Scrabbling up the wall to festoon the entryway with cotton-silk spider-webbing, web he grabbed hold of a fistful of rubbery plants in the wall-planter on the ledge above him. He gained his footing above, but a chunk of colorful bloom snapped loose. He turned it over on his palm …
Category: Part
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#a254 :: Bird of Paradise blossom
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#a253 :: Desk cleaning time
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that. -
#a246 :: Creepy Crawlers mold
This deeply iconic toy from my youth let you commit a sort of reverse archaeology:Begin with the shapes left in metal by “disgusting” creatures – an aluminum “fossil” that holds the power to create a form of life.
Pour plasma-like “Plasti-Goop” into their very absence. Heat it on a small thermoelectric hotplate. Watch the forms congeal and cool. Then tweeze out bug simulacra – now endowed the “lifelike” jiggle of insect energy … and completely creep out your little sister.
Utter heaven.
Like so many great toys, sildenafil The Mattel ThingmakerTM was watered down, neglected, and bastardized into something sort of resembling its former glory due to too many small-minded parents suing over their children’s burnt fingers, but it’s still available in some form.
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#a240 :: “Magnum” 13-tip tattoo needle
Tonight was big.For three-plus years, order Justin has been installing and detailing my biomechanical arm. He does all the heavy shading with one of these nasty bastards – 13 tattoo needles epoxied together in a head and soldered onto a needle shaft.
Tonight he finished all the principal work, order leaving only some cleanup, and we’re talking about him putting some decals and abrasions on the “blank” plates between the open access ports …
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#a236 :: Stanley Handyman bullet level
It’s fitting that today’s object is a level.For today I have finally brought HLO completely up to date, no rx after a double-whammy punch of working vacation with my family in London for a month and a full-bore trip to Burning Man crushed my daily blog output.
A good level operates with an oracular efficiency and grace that blows your mind the first time you see it. Wha …? How can that be? That little bubble dictates how well something is aligned to the center of the EARTH??? Who makes the bubble capsules level in the first place?
I’ve always loved and admired the handle as a legendary, diagnosis class-defining tool, like a good hammer. This is a particularly gorgeous specimen from Stanley Tools.
Everything is in balance now. I wonder what tomorrow’s object will be … -
#a233 :: Hexagonal mirror
Every year, order about six weeks after Burning Man, the community of Burners gathers in L.A. for the Decompression event – a taste of Black Rock arts and nonsense plunked down in the middle of the city.This year, they moved it to the lovely L.A. State Historical Park (more photos here). I wore, among other things, a backpack light rig packed with cheap Chinese-made LEDs that sprout from the ends of steel-conduit tentacles, magnified by hexagonal mirrors.
One of the mirrors fell off. This is it.
You can see the rest of my cockamamie outfit after the jump.
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#a222 :: Worn bicycle brake pads
So that’s what that horrible grinding noise was.Two or three mornings a week, approved I pump my Cannondale up the fire roads of Griffith Park, do my old-man stretches at the top beneath an ancient live oak, then bomb back down towards home.
Do the math – a 200-coughcough-pound man on a 25-pound mountain bike going down a 7% grade at 30-40mph and coming to rest thanks to exactly four square inches of synthetic brake pad – at some point, something’s gotta give.
Just replaced ’em tonight, and now instead of the teeth-grating sound of metal on metal, I gotta double-fistful of WHOA THERE!
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#a213 :: Canon i9900 Bubble-Jet printer cartridges
This is the business end of the food chain that produced this. For $12, generic you get a little, web meticulously machined and vacuformed plastic box half packed with lurid ink, the other with a cubical cotton swab that seems to absorb all the ink – eight flavors of which are required to keep the printer running, any one of which could run out at any time. Because the digital human requires images on nonrecyclable plastic-coated paper. Very, very large images. In large quantities. I may just spend more than $300 a year on this stuff. -
#a205 :: Jerry-rigged Bluetooth earhook
For the second time in as many months, mind the earhook on my Bluetooth headset snapped off.You can’t buy replacements for these things online. I know, I’ve tried
A cheap little plastic part fails, leaving you the choice of fixing it (virtually impossible to glue) versus spending $50 to buy another gadget. And you still haven’t really solved the problem, which is that you’re doomed to keep leaking money $50 at a time as long as you need an earpiece and keep putting them in your pockets after use, as any normal person would.
Fuck. That.
One coat hanger, two pairs of pliers, forty-odd choice curses and half an hour later, and your ghetto earhook is clamped into place, and it fits perfectly.
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#a192 :: Refrigerator water filter
We replaced our fridge a few months back. Then it told us we needed a new one of these.For $36.95, there rx you get a thick block of Lucite wrapped around a double-fistful of charcoal crumbs with a couple of hoses and gaskets on the business end and some helpful instructional pictograms on the “user” end.
When it wears out, about 6 months after you install it, you’ll need to toss its 5-pound, thoroughly non-recyclable carcass in the trash, where it will likely remain biologically unmolested for hundreds, nay, thousands of years.
Am I the only one bothered by this?
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#a187 :: iPhone 3G
My birthday gift. My wife’s love in a handheld marvel. My new video game platform. My toy. My crack pipe. My next-gen paid-content conduit. My memory bank. My little wallet-suck. My preeeeciousssss. My underestimation of Apple‘s continued brilliance at industrial design. My PDA. My GPS. My portable Thomas Guide. My jukebox. My phone.The blue rubber grip keeps the slippery little oyster in my hand. I’m paranoid I’ll lose it. Or break it. Or get bored and move on to lusting after the Next Big Thing. This is the sound of obsession.
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#a151 :: Feather
Look, information pills web let me level with you. I’ve been slamming in four nights worth of HLOs for the past hour or so, and just to get ’em done. In fact, seek I’m post-dating this one because I’ll be in transit 24 hours from now. We’ve been packing and prepping our own house for a big house exchange with a London family, and it takes time to square things away.This fell off the feather duster when I was dusting out my office last night. Its color always fills me with hope.
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#a137 :: Watch guts
Cheap stuff breaks. You get to decide – take it apart? Or just stomp its li’l plastic casing to shrapnel.I’ve had this in my stuff drawers for years. I keep promising myself I’ll take it apart.
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#a131 :: The NeoCube
Magnetism enchants and mystifies me.These 216 neodymium magnets – each 3mm thick – cling together in clouds when crushed, erectile in polyhedrons and exotic coils when aligned.
I roll them between my fingers, pharmacy and they snap together with the surety of pure particle physics. They form a collective entity, this site a hive colony of homogeneous individuals, and whole complexity.
They tug on my deepest childhood curiosity, my gnarliest gadget fetish hot-points. They are probably completely evil.
I found the NeoCube on some gadget blog or another. And ever since they – or it – arrived, I have run the serious risk of not getting a single goddamn thing done.
Check out the videos at your own peril. You have been duly warned.
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#a116 :: Chinese stainless-steel swivels
We swam with manta rays in Hawaii last summer.Yes, cialis 40mg it really was that idyllic.
We tell ourselves it was kharmic payback for a summer of pain – our dear friend Keith died horribly and too young, we were both working 14 hour days and struggling to be with the kids, our daughter broke her arm. And to top it all off, a skunk crawled into the foundation of our chimney and died. And stank. A lot.
So when we spent the most glorious week off we’ve ever enjoyed in our lives, we came away feeling as though the universe was rebalancing the scales. But the bulk of it – like this experience – smelled like magic – or some absurd positive kharma that we have yet to earn …
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#108 :: Chibi giant robot warrior
I’ve written before of chibi.No more about that need be said. Right here, erectile Scope Dog (or someone very much like him) packs two big fat weapons on his short, stout person.
He’s 5 inches high and balances quite well on his feet – one at a time – if you provoke him.
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#a102 :: 88MB Syquest Drive cartridge
Ah, medical Syquest. This 8-inch-wide slab of a disc, buy information pills encased in a high-impact plastic carrier, was the very height of portable data storage 16 years ago.You could pack a lot into 88 megabytes – screenplay ideas, hundreds of newspaper stories, Photoshop tomfoolery – so long as you had a Syquest drive.
Of course, this is to a modern 1GB flash drive as a Powerbook is to a diesel-powered Mergenthaler Linotype machine. I no longer have the computer with the SCSI card that was needed to control the drive that read these things. Data retrieval for such discs is pricey and sure to disappoint.
And I’ve long ago forgotten what I stored on the dozen or so discs I had collected.
So – I bid it farewell. Relic of a more innocent Web, a less detail-obsessed time.
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#a101 :: Lens mechanism
Clockwork is a wonderful thing to begin with. Couple it with optics and it carries the promise of alchemy.I once spent hours poring over used-gear cases at camera shops, try camera shows, flea markets, staring at oblong packages of brushed aluminum and black leatherette.
I was a photo geek …
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#a97 :: Iron box wrench
This beautiful little enigma began life as a hot rivulet of molten iron, ampoule poured into a sand mold with a precise 5/8ths-inch hex opening at one end.After knocking it out of its mold, search its maker probably quenched it, viagra 40mg heat-treated it again and then dipped it once in black paint and (after waiting a respectful interval) dipped the handle end in red a little too soon, and set it down to dry.
I do not know its original purpose. I can only guess that it was supplied with a steam engine or other old-time motor, the sort of wheezing, tapocketa-pocketa-pocketa rattletrap that eased men’s labor and needed constant adjusting. Anyone have any ideas?
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#a96 – Craftsman adjustable pliers
I love the Sears Crafstman tool guarantee. It’s simple: break it and they’ll replace it.For the rest of your life. Period.I bought these adjustable pliers a good 25-some years ago, sildenafil when I was spending hours at a time lying on my back under a filthy Volvo. Cursing. A lot … (more…)
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#a91 :: Magic starfish – How the Web feeds the seven deadly sins
I’m bench-testing this theory:Everything on the Internet – every single human endeavor online – can be mapped against one or more of the seven deadly sins.
Too simplistic? Maybe not. Just consider the primary sins that we ever-so-weak mortals commit by running, pharmacy populating or using services like these:
Gaming? – Anger.
Celebrity news? Envy.
Porn? Heh. Lust, silly.
eCommerce and mass media? Basest greed.
Food and gadget sites – Gluttony, pure and simple.
Blogs? Social networking? art communities? Vanity, vanity, vanity.
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#a90 :: Pull tab
“Hold him, order Teck, approved I wanna piss on him.”Boomer loomed over the prostrate sophomore and began unbuckling his pants.
Kyle looked up – as much as Teck’s kung-fu grip on his neck would allow, at least – sighed, and resumed staring inches away at the defocused glitter of burst Lowenbrau bottles and Molson caps in which he knelt.
He really needed to figure this out.
Stoned, Boomer was harmless. Just another burly, ugly, dumb asshole dropout loser from Hull, who bailed out of junior year and found work sheetrocking crackerbox condos for Beacon Hill yuppies to feed his beer and pot habit … (more…)
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#a83 :: Floppy disk
A mix of no-nonsense design and obsolescence incarnate, symptoms this is a perfectly made object lesson in hubris:The 3.5-inch floppy was designed to last for decades – and outstripped within a mere few years by bigger, page faster, even-more-durable flash memory.
What are they good for now? Coasters. Table-levelers. Impromptu office Frisbees. And speculations on what the dot-com boom of the late 1990s would have been without the ability to carry a sheaf of documents or photos around on a lightweight, plastic facsimile of your computer hard-drive that fit into your shirt pocket.
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#a78 :: Ukelin strings
Strings own our music.Violin, viagra buy electric guitar, this site piano, search mandolin, koto, balalaika, electric bass, bull fiddle – all vibrate with the voices of plucked, sawn and hammered wires.
More than brass or woodwind or electronics, second maybe only to drums in the pantheon of world musical instrumentation, strings run the longest and deepest in the bloodstream of intelligent sound.
I’m midway through a project – restringing a circa-1926 ukelin that I retrieved from my parents’ attic … (more…)
