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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…)
This is a very, very early example of mass-produced, full-color graphic design – a ceramic container for potted meat produced some time just after the mid-19th century. (From my father’s collection). Rubberstamped and then handcolored, glazed and fired, battalions of British soldiers arrive by warship and landing boat at the Crimea, to fend off Russian agression against their Turkish allies (if I’m reading 
At some point, Fitzgerald settled in Towson, Maryland (the years 1932 and 1933, to be precise) to rent a house called “La Paix.” At some point a couple of decades later, my folks were fun-loving college kids, and the house was being torn down. They made off with the pull-handle from his water-closet, and my father subsequently enshrined it in this ornate little inlaid-mother-of-pearl frame. It hung in our home as long as I can remember growing up, and hangs there still, beneath a venerable coating of dust. It struck me as funny at age 7 as it still does decades later. Because at some point – more likely on several hundred occasions – F. Scott Fitzgerald got up from the crapper like everyone else, and gave this thing a yank – and then unlike the rest of us 
Squatting on its cast-iron haunches, its steel tail coiled with ready staples, this artifact of turn-of-the-last-century industrial design awaits a punch on the head. It is about eight inches long, and five high. Though it looks like a prop from an 
This double-glass-block icon is meant to remind you of 
This is what the 
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 
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 
How curious that we require our gods to be 
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 
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 
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.
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 
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 
Lampblack and glue, pressed into hard sticks, must be ground against a smooth stone with water to make ink. I think 
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.
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 
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.
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 
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 
Object 200. Milestone. 
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-
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.
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 
The 
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 
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 
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 
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 
AA batteries weigh down each leg. Ignited by the toggle switch, a tiny electric motor spins inside. The main cog drives a wheel that spins on his back – a wheel with removable pins. The pins act as cams, driving the limbs as they rotate past the hip and shoulder joints. Springs on each limb supply recoil. Program his blows and stance by moving the pins. Stage elaborate battles. Wonder about his origins, lost in the baroque history of ’80s Japanese science fiction. Re-place the decorative foil stickers that keep falling off. Watch that mean right hook. He’s just 7 inches high, but he’s fast.
The room where these are made must be light. (I was a potter once, and can picture it:) Powdery, white porcelain dust probably coats all tools, surfaces, the windows, and the makers’ hair, fingers and clothes as they shape the clay. Four cup-and-saucer pairs in each set, a tiny cream-and-sugar suite, a diminutive ewer for “tea.” A tinny radio plays news or dramas from state-run Chinese radio. The shop boss sits in the corner, chain-smoking, reading the paper and glancing up every now and then. It is hot, from the kiln in the next room. Deft fingers knead and mold the porcelain, forming tiny cups around their tips and then setting them – misshapen but good enough for export – onto a firebrick batt for drying. There are more than a thousand small tea vessels in this room, waiting to be fired. The third worker in the sixth row finishes one ball of clay, stretches her shoulders, then reaches into the cloth-capped bucket for another. The radio announcer reads another headline or makes another dramatic declaration. The boss turns the page.
Synthetic id, a tiny iconic totem of the claimer of heads and taster of the forbidden, this squishy finger puppet seems a blasphemous joke in the face of what would surely be the most vengeful wrath of the Indian goddess of destruction, 
A better mineralogist than I would be able to name this thing. He would be able to say how many millions of years it took to form, what the minerals were in the dripping water that formed it, where it was probably found, and how many hundreds of thousands of years older than him it might be. I am not a mineralogist. I am a fetishist, a 
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 
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.
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.)
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 
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 
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 
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 
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. 
Given out with tiny burgers and itty-bitty orders of fries to promote 
A hoop of pewter notched with the hours and days, a ring of brass with a little knob for spinning it, a lanyard and a pinhole. Line it up with the sun, spin the ring to indicate the month, and a pinprick of sunlight falls on the hour. I had only the vaguest understanding of this object’s function from my wife, who had forgotten its meaning since receiving it as a gift years ago. It is the “shepherd’s watch” or 
You must hunker over your workbench with two tubes of vibrantly colored silicone caulk, and you must squeeze and wait, squeeze and wait, squeeze and wait. The first color must go on with mathematical certainty, each point of goop destined to hold a certain place on the microtopography of the underlying rubber ball. You must wait now, perhaps overnight, for the tray of weird little half-made things to cure, the reek of silicone vapors permeating your factory floor. You must return the next day. Your thing is almost done. You pick up the other tube of technicolor caulk, and you fill in the gaps, with mathematical faith rather than certainty that your work today will complete the work of yesterday perfectly, without variation in height, volume or placement of the tiny beads of color. You put it down again. And come back hours later, to put in the screw, affix the little chromed chain, so tiny as to make this the morningstar weapon for a Teletubby knight. And you must put it into the box with the others, to be shipped to far away places where people spend good money on suuch tactile, febrile, ultimately worthless trinkets. And you laugh, because you have a good meal to eat tonight and somewhere somebody has just this thing you spent the past two days of your life making (staggered, of course, with the manufacture of dozens more). You laugh and you take a bite of your rice cake, amused, happy to be having lunch on such a beautiful day, beneath a magenta and fluorescent orange sun.
About 35 years ago, a student of my father’s pulled a slick slab of leather and chrome from his overcoat pocket and performed an act of origami sorcery I’ll never forget. 
A souvenir from a European road trip, a call to action, a study in 
Encased in an armored shell with a clamshell hatch that is probably lined with heads-up displays and chin and tongue controls, the occupant of this suit – from some obscure animé series – would have to be psychologically conditioned against claustrophobia. Picture it – you’ve just taken a catastrophic hit on the battlefield. Exotic alloys and fluid damping systems have protected your life, but your power is out. The emergency backup has failed, and only a battery-powered trouble light inside the suit is showing you a dim view of dead screens. The suit is too heavy to be shifted without power. YOu lie there, breathing your last few gallons of air now that the AC unit has quit, unable to see whatever it is that is rumbling towards your prone form, unable to defend yourself. Unable to move.
Silver iodide layered on a 3.25×4.25-inch chunk of glass tells of a time when men made money the old-fashioned way – with machines. A gold-embossed frame on this paper-edged magic lantern slide credits “William H. Rau, Photographer – Philadelphia, Penna. On the other side, written in fine ink, are the words “Penna. Phila. – New U.S. Mint Milling Room.” The men perch on stools beside the iron flywheels of massive, belt-driven machines, holding as still as they can for Mr. Rau to close the shutter.
The only English amid the florid Kanji on the iridescent-lime-green Ziploc foil-plastic container says:
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.
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.
What drives you to render your gods in 
This flew out of the armory of 
In the silicon age, few first-world nations turn out mechanical watches anymore. Thick, graceless, manly, stiffly assembled, it bears the shield-and-dagger logo and Cyrillic characters of the 
Nevada’s 
Ornithorhynchus anatinus is the poster child for creationism. How in the name of Dodo could such a freak result from 
By the time goth became 
The 1960s saw pop culture reinvent itself in the coruscating glare of television. Cars became celebrities – the lesser luminaries that orbited starlike Kustom gods like 
I spent too many of my addled high school and college years staring at 
Faith is an odd, powerful force – a combination of yearning and belief in the unbelievable. Prayer cards are little faith amplifiers, allowing you (if you believe) to draw on the faith of dead saints whose faith was more powerful, and to ask for them to help. They’re tools for bootstrapping yourself to grace with more effective prayer. Here’s what you’re supposed to say to St. Francis Xavier (namesake of my 
It’s begun. 
In the boom years, you’d think nothing of spending $2 million a year on billboards – in one city alone. 
This 
Fossil tech, the earbone of a giant. Fifty years ago, thousands of operators huddled at thousands of switchboards, plugging and unplugging calls from millions of jacks at the Bell Telephone Company nearest you. The nationwide American Telephone and Telegraph conglomerate was as close as anyone had come to building a nationwide monopoly without inviting antitrust litigation. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that lawsuits from a put-upon public finally brought down mighty Ma Bell and splintered her like an enormous, brittle tree, her branches taking wild, chaotic root in the hundreds of telcos that have sprung up since. Chances are, if you called information back then, the operator was talking on one of these. Like everything else Bell made, it is extremely durable and thanks to the (now missing) wire headstrap, reasonably comfortable. My first six years as a newspaper reporter, I was on this stupid macho head trip, convinced that only obit writers and women wore headsets for interviews, real reporters crunched the phone ‘twixt shoulder and ear while typing and drawling from the side of their mouths, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Is that riiiight.” After a lovely bout of crippling neck spasms and trips to the chiropractor, I relented, and began using one of these while at the 
Squirt guns were forbidden in 6th grade. It didn’t stop me from collecting them. I had two favorites – the “secret” gun shaped like brass knuckles cast in plastic that was army-man green (you could make it all the more secret by snapping off the knuckleguard so that the only thing visible was the nozzle peeking up out of your fist); and the “sneaky” model, whcih had a little pivot wheel on the business end that you turned at a 90-degree angle so you could look like you were innocently aiming the gun away from someone until you soaked them point-blank. This month is birthday season among our kid friends, which means an endless parade of goodie-bags into the house, bearing trinkets, gadgets and crap. This one has teeth.
Chrome-plating came into vogue as a protective measure, rust-blocker, bulwark against time. Before long, it was appropriated as 
Utter destruction and evil in the palm of your hand. What sets this apart from the vast majority of 
This is made of the very thing it represents. This represents the very thing of which it is made. Symbolic cannibalism, the Ourobouros myth made wood. Just as pop will eat itself so too does meaning applied to something rob it of the potential for meaning something greater. Perhaps someone at the wooden trainset factory cut this by hand from a sheet of half-inch pine with a coping saw, sanded it smooth, hand-stained it and painted it with three coats of clear lacquer. Maybe it was die-stamped and triple-dipped by machine. No matter. It’s just a tree. And it’s just a “tree.” And it’s “just a tree.”
I was a theater geek in 
Yin to the 
The first time I saw a floppy disk, it was a 5-½-inch model, with the massive hole in the center and a capacity of something like 256 kilobytes. My Kaypro II required two of them, one in the left-hand drive to carry the CP/M operating system and Wordstar, one in the right-hand drive to carry freelance articles I would occasionally print through my dot-matrix printer, the model of which escapes me. The 
In 
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 
Immense in the imagination, the 
The 
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.
We had a homemade corduroy sack full of 
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.
About four years ago, 
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 
When I was 4, my folks took us to the 
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 
I have no clue what 
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 
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 
“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 
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 
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 – 
