Category: symbol

sale sickness ‘popup’, decease and ‘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 double-glass-block icon is meant to remind you of this – an elaborate ice castle lit from within. It glows with a liquid intensity, the frosted bulb cavity diffusing all 25 watts of its little bulb through about two pounds of solid glass. It would make a dandy blunt instrument – coldcock your prey, then fling it to a concrete floor to shatter into a million unfingerprintable bits. Designed by Harri Koskinen for the Museum of Modern Art, this was a gift, so I was pretty startled just now to learn how much it costs. The design concept itself screams “kitsch!” – until you switch it on. Then all hard feelings melt away. Oooh, says some small voice from somewhere south of my adolescence. It’s pretty

online nurse ‘popup’, click ‘width=500, side effects height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Blue-green metal in concentric descending rectangles form a frozen vortex. It was grown in a lab, so pure is its shape. An inch long, it could be the set for a remake of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as staged by subatomic robots. I’ve Googled and Googled and can find no hint as to its true nature. The gift box it came in years ago has long since shed its tiny slip of paper with explanatory text. I’d be grateful if anyone out there could help me identify the metal.
viagra 40mg ‘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”>The invention of the white LED has sparked a renaissance in personal illumination. The carbon-battery-powered torch in 1899 began pushing back the darkness around us at night that was only somewhat held at bay by oil and kerosene lamps. Beef that up into brick-sized 9-volt-powered floods, tweak it into the shape of a cop’s metal nightstick – there’s not much more room for improvement. Batteries die. The light fades in 10 hours or so, and you’re left with a heavy implement full of dead weight. But this – this is a miner’s lamp for the digital era, a tiny sun with a hundred hours of life strapped to my forehead. I strap this thing on whenever I have to excavate beneath my desk for some lost plug, jack or thingummy. It came into the house a while back as a gift for my son, but I’m using it until he can be trusted not to leave it on and completely drain its $8 battery every time he uses it.
sickness ‘popup’, viagra ‘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 another era, you could rimshot off the name of this device in a second – Heyaa, I’m here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitresses, try the veal it’s delicious – but this is 2004. The line between the sex roles is smearing, the po-mo mediasphere is awash in home-improvement shows, and now that porn is mainstream, nearly-genteel Victoria’s Secret catalogues are the new Hustler for the cheesecake hounds. And some factory somewhere is turning out a mystical device in gumdrop plastic with user-friendly instructions, cheerful LED indicators and a little integrated pocket clip – that can see through walls. In truth, it uses a magnetic field to “see” sheetrock screws or steel studs – a skill once left to carpenters with butt-crack beltlines and an uncanny ability to find solid wood behind plaster and lath simply by thumping on it with their callused fists. This runs on AAAs.
information pills ‘popup’, ampoule ‘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”>There is a mysticism in Zen Buddhism that I feared I would never approach as an outsider – a holiness in the mundane, the worship of a pebble, a leaf, a puddle. Then my son handed me this. “Here. This is for you.” I’m dumbstruck. “What the … how did you … what is this?” I turned it over. The light shone through its translucent bottom. The accordion pleats seemed deformed by design, shaped with a mathematical certainty to a Brancusian rhythm and volume. “It’s a paper cup,” he said. “How did it get like …” He grabbed it, demonstrating how to put it on your mouth, form a tight seal, and simultaneously blow and shove the cup’s bottom toward your face. “No, wait! I get it! Don’t ruin it! It’s really cool!” Transfixed. Absolutely held in thrall by the alchemy of paper product, physics and impetuous boyhood. “Can I keep it?” He shrugged. “Sure.” He’s 4½. I wonder at times about my real age.
medications ‘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”>AA batteries weigh down each leg. Ignited by the toggle switch, a tiny electric motor spins inside. The main cog drives a wheel that spins on his back – a wheel with removable pins. The pins act as cams, driving the limbs as they rotate past the hip and shoulder joints. Springs on each limb supply recoil. Program his blows and stance by moving the pins. Stage elaborate battles. Wonder about his origins, lost in the baroque history of ’80s Japanese science fiction. Re-place the decorative foil stickers that keep falling off. Watch that mean right hook. He’s just 7 inches high, but he’s fast.
click ‘popup’, more about ‘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 room where these are made must be light. (I was a potter once, and can picture it:) Powdery, white porcelain dust probably coats all tools, surfaces, the windows, and the makers’ hair, fingers and clothes as they shape the clay. Four cup-and-saucer pairs in each set, a tiny cream-and-sugar suite, a diminutive ewer for “tea.” A tinny radio plays news or dramas from state-run Chinese radio. The shop boss sits in the corner, chain-smoking, reading the paper and glancing up every now and then. It is hot, from the kiln in the next room. Deft fingers knead and mold the porcelain, forming tiny cups around their tips and then setting them – misshapen but good enough for export – onto a firebrick batt for drying. There are more than a thousand small tea vessels in this room, waiting to be fired. The third worker in the sixth row finishes one ball of clay, stretches her shoulders, then reaches into the cloth-capped bucket for another. The radio announcer reads another headline or makes another dramatic declaration. The boss turns the page.
pill ‘popup’, tadalafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Synthetic id, a tiny iconic totem of the claimer of heads and taster of the forbidden, this squishy finger puppet seems a blasphemous joke in the face of what would surely be the most vengeful wrath of the Indian goddess of destruction, Kali.

She is full-breasted; her motherhood is a ceaseless creation. Her disheveled hair forms a curtain of illusion, the fabric of space – time which organizes matter out of the chaotic sea of quantum-foam. Her garland of fifty human heads, each representing one of the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes the repository of knowledge and wisdom. She wears a girdle of severed human hands- hands that are the principal instruments of work and so signify the action of karma. Thus the binding effects of this karma have been overcome, severed, as it were, by devotion to Kali. She has blessed the devotee by cutting him free from the cycle of karma. Her white teeth are symbolic of purity (Sans. Sattva), and her lolling tongue which is red dramatically depicts the fact that she consumes all things and denotes the act of tasting or enjoying what society regards as forbidden, i.e. her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world’s “flavors”.

But Western culture always does this – reduces fearsome symbolism and religious beliefs to the level of trivialized kitsch. Why, then, when this silly Kali offends me, does her little rubber comrade inspire?

