HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Tool

  • #a225 :: House of Commons hip flask

    ENLARGEJust a nip.

    He wondered – as he idly did in these customary moments when he stole a drink just after lunch in the House of Lords dining room, doctor between a trip to the loo and the afternoon session – whether the cameras would see him.

    Surely they did. London was positively filthy with CCTV cameras. The flat, page disapproving eyes of post-9/11 paranoia swallowed every godawfully boring detail of the city’s yawning, nose-picking existence. Somewhere, legions of poor sods sat before screens watching all of it.

    The House of Commons, even more so.

    It was getting so he pondered his own every move – whose hands he shook from the other side of the house, whether he recycled his soda bottle, what magazines he read on the toilet. The compound eye of surveillance saw, the great bloody eye of Sauron.

    And while he knew these were manned by spotty security trainees under the tutelage of washed-up career thugs for whom this was the very last posting – neither class of which gave a wrinkly-scrotal toss about anything short of the screams of swarthy, sweating wogs with leaky gym bags full of C4 and medical radioactive waste sprinting towards whatever destiny and certain glory they imagined in the arms of the first copper to tackle them – he always grew self-conscious just after lunch. Someone might see.
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  • #a224 :: Amelia’s USB

    enlargeA soft, information pills mushy, drugs pungently overripe spot has formed in my brain over the years to accommodate certain industrial finishes.

    I sweat and pant for the chrome of bicycle handlebars, the deep metalflake of kustom kars, the wrinkled black baked-enamel of 1950s cameras and the liver-colored hammertone of certain antique audio gear.

    So it is with brushed steel. And so it was to my great joy that the quirky art-omnibus magazine I bought in London came with a flash drive packed full of oddball pop – and encased in cheaply-made brushed steel.

    The sandblasted rocketship and communications satellite crank the fetish knob up one more excruciating notch, and the red pinhead LED that winks when you plug it in just sends me over the top. I hung it with all the other heavy clobber on my keyring, which is now completely out of hand.

  • #a223 :: Sawyer View-Master

    ENLARGEIn the 50s multimedia realm of celluloid filmstrips and magnetic tape, prostate this was, ed arguably, order the iPhone of its day.

    You could get “reels” of stereo photos or cartoons on virtually any subject – 8 shots each – and completely immerse yourself in 3-D imagery – even sometimes with a soundtrack.

    Sawyer’s View-Master put images of the world in your pocket, hours of time-eating enjoyment at your fingertips with the most simple-minded of technologies: (more…)

  • #a221 :: Petrie

    ENLARGEAt the obvious risk of being (as well as sounding) thoroughly sexist, approved you never know what nerve you’ll hit with a woman until you hit that nerve dead-on.

    At the same time I bought RayD8 to back up my photos, top-secret work projects and random droolings, I bought this little orange Mimobot and gave it to my wife. I think she may have squealed.

    “He’s so cute!”

    She still squeals – on a regular basis – because he’s still so cute, and his little butt lights up red when you plug him in.

    His name is Petrie.

  • #a217 :: “Leight Sleepers” brand earplugs

    ENLARGEI’ve worn a lot of earplugs.

    I’m a light sleeper, viagra sale unhealthy I have kids and I camp on the playa, remedy thumb which readies you for pretty much any cacophonous grab-bag of a soundscape the world can dish out – while making it impossible to cobble together 3 decent minutes of sleep for the noise of hooting, bumping and explosions.

    I’ve worn full cranials to protect my delicate, shell-like ears from jets screaming skyward atop lit afterburners at Southern California Airshows. They were solid.

    I’ve worn Class 4 ribbed earplugs that were given out at the brain-fuckingly loud Survival Research Labs show in L.A. a couple years back.

    But sometimes you need nothing more than a cheapass thimbleful of foam to keep everyone else out of your night.

  • #a213 :: Canon i9900 Bubble-Jet printer cartridges

    ENLARGEThis is the business end of the food chain that produced this. For $12, generic you get a little, web meticulously machined and vacuformed plastic box half packed with lurid ink, the other with a cubical cotton swab that seems to absorb all the ink – eight flavors of which are required to keep the printer running, any one of which could run out at any time. Because the digital human requires images on nonrecyclable plastic-coated paper. Very, very large images. In large quantities. I may just spend more than $300 a year on this stuff.

  • #a212 :: Hand-carved Indian candlestick

    ENLARGEThis appeared in the house some time in the past month. I have no idea where it came from, advice beyond the tiny “India” sticker on its base. Around it, try a lion chases an elephant that threatens to trample the elephant that flees the lion. Candlelight sounds nice.

  • #a211 :: Tennis ball

    ENLARGEPock.
    Puck.
    Pock.
    Puck.
    (shuffle-lunge)Pock*blick*
    “Out!”
    (applause).
    I never got any good at this game, information pills but I adored watching Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, seek Andre Agassi and Venus Williams play Wimbledon.

