HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: symbol

  • #a10 :: Chocolate booze bottles

    chocobottles.jpgMmmm.

    Hollow bottles of semi-sweet chocolate injected with liqueur, find brandy, prescription whisky, troche tequila, cognac from Anthon Berg. These came into our house over Christmas, a generous surprise from friends.

    Decisions, decisions: chocolate’s buzz, or alcohol’s melting warmth – or is it vice versa?

    Choose your poison – Grand Marnier, you think – and unfoil it. Nip the bottom off with your incisors and tip the brandy in to mix with the luscious chocolate disk you’re chewing. The pressure of your bite bursts a weak mold-seam and brandy oozes over your fingertips …
    (more…)

  • #a8 :: Rubber germ

    rubbergerm.jpgWork at the SETI lab – and every other acronymed institution from DARPA to the headquarters of the NRA – had run at a breakneck clip since first contact.

    Nothing galvanizes an entire race like a blanket signal transmitted to every single computer, information pills television and data-display display device on the planet, page carrying images of an alien commander, mil-specs for an inbound armada and a declaration of war … (more…)

  • #a6 :: Carrier pigeon message capsule (part 1)

    amoebic_nalgene.jpgFor the past, order let’s see, six months, my 8-year-old son has been bandying this … phrase … about.

    For a while, he didn’t know what it meant, and cared even less, but he would utter this phrase every chance he got, snickering and cackling like a fiend.

    It is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. And for the first two or three times I heard him say it and cackle, it was the funniest thing I’d heard in a couple of hours, at least.

    Now, hold that thought. (more…)

  • #a5 :: Child’s water bottle

    amoebic_nalgene.jpgFor the past, order let’s see, six months, my 8-year-old son has been bandying this … phrase … about.

    For a while, he didn’t know what it meant, and cared even less, but he would utter this phrase every chance he got, snickering and cackling like a fiend.

    It is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. And for the first two or three times I heard him say it and cackle, it was the funniest thing I’d heard in a couple of hours, at least.

    Now, hold that thought. (more…)

  • #a2 :: Faux long-stemmed chocolate rose

    rose.jpgIt was the perfect metaphor, order really. His hair plugs, his teeth caps, his botox, his Bavarian penile-compensation vehicle.

    And now, she sighed, biting her lip, this.

    She sniffled a bit more and peeled back the red foil. The “blossom” popped out of its green-plastic receptacle and tumbled under the futon.

    I will not lose it. I will not.

    On her knees, she reached under, crushing it slightly in her fist and fished it out. It wore a fuzz of dust bunnies. Brushing them off, she sagged to the floor. Cheap, waxy chocolate melted across her teeth as she teetered over whether to bite into it.

    She caved.

  • #365 :: Ring

    sildenafil this ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Here are some of the posts I had the most fun writing and/or shooting.If you like any of them, maybe you’ll email one to a friend who might enjoy it, too. And if you just discovered this site, any of these is a good place to jump in:
    Rubber Ghoul
    Drain Valve/Bell
    Photo-Theremin
    Saab Front Wheel Bearings
    Nuclear Bomb Test Souvenir
    Monocular
    Battle Suit
    Daguerrotype
    Brownie Hawkeye
    Vinyl Frog
    Lightcycle
    Minnie Ball
    Spoke Wrench
    Art Deco Reading Lamp
    Spiky Silicone Keychain
    Fuckin’ Wirenuts
    Tiara
    Doll Leg
    Shalom Bracelet
    Gunslinger
    Last Resort
    Novelty Lighter
    3 Red Demons in a Little Rowboat
    Fortune Cookie
    Wallpaper Print Block

    Welcome newcomers: For clarity, I have swapped this post’s halves from its originally posted state. Note also that I’m running around cleaning up some bad internal links – a legacy from when I switched to WordPress at the end of the 2004-2005 run … mr …12/16/08

    The old man lived in a small trailer park in one of the Carolinas, by a huge stand of bamboo. He sat beneath the awning of the old Airstream with his second wife. I don’t remember her saying much. But I remember him bouncing me on his knee, asking questions, listening with that sort of benevolent, distant warmth that I came to know ever so briefly as grandfatherly.