rx cheap ‘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”>Given out with tiny burgers and itty-bitty orders of fries to promote Disney’s box-office bomb, The Haunted Mansion, this faux-marble bust sings when you push its button: “Ghostly hosts come out to social-iiiiiiize.” His best features are actually his mutton chops, which are cast in a lustrous white resin that catches the light in a respectable facsimile of white marble.
viagra sale ‘popup’, click ‘width=500, nurse height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A hoop of pewter notched with the hours and days, a ring of brass with a little knob for spinning it, a lanyard and a pinhole. Line it up with the sun, spin the ring to indicate the month, and a pinprick of sunlight falls on the hour. I had only the vaguest understanding of this object’s function from my wife, who had forgotten its meaning since receiving it as a gift years ago. It is the “shepherd’s watch” or Aquitaine sundial, a replica of the clever device given by Eleanor of Aquitaine to King Henry II to help him remember the time of their appointed trysts. There’s a whole business built around this sort of trinket. It requires a particular sort of patience to put yourself in the mind of someone living in a time when this device would have been an invaluable aid to punctuality. The clock running the computer on which you are reading this is many thousands of times more accurate – and more complex. It brings to mind a quote, the author of whom I forget, something to the effect that “in the future, technology will be sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.” I see a glint of magic in this thing, with its corny “Carpe Diem” inscription, its low-tech urgency and infectious cleverness.
viagra 100mg ‘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”>You must hunker over your workbench with two tubes of vibrantly colored silicone caulk, and you must squeeze and wait, squeeze and wait, squeeze and wait. The first color must go on with mathematical certainty, each point of goop destined to hold a certain place on the microtopography of the underlying rubber ball. You must wait now, perhaps overnight, for the tray of weird little half-made things to cure, the reek of silicone vapors permeating your factory floor. You must return the next day. Your thing is almost done. You pick up the other tube of technicolor caulk, and you fill in the gaps, with mathematical faith rather than certainty that your work today will complete the work of yesterday perfectly, without variation in height, volume or placement of the tiny beads of color. You put it down again. And come back hours later, to put in the screw, affix the little chromed chain, so tiny as to make this the morningstar weapon for a Teletubby knight. And you must put it into the box with the others, to be shipped to far away places where people spend good money on suuch tactile, febrile, ultimately worthless trinkets. And you laugh, because you have a good meal to eat tonight and somewhere somebody has just this thing you spent the past two days of your life making (staggered, of course, with the manufacture of dozens more). You laugh and you take a bite of your rice cake, amused, happy to be having lunch on such a beautiful day, beneath a magenta and fluorescent orange sun.

seek look ‘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”>About 35 years ago, a student of my father’s pulled a slick slab of leather and chrome from his overcoat pocket and performed an act of origami sorcery I’ll never forget. Polaroid had given the guy one of the first SX-70 instant cameras, a few bricks of film, and marching orders to test it wherever and whenever he could. He pinched, and lifted and the slab unfolded in a slow, balletic explosion of inclined planes, black bellows and pivoting glass. I was completely mesmerized. He aimed, focused, and snapped, and the thing extruded a squarish rectangle that went from a white mist to a full-color photo of my little brother and me. Then with a pop and shuffle, he collapsed the camera into a slab again and slipped it back into his pocket with the slyest grin a recent college graduate could muster. I was used to Flash-Cubed Instamatics that teased and tortured, making me wait for weeks to see my photos until my Dad retrieved them from the drugstore. This – this was miraculous. I got a non-folding SX-70 for high school graduation years later, and spent the better part of my time in photo classes blowing through packs of film, gouging and abusing freshly-shot emulsion in a juvenile attempt to imitate Lucas Samaras and Les Krims. I found this top-of-the-line model in an antique store in Ventura a few years back – to replace an earlier folding model I owned. You can still buy the film – mostly at professional photo stores, though occasionally you’ll run across it at drug stores. You can use the crazy-fast 600 film if you don’t mind stopping everything way down and just dealing with the overexposure – I had a nice portfolio of stuff I shot at Joshua Tree not long back on the black-and-white stock. The cameras can be had on eBay for a song, and if you’re a true ‘Roid geek, you’ll enjoy the Hacker’s Guide to the SX-70.”
buy ‘popup’, health ‘width=500, information pills height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A souvenir from a European road trip, a call to action, a study in French traffic control. Printed black on yellow and stuck to a little plastic road sign, the message is clear, yet vague if you feign ignorance as to its purpose: 500 meters to an exit? 500 million possible variations ahead? An arrow that got lost en route to a Volvo logo? A mutant stick figure 500 meters high? This is a silly game I’m playing, as befits a silly little sign. But it’s compelling …

approved generic ‘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”>Lines of dialogue come unbidden when this is before your poised lips: “Ms. Dix, letter, date June 18, 19XX, to Oswald Crane, at Crane, Crane and Reynaldo …” “We’re now thpeaking to you from Mr. Hayrick’th garage, where we have just seen the filthy girlth exit the building …” “I’m ain’t sayin’ nothing until I talk to my lawyer and … hey, what’s the big idea, HEY — ! …” The gold-thread cloth screen behind the two-piece cast-potmetal shell speaks of Chanel, cheap cigars, hand-rolleds, Old Grand-Dad. The cord leads (at the other end) to a heavy middle-sized object – a Weber-Carlson reel-to-reel tape recorder with a multi-tube chassis and enameled cast-metal face, and a green “Magic Eye” tube hooked up as a VU meter. It’s part of my very small collection of old-world multimedia tools.
and ‘popup’, what is ed ‘width=500, prescription height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>There was no reason to expect this formula to work: science fiction adventure played wooden marionettes and foot-and-a-half-long balsa-wood rocketships. Yet pound for pound, lovers of high-action melodrama and futuristic equipment could get more thrill out of watching Thunderbirds every week than a year’s worth of Star Trek. In the era of once-every-nine-months solo space shots, International Rescue had a personal rockets, six-wheeled cars, a mean, green cargo-carrier the size of a football pitch, a jet-powered submarine a tunnel-boring machine and – god – a SECRET UNDERGROUND HEADQUARTERS,This little trinket wakens my inner fanboy to remember one episode in which the Powers that Be were trying to move the Empire State Building on massive caterpillar platforms during an earthquake. It’s all a blur – I can’t even remember how Thunderbird 3 helped save the day. But now I cannot bear to remove this die-cast treasure from its blister pack, and risk spoiling the package, so juvenile and deeply rooted is my reverence for this mythology.
salve ‘popup’, visit this site ‘width=500, medicine height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Before 3D Studio Max, before CG animation, CAD, before Microsoft and Apple, before even IBM and Univac, a man would hunker over his drafting table, scratching away with a little sliver of graphite. Every so often, he’d reach over, stick its tip into one of these, give it a few spins of the wrist, and resume scratching, unaware of the tsunami of technology that would soon wipe away his toils and replace them with new pleasures and woes. This Leitz lead pointer is cast in thick iron – the pencil tip (for it is only used on mechanical pencils) is rubbed pointy against an internal drum that catches the graphite dust. It is coated in one of my favorite old-school industrial finishes – and if anyone knows its name, I’d be most grateful to learn more about it.
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”>A dense concentration of totemic power – symbols of meaningful events in life strapped to your wrist, proof against ennui, woe and forgetfulness. A long chain of chains leads up to your personalized collection: designers craft molds for cars, tools, creatures, buildings and states of the Union; Manufacturers pour, stamp, cut, enamel and polish hot metal. Distributors pin the charms to little priced cards and wholesale them out to gift shops in foreign cities, national parks, malls and jewelers’ shops. And you simply live your life – possessed here and there by a deep, organic need to measure your accomplishment with some tiny shape that you pinch onto the growing strand of icons. Juxtapositions occur unbidden, bat and pencil sharpener, race car and Houses of Parliament, adding machine and scuba diver – the hidden semiotics of trinkets spoken by your heavy metal biography.

treat treat ‘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”>The only English amid the florid Kanji on the iridescent-lime-green Ziploc foil-plastic container says:

“SUGAR CANDY
KASUGAI (KONPEITO)
Ingredients     SUGAR LAC COLOR FD&C YELLOW NO.5 (TARTRAZINE), YELLOW NO.6 (SUNSET YELLOW FCF) BLUE NO. 1 BRILLIANT BLUE FCF. DISTRIBUTED BY PAXS GARDENA, CA 90248 PRODUCT OF JAPAN”
Then there’s the usual nutritional table: 7 of them weigh 28 grams and contain 110 calories, and 0g of total fat, sat. fat, cholest., sodium, fiber and protein, and 27g of sugar including 28g. of carbs, or 9% of the daily values based on a 2000-calorie diet.” These are about the size of your fingertips, like tiny naval mines cast in solid sugar.
click ‘popup’, viagra 60mg ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>I’ve never bought into the new-Lego ethos – the sort of Harry-Potter-diorama-with-instructions-sheet folderol that passes as a creative plaything these days. I grew up with a sackful of green plates and simple 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x3s, 2x4s and 2x8s in nothing more elaborate than black, white, red and blue. I think we had one set of wheels. But we built airships, houses, fortresses and monsters out of ’em, and they were good enough for us. (Tramps off, stage left, muttering and glowering behind his bifocals.) Anyway, we’ve been buying odd lots of Lego off of eBay – the sort of weird, grab-baggy assortments that make for some bizarre constructs and brilliant flights of fancy in the hands of a 2½-year-old and a 4½-year-old. My wife built me this little battalion one night. I don’t know where they’re going, but they’re obviously loaded for bear.

cialis 40mg approved ‘popup’, stuff mind ‘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”>Pixelblocks are the toy equivalent of pruno, the alcoholic beverage inmates brew under their prison beds from raisins or surplus sugar: They’re fun, intoxicating and in the end, something of a headache. Imagine Lego blocks were divisible – and assemblable – not the multi-cell 2×4 or 4×12 kind sold now, but true single-celled plastic organisms capable of breeding by accretion. Imagine they came in psychedelic transparent colors, and could be mated not only peg-to-hole, but also slid together side by side, in reverse mitosis. You could manufacture entire pixel art cities in three actual dimensions, bring your Zaxxon world to life. But then you realize that it takes a long time to build a world one pixel at a time, and your ambitions and enthusiasm run afoul of your patience and the teensy little grooves you’re supposed to use to build with them but can never seem to line up correctly so you’re often separating misaligned and jammed-together blocks with your teeth. But you’ve got boxes and boxes of them, and you’re going to by-god make something cool. And it winds up the size of a baby’s fist, but at least pleasing in its own right. And now that you’ve done it, you’ll never drink pruno again until you’ve been really dry for a really long time. Pixelblocks are like that.
website ‘popup’, ed ‘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”>Before any lens, a performance takes shape the instant the shutter is opened. It lasts a few milliseconds, so quickly as to not exactly “happen” at all and then the camera shuts its one good eye, sinking into blissful ignorance of what it has witnessed, the actions, people, places and things lurking inside the dark box until you release them for capture in silver iodide, complex dyes or 1/0 bits. Your camera is a portable proscenium – whatever transpires within that bright rectangle is art, or drama, history or evidence, love or crap. The picture is whatever you say it is – until someone else looks at it, and then the the reviews come in, the script is scrapped in favor of new interpretations, and your quicksilver vision goes into the tall, moldering, mountainous stack with the rest of the already-consumed media the human race has made.

Made by Kodak and marketed in the U.S. from 1950 to 1961, the Brownie Hawkeye feels like the iPod of its day. Cubical, yet streamlined all over, its fluted surfaces invite your grip, a vinyl handle surges up out of its body, and a screw-on bulb-flash unit with a fat parabolic reflector blooms on its lapel. This is a damn simple camera – point-and-shoot, with single meniscus lens boasting a focus range of 6′ to infinity. You can try to re-roll 120 film onto Kodak’s proprietary and obsolete 620 reels, and if you succeed and you shoot something slow like Plus X, you can get wonderful low-contrast BnW images, square and rustic. It is not a camera for grand moments, nor surreptitious bursts of creative blood. It is a camera for standing in front of a thing or a person, and pressing the square, grey button to help you remember.
advice ‘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 lonely shepherd am I, trudging across my mountain’s terraced emerald flank. The sheep reek. It is raining. Consuela wants to shear them tomorrow. This rain will go on forever and the shears will stick and slip and the children will quarrel if they spend another day indoors. The rain grows heavier and the two youngest rams nip and butt heads. Clouds the color of intestines. I finger this little toy on the neck-cord, give it a tug. The dog yaps and nips. The herd turns and surges uphill out of the corral. The rain falls and falls and falls.

This ancient, much-copied design came from some jungle-themed Disneyland gift shop. At $7, it was a cheap, if overpriced addition to our music crate. It is quite loud and, played correctly, sweet.
tadalafil ‘popup’, pharm ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>What drives you to render your gods in lost-wax process brass? Faith? Profits? Tradition? Hunger? When the wholesaler offers you but a rupee or two apiece for a thousand of them, and you think of the laborious work pouring the wax, the splatter-burns on your fingers and toes from hot brass, of the hacking cough you’ve had for 20 years caused by burnoff of impurities in the metal, do you haggle? Refuse? Strike him? When you remember that your teacher told you 19 years ago that the ones you allow the wholesaler to export are stacked in upperclass gift shops in upperclass American and European cities and sold for enough money each to feed your family for a week, do you shrug? Spit? Smile? Pray? And is there a special prayer each time you cast your preferred god? Is it Vishnu? Krishna? Shiva? Ganesha? Ah. The brass is hot enough now. Back to work.
ask ‘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”>This flew out of the armory of MegaMan X, who in turn sprang from MegaMan X the anime series, which spawned MegaMan X the game, MegaMan X the obsessive image archive. Were this not the age of instant information retrieval, I could honestly say that I do not know who MegaMan X is. Instead, I must say that I’m wilfully ignoring him in favor of other obsessions. But his bomb remains.
pills ‘popup’, store ‘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 the silicon age, few first-world nations turn out mechanical watches anymore. Thick, graceless, manly, stiffly assembled, it bears the shield-and-dagger logo and Cyrillic characters of the KGB, the former Soviet Union security agency. If this were genuine, it might explain help explain why we won the cold war: advancing the date means twirling the hands twice around the dial for every single day (no simple click function here); the bezel spins in both directions – meaning certain doom to anyone relying on it as a diving watch; and though it is but a few years old, the chrome is already peeling off. Instead it is likely a factory-made trinket, offloaded to eastern European souvenir shops and sold at a heavy markup. My wife brought it back for me from Prague. It keeps excellent time, when wound.
sales ‘popup’, case ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Nevada’s Black Rock Desert is a trackless waste – 400 square miles of parched alkali lake basin undisturbed most of the time by anything but flies and the occasional land sailor or land-speed monster. Without a good compass, you could could get the kind of hopelessly lost that leaves McTeague wandering mad with blood on his hands through Death Valley at the end of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. That’s why we took about three or four of them with us to Burning Man the first of the three years we went (accounts and photos are here and here for anyone not yet completely saturated with BM lore. Long ago, before festival organizers kowtowed to BLM’s demands and shoved the whole festival up at the west end of the playa, you could get in your car and just drive in any direction you cared to. We piled in, loading up with oil-can-sized Fosters’ and cigars and the like, cranking up the air conditioning against the 104-degree heat and just cruising – 4 miles, veer left, 200 feet, swerve right, 2 miles more, drive in a giant circle – twice, because you can. The miracle of the earth’s magnetism kept paranoia from swallowing us as we became completely detached from our own navigational senses – floating around this vast, dusty white plain at 60 miles per hour, untethered and alone. It was as close to exploring the surface of another planet as any of us have ever come – to date. A good compass can save your life, your ship, your mission. This is not necessarily a good compass, but as good as any so long as you keep it away from other metal objects. Here’s how it works.
what is ed ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500, prostate height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Ornithorhynchus anatinus is the poster child for creationism. How in the name of Dodo could such a freak result from natural selection? Platypi hatch from eggs, all fur, claws, webbed feet, daffy duck bill and (on the females, anyway) mammary glands. Poison found in the foot spurs of male platypi is among the most excruciating toxins known to man – and may also be the key to treatment for common pain. Think about all that, packed in miniature, into a 2.25-inch-long molded-plastic toy with malevolent, red eyes.

