HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Part

#a429 :: Rotten witch fingers

At some point last month, approved my mother-in-law gave my daughter (age 7) a little keyring with a big fob that spelled out “Love” in lurid gold-chromed script.

It was schwag from some utterly-too-grownup movie, check as evidenced by the little stamped-metal tag proclaiming the brand. Here’s what ensued the moment I laid eyes on it:

Me: (rummaging for the pliers) Here, buy let me fix that for you.

Daughter: Dad, can’t I keep that?

Uh, no. (*snap!*)

I could go on here about the bizarre cultural currency our infantilized nation has created around the fetishism of branded schwag, but I’m saving all my energy for
A Halloween candy bowl kept at the back of our cupboard finally (pardon the pun) gave up the ghost.

Used to be you would reach into it for a tasty treat, sildenafil and a little infrared sensor triggered an animated rubber witch’s hand to snatch at yours and a voicebox would rasp, what is ed “Trick or treat!”

This morning we reached in to find the rubber-encased, cotton-stuffed digits had gone the way of all silicone flesh.

I’m loving these things so much, they may even get the Object of the Month award.

4/21/2009
#a428 :: Undesirable keychain tag

What happens when your son has parked a big bottle of water precariously on the top shelf of an open refrigerator door and you unwittingly shut the door, price dosage causing it to plunge to the bottom and snap the shelf straight out of the fridge?

You hunt through the shattered plastic shards looking for the serial number so you can order a new one.

Children are agents of entropy.
At some point last month, mind my mother-in-law gave my daughter (age 7) a little keyring with a big fob that spelled out “Love” in lurid gold-chromed script.

It was schwag from some utterly-too-grownup movie, find as evidenced by the little stamped-metal tag proclaiming the brand. Here’s what ensued the moment I laid eyes on it:

Me: (rummaging for the pliers) Here, let me fix that for you.

Daughter: Dad, can’t I keep that?

Uh, no. (*snap!*)

I could go on here about the bizarre cultural currency our infantilized nation has created around the fetishism of branded schwag, but I’m saving all my energy for, oh, about four or five years from now when she starts pushing back.

4/20/2009
#a427 :: Refrigerator shelf shard

To someone who uses knives as much as I do, this site this thing is about as useful as Truck Balls.

You press it against the side of a sealed CD or DVD, depressing a spring-loaded cap to reveal a tiny steel blade that slices open the shrink-wrap.

They were giving them away today at Amoeba for National Record Store Week – something I didn’t really discover until I got home to unpack my goodie bag. Had I known, I probably would have politely declined, and let someone else enjoy it.Mbr Now I can either keep it around, adding to the household clutter, or huck it since the metal makes it unrecyclable.

Do people ever think about the amount of material they’re pumping into landfills and the atmosphere by manufacturing this kind of object?
What happens when your son has parked a big bottle of water precariously on the top shelf of an open refrigerator door and you unwittingly shut the door, ed causing it to plunge to the bottom and snap the shelf straight out of the fridge?

You hunt through the shattered plastic shards looking for the serial number so you can order a new one.

Children are agents of entropy.

4/19/2009
#a425 :: Gilette Shaving Cream cap

This also came home with the kids from their hike – I’ve always liked the unforgivingly ugly shape of seeds. They are meant to be discovered by accident (bite into a delicious fruit, abortion find a nasty, woody chunk of bitterness) and discarded as useless – the better to propagate their kind.
This also came home with the kids from their hike – I’ve always liked the woody, capsule unforgivingly ugly shape of seeds. They are meant to be discovered by accident (bite into a delicious fruit, fin
The fetish of packaging, sildenafil the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

With the earth’s carbon load trending toward the toxic, I worry about the way we’re accounting for the shit that manufacturing puts into the air. Sure, China and India are the planet’s booming engines of cheap manufacture, heedless of air scrubbers and parts-per-million of nonorganic particulates and other niceties of owning your effluence.

