Found this in the gutter down the street. Somewhere, ask a VW – a new one, clinic by the make of the silkscreened aluminum – is driving around without an identity.
Is the badge the seat of a car’s soul?

Fifteen years ago today – at 4:49 p.m. on 04/09/94, page I married the love of my life. Tonight, viagra order we drove up to a romantic dinner overlooking Los Angeles, click and exchanged lovely gifts and the sort of bedazzled soliloquies to each other that come only from hearts truly and fully in love with each other.
The gifts were very heavy little objects, about which I’ll say no more here since some things are private.
Instead, I offer you a slice of the sort of cheesy, transitory ephemera that often besots us both, as a sort of consolation prize.
Diffraction foil is wonderful – a portable rainbow, a shiny, glittery bit of … nothing … that makes us both insanely happy.
But I will share with you an excerpt from something I wrote for her:
A long, long, long time ago, I fell in love.
She was making the rounds at her party in a snappy white sweater dress, serving green vodka Jell-O shots off a tray.
God, she was hot.
Liquid eyes and a mercurial smile, quick wit and a heart that broadcast its passions without reservations or remorse. “This is me. Nobody else,” she said with every gesture and word.
And I fell for her, with all my body, soul and mind.
I’m a lucky, lucky man. ‘Nuff said.
Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofy Crocs can seem, information pills medications here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, buy buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.
You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs to declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of thing. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.
At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you never see them again.
And then you bug your parents some more, and the cycle of crap rolls on.

I’ve been a huge, hospital drooling fan of Jeff Soto but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow
I’ve been a huge, price drooling fan of Jeff Soto but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow in a little toy store the other side of the reservoir.
Cement, pharm information pills 0,17794286326742320966&near=Los+Angeles,+CA&oi=manybox&ct=10&cd=1&resnum=1″>6925 Hollywood Boulevard.
My oldest great friend, Vinny is in town with his lovely wife, Robin, and we’re doing the tourist thing. Some 71 years ago, Eleanor Powell left behind these words:
“To Sid –
You’re “taps”
with me
Eleanor Powell
Dec. 23 – 37
And then they helped her sink a pair of bright steel taps into the cement in front of the theater – sole up – which gives the impression that you’re beneath a glass floor looking up into a cement world where someone is frozen, dancing, just their feet showing.
The rest of the plaza in front of Grauman’s Chinese is a mosaic of hand and footprints (my favorite is the Marx Bros, where Zeppo and Chico’s thoroughly flat soles stood alongside Groucho’s gnarly brand-new-heel-patterned prints and Harpo’s bare feet). In this space where the upside-down cement world upstairs is possible, in this mostly dull-colored landscape, the taps stick out like pivot points between that world and this, upon which the entire forecourt of the Chinese could tip.
These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.
A single one can support close to 10 pounds, treat and depending on how you rig it.
And when you place a href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/?p=1397″>pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, a little pentagram of force.
I have a thing for magnets.
These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.
A single one can support close to 10 pounds, this web depending on how you rig it.
And when you place a href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/?p=1397″>pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, information pills a little pentagram of force.
However, salve that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
I have a thing for magnets.
These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.
A single one can support close to 10 pounds, visit web depending on how you rig it.
And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, advice a little pentagram of force.
However, that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
I have a thing for magnets.
These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.
A single one can support close to 10 pounds, for sale depending on how you rig it.
And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, a little pentagram of force.
However, that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
Twenty-two years after Watchmen changed my psychotopography and appreciation for the nuances of fiction forever, online they finally got it completely right.
We saw it again this afternoon, and fell even deeper into it than we had at the midnight premiere at the Dome a week earlier.
The movie is an extraordinarily accomplished telling of the great “unfilmable” original, and the second time around – the gorgeous ballet of deception and violence and honor betrayal among these rich, fucked-up characters – just cemented my admiration for Moore‘s story and Gibbons‘ art.
