Indian Mouse Gets No Ice Cream In 1991

Nancy Crunch sends along this Flickr set detailing the differences between the 1963 and 1991 editions of Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kokogiak/sets/1425737/

In return, I'm sure Ms. Crunch will appreciate this group portrait:

http://www.rob-sheridan.com/sketchblog/2008/04/cereal-mascot-reunion.html

Affluenza: April 16

Oh my god, check out this stunning Endovanera casual jacket from David Hershberger and Mitch Mosley:

http://www.tobi.com/product/8918-endovanera-pullback-jacket-jackets-casual

Look at all the pictures to see the three different lapel configurations it's capable of. "Timeless yet quite fashion-forward" sums it up perfectly. And, at $400, the price isn't exactly affordable, but it's at least surprisingly non-retarded.

Here's a jacket for women with a similarly versatile lapel:

http://lagarconne.com/store/item.htm?itemid=1062&sid=7

*

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

http://charlesandmarie.com/lifestyle-gems/quintessentials/tech-toys/details/product/2gb-natural-usb-memory-stick/ (Thanks, Adam!)

http://www.velocityartanddesign.com/product.php?productid=20219

*

Temporary tattoo paper for your inkjet printer:

http://www.craftycomputerpaper.co.uk/products-Inkjet-tattoo-paper_267.htm

Everyone's getting Affluenza tats for Christmas.

*

Very clever mirrored tic-tac-toe board:

http://www.bemlegaus.com/2008/04/espelho-da-velha.html

and a high-design foosball table:

http://www.eleventhegame.com/

Hey, why not?

*

A bowl with a spoon notch:

http://dvice.com/archives/2008/04/bowl_has_perfec.php

This seems like a good idea, but how often does your spoon fall into your bowl? I mean, when you're not eating an entire box of Cocoa Pebbles out of a mixing bowl, that is? I don't think it happens that often.

Here's another item that solves a non-existent problem...the SofaBOX:

http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/2008/04/sofa-box.html

It's a sofa that secretly turns into a, uh, box. But...why would you need that? What can you do with a box that you can't with a sofa? Sit on it?

*

What the HAY-ULL?

http://www.belowtheclouds.com/2008/04/11/31-studenter-skapar-5-stolar/

http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2008/04/the_suck_uk_ted.html

http://interiordesignroom.blogspot.com/2008/04/konstfack.html

"I don't really think of myself as a designer, really. I think of myself as a professional questioner....with this piece, I'm making people question their assumptions about whether chairs need fulfill a sitting role, and if tables should be functional eating surfaces. In fact, you might say I'm subverting the dominant paradigm..."

*

BrickArms, the Lego minifig armory with an impressively extensive product line, have released their 2008 line-up:

http://brickarms.com/

*

Every once and a while a product comes along that just gives you a headache. Admit it -- you know what I'm talking about. It's curves and shape makes you forget how to use apostrophes correctly. You don't even care about the ludicrous price --- you MUST feature it on Affluenza.

I see countless modern and contemporary home products each day. Most evoke feelings of disgust, but only the really special ones send me into a tizzy -- frantically trying to figure out the best way to mock them on this link dump.

Enter the Peel:

http://purecontemporary.blogs.com/behind_the_curtains/2008/04/perfect-peel.html

I know how you're feeling. Migraine-y. Nauseated. Am I right?

*

Christiaan Postma's Calendar Wallpaper:

http://design-milk.com/christiaan-postma/

Love it, but...you have to get your office re-papered every year?

*

Antonio Citterio's Flat.C shelving system is beautiful:

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/read.php?CATEGORY_PK=&TOPIC_PK=2715

Blah blah blah: "[T]he shelving system has [been] designed to house books and technology items such as a stereo and television set." Oh, so it's flat and horizontal, then? Amazing!

UPDATE: I think maybe I prefer the DeKast:

http://www.dekast.eu/#height_416

*

Constantin Wortmann's Cobra Candlesticks:

http://www.georgjensen.com/English/Collections/Living/Candleholders/COBRA%20Candlestick.aspx

*

I was all prepared to hate on Maarten Baas for his useless wobbly desk and his...inexplicable collection of junk:

http://www.dezeen.com/2008/04/10/studio-baas-den-herder-in-milan/

but I actually really like that first piece, the gorgeous hardwood version of a plastic patio chair.

Boy, these avant-garde designers have such a great goddamn gig: if you don't go along with their stupid "experiments," then you're just too middle-class to understand.

*

"24 hours before your special day, the Hot Spot™ on the interior surface of your Remember Ring™ will warm to 120º F for approximately 10 seconds, and continue to warm up every hour, on the hour, all day long!"

http://www.alaskajewelry.com/remember-rings-never-forget-anniversary-p-2040.html

*

THEM: I love Baby Ruthless, but what's this Affluenza thing Johnny does every week?

