Category: Artifact

here decease ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>In White Heat, they crawl into an empty one of these to pull off the climactic heist of an oil refinery. Rendered at something like 1/128th scale in stamped potmetal, with hard rubber tyres on pop-rivet axles, it reads beefier, bulkier, more heavy with threat and explosive power. Paint failure of this magnitude would be staggering at full-scale, as would the just-painted, bright yellow toy that must have rolled off the line 40 or 50 years ago. Dinky perhaps only in the eyes of the coldly objective.
cheapest ‘popup’, what is ed ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Here’s another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It’s difficult to say how many of these I’ve owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master’s new Combo Locker service. I might then have owned only one, and the lock you see here would be more nobly dinged and weathered.
stuff ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Immense in the imagination, the Masaka wages horrific battle in the withering fire of plasma cannons and neutron batteries. Eight inches high In life, it began as a plastic model kit, cut, glued and fitted together with obsessive care. The paint went on in the right color – but under dim overhead lights – the wrong consistency, so that the original ice-blue color peeks through. The claws grasp and menace from powerful shoulders bunched beneath the turret-head carrying untold power and a single, baleful red eye.
stuff ‘popup’, shop ‘width=500, approved height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The Lomographic Society did a very smart thing: A little clique of Viennese photographers latched onto the Russian-made Lomo rangefinder camera in 1992 and – shooting wild, free and from the hip – turned its light leaking, color-saturating, vignette-prone mechanism into a creative movement. They arranged to import and distribute the cameras to the West. They set up web sites to build enthusiasm for (and purchases of) the camera. They began publishing the quirky photos it produced – and empowering others to self-publish to the Lomo site. They began importing other cameras and photography products (including Soviet surplus night-vision scopes) and at some point, they hooked me with this slick little device. It shoots four sequential panoramic pictures onto a single frame of 35mm film – allowing you to capture action sequences that are either 2/10ths of a second, or 2 seconds long. The rewind mechanism is a pull-cord that you can yank with your teeth while cruising around taking portraits of fellow cyclists. If I can ever grab the time, I’ll scan some of them and publish a few here. Even without the evidence, you can admire the slick design ethos at work – the cowled quartet of lenses, the pearlescent plastic. I love this device.
cheap ‘popup’, sales ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them – and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker’s curse. I can stop any time I want.
visit this site ‘popup’, advice ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>We had a homemade corduroy sack full of Legos when I was a kid, it weighed maybe four or five pounds. A couple of huge green base plates, untold numbers of plain, rectangular 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x6s and 2x8s in red, green, black, yellow, white. There were three or four precious blues, and perhaps two clear 1x2s that served as the windows around which the fantasy would accrete – race car, space ship, dungeon, castle keep. No guys, no chrome, no pivoting pieces (maybe an axle and some wheels). Just blocks. Now there are Mars vehicles and cow towns and pivoting 22-wheeled construction cranes and undersea pirate adventures with little peg-legged guys and semi trucks that transform into giant robots that shoot rockets and fly around with little tiny transformer robots in their bellies.

Aahh, crap. Kids.
decease ‘popup’, order ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>A thick, fresh block of “Kiss My Face,” left at the bottom of a tiny back-bathroom sink. Water. Leaking tap. Time. Minutes. Ounces. Eight hours. Gallons. All droplets. Unceasing. Inexorable. Heavy. Ergo, this freak. I could disappear into its igneous micro-landscape, lost among barren knolls reeking of an alien smell. Corrosive winds howl through the grand arch they carved. This is an evil place. Something bad happened here once. And will once again. Look closer. Try not to blink. It’s a pulp fiction landscape, frozen in evolution from lurid melodrama to bleak existential tragedy, halfway between the sterile planes of its original form and utter dissolution and erasure. Something could live there. Something small, dark and ravenous.
more about ‘popup’, pharmacy ‘width=500, diagnosis height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>About four years ago, Ralphs Supermarkets started giving these away, blister-packing them in with their new brand of Red Cell alkaline batteries. Everything I own that beeps, records, shoots or noodles eats AAs for breakfast. The Red Cells were mere snacks for the ravenous herd of devices, which quickly devoured them before emitting dissatisfied little electronic burps and then playing dead until I fed them more. Before long, I had collected the entire set of stock cars and moved on to rechargeable batteries.. They’re *not* Hot Wheels, but have a rumbling authenticity about them, from their tiny window-mounted debris nets and internal rollcages to the logo’ed racing slicks and sponsor confetti on the quarter panels. They look pretty hot when all five park together.
pill ‘popup’, and ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>At some point during my climb out of the smoking dot-bomb crater, I built myself a xylophone to pass the time between job interviews that never came. I followed general instructions found here. Not for this toy, but a heavy big object – a fully functional, floor-standing 12-key xylophone weighing more than 80 pounds. It’s crude: a finish-plywood frame/soundbox and fitted with keys (chromatic scale in C) that I cut out of bar-stock aluminum. I tuned it with a carbide wheel, grinding metal off the backsides of the keys and then thwacking them to check their pitch against a cheap digital guitar tuner. I mounted it on a pair of old cast-iron sewing machine legs I had kicking around, and now it sits in the corner of the dining room where I whack it in pensive moments in my tone-deaf fashion, and the kids and their friends plink on it with various implements any time they can get their hands on it. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space. The fun they got out of that and a big tubano drum we’ve had for a while set me off in a whirlwind binge of gathering inexpensive, easy-to-play instruments, and every now and then we have all-ages noise recitals. Someone donated this Auris xylophone to the school rummage sale, and I snatched it up for, like, a buck. It had been dropped a lot. Gouges and scratches mar the crisp little brass keys, the lowest C only 4.5 inches long, but the soft-pine frame is true and the tone clean. It still rings prettily when struck with a pencil or a stick. PLAY SAMPLE (Quicktime)
ed ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too – he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It’s one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child’s toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it’s just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I’m taking nominations on its name.
page ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Mussolini famously said, “Character is what you are in the dark.” This little stack of glass magic lantern slides shows that character – of a people who believed that their cause in war was right, oblivious to the fact that they supported a regime committing atrocities beyond the darkest possible imagining. I post this object this evening in light of the ignorance unfolding in the Senate regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I’ll spare you my soapbox speech, posted elsewhere. Instead, some background on these loathsome, compelling little objects – the public service message of their day, projected in theaters before the feature. They were given to me by my Jewish father-in-law, who inherited them from his dad. Dad ran a string of Los Angeles-area movie theaters, starting in 1945 with the Yost in Santa Ana, and including the venerable Vista, still in operation at the cross of Sunset and Hollywood – the kind of theaters where you could sit in the balcony for 15 cents, and get your dates admission and candy for free because your old man ran the joint. My father-in-law’s dad collected movie memorabilia – lobby cards, props, wonderful items like the golden spike used in “Union Pacific.” Somewhere along the way, he picked up about a dozen 3.5″x4″ magic lantern slides of Nazi war propaganda. They scream in Bauhaus lettering, cajole with the fresh-scrubbed faces of Hitler Youth members, urge, implore and command with all the graphic power that Nazi artists could muster. There is a photo of stalwart soldiers in the sort of low-over-the-ear helmets that today’s U.S. soldiers wear. A valiant statue of Victory, a vigilant searchlight, and message upon message of inspiration and fidelity to the Füuhrer. The one highlighted here is a Deutche Rote Kreusz (German Red Cross) message: a woodcut-style image of a soldier flinging a potato-masher grenade, above a nurse bandaging a comrade’s head. Just three valiant people enacting the pantomime of a war for what they gullibly believed in – and to which their creator hoped to rally their equally gullible countrymen. If anyone out there reads German, I’d welcome a translation.
viagra sale ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I have no clue what Nyko.com does. I may never even visit them to find out. I’d rather keep the purity of this piece of swag from this year’s brain-rattling E3 convention (many more of my words and pictures here) intact. Swag is the faux currency of E3, the cool-now logoed crap that everyone runs around collecting, and then promptly forgets at the bottom of some drawer or in the back of the glovebox. Push the chrome button on the end of this bullet-shaped keychain and an LED suffuses the perspex logo with soft white light. Push it again – the light flashes. Push it again – the light switches off. Three simple technologies conspired in its making: mechanics, simple battery power and assembly-line electronics. At some point I’ll figure out a way express my unified field theory of all things (animal, vegetable, mineral, mechanical, chemical, biological, digital) in multimedia. But I fear if I succeed, I’ll wink out of existence entirely.
drugs ‘popup’, about it ‘width=500, case height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I can’t say what upsets me more – that tens of thousands of U.S. troops tear these open every night, ignite the little chemical food heaters inside and chow down on them for probably the 365th night in a row in many cases; or that the military is giving them away to geeks and swag hounds at the world’s largest video game convention to promote a game the U.S. Army developed to teach you how to kill without the risk of actually dying or taking someone’s life. The army booth at E3 sprawls across some 2,000 square feet beneath a 2-story Moorish village wall – surrounded by sandbagged bunkers, and staffed by real-life soldiers brandishing next-gen weapons. It was packed. This rather amazing little artifact weighs about three pounds and claims to contain chicken and noodles. I’ll just toss it in the camping basket so we can “eat like the grunts” and think of a video game next time we’re lounging in camp at Yosemite while my countrymen are dying for an unjust, unwinnable war they never should have been ordered to start. Ashamed to be an American these days, I’m going to feel helpless until November to change the way we’re headed.
stuff ‘popup’, approved ‘width=500, see height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>It grows wild in the desert here. One of the ironic blessings of wildland brushfires – which can devour entire housing tracts and splinter their communities forever – is that they smell intoxicating as destroy lives. In Native American ritual – as in coastal Southern California, the burning of sagebrush is a process of cleansing and renewal. This bundle was collected and bound by an old hippie who works the Venice boardwalk on weekends. He heaps raw sage on a weathered Guatemalan blanket, and with great patience and something of a distant, worried look in his eye, bundles the stalks together with cotton yarn and sells them for a dollar or two. We smudged our house in Venice a few years back – half giggling, half solemn as priests – in a ceremony that was by turns awkward and reverent for two people who despite Catholic upbringing had found their spiritual centers somewhere far away from organized religion and ceremony. Now that we’ve moved again and settled in, perhaps it’s time to do it again.
remedy ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>“Flasbulbs popping” remained a cliché long after electronic strobes took over for these pearlescent, one-shot marvels. Snapping the shutter on a camera would close a circuit, allowing electricity from a battery to jolt a hair-fine cloud of zirconium wire into ignition in the pressurized oxygen barely contained in the bulb’s glass capsule. Instant daylight – or a harsh approximation thereof. Once the bulb went off, a photographer – particularly a news shooter – would quickly pop the bulb out of its clip, usually to clatter on the street below, and shove another into the socket before the previous one quit bouncing. In the days when photojournalists relied upon the plate-format Speed Graphic, taking a string of photos meant popping and replacing the bulb, then sliding a dark-slide in to the film holder to cover the 4″x5″ film sheet just exposed, pulling the filmholder out, flipping it over, sticking it back into the camera and pulling its darsklide to ready the next frame. Flashbulbs were what gave Weegee’s photos their garish, hyper-real edge – the sudden explosion of light and flash of heat that revealed the rawest nature of humanity at its peak. This history gives more details on the lowly flashbulb’s origins and evolution.
information pills ‘popup’, remedy ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Having gamely served their duty to decorate and delight, these hand-painted, cast-resin beauties continue to flounce and pirouette in the residue of their natural habitat. They are artifacts of the ubiquitous, now worldwide cult of the Princess. The Disney heroines have become the fountainhead of lore, iconography and financial operations for this cult, which capitalizes on the desire of many little girls to dress up and feel special, a movement propagated by the blandishments of carelessly doting mothers and fathers who have only the faintest inkling as to what puberty will be like if they keep this up. But that’s a cynic’s view, falling like a harmless cloud of spiteful ash on the shoulders of these three as they dance on, blithely, prettily, endlessly, their light steps barely slowed by the butter cream frosting clogging their petticoats.

