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This double-glass-block icon is meant to remind you of this – an elaborate ice castle lit from within. It glows with a liquid intensity, the frosted bulb cavity diffusing all 25 watts of its little bulb through about two pounds of solid glass. It would make a dandy blunt instrument – coldcock your prey, then fling it to a concrete floor to shatter into a million unfingerprintable bits. Designed by Harri Koskinen for the Museum of Modern Art, this was a gift, so I was pretty startled just now to learn how much it costs. The design concept itself screams “kitsch!” – until you switch it on. Then all hard feelings melt away. Oooh, says some small voice from somewhere south of my adolescence. It’s pretty
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This is what the atomic Zippo evolved into: Fast times demand fast tools. Many tools of the 50s and 60s owe their visual speed to Raymond Loewy. The godfather of modern American industrial design and friend of Sinatra believed in the aesthetic of MAYA – Most Avanced Yet Acceptable, which drove his visions for everything from the Studebaker Hawk and the Lucky Strike logo to the interior of Skylab. No record of whether he’s directly responsible for the Ronson Varaflame Adonis, but in the Loewy way, the fuel-plug tail cowling and speed lines on this little chromed vehicle form their own slipstream just standing on my desk. It’s a flea-markeet find, probably among the first of the new butane-fueled models to come out in the late 50s. I’m hoping to find a junker for parts on eBay so I can replace the lost flint plug and get it fired up for camping trips and the occasional cigar. Meantime, here’s a fairly exhaustive history of Ronson lighters.
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It’s drop-forged potmetal, about as heavy as six or seven quarters. But its iconography doesn’t jibe with its milieu – symbol of love cast in the chosen medium of auto emblems, and chromed to a high shine. Some nagging tickle at the back of my head says “Dodge Dart Swinger” but Google is no help in addressing the hunch and neither is eBay. Hard nicks and gouges attest to its recent history of abuse – the blackout time it spent between life on its car and life on my lawn, where my son picked it up and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, in that way of his, “This is for you.”
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Like French provincial or Aztec modern, brutish industrial design is its own beast, not a blend of given sets of style but a strict, hermetic discipline unto itself. To make something wilfully, truly ugly – and yet appealing – is to create raw beauty, the unabashed individuality of things that are not only oblivious of their appearance, but apathetic about it. This Taiwanese ripoff of a $125 design doesn’t even bother with a crude approximation. It steals the basic core setup and a single styling cue (the useless hexagonal barrel points) and crams them together into the single most graceless, fugly package possible, wrapped in a (badly) anodized aluminum finish closely approximating the color of monkey diarrhea. It’s unbelievably bright (eight LEDs!), and puts the other white LED device on HLO to shame for both heaviness and size-to-power ratio. Ten bucks at my favorite vendor – the Chinese tool merchant at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet. It’s the VW Thing of flashlights, the Pontiac Aztek, the sort of thing Judge Dredd would duct-tape to his truncheon. Even the circular rubber switchbutton on the butt is ugly.
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How curious that we require our gods to be portable. For some, gods can’t be so great that they intimidate, nor so formidable that they can’t be compressed, miniaturized, made chibi and thus toted around as totem or proof of faith. This came from the stall of a far-East trader, whose wares ran from ornate meditation bells and elaborately carved wooden boxes to huge-phallused monkey talismans of bone, and captive Buddhas. The Buddha himself is carved in copper or some baser metal, weathered with what looks like lime or lye, and then encased in a chromed, red-lined glass box, proof against the weather and the world’s wickedness. While I am not Buddhist, he has been riding with me this week in case of the faintest whiff of sudden enlightenment.
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Your outlook on life governs your reaction to kaleidoscopes: It’s just a kid’s toy, you snort. No, you gush, it’s an entheogenic viewer for cleansing the mind’s eye, an acid-tripper’s kit-bag accessory, an artistic medium. Aaahh, it’s just a waste of materials. I’ve been in a few of those camps, but never in the last of them. Putting a new kaleidoscope to your eye sucks you into a quiet bubble that no one else shares, sending you on a tiny expedition: how many mirrors does it have? What little colored particles and knicknacks are rolling around up in the business end? Does the outside view factor into the inner visual vortex? What happens when I point it at this lamp, that TV, the sun? Kaleidoscopes have been around since 1816. They have inspired digital imitation, prompted navel-gazing obsession, and figured into countless business metaphors. This one is sturdy, made of lithographed tin, carefully rolled and crimped and packed with glass mirrors and colored beads in China. It’s sturdy little piece of work.