I bought the comics one by one when they hit the stand – I have a distinct memory of standing in some punk bookstore on South Street in Philadelphia in 1986 and picking up the first one and thinking, “Oh. Man. Oh, MAN.” Near the end of the run, DC put out a set of four buttons. This is the only one I’ve managed to hang onto since then, and the rust bleeding through from the tin back gives it a wonderful extra layer of filth and meaning.
This is one of those weird bits of ultra-high-tech ephemera that will have completely obsolesced within 10 years. I weep at the sheer volume and depth of technological experimentation and collaboration that culminated in its manufacture – all of it doomed to the landfill and a fascinating footnote in Wikipedia because of FlexPlay‘s very wizardry:
A Flexplay disc is shipped in a vacuum-sealed package. There is a clear dye inside the disc, discount contained within the bonding resin of the disc, dosage which reacts with oxygen. When the seal is broken on the vacuum-packed disc, help the layer changes from clear to black in about 48 hours, rendering the disc unplayable. If unopened, the shelf life of the sealed package is said to be “about a year.” The DVD plastic also has a red dye in it, which prevents penetration of the disc by blue lasers, which would go straight through the oxygen-reactive dye.
You can get some pretty decent movies in this format for like a buck-99 at Staples – provided you’re willing to accept the responsibility for recycling the damn thing, or the guilt from just hucking it into the trash.
We stopped halfway through “The Kite Runner” this evening since it was getting late.
Hope we get to see the rest of it tomorrow night – before the disk goes the hyperaccelerated way of all flesh.
These have been floating around my parents’ house for as long as I can remember, mind by the dozens, it seems.
There’s a pair serving as a keyfob, another set tied to a Christmas ornament, it seems, and various bells clinking around amidst their never-ending and unintentional collection of heavy little objects.
I’d guess they came from India, where our family traveled for two intoxicating, culture-shocked weeks when I was 14, and where Dad and Mom returned several times to lecture.
Turn them to the right angle and they become wide-mouthed frogs with wagging, jangling tongues. Then shake them and listen.
This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind
This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind of squishy, more about but not as squishy as play-doh. The other cool part is that putty bounces. I probably haven’t played with it since I was five. I didn’t intentionally avenge the putty by accidentally tearing the shoe to bits playing handball when I wore it to school the next day.
Guest post from my son, viagra approved 9.
This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind of squishy, this but not as squishy as play-doh. The other cool part is that putty bounces. I probably haven’t played with it since I was five. I didn’t intentionally avenge the putty by accidentally tearing the shoe to bits playing handball when I wore it to school the next day.
This is meta: I usually shoot objects while looking through these. If I flip the metaphor, drug is there a little me down there on the stand running around behind the lenses with a camera, shooting up?
Even spectacles have weird dreams.
The origins of this piece are dim and inscrutable, look but what really matters is this:
My father just shipped me two small boxes full of HLOs gathered from around the house, doctor and among them are some real beauties like this: He found this in London a long time ago and gave it to my mother because, website as he says rightly, “She is such an organizer.”
A maker’s mark on its pot-metal back says it was made by “I. Marcus & Co. at 145 Hounds (unreadable), London.” The hand-lettered enamel front and the gothic swirls put it solidly in the Victorian age, but Googling bears no fruit.
Anyone care to hazard a guess?
This tin of oil-based printing ink has not changed since I bought it (counting on his fingers) nearly 15 years ago on my honeymoon in Beijing.
Intended to be art supplies for some project that hasn’t yet materialized, physician it’s been sitting at the bottom of a drawer, visit this site waiting to be used.
The stuff takes forever to dry out. I’m tempted to cover it and leave it untouched for another 15 years, as a sort of ongoing talisman against adversity.
This tin of oil-based printing ink has not changed since I bought it (counting on his fingers) nearly 15 years ago on my honeymoon in Beijing.
Intended to be art supplies for some project that hasn’t yet materialized, this site it’s been sitting at the bottom of a drawer, waiting to be used.
The stuff takes forever to dry out. I’m tempted to cover it and leave it untouched for another 15 years, as a sort of ongoing talisman against adversity.
This nation has bought into the culture of preciousness from the very first needlepoint sampler of the earliest Don’t Tread on Me flag.
