Category: Jetsam

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

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

So it is with this thing. The fortune cookie is a confection of frothy whimsy and deep portent, of crunchiness and clairvoyance. It’s jsut a snack, a crisp trifle. It’s also your fate. You know it’s mass-produced, you can never tell whether you’re going to get a real future-predicting fortune or some worthless aphorism like “It is better to be wise than to be rich.” But it’s your fortune, a tiny oracle to be heeded with some reverence or at least a snicker, as you munch the vessel in which it arrived to stop ever so briefly your headlong rush through life and make you think: Is this true?
shop ‘popup’, visit this ‘width=500, viagra 40mg height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Problems. Solve my problems with a thing. My problems are in my head, they’re in my life, I can’t touch them or put a dent in them or even make sense of them or time for them. But my problems run my head. And my head runs my time and my time runs my life. So I have a thing, a thing I can use to make them stop. Stop them with a thing. It’s a miracle. Father’s little helper. See how? I put this thing in my mouth and in a little while, my problems aren’t problems any more. A dull roar, nothing more. I have more things now. One for each problem. But sometimes they can’t stop them. And I can’t think.

I’ve never been one to use this kind of drug. My back acts up or a toothache starts murdering me and I’ll pop aspirin to sleep, maybe a really big painkiller for a day or so post-surgery. But it’s a cycle. Like all artificial chemicals (and half the real ones) sooner or later, the cure goes away, and the hurt returns, twice as bad.

I’m in a peaceful space now, having just come through a hard time in my professional life. I’ve found some clarity: I’m able to look back, see what happened, see where I am, and realize that everything’s going to be all right. So, in this playful head suddenly there’s room for the bogus lyric above, and the real ones below. And this little pile of gel caps – left over from a futile, months-long attempt to cure my daughter’s horrible eczema with nightly doses of weird naturopathic chemicals after modern medicine seemed to have failed (we’ve since found the real allergen and gotten a grip on it) – put two lyrics into my suddenly copascetic mind:

unhealthy look ‘popup’, approved ‘width=500, mind height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A grand architecture in miniature defines the way generations of the sweetgum tree last into the future. Nature designs the perfect time-travel vessel for every environmental niche – this one is spiked, to deter predators from its cargo; hollow, to float; hard to withstand crushing and plentiful – coming in great clumps to ensure survival. It is related – if not in toughness then in strangeness – to the wild walnut, the magnolia pod, the coconut. These craft fall by the hundreds at the children’s playground, looking green and ripe until the California air starts to dry them seconds later, and they begin to split and brown in the sun, gaps between their spikes widening from pinhole fissures to gaping wounds, from which seeds spill like thick, tan grains of sand.

decease website ‘popup’, drug ‘width=500, store height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
sickness ‘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”>Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the Wheel-O was your own hand-held Sputnik. The red wheel spins on axle-tips of magnetized metal that cling to the wire frame. Tip the frame back and forth, and it spins faster as it rolls around the frame. Get good enough at it, you can get it up to around 500 rpm, and more than two complete “orbits” per second. It’s the perfect desk toy – the quiet whir of magnets on steel, the whipping action of your wrist, the circular/linear motion always seem to relieve stress and restore focus when the project I’ve been staring at for far too long has begun to numb my wits. Sadly, there’s not much to be found on the Web, even on Amazon’s still-in-beta A9 search engine (which seems a bit unreliable, but has plenty of entertaining bells and whistles). Search results are far better for the still-in-mass-production Superball (“made of amazing Zectron(tm)!”), which is a heavy little object in its own right – though arguably not so elegant as Wheel-O. eBay is disappointing, offering only this ferociously ugly and overengineered knock-off. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find some true believers still selling this space-age delight, along with Sea Monkeys, Etch-a-Sketch and Wooly Willy.
information pills ‘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”>Z-Cardz are nifty. Z-Cardz are stupid. Z-Cardz are collectible. Z-Cardz are 3D DIY models that start as 2D cards. Z-Cardz come five to a box. Z-Cardz might be laser-cut. Z-Cardz might be water-cut. Z-Cardz manufacturing methods don’t show up easily in Google. Or A9. Z-Cardz are boats. Z-Cardz are animals. Z-Cardz are airplanes. Z-Cardz are spaceships. Z-Cardz are now, just two years after their introdution, some ridiculously elaborate game. Z-Cardz are a bore. Z-Cardz are more delightful when you put the pieces back into the cards, stick them on the shelf and forget about them until two years later when you suddenly stumble upon them and have to build them all over again. Z-Cardz are serious irritainment.
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”>So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.

How do you symbolize faith in peace? The symbols are far fewer, less legitimized, hardly noticeable at all in human culture. One man’s peace symbol is another’s “footprint of the American chicken,” as they used to call it in the 60s. Lately, movements religious and otherwise are adopting bracelets as symbols. In a different era, it might have been hair shirts or amulets or tattoos. For the past 10 years it’s been a smug little slapfight of bumper-mounted metallic fish. But these days, it’s bracelets.

The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles is trying out this object – a simple blue strap of elastic, tin-crimped to form a hoop, silkscreened with a few words in Hebrew. My good friend Yael Swerdlow, Press Officer for the consulate, explains:

It says Shalom in Hebrew, which means “Peace”.

The message we at the Consulate created it for is “Israel wants peace.” It’s nonpolitical, not aligned to any person or policy or specific population— Israel is a multicultural and diverse democracy, with over twenty percent Arab, Bedouin and Druze, and people of different faiths, Christians, Moslems, and they want peace just as much so this is not just Jewish, it’s just Israel wants Peace.

Because of the way the consulate is chartered, they cannot use the bracelets for fundraising, Swerdlow says. So they’re still working out exactly how they want to distribute the “shalom bracelet” but it will probably be via something like SASE so that anyone who wants one will be able to order it.

Bracelets can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Consulate General of Israel
6380 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1700, LA 90048
Attention: Yariv Ovadia, Consul for Communications and Public Affairs.
cialis 40mg ‘popup’, cure ‘width=500, recipe height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of this. It was the worst pain of my life, and the most hellacious 3-month round of shopping for a cure I’ve ever endured, but you should duck out if you bore easily. You’ve been warned.

My summer trip to Hell began on the July 4 trip to Yosemite, at the very moment I tore the bike racks off the car.

Instant stress. By the time I had blown through three bike shops and wasted two hours on the road and spent two more on the mountainside corkscrew hairpins into Yosemite with bughouse kids and carsick wife, I had a roaring headache. I thought nothing of it at the time, just, “Oh. This too. Great. Gottagettocamp.”

Next day, a duller version of the headache persisted as I wrestled with rebuilding my thrashed wheel rim beneath the redwoods. Popped a couple aspirin, it subsided a bit.

Next day, another headache. Now it’s getting weird. Stress, I tell myself. it’ll even out once you’ve stuck your feet in the river and hear the sough of wind through the pines for a few more hours …
(more…)

decease website ‘popup’, drug ‘width=500, store height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
sickness ‘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”>Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the Wheel-O was your own hand-held Sputnik. The red wheel spins on axle-tips of magnetized metal that cling to the wire frame. Tip the frame back and forth, and it spins faster as it rolls around the frame. Get good enough at it, you can get it up to around 500 rpm, and more than two complete “orbits” per second. It’s the perfect desk toy – the quiet whir of magnets on steel, the whipping action of your wrist, the circular/linear motion always seem to relieve stress and restore focus when the project I’ve been staring at for far too long has begun to numb my wits. Sadly, there’s not much to be found on the Web, even on Amazon’s still-in-beta A9 search engine (which seems a bit unreliable, but has plenty of entertaining bells and whistles). Search results are far better for the still-in-mass-production Superball (“made of amazing Zectron(tm)!”), which is a heavy little object in its own right – though arguably not so elegant as Wheel-O. eBay is disappointing, offering only this ferociously ugly and overengineered knock-off. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find some true believers still selling this space-age delight, along with Sea Monkeys, Etch-a-Sketch and Wooly Willy.
information pills ‘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”>Z-Cardz are nifty. Z-Cardz are stupid. Z-Cardz are collectible. Z-Cardz are 3D DIY models that start as 2D cards. Z-Cardz come five to a box. Z-Cardz might be laser-cut. Z-Cardz might be water-cut. Z-Cardz manufacturing methods don’t show up easily in Google. Or A9. Z-Cardz are boats. Z-Cardz are animals. Z-Cardz are airplanes. Z-Cardz are spaceships. Z-Cardz are now, just two years after their introdution, some ridiculously elaborate game. Z-Cardz are a bore. Z-Cardz are more delightful when you put the pieces back into the cards, stick them on the shelf and forget about them until two years later when you suddenly stumble upon them and have to build them all over again. Z-Cardz are serious irritainment.
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”>So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.

How do you symbolize faith in peace? The symbols are far fewer, less legitimized, hardly noticeable at all in human culture. One man’s peace symbol is another’s “footprint of the American chicken,” as they used to call it in the 60s. Lately, movements religious and otherwise are adopting bracelets as symbols. In a different era, it might have been hair shirts or amulets or tattoos. For the past 10 years it’s been a smug little slapfight of bumper-mounted metallic fish. But these days, it’s bracelets.

The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles is trying out this object – a simple blue strap of elastic, tin-crimped to form a hoop, silkscreened with a few words in Hebrew. My good friend Yael Swerdlow, Press Officer for the consulate, explains:

It says Shalom in Hebrew, which means “Peace”.

The message we at the Consulate created it for is “Israel wants peace.” It’s nonpolitical, not aligned to any person or policy or specific population— Israel is a multicultural and diverse democracy, with over twenty percent Arab, Bedouin and Druze, and people of different faiths, Christians, Moslems, and they want peace just as much so this is not just Jewish, it’s just Israel wants Peace.

Because of the way the consulate is chartered, they cannot use the bracelets for fundraising, Swerdlow says. So they’re still working out exactly how they want to distribute the “shalom bracelet” but it will probably be via something like SASE so that anyone who wants one will be able to order it.

Bracelets can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Consulate General of Israel
6380 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1700, LA 90048
Attention: Yariv Ovadia, Consul for Communications and Public Affairs.
cialis 40mg ‘popup’, cure ‘width=500, recipe height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of this. It was the worst pain of my life, and the most hellacious 3-month round of shopping for a cure I’ve ever endured, but you should duck out if you bore easily. You’ve been warned.

My summer trip to Hell began on the July 4 trip to Yosemite, at the very moment I tore the bike racks off the car.

Instant stress. By the time I had blown through three bike shops and wasted two hours on the road and spent two more on the mountainside corkscrew hairpins into Yosemite with bughouse kids and carsick wife, I had a roaring headache. I thought nothing of it at the time, just, “Oh. This too. Great. Gottagettocamp.”

Next day, a duller version of the headache persisted as I wrestled with rebuilding my thrashed wheel rim beneath the redwoods. Popped a couple aspirin, it subsided a bit.