here decease ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>In White Heat, they crawl into an empty one of these to pull off the climactic heist of an oil refinery. Rendered at something like 1/128th scale in stamped potmetal, with hard rubber tyres on pop-rivet axles, it reads beefier, bulkier, more heavy with threat and explosive power. Paint failure of this magnitude would be staggering at full-scale, as would the just-painted, bright yellow toy that must have rolled off the line 40 or 50 years ago. Dinky perhaps only in the eyes of the coldly objective.
cheapest ‘popup’, what is ed ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Here’s another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It’s difficult to say how many of these I’ve owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master’s new Combo Locker service. I might then have owned only one, and the lock you see here would be more nobly dinged and weathered.
stuff ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Immense in the imagination, the Masaka wages horrific battle in the withering fire of plasma cannons and neutron batteries. Eight inches high In life, it began as a plastic model kit, cut, glued and fitted together with obsessive care. The paint went on in the right color – but under dim overhead lights – the wrong consistency, so that the original ice-blue color peeks through. The claws grasp and menace from powerful shoulders bunched beneath the turret-head carrying untold power and a single, baleful red eye.
stuff ‘popup’, shop ‘width=500, approved height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The Lomographic Society did a very smart thing: A little clique of Viennese photographers latched onto the Russian-made Lomo rangefinder camera in 1992 and – shooting wild, free and from the hip – turned its light leaking, color-saturating, vignette-prone mechanism into a creative movement. They arranged to import and distribute the cameras to the West. They set up web sites to build enthusiasm for (and purchases of) the camera. They began publishing the quirky photos it produced – and empowering others to self-publish to the Lomo site. They began importing other cameras and photography products (including Soviet surplus night-vision scopes) and at some point, they hooked me with this slick little device. It shoots four sequential panoramic pictures onto a single frame of 35mm film – allowing you to capture action sequences that are either 2/10ths of a second, or 2 seconds long. The rewind mechanism is a pull-cord that you can yank with your teeth while cruising around taking portraits of fellow cyclists. If I can ever grab the time, I’ll scan some of them and publish a few here. Even without the evidence, you can admire the slick design ethos at work – the cowled quartet of lenses, the pearlescent plastic. I love this device.
cheap ‘popup’, sales ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them – and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker’s curse. I can stop any time I want.
visit this site ‘popup’, advice ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>We had a homemade corduroy sack full of Legos when I was a kid, it weighed maybe four or five pounds. A couple of huge green base plates, untold numbers of plain, rectangular 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x6s and 2x8s in red, green, black, yellow, white. There were three or four precious blues, and perhaps two clear 1x2s that served as the windows around which the fantasy would accrete – race car, space ship, dungeon, castle keep. No guys, no chrome, no pivoting pieces (maybe an axle and some wheels). Just blocks. Now there are Mars vehicles and cow towns and pivoting 22-wheeled construction cranes and undersea pirate adventures with little peg-legged guys and semi trucks that transform into giant robots that shoot rockets and fly around with little tiny transformer robots in their bellies.

Aahh, crap. Kids.
decease ‘popup’, order ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>A thick, fresh block of “Kiss My Face,” left at the bottom of a tiny back-bathroom sink. Water. Leaking tap. Time. Minutes. Ounces. Eight hours. Gallons. All droplets. Unceasing. Inexorable. Heavy. Ergo, this freak. I could disappear into its igneous micro-landscape, lost among barren knolls reeking of an alien smell. Corrosive winds howl through the grand arch they carved. This is an evil place. Something bad happened here once. And will once again. Look closer. Try not to blink. It’s a pulp fiction landscape, frozen in evolution from lurid melodrama to bleak existential tragedy, halfway between the sterile planes of its original form and utter dissolution and erasure. Something could live there. Something small, dark and ravenous.
more about ‘popup’, pharmacy ‘width=500, diagnosis height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>About four years ago, Ralphs Supermarkets started giving these away, blister-packing them in with their new brand of Red Cell alkaline batteries. Everything I own that beeps, records, shoots or noodles eats AAs for breakfast. The Red Cells were mere snacks for the ravenous herd of devices, which quickly devoured them before emitting dissatisfied little electronic burps and then playing dead until I fed them more. Before long, I had collected the entire set of stock cars and moved on to rechargeable batteries.. They’re *not* Hot Wheels, but have a rumbling authenticity about them, from their tiny window-mounted debris nets and internal rollcages to the logo’ed racing slicks and sponsor confetti on the quarter panels. They look pretty hot when all five park together.
pill ‘popup’, and ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>At some point during my climb out of the smoking dot-bomb crater, I built myself a xylophone to pass the time between job interviews that never came. I followed general instructions found here. Not for this toy, but a heavy big object – a fully functional, floor-standing 12-key xylophone weighing more than 80 pounds. It’s crude: a finish-plywood frame/soundbox and fitted with keys (chromatic scale in C) that I cut out of bar-stock aluminum. I tuned it with a carbide wheel, grinding metal off the backsides of the keys and then thwacking them to check their pitch against a cheap digital guitar tuner. I mounted it on a pair of old cast-iron sewing machine legs I had kicking around, and now it sits in the corner of the dining room where I whack it in pensive moments in my tone-deaf fashion, and the kids and their friends plink on it with various implements any time they can get their hands on it. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space. The fun they got out of that and a big tubano drum we’ve had for a while set me off in a whirlwind binge of gathering inexpensive, easy-to-play instruments, and every now and then we have all-ages noise recitals. Someone donated this Auris xylophone to the school rummage sale, and I snatched it up for, like, a buck. It had been dropped a lot. Gouges and scratches mar the crisp little brass keys, the lowest C only 4.5 inches long, but the soft-pine frame is true and the tone clean. It still rings prettily when struck with a pencil or a stick. PLAY SAMPLE (Quicktime)
ed ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too – he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It’s one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child’s toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it’s just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I’m taking nominations on its name.
page ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Mussolini famously said, “Character is what you are in the dark.” This little stack of glass magic lantern slides shows that character – of a people who believed that their cause in war was right, oblivious to the fact that they supported a regime committing atrocities beyond the darkest possible imagining. I post this object this evening in light of the ignorance unfolding in the Senate regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I’ll spare you my soapbox speech, posted elsewhere. Instead, some background on these loathsome, compelling little objects – the public service message of their day, projected in theaters before the feature. They were given to me by my Jewish father-in-law, who inherited them from his dad. Dad ran a string of Los Angeles-area movie theaters, starting in 1945 with the Yost in Santa Ana, and including the venerable Vista, still in operation at the cross of Sunset and Hollywood – the kind of theaters where you could sit in the balcony for 15 cents, and get your dates admission and candy for free because your old man ran the joint. My father-in-law’s dad collected movie memorabilia – lobby cards, props, wonderful items like the golden spike used in “Union Pacific.” Somewhere along the way, he picked up about a dozen 3.5″x4″ magic lantern slides of Nazi war propaganda. They scream in Bauhaus lettering, cajole with the fresh-scrubbed faces of Hitler Youth members, urge, implore and command with all the graphic power that Nazi artists could muster. There is a photo of stalwart soldiers in the sort of low-over-the-ear helmets that today’s U.S. soldiers wear. A valiant statue of Victory, a vigilant searchlight, and message upon message of inspiration and fidelity to the Füuhrer. The one highlighted here is a Deutche Rote Kreusz (German Red Cross) message: a woodcut-style image of a soldier flinging a potato-masher grenade, above a nurse bandaging a comrade’s head. Just three valiant people enacting the pantomime of a war for what they gullibly believed in – and to which their creator hoped to rally their equally gullible countrymen. If anyone out there reads German, I’d welcome a translation.
viagra sale ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I have no clue what Nyko.com does. I may never even visit them to find out. I’d rather keep the purity of this piece of swag from this year’s brain-rattling E3 convention (many more of my words and pictures here) intact. Swag is the faux currency of E3, the cool-now logoed crap that everyone runs around collecting, and then promptly forgets at the bottom of some drawer or in the back of the glovebox. Push the chrome button on the end of this bullet-shaped keychain and an LED suffuses the perspex logo with soft white light. Push it again – the light flashes. Push it again – the light switches off. Three simple technologies conspired in its making: mechanics, simple battery power and assembly-line electronics. At some point I’ll figure out a way express my unified field theory of all things (animal, vegetable, mineral, mechanical, chemical, biological, digital) in multimedia. But I fear if I succeed, I’ll wink out of existence entirely.
drugs ‘popup’, about it ‘width=500, case height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I can’t say what upsets me more – that tens of thousands of U.S. troops tear these open every night, ignite the little chemical food heaters inside and chow down on them for probably the 365th night in a row in many cases; or that the military is giving them away to geeks and swag hounds at the world’s largest video game convention to promote a game the U.S. Army developed to teach you how to kill without the risk of actually dying or taking someone’s life. The army booth at E3 sprawls across some 2,000 square feet beneath a 2-story Moorish village wall – surrounded by sandbagged bunkers, and staffed by real-life soldiers brandishing next-gen weapons. It was packed. This rather amazing little artifact weighs about three pounds and claims to contain chicken and noodles. I’ll just toss it in the camping basket so we can “eat like the grunts” and think of a video game next time we’re lounging in camp at Yosemite while my countrymen are dying for an unjust, unwinnable war they never should have been ordered to start. Ashamed to be an American these days, I’m going to feel helpless until November to change the way we’re headed.