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At some point, toys became all about accessories. Kids shoulder past your knees at KayBee to hunch over demonic action figures – “What weapons does it have?” There are more than a dozen kinds of Batman. Barbie has always been accessorized. You’d think someone who owns a mobile home and a jet plane wouldn’t have to save her pennies, but then, she does work in a convenience store. Perhaps this little porcine keg – and an unswerving sense of thrift – brought her all that wealth. Perhaps she’s just a grown-up little girl whose anatomy is now obsessed over by toy fetishists, and whose original, sweet identity has been co-opted by the planet-wide hive mind of little girls yearning to be sophisticated, successful grown-ups.
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The technological revolution ain’t what it used to be, no sir. Time was, you didn’t know what a part was and installed it wrong, an industrial machine could macerate your hand, rip out your hair, suck your cravat in right up to your sideburns. You put the wrong part on, why, could lose a nose, an eye, an arm. Yessir, you wouldn’t want to dally ’round gettin’ your fingers greasy without readin’ the manual first, making sure you knew where everything went, and what it did, and what would happen if it broke. Not like nowadays, where it’s all code and passwords and glowing words that hurt your eyes, and it’s guesswork and you can never tell if the people sendin’ ya letters about your house or your apothecary order or the size of your tallywhacker is even men or women. You never have to get your hands dirty, or even move, much. It’s all guesswork and hoodoo and a buncha black magic, I tell ya, and I don’t pretend to understand none of it.
But this here little gizmo, I know this has gotta be for some kinda big sewing machine, right? It’s cast steel, with a v-shaped channel cut into it big enough for thread, and some sort of eyelet whatsis screwed into it. And there’s a sharp end, and a blunt end. Oughta be able to figger it out, oughtn’t I? Right? Say, what’n hell is this doohickey, anyways?
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I believe there is a continuation of the three classifications that make up the first query in a game of 20 Questions. Animal, vegetable and mineral are followed by mechanical, chemical, electrical, digital and, ultimately – if it really all is some bottomless vortex of a Darwinian end game and we each will return to dust – spiritual. There’s an unrealized artwork in my head centering around the nexus of these seven factors and the four traditional elements – earth, wind, fire, water – maybe some sort of periodic table for existence, maybe a deck of cards with suits and faces and long, wickedly complex games with too many rules to argue over. Maybe just a bad haiku. And maybe this New Periodic Table’s really about physical compounds: Where do Persian carpets fall on the chart compared with, say, hockey pucks? Schnauzers versus beveled -glass, walnut-paneled doors? Somewhere up among the noble compounds – the ones the world was made of before somebody discovered plastic and ruined it all – lie paper, glass and steel. Some rather large pharmaceutical company packed a little coil of dental floss (a slightly less noble, mid-table compound on the order of, say, cheddar cheese or wallets – into a glass capsule lined with a label and capped with a little cutter lid of stamped tin. They sold millions of ’em. And one made its way to a swap meet because you can’t just waltz into a store and buy ’em any longer.
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Somewhere in Bombay, a cargo container awaits, baking in the sun on a dock smeared with pelican shit. Inside are approximately 10,000 cheaply made, shiny, heavy little objects of a strange design. They were knocked out by sweatshops in Old Delhi or the poorer rural villages in Northern India for a few rupees apiece, sold by the sweatshop operators to exporters for a few hundred rupees more and then stuffed into this container for a long ocean voyage. Soon, they will make their way to Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, Sydney and the Port of Los Angeles. The exporter will take a wire transfer of a rather large sum of money (for him, a 400 or 500% markup) from an importer here. The importer will then sell to the buyers at Urban Outfitters or some other yuppie-decor chain. And paunchy, galumphing fools like me will stumble in on a late-night window-shopping binge, mutter, “Whoa, cooool” and shell out enough money for each of them to feed a family of four in rural India for a month. Then we’ll take them home, park them on our desks, play with them for a few weeks while procrastinating from work that must be done, and then abandon them to gather dust and shame.