    We had ridden in Frog Belly, our beaten third-hand two-tone Ford (?) for so many hours to get there. Down from the little Connecticut college where my father taught and would later turn to glorious painting, where my mother wrote like a weaver, with focus and care. That evening, after lemonade and maybe it was fried chicken, I lay in the motel room nearby, all of six or seven years old. Night heat smothered any chance at sleep, which was already elusive, thanks to the rock’n’roll band blaring from a stage beneath bright lights in the field next door. Insects keened outside, the cicadas out in force on their once-every-17-year cycle of birth, sex and death.

    The next morning, we went back over to the trailer for breakfast. And my father’s father took us out to the bamboo afterwards, where he cut chunks from a stalk and fashioned it into a little two-piece slide whistle that he gave to me. I wish I had kept it. I can’t even remember what became of it – I must have left it behind because the aching memory puts it only and fully in that place, no other. Just there, blowing the bamboo mouthpiece and sliding it up and down the octaves – and then it was gone.

    Joseph Wayne Reed Sr. was my father’s father – a medical corpsman in WWI and a Red Cross medic in the Pacific in WWII, a Linotype operator for the St. Petersburg Times in his later years. Heart disease killed him – I remember, he was overweight and not too athletic – when I was eight.

    Four years later, my father gave me his ring – white gold and onyx. I have worn it every single day of my life since then. Dad had the stone flipped over to hide what must have been a lifetime of chips and scars, and new gold added to the bottom where abuse and wear had ground it down to the thickness of a kite string.

    Once in 1984, body-surfing high at Misquamicut, Rhode Island, I thought I had lost it to the sea. The empty-handed sensation of realizing this was a head-to-toe shock that overpowered the full-body battery of cold October breakers and left me feeling naked, careless and stupid. At this point in my life, my young journalism career seemed to have fallen apart and I was casting about for some sense of direction. So I bounced on tiptoes in the surf as my mother had taught me there long ago, and tried to absorb the loss of the ring as an omen – a clean break, a fresh start, a way out to new thinking. Weak, I thought. Fuckup. I dragged myself back to the parking lot to towel off in abject depression, which shattered in a paroxysm of joy only when I realized that I had sensibly stashed the ring in the glovebox of Steve’s Celica before jumping into the ocean.

    I nearly lost the ring again 20 years later. A brain-crushingly bad week at work sent me home in a funk, and drumming seemed the only way to shake it off. Pounding out amateurish polyrhythms and 2/4 tribal stomps at full volume in the empty house, I pummeled the shit out of my kids’ tubano until my arms tingled. Then I looked down and saw that not only had the circle of white gold cracked, but the stone had disappeared and the empty prongs gaped up at me in blinded reproach. After five solid minutes of knees-and-fingertips searching through the pile of the thick Oriental rug around the drum area, I found the small, black stone, and resumed breathing. Our local jeweler set things right, and my arm is complete again.

    My wife says she considers this the ultimate Heavy Little Object – it’s not the sort of archetypal machined steel gizmo upon which I first focused this site. But it is of stone and precious metal, and freighted with meaning and worth beyond the reach of my words. It’s part of me, and a good place to stop – maybe so I can devote a bit more time to my other blog – and think about where I’m headed next.

    This site is dedicated to my parents.The contest results are here.

  • #360 :: Fortune Cookie

    order physician ‘popup’, here dosage ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Wind the key, and it goes – a self-locomoting toy, the culmination of myriad simple technologies in a complex, palm-sized plaything: Wheels – once just logs used to move other logs, now advanced to trim wheel/hub/axle design. Tin lithography – the semblance of color, depth and detail printed in Benday dots on machine-cut, rust-prone sheet metal that’s folded and slotted together, tab A to slot B and so on, until it takes shape as a bus. Clockwork – spring-driven cogs and gears store energy pumped in by a few revolutions of the key, then convert it to be pumped out as hundreds of revolutions of the axles. It makes a clicking sound when being wound, a ratcheting sizzle when released to glide across the kitchen floor, invisible passengers hidden behind painted windows – tiny avatars to your rapid transit fantasies. The “Blue Giant” is made in China.
    cost ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A brain tremor emerges from childhood, a submerged snag in the deep, slow-flowing river of memory: I was probably three or four when I put my forefinger and thumb together, tight, pinching nothing and imagining a whale in there, its full tonnage trapped between my fingerprints. It was a huge concept for a kid – tiny density, microscopic mass – and to this day I don’t know where it came from, but I would revisit it every now and then with a sort of breathy little “whoa.”

