding Band
Commissioned bands are delicately hand-engraved with the fingerprint of your partner and therefore completely unique to each couple.

Gazebo Chess Set

Inside-Out Drinking Glasses

Dream Dollars

Monsters And Dubious Characters

MooStickers

TankBooks

Amenity Nursery

Freestyle Desk

PinQy
You didn't even know you WANTED a fire extinguisher, did you?



(The subject line is french for "The Absolute End of the World.")

Joe

In a 1988 interview with John Waters, he mentions that when he was in high school, most of the girls had beehives...but then a few of them started showing up to school with super-straight hair. This was referred to as "going Joe," short for "going Joe College," i.e. becoming a beatnik.

I want this to come back, but age-reversed. For example, when discussing a 26-year-old broker who wears Abercrombie & Fitch and drinks too much Budweiser, one could say: "He's a nice enough guy, but I could never get serious with him...he's still Joe."

Get on this.

Turbo

This Washington City Paper article, about a MySpace-like network for young affluent DC types, is fascinating.

Obviously, the Internet is alive with condemnation for the people profiled, but what strikes me about it is how out-of-time, even innocent, their revolting behavior is. Even the "have you done it up the butt?" bit, though grody, seems more grade school than frat boy...it reads as though he just found out about the concept and was eager to share. It's not childish...it's pre-childish.

But the most interesting thing for me is their simultaneously crude yet almost chaste attitudes towards sex. "You don't think all the sex they talk about really happens, do you?" that one guy as much as asks, and there is a certain amount of prudishness on display. I've seen this in my cab among the upper-upper-middle class; excessive fooling around is seen as almost declasse.

This is most obvious with the girls in the middle of the scene, especially the so-awesomely-named Coventry Burke, who seems more like a Radcliffe or Barnard girl that William Safire and Calvin Trillan was pie-eyed over than the coked-up whooHOO-er I was expecting. I'm sure she's an awful person to be around, don't get me wrong, but not in the way I thought she would be when I first started reading the article.

Mostly, though, I came away from the story wishing it had been given to a better journalist, one capable of somewhat more complicated thinking than the OMG tone used in this piece.

(Also, expect to hear me say "turbo" about a million times in the next few weeks.)