cialis 40mg approved ‘popup’, stuff mind ‘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”>Pixelblocks are the toy equivalent of pruno, the alcoholic beverage inmates brew under their prison beds from raisins or surplus sugar: They’re fun, intoxicating and in the end, something of a headache. Imagine Lego blocks were divisible – and assemblable – not the multi-cell 2×4 or 4×12 kind sold now, but true single-celled plastic organisms capable of breeding by accretion. Imagine they came in psychedelic transparent colors, and could be mated not only peg-to-hole, but also slid together side by side, in reverse mitosis. You could manufacture entire pixel art cities in three actual dimensions, bring your Zaxxon world to life. But then you realize that it takes a long time to build a world one pixel at a time, and your ambitions and enthusiasm run afoul of your patience and the teensy little grooves you’re supposed to use to build with them but can never seem to line up correctly so you’re often separating misaligned and jammed-together blocks with your teeth. But you’ve got boxes and boxes of them, and you’re going to by-god make something cool. And it winds up the size of a baby’s fist, but at least pleasing in its own right. And now that you’ve done it, you’ll never drink pruno again until you’ve been really dry for a really long time. Pixelblocks are like that.
website ‘popup’, ed ‘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”>Before any lens, a performance takes shape the instant the shutter is opened. It lasts a few milliseconds, so quickly as to not exactly “happen” at all and then the camera shuts its one good eye, sinking into blissful ignorance of what it has witnessed, the actions, people, places and things lurking inside the dark box until you release them for capture in silver iodide, complex dyes or 1/0 bits. Your camera is a portable proscenium – whatever transpires within that bright rectangle is art, or drama, history or evidence, love or crap. The picture is whatever you say it is – until someone else looks at it, and then the the reviews come in, the script is scrapped in favor of new interpretations, and your quicksilver vision goes into the tall, moldering, mountainous stack with the rest of the already-consumed media the human race has made.

Made by Kodak and marketed in the U.S. from 1950 to 1961, the Brownie Hawkeye feels like the iPod of its day. Cubical, yet streamlined all over, its fluted surfaces invite your grip, a vinyl handle surges up out of its body, and a screw-on bulb-flash unit with a fat parabolic reflector blooms on its lapel. This is a damn simple camera – point-and-shoot, with single meniscus lens boasting a focus range of 6′ to infinity. You can try to re-roll 120 film onto Kodak’s proprietary and obsolete 620 reels, and if you succeed and you shoot something slow like Plus X, you can get wonderful low-contrast BnW images, square and rustic. It is not a camera for grand moments, nor surreptitious bursts of creative blood. It is a camera for standing in front of a thing or a person, and pressing the square, grey button to help you remember.
advice ‘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 lonely shepherd am I, trudging across my mountain’s terraced emerald flank. The sheep reek. It is raining. Consuela wants to shear them tomorrow. This rain will go on forever and the shears will stick and slip and the children will quarrel if they spend another day indoors. The rain grows heavier and the two youngest rams nip and butt heads. Clouds the color of intestines. I finger this little toy on the neck-cord, give it a tug. The dog yaps and nips. The herd turns and surges uphill out of the corral. The rain falls and falls and falls.

This ancient, much-copied design came from some jungle-themed Disneyland gift shop. At $7, it was a cheap, if overpriced addition to our music crate. It is quite loud and, played correctly, sweet.
tadalafil ‘popup’, pharm ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>What drives you to render your gods in lost-wax process brass? Faith? Profits? Tradition? Hunger? When the wholesaler offers you but a rupee or two apiece for a thousand of them, and you think of the laborious work pouring the wax, the splatter-burns on your fingers and toes from hot brass, of the hacking cough you’ve had for 20 years caused by burnoff of impurities in the metal, do you haggle? Refuse? Strike him? When you remember that your teacher told you 19 years ago that the ones you allow the wholesaler to export are stacked in upperclass gift shops in upperclass American and European cities and sold for enough money each to feed your family for a week, do you shrug? Spit? Smile? Pray? And is there a special prayer each time you cast your preferred god? Is it Vishnu? Krishna? Shiva? Ganesha? Ah. The brass is hot enough now. Back to work.

pills price ‘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”>I spent too many of my addled high school and college years staring at Roger Dean paintings. Staring at these, you could get lost in reveries of microscopic subway networks, elven mineshafts, fossilized toothpaste. You want to figure out what made them, and why they live in the tide pools of Malibu. They are an invitation to wonder.
tadalafil ‘popup’, medications ‘width=500, more about height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Faith is an odd, powerful force – a combination of yearning and belief in the unbelievable. Prayer cards are little faith amplifiers, allowing you (if you believe) to draw on the faith of dead saints whose faith was more powerful, and to ask for them to help. They’re tools for bootstrapping yourself to grace with more effective prayer. Here’s what you’re supposed to say to St. Francis Xavier (namesake of my Catholic high school) when you want something in the world:

Prayer of Saint Francis Xavier (attributed to Fr. Marcello Mastrilli, S.J (17th cc.)

Most amiable and most loving Saint Francis Xavier, in union with thee I reverently adore the Divine Majesty. I rejoice exceedingly on account of the marvelous gifts which God bestowed upon thee. I thank God for the special graces He gave thee during thy life on earth and for the great glory that came to thee after thy death. I implore thee to obtain for me, through thy powerful intercession, the greatest of all blessings – that of living and dying in the state of grace. I also beg of thee to secure for me the special favor I ask. In asking this favor I am fully resigned to the Divine Will. I pray and desire only to obtain that which is most conducive to the greater glory of God and the greater good of my soul.

Feast Day: December 3.