    As I grew, the sensation recurred in odd places: On the job as a reporter: A treeful of egrets, looking delicate as tapers in a cathedral candelabra, perched in the path of a 400,000-gallon oil spill on the Delaware River that was headed their way from the breached hull of a tanker run aground upstream. In pop culture: Frank Miller’s Miho, the tiny, ruthlessly lethal street-waif/assassin who fends off the entire Mafia on tiptoe and sword-point. In nature: swollen, phallic stalactites hanging impossibly in the gaping maw of Carlsbad Caverns, tapering to a point the width of a molecule that grows with near-infinite slowness, a single drop of mineral-laden water at a time – and the huge colony of bats that swarm up out of the cave at night like a seething, black tornado from which they peel off at the top – single file – to hunt for food at sunset.

    So it is with this thing. The fortune cookie is a confection of frothy whimsy and deep portent, of crunchiness and clairvoyance. It’s jsut a snack, a crisp trifle. It’s also your fate. You know it’s mass-produced, you can never tell whether you’re going to get a real future-predicting fortune or some worthless aphorism like “It is better to be wise than to be rich.” But it’s your fortune, a tiny oracle to be heeded with some reverence or at least a snicker, as you munch the vessel in which it arrived to stop ever so briefly your headlong rush through life and make you think: Is this true?

  • #358 :: Bow

    remedy adiposity ‘popup’, drugs ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>This is the cultural equivalent of a successful GoogleWhack: A purpose-built frippery with one and only one use. The peach-satin confection came flat in a glassine envelope, a little stack of ribbon rectangles. To set it up, you pull a little thread at its center, which bunches the strips into loops forming a perfect, gift-ready visual confection. It is an emotional virus, designed to carry a “message” of “festivity” and “affection” to the recipient, and then to be simply torn off and discarded. If you put together the production chain, from designer to industrial loom operator to dye-maker to cutter and packager, you wind up with a micro-economy of specialized laborers whose only professional purpose is to construct the physical manifestation of a hoary old meme in visual semiotics. You could work yourself cross-eyed deconstructing the symbolism, or just trying to understand the way the flat thing becomes a rounded, resilient and brilliant bow. But then you’d have given it way too much thought.

  • #356 :: Scurvy Knave

    drug ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/archives/2005/01/012805.html”>He wakes up after an hour or so, his face pressed to the wet bar, his brain still well-pickled on the shots of rye he’d been tossing back before (and after) he insulted that lady (well, she wasn’t, really) and she slapped him hard. He doesn’t bother raising his head. It’s comfy here. A warm pad of numb flesh covers his cheek, nerves deadened to sleep by the constant pressure of his sweating head against pocked mahogany. If he gets up, he’ll just feel cold, the breeze from the open bar door chilling the spilled booze on his face. So he lies there and considers: Beer taps hunching, cobra-like, overhead. Change puddling near his nose – before passing out, he kept dredging up pennies from his pocket for every shot the bartender slid his way that didn’t arrive with it a disapproving sneer. Olives lurking in a murky jar of oil. The incandescent hush of warm lights beneath the liquor racks float up through colored bottles – rye, whiskey, bourbon, gin, vermouth, absinthe, coca syrup, malt, seltzer, grenadine – a woozy hallucination of polychrome gems. This one bottle is … so pretty – a delicate turqoise lozenge of serenity, its maker’s name mock-etched into the glass. The barkeep shoots himself a seltzer/rocks, and returns to mopping the other end of the bar. Be here long, the drunk thinks. He’ll work his way down here and I’ll just have to move, finally go home to Virginia and the kids. And the dog. And the house, the newly electrified townhouse with a gas tap in every room, the huge mortgage he took out a month ago, before his boss let him go on Tuesday. I’ll have to steel my resolve and face it all. He turns his head a bit – well, turns it on the bar as if moving a huge, soggy block of soap – twisting it free so that the suction of his face on the wet, varnished wood is broken slightly, and sensation tingles back into his cheek. God. This’ll kill Virginia, he thinks. And slowly, he picks himself up.

    Back in the first or second decade of the 20th century (future shock, anyone?) this was a state-of-the-art delivery system for bubbly water. It was refillable: Once you used up the liter or so of seltzer, you’d toss it back into its crate for collection by the seltzer man, who would return the whole thing to a delivery plantto be cleaned out and refilled. At about five pounds and nearly 12 inches high, it’s just under the bulk limit for HLOs, but it’s so gorgeous I had to squeeze it in.

