Armor on the brain lately:
The Telmarine king’s armor was about the best thing in Prince Caspian, help which was otherwise a dull roar of a film. Gorgeous, view filigree’d stuff.
… and …
Grant Williams, The Incredible Shrinking Man stabs an un-armored tarantula (which poses as a giant killer spider) and lives to explore the ever-expanding universe as part of God’s little plan (still one of the finer movie endings from my boyhood)
… and … (more…)
I’m bench-testing this theory:
Everything on the Internet – every single human endeavor online – can be mapped against one or more of the seven deadly sins.
Too simplistic? Maybe not. Just consider the primary sins that we ever-so-weak mortals commit by running, pharmacy populating or using services like these:
Gaming? – Anger.
Celebrity news? Envy.
Porn? Heh. Lust, silly.
eCommerce and mass media? Basest greed.
Food and gadget sites – Gluttony, pure and simple.
Blogs? Social networking? art communities? Vanity, vanity, vanity.
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In the realm of burned-out rave gear trends, more about the blinky LED pendant burns on – loud and frenetic as an 8-year-old on his fourth bowl of Cap’n Crunch. In fact, for sale it’s always as perpetually in style as the good Cap’n himself.
Squeeze this complex polyhedron in the right place and it bursts to life, information pills its RGB-LED heart pulsating with the promise of an endless string of nights in Ibiza or Goa with no cover, no closing time, no hangover, no guilt.
Squeeze it again, and it dies. Or reverts to what it is – an ounce of exotically-molded silicone wrapped around a mass-produced irritainment generator and hung from a chintzy ribbon necklace. I imagine after it goes for an extended swim in the kids’ toyboxes it will stay in that state permanently, as there’s no clear battery port anywhere on it.
Ah, well. Factory hands in China get to eat for another 5 minutes because we now own their work.
The lickety-split digitization of all human commerce runs into a brick wall when it comes to sending physical messages.
Until mass production sufficiently cuts the cost of 3-D printing and, viagra thus, the 3-D fax, humans must carry hand-made documents and machine-made objects from one place to another.
To subsidize the cost of the trucks, trains, planes and numb-minded civil servants who move our stuff, we rely on the most archaic and quaint of constructs: A law requiring us to buy elaborately-printed squares of paper and glue them onto packages to prove we’ve paid for the service.
This odd lot of Australian stamps came into the house as a gift and is handsomely shrink-wrapped and labeled – oddly – “GIFT.” Which mirrors the same sort of moebius-strip recursion that gave rise to the practice of using postage stamps in the first place.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Again.
Somewhere, no rx visit in some bizarro alternate reality, capsule this thing is funny.
Wind it up and a little clockwork mechanism delivers a nasty, vibrating buzz when the button is pressed.
Slip the ring onto your finger and the gadget into your palm, and shake hands with an unsuspecting dupe to press the button.
The gadget buzzes the dupe. Hilarity ensues. Made in China.
A mix of no-nonsense design and obsolescence incarnate, symptoms this is a perfectly made object lesson in hubris:
The 3.5-inch floppy was designed to last for decades – and outstripped within a mere few years by bigger, page faster, even-more-durable flash memory.
What are they good for now? Coasters. Table-levelers. Impromptu office Frisbees. And speculations on what the dot-com boom of the late 1990s would have been without the ability to carry a sheaf of documents or photos around on a lightweight, plastic facsimile of your computer hard-drive that fit into your shirt pocket.
It folds out from a ripstop nylon pouch the size of a cigar case.
Its fiberglass ribs hold it together in 30 mph winds.
It’s barely 8 inches long fully assembled.
It’s a Finger Kite!
Our endless list of household projects marches forward because of my wife, buy information pills the movie producer.
This week’s tribute to her ambitions is me shoveling out the large storage area in my office – which means going through virtually every bit of hard-copy media I’ve ever owned, sorting, refiling and throwing out crap.
The room looks like a geek hoard. Every horizontal surface bears a stack of tools, books, CDs, tchotchkes, gizmos, whatses, thingummies and scraps of half-usable art material – any one of which could be EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND PROBABLY SHOULD NOT BE THROWN OUT YET.
Actually, I’m doing a reasonably good job throwing things out – all in advance of painting said closet space and then replacing the massive, ugly, old four-drawer legal file cabinet with three brand-new (and much smaller) four-drawer legal file cabinets.
In the midst of all this, I can barely think.