here decease ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>In White Heat, they crawl into an empty one of these to pull off the climactic heist of an oil refinery. Rendered at something like 1/128th scale in stamped potmetal, with hard rubber tyres on pop-rivet axles, it reads beefier, bulkier, more heavy with threat and explosive power. Paint failure of this magnitude would be staggering at full-scale, as would the just-painted, bright yellow toy that must have rolled off the line 40 or 50 years ago. Dinky perhaps only in the eyes of the coldly objective.
cheapest ‘popup’, what is ed ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Here’s another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It’s difficult to say how many of these I’ve owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master’s new Combo Locker service. I might then have owned only one, and the lock you see here would be more nobly dinged and weathered.
stuff ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Immense in the imagination, the Masaka wages horrific battle in the withering fire of plasma cannons and neutron batteries. Eight inches high In life, it began as a plastic model kit, cut, glued and fitted together with obsessive care. The paint went on in the right color – but under dim overhead lights – the wrong consistency, so that the original ice-blue color peeks through. The claws grasp and menace from powerful shoulders bunched beneath the turret-head carrying untold power and a single, baleful red eye.
stuff ‘popup’, shop ‘width=500, approved height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The Lomographic Society did a very smart thing: A little clique of Viennese photographers latched onto the Russian-made Lomo rangefinder camera in 1992 and – shooting wild, free and from the hip – turned its light leaking, color-saturating, vignette-prone mechanism into a creative movement. They arranged to import and distribute the cameras to the West. They set up web sites to build enthusiasm for (and purchases of) the camera. They began publishing the quirky photos it produced – and empowering others to self-publish to the Lomo site. They began importing other cameras and photography products (including Soviet surplus night-vision scopes) and at some point, they hooked me with this slick little device. It shoots four sequential panoramic pictures onto a single frame of 35mm film – allowing you to capture action sequences that are either 2/10ths of a second, or 2 seconds long. The rewind mechanism is a pull-cord that you can yank with your teeth while cruising around taking portraits of fellow cyclists. If I can ever grab the time, I’ll scan some of them and publish a few here. Even without the evidence, you can admire the slick design ethos at work – the cowled quartet of lenses, the pearlescent plastic. I love this device.
cheap ‘popup’, sales ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them – and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker’s curse. I can stop any time I want.
visit this site ‘popup’, advice ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>We had a homemade corduroy sack full of Legos when I was a kid, it weighed maybe four or five pounds. A couple of huge green base plates, untold numbers of plain, rectangular 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x6s and 2x8s in red, green, black, yellow, white. There were three or four precious blues, and perhaps two clear 1x2s that served as the windows around which the fantasy would accrete – race car, space ship, dungeon, castle keep. No guys, no chrome, no pivoting pieces (maybe an axle and some wheels). Just blocks. Now there are Mars vehicles and cow towns and pivoting 22-wheeled construction cranes and undersea pirate adventures with little peg-legged guys and semi trucks that transform into giant robots that shoot rockets and fly around with little tiny transformer robots in their bellies.

Aahh, crap. Kids.
decease ‘popup’, order ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>A thick, fresh block of “Kiss My Face,” left at the bottom of a tiny back-bathroom sink. Water. Leaking tap. Time. Minutes. Ounces. Eight hours. Gallons. All droplets. Unceasing. Inexorable. Heavy. Ergo, this freak. I could disappear into its igneous micro-landscape, lost among barren knolls reeking of an alien smell. Corrosive winds howl through the grand arch they carved. This is an evil place. Something bad happened here once. And will once again. Look closer. Try not to blink. It’s a pulp fiction landscape, frozen in evolution from lurid melodrama to bleak existential tragedy, halfway between the sterile planes of its original form and utter dissolution and erasure. Something could live there. Something small, dark and ravenous.
more about ‘popup’, pharmacy ‘width=500, diagnosis height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>About four years ago, Ralphs Supermarkets started giving these away, blister-packing them in with their new brand of Red Cell alkaline batteries. Everything I own that beeps, records, shoots or noodles eats AAs for breakfast. The Red Cells were mere snacks for the ravenous herd of devices, which quickly devoured them before emitting dissatisfied little electronic burps and then playing dead until I fed them more. Before long, I had collected the entire set of stock cars and moved on to rechargeable batteries.. They’re *not* Hot Wheels, but have a rumbling authenticity about them, from their tiny window-mounted debris nets and internal rollcages to the logo’ed racing slicks and sponsor confetti on the quarter panels. They look pretty hot when all five park together.
pill ‘popup’, and ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>At some point during my climb out of the smoking dot-bomb crater, I built myself a xylophone to pass the time between job interviews that never came. I followed general instructions found here. Not for this toy, but a heavy big object – a fully functional, floor-standing 12-key xylophone weighing more than 80 pounds. It’s crude: a finish-plywood frame/soundbox and fitted with keys (chromatic scale in C) that I cut out of bar-stock aluminum. I tuned it with a carbide wheel, grinding metal off the backsides of the keys and then thwacking them to check their pitch against a cheap digital guitar tuner. I mounted it on a pair of old cast-iron sewing machine legs I had kicking around, and now it sits in the corner of the dining room where I whack it in pensive moments in my tone-deaf fashion, and the kids and their friends plink on it with various implements any time they can get their hands on it. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space. The fun they got out of that and a big tubano drum we’ve had for a while set me off in a whirlwind binge of gathering inexpensive, easy-to-play instruments, and every now and then we have all-ages noise recitals. Someone donated this Auris xylophone to the school rummage sale, and I snatched it up for, like, a buck. It had been dropped a lot. Gouges and scratches mar the crisp little brass keys, the lowest C only 4.5 inches long, but the soft-pine frame is true and the tone clean. It still rings prettily when struck with a pencil or a stick. PLAY SAMPLE (Quicktime)
ed ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too – he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It’s one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child’s toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it’s just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I’m taking nominations on its name.
page ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Mussolini famously said, “Character is what you are in the dark.” This little stack of glass magic lantern slides shows that character – of a people who believed that their cause in war was right, oblivious to the fact that they supported a regime committing atrocities beyond the darkest possible imagining. I post this object this evening in light of the ignorance unfolding in the Senate regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I’ll spare you my soapbox speech, posted elsewhere. Instead, some background on these loathsome, compelling little objects – the public service message of their day, projected in theaters before the feature. They were given to me by my Jewish father-in-law, who inherited them from his dad. Dad ran a string of Los Angeles-area movie theaters, starting in 1945 with the Yost in Santa Ana, and including the venerable Vista, still in operation at the cross of Sunset and Hollywood – the kind of theaters where you could sit in the balcony for 15 cents, and get your dates admission and candy for free because your old man ran the joint. My father-in-law’s dad collected movie memorabilia – lobby cards, props, wonderful items like the golden spike used in “Union Pacific.” Somewhere along the way, he picked up about a dozen 3.5″x4″ magic lantern slides of Nazi war propaganda. They scream in Bauhaus lettering, cajole with the fresh-scrubbed faces of Hitler Youth members, urge, implore and command with all the graphic power that Nazi artists could muster. There is a photo of stalwart soldiers in the sort of low-over-the-ear helmets that today’s U.S. soldiers wear. A valiant statue of Victory, a vigilant searchlight, and message upon message of inspiration and fidelity to the Füuhrer. The one highlighted here is a Deutche Rote Kreusz (German Red Cross) message: a woodcut-style image of a soldier flinging a potato-masher grenade, above a nurse bandaging a comrade’s head. Just three valiant people enacting the pantomime of a war for what they gullibly believed in – and to which their creator hoped to rally their equally gullible countrymen. If anyone out there reads German, I’d welcome a translation.
viagra sale ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I have no clue what Nyko.com does. I may never even visit them to find out. I’d rather keep the purity of this piece of swag from this year’s brain-rattling E3 convention (many more of my words and pictures here) intact. Swag is the faux currency of E3, the cool-now logoed crap that everyone runs around collecting, and then promptly forgets at the bottom of some drawer or in the back of the glovebox. Push the chrome button on the end of this bullet-shaped keychain and an LED suffuses the perspex logo with soft white light. Push it again – the light flashes. Push it again – the light switches off. Three simple technologies conspired in its making: mechanics, simple battery power and assembly-line electronics. At some point I’ll figure out a way express my unified field theory of all things (animal, vegetable, mineral, mechanical, chemical, biological, digital) in multimedia. But I fear if I succeed, I’ll wink out of existence entirely.