    CONTEST ENDING SOON:
    The identity contest for El Luchador Libre is drawing to an end – as is the first (and perhaps only) year of HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS. There have been some excellent entries so far, but I know there are great ones out there still unwritten. If you’d like to win the multi-masked Mexican grappler and at least one other relentlessly nifty HLO of your very own, drop by the contest and bang out a few paragraphs. I’ll announce the winner (and there will be fine runner-up prizes) in Entry #366. Jump in. Have fun.
    ed ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>One of two things will happen: He’ll eat your heart off a pike, or he’ll have your guts for garters. You have a choice: You can fight him with a cutlass, or you can walk the plank. Choose: The devil or the deep blue sea.

    These little avatars, these plastic warriors are a safe outlet for our genetic legacy of bloodthirst. We as a race teach children the ways of men. But we as a family allow no gun games in the house, show no videos with shooting. So why is my son already designing killer robots from K’Nex – this is the laser, that’s the missile launcher, here’s the thing that sucks blood from its enemies? He’s five.

    It’s just play. Isn’t it?

  • #352 :: Miniature Sieve

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #350 :: Dymo Label-Maker

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #349 :: Miniature Flour Mortar

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #347 :: Sugar Skulls

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #346 :: Dress

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #345 :: Fossils

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #344 :: Pepper

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #343 :: Incense

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #342 :: Finger Rosary

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #341 :: Mexican Glass Eye

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #339 :: Pre WW II Samurai

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #338 :: Miniature Hacksaw

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #337 :: Hot Wheels

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.
    ENLARGEI have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

    Stereopticons were the pinnacle of multimedia technology in their day – twin images shot simultaneously by cameras set a few feet apart, doctor approximating the 3-D view seen by the human eyes.

    With the gentleman beckoning at the right, website you could almost fall into this one, pill it’s so gorgeously intricate. I found it at the Rose Bowl swap meet for three bucks, in perfect shape: the stiff card is a little curved, and you can see silver glinting back from the blacks.

    Here’s what the Underwood and Underwood Works and Studios had to say about it: (more…)

  • #336 :: Plastic animals

    more about decease ‘popup’, ask ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The oil lamp guttered and went out in a little puff of soot.

    She sat, thumbs a-fidget, not wanting to stick her finger with the needle, but unable to keep still, with her sewing on the lap of her crinoline hoopskirt, in the dark.

    “I’m done being pleasant about this, ma’am,” Mr. Quimby had muttered, through twisted, disgusted lips, his greased handlebar mustache a-twitch. “You just be out o’ here in the morning with your brat and I’ll see to it Tom comes round with the cart to take your things wherever you’ve a mind to go.”

    She straightened, put her petitpoint needle into the heather blossom on the sampler she had been sewing, and carefully set the hoop frame and the spools of yarn into the wicker basket beside her. A deep breath eased the frown from her face. Well, it’s all one can do, isn’t it. One does what one can, and it’s all one can do.

    Rain hammered on the roof. Gertrude slept fitfully, making little piglike snorts beneath the counterpane, and rain hammered the shake roof with a hissing roar. Three weeks now the storms had been battering them, off and on, three weeks since her August was taken – finally returned to his Lord by the fever that had wracked him since the accident with the surrey, three weeks alone in this godless mining town in northern California, surrounded by ruffians and drunkards and women of loose character, and the claim August had staked was nowhere to be found in the records and Mr. Quimby had finally had enough excuses, he had a load of Chinamen he needed to house and the railroad was willing to pay double what August had been paying so what can one do.

    It’s all one can do.

    She stared around her through the gloom. Flickering shadows from the streetlight outside skittered across the floral wallpaper, which hung in great festoons from the wall now, its glue undone by the relentless rain. She bit her lip.

    She walked across the room, tore off a piece of it, stuck it into her mouth and began to chew. Bitter, bitter and sticky with mold. She chewed harder, but kept her eyes dry as she began to pack.