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Lampblack and glue, pressed into hard sticks, must be ground against a smooth stone with water to make ink. I think this page was more eloquent than I would ever hope to on the subject:
The inkstone, which was used to grind the ink, was considered the very soul of a scholars library.¢Ó These stones were selected with the greatest of care and were often decorated with elaborate symbols or literary phrases thought to encourage the scholars production of higher sentiments.¢Ó While there are many exceptions, most inkstones are rectangular or rounded.¢Ó Most are in fact made of stone but examples of pottery also exist.¢Ó The definitive work on this subject is probably Mi Fus Yen shih or Account of Inkstones.¢Ó This work gives the proper name for all portions of the Inkstone and sets out the various characteristics of Inkstones and their use.¢Ó Later but also fascinating works on Inkstones include the Yen lin or Forest of Inkstones by Yu Huai, which was written in the 1600s.¢Ó This was followed by¢Ó Pao yen tang yen pien or Discussion of Inkstones from the Hall of Treasured Inkstones by Ho Chuan-yao and Tuan his yen shih or Account of Tuan His Stones by Wu Lan-hsui, both of which were published in the 1830s.
Inkstones are an acquired taste like several other facets of Chinese culture.¢Ó They are generally black or dark in color and do not draw the attention of the eye.¢Ó Their beauty oftentimes is not so much in how they look but in how they work together with the ink and the paper and brush to achieve a particular color or texture.¢Ó However, for those fortunate enough to have learned to master the brush, ink, inkstone and paper, the four precious things of the library are a passion.¢Ó Holding an antique inkstone, it is hard not to feel the power that emanated from the previous painter or scholar who possessed this stone.¢Ó For this reason, inkstones are avidly collected and treasured by Chinese and some foreigners.¢Ó Prices vary greatly and are often based on stories as to prior owners, which are difficult if not impossible to verify.¢Ó
I bought this for a few yuan on our honeymoon in Beijing more than 10 years ago. I experimented with a set of traditional rabbit’s fur brushes for a little while, then stored it until recently. Its grinding surface is marred where some careless shopkeeper stuck an adhesive price tag to it long before it came to my possession, but it in no way detracts from the turbulent whorls of water, the watchful apsect of the little turtle at the edge of the “pond.” I pull it out and heft it in my hand every now and then, for inspiration.
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A floating police drone, a starship’s afterburner, a planet-crushing thermonuclear device that fits into a pocket, a digital key to the wealth of worlds. A transparent neoprene ball vacuformed around a simple 2-LED blink-repeater circuit and drilled through with a couple dozen very precise holes. It ignites at a single bounce, winking away with the universal red-blue semaphore of fate, the seizure-inducing blinking spasm that every drunk dreads, the visual shriek that puts him a simple breathalyzer test away from lost-license loss of independence, or serves as prelude to a chase. Who knew that if you focused on it and opened your shutter for a few extra seconds, it would take on a lurid, poetic beauty. Five bucks at Disneyland.
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This is a refugee from my wife’s jewelry box, the surviving member of a sundered pair. Its mate is gone – perhaps escaped back to a sea of black velvet to drift over formations of garnet and hammered brass, hunting for tiny glass shrimp. Hand-snipped tin segments are wired together in a flexible facscimile of swimming scales, the eyes tiny red beads held on by pins.
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Somewhere in life, you developed the habit of taking notes. Not in college, where your first-week-of-the-semester verbatim transcription of your professors’ every little pearl devolved quickly into random doodles and daydreamt screenplay ideas. Not in the frenzied scrawling of deadline reporting that led to squint-eyed panic back at your computer once you realized you had no idea what that guy really said to you. Not in the shopping lists, camping manifests, tech-support phone calls or the dark haze of a bar before a pair of pretty eyes. No, somewhere much longer ago, you decided to keep track. There were loose-leaf binders, spiral-ring cheapos, perfect-bound sketchbooks. And then there were the handful of “important” notebooks, the ones you meant for the stashing of deep and revelatory notions, the recordable moments of ringing clarity. This one, this would be the last notebook you’d ever own: Gilt-edged pages, leatherette-bound between two heavy slabs of burnished copper. You wound up jotting down business plans, fiction-ideas. You used it to host head-clearing brawls, to help thresh nutrition from a skullful of mental chaff. It served as a paperweight for a year or two while you hunkered down on a particularly deep and engaging project. It has an eternal, rock-of-ages feel to it – and picking it up invariably triggers an attack of impostor syndrome. You think about pouring vinegar on the covers, just to see if it will corrode.