YOU: Affluenza is a twenty-two hundred dollar tepee from Design Within Reach.

http://www.dwr.com/product/tools/view+all+tools+for+living/tepee.do?prfrm=1&cmp=AFC-GB9049936277

Black Feasts

A few days ago, I linked to an awesome photo Joris-Karl Huysmans, describing him as "the French writer of a 'novel' with only one character and no plot." This novel was A rebours, published in 1884. In the following excerpt, the sole character's early extravagances are described.

Des Esseintes acquired the reputation of an eccentric, which he enhanced by giving famous dinners to men of letters, one of which was a funeral repast.

In the dining room, hung in black and opening on the transformed garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with basalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines, the dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with baskets of violets and scabiouses, lit by candelabra from which green flames blazed, and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.

To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nude negresses, wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth with patterns of tears, served the guests.

Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort black pudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice and blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out of dark glasses, wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penas and Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of kvas and porter and stout.

The invitation cards were designed like bereavement notices.

*

However, if you decide to recreate this black feast, note that it didn't go well for Tarquin Winot, the narrator of John Lanchester's 1997 novel The Debt To Pleasure:

I told her, with that mixture of endearment and melancholy that attends the recitation of the follies of one's youth, about something I did once in what I used to call my aesthetic period. The idea, cribbed from Huysmans, was to serve a menu consisting entirely of black things. This occurred during my brief interval at university, whence I departed after two terms (the NOISE, dear, and the PEOPLE). My room, a banal heptagon in a banal heptagon-shaped building in one of the smarter Cambridge colleges, I had painted (slightly in violation of one or two of the more invasive college regulations) black. Bed, sheets, fittings, lamps, light bulbs--all black.

In my black room, dressed in black velvet, black silk cravat--no need to change the inherent color of the single orchid in my buttonhole--I would arrange for meals consisting entirely of black food: truffles grated over squid-ink pasta, followed by boudin noir on a bed of fried black radicchio. For desert, I wanted to emphasize the essential artificiality of the event, the fact that it was a celebration of art, whim, caprice, set over against the brutal facts of nature and death, so I served crème brûlée, dyed black. Naturally we drank Black Velvet.

Into this exquisite setting arrived my brother Bartholomew, an hour and a half late, in his overalls (in violation of the dress code I had specified) and saying:

"Bloody hell! Anybody dead?"

Geisha Guys And British Dandies

Geisha guys are "debonair lads who can be hired for an evening of sparkling conversation." And here I am wasting my life driving a cab.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzz/Geisha_Guys

All of those Buzzfeed links are golden, but whatever you do, don't miss this one:

http://www.aidakanko.com/ai-honten/staff.html

*

The other day I was Googling "british dandy" for no other reason than I was curious what the results were. Here's the first result:

http://men.style.com/gq/fashion/landing?id=content_4075

Interestingly, I actually picked up that GQ when this article originally ran, and I cut this picture out and even scanned it in, just in case I lost the original. I consider this a picture of an almost perfect look, from the cut of the suit down to the attitude.

I also ended up buying the book they're talking about in this article:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-English-Dandy-Alice-Cicolini/dp/050051268X

I mean, a coffeetable book about English dandies? Come ON.

It's hit and miss, of course, but the hits are HUGE. I scanned in the best 25 or so, though it would of course be illegal and immoral to post a huge zip file of the images here. (Email me!)

Here's another nearly perfect British look and I'm not even kidding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:You_Are_The_Quarry.jpg

I would love to be able to pull something like that off. But I have a feeling I'd end up looking more like this:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/29/1096401643089.html

Tree Of Smoke

Last week or so, I mentioned in the Junot Diaz post that Denis Johnson's Tree Of Smoke was a runner-up for the Pulitzer. However, I neglected to say that in November it won the National Book Award.

Uh: "The winners receive a $10,000 cash prize and a crystal sculpture." Okay, hold on, I have to find a picture of this sculpture.

[Fifteen minutes pass.]

Huh, I actually can't find a picture of it. So here's the first result from a Google Image Search for "crystal sculpture." Let's just say this is it:

http://www.crystal-fox.com/index.cfm/Dragon_small_Mats_Jonasson_Crystal_Sculpture_592.htm

It's weird that the winner of the freakin' National Book Award only gets ten large. The swag bags had better be SICK.

*

Oh wait, I was talking about Tree Of Smoke. Here's an excerpt from The New Yorker, which reads like Johnson's take on The Outsiders.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/06/11/070611fi_fiction_johnson

(I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way.)

Pretty Baby, Boring Adult

The other night, I think I had a couple of "buzz agents" in my cab. You know, people who get paid to mention products in conversations? It was two sorority girls--like actual girls in sorority letters--and three frat guys. This is more or less verbatim:

GIRL 1: Did you catch Lipstick Jungle last night?