And maybe that’s one of the problems I’ve had with organized religion – people believe that God can change their lives on earth. I’m cynical enough to believe in an observant God rather than an interventionist deity. (S)He went to all the trouble to set this huge, complex organism in motion, and sat back to watch. You’re on your own in the world, blessed with the family and friends you deserve, and you have to make the best of them and everything else. A little four-color, gilt-edged card of a long-dead saint waving a cross around may be an anchor of faith for some folks, but it’s just an artifact to me.

nurse capsule ‘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”>This all began as a way of codifying one of my most organic impulses. To hold a thing that is small, has some weight and purpose in the world is to own it, whether it takes up space in my drawer or just in my mind. I have acquired these 100 (so far) objects as a way of fulfilling that need quickly – in the mercurial snatch-it-now breath of the moment I first picked them up – and tried to make sense of them as sort of a test. I don’t know if I have succeeded. I did it to see if I could do it, to see if it would amount to anything. It’s become popular, thanks to Mark at BoingBoing. It has invigorated my drive to write and shoot again, though I’m not sure if it has any deeper meaning. At the very least, I have completed the traditional Japanese artist’s exercise of creating 100 demons in tribute to the Buddhist challenge of defeating 100 demons in a lifetime. If you have followed HLO at all, you have my humblest thanks, and if you want to introduce a friend to it, this entry is as good a place as any to start. In gratitude, I can only offer you this chunk of chain, which I’ve fiddled with for years at my desk. It is considered a deadly weapon, yet the strength, weight, intricacy and integrity of its 6-piece links and the unholy pressure used to force them together as one are taken for granted. You can twirl it like a watchman’s keychain, whip it through the air like a bullroarer, or crush ice in a dishcloth with it when your highball gets low. Put it around your neck and go punk. Dip it in paint and make prints. Hook it up to any number of drive systems and it will work flawlessly, without maintenance, for thousands of hours without a failure. There are few archetypally perfect machines left to invent in the world. This was one of them.
pharm ‘popup’, physician ‘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”>Fossil tech, the earbone of a giant. Fifty years ago, thousands of operators huddled at thousands of switchboards, plugging and unplugging calls from millions of jacks at the Bell Telephone Company nearest you. The nationwide American Telephone and Telegraph conglomerate was as close as anyone had come to building a nationwide monopoly without inviting antitrust litigation. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that lawsuits from a put-upon public finally brought down mighty Ma Bell and splintered her like an enormous, brittle tree, her branches taking wild, chaotic root in the hundreds of telcos that have sprung up since. Chances are, if you called information back then, the operator was talking on one of these. Like everything else Bell made, it is extremely durable and thanks to the (now missing) wire headstrap, reasonably comfortable. My first six years as a newspaper reporter, I was on this stupid macho head trip, convinced that only obit writers and women wore headsets for interviews, real reporters crunched the phone ‘twixt shoulder and ear while typing and drawling from the side of their mouths, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Is that riiiight.” After a lovely bout of crippling neck spasms and trips to the chiropractor, I relented, and began using one of these while at the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to a web site maintained by an antique phone phanatic, this is a telephone supervisor’s headset, model 52BW. It’s fitted with an HC3 receiver, an N1 transmitter, an L4AH cord with a 289B plug, and 29A connecting block. I used it for years, cutting the huge brass double-pronged cord off and splicing in a standard 4-pole modular phone plug so I could use it on the LA Times’ Rolm PBX system (if memory serves) but eventually they phased it out and began using phones with digital jacks that took only shitty Plantronics headsets made of plastic, with staticky, short-prone plugs. I can’t tell you how many interviews I conducted through this thing. But I did stack up every single clipping I ever wrote, and the stack of tiny shreds of newsprint is close to a foot thick.
remedy ‘popup’, find ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Squirt guns were forbidden in 6th grade. It didn’t stop me from collecting them. I had two favorites – the “secret” gun shaped like brass knuckles cast in plastic that was army-man green (you could make it all the more secret by snapping off the knuckleguard so that the only thing visible was the nozzle peeking up out of your fist); and the “sneaky” model, whcih had a little pivot wheel on the business end that you turned at a 90-degree angle so you could look like you were innocently aiming the gun away from someone until you soaked them point-blank. This month is birthday season among our kid friends, which means an endless parade of goodie-bags into the house, bearing trinkets, gadgets and crap. This one has teeth.
search ‘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”> Chrome-plating came into vogue as a protective measure, rust-blocker, bulwark against time. Before long, it was appropriated as street armor, fetishized as erotic surface and totemic protection, codified as evil and good and dubbed bling. It is also extremely toxic. Some of the best HLOs are all of the above. This chromed mirror’s head pivots on a double-ball joint and telescopes to 36 inches to extend your view beneath the engine block where you just dropped that vital hexbolt for the fifth time on your fourth attempt to insert it through the goddamned water pump into the motherfucking block just beyond the very edge of your (*SHIT!!!!*) fingertip reach. It also collapses to fit into a coveralls pocket by means of its handy clip.
medical ‘popup’, case ‘width=500, for sale height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Utter destruction and evil in the palm of your hand. What sets this apart from the vast majority of Star Wars toys are its weight and construction. Instead of injection-molded plastic, Kenner cast this thing in hemispheres of pot-metal. The halves are connected through the polar axis via an axle fitted with internal cogs to a fluorescent green disc behind the business end (ray projector, hellmouth, whatever you care to call it). When you turn the hemispheres, the disc spins and flickers, as if it is powering up to wreak tiny havoc on any baseballs or oranges that might be hovering in the cosmic vicinity. It is quite heavy.
viagra ‘popup’, view ‘width=500, health height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>McDonald’s gave these out with Happy Meals. The monsters were unremarkable – nicely built and faithful representations of the Monsters, Inc. characters. The doors, however, carry significant symbolic weight. You could stare into one of them for hours over your espresso and clove cigarettes, contemplating negative space, alternate universes, the depths of the human soul, and the crushing potential of every future second of your life. The second you’re wasting reading this. The one that follows your decision to shut off the computer and go outside. The next second after that. And the next.
medications ‘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”>This is made of the very thing it represents. This represents the very thing of which it is made. Symbolic cannibalism, the Ourobouros myth made wood. Just as pop will eat itself so too does meaning applied to something rob it of the potential for meaning something greater. Perhaps someone at the wooden trainset factory cut this by hand from a sheet of half-inch pine with a coping saw, sanded it smooth, hand-stained it and painted it with three coats of clear lacquer. Maybe it was die-stamped and triple-dipped by machine. No matter. It’s just a tree. And it’s just a “tree.” And it’s “just a tree.”
try ‘popup’, this web ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>I was a theater geek in college. Too generally shy (and probably untalented) to translate my run of lead performances in high school productions of “Sound of Music” and “Anything Goes” into acid-tinged audition-winning roles in “Tooth of Crime” and “Romeo and Juliet” against the Machiavellian conniving of pre-professional college-age actors, I contented myself with building sets and rigging lights. My favorite place was the grid – the steel grated rigging floor some 40 feet above the stage, where you used a crescent wrench to bolt bulky, high-wattage arc-lit instruments to pipes, and plug in their fat connectors to the 220-volt control circuits. Powerful, heavy, they vomited light so blindingly hot that you had to tame it with colored gels, barn doors, rheostats and soft focus. I always thought it would be fun to own a few, kept on low power to read by, but they’re too huge and costly. A few months ago, I stumbled across this miniaturized marvel at Ikea – a tiny Lekos projector – a powerful halogen lamp with a pair of rails screwed into its snout. It comes with four dichroic glass filters, a set of punched-aluminum gobos (patterns for projecting silhouettes), a few chunks of frosted glass for texture, and a lovely little convex lens – so that you can shoot a blue moose, red windows or an absinthe-green op-art pattern 10 feet high onto your back wall at night – for less than 40 bucks. I almost bought two.
hospital ‘popup’, price ‘width=500,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 rubber ghoul‘s yang, ego to the ghoul’s id, this little fellow is inscrutable. Perched on his kidney-shaped patch of street, he gestures in raptorous (no, not the like the upcoming Big Christian Faith Jump, but predatory and mantis-like) anticipation, raving like a tent preacher, sleeves cuffed to his biceps and imparting the Lord’s perennial Exhortations to Heal. It’s impossible to tell what world he came from, but he takes on a tremendous amount of weight and might when paired with the rubber ghoul. Their postures are eerily identical.