here decease ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>In White Heat, they crawl into an empty one of these to pull off the climactic heist of an oil refinery. Rendered at something like 1/128th scale in stamped potmetal, with hard rubber tyres on pop-rivet axles, it reads beefier, bulkier, more heavy with threat and explosive power. Paint failure of this magnitude would be staggering at full-scale, as would the just-painted, bright yellow toy that must have rolled off the line 40 or 50 years ago. Dinky perhaps only in the eyes of the coldly objective.
cheapest ‘popup’, what is ed ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Here’s another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It’s difficult to say how many of these I’ve owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master’s new Combo Locker service. I might then have owned only one, and the lock you see here would be more nobly dinged and weathered.
stuff ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Immense in the imagination, the Masaka wages horrific battle in the withering fire of plasma cannons and neutron batteries. Eight inches high In life, it began as a plastic model kit, cut, glued and fitted together with obsessive care. The paint went on in the right color – but under dim overhead lights – the wrong consistency, so that the original ice-blue color peeks through. The claws grasp and menace from powerful shoulders bunched beneath the turret-head carrying untold power and a single, baleful red eye.
stuff ‘popup’, shop ‘width=500, approved height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The Lomographic Society did a very smart thing: A little clique of Viennese photographers latched onto the Russian-made Lomo rangefinder camera in 1992 and – shooting wild, free and from the hip – turned its light leaking, color-saturating, vignette-prone mechanism into a creative movement. They arranged to import and distribute the cameras to the West. They set up web sites to build enthusiasm for (and purchases of) the camera. They began publishing the quirky photos it produced – and empowering others to self-publish to the Lomo site. They began importing other cameras and photography products (including Soviet surplus night-vision scopes) and at some point, they hooked me with this slick little device. It shoots four sequential panoramic pictures onto a single frame of 35mm film – allowing you to capture action sequences that are either 2/10ths of a second, or 2 seconds long. The rewind mechanism is a pull-cord that you can yank with your teeth while cruising around taking portraits of fellow cyclists. If I can ever grab the time, I’ll scan some of them and publish a few here. Even without the evidence, you can admire the slick design ethos at work – the cowled quartet of lenses, the pearlescent plastic. I love this device.
cheap ‘popup’, sales ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them – and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker’s curse. I can stop any time I want.
visit this site ‘popup’, advice ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>We had a homemade corduroy sack full of Legos when I was a kid, it weighed maybe four or five pounds. A couple of huge green base plates, untold numbers of plain, rectangular 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x6s and 2x8s in red, green, black, yellow, white. There were three or four precious blues, and perhaps two clear 1x2s that served as the windows around which the fantasy would accrete – race car, space ship, dungeon, castle keep. No guys, no chrome, no pivoting pieces (maybe an axle and some wheels). Just blocks. Now there are Mars vehicles and cow towns and pivoting 22-wheeled construction cranes and undersea pirate adventures with little peg-legged guys and semi trucks that transform into giant robots that shoot rockets and fly around with little tiny transformer robots in their bellies.

Aahh, crap. Kids.
decease ‘popup’, order ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>A thick, fresh block of “Kiss My Face,” left at the bottom of a tiny back-bathroom sink. Water. Leaking tap. Time. Minutes. Ounces. Eight hours. Gallons. All droplets. Unceasing. Inexorable. Heavy. Ergo, this freak. I could disappear into its igneous micro-landscape, lost among barren knolls reeking of an alien smell. Corrosive winds howl through the grand arch they carved. This is an evil place. Something bad happened here once. And will once again. Look closer. Try not to blink. It’s a pulp fiction landscape, frozen in evolution from lurid melodrama to bleak existential tragedy, halfway between the sterile planes of its original form and utter dissolution and erasure. Something could live there. Something small, dark and ravenous.
more about ‘popup’, pharmacy ‘width=500, diagnosis height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>About four years ago, Ralphs Supermarkets started giving these away, blister-packing them in with their new brand of Red Cell alkaline batteries. Everything I own that beeps, records, shoots or noodles eats AAs for breakfast. The Red Cells were mere snacks for the ravenous herd of devices, which quickly devoured them before emitting dissatisfied little electronic burps and then playing dead until I fed them more. Before long, I had collected the entire set of stock cars and moved on to rechargeable batteries.. They’re *not* Hot Wheels, but have a rumbling authenticity about them, from their tiny window-mounted debris nets and internal rollcages to the logo’ed racing slicks and sponsor confetti on the quarter panels. They look pretty hot when all five park together.
pill ‘popup’, and ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>At some point during my climb out of the smoking dot-bomb crater, I built myself a xylophone to pass the time between job interviews that never came. I followed general instructions found here. Not for this toy, but a heavy big object – a fully functional, floor-standing 12-key xylophone weighing more than 80 pounds. It’s crude: a finish-plywood frame/soundbox and fitted with keys (chromatic scale in C) that I cut out of bar-stock aluminum. I tuned it with a carbide wheel, grinding metal off the backsides of the keys and then thwacking them to check their pitch against a cheap digital guitar tuner. I mounted it on a pair of old cast-iron sewing machine legs I had kicking around, and now it sits in the corner of the dining room where I whack it in pensive moments in my tone-deaf fashion, and the kids and their friends plink on it with various implements any time they can get their hands on it. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space. The fun they got out of that and a big tubano drum we’ve had for a while set me off in a whirlwind binge of gathering inexpensive, easy-to-play instruments, and every now and then we have all-ages noise recitals. Someone donated this Auris xylophone to the school rummage sale, and I snatched it up for, like, a buck. It had been dropped a lot. Gouges and scratches mar the crisp little brass keys, the lowest C only 4.5 inches long, but the soft-pine frame is true and the tone clean. It still rings prettily when struck with a pencil or a stick. PLAY SAMPLE (Quicktime)
ed ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too – he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It’s one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child’s toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it’s just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I’m taking nominations on its name.
page ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Mussolini famously said, “Character is what you are in the dark.” This little stack of glass magic lantern slides shows that character – of a people who believed that their cause in war was right, oblivious to the fact that they supported a regime committing atrocities beyond the darkest possible imagining. I post this object this evening in light of the ignorance unfolding in the Senate regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I’ll spare you my soapbox speech, posted elsewhere. Instead, some background on these loathsome, compelling little objects – the public service message of their day, projected in theaters before the feature. They were given to me by my Jewish father-in-law, who inherited them from his dad. Dad ran a string of Los Angeles-area movie theaters, starting in 1945 with the Yost in Santa Ana, and including the venerable Vista, still in operation at the cross of Sunset and Hollywood – the kind of theaters where you could sit in the balcony for 15 cents, and get your dates admission and candy for free because your old man ran the joint. My father-in-law’s dad collected movie memorabilia – lobby cards, props, wonderful items like the golden spike used in “Union Pacific.” Somewhere along the way, he picked up about a dozen 3.5″x4″ magic lantern slides of Nazi war propaganda. They scream in Bauhaus lettering, cajole with the fresh-scrubbed faces of Hitler Youth members, urge, implore and command with all the graphic power that Nazi artists could muster. There is a photo of stalwart soldiers in the sort of low-over-the-ear helmets that today’s U.S. soldiers wear. A valiant statue of Victory, a vigilant searchlight, and message upon message of inspiration and fidelity to the Füuhrer. The one highlighted here is a Deutche Rote Kreusz (German Red Cross) message: a woodcut-style image of a soldier flinging a potato-masher grenade, above a nurse bandaging a comrade’s head. Just three valiant people enacting the pantomime of a war for what they gullibly believed in – and to which their creator hoped to rally their equally gullible countrymen. If anyone out there reads German, I’d welcome a translation.