    (A note tacked to this block by the seller says:

    Hand-carved, labor intensive wallpaper print block. Circa 1840-1880. Note square nails and peg construction. Each is a unique piece of art; no two are alike.” It has hand-grooves gouged into its flanks, and the print surface feels velvety, soft. On its end are very old white numerals that some printmaker painted by hand: 2866.)

    purchase ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2005/01/011105.html”>At some point – midway between the Playskool block-sorting drum and the Thomas the Tank Engine fetish, we began to sort our two young children’s toys. Bricks, gears, stuffed animals, dress-up clothes – all were assigned translucent plastic bins in a pine toy rack – and my wife would spend a happy, idle hour every week or three sorting. Broken toys are banished. New alliances arise – the Monsters, Inc. figures with scale-model doors are grouped first with cheap toys, then building toys, then action heroes – and sundered at a whim. A constant surf of toys and parts batters the rack, rising and falling over days, hours, minutes. One of my favorites is the animal box, a mad, mis-scaled menagerie gathered from countless birthday party goodie bags, Christmas stockings and some mysterious wormhole that exists in parts of the house unknown and admits animals while inhaling socks.

    Just now, I have imagined a flood from the nearby bathroom, my son frantically building a Lego ark amid the rising waters, and all these marvelous one-of-a-kind species perishing upon reaching dry land in the absence of mates.

  • #330 :: Automotive Logo – Print Slug

    visit web search ‘popup’, advice ‘width=500, ask height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Yin to the raygun’s yang, the Clic-Clac is useful, modest and crisp – an elegant tribute to simple industrial design. Press the center of the puckered lid and the edge-tabs around the rim flip open. Squeeze the rim, and the puckered lid springs up again with a pop, clamping the tabs firmly into place once more. Press-open. Squeeze-closed. For a while, it seemed these tins were available only in a tiny size, full of silly mints and emblazoned with dot-com logos. But I just found a source for larger, 3.5-inch-diameter models at the amazing Surfas restaurant supply store a couple miles from here. They make a happy sound.
    stomach ‘popup’, no rx ‘width=500, adiposity height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>To wait for a thing, to truly be patient and allow it to come at its own pace, is an inhuman act of will. We yearn – for new jobs, hot concerts, latest games, fast cars, slow weekends, a first kiss, a second chance, freedom, food, rest, love. Childhood trains us to await Christmas with palpable, potent longing. The Santa legend, the daily ritual of the advent calendar, the growth of the pile beneath the tree. Our lives seem measured out in the stroboscopic wink and bubble of tiny lights on slaughtered evergreens.

    Time was, you pounded nails into your mantelpiece from which to hang your family’s Christmas stockings. Now there are hooks for the purpose. This plated, urethane-coated pot-metal facsimile of a bristlecone pine weighs close to two pounds. It sits on our rounded fireplace shelf, its hook dangling tongue-like through the loops of the children’s two empty Christmas stockings.

    It waits. Because it must.
    cost ‘popup’, information pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Finding the perfect gift for someone quirky. It’s an elusive goal at Christmastime, particularly when you have about two dozen such nebulous missions to add to an agenda of stocking-filling, tree-buying, menu-planning, house-cleaning, wreath-weaving and the otherwise headlong rush of your already insane life. You have secrets for efficiency. The oddball hardware store with everything. The coffee-fueled, lunchtime dead run down the most diverse shopping strip in town. The scientific, ballistic, oddball, geekhead, propeller-beanied sites in the “e-commerce” section of the bookmarks you’ve been collecting for the past 10 years (whatever became of that font of Mexican wrestling gear, LuchaSwag?) And in the end, you’re surrounded by a pile of rubbish, blearily scotchtaping things shut and hoping you haven’t insulted anyone or shortchanged anyone or spent too much money or too little or … Christmas didn’t used to be this stressful when you were a kid, you tell yourself as you try to curl ribbon with scissors without slicing off a finger. And then the day comes, and everybody turns out to be (mostly) tickled with what you got ’em. My talented and industrious brother-in-law likes – among other things – to make candy. Chocolate butts are a favored specialty. This little stamped-tin submarine went into his Xmas bag this year – a 1930s-vintage repro stamped from an old die, by the look of it. I haven’t heard yet, of course, whether it was the perfect thing. Or rubbish.
    this ‘popup’, this site ‘width=500, web height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>(front)

    CHOU TALook! Magic Tree (R)
    FLOWERS GROW FROM PAPER
    The flower begin to grow from the tree after 1-2 hours and will grow to marvellous flowers in 6 hours.