nurse capsule ‘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”>This all began as a way of codifying one of my most organic impulses. To hold a thing that is small, has some weight and purpose in the world is to own it, whether it takes up space in my drawer or just in my mind. I have acquired these 100 (so far) objects as a way of fulfilling that need quickly – in the mercurial snatch-it-now breath of the moment I first picked them up – and tried to make sense of them as sort of a test. I don’t know if I have succeeded. I did it to see if I could do it, to see if it would amount to anything. It’s become popular, thanks to Mark at BoingBoing. It has invigorated my drive to write and shoot again, though I’m not sure if it has any deeper meaning. At the very least, I have completed the traditional Japanese artist’s exercise of creating 100 demons in tribute to the Buddhist challenge of defeating 100 demons in a lifetime. If you have followed HLO at all, you have my humblest thanks, and if you want to introduce a friend to it, this entry is as good a place as any to start. In gratitude, I can only offer you this chunk of chain, which I’ve fiddled with for years at my desk. It is considered a deadly weapon, yet the strength, weight, intricacy and integrity of its 6-piece links and the unholy pressure used to force them together as one are taken for granted. You can twirl it like a watchman’s keychain, whip it through the air like a bullroarer, or crush ice in a dishcloth with it when your highball gets low. Put it around your neck and go punk. Dip it in paint and make prints. Hook it up to any number of drive systems and it will work flawlessly, without maintenance, for thousands of hours without a failure. There are few archetypally perfect machines left to invent in the world. This was one of them.
pharm ‘popup’, physician ‘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”>Fossil tech, the earbone of a giant. Fifty years ago, thousands of operators huddled at thousands of switchboards, plugging and unplugging calls from millions of jacks at the Bell Telephone Company nearest you. The nationwide American Telephone and Telegraph conglomerate was as close as anyone had come to building a nationwide monopoly without inviting antitrust litigation. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that lawsuits from a put-upon public finally brought down mighty Ma Bell and splintered her like an enormous, brittle tree, her branches taking wild, chaotic root in the hundreds of telcos that have sprung up since. Chances are, if you called information back then, the operator was talking on one of these. Like everything else Bell made, it is extremely durable and thanks to the (now missing) wire headstrap, reasonably comfortable. My first six years as a newspaper reporter, I was on this stupid macho head trip, convinced that only obit writers and women wore headsets for interviews, real reporters crunched the phone ‘twixt shoulder and ear while typing and drawling from the side of their mouths, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Is that riiiight.” After a lovely bout of crippling neck spasms and trips to the chiropractor, I relented, and began using one of these while at the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to a web site maintained by an antique phone phanatic, this is a telephone supervisor’s headset, model 52BW. It’s fitted with an HC3 receiver, an N1 transmitter, an L4AH cord with a 289B plug, and 29A connecting block. I used it for years, cutting the huge brass double-pronged cord off and splicing in a standard 4-pole modular phone plug so I could use it on the LA Times’ Rolm PBX system (if memory serves) but eventually they phased it out and began using phones with digital jacks that took only shitty Plantronics headsets made of plastic, with staticky, short-prone plugs. I can’t tell you how many interviews I conducted through this thing. But I did stack up every single clipping I ever wrote, and the stack of tiny shreds of newsprint is close to a foot thick.
remedy ‘popup’, find ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Squirt guns were forbidden in 6th grade. It didn’t stop me from collecting them. I had two favorites – the “secret” gun shaped like brass knuckles cast in plastic that was army-man green (you could make it all the more secret by snapping off the knuckleguard so that the only thing visible was the nozzle peeking up out of your fist); and the “sneaky” model, whcih had a little pivot wheel on the business end that you turned at a 90-degree angle so you could look like you were innocently aiming the gun away from someone until you soaked them point-blank. This month is birthday season among our kid friends, which means an endless parade of goodie-bags into the house, bearing trinkets, gadgets and crap. This one has teeth.
search ‘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”> Chrome-plating came into vogue as a protective measure, rust-blocker, bulwark against time. Before long, it was appropriated as street armor, fetishized as erotic surface and totemic protection, codified as evil and good and dubbed bling. It is also extremely toxic. Some of the best HLOs are all of the above. This chromed mirror’s head pivots on a double-ball joint and telescopes to 36 inches to extend your view beneath the engine block where you just dropped that vital hexbolt for the fifth time on your fourth attempt to insert it through the goddamned water pump into the motherfucking block just beyond the very edge of your (*SHIT!!!!*) fingertip reach. It also collapses to fit into a coveralls pocket by means of its handy clip.
medical ‘popup’, case ‘width=500, for sale height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Utter destruction and evil in the palm of your hand. What sets this apart from the vast majority of Star Wars toys are its weight and construction. Instead of injection-molded plastic, Kenner cast this thing in hemispheres of pot-metal. The halves are connected through the polar axis via an axle fitted with internal cogs to a fluorescent green disc behind the business end (ray projector, hellmouth, whatever you care to call it). When you turn the hemispheres, the disc spins and flickers, as if it is powering up to wreak tiny havoc on any baseballs or oranges that might be hovering in the cosmic vicinity. It is quite heavy.
viagra ‘popup’, view ‘width=500, health height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>McDonald’s gave these out with Happy Meals. The monsters were unremarkable – nicely built and faithful representations of the Monsters, Inc. characters. The doors, however, carry significant symbolic weight. You could stare into one of them for hours over your espresso and clove cigarettes, contemplating negative space, alternate universes, the depths of the human soul, and the crushing potential of every future second of your life. The second you’re wasting reading this. The one that follows your decision to shut off the computer and go outside. The next second after that. And the next.
medications ‘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”>This is made of the very thing it represents. This represents the very thing of which it is made. Symbolic cannibalism, the Ourobouros myth made wood. Just as pop will eat itself so too does meaning applied to something rob it of the potential for meaning something greater. Perhaps someone at the wooden trainset factory cut this by hand from a sheet of half-inch pine with a coping saw, sanded it smooth, hand-stained it and painted it with three coats of clear lacquer. Maybe it was die-stamped and triple-dipped by machine. No matter. It’s just a tree. And it’s just a “tree.” And it’s “just a tree.”