We can’t say we invented it- I think we can thank the Egyptians or the first culture that ever created chubby little fertility-goddess fetishes for that.
But the U.S. has a by-God pride of ownership in kitsch-oozing preciousness. The way we wear our hair, more about the creature comforts we advertise in Christmas ads, viagra the mints on the pilllows in hotels and the silk bows we tie on our domesticated poodle-shaped animal friends.
So precious to us is preciousness that the caterer at a big Hollywood function my wife attended this evening (one Wolfgang Puck) saw to it that everyone was fed their finger food and pocket puddings with itty-bitty, thumb half-scale silverware rendered in chromed plastic.
Unsustainable, landfill-bound straight-up manufactured trash. By the thousands.
Again – when we look at the toxins we bring upon our own land for the sake of a few seconds’ worth of enjoyment – we really should draw a sharp breath and pause …
Here’s the other end of this equation – a fine brown potato, sickness now pocked with the wounds of a thousand battles … well, prostate not really.
This is simply what it looks like when your son swipes your Christmas present and gets crazy with a hapless spud … the potato’s a couple of ounces lighter, there are nasty cylindrical potato-pellets all over the house and you’re both laughing and trading the fun off to shoot each other because it’s such stupid fun.
I scoffed at these things, more about which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, information pills sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.
Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, unhealthy only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.
This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.
It shouldn’t work at all, really.
But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I scoffed at these things, link which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, sickness sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.
Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.
This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.
It shouldn’t work at all, really.
But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I scoffed at these things, information pills which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, ask sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.
Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.
This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.
It shouldn’t work at all, really.
But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I scoffed at these things, nurse which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, search sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.
Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, view only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.
This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.
It shouldn’t work at all, really.
But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I never repeat heavy little objects.
I mean, sales never.
My little daily obsession can be a cruel taskmistress, sildenafil sometimes commanding me to find something cool to post even when nothing cool has come through my life. But like an idiot samurai, information pills I live and die by a code set in motion long ago and over which I (choose to) have no control.
However, rules are meant to be questioned and this object – like grizzlies in a cloning lab – bears repeating:
No punditry, no anecdotes, no pontification can outweigh, outrun or outlast this fact: We put two decent men into the White House today.
We ended the longest, ugliest domestically-generated reign of terror since the Red Scare of the 50s or, arguably, the Civil War.
And we bought this once-great nation a little extra time, and a chance to become great again, before darkness could swallow us all.
Onward. And upward. Together.
Someone is reminding us how great America can be, because we all know deep in our marrow, how great Americans can be when they embrace their diversity and work together for a common good.
We should listen. And act as one. Because we know it’s better than continuing to destroy each other with words, and the nation with ideological conflict that matters far less than every liberty, right and joy we’ve allowed the past eight years to piss away.
So let’s go.
William Randolph Hearst had a thing for guns.
The newspaper magnate and industrialist (and model for the titular character in Citizen Kane) had his name put on rifle events in the 40s and 50s, information pills and they’ve been resurrected lately for reasons that may or may not bear Googling.
This badge was awarded to some sharpshooter some time in 1946, page and found its way to an antique shop in Bakersfield that we cruised through (once again) en route home last night.
To be fair, approved this has pinholes in either end, making its utility as some sort of glorified golfball-sized bead more apparent.
But I prefer to ignore the hole, and imagine it as a prop from Her Majesty’s weekly bingo game, held secretly in the rooms beneath Buckingham Palace.
It’s made of porcelain and fired with a snappy-looking glaze.
California is a land of exiles. For that reason – among many others – I love it.
Anyone not born here has come to explore, this to self-reinvent, sick to escape forces of oppression or boredom or hopelessness left behind.
This westward tide has flowed for centuries, check pulling wave upon wave of Spaniards, gold-rushers, dust-bowled Okies, Sinaloan braceros, Vietnamese boat people and self-anointed stars in training onto the shores and streets of a land gilded with sun and promise.