But they’re booming because we Americans – prim, Prius-driving, grocery-bag-recycling little smuglies that we are – still consume the lion’s share of the world’s manufactured goods.

Something to think about as Earth Day approaches and the temp in my office is preparing to top 90 in the middle of April.

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that L.A. City trash gleaners reroute it to the proper recycling chain.

Or I could think of some other use for it.

Meantime, maybe I need to go back to shaving with soap from a mug …

4/17/2009
#a420 :: 1-inch hex nut

I stumbled across this at Pasadena City College Swap Meet last Sunday. The college seems to be in a constant state of construction, sildenafil and someone ha dropped it in the grass – a missing part for a mystery structure.

It put me in mind of this Todd Rundgren song, the lyrics of which go something like this …
Ive been wrong I had plans so big But the devils in the details I left out one thing No one to love me No one to love me No one to love For the want of a nail, the world was lost For the want of a nail, the world was lost For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost For the want of a horse, the rider was lost For the want of a rider, the message was lost For the want of a rider, the message was lost For the want of a message, the battle was lost For the want of a battle, the war was lost For the want of a war, the kingdom was lost (such a tiny thing) Youre askin Whats all this talk about horses and war? Put yourself in the place of the man at the forge And day after day you live a life without love til the morning you cant take it anymore And you dont get up Multiply it a billion times Spread it all round the world Put the curse of loneliness on every boy and every girl Until everybodys kicking, everybodys scratching Everything seems to fail And it was all for the want of a nail Tell me what else could the answer be Dont hold back now Give me all your love Just a little more love A little tiny bit of love

4/12/2009
#a411 Ken Onion “Chive”

Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofy Crocs can seem, price here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, pharm buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs and declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of things. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you enver see them again.
I have a thing for pocket knives, pharmacy as you’ve probably noticed by now.

At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the mythically beautiful multi-layered metal as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.

4/2/2009
#a410 :: Jibbitz

Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofy Crocs can seem, information pills medications here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, buy buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs to declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of thing. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you never see them again.

And then you bug your parents some more, and the cycle of crap rolls on.

4/1/2009
#a406 :: Eleanor Powell’s taps

I’ve been a huge, hospital drooling fan of Jeff Soto but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow
I’ve been a huge, price drooling fan of Jeff Soto but couldn’t afford his work until I spotted this fine fellow in a little toy store the other side of the reservoir.
Cement, pharm information pills 0,17794286326742320966&near=Los+Angeles,+CA&oi=manybox&ct=10&cd=1&resnum=1″>6925 Hollywood Boulevard.

My oldest great friend, Vinny is in town with his lovely wife, Robin, and we’re doing the tourist thing. Some 71 years ago, Eleanor Powell left behind these words:

“To Sid –
You’re “taps”
with me
Eleanor Powell
Dec. 23 – 37

And then they helped her sink a pair of bright steel taps into the cement in front of the theater – sole up – which gives the impression that you’re beneath a glass floor looking up into a cement world where someone is frozen, dancing, just their feet showing.

The rest of the plaza in front of Grauman’s Chinese is a mosaic of hand and footprints (my favorite is the Marx Bros, where Zeppo and Chico’s thoroughly flat soles stood alongside Groucho’s gnarly brand-new-heel-patterned prints and Harpo’s bare feet). In this space where the upside-down cement world upstairs is possible, in this mostly dull-colored landscape, the taps stick out like pivot points between that world and this, upon which the entire forecourt of the Chinese could tip.

3/28/2009
#a394 :: Mystery gizmo

Every now and then a mystery washes up out of the ceaseless surf of crap inundating this house.

What is this?

It has the precise curves and clean-milled transparent plastic of an Appleproduct, stuff more about but has a vinyl flap-valve at its center. No one in my family can explain it.

3/16/2009
#a393 :: Used car key

In all my years on this blog, more about mind I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key.