nurse capsule ‘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”>This all began as a way of codifying one of my most organic impulses. To hold a thing that is small, has some weight and purpose in the world is to own it, whether it takes up space in my drawer or just in my mind. I have acquired these 100 (so far) objects as a way of fulfilling that need quickly – in the mercurial snatch-it-now breath of the moment I first picked them up – and tried to make sense of them as sort of a test. I don’t know if I have succeeded. I did it to see if I could do it, to see if it would amount to anything. It’s become popular, thanks to Mark at BoingBoing. It has invigorated my drive to write and shoot again, though I’m not sure if it has any deeper meaning. At the very least, I have completed the traditional Japanese artist’s exercise of creating 100 demons in tribute to the Buddhist challenge of defeating 100 demons in a lifetime. If you have followed HLO at all, you have my humblest thanks, and if you want to introduce a friend to it, this entry is as good a place as any to start. In gratitude, I can only offer you this chunk of chain, which I’ve fiddled with for years at my desk. It is considered a deadly weapon, yet the strength, weight, intricacy and integrity of its 6-piece links and the unholy pressure used to force them together as one are taken for granted. You can twirl it like a watchman’s keychain, whip it through the air like a bullroarer, or crush ice in a dishcloth with it when your highball gets low. Put it around your neck and go punk. Dip it in paint and make prints. Hook it up to any number of drive systems and it will work flawlessly, without maintenance, for thousands of hours without a failure. There are few archetypally perfect machines left to invent in the world. This was one of them.
pharm ‘popup’, physician ‘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”>Fossil tech, the earbone of a giant. Fifty years ago, thousands of operators huddled at thousands of switchboards, plugging and unplugging calls from millions of jacks at the Bell Telephone Company nearest you. The nationwide American Telephone and Telegraph conglomerate was as close as anyone had come to building a nationwide monopoly without inviting antitrust litigation. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that lawsuits from a put-upon public finally brought down mighty Ma Bell and splintered her like an enormous, brittle tree, her branches taking wild, chaotic root in the hundreds of telcos that have sprung up since. Chances are, if you called information back then, the operator was talking on one of these. Like everything else Bell made, it is extremely durable and thanks to the (now missing) wire headstrap, reasonably comfortable. My first six years as a newspaper reporter, I was on this stupid macho head trip, convinced that only obit writers and women wore headsets for interviews, real reporters crunched the phone ‘twixt shoulder and ear while typing and drawling from the side of their mouths, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Is that riiiight.” After a lovely bout of crippling neck spasms and trips to the chiropractor, I relented, and began using one of these while at the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to a web site maintained by an antique phone phanatic, this is a telephone supervisor’s headset, model 52BW. It’s fitted with an HC3 receiver, an N1 transmitter, an L4AH cord with a 289B plug, and 29A connecting block. I used it for years, cutting the huge brass double-pronged cord off and splicing in a standard 4-pole modular phone plug so I could use it on the LA Times’ Rolm PBX system (if memory serves) but eventually they phased it out and began using phones with digital jacks that took only shitty Plantronics headsets made of plastic, with staticky, short-prone plugs. I can’t tell you how many interviews I conducted through this thing. But I did stack up every single clipping I ever wrote, and the stack of tiny shreds of newsprint is close to a foot thick.
remedy ‘popup’, find ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Squirt guns were forbidden in 6th grade. It didn’t stop me from collecting them. I had two favorites – the “secret” gun shaped like brass knuckles cast in plastic that was army-man green (you could make it all the more secret by snapping off the knuckleguard so that the only thing visible was the nozzle peeking up out of your fist); and the “sneaky” model, whcih had a little pivot wheel on the business end that you turned at a 90-degree angle so you could look like you were innocently aiming the gun away from someone until you soaked them point-blank. This month is birthday season among our kid friends, which means an endless parade of goodie-bags into the house, bearing trinkets, gadgets and crap. This one has teeth.
search ‘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”> Chrome-plating came into vogue as a protective measure, rust-blocker, bulwark against time. Before long, it was appropriated as street armor, fetishized as erotic surface and totemic protection, codified as evil and good and dubbed bling. It is also extremely toxic. Some of the best HLOs are all of the above. This chromed mirror’s head pivots on a double-ball joint and telescopes to 36 inches to extend your view beneath the engine block where you just dropped that vital hexbolt for the fifth time on your fourth attempt to insert it through the goddamned water pump into the motherfucking block just beyond the very edge of your (*SHIT!!!!*) fingertip reach. It also collapses to fit into a coveralls pocket by means of its handy clip.
medical ‘popup’, case ‘width=500, for sale height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Utter destruction and evil in the palm of your hand. What sets this apart from the vast majority of Star Wars toys are its weight and construction. Instead of injection-molded plastic, Kenner cast this thing in hemispheres of pot-metal. The halves are connected through the polar axis via an axle fitted with internal cogs to a fluorescent green disc behind the business end (ray projector, hellmouth, whatever you care to call it). When you turn the hemispheres, the disc spins and flickers, as if it is powering up to wreak tiny havoc on any baseballs or oranges that might be hovering in the cosmic vicinity. It is quite heavy.
viagra ‘popup’, view ‘width=500, health height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>McDonald’s gave these out with Happy Meals. The monsters were unremarkable – nicely built and faithful representations of the Monsters, Inc. characters. The doors, however, carry significant symbolic weight. You could stare into one of them for hours over your espresso and clove cigarettes, contemplating negative space, alternate universes, the depths of the human soul, and the crushing potential of every future second of your life. The second you’re wasting reading this. The one that follows your decision to shut off the computer and go outside. The next second after that. And the next.

here decease ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘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 White Heat, they crawl into an empty one of these to pull off the climactic heist of an oil refinery. Rendered at something like 1/128th scale in stamped potmetal, with hard rubber tyres on pop-rivet axles, it reads beefier, bulkier, more heavy with threat and explosive power. Paint failure of this magnitude would be staggering at full-scale, as would the just-painted, bright yellow toy that must have rolled off the line 40 or 50 years ago. Dinky perhaps only in the eyes of the coldly objective.
cheapest ‘popup’, what is ed ‘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’s another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It’s difficult to say how many of these I’ve owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master’s new Combo Locker service. I might then have owned only one, and the lock you see here would be more nobly dinged and weathered.
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”>Immense in the imagination, the Masaka wages horrific battle in the withering fire of plasma cannons and neutron batteries. Eight inches high In life, it began as a plastic model kit, cut, glued and fitted together with obsessive care. The paint went on in the right color – but under dim overhead lights – the wrong consistency, so that the original ice-blue color peeks through. The claws grasp and menace from powerful shoulders bunched beneath the turret-head carrying untold power and a single, baleful red eye.
stuff ‘popup’, shop ‘width=500, approved height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The Lomographic Society did a very smart thing: A little clique of Viennese photographers latched onto the Russian-made Lomo rangefinder camera in 1992 and – shooting wild, free and from the hip – turned its light leaking, color-saturating, vignette-prone mechanism into a creative movement. They arranged to import and distribute the cameras to the West. They set up web sites to build enthusiasm for (and purchases of) the camera. They began publishing the quirky photos it produced – and empowering others to self-publish to the Lomo site. They began importing other cameras and photography products (including Soviet surplus night-vision scopes) and at some point, they hooked me with this slick little device. It shoots four sequential panoramic pictures onto a single frame of 35mm film – allowing you to capture action sequences that are either 2/10ths of a second, or 2 seconds long. The rewind mechanism is a pull-cord that you can yank with your teeth while cruising around taking portraits of fellow cyclists. If I can ever grab the time, I’ll scan some of them and publish a few here. Even without the evidence, you can admire the slick design ethos at work – the cowled quartet of lenses, the pearlescent plastic. I love this device.
cheap ‘popup’, sales ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them – and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker’s curse. I can stop any time I want.
visit this site ‘popup’, advice ‘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 had a homemade corduroy sack full of Legos when I was a kid, it weighed maybe four or five pounds. A couple of huge green base plates, untold numbers of plain, rectangular 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x6s and 2x8s in red, green, black, yellow, white. There were three or four precious blues, and perhaps two clear 1x2s that served as the windows around which the fantasy would accrete – race car, space ship, dungeon, castle keep. No guys, no chrome, no pivoting pieces (maybe an axle and some wheels). Just blocks. Now there are Mars vehicles and cow towns and pivoting 22-wheeled construction cranes and undersea pirate adventures with little peg-legged guys and semi trucks that transform into giant robots that shoot rockets and fly around with little tiny transformer robots in their bellies.