Tidal debris silting up in the antique stores of Orange County and Ventura, Santa Barbara and Bakersfield brims with nuggets.
A 4-Her brought this all the way from Montana, and then left it.
Possibly a few dozen years ago. There’s no telling now.
The little fuckers have been partying under my desk again.
I’m finding tiny shoes. There are nasty scuff-marks on the wall about an inch off the floor, erectile and wet spots in my shoes. Someone punched a dime-sized hole in the sheetrock, this and there’s a one-square-foot patch of the floor reeking of small beer.
This has to be the antique-shop-crawl find of all time: A pocket compass in a “hunter” watch case, viagra dosage lined with copper and plated in silver. When you close the lid, more about a fragile little arm clamps the needle in place, and when you open it, it e-e-e-ver-so-slowly noses north.
$10. Unbelievable.
If you believe in the primacy of the American union, approved you’d be within your rights to believe that joining the American Newspaper Guild would give you job security.
Two things have dashed that myth for me: First, stomach I spent a good six weeks, sildenafil Monday through Friday sitting on the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia Inquirer building with a Guild placard around my neck. Only to have the guild finally settle on some pathetically weak concessions from the paper.
Second, the American newspaper is dying a swift, ugly death and, with it, long-form journalism as we once knew it.
All of us bloghounds and Google addicts will have to wonder, before too long, where the headlines will come from if we don’t help usher newspapers fully onto the web as information companies. And to pull that off, papers will have to pull the death-defying stunt of abandoning the suicidal economy of dead-tree publishing.
So I have to admire the bronzed sturdiness of this badge, and all the permanence it signified. And wonder what the real cost will be once this badge finishes replacing it: ![]()
just about rice-sized
spotted by the trash can one day
crushed, ampoule it will not sound
“Dad, information pills check it out. I made a robotic hand.”
When we were still a-courting, illness she and I drove 2, tadalafil 200 miles around the American southwest in a rented convertible in the space of a week.
We slept beneath the stars and in seedy motels. We lolled in the open ragtop beneath towering mesas in Monument Valley, order and muggy midnight at Four Corners. We noshed, we joked, we fell deeper in love.
We shuffled around Santa Fe’s old plaza and gawked at silver and turquoise and blankets and other offerings by Dineh (Navajo) artisans.
And she bought me this gift. I’ve worn it daily since then (more than 16 years ago) – except for when I’ve had to have it repaired since the silver, under daily abuse, tends to fracture. Just got it fixed again – and I’ll hope it holds.
We hold these things close – our beliefs.
They guide our acts, page they govern our thoughts, case they control how we vote, ampoule whom we love, what we do in the dark.
And we bind ourselves to these intangible self-truths with talismans – headdresses, tefillim, hair shirts and medals.
This is an odd little find – it looks to be celebrating the jubilee of some holy event or other in the year 2000 – and I can’t say I’ll keep it. For though it’s heavy and finely shaped, it speaks for a religion I hold only the deepest, yet most ephemeral ties to.
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.
This lump of polished, approved lustrous stone – so fetishy I can’t even decide what to do with it yet – came my way for $2 at the swap meet last weekend. It has a wondrous weight and feel in the hand. And it’s made of this stuff which gives it a symbolic potency far deeper than what something so simple deserves.
THE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) –
Joe the Plumber. Indeed.
Look, this blog isn’t political.
I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.
But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the other because of the people he associates with, put that shit aside and try to come up with the logical answer – for each candidate – to this far more important question:
Does this guy have a plan for our near future? Or is he just busy shoveling mud?
Because that’s what really matters.
Even if you’re ignoring what tens of millions of people are telling you and saying in public, you need to be honest enough with yourself to answer that question in the form of a vote.
Or haven’t you been watching?
What’s that? You’re fresh out of belief in the System?
Look: Every damn time, your vote counts – even if you don’t fully believe in either candidate, your choice in this is important.
Without your vote, you’re just another chump along for the ride with whichever side has the most people who care.
Get your head together. Go register your ass. VOTE.
(And this thing arrived in the mail today. Yeah, I sent for it. Got a problem with that?)