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Hematite is the perfect heavy little substance. It’s not as heavy, expensive or hard to shape as iridium. Nor is it pure. Just common iron oxide, solid, dark and – when polished right – lustrous as a field of stars. Somewhere in my effects is a little blob of milled hematite, a worry stone the size of my thumb. Until I find it, here is a string of hematite pearls from my wife’s bead box. They are cold, and holding them, I could almost fall asleep.
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A symbolic oxymoron, the log made out of plastic. Blowformed in un-lifelike brown, the mold marks show a careless inattention to proportions – one half’s longer than the other – and to details – the whole thing looks like a knotty Tootsie Roll more than anything that once swayed in the breeze. But it is unapologetically what it is: A log, stout and true. Sing along with me if you can remember the words:
What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs…
Rolls over your neighbor’s dog?
What’s great for a snack
And fits on your back?
It’s Log! Log! Log!
It’s Lo-og, it’s Lo-og
It’s big, it’s heavy
It’s wood!
It’s Lo-og, Lo-og
It’s better than bad
It’s good!!!
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The rims would have been steel, perhaps, or brass, and fit uncomfortably at the temples and the nose. The lenses would have been wavy, heavy, thick and, worst of all, scratched, if for no other reason than because the case was made of wood. It was elegant in its time, rimmed in brass and protected by a carapace of cellulose tinted a rather miraculous sea-foam green. He would have put them on, squinted a bit, then taken them off to rub them on his inkstained tunic before putting them on again and beginning his work – a dip to the inkwell, a few strokes to the page, one word at a time in the exact order in which they would have to remain. Paper was expensive, and he was poor, with very much to write, for his master was a man of many words. It is Chinese. It may be more than 100 years old. LIght glows from its thousands of tiny, iridescent pools.
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Object 200. Milestone. Millstone. This number means everything, and nothing – a way of quantifying this trivial obsession, or giving it weight it doesn’t deserve. The endless procession of things past the lens since I began now completely clutters my desk. This little fellow seems ready for anything. In honor of having done this 200 nights in a row (sort of) I’m parking him with #148 and #7, and an object still unobjectified. Visitors are invited to name him, and the bestower of the best name gets to keep him. Have fun. I do.
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This is a facsimile of a thing of honor. Being not of the culture, but in the country, I had this traditional stone seal for imprinting my name made at a Hong Kong shop. The chop signifies dignity and integrity to those who use it correctly and understand its worth. For me, it was like bellying up to a foreign bar and ordering an exotic cocktail, a concrete totem that might bring me a millimetre closer to being Chinese. I’m often accused of tragic naievete. For all I know, the little carven lion imprints the word “western monkey’s ass” onto the documents I choose. So far, I’ve chosen only amateurish brush-and-ink paintings, where the sticky red ink of the chop-glyph adds contrast and a soupcon of authenticity.
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Tibet, Indonesia, India, Pakistan – points east. Silver is hammered, pierced, drawn and twisted, orbited with wire and augmented with tiny balls of solder to the point where – alone – it hums with the import of an alien craft. Strung together with others, it loses all significance, retaining just the dull luster of metal of minor worth. Each of these is individual, handcrafted, worthy of admiration on its own. One of a series collected in a box.
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The 50s-retro-chic flavor skein floating through the 80s oozed from many media. Sci-fi costume jewelry included. Television’s rabbit-eared, 1:66 Cyclopean eye follows you around the room from atop a doll’s body in an explosion of gears. The chunk of holographic plastic is filed and buffed along the edges, complementing the Googie-trapezoidal shape and aesthetic. It’s got that rainbow sheen. A gift. I have no more knowledge about it.
Cast of aluminum, hinged and stamped with cryptic markings, this once turned out chocolate peaches the size of baseballs. You can buy 
Nothing makes my stomach churn like the anatomy of thermoplastic dolls. Their hair grows in numbered clumps, through symmetrically drilled holes in their plasticene skulls. Paint-irised eyes fringed with nylon fuzz tilt back on tiny weights – very sanpaku – and only little stop-pins keep you from seeing them roll all the way around to expose the unholy backs of their eyeballs. Hands extend in gestural rigors meant to invite play, frozen in spastic mudras that instead signal dread and mute panic. Hips and shoulder joints pop out of sockets at any 5-year-olds sadistic wrench, leaving that frightening hollow torso that gives you one of two possible reactions: Joking – (What do you call a quadriplegic in a bathtub? Bob) or numb horror: (My God. What if I look like that inside? What if my arms could pop off that easily?) Can’t sleep: Dolls will eat me.