I keep one mental tunnel open for family obligations, another for work, and the rest of my view is 720-degree,
Keith Hunter left us almost nine months ago.
I’ve been waiting to burn this bundle of sage for him – perhaps on the anniversary of his passing, purchase perhaps when his widow, information pills our dear friend, more about decides it’s time.
The lore around sage is thick and changeable: It stems from the rites of the aboriginal people whom we conquering louts bloodily shoved off their land hundreds of years ago – and has been altered, adapted, stolen, monkeyed with and otherwise revered by generations of hippies in Topanga Canyon and beyond ever since … (more…)
It figures that a freakishly shaped girl doll – one of the greatest, ailment most successful toys of all time – would have such cute props.
One day, cheap the endless toy-surf that washes through this house coughed up this itty-bitty soda-fountain treat, doctor and I had to ask my 6-year-old daughter what it was.
Somewhere in China, a low-paid worker pulled a plastic rackful of these out of an injection mold and hung it to cool. Another worker likely cut it loose, and a third daubed its top with creamy white paint …
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I harbor a deep, here advice fetishy lust for “urban vinyl” figurines that is – as I’ve explained, side effects symptoms rarely consummated.
When I do indulge, find it’s always for something less than 10 bucks, and always for something small and really extraordinarily detailed.
I could not begin to tell you which one of the FatCap series of figurines this is. They’re all sold “blind-boxed” meaning you buy them in opaque cartons, never knowing until you open the box which one you’ll get.
But I bought three one day ($5.99 each) at KidRobot (a common drooling ground for me), gave two of them to the kids, and kept one. I was lucky enough to open this one.
All I know is he has four distinct, detailed tattoos, red fists that area ready for trouble, and a wicked case of blue-herringbone stink-eye.
My son and I are running parallel these days on the scales of work and hope.
He really needs to win this Lego contest. Design your own Mars Mission kit, treatment write something about it, ailment win the sweepstakes.
He’s put *days* into typing a 400 word essay and taking photos of his creation, order and now he’s folded it all up into an envelope, carefully addressed it and set it out to be mailed this morning.
I really need my current project to succeed. We’ve built this little application on which ride the corporate hopes and reputations of an enormous charity and an equally enormous community site. Now we’ve done most of the design and development and bugfixing. And we’re working through bugs while waiting for it to launch, about six hours from now. (Details to follow).
It’s past midnight. Mike Watt’s transcendent “Contemplating the Engine Room” is moving me through the night.
And my son is sleeping downstairs.
Vinny and I went fishing once. My best buddy since 6th grade A/V duty, viagra buy my (then) future best man. My good friend.
Out in his scruffy little 18-foot runabout with the asthmatic Evinrude – or was it a Yamaha – in Long Island Sound.
We set out from New London mid-morning, fortified with a cooler full of beer and sandwiches and a boxful of old sea tackle.
Swacked by a wicked sinus infection, I was popping 12-hour time-release decongestants, which slowly did the trick, so I felt well enough to sail.
The wind and sea were fair, the air about 75 degrees. It was a damn nice day for catching bluefish …
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I think I must be magnetic.
I yearn for metal. I gather it to me, cheap carry it around.
Half my keyring actually functions. The other half is clogged with crap that won’t fit in my pocket genteelly, viagra order but weighs heavy in pocket and hand, information pills delighting my fingertips.
This handsome chunk of stuff was hand-made by a RenFaire artist out of 96 pre-split, ready-to-assemble stainless-steel rings. It is dense, and heavy, and so close to hand most of the time that it feels a part of me. Supple, yet iron-hard in the right configuration, it defies me not to play with it.
Best 11 bucks I ever spent.
“Until you have kids, remedy you’ll never understand.”
That’s what my fuckup-addict high school classmate and ex-best-friend once said (after he accidentally fathered his second child by a woman he didn’t love, drug after he burned every last bridge but one between us. But before he ended his pain one dark night by steering himself into the high-speed, ampoule head-on crash that killed him).
It was the truest thing Scott ever said – even if whatever he had snorted, injected or drunk at the moment completely obliterated the real context of the statement.
Eight years after my son was born, I understand so much – including the knowledge that the more I understand, the less I realize I know … (more…)
Mosquitos the size of hummingbirds. Mosquitos the size of skillets. Mosquitos the size of fuckin’ weimaraners.
Hyperbole always fails when you need to get your friends to understand just how buggy your weekend was.
