This has to be the antique-shop-crawl find of all time: A pocket compass in a “hunter” watch case, viagra dosage lined with copper and plated in silver. When you close the lid, more about a fragile little arm clamps the needle in place, and when you open it, it e-e-e-ver-so-slowly noses north.
$10. Unbelievable.
This has to be the antique-shop-crawl find of all time: A pocket compass in a “hunter” watch case, viagra dosage lined with copper and plated in silver. When you close the lid, more about a fragile little arm clamps the needle in place, and when you open it, it e-e-e-ver-so-slowly noses north.
$10. Unbelievable.
If you believe in the primacy of the American union, approved you’d be within your rights to believe that joining the American Newspaper Guild would give you job security.
Two things have dashed that myth for me: First, stomach I spent a good six weeks, sildenafil Monday through Friday sitting on the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia Inquirer building with a Guild placard around my neck. Only to have the guild finally settle on some pathetically weak concessions from the paper.
Second, the American newspaper is dying a swift, ugly death and, with it, long-form journalism as we once knew it.
All of us bloghounds and Google addicts will have to wonder, before too long, where the headlines will come from if we don’t help usher newspapers fully onto the web as information companies. And to pull that off, papers will have to pull the death-defying stunt of abandoning the suicidal economy of dead-tree publishing.
So I have to admire the bronzed sturdiness of this badge, and all the permanence it signified. And wonder what the real cost will be once this badge finishes replacing it: 
Down at the other end of the mock-currency spectrum, cure plastic doubloons are minted in China by the chestful to lend that yo-ho-ho feeling to your kid’s birthday party.
I found this in the grass at a park today at another kid’s birthday party, while watching yet another birthday party setting up. The trappings – and there alwa are trappings – vary from one party to the next: Here, we honored Lewis Carroll’s mad tea party with three flavors of tea and readings, and cucumber sandwiches (with no crusts) and cupcakes labeled “EAT ME.”
Across the way the parents had laid on 50 rental chairs and strung up a noose for the yet-to-arrive pinata and shooed flies away from boxed snacks that had come several hours early.
And somewhere beneath my feet, a weekend or three or 39 weekends ago, kids hunted through the grass and climbed trees and peeked beneath bushes in search the few remaining coins scattered from a pirate’s treasure.
They missed one.
More than 500 million human beings live in absolute poverty. Right now.
Their lot is not changing.
More than 15 million children die of hunger every year. Starve. To. Death.
How many children is that? Numbers are pretty meaningless when you’re talking about entire nations of people, try but do some math:
Remember the faces of the kids in your own first-grade class? Remember the fat kid and the anxious kid? The punchy kid and the silly kid and your very best friend in the world who laughed when you ate paste? Now multiply the size of your own first-grade classroom by about 20 … (more…)
A simple soundboard, cheapest wired to a switch and a speaker. I disemboweled it from (?) an 8×11 promo folder for “Scream 2008” that landed in my wife’s office. When you opened the cover of the folder, see a horrific shriek would ensue: “AUUUGHHHAAAAAAAGOODDDDNOOOOO!!!” Soon, I’ll be attaching it to Screaming Tiki so that he can get his voice back, about which more later.
A barely recyclable skin, visit this information pills shucked from the future corpses of non-recyclable devices that are designed to power other devices that would otherwise be helpless without them.
Could we do without these husks? Could we bind batteries together with rubber bands or zipties or something less insulting to the environment? Could we design solar chargers for rechargable batteries?
We will have to, if we expect to keep the right to ownership of this planet.
We hold these things close – our beliefs.
They guide our acts, page they govern our thoughts, case they control how we vote, ampoule whom we love, what we do in the dark.
And we bind ourselves to these intangible self-truths with talismans – headdresses, tefillim, hair shirts and medals.
This is an odd little find – it looks to be celebrating the jubilee of some holy event or other in the year 2000 – and I can’t say I’ll keep it. For though it’s heavy and finely shaped, it speaks for a religion I hold only the deepest, yet most ephemeral ties to.
Oh my gawd:
Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:
A chunk of bona-fide space rock.
But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)
Oh my gawd:
Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:
A chunk of bona-fide space rock.
But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the things as swiftly as you take them on. So you amuse yourself with the illusory luxury of a desk-clearing brawl – all elbows and rags and windex and a sweet sparkling aftertaste. And you cap the day doing the very thing you told yourself you were done with five or six hours ago. Staring at the desk. Letting shit pile up on it. Because it’s your desk. And it does that.
Overcome for a moment, order if you can, healing the urge to vomit:
You’re looking at casts of someone’s teeth – full bicuspid-to-incisor replicas of a human’s business end, cast in peach-colored plaster, mounted on more white plaster that is set into a hinged contraption meant to approximate the original owner’s jaw.
Only the hinge is too far back from where the molars connect; sinew and bone are rendered in bronze; and the rest of the owner’s … context … is missing.
What is this for? How does it work?
And could one, as posited in one of James Ellroy‘s grislier scenarios, frame someone for murder by using this thing to put signifying bitemarks all over the victim’s body?
Halloween’s just a week away, my friends. And half a week beyond is the election, which is – in all candor – far more gruesome to contemplate.
(Spotted at the Melrose swap meet)
This deeply iconic toy from my youth let you commit a sort of reverse archaeology:
Begin with the shapes left in metal by “disgusting” creatures – an aluminum “fossil” that holds the power to create a form of life.
Pour plasma-like “Plasti-Goop” into their very absence. Heat it on a small thermoelectric hotplate. Watch the forms congeal and cool. Then tweeze out bug simulacra – now endowed the “lifelike” jiggle of insect energy … and completely creep out your little sister.
Utter heaven.
Like so many great toys, sildenafil The Mattel ThingmakerTM was watered down, neglected, and bastardized into something sort of resembling its former glory due to too many small-minded parents suing over their children’s burnt fingers, but it’s still available in some form.
THE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) –
Joe the Plumber. Indeed.
Look, this blog isn’t political.
I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things.
But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one would-be U.S. president over the other because of the people he associates with, put that shit aside and try to come up with the logical answer – for each candidate – to this far more important question:
Does this guy have a plan for our near future? Or is he just busy shoveling mud?
Because that’s what really matters.
Even if you’re ignoring what tens of millions of people are telling you and saying in public, you need to be honest enough with yourself to answer that question in the form of a vote.
Or haven’t you been watching?
What’s that? You’re fresh out of belief in the System?
Look: Every damn time, your vote counts – even if you don’t fully believe in either candidate, your choice in this is important.
Without your vote, you’re just another chump along for the ride with whichever side has the most people who care.
Get your head together. Go register your ass. VOTE.
(And this thing arrived in the mail today. Yeah, I sent for it. Got a problem with that?)
I love mystery gadgets best of all. I have a sense of what this is for – but not, erectile precisely, viagra 60mg how to use it.
Put the black bakelite eyecup to your eye and what do you see? A thin strip of optical film, stomach with light showing through a tower of letters.
Pull out the telescoping center – what does it do? Just reveals a scale of notches – 5, 10, 15 … – etched in chrome.
Spin the knurled collar – it holds letters matching the ones inside the eyepiece that seem to compare against a scale of f. stops, exposure lengths and frame-per-second numbers printed on the barrel.
But how exactly would you use it? What alchemy of light, emulsion and artistic eye would it produce for you if you did it right?
A, M, P, X, D, R, F, H, B, K, V, S, G, N, L, Z. No help from Google there.
Instocine Drem. Not much help here, either.
The heavy, printed tin encases a heart of what feels (by weight) like optical glass – holding secrets of its use that may have died long ago with those who used it most. It was made in Austria, and found its way to a swap meet in West Hollywood, where I rescued it.
It’s fitting that today’s object is a level.
For today I have finally brought HLO completely up to date, no rx after a double-whammy punch of working vacation with my family in London for a month and a full-bore trip to Burning Man crushed my daily blog output.
A good level operates with an oracular efficiency and grace that blows your mind the first time you see it. Wha …? How can that be? That little bubble dictates how well something is aligned to the center of the EARTH??? Who makes the bubble capsules level in the first place?
I’ve always loved and admired the handle as a legendary, diagnosis class-defining tool, like a good hammer. This is a particularly gorgeous specimen from Stanley Tools.
Everything is in balance now. I wonder what tomorrow’s object will be …
Almost 70 years ago, website this was the height of compact multimedia viewing equipment:
A dark, here swirled cube of oxblood-and-black Bakelite with a simple double-convex eye and the weight of history upon it. Slip a 35mm slide into it, point it at the light and gaze.
Good, clean American fun.
And now obsolete.
This gem glinted out at me from the cluttered shelves of an antiques mall in nether San Bernardino County, cialis 40mg and the $1.95 price tag sent it home with me.
Back when the Playboy Club was truly the capital of hedonism – and not just another seedy Hollywood venue – back before the bunny head, this was the logo for American lust: A cartoon nude with black stockings and opera gloves, dangling a key to the kingdom of wet dreams, her lipsticked sneer a promise of certain delights.
Go on. Stub out your cigarettes on her midriff, was the unsubtle semiotic code. She’s there to be used.
But oh, so tasteful.
Balefully he stares at the lens and struggles to hold his pose.
The photographer has gone to lengths to make him appear comfortable – with a little wall and urn upon which to lean poeticallly – and “natural” – with tufts of grass and twigs underfoot and a bough of oak leaves overhead.
But he cannot look comfortable: He must stand stock still for up to 20 seconds. He doesn’t really want to be here. His collar is tight. The shoes pinch.
Are you ready? The photographer pulls the dark slide from the holder carrying the prepared sheet of japanned tin.
I guess so. The man steadies himself and exhales deeply, buy searching for inner calm.
Hold it now.
The photographer pulls off the lens cap and looks at the man. Okay now – just a little while longer.
The man waits. He cannot help blinking at least once, this and glancing around the studio: this blurs his eyes on the painfully slow emulsion.
In happier times, shop before the marriage, and the kids and the mortgage, this fellow might have enjoyed hanging out with these fellows. But not here. No longer. That life is gone.
The photographer vamps: Just a liiittle longer … the man sighs. His shoulders lift and his head moves, imperceptibly fuzzing the edges of his face.
… aaand, okay, sir. Thank you. He caps the lens, and the ordeal is over. The man’s picture is now inside the camera, and the photographer must get it out.
Back in 1969, viagra dosage the Louis Marx and Company was casting its “WILD ANIMALS” series in plastic. These beautiful little facsimile animals were hand-painted (in Taiwan, unhealthy according to the garish and lush four-color offset-litho box) and turned them loose in the wilds of American family rooms.
The box copy says (in all its unproofread glory):
MULE DEER
Ranging from the cold mountains of Alaska to the burning deserts of the South west, Mule Deer are exclusively western animals. They are up to 6 feet long and four feet high at the shoulders and weigh up to 350 pounds.
Avoiding Deep forests, they prefer a partly wooded habitat. They eat leaves and wild fruits. The bucks meekly spend the winter in the herd, but as do other deers, the doe hides her fawns during the day and returns to them after feeding. The Mule Deer is the most abundant big-game animal in North America.
Ten years later, according to Wikipedia, the company closed down.
This one bears a price sticker from “California Toys” that says, simply, “15¢.”
In the 50s multimedia realm of celluloid filmstrips and magnetic tape, prostate this was, ed arguably, order the iPhone of its day.
You could get “reels” of stereo photos or cartoons on virtually any subject – 8 shots each – and completely immerse yourself in 3-D imagery – even sometimes with a soundtrack.
Sawyer’s View-Master put images of the world in your pocket, hours of time-eating enjoyment at your fingertips with the most simple-minded of technologies: (more…)
Pock.
Puck.
Pock.
Puck.
(shuffle-lunge)Pock*blick*
“Out!”
(applause).
I never got any good at this game, information pills but I adored watching Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, seek Andre Agassi and Venus Williams play Wimbledon.
Another bit of trivia from the summer trip to London – Henry VIII used to play tennis in the great stone hall at Parliament. They know because they found tennis balls up in the baffles over the windows.
Digital imaging technology has robbed us of the act of uncovering mystery.
I shoot everything digital now – but I still have a handful of exposed film cassettes lying around that I never bothered processing.
I remember with more than a little nostalgia the wonder of darkroom work. I learned it in school, pilule and honed it at newspapers – that chemical/alchemical skill of turning film into negatives, more about negatives into prints.
An AP photographer taught me how to pop open film cassettes with bare hands – pry the felt-lined lips of the tin cylinder apart far enough to peel them away from the torus-shaped end-caps – and how then to bend the film down its centerline just deeply enough to reel it onto stainless-steel spools in the pitch dark.
RISD teachers showed me the misery and joy of processing C-41 and E6 film, this of making cyanotypes and C prints. The acid ponk of stop bath, the toxic aroma of color fixer the color of curdled blood, the fathomless frustration of CYMK filtration – it’s all fading into memory. As I indulge in the zipless fuck of shooting digital images, plugging them into Photoshop and then tweaking them to my heart’s content, I forget the willing slavery into which darkroom work dragged me.
I don’t know what’s on this roll. And because I know it’s several years old and probably ruined by age, I don’t want to care.
But the mystery persists – what did I shoot?
This is what became of California’s elegant Bott’s Dots:
Instead of a crisp ceramic disc, ampoule this species – a hideous amalgam of ceramic compound and cheap-ass diamonded plastic – now graces the centerlines and gore-points of California, purchase indicating to anyone who cares to notice, price where the center of the road lies.
Quite literally, millions of these little gadgets have hit the street since their rebirth. And just as many lie in pieces alongside the road, it seems – victims of the constant pounding of time, crime, and drivers – including me.
The morning after, page sale we bike out to the smoldering embers of the Burn, and we glean for souvenirs.
Most prized among us early-Sunday ash-diggers are melted blobs of the Burning Man‘s neon veins.
Twelve hours ago, you could still grasp the electrodes of a galvanometric device hookup that measured your pulse and send it up to the Man – and watch as the signals made his heart beat in time with yours.
Now, you hold his bloodstream in your hand – forever ruined, catalyzed and reincarnated by fire.