One heavy little object will never appear on this site, for it is likely dead. When I was about nine, an artist friend of my parents came to visit, bringing with him trinkets from his rakish hippie life in Cartagena. Among them was a jeweled bug. Not a cloisonné insect, nor a 14-karat bug brooch with diamonds, pav&eaccute;, but a living beetle onto which some Colombian peasant had 
The thinking man’s duct tape comes in many forms: 5-minute, clear, white, earthquake, metal, 
You could create an elaborate mythology around it. It’s the latest SoHo club fetish; the gilded relic of an antebellum sharecropping cult; the culmination of a promise made over the last uneaten morsel of food in a lifeboat 3 weeks at sea. But no, it’s just the sort of thing that gets thrown into a box and discovered later, 12 years after you went through a phase of shooting gold 
Random signals:
Given out with tiny burgers and itty-bitty orders of fries to promote 
A hoop of pewter notched with the hours and days, a ring of brass with a little knob for spinning it, a lanyard and a pinhole. Line it up with the sun, spin the ring to indicate the month, and a pinprick of sunlight falls on the hour. I had only the vaguest understanding of this object’s function from my wife, who had forgotten its meaning since receiving it as a gift years ago. It is the “shepherd’s watch” or 
Before any lens, a performance takes shape the instant the shutter is opened. It lasts a few milliseconds, so quickly as to not exactly “happen” at all and then the camera shuts its one good eye, sinking into blissful ignorance of what it has witnessed, the actions, people, places and things lurking inside the dark box until you release them for capture in silver iodide, complex dyes or 1/0 bits. Your camera is a portable proscenium – whatever transpires within that bright rectangle is art, or drama, history or evidence, love or crap. The picture is whatever you say it is – until someone else looks at it, and then the the reviews come in, the script is scrapped in favor of new interpretations, and your quicksilver vision goes into the tall, moldering, mountainous stack with the rest of the already-consumed media the human race has made.
A lonely shepherd am I, trudging across my mountain’s terraced emerald flank. The sheep reek. It is raining. Consuela wants to shear them tomorrow. This rain will go on forever and the shears will stick and slip and the children will quarrel if they spend another day indoors. The rain grows heavier and the two youngest rams nip and butt heads. Clouds the color of intestines. I finger this little toy on the neck-cord, give it a tug. The dog yaps and nips. The herd turns and surges uphill out of the corral. The rain falls and falls and falls.
What drives you to render your gods in 
This flew out of the armory of 
In the silicon age, few first-world nations turn out mechanical watches anymore. Thick, graceless, manly, stiffly assembled, it bears the shield-and-dagger logo and Cyrillic characters of the 
Nevada’s 
Ornithorhynchus anatinus is the poster child for creationism. How in the name of Dodo could such a freak result from 
By the time goth became 
Back in college one night, we saw a wall of smoke coming around the corner on Halloween. Being a wannabe photojournalist at the time, and thinking, “fire” I grabbed my camera and ran – straight into a cloud of tear gas. Needles in the eyes, claws in the lungs, I doubled over, immediately capacitated along with about a dozen other people who had fallen victim to someone’s asshole idea of a prank. I spent the next half hour coughing and weeping the shit out of my system, sucking down Cokes at the pizzeria. Cops have some pretty impressive nonlethal weapons at their disposal. Here’s another one: Fired from shells that fit standard-issue riot guns, these don’t incapacitate, but they definitely sting and deter. I’ve never experienced them first-hand – these were fired at a press-and-public show-and-tell day for the Ventura County Sheriff’s station in Thousand Oaks a few years ago, along with bean-bag projectiles, which are shot from fat 37-mm shells from the police equivalent of grenade launchers They had teargas shells, too. Fortunately, they chose not to demonstrate those.