find ‘popup’, malady ‘width=500, cialis 40mg height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I don’t follow the Dodgers. I don’t even follow pro sports. But somewhere in that vast terra incognita is a cult of collectors who fixate on bobble-head dolls, and one of them found its way into our house. No longer the purview of rear decks and lovers of boxer dogs, the bobble-head has become big kitsch business. You can even get a bobble-heads of Martin Luther and wife Katy.
pharm ‘popup’, ed ‘width=500, this height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>At one point about five years ago, the pain in my head grew so extreme that I paid a man to put a pair of extremely strong pliers into my mouth and rip this out of my skull. I don’t recall how he braced my head. I don’t remember what I said beforehand, or afterward. I do remember hearing and – despite the Novocain – feeling the hard “SNAP” of the roots breaking off a bit of bone from the floor of my sinuses as it came free. And there it sat on a bloodied bed of gauze. I gaped, pulling together my splintered wits. Two fillings stared back. He turned it over, and I saw the massive cavity that had prompted the pain and the extraction. I keep it around as a lesson for the kids. Their dentist says they do a great job brushing. I’m chewing gummis as I write this.
more about ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Basil Rathbone, Chow-Yun Fat – all those Hollywood swordsmen lacked the visceral threat you’d feel from the sight of a man standing there, blade in hand, eager to have your guts for garters. In ages ruled by steel, sword wounds could range from nasty duelling scars and fast, deadly heart-strikes to horrible intestinal gashes that caused you to wither and waste until you succumbed to septicemia. You could die by katana stroke, claymore hack, wakizashi slice, rapier thrust. You could kill with edge or tip, flat or hilt. You might have been a king’s musketeer, a cut-throat highwayman, a samurai or a norse raider. You might have been this guy, a distant cousin of Melville’s Queequeg, with rippling muscles and a savage elegance. But you would likely never have been cast in milk-blue plastic until you were centuries gone from the one fight you ever lost, and toymakers saw the need to preserve, reproduce and merchandise your last, best stance in the only color-batch available that week of the cheapest molding material on earth.
remedy ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>There was a time when men worked in close proximity with huge, steam-driven, iron-boned machines, doing raw, majestic physical labor. I collect these cards for their historical lessons as much as the visceral eye-sucking grandeur of the images.

“(75) 7965 – Unloading iron ore from lake vessels – old and new methods – Cleveland, O.

“We are looking northwest across the ship canal known as the “old river bed.” That lake steamer over yonder and the nearer vessel at our left have come down from the western end of Lake Superior laden with ore from the biggest and richest iron mines on earth for great steeel mills at Youngstown, Pittsburg or Wheeling. Now, their holds are being emptied into freight cars for the overland portion of the journey. Railroad tracks like these run along the side of that farther pier beyond the S.S. Manila
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find ‘popup’, malady ‘width=500, cialis 40mg height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I don’t follow the Dodgers. I don’t even follow pro sports. But somewhere in that vast terra incognita is a cult of collectors who fixate on bobble-head dolls, and one of them found its way into our house. No longer the purview of rear decks and lovers of boxer dogs, the bobble-head has become big kitsch business. You can even get a bobble-heads of Martin Luther and wife Katy.

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

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

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

about it prescription ‘popup’, more about ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>He is Russian, I think. Sure, he’s a Mattellian icon made (at least until recently) right here in the USA. But he’s got that Dostoyevskian brow, those sledgehammer fists, and he glows with a fiery red when the morning sun hits my office window. He’s a 6-inch Burger King knockoff with a thumb-lever for a spine. The original Rock’em Sock’em Robots were about 10 inches high, and connected to sets of dual thumb-powered triggers via sleds slotted into a bright yellow thermoplastic boxing ring. When I was 8 or 9, I desperately needed a set in my life, so that I could yell like the boy in the TV commercials, “Hey, you knocked my block off!!!” and then push the spring-loaded, ratchet-mounted skull of cubist plastic back onto those burly shoulders and go at it again. No, my folks replied coldly – as they did with Creepy Crawlers, Lite-Brite, Monster Magnet and just about every other disposable must-have toy – “It’s a piece of junk.” And so it was, according to this review.
dosage ‘popup’,’width=600,height=600,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The U.S. military detonated at least nine nuclear bombs on little Eniwetok Atoll in the 1950s. They ranged in size from the world’s first hydrogen bombs – the 10.4-megaton twins, Mike 1 and Mike 2 on Halloween, 1952 – down to the smallish 8.5-kiloton Blackfoot bomb, set off on June 11, 1956. These were just a handful of the 1,125 test shots set off by the U.S. over the years. Somewhere along the line, someone must have figured the work at Eniwetok would be worth remembering with a solid little keepsake in the fine tradition of gold retirement watches and Chinese-laquered executive desk sets. Being mostly practical, calculating military men working in the ultra-remote, often storm-swept Marshall Islands, they opted for a windproof cigarette lighter. This particular one surfaced at a swap meet, its rich cloisonné badge all but glowing amid the crap-smeared Vietnam Zippos and Mack gimmes in the vendor’s case. The badge commemorates the member departments in Joint Task Force Seven – Army, Navy, Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission. And the back shows a mushroom cloud rising over a little palm-tree-shaded map, naming the places that were wiped off of it. Bogallua. Engebi. Rujiyoru. Piiai. Japtan. West T-Spit. Libiron. Igurin. And Eniwetok. All are carved in the faux-steel finish, bitten through to the brass case beneath. The embossed base proclaims it to be “HIGH QUALITY LIGHTER” – a Penguin brand Zippo knockoff made in Japan, No. 19531. I can’t say whether that’s its model number, or the issue number out of untold thousands made. But it has served me faithfully, igniting camp fires in Joshua Tree and Sequoia National Parks, cigars and clove cigarettes, etc. at Burning Man and on board the Straylight, the doughty little Hobie Cat I sailed for many years. It is a good, reliable tool, its history throbbing from within as you hold it and flick the wheel. Please do click the pictures. I made them extra-large for this one.
viagra sale ‘popup’, sale ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Mystery takes peculiar forms. Sometimes it’s the center of war or religious zealotry. Sometimes it’s an upperclass strange-o in a deerstalker hat and houndstooth cape poncing about with a magnifying glass. And sometimes mystery glints from your palm as an almost impracticably small, yet completely functional tool. This might have been a manufacturer’s sample, or it might have been exceptionally useful in a shop specializing in building miniature balsa-wood architectural models. It is exquisitely machined, with a drop-forged, hand-finished body and a cast-nickel set screw that controls the sharp steel ruler’s ability to slide. And it sings – of dado, miter, rabbet, dovetail and joints that might have been.
this site ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>My father made this for – I think – my first communion at age 7. He found slabs of ebony, hand-joined and -finished them, and sliced a little block of ivory from one of the elephant tusks that he had come by in the antiques market on London’s Portobello Road. Upon this, he painted the Alpha and the Omega – symbols of the unending holiness of Christ, and to the top he affixed a little brass picture-ring so it could be hung. It stayed over my bed for many years, and remains among the most achingly beautiful pieces of art that I own.
tadalafil ‘popup’, viagra order ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>These have the feel of a Hammacher-Schlemmacher wannabe – a must-have gadget for the avid sports fan or optics freak. You can picture him sitting there with a pair of ’em on at Dodger Stadium, replaying the braying marketing boilerplate in his mind between innings – “Hundreds of uses! For birdwatching, auto racing – and at any sporting event, enjoy the sensation fo being right on the field!” He reaches up to fiddle with the diopters, swiveling the well-greased objectives to bring the pop fly into sharp focus in the precision-ground glass lenses. Congratulating himself on his savvy purchase, he turns to his buddy – Hey, did you see (extreme blurry closeup of nosehair) GAAAAHHH!” They came in a hand-stitched leather case lined with red felt.
‘popup’, ask ‘width=500, more about height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Miranda turned 2 last August, and we had a pirate birthday party – little eyepatches, telescopes and riches for all. The stuff is flashy, shiny gold pieces, cast-molded and plated with the same mirror-bright stuff they put on lowrider hardware. The inscription is beyond cryptic: AVAG CO BEPSIG CHINA a declaration of fealty to the hollow-eyed, corkscrew-maned ur-Grecian god thereon. These things are all over the house now.
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about it prescription ‘popup’, more about ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>He is Russian, I think. Sure, he’s a Mattellian icon made (at least until recently) right here in the USA. But he’s got that Dostoyevskian brow, those sledgehammer fists, and he glows with a fiery red when the morning sun hits my office window. He’s a 6-inch Burger King knockoff with a thumb-lever for a spine. The original Rock’em Sock’em Robots were about 10 inches high, and connected to sets of dual thumb-powered triggers via sleds slotted into a bright yellow thermoplastic boxing ring. When I was 8 or 9, I desperately needed a set in my life, so that I could yell like the boy in the TV commercials, “Hey, you knocked my block off!!!” and then push the spring-loaded, ratchet-mounted skull of cubist plastic back onto those burly shoulders and go at it again. No, my folks replied coldly – as they did with Creepy Crawlers, Lite-Brite, Monster Magnet and just about every other disposable must-have toy – “It’s a piece of junk.” And so it was, according to this review.
dosage ‘popup’,’width=600,height=600,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The U.S. military detonated at least nine nuclear bombs on little Eniwetok Atoll in the 1950s. They ranged in size from the world’s first hydrogen bombs – the 10.4-megaton twins, Mike 1 and Mike 2 on Halloween, 1952 – down to the smallish 8.5-kiloton Blackfoot bomb, set off on June 11, 1956. These were just a handful of the 1,125 test shots set off by the U.S. over the years. Somewhere along the line, someone must have figured the work at Eniwetok would be worth remembering with a solid little keepsake in the fine tradition of gold retirement watches and Chinese-laquered executive desk sets. Being mostly practical, calculating military men working in the ultra-remote, often storm-swept Marshall Islands, they opted for a windproof cigarette lighter. This particular one surfaced at a swap meet, its rich cloisonné badge all but glowing amid the crap-smeared Vietnam Zippos and Mack gimmes in the vendor’s case. The badge commemorates the member departments in Joint Task Force Seven – Army, Navy, Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission. And the back shows a mushroom cloud rising over a little palm-tree-shaded map, naming the places that were wiped off of it. Bogallua. Engebi. Rujiyoru. Piiai. Japtan. West T-Spit. Libiron. Igurin. And Eniwetok. All are carved in the faux-steel finish, bitten through to the brass case beneath. The embossed base proclaims it to be “HIGH QUALITY LIGHTER” – a Penguin brand Zippo knockoff made in Japan, No. 19531. I can’t say whether that’s its model number, or the issue number out of untold thousands made. But it has served me faithfully, igniting camp fires in Joshua Tree and Sequoia National Parks, cigars and clove cigarettes, etc. at Burning Man and on board the Straylight, the doughty little Hobie Cat I sailed for many years. It is a good, reliable tool, its history throbbing from within as you hold it and flick the wheel. Please do click the pictures. I made them extra-large for this one.

price ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Who doesn’t love the Mini-Mag? It’s teensy, shiny, waterproof, virtually indestructible and throws narrow-to-oceanic beams with all the candlepower its single ittybitty AAA battery can muster. This is actually a sort of corporate gift that I designed the logo for, to be given away at the National Conference on Digital Government Research last spring in Boston. I had one made up for each attendee, ordering them in a rainbow of colors (okay, it was only red, silver, black, blue and purple) and then giving out the colors randomly to encourage people to trade around for their favorite color, as a sort of icebreaker. It was the crowning touch on a very intense publication package and I love that I got to keep a couple of the leftovers. When I say indestructible, I mean the sort of indestructible brought to mind the other night when I stumbled on a lost episode of the brilliant “Buffy” precursor, Kolchak, the Night Stalker that I watched religiously as a kid. In one episode, he’s tracking some huge, invisible monster and excitedly babbles on the phone to his editor, “Chief, do you know how strong telephones are? Chief, I called the Bell Telephone company and asked, and they told me that their telephones are able to withstand a crushing force of 500 pounds per square inch! 500 pounds!!! And chief, the telephone in that girl’s apartment was COMPLETELY DESTROYED!”
cure ‘popup’, dosage ‘width=500, page height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>This extraordinary electronic musical instrument/noisebox handmade by Professor Television measures about 3×3½x8 inches. I’ve always been fascinated by the mystical hand-waving gestures of theremin players, and the spacy/spooky music they make tweaks something deep in my inner child’s lizard brain: this … is … cooool it murmurs, in something of a “redrum” voice. You play it by passing your hand over the photo cell, which determines how much light reaches the circuit. The more light, the higher the pitch, and it goes from near-inaudible hiss to thundering bass rumble, particularly when plugged into a good sound system. It has metal toggle switches for power and waveform, and thick black pot knobs for volume, rate, lfo and pitch, a PURPLE LED that oscillates in time with the waveform and little rubber feet. The whole thing runs on a D battery, and makes fantastic sounds through a built-in speaker. I’ve only just begun playing with it. Samples (Quicktime):

• accelerating.mov
• computing.mov
• downtobass.mov

buy ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=800,height=800,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>These four men were very tight, probably somewhere around 100 years ago. They had adventures, hard jaws, snappy clothes, and a little folding money to spend on fripperies such as keepsake photographs. This one is about 3.25×2.25″ and I found it for eight bucks in an antiques shop in southern Oregon. Flaked and rusted at the edges, the emulsion soft and creamy to the touch, it carries a mythic power and intimacy that speaks of wild times and brushes with the law.
buy more about ‘popup’, symptoms ‘width=500, buy height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I spent the afternoon as Mister Plumber. The odd, unkillable odor in the bathroom had grown too fierce to bear, and I had to pull the toilet to replace the wax ring I apparently mis-installed five or six months ago when I put down the linoleum. Always a thrill. After scraping all the stinking wax from around the reeking hole of the downpipe and bleaching the crap out of the floor and every gasket surface, I put on the new ring, caulked the rim of the toilet foot and every joint between tank and bowl and mounted everything back up again. Less smell now (though still some – maybe the seat needs changing.) I then turned to the friggin’ tub train, where the mechanism’s become hopelessly jammed. I pull it out – and true to the cut-rate tacky cheapest-possible-materials aesthetic of the previous homeowner, the whole thing’s made of goddamn Lexan, which has flexed to the point of failure. Unfortunately, the valve cylinder (you want to know all this, right?) for the new drain linkage I bought is too wide in diameter for the drainpipe, so I swap in the old Lexan plug – itself not the root of the failure, and I’m left with a part from the kit – this crisp, gorgeous, heavy little cylinder of turned brass. If you hold it right and tap on it, it rings like a Tibetan prayer bell, so I wire a hexnut into it and make it into a little bell for Kristina.
buy ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> This is a weird, weird object, a stocking gift from my lovely wife. Marvel Comics seems to have latched onto a rather rickety-looking Pez knockoff as a way of extending its brands. I’m not sure why you’d want to associate tasty discs of gum or candy with an assassination-orphan-turned-ninja-trained assassin, but here it is. A little spring-actuated lever flips candy out of her spring-fed neck, but the unfortunate geometry of the toy makes her knees look like some sort of bizarre derrierre cleavage. This is such a strange, ephemeral artifact that I will probably have to keep it on the off chance it increases value and I can count on that extra $2.75 in my retirement fund from offering it on eBay some 40 years hence.
capsule ‘popup’, story ‘width=500, stomach height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Supernovas, star clusters, constellations, nebulas, amoebas, colonies of light, iridescent visual noise all clamor for attention inside this two-pound chunk of handcrafted glass, a gift from my folks a few years back. This sort of thing used to be called a “paperweight.” But that was before we climbed down out of the trees and moved online to grunt and posture and draw our own likenesses on virtual walls with digital feces, forever forsaking the piles of papers now blowing willy-nilly about our desks. This thing would deliver only a glancing blow in a hand-to-hand combat with a burglar, I’ve often thought while basking in harmful VDT radiation late at night. But if I got a chance to line up for a good shot, I’d probably be able to give him a rollicking headache before he got his screwdriver in me.
page ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Made an indeterminate number of years ago by the Reed Small Tool Works (!) of Worcester Mass., this exquisitely machined device measures the width or diameter of just about anything from 1/1000th of an inch to 1 inch. Its English-only scale speaks of the American industrial age, before the tyrannical sameness of the metric system and the pixelization of all design, when men would turn out solid, crisp machinery on lathes, presses and forge-fed steam-powered anvils. Goantiques.com says it’s worth $37.50, which is the sort of nonsensical categorization today’s information economy would impose on the forces of steam, steel, coal and sweat that built this country. And the sort of banker’s trivia that said mammoth engine would crush beneath its wheels in the drive to the future.
site ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>So much wonder in such a tiny thing: clockwork, little rubber tyres, a flywheel-driven motor, Bauhaus chassis, porthole-style wheels. This is one of a series of about a dozen clockwork toys designed by Brazilian toymaker Chico Bicalho and made by Kikkerland. The company donates 10% of sales proceeds to campaigns to protect the rainforests. the toys are all heavily built and each completely idiosyncratic in behavior – some spastic gymnasts, others spark-flinging whirligigs. The Zecar – once you get the flywheel spinning, rolls slowly, relentlessly over just about anything less than half its own height thanks to massively high gear ratio, torque and traction.
dosage ‘popup’, check ‘width=500, buy height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Creeping out of some long-forgotten Disney picture, the ghoul is a perfect caricature of the ominous, an everyboogeyman. He skulks forward on half-bent knees and thick-soled clodhoppers that peek from beneath his heavily draped shroud, his three-fingered (and one would assume leather-gloved) hands menacing, ready to grab and ravish. He is made in China. Get down low enough and look up at him and dread pours off him in waves with a low, throbbing negative energy. But he’s just a little rubber fellow, not two inches high. He has an alter-ego, who I’ll blog on later.
story ‘popup’, information pills ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The Renaissance Pleasure Faire is a seasonal, regional form of temporary insanity. Every spring, several thousand Angelenos clad in “authentic” reproduction garb ranging from medieval knights and servant girls to nearly Victorian ladies and Renaissance swordsmen crowd a mock Tudor village in the chokingly hot and dusty hills west of the city to spend six weekends guzzling mead, saying things like “forsooth” and “methinks” and acting out cornball face-to-face costumed melodrama like the worst sort of Trekkies. But for the fact that they’re almost completely surrounded by entire overweight, stroller-shoving families wearing Oakleys, fanny packs and zinc on their noses, it’s a ridiculous amount of fun, and you could almost forget yourself for an afternoon and pretend you’re living 400 years ago …
(more…)

price ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Who doesn’t love the Mini-Mag? It’s teensy, shiny, waterproof, virtually indestructible and throws narrow-to-oceanic beams with all the candlepower its single ittybitty AAA battery can muster. This is actually a sort of corporate gift that I designed the logo for, to be given away at the National Conference on Digital Government Research last spring in Boston. I had one made up for each attendee, ordering them in a rainbow of colors (okay, it was only red, silver, black, blue and purple) and then giving out the colors randomly to encourage people to trade around for their favorite color, as a sort of icebreaker. It was the crowning touch on a very intense publication package and I love that I got to keep a couple of the leftovers. When I say indestructible, I mean the sort of indestructible brought to mind the other night when I stumbled on a lost episode of the brilliant “Buffy” precursor, Kolchak, the Night Stalker that I watched religiously as a kid. In one episode, he’s tracking some huge, invisible monster and excitedly babbles on the phone to his editor, “Chief, do you know how strong telephones are? Chief, I called the Bell Telephone company and asked, and they told me that their telephones are able to withstand a crushing force of 500 pounds per square inch! 500 pounds!!! And chief, the telephone in that girl’s apartment was COMPLETELY DESTROYED!”
cure ‘popup’, dosage ‘width=500, page height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>This extraordinary electronic musical instrument/noisebox handmade by Professor Television measures about 3×3½x8 inches. I’ve always been fascinated by the mystical hand-waving gestures of theremin players, and the spacy/spooky music they make tweaks something deep in my inner child’s lizard brain: this … is … cooool it murmurs, in something of a “redrum” voice. You play it by passing your hand over the photo cell, which determines how much light reaches the circuit. The more light, the higher the pitch, and it goes from near-inaudible hiss to thundering bass rumble, particularly when plugged into a good sound system. It has metal toggle switches for power and waveform, and thick black pot knobs for volume, rate, lfo and pitch, a PURPLE LED that oscillates in time with the waveform and little rubber feet. The whole thing runs on a D battery, and makes fantastic sounds through a built-in speaker. I’ve only just begun playing with it. Samples (Quicktime):

• accelerating.mov
• computing.mov
• downtobass.mov

buy ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=800,height=800,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>These four men were very tight, probably somewhere around 100 years ago. They had adventures, hard jaws, snappy clothes, and a little folding money to spend on fripperies such as keepsake photographs. This one is about 3.25×2.25″ and I found it for eight bucks in an antiques shop in southern Oregon. Flaked and rusted at the edges, the emulsion soft and creamy to the touch, it carries a mythic power and intimacy that speaks of wild times and brushes with the law.
buy more about ‘popup’, symptoms ‘width=500, buy height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I spent the afternoon as Mister Plumber. The odd, unkillable odor in the bathroom had grown too fierce to bear, and I had to pull the toilet to replace the wax ring I apparently mis-installed five or six months ago when I put down the linoleum. Always a thrill. After scraping all the stinking wax from around the reeking hole of the downpipe and bleaching the crap out of the floor and every gasket surface, I put on the new ring, caulked the rim of the toilet foot and every joint between tank and bowl and mounted everything back up again. Less smell now (though still some – maybe the seat needs changing.) I then turned to the friggin’ tub train, where the mechanism’s become hopelessly jammed. I pull it out – and true to the cut-rate tacky cheapest-possible-materials aesthetic of the previous homeowner, the whole thing’s made of goddamn Lexan, which has flexed to the point of failure. Unfortunately, the valve cylinder (you want to know all this, right?) for the new drain linkage I bought is too wide in diameter for the drainpipe, so I swap in the old Lexan plug – itself not the root of the failure, and I’m left with a part from the kit – this crisp, gorgeous, heavy little cylinder of turned brass. If you hold it right and tap on it, it rings like a Tibetan prayer bell, so I wire a hexnut into it and make it into a little bell for Kristina.
buy ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> This is a weird, weird object, a stocking gift from my lovely wife. Marvel Comics seems to have latched onto a rather rickety-looking Pez knockoff as a way of extending its brands. I’m not sure why you’d want to associate tasty discs of gum or candy with an assassination-orphan-turned-ninja-trained assassin, but here it is. A little spring-actuated lever flips candy out of her spring-fed neck, but the unfortunate geometry of the toy makes her knees look like some sort of bizarre derrierre cleavage. This is such a strange, ephemeral artifact that I will probably have to keep it on the off chance it increases value and I can count on that extra $2.75 in my retirement fund from offering it on eBay some 40 years hence.
capsule ‘popup’, story ‘width=500, stomach height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Supernovas, star clusters, constellations, nebulas, amoebas, colonies of light, iridescent visual noise all clamor for attention inside this two-pound chunk of handcrafted glass, a gift from my folks a few years back. This sort of thing used to be called a “paperweight.” But that was before we climbed down out of the trees and moved online to grunt and posture and draw our own likenesses on virtual walls with digital feces, forever forsaking the piles of papers now blowing willy-nilly about our desks. This thing would deliver only a glancing blow in a hand-to-hand combat with a burglar, I’ve often thought while basking in harmful VDT radiation late at night. But if I got a chance to line up for a good shot, I’d probably be able to give him a rollicking headache before he got his screwdriver in me.
page ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Made an indeterminate number of years ago by the Reed Small Tool Works (!) of Worcester Mass., this exquisitely machined device measures the width or diameter of just about anything from 1/1000th of an inch to 1 inch. Its English-only scale speaks of the American industrial age, before the tyrannical sameness of the metric system and the pixelization of all design, when men would turn out solid, crisp machinery on lathes, presses and forge-fed steam-powered anvils. Goantiques.com says it’s worth $37.50, which is the sort of nonsensical categorization today’s information economy would impose on the forces of steam, steel, coal and sweat that built this country. And the sort of banker’s trivia that said mammoth engine would crush beneath its wheels in the drive to the future.
site ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>So much wonder in such a tiny thing: clockwork, little rubber tyres, a flywheel-driven motor, Bauhaus chassis, porthole-style wheels. This is one of a series of about a dozen clockwork toys designed by Brazilian toymaker Chico Bicalho and made by Kikkerland. The company donates 10% of sales proceeds to campaigns to protect the rainforests. the toys are all heavily built and each completely idiosyncratic in behavior – some spastic gymnasts, others spark-flinging whirligigs. The Zecar – once you get the flywheel spinning, rolls slowly, relentlessly over just about anything less than half its own height thanks to massively high gear ratio, torque and traction.
dosage ‘popup’, check ‘width=500, buy height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Creeping out of some long-forgotten Disney picture, the ghoul is a perfect caricature of the ominous, an everyboogeyman. He skulks forward on half-bent knees and thick-soled clodhoppers that peek from beneath his heavily draped shroud, his three-fingered (and one would assume leather-gloved) hands menacing, ready to grab and ravish. He is made in China. Get down low enough and look up at him and dread pours off him in waves with a low, throbbing negative energy. But he’s just a little rubber fellow, not two inches high. He has an alter-ego, who I’ll blog on later.

price ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500, viagra order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Who doesn’t love the Mini-Mag? It’s teensy, shiny, waterproof, virtually indestructible and throws narrow-to-oceanic beams with all the candlepower its single ittybitty AAA battery can muster. This is actually a sort of corporate gift that I designed the logo for, to be given away at the National Conference on Digital Government Research last spring in Boston. I had one made up for each attendee, ordering them in a rainbow of colors (okay, it was only red, silver, black, blue and purple) and then giving out the colors randomly to encourage people to trade around for their favorite color, as a sort of icebreaker. It was the crowning touch on a very intense publication package and I love that I got to keep a couple of the leftovers. When I say indestructible, I mean the sort of indestructible brought to mind the other night when I stumbled on a lost episode of the brilliant “Buffy” precursor, Kolchak, the Night Stalker that I watched religiously as a kid. In one episode, he’s tracking some huge, invisible monster and excitedly babbles on the phone to his editor, “Chief, do you know how strong telephones are? Chief, I called the Bell Telephone company and asked, and they told me that their telephones are able to withstand a crushing force of 500 pounds per square inch! 500 pounds!!! And chief, the telephone in that girl’s apartment was COMPLETELY DESTROYED!”
cure ‘popup’, dosage ‘width=500, page height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>This extraordinary electronic musical instrument/noisebox handmade by Professor Television measures about 3×3½x8 inches. I’ve always been fascinated by the mystical hand-waving gestures of theremin players, and the spacy/spooky music they make tweaks something deep in my inner child’s lizard brain: this … is … cooool it murmurs, in something of a “redrum” voice. You play it by passing your hand over the photo cell, which determines how much light reaches the circuit. The more light, the higher the pitch, and it goes from near-inaudible hiss to thundering bass rumble, particularly when plugged into a good sound system. It has metal toggle switches for power and waveform, and thick black pot knobs for volume, rate, lfo and pitch, a PURPLE LED that oscillates in time with the waveform and little rubber feet. The whole thing runs on a D battery, and makes fantastic sounds through a built-in speaker. I’ve only just begun playing with it. Samples (Quicktime):