Next day, another headache. Now it’s getting weird. Stress, I tell myself. it’ll even out once you’ve stuck your feet in the river and hear the sough of wind through the pines for a few more hours …
(more…)

decease website ‘popup’, drug ‘width=500, store height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
sickness ‘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”>Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the Wheel-O was your own hand-held Sputnik. The red wheel spins on axle-tips of magnetized metal that cling to the wire frame. Tip the frame back and forth, and it spins faster as it rolls around the frame. Get good enough at it, you can get it up to around 500 rpm, and more than two complete “orbits” per second. It’s the perfect desk toy – the quiet whir of magnets on steel, the whipping action of your wrist, the circular/linear motion always seem to relieve stress and restore focus when the project I’ve been staring at for far too long has begun to numb my wits. Sadly, there’s not much to be found on the Web, even on Amazon’s still-in-beta A9 search engine (which seems a bit unreliable, but has plenty of entertaining bells and whistles). Search results are far better for the still-in-mass-production Superball (“made of amazing Zectron(tm)!”), which is a heavy little object in its own right – though arguably not so elegant as Wheel-O. eBay is disappointing, offering only this ferociously ugly and overengineered knock-off. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find some true believers still selling this space-age delight, along with Sea Monkeys, Etch-a-Sketch and Wooly Willy.
information pills ‘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”>Z-Cardz are nifty. Z-Cardz are stupid. Z-Cardz are collectible. Z-Cardz are 3D DIY models that start as 2D cards. Z-Cardz come five to a box. Z-Cardz might be laser-cut. Z-Cardz might be water-cut. Z-Cardz manufacturing methods don’t show up easily in Google. Or A9. Z-Cardz are boats. Z-Cardz are animals. Z-Cardz are airplanes. Z-Cardz are spaceships. Z-Cardz are now, just two years after their introdution, some ridiculously elaborate game. Z-Cardz are a bore. Z-Cardz are more delightful when you put the pieces back into the cards, stick them on the shelf and forget about them until two years later when you suddenly stumble upon them and have to build them all over again. Z-Cardz are serious irritainment.
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”>So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.

How do you symbolize faith in peace? The symbols are far fewer, less legitimized, hardly noticeable at all in human culture. One man’s peace symbol is another’s “footprint of the American chicken,” as they used to call it in the 60s. Lately, movements religious and otherwise are adopting bracelets as symbols. In a different era, it might have been hair shirts or amulets or tattoos. For the past 10 years it’s been a smug little slapfight of bumper-mounted metallic fish. But these days, it’s bracelets.

The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles is trying out this object – a simple blue strap of elastic, tin-crimped to form a hoop, silkscreened with a few words in Hebrew. My good friend Yael Swerdlow, Press Officer for the consulate, explains:

It says Shalom in Hebrew, which means “Peace”.

The message we at the Consulate created it for is “Israel wants peace.” It’s nonpolitical, not aligned to any person or policy or specific population— Israel is a multicultural and diverse democracy, with over twenty percent Arab, Bedouin and Druze, and people of different faiths, Christians, Moslems, and they want peace just as much so this is not just Jewish, it’s just Israel wants Peace.

Because of the way the consulate is chartered, they cannot use the bracelets for fundraising, Swerdlow says. So they’re still working out exactly how they want to distribute the “shalom bracelet” but it will probably be via something like SASE so that anyone who wants one will be able to order it.

Bracelets can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Consulate General of Israel
6380 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1700, LA 90048
Attention: Yariv Ovadia, Consul for Communications and Public Affairs.
cialis 40mg ‘popup’, cure ‘width=500, recipe height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of this. It was the worst pain of my life, and the most hellacious 3-month round of shopping for a cure I’ve ever endured, but you should duck out if you bore easily. You’ve been warned.

My summer trip to Hell began on the July 4 trip to Yosemite, at the very moment I tore the bike racks off the car.

Instant stress. By the time I had blown through three bike shops and wasted two hours on the road and spent two more on the mountainside corkscrew hairpins into Yosemite with bughouse kids and carsick wife, I had a roaring headache. I thought nothing of it at the time, just, “Oh. This too. Great. Gottagettocamp.”

Next day, a duller version of the headache persisted as I wrestled with rebuilding my thrashed wheel rim beneath the redwoods. Popped a couple aspirin, it subsided a bit.

Next day, another headache. Now it’s getting weird. Stress, I tell myself. it’ll even out once you’ve stuck your feet in the river and hear the sough of wind through the pines for a few more hours …
(more…)

decease website ‘popup’, drug ‘width=500, store height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
sickness ‘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”>Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the Wheel-O was your own hand-held Sputnik. The red wheel spins on axle-tips of magnetized metal that cling to the wire frame. Tip the frame back and forth, and it spins faster as it rolls around the frame. Get good enough at it, you can get it up to around 500 rpm, and more than two complete “orbits” per second. It’s the perfect desk toy – the quiet whir of magnets on steel, the whipping action of your wrist, the circular/linear motion always seem to relieve stress and restore focus when the project I’ve been staring at for far too long has begun to numb my wits. Sadly, there’s not much to be found on the Web, even on Amazon’s still-in-beta A9 search engine (which seems a bit unreliable, but has plenty of entertaining bells and whistles). Search results are far better for the still-in-mass-production Superball (“made of amazing Zectron(tm)!”), which is a heavy little object in its own right – though arguably not so elegant as Wheel-O. eBay is disappointing, offering only this ferociously ugly and overengineered knock-off. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find some true believers still selling this space-age delight, along with Sea Monkeys, Etch-a-Sketch and Wooly Willy.
information pills ‘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”>Z-Cardz are nifty. Z-Cardz are stupid. Z-Cardz are collectible. Z-Cardz are 3D DIY models that start as 2D cards. Z-Cardz come five to a box. Z-Cardz might be laser-cut. Z-Cardz might be water-cut. Z-Cardz manufacturing methods don’t show up easily in Google. Or A9. Z-Cardz are boats. Z-Cardz are animals. Z-Cardz are airplanes. Z-Cardz are spaceships. Z-Cardz are now, just two years after their introdution, some ridiculously elaborate game. Z-Cardz are a bore. Z-Cardz are more delightful when you put the pieces back into the cards, stick them on the shelf and forget about them until two years later when you suddenly stumble upon them and have to build them all over again. Z-Cardz are serious irritainment.
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”>So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.

How do you symbolize faith in peace? The symbols are far fewer, less legitimized, hardly noticeable at all in human culture. One man’s peace symbol is another’s “footprint of the American chicken,” as they used to call it in the 60s. Lately, movements religious and otherwise are adopting bracelets as symbols. In a different era, it might have been hair shirts or amulets or tattoos. For the past 10 years it’s been a smug little slapfight of bumper-mounted metallic fish. But these days, it’s bracelets.

The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles is trying out this object – a simple blue strap of elastic, tin-crimped to form a hoop, silkscreened with a few words in Hebrew. My good friend Yael Swerdlow, Press Officer for the consulate, explains:

It says Shalom in Hebrew, which means “Peace”.

The message we at the Consulate created it for is “Israel wants peace.” It’s nonpolitical, not aligned to any person or policy or specific population— Israel is a multicultural and diverse democracy, with over twenty percent Arab, Bedouin and Druze, and people of different faiths, Christians, Moslems, and they want peace just as much so this is not just Jewish, it’s just Israel wants Peace.

Because of the way the consulate is chartered, they cannot use the bracelets for fundraising, Swerdlow says. So they’re still working out exactly how they want to distribute the “shalom bracelet” but it will probably be via something like SASE so that anyone who wants one will be able to order it.

Bracelets can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Consulate General of Israel
6380 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1700, LA 90048
Attention: Yariv Ovadia, Consul for Communications and Public Affairs.
cialis 40mg ‘popup’, cure ‘width=500, recipe height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of this. It was the worst pain of my life, and the most hellacious 3-month round of shopping for a cure I’ve ever endured, but you should duck out if you bore easily. You’ve been warned.

My summer trip to Hell began on the July 4 trip to Yosemite, at the very moment I tore the bike racks off the car.

Instant stress. By the time I had blown through three bike shops and wasted two hours on the road and spent two more on the mountainside corkscrew hairpins into Yosemite with bughouse kids and carsick wife, I had a roaring headache. I thought nothing of it at the time, just, “Oh. This too. Great. Gottagettocamp.”

Next day, a duller version of the headache persisted as I wrestled with rebuilding my thrashed wheel rim beneath the redwoods. Popped a couple aspirin, it subsided a bit.

Next day, another headache. Now it’s getting weird. Stress, I tell myself. it’ll even out once you’ve stuck your feet in the river and hear the sough of wind through the pines for a few more hours …
(more…)

decease website ‘popup’, drug ‘width=500, store height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
sickness ‘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”>Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the Wheel-O was your own hand-held Sputnik. The red wheel spins on axle-tips of magnetized metal that cling to the wire frame. Tip the frame back and forth, and it spins faster as it rolls around the frame. Get good enough at it, you can get it up to around 500 rpm, and more than two complete “orbits” per second. It’s the perfect desk toy – the quiet whir of magnets on steel, the whipping action of your wrist, the circular/linear motion always seem to relieve stress and restore focus when the project I’ve been staring at for far too long has begun to numb my wits. Sadly, there’s not much to be found on the Web, even on Amazon’s still-in-beta A9 search engine (which seems a bit unreliable, but has plenty of entertaining bells and whistles). Search results are far better for the still-in-mass-production Superball (“made of amazing Zectron(tm)!”), which is a heavy little object in its own right – though arguably not so elegant as Wheel-O. eBay is disappointing, offering only this ferociously ugly and overengineered knock-off. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find some true believers still selling this space-age delight, along with Sea Monkeys, Etch-a-Sketch and Wooly Willy.
information pills ‘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”>Z-Cardz are nifty. Z-Cardz are stupid. Z-Cardz are collectible. Z-Cardz are 3D DIY models that start as 2D cards. Z-Cardz come five to a box. Z-Cardz might be laser-cut. Z-Cardz might be water-cut. Z-Cardz manufacturing methods don’t show up easily in Google. Or A9. Z-Cardz are boats. Z-Cardz are animals. Z-Cardz are airplanes. Z-Cardz are spaceships. Z-Cardz are now, just two years after their introdution, some ridiculously elaborate game. Z-Cardz are a bore. Z-Cardz are more delightful when you put the pieces back into the cards, stick them on the shelf and forget about them until two years later when you suddenly stumble upon them and have to build them all over again. Z-Cardz are serious irritainment.
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”>So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.

How do you symbolize faith in peace? The symbols are far fewer, less legitimized, hardly noticeable at all in human culture. One man’s peace symbol is another’s “footprint of the American chicken,” as they used to call it in the 60s. Lately, movements religious and otherwise are adopting bracelets as symbols. In a different era, it might have been hair shirts or amulets or tattoos. For the past 10 years it’s been a smug little slapfight of bumper-mounted metallic fish. But these days, it’s bracelets.

The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles is trying out this object – a simple blue strap of elastic, tin-crimped to form a hoop, silkscreened with a few words in Hebrew. My good friend Yael Swerdlow, Press Officer for the consulate, explains:

It says Shalom in Hebrew, which means “Peace”.