GIRL 2: No, I missed it...I'll have to catch up on YouTube. Was it awesome?

GIRL 1: So awesome. But don't mess with YouTube...try Alterna.TV. It's got all the hit shows, with no commercials.

GIRL 2: Cool, I'll check it out!


Ahem. I changed the URL up there, by the way...no reason to give them more exposure. I'm not sure which is the dumber scenario, that they were trying to market Lipstick Jungle and a "me too!" video service to a handful of fratties, or to me, their freaking cab driver.

There is, of course, a more depressing angle: that this WASN'T clumsy marketing, but rather the way 20-year-old girls, raised on infomercials and The Hills, just naturally talk to each other these days. That's actually way more chilling than the concept of guerilla marketing.


But their Lipstick Jungle plug--or, less likely, genuine Lipstick Jungle enthusiasm--made me think about how sad it must be to be Brooke Shields. After her first stint as a superstar, she has long since passed into the realm of "celebrity," without actually being very successful.

And not for lack of trying...how many failed Brooke Shields projects can you think of just off the top of your head? Well, not really "failed"...just middling and uninteresting.

This is where the sadness comes in: it must be weird to know that you're not famous simply because people just aren't very interested in you. Brooke Shields is beautiful, intelligent, and well-spoken. She seems like a nice woman. She carries herself with an air of class. As an adult she's never been involved in any major scandals that I know of, certainly none where she was at fault. She has the sympathy of the Oprah nation on her side because of the post-partum depression issue and the subsequent Tom Cruise debacle. She doesn't have any weird beliefs or a crazy spouse or a history of terrible career choices. She's not a stunning performer, but she's hardly a terrible actress. She's an icon of the early 80s, and a fondly remembered as a part of a lot of people's childhood.

But she's just never broken through in the way she clearly wants, and it must be so daunting to her, at the end of the day, to know that she has no one to blame. We just aren't interested in buying what she's selling...we're not in the Brooke Shields business.

One of the few consolations I have in this world is that whatever situation I've found myself in at this point in my life, the mistakes I made were my own and I have only myself to blame. But what if you never really made any mistakes and you were still unsuccessful? What if you tried with all your heart and made all the right decisions, and in the end the problem was just...YOU?

Lipstick Jungle, NBC's sizzling new hit series from the author of Sex In The City, airs on Thursdays at 10. Catch commercial-free episodes of your favorite shows, as well as music videos and hilarious skits, at Alterna.TV.

"The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

As you may have heard, Crayola allowed actual children to rename crayon colors, and the children failed spectacularly. Ignoring the lame attempt at comedy in the actual post itself, this Gawker headline is my favorite commentary on the issue:

http://gawker.com/378432/gaylord-children-invent-gay-new-crayons

(Hey look, you don't even have to click the link!)

*

There are a ton of Random Name Generators on the web, and most of them serve up improbable names that sound like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang characters.

But Unled is a clean and simple single-serving website that uses actual census data to offer two different kinds of random names. One is truly random like the other sites, but the other is based on the probability of certain names appearing, pairing up statistically likely names with...uh, other names that are...er. Look, I have no idea how it actually works, all I know is the second name sounds like an actual human being.

http://www.unled.net/

Hit reload to get four more. Beats flipping through the phone book. (Do they even still make those?)

*

Ernest Hemingway on symbolism:

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

*

Huysmans And Knorozov

My perpetual Favorite Author Photo Ever is that of Joris-Karl Husymans, the French writer of a "novel" with only one character and no plot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Huysmans.jpg

But I think this shot of Russian linguist Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov just took over the top spot:

http://minaev.blogspot.com/2007/11/november-19-in-russian-history.html

Sillof

Here are three things I can't stand:

-"steampunk"
-Star Wars fandom
-grown men playing with toys

Having said that, how awesome are these steampunk reimaginings of Star Wars toys?

http://www.sillof.com/C-Steampunk-SW.htm

Also neat are his Victorian Avengers and Gaslight Justice League series, not to mention his OTHER Star Wars line:

http://www.sillof.com/C-Vict-Avengers.htm

http://www.sillof.com/C-Gaslight.htm

http://www.sillof.com/C-SW_Rev.htm

Reading about his design process--typos and all--is fascinating. In fact, a big part of the appeal of these toys isn't even the visuals, it's the amount of thought and insight Sillof brings to his work.

Fire Watch, by Connie Willis

Fire Watch was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, in Feb 1982, and won the 1982 Nebula and 1983 Hugo awards for best novelette:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm

Ten years later, she expanded the story of Kivrin's practicum, here only alluded to, into the novel The Doomsday Book, which also won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards.