HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Artifact

# a426 :: CD opener keychain

The fetish of packaging, viagra 100mg the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, look which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

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

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

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

So I could dump this back into the waste stream – hoping that the
The fetish of packaging, approved the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

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

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

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

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

Or I could think of some other use for it …
The fetish of packaging, buy more about the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, advice which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

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

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

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

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

Or I could think of some other use for it …
The fetish of packaging, drugs the gloss of the new. Plastic lids for shaving cream come in two sizes – the simple quarter-sized button protector found on Barbasol or this full-bloat blowmolded cylindrical monster, which covered the can of Gilette I bought last week.

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

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

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

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

Or I could think of some other use for it …
To someone who uses knives as much as I do, try this thing is about as useful as Truck Balls.

You press it against the side of a sealed CD or DVD, viagra 100mg depressing a spring-loaded cap to reveal a tiny steel blade that slices open the shrink-wrap.

They were giving them away today at Amoeba for National Record Store Week – something I didn’t really discover until I got home to unpack my goodie bag. Had I known, viagra I probably would have politely declined, and let someone else enjoy it.

Now I can either keep it around, adding to the household clutter, or huck it since the metal makes it unrecyclable.

Do people ever think about the amount of material they’re pumping into landfills and the atmosphere by manufacturing this kind of object?

4/18/2009
#a392 :: Old Rohrshach pin

I have a thing for magnets.

These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

A single one can support close to 10 pounds, treat and depending on how you rig it.

And when you place a href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/?p=1397″>pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, a little pentagram of force.
I have a thing for magnets.

These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

A single one can support close to 10 pounds, this web depending on how you rig it.

And when you place a href=”http://heavylittleobjects.com/?p=1397″>pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, information pills a little pentagram of force.

However, salve that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
I have a thing for magnets.

These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

A single one can support close to 10 pounds, visit web depending on how you rig it.

And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, advice a little pentagram of force.

However, that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
I have a thing for magnets.

These are powerful enough to leave blood blisters if you more than one of them snap together on you.

A single one can support close to 10 pounds, for sale depending on how you rig it.

And when you place pinballs around one the magnetism distributes evenly through five of them, a little pentagram of force.

However, that’s not a magnet. this is a magnet. Any of ’em. Go on, pick one.
Twenty-two years after Watchmen changed my psychotopography and appreciation for the nuances of fiction forever, online they finally got it completely right.

We saw it again this afternoon, and fell even deeper into it than we had at the midnight premiere at the Dome a week earlier.

The movie is an extraordinarily accomplished telling of the great “unfilmable” original, and the second time around – the gorgeous ballet of deception and violence and honor betrayal among these rich, fucked-up characters – just cemented my admiration for Moore‘s story and Gibbons‘ art.

I bought the comics one by one when they hit the stand – I have a distinct memory of standing in some punk bookstore on South Street in Philadelphia in 1986 and picking up the first one and thinking, “Oh. Man. Oh, MAN.” Near the end of the run, DC put out a set of four buttons. This is the only one I’ve managed to hang onto since then, and the rust bleeding through from the tin back gives it a wonderful extra layer of filth and meaning.

3/14/2009
#a389 :: Amethyst “crystal”

Where is he going? What is he carrying? Why is he important?

Chinese factory workers so beautifully aped the luster of carved coral with cast, more about prostate burnished and “age”-dusted red plastic resin that I’m left wishing I had the answers to these questions.

In lesser hands, healing he would have been a child’s plaything, a little knicknack amid thousands of others on a shop shelf, an inconsequential bauble.

But look at the bearing they’ve given him, the speed of his walk, the indomitable purpose in his knowing eyes. Mold seams and tool gouges would have killed that effect. You have to admire the height of the art of faux-antiques.

Found him in Chinatown for three bucks.
She regards it with suspicion.

“Amethyst?”

The Chinese shopkeeper nods firmly. “Finest, viagra 100mg from Xian province. Xian province. Terra cotta warrior. Xian.”

He keeps nodding.

She drums her French-tipped nails against its too-glossy sides. She pricks at her fingertips with its perfectly asymmetrical point. She hefts it. Rolls it over in her perfumed hand.

Then she waves it at him: “Bullshit. It is not …” (more…)

3/11/2009
#a381 :: Flexplay DVD

This is one of those freaks of science that will have completely obsolesced within 10 years.

I weep at the sheer volume and depth of technological experimentation and collaboration that culminated in its manufacture – all of it doomed to the landfill and a fascinating footnote in Wikipedia because of FlexPlay‘s very wizardry:

A Flexplay disc is shipped in a vacuum-sealed package. There is a clear dye inside the disc, viagra approved link contained within the bonding resin of the disc, which reacts with oxygen. When the seal is broken on the vacuum-packed disc, the layer changes from clear to black in about 48 hours, rendering the disc unplayable. If unopened, the shelf life of the sealed package is said to be “about a year.” The DVD plastic also has a red dye in it, which prevents penetration of the disc by blue lasers, which would go straight through the oxygen-reactive dye.

You can get some pretty decent movies in this format for like a buck-99 at Staples – provided you’re willing to accept the responsibility for recycling the damn thing, or the guilt from just hucking it into the trash.

We stopped halfway through “The Kite Runner” this evening since it was getting late.

Hope we get to see the rest of it tomorrow night – before the disk goes the hyperaccelerated way of all flesh.

3/3/2009
#a379 :: Las Vegas tiki culture artifact

Before the age of fluorocarbons and exotic esthers, link a man used to scrub his bar of shaving soap into a lather with one of these, daub it on his face and shave.

I gave this to Dad for Christmas a few years ago, and he sent it along last month in a boxful of HLOs he generously lent to the cause (yes, I’ll be mailing most of them back).

Chromed brass, by the way it’s corroding. I don’t think he uses it much.
Before the age of fluorocarbons and exotic esthers, help a man used to scrub his bar of shaving soap into a lather with one of these, daub thge resulting suds onto his face and shave.

I gave this to Dad for Christmas a few years ago, and he sent it along last month in a boxful of HLOs he generously lent to the cause.

Chromed brass, and little used, by the way it’s corroding. Somewhere in the sound stages of Hollywood I imagine a prop man is working very hard to apply this sort of finish to a gilded-age industrial opera.
Before the age of fluorocarbons and exotic esthers, more about a man used to scrub his bar of shaving soap into a lather with one of these, daub it on his face and shave.

I gave this to Dad for Christmas a few years ago, and he sent it along last month in a boxful of HLOs he generously lent to the cause (yes, I’ll be mailing most of them back).

Chromed brass, and little used, by the way it’s corroding.
The Aku-Aku Restaurant opened in 1960 inside the much-fabled Stardust Casino in Las Vegas.

When the Stardust was imploded in 2007, prostate mob-culture journalist Nick Pileggi called it “the Bellagio of its day, ampoule the most dazzling casino out there.”

The Aku Aku ran for 20 years.=, a veritable temple of tiki culture (Here’s its appetizer menu).

My step-father-in-law, who has a massive Vegas collection both in cabinets and in his head, very generously gave me this today. (Thanks, Lee!)

I don’t know whether this fellow is laughing or grimacing, but he’s the real deal – a rough-hewn head in wonderfully scratchy ceramic.

He’s now living in a place of honor, among the other shrunken heads.

3/1/2009
#a369 :: Lucky lead pig

Once upon a time, stomach more about his paint was perfect.

You can see it on his good side – the bright and chipper eye facing the lucky shamrock dangling from his left jowls – that look that says fortune will smile on us both if you keep me close.

Flip to the other side – the stem of the shamrock – and age has turned him grim.

Chipped paint has flaked away from his face, left him with a patina of jaundice, decay and despair.

He’s sat overseeing my family’s kitchen for decades of happy parties, warm dinners, humdrum suppers and lonely midnight snacks. He’s seen three or four generations of scotties come and go. Watched my brother and sister and me grow up, squabble, chuckle, despair, rave and joke, waited quietly while we went off to school and then work and life beyond the kitchen, and return home there again and again.

And my dad was kind enough to dethrone the little feller long enough to ship him to me to be duly added to this rambling catalog of obsession.

Tomorrow, I’ll ship him back so he can return to his rightful place. And continue his vigil of bemused decay.

2/19/2009
#a366 :: Original copper transmission line – Hoover Dam

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

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

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

2/16/2009
#a365 :: Lead type
I work in this office, mind in my home. It’s a nice office, this web in a very nice home, but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head.

Later that evening I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room marveling at two things:
1. as I Twittered earlier:
  
  Imagining the mystic vortex of passion,depression,vulgarity,love & kink that was going on in this town last night.Vegas=such a human swamp.
  
  and …
2. The performance of Ka, the Cirque du Soleil’s orgiastic blast of stagecraft, the single biggest, lushest, most ravishing thing I have ever seen on stage.
I won’t begin to describe it, except to say that I wore a stupid grin throughout most of the 100-minute show, and left the purpose-built theater at the MGM Grand feeling well and thoroughly entertained.

You won’t find video or many stills of the show, but you have ple
I work in this office, order in my home. It’s a nice office, this in a very nice home, this web but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head … Next morning, I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room realigning my spine and marveling at two things:
1. as I Twittered earlier, Las Vegas is an interesting place to spend Valentine’s day:
  
  Imagining the mystic vortex of passion,depression,vulgarity,love & kink that was going on in this town last night.Vegas=such a human swamp.
  
  and …
2. The performance of Ka, the Cirque du Soleil’s orgiastic blast of stagecraft, the single biggest, lushest, most ravishing thing I have ever seen on stage.
I won’t begin to describe it, except to say that I wore a stupid grin throughout most of the 100-minute show, and left the massive, purpose-built, state-of-the-art, 1000-seat theater at the MGM Grand feeling well and thoroughly entertained.

You won’t find video or many stills of the show, but you have plenty of time to save up if it seems like your kind of fun: The show is four years into its 10-year contract.
I work in this office, viagra in my home. It’s a nice office, in a very nice home, but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head.

Later that evening I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room marveling at two things:
1. as I Twittered earlier:
  
  Imagining the mystic vortex of passion,depression,vulgarity,love & kink that was going on in this town last night.Vegas=such a human swamp.
  
  and …
2. The performance of Ka, the Cirque du Soleil’s orgiastic blast of stagecraft, the single biggest, lushest, most ravishing thing I have ever seen on stage.
I won’t begin to describe it, except to say that I wore a stupid grin throughout most of the 100-minute show, and left the purpose-built theater at the MGM Grand feeling well and thoroughly entertained.

You won’t find video or many stills of the show, but you have plenty of time to save up if it seems like your kind of fun: The show is four years into its 10-year contract.
It’s fitting that I mark the end of my second full year of daily obsession on this blog with such an archetypal handful of heavy little objects:

I found these samples of a truly lovely display font in an antique shop in rural Arizona earlier this week – artifacts of a dead technology going for a buck apiece.

Moveable type remained nearly unchanged for more than 400 years after Gutenberg first puzzled it together – solid blocks shaped into reversed letters, side effects inked to move message to page – until computers blew away all the old technology and the ensuing conflagration began taking with it the newspapers, page magazines and other ephemera with which a race has spent centuries defining itself … (more…)
2/15/2009
#a364 :: Las Vegas thrill tickets

It’s rare that an object straddles the razor-fine line between art and camp, remedy more about between craft and kitsch.

Yet here is a little man of bronze, remedy made to recline in the cup of a water-pocked stone.

His blobby countenance, his Giacomettian proportions keep him from being a thing of manufactured cuteness and maybe lend him a bit of gravitas. Or, he could be just a quaint paperweight. I can’t decide.

This is something my father lent to the cause by way of his collection.
I work in this office, dosage in my home. It’s a nice office, in a very nice home, but when you’re in a building 24/7, you develop a deep need to get the hell out before your urge to claw your hair out turns too real.

Cabin fever and a three-day weekend conspired to send us to Las Vegas for a couple of nights.

ON the way out, I took the kids on Desperado, a rattling, nasty, brutish roller-coaster at Buffalo Bill’s. Poised at Primm, NV, the huge casino complex is perfectly situated to suck in road-weary Angelenos looking for a respite and an early taste of the thrills in store in Las Vegas proper.

The kids screamed their heads off. My spine reminded me of my age. And yet the chill blast of air, the wicked first plunge at 85mph and something like a 60-degree angle into a tunnel in the ground was just the thing to blow all remaining shreds of stir-crazy from my head … Next morning, I lay on my back on the floor of our Las Vegas hotel room realigning my spine and marveling at two things: (more…)

2/14/2009
#a360 :: Temperance-era novelty bar tool

This conflicted fellow was cast in pot-metal and chromed in cheap silver probably more than 100 years ago.

His top-hat is a jigger, decease ed his feet end in a spoon, order information pills the better to mix you a nice drink and present you with a little moral dilemma in the bargain:

Do you spoon something into your drink, facing the two-headed man’s disapproving snarl and wagging finger of reproach on the front side?

Or do you prefer to see the back, where heedless souse’s happy guffaw uncorks your beer and his little cocktail glass foameth over?

I’m really grateful for this loan from the amazing collection of Dad.

Update – Apparently this comes from the early 20-th century temperance era – see Dad’s comment quoted below. More about Carrie Nation here.

2/9/2009
#a357 :: Rokenbok ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/6/2009
#a341 :: Obama campaign pin

Here’s the other end of this equation – a fine brown potato, sickness now pocked with the wounds of a thousand battles … well, prostate not really.

This is simply what it looks like when your son swipes your Christmas present and gets crazy with a hapless spud … the potato’s a couple of ounces lighter, there are nasty cylindrical potato-pellets all over the house and you’re both laughing and trading the fun off to shoot each other because it’s such stupid fun.
I scoffed at these things, more about which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, information pills sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, unhealthy only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

It shouldn’t work at all, really.

But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I scoffed at these things, link which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, sickness sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

It shouldn’t work at all, really.

But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I scoffed at these things, information pills which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, ask sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

It shouldn’t work at all, really.

But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I scoffed at these things, nurse which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, search sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid.

Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away once, view only he managed to shatter the family’s front window … but thats another story.

This appeared in my Christmas stocking last month courtesy of Santa Wife, who knows the buttered side of my bread quite well: Sturdy blowmolded thermoplastic – a simple mechanism made of two parts – a red barrel/trigger assembly mounted tightly to a black receiver with a good, stiff spring.

It shouldn’t work at all, really.

But just shove the muzzle into a raw potato, tearing off a bit of ammo as you withdraw it and you have the power to nail someone30 feet away with a tiny cylinder of potato that leaves the gun with a sharp *Plick*, and leaves your mouth with a stupid 10-year-old’s grin.
I never repeat heavy little objects.

I mean, sales never.

My little daily obsession can be a cruel taskmistress, sildenafil sometimes commanding me to find something cool to post even when nothing cool has come through my life. But like an idiot samurai, information pills I live and die by a code set in motion long ago and over which I (choose to) have no control.

However, rules are meant to be questioned and this object – like grizzlies in a cloning lab – bears repeating:

No punditry, no anecdotes, no pontification can outweigh, outrun or outlast this fact: We put two decent men into the White House today.

We ended the longest, ugliest domestically-generated reign of terror since the Red Scare of the 50s or, arguably, the Civil War.

And we bought this once-great nation a little extra time, and a chance to become great again, before darkness could swallow us all.

Onward. And upward. Together.

Someone is reminding us how great America can be, because we all know deep in our marrow, how great Americans can be when they embrace their diversity and work together for a common good.

We should listen. And act as one. Because we know it’s better than continuing to destroy each other with words, and the nation with ideological conflict that matters far less than every liberty, right and joy we’ve allowed the past eight years to piss away.

So let’s go.

1/21/2009
#a336 :: Railroad date nail

ENLARGE
I have a thing for stereo cards – particularly views of the industrial age.

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

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

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

1/15/2009
#a334 :: Tin advertising whistle

Vintage viral marketing, treat for what may or may not be Captain Black tobacco.

Blow through the stem and you get a sweet bosun’s-pipe peep. By the look of the printing, price this dates back at least 50 or 60 years, but Googling bears no clear clues to its origins.

You gotta love the mascot’s pissed-off expression and his jaunty pirate’s hat.

1/14/2009
#a328 :: Glass syringe

She fiddles with it. Finally squeezes a needle onto it. And fixes up.

Big fucking horse syringe. Soup spoon full of horse. The snap and heat of the Bic under the spoon brings her to: (more…)

1/7/2009
#a326 :: Porcelain doll head

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

1/5/2009
#a325 :: Padlock

Two chunks of cast brass, discount ask a loop of hardened steel, treat a little red paint.

An amulet against burglary. A barrier against the night.

Put it in your magpie’s hoard. Slip it into your boxing glove. Clamp it through the hasp of your Navy trunk and lose the key, prostate dooming yourself to a 10-minute round of cursing and destroying the hasp with a hatchet until you stagger back, winded and sweating, and wondering “What was that all about?”

Who knew there was an entire collection of videos dedicated to picking the things?

Such a meaty weight, the brass warms in your hand as you heft it, and try to imagine its past.

1/4/2009
#a321 :: Shooting badge

William Randolph Hearst had a thing for guns.

The newspaper magnate and industrialist (and model for the titular character in Citizen Kane) had his name put on rifle events in the 40s and 50s, information pills and they’ve been resurrected lately for reasons that may or may not bear Googling.

This badge was awarded to some sharpshooter some time in 1946, page and found its way to an antique shop in Bakersfield that we cruised through (once again) en route home last night.

12/31/2008
#a320 :: Traveling Ganesha

He is the lord and destroyer of obstacles and like his brother, buy he came from San Francisco – indeed from another shop in the same block on Columbus Avenue.

He is brass, ampoule barely 1.25 inches high, carrying his teapot and parasol on the road from here to there. He smiles benevolently, secure in some knowledge to which I am not privy.

12/30/2008
#a312 :: Old “Backwards Bush” countdown timer

This thing has been kicking around my office for quite a while. Six years have flattened its battery. It was only supposed to have lasted another two years.

I’m such an optimist.

While you’re dozing the sand is completely eroded from beneath you and two years stretch to six. By the time you look up a rapacious gang of mercenary thugs has looted your nation, here fucked your reputation, approved gutshot your economy and kicked justice squarely in the nads.

Things grow so bad that basically everyone you know or would care to know raves an unlikely superhero type into power.

The ugly fear from the base of your spine moans, “it can’t succeed. It just can’t.”

And you’re left sifting through the wreckage of what’s come before. Waiting for what’s to come.

One question: Will we watch this guy a bit more closely? After all – he does work for us.

12/22/2008
#a304 :: Agitprop

Even with the massive combined forces of a wronged and angry nation of voters, viagra order a reinvigorated Democratic party machine and some of the savviest campaigning in history buoying him up, hospital Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election was hardly the landslide it should have been.

The count was 69.4 million to 59.9 million, which means nearly half the people who voted couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see the smarter option.

It’s all blood down the drain at this point, but Obama’s mighty machine continues to churn, still collecting donations … for what? A $5 donation bought (at least for me) five of these stickers, designed by Shepard Fairey as a sort of ephemeral victory dance.

The detail’s too small to really translate from a car bumper 20 feet away, but it’s all just confetti now that the economy is on fire, the Constitution has been kneecapped and the fucking corporate greedheads spent the past eight years robbing us blind.

Much work to be done. What we “did” was get a chance to do it.

I’m hopeful. You?

12/14/2008
#a298 :: Porcelain numbered sphere

To be fair, approved this has pinholes in either end, making its utility as some sort of glorified golfball-sized bead more apparent.

But I prefer to ignore the hole, and imagine it as a prop from Her Majesty’s weekly bingo game, held secretly in the rooms beneath Buckingham Palace.

It’s made of porcelain and fired with a snappy-looking glaze.

12/8/2008
#a297 :: Chinese novelty matchboxes

I can’t tell if these are serious products of Chinese public-health propaganda agencies or just an Engrish yock cooked up by China’s ever-creative but English-impaired export trade. Not sure it matters – they’ll own us completely by 2020.

All I know is these were 40 cents each at a curio shop in Chinatown, link and they came with striking surfaces but no matches. The sides bear this helpful warning and – in much smaller print – the epigram, cheapest “Childhood memory, combustion pleasure.

The one at bottom left of the stack says “DO NOT PEE OUT.”

12/7/2008
#a296 :: 4H Pin

California is a land of exiles. For that reason – among many others – I love it.

Anyone not born here has come to explore, this to self-reinvent, sick to escape forces of oppression or boredom or hopelessness left behind.

This westward tide has flowed for centuries, check pulling wave upon wave of Spaniards, gold-rushers, dust-bowled Okies, Sinaloan braceros, Vietnamese boat people and self-anointed stars in training onto the shores and streets of a land gilded with sun and promise.

Tidal debris silting up in the antique stores of Orange County and Ventura, Santa Barbara and Bakersfield brims with nuggets.

A 4-Her brought this all the way from Montana, and then left it.

Possibly a few dozen years ago. There’s no telling now.

12/6/2008
#a294 :: Ideal “Powermite” orbital sander

In 1969, order the Ideal Toy company came out with a line of fully operational miniature powertools that plugged into battery supplies built into their small carrying cases.

This “Powermite” sander is about three inches long by two inches tall and less than an inch wide, order and came with little sheets of sandpaper, for sale which clamped onto its pad much the way full-sized ones do today.

You get the sense from holding this that you could – quite literally – build an entire dollhouse with a full set of them.

A full set looks something like this. I found this for a few bucks in an antique store.

12/4/2008