The message we at the Consulate created it for is “Israel wants peace.” It’s nonpolitical, not aligned to any person or policy or specific population— Israel is a multicultural and diverse democracy, with over twenty percent Arab, Bedouin and Druze, and people of different faiths, Christians, Moslems, and they want peace just as much so this is not just Jewish, it’s just Israel wants Peace.

Because of the way the consulate is chartered, they cannot use the bracelets for fundraising, Swerdlow says. So they’re still working out exactly how they want to distribute the “shalom bracelet” but it will probably be via something like SASE so that anyone who wants one will be able to order it.

Bracelets can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Consulate General of Israel
6380 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1700, LA 90048
Attention: Yariv Ovadia, Consul for Communications and Public Affairs.
cialis 40mg ‘popup’, cure ‘width=500, recipe height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of this. It was the worst pain of my life, and the most hellacious 3-month round of shopping for a cure I’ve ever endured, but you should duck out if you bore easily. You’ve been warned.

My summer trip to Hell began on the July 4 trip to Yosemite, at the very moment I tore the bike racks off the car.

Instant stress. By the time I had blown through three bike shops and wasted two hours on the road and spent two more on the mountainside corkscrew hairpins into Yosemite with bughouse kids and carsick wife, I had a roaring headache. I thought nothing of it at the time, just, “Oh. This too. Great. Gottagettocamp.”

Next day, a duller version of the headache persisted as I wrestled with rebuilding my thrashed wheel rim beneath the redwoods. Popped a couple aspirin, it subsided a bit.

Next day, another headache. Now it’s getting weird. Stress, I tell myself. it’ll even out once you’ve stuck your feet in the river and hear the sough of wind through the pines for a few more hours …
(more…)

decease website ‘popup’, drug ‘width=500, store height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
sickness ‘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”>Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the Wheel-O was your own hand-held Sputnik. The red wheel spins on axle-tips of magnetized metal that cling to the wire frame. Tip the frame back and forth, and it spins faster as it rolls around the frame. Get good enough at it, you can get it up to around 500 rpm, and more than two complete “orbits” per second. It’s the perfect desk toy – the quiet whir of magnets on steel, the whipping action of your wrist, the circular/linear motion always seem to relieve stress and restore focus when the project I’ve been staring at for far too long has begun to numb my wits. Sadly, there’s not much to be found on the Web, even on Amazon’s still-in-beta A9 search engine (which seems a bit unreliable, but has plenty of entertaining bells and whistles). Search results are far better for the still-in-mass-production Superball (“made of amazing Zectron(tm)!”), which is a heavy little object in its own right – though arguably not so elegant as Wheel-O. eBay is disappointing, offering only this ferociously ugly and overengineered knock-off. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find some true believers still selling this space-age delight, along with Sea Monkeys, Etch-a-Sketch and Wooly Willy.
information pills ‘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”>Z-Cardz are nifty. Z-Cardz are stupid. Z-Cardz are collectible. Z-Cardz are 3D DIY models that start as 2D cards. Z-Cardz come five to a box. Z-Cardz might be laser-cut. Z-Cardz might be water-cut. Z-Cardz manufacturing methods don’t show up easily in Google. Or A9. Z-Cardz are boats. Z-Cardz are animals. Z-Cardz are airplanes. Z-Cardz are spaceships. Z-Cardz are now, just two years after their introdution, some ridiculously elaborate game. Z-Cardz are a bore. Z-Cardz are more delightful when you put the pieces back into the cards, stick them on the shelf and forget about them until two years later when you suddenly stumble upon them and have to build them all over again. Z-Cardz are serious irritainment.
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”>So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.

How do you symbolize faith in peace? The symbols are far fewer, less legitimized, hardly noticeable at all in human culture. One man’s peace symbol is another’s “footprint of the American chicken,” as they used to call it in the 60s. Lately, movements religious and otherwise are adopting bracelets as symbols. In a different era, it might have been hair shirts or amulets or tattoos. For the past 10 years it’s been a smug little slapfight of bumper-mounted metallic fish. But these days, it’s bracelets.

The Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles is trying out this object – a simple blue strap of elastic, tin-crimped to form a hoop, silkscreened with a few words in Hebrew. My good friend Yael Swerdlow, Press Officer for the consulate, explains:

It says Shalom in Hebrew, which means “Peace”.

The message we at the Consulate created it for is “Israel wants peace.” It’s nonpolitical, not aligned to any person or policy or specific population— Israel is a multicultural and diverse democracy, with over twenty percent Arab, Bedouin and Druze, and people of different faiths, Christians, Moslems, and they want peace just as much so this is not just Jewish, it’s just Israel wants Peace.

Because of the way the consulate is chartered, they cannot use the bracelets for fundraising, Swerdlow says. So they’re still working out exactly how they want to distribute the “shalom bracelet” but it will probably be via something like SASE so that anyone who wants one will be able to order it.

Bracelets can be ordered by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Consulate General of Israel
6380 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1700, LA 90048
Attention: Yariv Ovadia, Consul for Communications and Public Affairs.
cialis 40mg ‘popup’, cure ‘width=500, recipe height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of this. It was the worst pain of my life, and the most hellacious 3-month round of shopping for a cure I’ve ever endured, but you should duck out if you bore easily. You’ve been warned.

My summer trip to Hell began on the July 4 trip to Yosemite, at the very moment I tore the bike racks off the car.

Instant stress. By the time I had blown through three bike shops and wasted two hours on the road and spent two more on the mountainside corkscrew hairpins into Yosemite with bughouse kids and carsick wife, I had a roaring headache. I thought nothing of it at the time, just, “Oh. This too. Great. Gottagettocamp.”

Next day, a duller version of the headache persisted as I wrestled with rebuilding my thrashed wheel rim beneath the redwoods. Popped a couple aspirin, it subsided a bit.

Next day, another headache. Now it’s getting weird. Stress, I tell myself. it’ll even out once you’ve stuck your feet in the river and hear the sough of wind through the pines for a few more hours …
(more…)

viagra sale this site ‘popup’, here drug ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Exquisite little clockwork instrument, complex of make, simple of mind: It requires no talent to play, and yet rewards with a tinkly, plinky little rendition of Brahms’ “Moonlight Sonata.” Crank it fast or slow, as is your mood, but you have no more control over its workings than over the behavior of a mousetrap. Use it, it makes but one kind of noise as the spines on its tiny drum pluck the vibrating metal tines of its tongue. This one is uncomplicated, devoid – but for the melody – of the kitsch that infects most music boxes. I’ve looked in vain for music boxes that play more challenging music, but alas they’re too expensive to contemplate, or too hard to find. Someday, someone will build one that plays Ramones tunes, and then we’ll know civilization has somehow changed for the better – or ended altogether.
treatment ‘popup’, visit this ‘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”>Ramune soda itself is nothing remarkable – a pleasant, ineffectual carbonated citrus drink, as clear and forgettable as Sierra Mist, 7-Up and their ilk. But the bottle – a patented marvel of modernized glass-blowing – is a wonderful toy, souvenir and conversation piece. The glass marble waits seated in a rubber collar in the bottle’s thick mouth. By use of a special plastic plunger, you push the marble inside the bottle, where it rattles pleasingly while you drink the soda. The two eye-like dimples at the neck are practical – if you drink with them situated on your thumb, they catch the marble and keep it from rolling up to the lip and plugging it as you sip. You can buy this stuff for about a dollar a bottle at any good Japanese market, or for $1.29 and up online. Some time ago, they added a plastic collar around the lip – presumably to make bottling easier or more sanitary, but if you’re lucky, you can find the old-style all-glass bottle in junk shops in the right Pacific-Rim neighborhoods. The vessel is a cold, dense, weird little testament to the marvelous other-ness of Japanese industrial design.
more about ‘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”>It’s autumn, and these plummet from the sky like alien landing craft. They lie dormant on the earth for a few weeks, benignly green and pine-coneish. But the Santa Ana winds seem to trigger a rot from within that transforms their pulp to flesh, which twists grotesquely and begins squeezing out vermillion seeds like so many alien spoor, or hatchlings oozing from the back of a Surinam toad. Whatever conditions must exist to germinate one of these screaming red seeds do not occur in our front yard, but the huge, 80-year-old tree keeps dumping pods in mute Darwinian hope.

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
visit ‘popup’, link ‘width=500, cheap height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>This is what the atomic Zippo evolved into: Fast times demand fast tools. Many tools of the 50s and 60s owe their visual speed to Raymond Loewy. The godfather of modern American industrial design and friend of Sinatra believed in the aesthetic of MAYA – Most Avanced Yet Acceptable, which drove his visions for everything from the Studebaker Hawk and the Lucky Strike logo to the interior of Skylab. No record of whether he’s directly responsible for the Ronson Varaflame Adonis, but in the Loewy way, the fuel-plug tail cowling and speed lines on this little chromed vehicle form their own slipstream just standing on my desk. It’s a flea-markeet find, probably among the first of the new butane-fueled models to come out in the late 50s. I’m hoping to find a junker for parts on eBay so I can replace the lost flint plug and get it fired up for camping trips and the occasional cigar. Meantime, here’s a fairly exhaustive history of Ronson lighters.
what is ed ‘popup’, about it ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>It’s drop-forged potmetal, about as heavy as six or seven quarters. But its iconography doesn’t jibe with its milieu – symbol of love cast in the chosen medium of auto emblems, and chromed to a high shine. Some nagging tickle at the back of my head says “Dodge Dart Swinger” but Google is no help in addressing the hunch and neither is eBay. Hard nicks and gouges attest to its recent history of abuse – the blackout time it spent between life on its car and life on my lawn, where my son picked it up and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, in that way of his, “This is for you.”
pill ‘popup’, pilule ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Like French provincial or Aztec modern, brutish industrial design is its own beast, not a blend of given sets of style but a strict, hermetic discipline unto itself. To make something wilfully, truly ugly – and yet appealing – is to create raw beauty, the unabashed individuality of things that are not only oblivious of their appearance, but apathetic about it. This Taiwanese ripoff of a $125 design doesn’t even bother with a crude approximation. It steals the basic core setup and a single styling cue (the useless hexagonal barrel points) and crams them together into the single most graceless, fugly package possible, wrapped in a (badly) anodized aluminum finish closely approximating the color of monkey diarrhea. It’s unbelievably bright (eight LEDs!), and puts the other white LED device on HLO to shame for both heaviness and size-to-power ratio. Ten bucks at my favorite vendor – the Chinese tool merchant at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet. It’s the VW Thing of flashlights, the Pontiac Aztek, the sort of thing Judge Dredd would duct-tape to his truncheon. Even the circular rubber switchbutton on the butt is ugly.
viagra approved ‘popup’, viagra 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”>How curious that we require our gods to be portable. For some, gods can’t be so great that they intimidate, nor so formidable that they can’t be compressed, miniaturized, made chibi and thus toted around as totem or proof of faith. This came from the stall of a far-East trader, whose wares ran from ornate meditation bells and elaborately carved wooden boxes to huge-phallused monkey talismans of bone, and captive Buddhas. The Buddha himself is carved in copper or some baser metal, weathered with what looks like lime or lye, and then encased in a chromed, red-lined glass box, proof against the weather and the world’s wickedness. While I am not Buddhist, he has been riding with me this week in case of the faintest whiff of sudden enlightenment.
view ‘popup’, order ‘width=500, malady height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Your outlook on life governs your reaction to kaleidoscopes: It’s just a kid’s toy, you snort. No, you gush, it’s an entheogenic viewer for cleansing the mind’s eye, an acid-tripper’s kit-bag accessory, an artistic medium. Aaahh, it’s just a waste of materials. I’ve been in a few of those camps, but never in the last of them. Putting a new kaleidoscope to your eye sucks you into a quiet bubble that no one else shares, sending you on a tiny expedition: how many mirrors does it have? What little colored particles and knicknacks are rolling around up in the business end? Does the outside view factor into the inner visual vortex? What happens when I point it at this lamp, that TV, the sun? Kaleidoscopes have been around since 1816. They have inspired digital imitation, prompted navel-gazing obsession, and figured into countless business metaphors. This one is sturdy, made of lithographed tin, carefully rolled and crimped and packed with glass mirrors and colored beads in China. It’s sturdy little piece of work.
viagra buy ‘popup’, viagra sale ‘width=500,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, toys became all about accessories. Kids shoulder past your knees at KayBee to hunch over demonic action figures – “What weapons does it have?” There are more than a dozen kinds of Batman. Barbie has always been accessorized. You’d think someone who owns a mobile home and a jet plane wouldn’t have to save her pennies, but then, she does work in a convenience store. Perhaps this little porcine keg – and an unswerving sense of thrift – brought her all that wealth. Perhaps she’s just a grown-up little girl whose anatomy is now obsessed over by toy fetishists, and whose original, sweet identity has been co-opted by the planet-wide hive mind of little girls yearning to be sophisticated, successful grown-ups.
discount ‘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 technological revolution ain’t what it used to be, no sir. Time was, you didn’t know what a part was and installed it wrong, an industrial machine could macerate your hand, rip out your hair, suck your cravat in right up to your sideburns. You put the wrong part on, why, could lose a nose, an eye, an arm. Yessir, you wouldn’t want to dally ’round gettin’ your fingers greasy without readin’ the manual first, making sure you knew where everything went, and what it did, and what would happen if it broke. Not like nowadays, where it’s all code and passwords and glowing words that hurt your eyes, and it’s guesswork and you can never tell if the people sendin’ ya letters about your house or your apothecary order or the size of your tallywhacker is even men or women. You never have to get your hands dirty, or even move, much. It’s all guesswork and hoodoo and a buncha black magic, I tell ya, and I don’t pretend to understand none of it.