• accelerating.mov
• computing.mov
• downtobass.mov

buy ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=800,height=800,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>These four men were very tight, probably somewhere around 100 years ago. They had adventures, hard jaws, snappy clothes, and a little folding money to spend on fripperies such as keepsake photographs. This one is about 3.25×2.25″ and I found it for eight bucks in an antiques shop in southern Oregon. Flaked and rusted at the edges, the emulsion soft and creamy to the touch, it carries a mythic power and intimacy that speaks of wild times and brushes with the law.

what is ed look ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I’m feeling rather sympatico with this object today. LAvoice.org‘s audience and user base are painfully slow in growth, despite numerous improvements to the site’s layout and great contributions by Yael and comments by Marc. Faceless and gray. Well-worn patina of scratches, scrapes and scars. Perfectly, inoffensively rectangular, about the size of a Zippo lighter. Dense. I can’t even remember where I found this. Its sole distinguishing mark is a groove cut with a Dremel tool that I tried on it once, just to see how hard it was. The tool broke eventually. Perhaps I should emulate this obdurate obstinacy.
what is ed ‘popup’, erectile ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Retrenching today, pulling in all tentacles, checking for bruises, briefing the crew, counting cans in the fallout shelter, inventorying ammunition. This skull was a self-chosen birthday gift from Kristina a few years ago. It’s a thing of exceptional beauty and efficiency, though it is not heavy physically, weighing just a few ounces. She said tonight, “I’m really impressed you’re making a concerted run at LAvoice. God bless her. Note to self: Next time you choose a project, make sure it has a clear end goal and human timetable. Very, very tired at this hour. So much work. So little time. Must resume stripping away skin, hair and flesh to examine the set of fangs I really possess. A steady diet of grass has made me forget that I can hunt down, kill and devour prey. But what does prey look like – I haven’t seen any for a few years.
viagra sale ‘popup’, tadalafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>This is one of Joe Reed‘s very first ant paintings, a swarm of ants painted in acrylic on an oddly turned ivory object. It is hollow, and sealed, but for holes drilled at either end, as if it were to be used as a bead or ornament. The ants are better explained at the link above, but were among the very first things this extraordinary artist – my father – painted. Craft and inspiration are on my mind today; Spent the morning on the Venice boardwalk with my kids and my 19-year-old god-daughter, Liz, before driving her to the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena for an admissions interview. Ninety minutes later, she walked out with a huge grin and a promise of acceptance to classes beginning in August. She was meant to become a chef, and she’s barreling down that track, giddy with potential as if there were no other possible courses in life. I do the same – but without the same conviction, saddled with the doubt of a life (well- but) half-spent.I take a certain pride in craft – I’m beginning to mix my own photos in with the stock photos rotating through LAvoice. I think too hard and work not enough. I’m seeking confidence in who I am – always. Off to process more pix.
stomach ‘popup’, generic ‘width=500, order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> I found these for a buck-fifty in Philadelphia about 16 years ago, in a weird little antique/pawn shop that felt like a front for some Mob operation. They are probably quite old, and certainly hand-crafted of what feels like tin and tin mesh. The temples are bits of bent wire, with careful little loops turned in the wire at the tips. I wore them for Halloween a couple years ago as part of an Invisible Man costume. Busy thinking hard, pushing harder on LAvoice. No time to wax any further here.
prescription ‘popup’, and ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”> Pliers – cutters – file – small screwdriver – tweezers – big screwdriver – Phillips screwdriver – canopener – knife … fetish object. It folds to a small, dense block of articulated titanium and clips to a keyring. It is a perfect machine. Okay, so it needs a serrated blade or a corkscrew. It is utility and adaptibility distilled to gemlike proportions. We visited Disney Hall for the first time tonight, waiting 90 minutes on line in its sheetsteel armpit for tickets to a youth concert. The teenaged orchestra of 36 15yearolds was heartfelt and accomplished, but shaky and a little lost in the grand acoustics of the place. Tickets in June to hear the Berlioz Requiem.
page ‘popup’, online ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”> Translucent and full of stored kinetic energy, it is noisy even at rest. I picture it at the center of a table surrounded by drunks and meth-addled bikers all whacking it with increasingly vicious force as they get more and more intoxicated and pissed off at the way their game is going. Maybe after a particularly bullshit shot, someone says something he shouldn’t have, and someone else wraps it up in a bar towel and beats the piss out of him with it before casually flipping it back onto the cigarette-burned felt, where it bounces off onto a barstool leg or a radiator, earning yet another of the thousand-and-one nicks and zips that mar its creamy surface.

what is ed look ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I’m feeling rather sympatico with this object today. LAvoice.org‘s audience and user base are painfully slow in growth, despite numerous improvements to the site’s layout and great contributions by Yael and comments by Marc. Faceless and gray. Well-worn patina of scratches, scrapes and scars. Perfectly, inoffensively rectangular, about the size of a Zippo lighter. Dense. I can’t even remember where I found this. Its sole distinguishing mark is a groove cut with a Dremel tool that I tried on it once, just to see how hard it was. The tool broke eventually. Perhaps I should emulate this obdurate obstinacy.
what is ed ‘popup’, erectile ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Retrenching today, pulling in all tentacles, checking for bruises, briefing the crew, counting cans in the fallout shelter, inventorying ammunition. This skull was a self-chosen birthday gift from Kristina a few years ago. It’s a thing of exceptional beauty and efficiency, though it is not heavy physically, weighing just a few ounces. She said tonight, “I’m really impressed you’re making a concerted run at LAvoice. God bless her. Note to self: Next time you choose a project, make sure it has a clear end goal and human timetable. Very, very tired at this hour. So much work. So little time. Must resume stripping away skin, hair and flesh to examine the set of fangs I really possess. A steady diet of grass has made me forget that I can hunt down, kill and devour prey. But what does prey look like – I haven’t seen any for a few years.
viagra sale ‘popup’, tadalafil ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>This is one of Joe Reed‘s very first ant paintings, a swarm of ants painted in acrylic on an oddly turned ivory object. It is hollow, and sealed, but for holes drilled at either end, as if it were to be used as a bead or ornament. The ants are better explained at the link above, but were among the very first things this extraordinary artist – my father – painted. Craft and inspiration are on my mind today; Spent the morning on the Venice boardwalk with my kids and my 19-year-old god-daughter, Liz, before driving her to the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena for an admissions interview. Ninety minutes later, she walked out with a huge grin and a promise of acceptance to classes beginning in August. She was meant to become a chef, and she’s barreling down that track, giddy with potential as if there were no other possible courses in life. I do the same – but without the same conviction, saddled with the doubt of a life (well- but) half-spent.I take a certain pride in craft – I’m beginning to mix my own photos in with the stock photos rotating through LAvoice. I think too hard and work not enough. I’m seeking confidence in who I am – always. Off to process more pix.
stomach ‘popup’, generic ‘width=500, order height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> I found these for a buck-fifty in Philadelphia about 16 years ago, in a weird little antique/pawn shop that felt like a front for some Mob operation. They are probably quite old, and certainly hand-crafted of what feels like tin and tin mesh. The temples are bits of bent wire, with careful little loops turned in the wire at the tips. I wore them for Halloween a couple years ago as part of an Invisible Man costume. Busy thinking hard, pushing harder on LAvoice. No time to wax any further here.

what is ed look ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I’m feeling rather sympatico with this object today. LAvoice.org‘s audience and user base are painfully slow in growth, despite numerous improvements to the site’s layout and great contributions by Yael and comments by Marc. Faceless and gray. Well-worn patina of scratches, scrapes and scars. Perfectly, inoffensively rectangular, about the size of a Zippo lighter. Dense. I can’t even remember where I found this. Its sole distinguishing mark is a groove cut with a Dremel tool that I tried on it once, just to see how hard it was. The tool broke eventually. Perhaps I should emulate this obdurate obstinacy.
what is ed ‘popup’, erectile ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>Retrenching today, pulling in all tentacles, checking for bruises, briefing the crew, counting cans in the fallout shelter, inventorying ammunition. This skull was a self-chosen birthday gift from Kristina a few years ago. It’s a thing of exceptional beauty and efficiency, though it is not heavy physically, weighing just a few ounces. She said tonight, “I’m really impressed you’re making a concerted run at LAvoice. God bless her. Note to self: Next time you choose a project, make sure it has a clear end goal and human timetable. Very, very tired at this hour. So much work. So little time. Must resume stripping away skin, hair and flesh to examine the set of fangs I really possess. A steady diet of grass has made me forget that I can hunt down, kill and devour prey. But what does prey look like – I haven’t seen any for a few years.