    (front)

    Color Buds appear in 1-2 hours. The fun is watching its growing. You will have more fun when you grow the flowers by yourself.
    INSTRUCTIONS (Please refer to following pictures)

    1. Assemble tree.
    2. Place tree in middle of the saucer.
    3. Cut off corner of plant food envelope and squeeze out entire contents in saucer
    4. Look at it, it will start to grow little by little after 1-2 hours when it blooms completely the flowers usually can maintain several months.
    5. Be sure to keep the tree away from warmer moisture and wind. which will affect its growth.
    6. In case the tree blooms in one side only , please turn it to the other side, the flowers will continue to grow.
    NON-TOXIC

    approved ‘popup’, and ‘width=500, doctor height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The vast majority of us have no sense of war. We have never served. We absorb media – most of it fictitious, some tiny part of it news – that lets us put our acceptance of the real thing in our world view into a neat box: It’s hell. It’s necessary to protect our national interests. It’s the right thing to do. It makes of men pure animals. It kills children. It topples despots. It bankrupts nations and tortures innocents. We cobble together imagery from TV and movies, equal parts Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan and Casualties of War, and we note the nightly news’ body count and the empty blather of whatever politician has taken on the White House, and whatever pro-war demagogue is braying for the death to continue. But – save for the words of a few honest soldiers – we know nothing of blood and shit and killing for the leadership of one’s countrymen.

    What to make of this little icon? He tumbled out of a dainty, girly pink-and-purple toy that we bought at a second-hand kids’ shop recently for our daughter – a gritty black pearl from a soft, innocent oyster. He not fully formed, but half the thickness he should be, as if someone injection-molded a microminiature study in thermoplastic of the burly stone bas-reliefs of heroes of the revolution that line Tienanmen Square – impersonal gallantry incarnate, a sketch of a warrior that offers no hint of the reality of his job. He’s a toy.

    And what to make of the perspective whiplash you suffer when you’re blogging smugly about a plastic toy, and suddenly learn that one-tenth the number of U.S. soldiers have died the in Iraq war to date, as Asians have died in today’s horrific tsunamis? This site seems pretty trivial at the moment. Links here to aid organizations.
    find ‘popup’, story ‘width=500, price height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A nylon tube filled with one chemical inside which floats a glass tube filled with another chemical. Snap them, and a chemiluminescent reaction takes place – cold light – for a few hours of crisis visibility, emergency lighting or party fun. They look fuzzy here, as they are on the web, which offers up a bewildering array of data – little of it pertaining to their actual origins. Somewhere in California, something like 25 years ago, something something. Half the time, the phrase “glow stick” winds up alongside “rave,” “ecstasy” and “drug threat assessment, as if it the simple device is illicit by association. You can buy glow cubes, you can get necklaces, bracelets and sooner or later someone’s going to go out on the liability limb and start marketing chemically phosphorescent glow fangs that don’t need incandescent charge-ups. In the end, history will cast American Cyanamid, (now the subject of EPA investigations) in the role of Prometheus to the drums-n-bass-n-pacifiers crowd.

    All of which is utter trivia compared to what now seem to be 25,000 deaths and untold people uprooted in the weekend’s disaster. A few agencies, such as Doctors Without Borders are stepping up to provide aid. You can donate to them if you want to help. in some meaningful way.
    stuff ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>He weeps for the sins of the world. And the world sins with his tears. We are a manufacturing society, and objects of devotion and symbolism are among the things most easily manufactured and sold. I plucked him from a bucketful of his kind, where they tumbled in silent mass grief in a San Francisco curio shop, surrounded by southeast Asian artifacts mass-produced, mass-shipped, and sold as one-of-a-kind objets. He is the size of a golf ball, and about a third of the weight.

    As more children and adults are counted among those who were drowned or crushed in the disaster, his posture seems the only appropriate response.
    approved ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>We scurry on with our materialist lives. We return Christmas presents that were the wrong size, we drift into post-holiday sales and buy things on a whim. We ignore horrors that do not affect us. It’s a peculiarly American behavior. Heads appropriately buried in “our” culture we can ignore the active stupidity of our leaders, the crimes committed in our name, the suffering of millions with shattered lives who live at a safe remove on the other side of the planet.

    I needed a new keyring. The old one was thrashed, threatening to pop open and lose the keys to my car, my house, my bike, my computer, my bike racks. This one’s held together with steel cable anchored to a chunk of anodized aluminum. It’s whimsical. It was on sale. Doubtless this would be seen in some quarters of Washington as – in its own small, consumerist way – patriotic.