But this here little gizmo, I know this has gotta be for some kinda big sewing machine, right? It’s cast steel, with a v-shaped channel cut into it big enough for thread, and some sort of eyelet whatsis screwed into it. And there’s a sharp end, and a blunt end. Oughta be able to figger it out, oughtn’t I? Right? Say, what’n hell is this doohickey, anyways?
stomach ‘popup’, viagra ‘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”>I believe there is a continuation of the three classifications that make up the first query in a game of 20 Questions. Animal, vegetable and mineral are followed by mechanical, chemical, electrical, digital and, ultimately – if it really all is some bottomless vortex of a Darwinian end game and we each will return to dust – spiritual. There’s an unrealized artwork in my head centering around the nexus of these seven factors and the four traditional elements – earth, wind, fire, water – maybe some sort of periodic table for existence, maybe a deck of cards with suits and faces and long, wickedly complex games with too many rules to argue over. Maybe just a bad haiku. And maybe this New Periodic Table’s really about physical compounds: Where do Persian carpets fall on the chart compared with, say, hockey pucks? Schnauzers versus beveled -glass, walnut-paneled doors? Somewhere up among the noble compounds – the ones the world was made of before somebody discovered plastic and ruined it all – lie paper, glass and steel. Some rather large pharmaceutical company packed a little coil of dental floss (a slightly less noble, mid-table compound on the order of, say, cheddar cheese or wallets – into a glass capsule lined with a label and capped with a little cutter lid of stamped tin. They sold millions of ’em. And one made its way to a swap meet because you can’t just waltz into a store and buy ’em any longer.
remedy ‘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”>Somewhere in Bombay, a cargo container awaits, baking in the sun on a dock smeared with pelican shit. Inside are approximately 10,000 cheaply made, shiny, heavy little objects of a strange design. They were knocked out by sweatshops in Old Delhi or the poorer rural villages in Northern India for a few rupees apiece, sold by the sweatshop operators to exporters for a few hundred rupees more and then stuffed into this container for a long ocean voyage. Soon, they will make their way to Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, Sydney and the Port of Los Angeles. The exporter will take a wire transfer of a rather large sum of money (for him, a 400 or 500% markup) from an importer here. The importer will then sell to the buyers at Urban Outfitters or some other yuppie-decor chain. And paunchy, galumphing fools like me will stumble in on a late-night window-shopping binge, mutter, “Whoa, cooool” and shell out enough money for each of them to feed a family of four in rural India for a month. Then we’ll take them home, park them on our desks, play with them for a few weeks while procrastinating from work that must be done, and then abandon them to gather dust and shame.
more about ‘popup’, sickness ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Lampblack and glue, pressed into hard sticks, must be ground against a smooth stone with water to make ink. I think this page was more eloquent than I would ever hope to on the subject:

The inkstone, which was used to grind the ink, was considered the very soul of a scholars library.¢Ó These stones were selected with the greatest of care and were often decorated with elaborate symbols or literary phrases thought to encourage the scholars production of higher sentiments.¢Ó While there are many exceptions, most inkstones are rectangular or rounded.¢Ó Most are in fact made of stone but examples of pottery also exist.¢Ó The definitive work on this subject is probably Mi Fus Yen shih or Account of Inkstones.¢Ó This work gives the proper name for all portions of the Inkstone and sets out the various characteristics of Inkstones and their use.¢Ó Later but also fascinating works on Inkstones include the Yen lin or Forest of Inkstones by Yu Huai, which was written in the 1600s.¢Ó This was followed by¢Ó Pao yen tang yen pien or Discussion of Inkstones from the Hall of Treasured Inkstones by Ho Chuan-yao and Tuan his yen shih or Account of Tuan His Stones by Wu Lan-hsui, both of which were published in the 1830s.

Inkstones are an acquired taste like several other facets of Chinese culture.¢Ó They are generally black or dark in color and do not draw the attention of the eye.¢Ó Their beauty oftentimes is not so much in how they look but in how they work together with the ink and the paper and brush to achieve a particular color or texture.¢Ó However, for those fortunate enough to have learned to master the brush, ink, inkstone and paper, the four precious things of the library are a passion.¢Ó Holding an antique inkstone, it is hard not to feel the power that emanated from the previous painter or scholar who possessed this stone.¢Ó For this reason, inkstones are avidly collected and treasured by Chinese and some foreigners.¢Ó Prices vary greatly and are often based on stories as to prior owners, which are difficult if not impossible to verify.¢Ó

I bought this for a few yuan on our honeymoon in Beijing more than 10 years ago. I experimented with a set of traditional rabbit’s fur brushes for a little while, then stored it until recently. Its grinding surface is marred where some careless shopkeeper stuck an adhesive price tag to it long before it came to my possession, but it in no way detracts from the turbulent whorls of water, the watchful apsect of the little turtle at the edge of the “pond.” I pull it out and heft it in my hand every now and then, for inspiration.
viagra approved ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500, stomach height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A floating police drone, a starship’s afterburner, a planet-crushing thermonuclear device that fits into a pocket, a digital key to the wealth of worlds. A transparent neoprene ball vacuformed around a simple 2-LED blink-repeater circuit and drilled through with a couple dozen very precise holes. It ignites at a single bounce, winking away with the universal red-blue semaphore of fate, the seizure-inducing blinking spasm that every drunk dreads, the visual shriek that puts him a simple breathalyzer test away from lost-license loss of independence, or serves as prelude to a chase. Who knew that if you focused on it and opened your shutter for a few extra seconds, it would take on a lurid, poetic beauty. Five bucks at Disneyland.
recipe ‘popup’, 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”>This is a refugee from my wife’s jewelry box, the surviving member of a sundered pair. Its mate is gone – perhaps escaped back to a sea of black velvet to drift over formations of garnet and hammered brass, hunting for tiny glass shrimp. Hand-snipped tin segments are wired together in a flexible facscimile of swimming scales, the eyes tiny red beads held on by pins.
more about ‘popup’, medicine ‘width=500, height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Somewhere in life, you developed the habit of taking notes. Not in college, where your first-week-of-the-semester verbatim transcription of your professors’ every little pearl devolved quickly into random doodles and daydreamt screenplay ideas. Not in the frenzied scrawling of deadline reporting that led to squint-eyed panic back at your computer once you realized you had no idea what that guy really said to you. Not in the shopping lists, camping manifests, tech-support phone calls or the dark haze of a bar before a pair of pretty eyes. No, somewhere much longer ago, you decided to keep track. There were loose-leaf binders, spiral-ring cheapos, perfect-bound sketchbooks. And then there were the handful of “important” notebooks, the ones you meant for the stashing of deep and revelatory notions, the recordable moments of ringing clarity. This one, this would be the last notebook you’d ever own: Gilt-edged pages, leatherette-bound between two heavy slabs of burnished copper. You wound up jotting down business plans, fiction-ideas. You used it to host head-clearing brawls, to help thresh nutrition from a skullful of mental chaff. It served as a paperweight for a year or two while you hunkered down on a particularly deep and engaging project. It has an eternal, rock-of-ages feel to it – and picking it up invariably triggers an attack of impostor syndrome. You think about pouring vinegar on the covers, just to see if it will corrode.
case ‘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”>Hematite is the perfect heavy little substance. It’s not as heavy, expensive or hard to shape as iridium. Nor is it pure. Just common iron oxide, solid, dark and – when polished right – lustrous as a field of stars. Somewhere in my effects is a little blob of milled hematite, a worry stone the size of my thumb. Until I find it, here is a string of hematite pearls from my wife’s bead box. They are cold, and holding them, I could almost fall asleep.
approved ‘popup’, information pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>A symbolic oxymoron, the log made out of plastic. Blowformed in un-lifelike brown, the mold marks show a careless inattention to proportions – one half’s longer than the other – and to details – the whole thing looks like a knotty Tootsie Roll more than anything that once swayed in the breeze. But it is unapologetically what it is: A log, stout and true. Sing along with me if you can remember the words:

What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs…
Rolls over your neighbor’s dog?
What’s great for a snack
And fits on your back?
It’s Log! Log! Log!
It’s Lo-og, it’s Lo-og
It’s big, it’s heavy
It’s wood!
It’s Lo-og, Lo-og
It’s better than bad
It’s good!!!