It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation.

But a car key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member of the family that lives in mostly silent service – a portable id, a means of self-projection from one existence to another – rarely complaining and seldom causing trouble on its own.

And that’s about as far as I’ll drag you down that rabbit hole.

My wife’s old Volvo S70 served us faithfully and well for 7 years, but with 104,000+ miles and a bad case of accelerating decrepitude, its time had come to an end.

Yesterday, we went out and bought a newer used Volvo – a tight, gorgeous bottom-of-the-line S40 with only 10,572 miles on it for more than a third off original sticker).

And there it sits, in the garage’s place of honor, while the old one sits on the street awaiting its fate.

Which as much as anything – and better than anything I could say – explains this meaning of this key.

3/15/2009
#a366 :: Original copper transmission line – Hoover Dam

This is almost the holy grail of heavy little objects: a thing with history, abortion patina, functionality, exciting manufacture and moving parts. Jesus, it made me one happy tool-using ape to find this: a chunk of the original copper electrical transmission line installed during construction of the mighty Hoover Dam.

For five bucks you get a gorgeous slice of copper cable – buffed of burrs and still bearing the black corrosion picked up while hanging over the Hoover Dam gorge for more than 7 decades charged with 287,500 hydroelectrically generated volts.

Here’s the background from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation‘s brochure that came with it : (more…)

2/16/2009
#a357 :: Rokenbok ball

This looks like an ice core taken from the frozen surface of a lake the size of a desktop. It’s actually chunk of Plexiglas that Dad sliced off of a 3/4-inch-diameter rod he had kicking around somewhere in the basement.

He was kind enough to mail it to me along with his
This looks like an ice core taken from the frozen surface of a lake the size of a desktop. It’s actually chunk of Plexiglas that Dad sliced off of a 3/4-inch-diameter rod he had kicking around somewhere in the basement.

He was kind enough to mail it to me along with his other HLOs, cialis 40mg which I’ll be featuring over the next few days.
Children’s toys approximate reality.

In the happy world of Rokenbok this is not a huge, mind filthy boulder shot through with veins of iron and smeared with the engine oil it’s been sitting in in the junkyard where you unearthed it after the glacier dropped it 3.2 million years ago.

It’s just part of a load that you spend idle hours shifting happily from one end of the Action Sorter & Conveyor Set to the other. Scoop up the boulders, dosage dump them in the hopper, capsule watch the little conveyor belt shift and sort them, repeat.

The toy hung around for a good three years after Santa brought it, until its recipient tired of it and moved on to videogaming, elaborate science fiction illustration and (shudder) HTML. I think we eBayed it, but this little rock escaped to remind us of who the boy once was: A sweaty, two-fisted quarry foreman.

2/6/2009
#a333 :: Saab pulley tensioner bearing

It’s always something, mind with a car.

We have a long history, viagra approved this car and I, capsule just as I’ve always had long histories with my cars.

Spend enough time in a car and you can reach an intimacy rivaling any human friendship: you know their sounds and smells, you sense their weaknesses, thrill to their strengths and sometimes they pull absurdly sudden shit: (more…)

1/12/2009
#a326 :: Porcelain doll head

He was rendered in porcelain bisque, advice no bigger than the end of my thumb many, advice many decades ago. This angelic countenance stands ready to receive whatever whim, benediction or mad wish a child of 18XX might bestow upon him. If he had a body, it’s gone now. No matter. Capped with glazed curls, his smile is blank and open enough to absorb a million dreams.

1/5/2009
#a319 :: Christmas tag

We took down the tree and put away the ornaments today in advance of our trip to SF.

This was on a gift from my son, price his idea of a little joke. He’s a geek off the old block.

12/29/2008
#a311 :: Littlest Pet Shop shower cap

Naturally, view a party of that size has its aftermath.