Aahh, crap. Kids.
decease ‘popup’, order ‘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 thick, fresh block of “Kiss My Face,” left at the bottom of a tiny back-bathroom sink. Water. Leaking tap. Time. Minutes. Ounces. Eight hours. Gallons. All droplets. Unceasing. Inexorable. Heavy. Ergo, this freak. I could disappear into its igneous micro-landscape, lost among barren knolls reeking of an alien smell. Corrosive winds howl through the grand arch they carved. This is an evil place. Something bad happened here once. And will once again. Look closer. Try not to blink. It’s a pulp fiction landscape, frozen in evolution from lurid melodrama to bleak existential tragedy, halfway between the sterile planes of its original form and utter dissolution and erasure. Something could live there. Something small, dark and ravenous.
more about ‘popup’, pharmacy ‘width=500, diagnosis height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>About four years ago, Ralphs Supermarkets started giving these away, blister-packing them in with their new brand of Red Cell alkaline batteries. Everything I own that beeps, records, shoots or noodles eats AAs for breakfast. The Red Cells were mere snacks for the ravenous herd of devices, which quickly devoured them before emitting dissatisfied little electronic burps and then playing dead until I fed them more. Before long, I had collected the entire set of stock cars and moved on to rechargeable batteries.. They’re *not* Hot Wheels, but have a rumbling authenticity about them, from their tiny window-mounted debris nets and internal rollcages to the logo’ed racing slicks and sponsor confetti on the quarter panels. They look pretty hot when all five park together.
pill ‘popup’, and ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>At some point during my climb out of the smoking dot-bomb crater, I built myself a xylophone to pass the time between job interviews that never came. I followed general instructions found here. Not for this toy, but a heavy big object – a fully functional, floor-standing 12-key xylophone weighing more than 80 pounds. It’s crude: a finish-plywood frame/soundbox and fitted with keys (chromatic scale in C) that I cut out of bar-stock aluminum. I tuned it with a carbide wheel, grinding metal off the backsides of the keys and then thwacking them to check their pitch against a cheap digital guitar tuner. I mounted it on a pair of old cast-iron sewing machine legs I had kicking around, and now it sits in the corner of the dining room where I whack it in pensive moments in my tone-deaf fashion, and the kids and their friends plink on it with various implements any time they can get their hands on it. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space. The fun they got out of that and a big tubano drum we’ve had for a while set me off in a whirlwind binge of gathering inexpensive, easy-to-play instruments, and every now and then we have all-ages noise recitals. Someone donated this Auris xylophone to the school rummage sale, and I snatched it up for, like, a buck. It had been dropped a lot. Gouges and scratches mar the crisp little brass keys, the lowest C only 4.5 inches long, but the soft-pine frame is true and the tone clean. It still rings prettily when struck with a pencil or a stick. PLAY SAMPLE (Quicktime)
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”>When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too – he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It’s one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child’s toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it’s just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I’m taking nominations on its name.
page ‘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”>Mussolini famously said, “Character is what you are in the dark.” This little stack of glass magic lantern slides shows that character – of a people who believed that their cause in war was right, oblivious to the fact that they supported a regime committing atrocities beyond the darkest possible imagining. I post this object this evening in light of the ignorance unfolding in the Senate regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I’ll spare you my soapbox speech, posted elsewhere. Instead, some background on these loathsome, compelling little objects – the public service message of their day, projected in theaters before the feature. They were given to me by my Jewish father-in-law, who inherited them from his dad. Dad ran a string of Los Angeles-area movie theaters, starting in 1945 with the Yost in Santa Ana, and including the venerable Vista, still in operation at the cross of Sunset and Hollywood – the kind of theaters where you could sit in the balcony for 15 cents, and get your dates admission and candy for free because your old man ran the joint. My father-in-law’s dad collected movie memorabilia – lobby cards, props, wonderful items like the golden spike used in “Union Pacific.” Somewhere along the way, he picked up about a dozen 3.5″x4″ magic lantern slides of Nazi war propaganda. They scream in Bauhaus lettering, cajole with the fresh-scrubbed faces of Hitler Youth members, urge, implore and command with all the graphic power that Nazi artists could muster. There is a photo of stalwart soldiers in the sort of low-over-the-ear helmets that today’s U.S. soldiers wear. A valiant statue of Victory, a vigilant searchlight, and message upon message of inspiration and fidelity to the Füuhrer. The one highlighted here is a Deutche Rote Kreusz (German Red Cross) message: a woodcut-style image of a soldier flinging a potato-masher grenade, above a nurse bandaging a comrade’s head. Just three valiant people enacting the pantomime of a war for what they gullibly believed in – and to which their creator hoped to rally their equally gullible countrymen. If anyone out there reads German, I’d welcome a translation.
viagra sale ‘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”>I have no clue what Nyko.com does. I may never even visit them to find out. I’d rather keep the purity of this piece of swag from this year’s brain-rattling E3 convention (many more of my words and pictures here) intact. Swag is the faux currency of E3, the cool-now logoed crap that everyone runs around collecting, and then promptly forgets at the bottom of some drawer or in the back of the glovebox. Push the chrome button on the end of this bullet-shaped keychain and an LED suffuses the perspex logo with soft white light. Push it again – the light flashes. Push it again – the light switches off. Three simple technologies conspired in its making: mechanics, simple battery power and assembly-line electronics. At some point I’ll figure out a way express my unified field theory of all things (animal, vegetable, mineral, mechanical, chemical, biological, digital) in multimedia. But I fear if I succeed, I’ll wink out of existence entirely.
drugs ‘popup’, about it ‘width=500, case height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I can’t say what upsets me more – that tens of thousands of U.S. troops tear these open every night, ignite the little chemical food heaters inside and chow down on them for probably the 365th night in a row in many cases; or that the military is giving them away to geeks and swag hounds at the world’s largest video game convention to promote a game the U.S. Army developed to teach you how to kill without the risk of actually dying or taking someone’s life. The army booth at E3 sprawls across some 2,000 square feet beneath a 2-story Moorish village wall – surrounded by sandbagged bunkers, and staffed by real-life soldiers brandishing next-gen weapons. It was packed. This rather amazing little artifact weighs about three pounds and claims to contain chicken and noodles. I’ll just toss it in the camping basket so we can “eat like the grunts” and think of a video game next time we’re lounging in camp at Yosemite while my countrymen are dying for an unjust, unwinnable war they never should have been ordered to start. Ashamed to be an American these days, I’m going to feel helpless until November to change the way we’re headed.
stuff ‘popup’, approved ‘width=500, see height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>It grows wild in the desert here. One of the ironic blessings of wildland brushfires – which can devour entire housing tracts and splinter their communities forever – is that they smell intoxicating as destroy lives. In Native American ritual – as in coastal Southern California, the burning of sagebrush is a process of cleansing and renewal. This bundle was collected and bound by an old hippie who works the Venice boardwalk on weekends. He heaps raw sage on a weathered Guatemalan blanket, and with great patience and something of a distant, worried look in his eye, bundles the stalks together with cotton yarn and sells them for a dollar or two. We smudged our house in Venice a few years back – half giggling, half solemn as priests – in a ceremony that was by turns awkward and reverent for two people who despite Catholic upbringing had found their spiritual centers somewhere far away from organized religion and ceremony. Now that we’ve moved again and settled in, perhaps it’s time to do it again.