recipe ‘popup’, visit this ‘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 rims would have been steel, perhaps, or brass, and fit uncomfortably at the temples and the nose. The lenses would have been wavy, heavy, thick and, worst of all, scratched, if for no other reason than because the case was made of wood. It was elegant in its time, rimmed in brass and protected by a carapace of cellulose tinted a rather miraculous sea-foam green. He would have put them on, squinted a bit, then taken them off to rub them on his inkstained tunic before putting them on again and beginning his work – a dip to the inkwell, a few strokes to the page, one word at a time in the exact order in which they would have to remain. Paper was expensive, and he was poor, with very much to write, for his master was a man of many words. It is Chinese. It may be more than 100 years old. LIght glows from its thousands of tiny, iridescent pools.
approved ‘popup’, pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Object 200. Milestone. Millstone. This number means everything, and nothing – a way of quantifying this trivial obsession, or giving it weight it doesn’t deserve. The endless procession of things past the lens since I began now completely clutters my desk. This little fellow seems ready for anything. In honor of having done this 200 nights in a row (sort of) I’m parking him with #148 and #7, and an object still unobjectified. Visitors are invited to name him, and the bestower of the best name gets to keep him. Have fun. I do.
decease ‘popup’, approved ‘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 a facsimile of a thing of honor. Being not of the culture, but in the country, I had this traditional stone seal for imprinting my name made at a Hong Kong shop. The chop signifies dignity and integrity to those who use it correctly and understand its worth. For me, it was like bellying up to a foreign bar and ordering an exotic cocktail, a concrete totem that might bring me a millimetre closer to being Chinese. I’m often accused of tragic naievete. For all I know, the little carven lion imprints the word “western monkey’s ass” onto the documents I choose. So far, I’ve chosen only amateurish brush-and-ink paintings, where the sticky red ink of the chop-glyph adds contrast and a soupcon of authenticity.
mind ‘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”>Tibet, Indonesia, India, Pakistan – points east. Silver is hammered, pierced, drawn and twisted, orbited with wire and augmented with tiny balls of solder to the point where – alone – it hums with the import of an alien craft. Strung together with others, it loses all significance, retaining just the dull luster of metal of minor worth. Each of these is individual, handcrafted, worthy of admiration on its own. One of a series collected in a box.
side effects ‘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 50s-retro-chic flavor skein floating through the 80s oozed from many media. Sci-fi costume jewelry included. Television’s rabbit-eared, 1:66 Cyclopean eye follows you around the room from atop a doll’s body in an explosion of gears. The chunk of holographic plastic is filed and buffed along the edges, complementing the Googie-trapezoidal shape and aesthetic. It’s got that rainbow sheen. A gift. I have no more knowledge about it.
see ‘popup’, click ‘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 Museum of Modern Art Store is a glittering beach of industrial design where seaglass gems pile up, exquisite of design and function. A stroboscopic hazard flasher bought there just across from the museum a decade ago served a good 9 years, keeping Kenworths from eating me and my bike in the predawn murk. One drop too many, and it failed, finally. I kept the lenses. Seriously, spend some time at the store, it is the last repository of mass-produced modernist good taste in the U.S.
purchase ‘popup’, treatment ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Vacation. A return to the old family sod in Connecticut, to that magic last hour of lush August sun and before autumn’s alarming kaleidoscope of decay cools it to a brown land of mud and slush. We are staying with my parents in the big, old clapboard house where I grew up, its interior festooned with art and mirrors and a wealth of heavy little objects. I’ve captured some to show you over the next few weeks. Perhaps the heaviest, though certainly not the littlest is this bronze life-cast of Walt Whitman‘s hand. Taken on April 18, 1881, it was probably made first by covering the poet’s great right paw with plaster of Paris. The hollow impression would have been then filled with liquid wax to produce a wax positive of the hand, and then cast by one of several methods used to cast bronze, in an edition of 500 or so. My father acquired it in trade for, as he recalls, one of his paintings (though perhaps not this one) of Gertrude Stein. At just under a foot long – the outside size limit for heavy little objects – Mr. Whitman’s right hand weighs around 15 pounds. It is dense and cold, and wonderful to handle.
information pills ‘popup’, treatment ‘width=500, what is ed 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 6 or 8 or 10, we used to travel to Long Island to visit family friends on Shelter Island. The flat green rush of trees and fields past our car window, beneath the unending blue field of cirrus and cumulus clouds formed the tranquil reaches of my personal geography, the promise of a beach or a sunset just beyond and out of reach. At some point, we drove past a field of squat, dusky green plants, and when I asked my dad what they were, he told me, potatoes. Little pain in the ass that I was, I averred, “potatoes don’t grow on Long Island,” a phrase that was then flung back in my face every single time I offered opinions on things about which I knew nothing – which was often. Potatoes do grow on Long Island. So do husk tomatoes. Sheathed in papery, bougainvillea-like envelopes, they are about half the size of grapes, and just as sweet.
I nodded to a few rows of potatoes the other morning, en route to the little painted-plywood farm stand there a few salty miles from the ferry slip where these were bought.
medicine ‘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”>So we packed light for this vacation, figuring we’ll do a load of wash at my parents’ place while visiting, to save having to lug all the extra clothes that we would otherwise wear once before repacking them. And a few minutes after moving the load to the dryer, the machine starts making this horrendous crashing clatter. My mother roots through the steaming, half-dried clothes, and pulls out this fine array of heavy little objects: small rocks, pebbles, acorns, a bottle cap, and a key. My son, clearly, has inherited one of my filthy habits. We had forgotten to empty his bulging shorts pockets before tossing his clothes in the wash. Look for future entries from him here once he develops a bit more of an eye and grows old enough to write.

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
visit ‘popup’, link ‘width=500, cheap height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>This is what the atomic Zippo evolved into: Fast times demand fast tools. Many tools of the 50s and 60s owe their visual speed to Raymond Loewy. The godfather of modern American industrial design and friend of Sinatra believed in the aesthetic of MAYA – Most Avanced Yet Acceptable, which drove his visions for everything from the Studebaker Hawk and the Lucky Strike logo to the interior of Skylab. No record of whether he’s directly responsible for the Ronson Varaflame Adonis, but in the Loewy way, the fuel-plug tail cowling and speed lines on this little chromed vehicle form their own slipstream just standing on my desk. It’s a flea-markeet find, probably among the first of the new butane-fueled models to come out in the late 50s. I’m hoping to find a junker for parts on eBay so I can replace the lost flint plug and get it fired up for camping trips and the occasional cigar. Meantime, here’s a fairly exhaustive history of Ronson lighters.
what is ed ‘popup’, about it ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>It’s drop-forged potmetal, about as heavy as six or seven quarters. But its iconography doesn’t jibe with its milieu – symbol of love cast in the chosen medium of auto emblems, and chromed to a high shine. Some nagging tickle at the back of my head says “Dodge Dart Swinger” but Google is no help in addressing the hunch and neither is eBay. Hard nicks and gouges attest to its recent history of abuse – the blackout time it spent between life on its car and life on my lawn, where my son picked it up and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, in that way of his, “This is for you.”
pill ‘popup’, pilule ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Like French provincial or Aztec modern, brutish industrial design is its own beast, not a blend of given sets of style but a strict, hermetic discipline unto itself. To make something wilfully, truly ugly – and yet appealing – is to create raw beauty, the unabashed individuality of things that are not only oblivious of their appearance, but apathetic about it. This Taiwanese ripoff of a $125 design doesn’t even bother with a crude approximation. It steals the basic core setup and a single styling cue (the useless hexagonal barrel points) and crams them together into the single most graceless, fugly package possible, wrapped in a (badly) anodized aluminum finish closely approximating the color of monkey diarrhea. It’s unbelievably bright (eight LEDs!), and puts the other white LED device on HLO to shame for both heaviness and size-to-power ratio. Ten bucks at my favorite vendor – the Chinese tool merchant at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet. It’s the VW Thing of flashlights, the Pontiac Aztek, the sort of thing Judge Dredd would duct-tape to his truncheon. Even the circular rubber switchbutton on the butt is ugly.
viagra approved ‘popup’, viagra 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”>How curious that we require our gods to be portable. For some, gods can’t be so great that they intimidate, nor so formidable that they can’t be compressed, miniaturized, made chibi and thus toted around as totem or proof of faith. This came from the stall of a far-East trader, whose wares ran from ornate meditation bells and elaborately carved wooden boxes to huge-phallused monkey talismans of bone, and captive Buddhas. The Buddha himself is carved in copper or some baser metal, weathered with what looks like lime or lye, and then encased in a chromed, red-lined glass box, proof against the weather and the world’s wickedness. While I am not Buddhist, he has been riding with me this week in case of the faintest whiff of sudden enlightenment.
view ‘popup’, order ‘width=500, malady height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Your outlook on life governs your reaction to kaleidoscopes: It’s just a kid’s toy, you snort. No, you gush, it’s an entheogenic viewer for cleansing the mind’s eye, an acid-tripper’s kit-bag accessory, an artistic medium. Aaahh, it’s just a waste of materials. I’ve been in a few of those camps, but never in the last of them. Putting a new kaleidoscope to your eye sucks you into a quiet bubble that no one else shares, sending you on a tiny expedition: how many mirrors does it have? What little colored particles and knicknacks are rolling around up in the business end? Does the outside view factor into the inner visual vortex? What happens when I point it at this lamp, that TV, the sun? Kaleidoscopes have been around since 1816. They have inspired digital imitation, prompted navel-gazing obsession, and figured into countless business metaphors. This one is sturdy, made of lithographed tin, carefully rolled and crimped and packed with glass mirrors and colored beads in China. It’s sturdy little piece of work.
viagra buy ‘popup’, viagra sale ‘width=500,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, toys became all about accessories. Kids shoulder past your knees at KayBee to hunch over demonic action figures – “What weapons does it have?” There are more than a dozen kinds of Batman. Barbie has always been accessorized. You’d think someone who owns a mobile home and a jet plane wouldn’t have to save her pennies, but then, she does work in a convenience store. Perhaps this little porcine keg – and an unswerving sense of thrift – brought her all that wealth. Perhaps she’s just a grown-up little girl whose anatomy is now obsessed over by toy fetishists, and whose original, sweet identity has been co-opted by the planet-wide hive mind of little girls yearning to be sophisticated, successful grown-ups.
discount ‘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 technological revolution ain’t what it used to be, no sir. Time was, you didn’t know what a part was and installed it wrong, an industrial machine could macerate your hand, rip out your hair, suck your cravat in right up to your sideburns. You put the wrong part on, why, could lose a nose, an eye, an arm. Yessir, you wouldn’t want to dally ’round gettin’ your fingers greasy without readin’ the manual first, making sure you knew where everything went, and what it did, and what would happen if it broke. Not like nowadays, where it’s all code and passwords and glowing words that hurt your eyes, and it’s guesswork and you can never tell if the people sendin’ ya letters about your house or your apothecary order or the size of your tallywhacker is even men or women. You never have to get your hands dirty, or even move, much. It’s all guesswork and hoodoo and a buncha black magic, I tell ya, and I don’t pretend to understand none of it.

But this here little gizmo, I know this has gotta be for some kinda big sewing machine, right? It’s cast steel, with a v-shaped channel cut into it big enough for thread, and some sort of eyelet whatsis screwed into it. And there’s a sharp end, and a blunt end. Oughta be able to figger it out, oughtn’t I? Right? Say, what’n hell is this doohickey, anyways?
stomach ‘popup’, viagra ‘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”>I believe there is a continuation of the three classifications that make up the first query in a game of 20 Questions. Animal, vegetable and mineral are followed by mechanical, chemical, electrical, digital and, ultimately – if it really all is some bottomless vortex of a Darwinian end game and we each will return to dust – spiritual. There’s an unrealized artwork in my head centering around the nexus of these seven factors and the four traditional elements – earth, wind, fire, water – maybe some sort of periodic table for existence, maybe a deck of cards with suits and faces and long, wickedly complex games with too many rules to argue over. Maybe just a bad haiku. And maybe this New Periodic Table’s really about physical compounds: Where do Persian carpets fall on the chart compared with, say, hockey pucks? Schnauzers versus beveled -glass, walnut-paneled doors? Somewhere up among the noble compounds – the ones the world was made of before somebody discovered plastic and ruined it all – lie paper, glass and steel. Some rather large pharmaceutical company packed a little coil of dental floss (a slightly less noble, mid-table compound on the order of, say, cheddar cheese or wallets – into a glass capsule lined with a label and capped with a little cutter lid of stamped tin. They sold millions of ’em. And one made its way to a swap meet because you can’t just waltz into a store and buy ’em any longer.
remedy ‘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”>Somewhere in Bombay, a cargo container awaits, baking in the sun on a dock smeared with pelican shit. Inside are approximately 10,000 cheaply made, shiny, heavy little objects of a strange design. They were knocked out by sweatshops in Old Delhi or the poorer rural villages in Northern India for a few rupees apiece, sold by the sweatshop operators to exporters for a few hundred rupees more and then stuffed into this container for a long ocean voyage. Soon, they will make their way to Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, Sydney and the Port of Los Angeles. The exporter will take a wire transfer of a rather large sum of money (for him, a 400 or 500% markup) from an importer here. The importer will then sell to the buyers at Urban Outfitters or some other yuppie-decor chain. And paunchy, galumphing fools like me will stumble in on a late-night window-shopping binge, mutter, “Whoa, cooool” and shell out enough money for each of them to feed a family of four in rural India for a month. Then we’ll take them home, park them on our desks, play with them for a few weeks while procrastinating from work that must be done, and then abandon them to gather dust and shame.
more about ‘popup’, sickness ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Lampblack and glue, pressed into hard sticks, must be ground against a smooth stone with water to make ink. I think this page was more eloquent than I would ever hope to on the subject:

The inkstone, which was used to grind the ink, was considered the very soul of a scholars library.¢Ó These stones were selected with the greatest of care and were often decorated with elaborate symbols or literary phrases thought to encourage the scholars production of higher sentiments.¢Ó While there are many exceptions, most inkstones are rectangular or rounded.¢Ó Most are in fact made of stone but examples of pottery also exist.¢Ó The definitive work on this subject is probably Mi Fus Yen shih or Account of Inkstones.¢Ó This work gives the proper name for all portions of the Inkstone and sets out the various characteristics of Inkstones and their use.¢Ó Later but also fascinating works on Inkstones include the Yen lin or Forest of Inkstones by Yu Huai, which was written in the 1600s.¢Ó This was followed by¢Ó Pao yen tang yen pien or Discussion of Inkstones from the Hall of Treasured Inkstones by Ho Chuan-yao and Tuan his yen shih or Account of Tuan His Stones by Wu Lan-hsui, both of which were published in the 1830s.

Inkstones are an acquired taste like several other facets of Chinese culture.¢Ó They are generally black or dark in color and do not draw the attention of the eye.¢Ó Their beauty oftentimes is not so much in how they look but in how they work together with the ink and the paper and brush to achieve a particular color or texture.¢Ó However, for those fortunate enough to have learned to master the brush, ink, inkstone and paper, the four precious things of the library are a passion.¢Ó Holding an antique inkstone, it is hard not to feel the power that emanated from the previous painter or scholar who possessed this stone.¢Ó For this reason, inkstones are avidly collected and treasured by Chinese and some foreigners.¢Ó Prices vary greatly and are often based on stories as to prior owners, which are difficult if not impossible to verify.¢Ó

I bought this for a few yuan on our honeymoon in Beijing more than 10 years ago. I experimented with a set of traditional rabbit’s fur brushes for a little while, then stored it until recently. Its grinding surface is marred where some careless shopkeeper stuck an adhesive price tag to it long before it came to my possession, but it in no way detracts from the turbulent whorls of water, the watchful apsect of the little turtle at the edge of the “pond.” I pull it out and heft it in my hand every now and then, for inspiration.
viagra approved ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500, stomach height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>A floating police drone, a starship’s afterburner, a planet-crushing thermonuclear device that fits into a pocket, a digital key to the wealth of worlds. A transparent neoprene ball vacuformed around a simple 2-LED blink-repeater circuit and drilled through with a couple dozen very precise holes. It ignites at a single bounce, winking away with the universal red-blue semaphore of fate, the seizure-inducing blinking spasm that every drunk dreads, the visual shriek that puts him a simple breathalyzer test away from lost-license loss of independence, or serves as prelude to a chase. Who knew that if you focused on it and opened your shutter for a few extra seconds, it would take on a lurid, poetic beauty. Five bucks at Disneyland.
recipe ‘popup’, 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”>This is a refugee from my wife’s jewelry box, the surviving member of a sundered pair. Its mate is gone – perhaps escaped back to a sea of black velvet to drift over formations of garnet and hammered brass, hunting for tiny glass shrimp. Hand-snipped tin segments are wired together in a flexible facscimile of swimming scales, the eyes tiny red beads held on by pins.
more about ‘popup’, medicine ‘width=500, height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Somewhere in life, you developed the habit of taking notes. Not in college, where your first-week-of-the-semester verbatim transcription of your professors’ every little pearl devolved quickly into random doodles and daydreamt screenplay ideas. Not in the frenzied scrawling of deadline reporting that led to squint-eyed panic back at your computer once you realized you had no idea what that guy really said to you. Not in the shopping lists, camping manifests, tech-support phone calls or the dark haze of a bar before a pair of pretty eyes. No, somewhere much longer ago, you decided to keep track. There were loose-leaf binders, spiral-ring cheapos, perfect-bound sketchbooks. And then there were the handful of “important” notebooks, the ones you meant for the stashing of deep and revelatory notions, the recordable moments of ringing clarity. This one, this would be the last notebook you’d ever own: Gilt-edged pages, leatherette-bound between two heavy slabs of burnished copper. You wound up jotting down business plans, fiction-ideas. You used it to host head-clearing brawls, to help thresh nutrition from a skullful of mental chaff. It served as a paperweight for a year or two while you hunkered down on a particularly deep and engaging project. It has an eternal, rock-of-ages feel to it – and picking it up invariably triggers an attack of impostor syndrome. You think about pouring vinegar on the covers, just to see if it will corrode.
case ‘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”>Hematite is the perfect heavy little substance. It’s not as heavy, expensive or hard to shape as iridium. Nor is it pure. Just common iron oxide, solid, dark and – when polished right – lustrous as a field of stars. Somewhere in my effects is a little blob of milled hematite, a worry stone the size of my thumb. Until I find it, here is a string of hematite pearls from my wife’s bead box. They are cold, and holding them, I could almost fall asleep.
approved ‘popup’, information pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>A symbolic oxymoron, the log made out of plastic. Blowformed in un-lifelike brown, the mold marks show a careless inattention to proportions – one half’s longer than the other – and to details – the whole thing looks like a knotty Tootsie Roll more than anything that once swayed in the breeze. But it is unapologetically what it is: A log, stout and true. Sing along with me if you can remember the words:

What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs…
Rolls over your neighbor’s dog?
What’s great for a snack
And fits on your back?
It’s Log! Log! Log!
It’s Lo-og, it’s Lo-og
It’s big, it’s heavy
It’s wood!
It’s Lo-og, Lo-og
It’s better than bad
It’s good!!!

recipe ‘popup’, visit this ‘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 rims would have been steel, perhaps, or brass, and fit uncomfortably at the temples and the nose. The lenses would have been wavy, heavy, thick and, worst of all, scratched, if for no other reason than because the case was made of wood. It was elegant in its time, rimmed in brass and protected by a carapace of cellulose tinted a rather miraculous sea-foam green. He would have put them on, squinted a bit, then taken them off to rub them on his inkstained tunic before putting them on again and beginning his work – a dip to the inkwell, a few strokes to the page, one word at a time in the exact order in which they would have to remain. Paper was expensive, and he was poor, with very much to write, for his master was a man of many words. It is Chinese. It may be more than 100 years old. LIght glows from its thousands of tiny, iridescent pools.
approved ‘popup’, pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Object 200. Milestone. Millstone. This number means everything, and nothing – a way of quantifying this trivial obsession, or giving it weight it doesn’t deserve. The endless procession of things past the lens since I began now completely clutters my desk. This little fellow seems ready for anything. In honor of having done this 200 nights in a row (sort of) I’m parking him with #148 and #7, and an object still unobjectified. Visitors are invited to name him, and the bestower of the best name gets to keep him. Have fun. I do.
decease ‘popup’, approved ‘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 a facsimile of a thing of honor. Being not of the culture, but in the country, I had this traditional stone seal for imprinting my name made at a Hong Kong shop. The chop signifies dignity and integrity to those who use it correctly and understand its worth. For me, it was like bellying up to a foreign bar and ordering an exotic cocktail, a concrete totem that might bring me a millimetre closer to being Chinese. I’m often accused of tragic naievete. For all I know, the little carven lion imprints the word “western monkey’s ass” onto the documents I choose. So far, I’ve chosen only amateurish brush-and-ink paintings, where the sticky red ink of the chop-glyph adds contrast and a soupcon of authenticity.
mind ‘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”>Tibet, Indonesia, India, Pakistan – points east. Silver is hammered, pierced, drawn and twisted, orbited with wire and augmented with tiny balls of solder to the point where – alone – it hums with the import of an alien craft. Strung together with others, it loses all significance, retaining just the dull luster of metal of minor worth. Each of these is individual, handcrafted, worthy of admiration on its own. One of a series collected in a box.
side effects ‘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 50s-retro-chic flavor skein floating through the 80s oozed from many media. Sci-fi costume jewelry included. Television’s rabbit-eared, 1:66 Cyclopean eye follows you around the room from atop a doll’s body in an explosion of gears. The chunk of holographic plastic is filed and buffed along the edges, complementing the Googie-trapezoidal shape and aesthetic. It’s got that rainbow sheen. A gift. I have no more knowledge about it.
see ‘popup’, click ‘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 Museum of Modern Art Store is a glittering beach of industrial design where seaglass gems pile up, exquisite of design and function. A stroboscopic hazard flasher bought there just across from the museum a decade ago served a good 9 years, keeping Kenworths from eating me and my bike in the predawn murk. One drop too many, and it failed, finally. I kept the lenses. Seriously, spend some time at the store, it is the last repository of mass-produced modernist good taste in the U.S.