Among the dead soldiers (easily policed up) and the bowls of dip that threaten to go off the minute you put them into the fridge, page you get an explosion of toys everywhere. Littlest Pet Shop creatures and accessories littered the floor, including a hand-stitched iridescent vinyl bathing cap that would barely cover the end of your thumb.

12/21/2008
#a309 :: Lug nut

I’ve been cleaning the office.

We’re having a party.

I found this.

12/19/2008
#a306 :: Christmas tree bulb

In the course of bedecking the sacrificial conifer with lights and baubles, site stuff gets broken.

We destroyed three glass balls this evening – fortunately none of them hand-made nor “special.”

This was the other casualty – my son went to pull a light from the string to attach a lighted ornament (a Star Trek shuttle that someone gave us years ago) and inadvertently yanked the bulb straight out of its base.

Stripped of context, it’s a beautiful specimen – the very core of the incandescent lighting engineer’s art – a bubble of glass extruded around two wires holding a tungsten filament taut in a vacuum.

12/16/2008
#a301 :: 1960 K+E Leroy scriber

A more mellifluous blend of ash-blue plastic and polished aluminum, symptoms nor a stranger device, order I have never seen.

The tool holds a small ink reservoir at the end of a complex/adjustable curve of metal. One of the handrests is missing, which is probably why it turned up in a junk shop en route home from the Angeles National Forest.

(googles) No, wait … it’s actually the business end of a 1960 K+E Leroy Lettering kit.

Wish I knew where the rest of it was.

12/12/2008
#a280 :: Copper pipe fitting

This has been skittering around the floor of our back hallway for a while, rx about it a relic of the unpleasant shower-valve failure incident.

Copper is the lushest metal color, more wonderful than gold.

11/20/2008
#a275 :: Robotic hand

“Dad, information pills check it out. I made a robotic hand.”

11/15/2008
#a274 :: Electronic shriek box

A simple soundboard, cheapest wired to a switch and a speaker. I disemboweled it from (?) an 8×11 promo folder for “Scream 2008” that landed in my wife’s office. When you opened the cover of the folder, see a horrific shriek would ensue: “AUUUGHHHAAAAAAAGOODDDDNOOOOO!!!” Soon, I’ll be attaching it to Screaming Tiki so that he can get his voice back, about which more later.

11/14/2008
#a260 :: Meteorite!

Oh my gawd:

Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:

A chunk of bona-fide space rock.

But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)

10/31/2008
#a259 :: Polly Pocket shoes & handbags

Tiny accessories for teensy simulacra, dosage mind these silicone shoelets and bagettes piled up in my daughter’s room until her obsession with Polly Pocket wore off and she tired of them and moved onto a new obsession.

At some point, here she got it into her head that she could sell them on eBay. I think she’s more excited about selling something on eBay than making any money off them.

She laid out a neat arrangement – I helped with the shoes – I shot the 14 dolls, 20 dresses, two shirt-and-pants sets (for the two boy dolls) and the tiny furniture, and next week when it’s art/music/internet night again, we’ll put it all up on eBay and see who bites.

She’s 7.

10/30/2008
#a257 :: Ruined chain links

Popped my chain before dawn this morning as I hoisted my bulk up on the pegs today and hammered up this steep little hill. This is what was left after the repair – the first two attempts at which failed because I had threaded the chain incorrectly. Both times. Furthermore, order the XBox 360 flung the Red Ring of Death at me precisely one year after we bought it – and exactly 74 minutes after Best Buy closed. Which puts me 12 hours out of warranty the next time I can possibly try getting a replacement.

Oh, ampoule and the stock market geeked out all over itself in a mad 900-point feint at recovery, order which is sure to be followed by an equally geeked-down plunge as everyone realizes amid the many layoffs.

Not to mention the endless ideological and bloody wars.

And now fucking this

Yeah, it was that kind of day. It’s been that kind of decade. Make of it – er, rather, the future – what you will.

10/28/2008