    On the other hand, it’s just a heavy, little object, number 325 in a yearlong series.
    order ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>In your mind, banish all tension. Sign a binding, planetwide truce to end war. Master genetics and cure all disease. Solve poverty and end hunger and illiteracy. Eliminate pollution and extinction. You’re omnipotent. Go ahead. The planet is safe and happy in your care. Now that you’ve given everyone on earth everything they need, you’re left with 9 billion people who still want, who desire, who manufacture needs to give their lives purpose. What happens? War and crime return to restore equilibrium. Now, return to reality’s yin/yang balance, to the natural tension that keeps us circling each other, giving and taking, punishing and rewarding, destroying and creating, warring and reconciling. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is a lovely, unrealistic pipe dream. We live in conflict.

    A pair of powerful ellipsoidal hematite magnets, their poles aligned through their narrow circumfrences, allow you to demonstrate the constant tension and readjustment of power in the universe. Throw them into the air about six inches apart, and they fly together, wrestling for equilibrium in a clattering, buzzing collision until they land at rest, centered and quiet in your cupped hand. They sound like this, and they can be bought online.
    viagra ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Chiseled, hammered brass, given a round volume and a ringing edge, stamped or engraved with religious symbols. Three for a dollar, here, labeled “Xmas bells” – and nothing farther from the truth. Banged out they were in India, sweated over for more than a few seconds each and tossed into a basket, upmarketed, shipped, distributed and displayed in another basket on the floor of a shop. The ugliest, most deformed of them made the deepest tones, while the smaller, finer ones sound tinny and the biggest, finest of them give a sort of castrato * c l i n k *. Like this.
    malady ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> Pairs attract me: Magnets. epoxy resins. Fornicatin’ keychains. And this delicately handcrafted dual slide whistle barely 8 inches long, which puts out a ripping din. To the man or child who carved this, and his countrymen, and to anyone reading this: blessings for strength and solace in 2005. It can only improve upon 2004.

    Tech note: Spambots (and a stern host) have forced me to shut off comments. Please bear with me over the next few days, while I move to a different blog platform, and thanks for reading this thing all last year. Your interest and comments (when working) have been a stout anchor for me.
    viagra buy ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>My grandfather was a newsman. He helped the St. Petersburg Times get started, and in later years he ran a Linotype. A story and a half high, the huge machine with its weird keyboard (ETAOIN SHRDLU instead of QWERT YUIOP) let the operator bang out lines of hot metal type in a few seconds instead of hand-setting them letter by letter. When I was a sprout, a school field trip took me to the composing room of the Hartford Courant, which – as much as any other experience – doomed me to a lifetime addiction to journalism in one form or another. I remember the roar of the presses and the Braille-like experience of touching a fiber-board plate offset printing plate that had been embossed by lines of type. This little chunk of history is a carmaker’s logo rendered for use on the press, in etched zinc mounted on wood. There’s a box of these at the Great American Antiques Mall in Bakersfield (mentioned yesterday) for 50 cents apiece. It’s a reminder of how we used to communicate before Tim Berners-Lee went and caused all this damn trouble.

  • #329 :: Rook, Knight

    click this web ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500, order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The game set has not yet been invented, but the pieces are constantly in play and the rules subject to random, violent and sudden change: The King moves in bold strokes across the spherical, blue board at will and at random, heedless to cries from his own Pawns. The Handlers and the Blind Pawns give him power. The Manipulator assigns the King’s moves, and calculates the moves the King’s Puppet and the Numb General must make in order to transit the board and claim territory without risking that Blind Pawns will become Seeing Pawns … This is tedious, isn’t it. Too bad that while I can re-edit the whole self-indulgent exercise in seconds, we have to wait four years to change the real thing.

    These two noble figures come from a game forged in a different era of power and sacrifice, and, ultimately, from the greatest antique store in Southern California. Swirled, pearlescent plastic lends gravitas to their prideful faces. They are, perhaps, secret lovers from warring houses, the swift, crafty knight and his blunt, fast-moving maiden in the tower. They came from a bin of about three dozen random chess pieces, only one or two more of which belonged to their set. I can’t place the design or the period, but I’d guess they have visual roots in facial studies by NC Wyeth and his fellow travelers.

    (Ed.: I just switched the site to WordPress, since the otherwise stellar Movable Type was causing me untold problems with comment spam. You’re now welcome to post comments once again. As you can see, I’m still fussing with the stylesheet, but I thought it was time to make the move anyway. Thanks for being so patient.)