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.

buy information pills view ‘popup’, ailment ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>My son calls these “treasures.” Any object found out of its element with a little color or interest is a treasure to him. He is not quite 5. Grubbing through a campsite, he pulls these together, and declares them treasure, bestowing on them a weight that is reinforced by the screen-printed labels, the rusty scars and rippled lips that were left by swift and brutal jerks of the bottle opener. Rocks, coins, found Legos, the odd pull-tab – all are treasures. I love my son.

health cialis 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”>We assume they’ll arrive in saucers, ablaze with circumfrential light arrays that strobe and dazzle. We assume they’ll be small, green or gray, with vast black eyes and skeletal fingers. We assume they’ll be benevolent or at least exotically distant enough to not be bloodthirsty, rapacious, radioactive, toxic, greedy, mean or any of the other malevolent human adjectives they might be if our worst fears were made alien flesh. We assume they’ll be able to communicate, and maybe they’ll do so with the flashing, spinny lights and mellifluous tones. Clutching these assumptions to our hearts, we build toys in Their image. This one is a ratchet-driven, spring-loaded top. Crank it up. Punch the chrome trigger, and it unwinds, spinning suddenly up to about 600 RPM. Centrifugal force closes a spring-loaded circuit, igniting the onboard chip that feeds random patterns to its sound chip and string of onboard LEDs, which spit intoxicating mandalas of light and noise as the craft floats across the floor on a small, sharp tip. They might arrive in one of these. Maybe even this size. They might.
physician ‘popup’, diagnosis ‘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 good pen is a transformative tool. If it is heavy and strange enough in your hand, it opens pathways in your writing circuitry where none existed, allowing creative flow from channels hitherto untapped. There is nothing so heavy and strange, nor pleasureable and – for the money – full of cheap thrills – as a Japanese-made pen. You can grab them for a few hundred yen if you’re lucky enough to visit Tokyo, or for a bit more in Japanese goods stores in the U.S., so long as you give up hope of ever finding a refill when the ink runs out. The spring-loaded plunger at the head of this fluted rubber instrument drives a fat ballpoint nib down through a ziggurat-stepped nozzle, sending a charge of techno-authority through my hand. I could jot down spare parts lists for my basement cybernetics lab, design holographic sleepwear, sign intergalactic treaties with it. It hits the desk drawer not with a click, but with a padded thud.
nurse ‘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 hard-jawed private dick would never furnish his offices. He’d pay a guy, unload the water-damaged boxes of case files from the beaten trunk of his Chrysler Airflow – no, wait, his clapped-out old Nash – and move in. He’d sag into the gutshot leather club chair, kick his feet up on the fringe of cigarette burns ringing the sagging mahogany desk and pour a shot of something strong into the cold cup of coffee he got six blocks and three hours away before he finally found this damn place. He’d look up at some point, and notice this little thing clipped to the old bookshelf behind him, and switch it on. Dim light would pool across his shoulder, the arm of the chair, the chipped mug. And he’d sigh, flip open a file and dig in. Two hours later, smoke-stung eyes would force him to close the file. He’d knuckle his lids and reach up to switch off the lamp – and immediately earn a wicked burn across the fingertips from the bulb-cooked metal. He’d curse and suck his fingers for a second, shooting a glare at the convex glass lens capping the little bullet shape – at the pointless token air vents, and resisting the urge to wrench it off the shelf and put it through the frosted glass of his o.:ffice door. Once more, he’d reach up and gingerly tweak the switch, this time finding darkness. Then he’d shrug on his rank trenchcoat and lurch out into the night. (Five bucks at a flea market years ago. I just rewired it the other day. It looks best with a clear bulb, which gives the light a fluid, “live” quality. It bears no maker’s marks, and thus defies casual research.)
information pills ‘popup’, try ‘width=500, this site height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Given: the elephant in the old parable is a rope, a bumpy wall, a hose, a smooth and pointy dagger, a sturdy tree – so say the old blind men. Therefore: this HLO entry is an imaginary flight to a synthetic forest of vinyl trees and cellophane flowers; a lament for the faded illustrator’s art of airbrushing, which has been lost not quite entirely to Adobe and other computer-based simulacra, but backed into the tiny niches of special effects makeup, motorcycle tank art, high-end manga paintings and mass-produced insects; a bitter rant on commonly held notions of “beauty” that revere rhinestones, rainbows, pink silk, flowers, gold-plated anything, large-eyed moppets and butterflies in any quantity, color or substance; the steady surf of tiny, crappy little toys through any house with young children; and how did the makers of this 3-inch-wide vinyl butterfly ever envision children playing with it? Ceci n’est pas une papillon.
mind ‘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 put your bikes on the roof racks. You pack the car with sleeping bags and stove and food and wine and toys an family. You stop in at McDonald’s to fuel up with grease-puck sandwiches and caffeinated fizzydrinks for your massive camping trip to Yosemite. You pull out of the drivethrough and – for just a second – into a metered parking space to whip out a knife and split a puck for the kids. “Uh-oh,” your wife says. “Parking Nazi.” You look up and see the overweight bike-patrol Parking Authority goon ticketing the car parked in front of you, and you panic. Rather than jumping out to just feed the meter, you mutter, “crap” and quickly goose the car across the street to park at the drive-through drycleaners. You finish carving up the sandwich, lick the grease off your knife, pocket it, say “All righty, let’s GO!” and punch the accelerator to head for the street. The sickening, horrific crunch reminds you that you are a moron. You have just driven through the drycleaners’ drivethrough, and the little overhead roof has completely peeled the bikes off the car’s roof, trashed the rack. The crash has reduced your Cannondale Lefty‘s wheel to an unrideable pretzeloid – and all your kindly, fatherly demeanor to a gutter-mouthed ball of self-directed rage. After much cursing and struggling, you rope the remains of your vacation to the roof, and set off for Fresno, where you spend two hours going from bike shop to bike shop in search of a wheel rim so you won’t have to walk (or worse, drive) all over Yosemite Valley. The third shop comes through. Rim in hand, you make it to Yosemite on the last fringes of a five-alarm migraine, pitch camp and fall into your tent, resolved to lace up the new wheel in the morning. You begin the painstaking job with trepidation, at first, carefully mapping old spoke locations to new wheel holes so you don’t bollix up the math, but things go more quickly, and the nifty little spoke wrench they sold you fairly flies around the spokes as you relace the wheel. Then you run out of spokes. They sold you the wrong rim – too many holes. A borrowed bike keeps the camping trip from being a total disaster, but on the way back through Fresno, you find the offending bike shop closed for the holiday. And now you’ve got this worthless $70 wheel rim and the bike’s still broken. And you have this spoke wrench.
medical ‘popup’, cost ‘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 .58-caliber slug killed a lot of men during the American Civil War. Big as your thumb, fired from a high-velocity muzzle-loading rifle, it went in hard, shattering bones and exploding organs before exiting through a fist-sized hole in your back. Fired and (like this) unfired slugs pepper the battlefields of Virginia and the Carolinas. You can buy one for a buck or two at national monument gift shops, coated with flaking, oxidized lead. As it destroys, so it also has a legendary power for giving life – just ask the Confederate battlefield bystander who was impregnated by a minnie ball …
visit ‘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”>The 26 bones in your foot take a step-by-step beating of 900 pounds per square inch. The femur will take 1,200, but that’s another story. Leather shoes – still de rigeur at weddings, in courts of law, on golf courses and bowling alleys, collapse over time if not properly supported and shaped. During the Song Dynasty, girls had all their toes but the first broken and bound tightly with cloth strips to keep them from growing much larger than 3.9 inches, forcing them to develop into “lotus hooks”, rendering them useless as they grew and their owners a burden to anyone but rich parents. But that’s another story. I found these at a yard sale for a buck, shined up their stamped-aluminum adjusting hardware, stripped and refinished the wood and then put them in a closet since I don’t wear much in the way of leather shoes. Nor does anybody else in this age of $130 basketball sneakers, Tevas, fashion Chucks and so on, which is probably making the shoeshine stall a dying business. But that’s another story. Imagine the foot-shaped foot surrogate surrounded by the foot-shaped clothing, itself both conforming to and shaping the foot inside, which gives shape to the shoe in return. Instead of imagining what the “other stories
really are – or clicking off to visit them willy-nilly, imagine that your entire body is built like these carven feet, hinged with metal joints, your wooden head filled with sawdust, ball bearings and busy termites. As a group of friends and I concluded last night while trying to compile a list of most-loathed clichés, welcome to my world. “But that’s another story.”
generic ‘popup’, viagra buy ‘width=500, story 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 done the math. Have you? Add them all up: all those quarters. Multiply the seconds into hours and months spent stabbing buttons, jerking joysticks. Calculate the synaptic flashes, the wrist muscle cramps, the rolling heat lightning of an adolescent nervous system tortured and misspent hunched over game consoles. Tron took me in Florida. It sucked me into the dank, neonized airconditioning of a St. Petersburg theater. Three times in a couple of weeks. What was a few more quarters, in exchange for total immersion in the type of world I could only chase but never grasp, just beyond my fingertips? A few weeks later, I stumbled off of Space Mountain at Disney World and into the toy store, and snapped up this iconic toy. Its rear wheel revved to humming speed by a thick, cogged nylon zipcord. It moved fast, straight into whatever distant obstacle you pointed it at across my floor’s blank plane. The movie imagery is quaint now. Cartoony. Lurid. It’s been reincarnated as itself. The vehicle still zooms, even standing still. Who is your user?
cheap ‘popup’, information pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Brush a cholla and know pain. Brittle spines coat this wild cactus, eager to show their defensive might. They fairly jump into your skin – hair-fine, needle-sharp and barbed, a reminder that you’re just dumb meat endowed with an exquisitely sensitive nervous system and all the reflexes of a rock. OoopsOWWWW! When dead and defoliated, sun-bleached and nettle-free, they look more foreboding than the fuzzy-bear picture of cuteness they portray in life – bones of an alien, or a breed of coral yet undiscovered. This piece – a pencil’s length and twice the girth – is light and hollow and pleasant to the touch.