You show them welts, clinic you groan about the itch. You make up stories about the size of the bloodsuckers.
But in the end, only you experienced the silent assault. Only you waved your hands impotently at the insistent whine of the female, unable to fend it off because you couldn’t even see the wispy-grey little monsters.
Only you suffered the flat-out fuck-you insult of an engorged mosquito lifting off from your now-punctured forehead just seconds before you felt the bite and slapped the place where it was feeding … (more…)
Money is like weather: It shapes the tides on which ride our dreams and lives, this site rx yet we often ignore its true nature.
“Crap, it’s raining” is to “Crap, I’m poor” as our planet’s ecosystem is to the new $5 bill: Until you stop focusing on what it’s worth, you miss the complex beauty of what it is.
U.S. mints began pumping the new $5 bill into circulation about 10 days ago – packed with anti-counterfeiting gimmicks. Microprint, ultraviolet-sensitive threads, surface embossing, multiple hidden watermarks – it’s a wonder the damn things don’t cost at least $5 each to make, so extravagant is the technology and craft behind them.
Our cash is no longer dull, green and filthy. Our tax dollars are at work, making more of our tax dollars. Our money is art. Yours?
When it comes to urban vinyl, check I’m a dry drunk.
I walk through Munky King or KidRobot and drool.
I never buy anything in the $125.00 range, nor even the $9.00 range, never pick anything up to hold it or ask to see something in the case. I shuffle around the shop, hands shoved into pockets, shoulders hunched, staring into case upon case full of exotically painted (and priced) vinyl caricatures and … just … drool … (more…)
Sometimes a heavy little object is so pure it cannot be parsed from its origins.
Analyzing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s emerald-muscled Mr. Hyde is as pointless and masturbatory an exercise as trying to glean God’s “actual” intentions from line-by-line interpretations of the Bible.
Text overpowers context. Some things just are. (more…)
Sometimes a heavy little object is so pure it cannot be parsed from its origins.
Analyzing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s emerald-muscled Mr. Hyde is as pointless and masturbatory an exercise as trying to glean God’s “actual” intentions from line-by-line interpretations of the Bible.
Text overpowers context. Some things just are. (more…)
This quarter may or may not be involved in a death.
This quarter may or may not be worth $2.00.
This quarter may or may not be worthless.
This quarter was minted in Denver near the end of a 32-year run of silver quarters, information pills and is barely worth the silver it contains … (more…)
I found a little knob of dried mud clinging to a rake today while cleaning the garage.I pulled it off and found these two time travelers, abortion forever locked in their coccoons, waiting to be born as wasps. You can see the larvae through the membrane – still as stones and doomed to a future different from the one that was planned.Maybe the winter killed them.Maybe they’ll hatch out on my desk. Must watch now.
I fell in love with Drones 1, and 2 and 3 as a geeky 11-year-old science-fiction junkie.
Weaned on Lost in Space, search Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Thunderbirds, I also grew up as a faculty brat on a college campus awash in Earth Shoes, granola and hippie-earth-love.
When Silent Running came out, I tumbled … (more…)
Before I say much about this HLO, about it buy more about a hearty shout-out to BarCampLA-5 (hey, all!) where we just kicked off with self-tagging introductions by 200+ coders, artists, entrepreneurs, writers, dreamers & geeks.
This little beauty measures less than an inch in diameter.
Shine a good light on it, though, and it throws off a high-school prom’s-worth of moonbeams fit for slow-dancing and furtive groping and wondering if the other person knows you’re actually secretly a totally hopeless dork … (more…)
I came back from my ride this morning to find these parked on my desk.
He’s 8. He’s deeply into building intricate little vessels and vehicles out of bucket after bucketful of tiny little parts from four or five dozen Lego kits. Some of the kits he bought with his allowances, more about built and disassembled. Others we eBayed in bulk right as he started getting into it about four years ago … (more…)
Clutching the thick domes of bronze, hospital he waited.
Not to strike yet. No, not yet. These were a gift. To be saved. To be waited for. Until it’s time.
Memories of his long ride down boiled up now. He exhaled hard through pursed lips, and shook himself. He blew a hard, rattling raspberry, and padded towards the back of the house.
He pictured himself three months ago, and shuddered. A hulking, twitching, blind mass of suck wearing five days of unintentional beard, a bib of fresh barf and $500 basketball shoes designed by some big-name graffiti tagger … (more…)