Somebody in a factory somewhere peeled two cast-vinyl frog halves out of a still-hot mold. The air reeked of curing toxins, raw polymers. She glued them together with adhesive or heat, and took up a spraycan or an airbrush to dust the top of the thing (along with all of its brothers, maybe laid out on a tray) with lurid, poisonous red. She let them dry a bit, maybe while pouring the next batch of vinyl, and then returned; she considered the red trayful of red frogs, the red under her nails, the smell of it in her nose, for only a second or two – likely, her boss was counting her output – and then grabbed a brushful of black: quick socks for the feet, and a couple dozen spots down its back. On to drying and packaging they went, and back to the cycle went she – mixing the vinyl again.
The aesthetic of brushed aluminum and blackout metal is as distinct a flavor of modern physical culture as gingham and daisies, bakelite and chintz, mahogany and stained leather. A wave ripples through me as I write this, and I flash on alternate molecular realities – strawberry roan gelding motorcycles; rocket gantries of hardwood and stucco, carpeted with bokharas and kilims; tricycles of flesh, bone and hair, and sneakers of diamondplate steel. Quick – an earthquake renders the earth around your house into Jell-O – literally. Liquefaction soil becomes dessert, a sticky-sweet confection into which the foundation of your 30-ton house begins to sink like the spoon in a playful child’s bowl. What do you grab before you bolt – the album of family photos rendered in colored sand? The satchel made of baseball mitts? Your 3.2-megapixel digital-zoom canteen? Your herbed salt-pork laptop containing your life’s work and your exhaustive research records on the mysterious transmogrification of all matter? Maybe you grab the last real thing you can see – a hard, cold, efficient little pocket telescope – so that you can bolt to higher ground and watch from safety as the house sinks beneath the shimmering green surface with a wet, sucking roar.
Too meek for bones through my septum, too square for even tattoos at that point, I was a square, square newspaperman, covering murder trials, city council meetings, disasters and defense contractor fraud for the 
There was no archetype before this one. Not Rossum’s Usuform Robots, not 
A Navajo silversmith cast this in sterling silver. The Dine (DIN-eh) as they prefer to call themselves, make a living doing business with each other, ranching, running stores and schools and businesses – and with tourists crossing tribal lands, by selling crafts like this from roadside stands in and around Monument Valley and the Four Corners area. From the tourist’s side of the equation, it’s a tiny glint of cunning grace in the dusty, ragged glory of a southwest road trip. From the artisan’s viewpoint, one I can only guess that it’s a symbol of considerable significance, crafted with industry and art, in a form that’s easy to duplicate and sure to sell for a good price.
I am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of 
Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The 
There is something narcotic about playing 
My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the 
He is Russian, I think. Sure, he’s a 
The U.S. military detonated at least nine nuclear bombs on little 
Mystery takes peculiar forms. Sometimes it’s the center of war or religious zealotry. Sometimes it’s an upperclass strange-o in a deerstalker hat and houndstooth cape poncing about with a magnifying glass. And sometimes mystery glints from your palm as an almost impracticably small, yet completely functional tool. This might have been a manufacturer’s sample, or it might have been exceptionally useful in a shop specializing in building miniature balsa-wood architectural models. It is exquisitely machined, with a drop-forged, hand-finished body and a cast-nickel set screw that controls the sharp steel ruler’s ability to slide. And it sings – of dado, miter, rabbet, dovetail and joints that might have been.
These have the feel of a Hammacher-Schlemmacher wannabe – a must-have gadget for the avid sports fan or optics freak. You can picture him sitting there with a pair of ’em on at Dodger Stadium, replaying the braying marketing boilerplate in his mind between innings – “Hundreds of uses! For birdwatching, auto racing – and at any sporting event, enjoy the sensation fo being right on the field!” He reaches up to fiddle with the diopters, swiveling the well-greased objectives to bring the pop fly into sharp focus in the precision-ground glass lenses. Congratulating himself on his savvy purchase, he turns to his buddy – Hey, did you see (extreme blurry closeup of nosehair) GAAAAHHH!” They came in a hand-stitched leather case lined with red felt.
Miranda turned 2 last August, and we had a pirate birthday party – little eyepatches, telescopes and riches for all. The stuff is flashy, shiny gold pieces, cast-molded and plated with the same mirror-bright stuff they put on lowrider hardware. The inscription is beyond cryptic: AVAG CO BEPSIG CHINA a declaration of fealty to the hollow-eyed, corkscrew-maned ur-Grecian god thereon. These things are all over the house now.