sickness mind ‘popup’, cure ‘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 act of capturing light is intoxicating. Next to the seemingly rational conversion of images to pixels by the average digital camera, shooting on film verges on sorcery. I’ve shot with just about every still medium available – black and white, color, infrared, ultraviolet, Fuji, Ilford, Agfa, Kodak, noname, 35mm, 126, 127, 2¼x2¼, 6cmx7cm, 4x5in, 5x7in, 8x10in, Polaroid SX-70, stereo – and the potential and power of exposed undeveloped film still amaze me. I’ve coiled rollfilm onto reels, dipped sheets into tanks and dropped it off at the drugstore – rolls upon countless, processed rolls of it fill my negative binders. I’ve lost thousands of frames more – images that escaped back into the light when a dropped cartridge broke, melted when it went overboard, fogged beyond use in an airport scanner. An AP photog taught me how to tear these little cartridges open with my bare hands in the darkroom and whip the film onto a reel in about 30 seconds. And he’s probably jumped on to surf the digital wave that will leave all this behind in a backwash of colored dots that can’t quite approximate the alchemy of an image on film. I don’t know what’s on these two. Yet.
and ‘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”>There’s something timeless and iconic about this chubby, vulcanized chunk of cheer. Ernie sang about him. You can buy his childlike optimism in bulk. He’s a quiz, an electronics warning, an obsession, an animated irritainment, and a target for black humor. And – oh, phenomenon most rare – he’s an unstoppable blight upon the waters of the world. This one’s about three and a half inches long, and looks … earnest.
symptoms ‘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 six, we all got on the school bus after getting to school one day, and drove away from school we went to this museum with GIANT DINOSAUR SKELETONS and you could imagine them walking the earth shaking the ground with their big heavy footsteps Thunder Lizards dinosaurs means and we got to see a coelacanth I can’t even spell it my future self would learn how to spell it decades later but a coelacanth the oldest species of fish on earth it’s like a living fossil fish and they had a stuffed emu I think and lots and lots of dinosaur footprint fossils but we couln’t touch them and they had this amazing picture, all stretched long of dinosaurs eating and walking in the swamp and eating each other’s flesh with huge sharp teeth and claws and I remember all the neato things in the glass case in the museum store this magnifying glass only I didn’t have enough money and I only had enough money for a little plastic dinosaur not even a good one I didn’t have enough money for this prism …

I could go on like that for hours. Age six is still very vivid for me, especially as my son approaches age five, gaining wonder and focus and smarts. I’ve had chandelier prisms and prism creatures and a military surplus tank rangefinder prism (wish I could lay hands on it now) and scientific prisms like this one, which really require direct sunlight to project the spectrum. There is nothing on earth – short of God’s holy dance of mist and light – so mystifying and pure as a prism.
information pills ‘popup’, pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The original was black, small, hard. If you threw it hard enough, it would almost whistle off the sidewalk 40 feet into the air, then bounce a second time almost as high. Superballs were cool. Then at some point, they started making them of swirled rubber, kaledoscopic and cheap, as if the halves of the mold barely fit together and the press operator overinjected one half and the finisher didn’t bother sanding off the mold marks. We always talked about how high one would bounce if you dropped it off the Empire State Building and whether it could jump higher if you were able to actually throw it toward the sidewalk 102 stories below. Zectron, man. Whoa.
stomach ‘popup’, mind ‘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 seventh grade, we had Mr. Sletner. He was pear shaped, phlegmatic, probably 32 or 33, a lifelong science geek with a rather brittle demeanor. He assigned us to write a science fiction story one semester and I remember I wrote this very involved drama about astronauts marooned on the moon with no radio, no rescue and no weapons battling this huge bat creature from the sun. They finally defeated it by using compressed blasts of oxygen from the last of their air bottles to fire moon rocks at it, and eventually kill it. I was pretty proud of the hard science involved in the story, and my ballpoint-and-crayon illustrations. He gave me a C+ because my handwriting was so bad. For that reason, I didn’t feel completely crushed by guilt when I was in his supply room one day after school by myself, and broke his sling psychrometer (a mercury-filled vessel with a wick that you swung in centrifugal circles) by accidentally smacking it against the black composite counter while swinging the thing around my head. Glass and beads of mercury all over the room. I sort of stuck it in the sink and vanished as fast as I could. Later that year (there was never any mention of the damaged equipment) he taught us about relative hardness, and how – short of diamonds – glass was one of the hardest substances on earth, harder even than steel. I still can’t entirely figure out how a glass cutter works – I’m guessing the pressure causes glass’ brittle surface to chip, scoring a line that later will snap when stressed by bending. But it’s just a tiny little steel wheel with a sharp edge, mounted on a single pin (not even a bearing!) shoved through a cast piece of potmetal.
approved ‘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”>Aaaaah, fuck. I dropped my fuckin’ wirenut. Hey, gimme another o’ those li’l fuckers, willya? Nah, not that one, gimme one o’ the big fuckin’ orange fuckers. Thanks. The fucker who invented fuckin’ wirenuts was one dedicated son of a bitch, man. Probably spent his days twisting 10-gauge wire together and balling it up in black fuckin’ electrician’s tape. Tore his fingers all to pieces, torques his wrist doing it with a wrench. I wonder how long that fucker did this, day in and fuckin’ day out, until a light just went on in his head, a big, fuckin’ cartoon lightbulb just like in the fuckin’ cartoons, and he says to himself, fuck this, what if you just make a little plastic knob with a tiny screw-in metal socket embedded in the end that you just twist onto the end of a couple of wires that you need to join? A few quick turns, and the wires are jammed together good ‘n’ tight like they’re one wire again, and the fucker won’t even move. I bet I could make a fuckin’ million if I ever thought of patenting the thing. Fuckin’ wirenuts. They keep the whole fuckin’ world running. Fuck
illness ‘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”>Ansel Adams may not have considered this when he shot and printed Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite or any of the other thousands of images he made at Yosemite National Park. The damage may not be in what men bring to the park, but in what happens when it falls apart. We camped at Yosemite this weekend – at one point about eight of the guys trouped out onto a boardwalk across a meadow to drink beers, make ridiculously long shutter exposurs of each other drinking, and to watch the full moon rise. The screw was sticking about half an inch up out of the boardwalk, where it had been extracted by the ceaseless pounding of millions of tourists’ feet each year. I pulled on my beer and considered it, a little woozily. It was loose. If I left it there, someone would surely come along and either blow a tire or stub a toe. If I pulled it out, I’d be an agent of entropy, a force for decay. I hesitated a bit, then pulled it out, having just recently come through a patch of wickedly bad kharma involving my own bike (drove it – while it was on my car’s roof rack – into a low-hanging steel-and-stucco carport, about which the less said, the better). The other item – a milky white glass insulator – glinted up at me from amid the granite stones in the bed of the stream that fed down from the foot of Lower Yosemite Falls to the Merced River. It was almost hidden in the icy, fast-running creek that swirled around my ankles. If I had left it there, perhaps it would have sunk back into the streambed, forever part of the landscape. Perhaps it came from a felled powerline or phone pole somehwere much farther north along the river. No matter. It’s on my desk now.

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.

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.
remedy ‘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”>“Flasbulbs popping” remained a cliché long after electronic strobes took over for these pearlescent, one-shot marvels. Snapping the shutter on a camera would close a circuit, allowing electricity from a battery to jolt a hair-fine cloud of zirconium wire into ignition in the pressurized oxygen barely contained in the bulb’s glass capsule. Instant daylight – or a harsh approximation thereof. Once the bulb went off, a photographer – particularly a news shooter – would quickly pop the bulb out of its clip, usually to clatter on the street below, and shove another into the socket before the previous one quit bouncing. In the days when photojournalists relied upon the plate-format Speed Graphic, taking a string of photos meant popping and replacing the bulb, then sliding a dark-slide in to the film holder to cover the 4″x5″ film sheet just exposed, pulling the filmholder out, flipping it over, sticking it back into the camera and pulling its darsklide to ready the next frame. Flashbulbs were what gave Weegee’s photos their garish, hyper-real edge – the sudden explosion of light and flash of heat that revealed the rawest nature of humanity at its peak. This history gives more details on the lowly flashbulb’s origins and evolution.
information pills ‘popup’, remedy ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Having gamely served their duty to decorate and delight, these hand-painted, cast-resin beauties continue to flounce and pirouette in the residue of their natural habitat. They are artifacts of the ubiquitous, now worldwide cult of the Princess. The Disney heroines have become the fountainhead of lore, iconography and financial operations for this cult, which capitalizes on the desire of many little girls to dress up and feel special, a movement propagated by the blandishments of carelessly doting mothers and fathers who have only the faintest inkling as to what puberty will be like if they keep this up. But that’s a cynic’s view, falling like a harmless cloud of spiteful ash on the shoulders of these three as they dance on, blithely, prettily, endlessly, their light steps barely slowed by the butter cream frosting clogging their petticoats.
link ‘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”>As with all globes, the topography of this Replogle moon engrosses me beyond reason. Not the mountains, craters and pressure ridges printed on its surface, but the way it’s put together: chunks of pressed cardboard made spherical are covered with little trapezoids of four-color-process map, all meticulously aligned and made more apparent by the dent I inflicted on it as a kid. I fondled it often, memorizing the names – Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, and the one I stared at the most after 7/20/69 – Mare Tranquilitatis. I pored over the craters, picturing them a-crawl with tiny 2001 spacesuits and moon buses – and imagining an Ice Station Zebra scenario played out by rival U.S. and Soviet expeditions, the icy weaponless standoff frozen in tension until someone would pull a top-secret raygun and touch off World War III.
prescription ‘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”>The grill-work of a large crab is a freakish wonder of bioengineering – burly as the Maginot Line, and baroquely bristly as an Antonio Gaudi cathedral. Built to withstand rock-crushing tides and predatory attacks while allowing for exploration of environment and the capture, disassembly and ingestion of prey, it is a perfect machine. Until disease or mishap caught up with it, this fat bastard was as big through the body as Shaquille O’Neal’s fist. Parts of it littered the beach, as though a massive submarine had exploded and sunk offshore, scattering flotsam to the waves. Knuckles were everywhere.

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.

check try ‘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 am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.
look ‘popup’, this ‘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”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.
medical ‘popup’, salve ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room’s hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine’s speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the “subtleties” of the game to realize that the Japanese aren’t insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others – inexplicably – the letters USA.
rx ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2004/03/032404.html”>My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.)

He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a “rare blood disease” – a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn’t do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death.

When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the ’80s – to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on …)
(more…)

check try ‘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 am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.
look ‘popup’, this ‘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”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.
medical ‘popup’, salve ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room’s hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine’s speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the “subtleties” of the game to realize that the Japanese aren’t insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others – inexplicably – the letters USA.
rx ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2004/03/032404.html”>My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.)

He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a “rare blood disease” – a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn’t do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death.

When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the ’80s – to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on …)
(more…)

check try ‘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 am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.
look ‘popup’, this ‘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”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.
medical ‘popup’, salve ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room’s hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine’s speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the “subtleties” of the game to realize that the Japanese aren’t insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others – inexplicably – the letters USA.
rx ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2004/03/032404.html”>My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.)

He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a “rare blood disease” – a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn’t do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death.

When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the ’80s – to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on …)
(more…)

check try ‘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 am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.
look ‘popup’, this ‘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”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.
medical ‘popup’, salve ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room’s hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine’s speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the “subtleties” of the game to realize that the Japanese aren’t insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others – inexplicably – the letters USA.
rx ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2004/03/032404.html”>My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.)

He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a “rare blood disease” – a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn’t do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death.

When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the ’80s – to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on …)
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check try ‘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 am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.
look ‘popup’, this ‘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”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.
medical ‘popup’, salve ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room’s hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine’s speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the “subtleties” of the game to realize that the Japanese aren’t insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others – inexplicably – the letters USA.
rx ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2004/03/032404.html”>My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.)

He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a “rare blood disease” – a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn’t do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death.

When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the ’80s – to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on …)
(more…)

check try ‘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 am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.
look ‘popup’, this ‘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”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.