    Another bit of trivia from the summer trip to London – Henry VIII used to play tennis in the great stone hall at Parliament. They know because they found tennis balls up in the baffles over the windows.

  • #a205 :: Jerry-rigged Bluetooth earhook

    ENLARGEFor the second time in as many months, mind the earhook on my Bluetooth headset snapped off.

    You can’t buy replacements for these things online. I know, I’ve tried

    A cheap little plastic part fails, leaving you the choice of fixing it (virtually impossible to glue) versus spending $50 to buy another gadget. And you still haven’t really solved the problem, which is that you’re doomed to keep leaking money $50 at a time as long as you need an earpiece and keep putting them in your pockets after use, as any normal person would.

    Fuck. That.

    One coat hanger, two pairs of pliers, forty-odd choice curses and half an hour later, and your ghetto earhook is clamped into place, and it fits perfectly.

  • #a204 :: “Eco-soil”

    ENLARGEWe found this stuff sold by the packet all over Brick Lane market.

    Dry, cialis 40mg it looks like colored bug feces. Wet, pill it transforms to plump pearls of color – a silica-based soil substitute for potting soil, case into which one is supposed to shove one’s flowers, adding a juicy splash to one’s Ikeafied bed-sit.

    As I found out one day, you don’t want to spill this stuff when wet, as the spheres are slippery, bouncy and perfectly round, which means they roll everywhere and you have to spend about 20 minutes per cup hunting all the little fuckers down for disposal.

    But it is kind of cool.

  • #a196 :: Krishna card

    ENLARGEFaith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.

    I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
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  • #a195 :: Bible tract

    ENLARGEFaith is one of those nature versus nurture questions. You either have it by the time you’re an adult, nurse or you don’t. But unless it’s very strong, viagra you’ll find it sorely tested.

    I was raised a good Catholic by a very good Catholic and an excellent Episcopalian, but wound up walking away from the Church in my 20s when I saw how completely anti-humanist some of its central tenets regarding natural human behavior and identity were: anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-contraception …
    (more…)

  • #a190 :: Pizza protector

    ENLARGEInside the box from Hard Times, order an itty-bitty thermoplastic table stands, poised to protect our 18-inch half-bacon-half-mushroom-and-black-olives pizza from the combined effects of gravity, pressure and corrugated cardboard. A tiny insurance policy, a finger in the dike, a talisman against doom.

    Landfill material.

  • #a189 :: Tattoo needle

    ENLARGEThere’s a certain serenity to getting tattooed. You sit (or lie) back on the chair or table and agree to let someone cause you tremendous pain for several hours and scar you for life.

    What gets you through the pain is the promise of how marvelous the scar will be. I’ve been waiting months to have Justin turn this into this.

    He put on Hans Zimmer‘s haunting score to The Dark Knight, approved and I lay back and let him jab this into my arm thousands of times per minute for two hours. Because I knew that when he was done, visit this site I would be transformed.

    And I was, exactly as I dreamed of being.

    That is the wonder of a good tattoo.

  • #a187 :: iPhone 3G

    ENLARGEMy birthday gift. My wife’s love in a handheld marvel. My new video game platform. My toy. My crack pipe. My next-gen paid-content conduit. My memory bank. My little wallet-suck. My preeeeciousssss. My underestimation of Apple‘s continued brilliance at industrial design. My PDA. My GPS. My portable Thomas Guide. My jukebox. My phone.

    The blue rubber grip keeps the slippery little oyster in my hand. I’m paranoid I’ll lose it. Or break it. Or get bored and move on to lusting after the Next Big Thing. This is the sound of obsession.

  • #186 :: “Thunderbird”

    enlargeThe decision had cost Daniel. Which is why he was standing here now with this ridiculous knife in his hand. Ankle-deep in all the tools he had yanked from the toolbox and flung to the floor as he rifled fruitlessly for a real weapon. weapons. Both blades out. Ready. Wicked.

    He tried not to look at the pickup truck. It had just parked across the street.

    The driver eyed him. He hefted the thing without daring to look down at it. He was high when he picked it out at the pawnshop. $10.52 with tax, recipe the man said. He pushed over $6 in quarters and a $5 bill.

    It looked wicked. Like Gene Simmons’ boots.

    The guy in the pickup glanced back over his shoulder, buy then turned to Daniel again.

    What the fuck am I gonna do with this fucking thing? I almost cut myself just getting the twin blades open … – their hooked bottle-opener jaws had snagged in the sleeves of his old raglan.

    Now he held it clenched in fist, where the vicious edges and impossible gothy points settled into his fingers along four grooves molded into the handle.

    Come ON, he mouthed. The man across the street was now missing from his truck. Daniel had not seen him go.

    He whirled but it was too late.

  • #a185 :: Defender Xtreme “Peramedics Pocket Knife”

    enlargeThe second in the series of three birthday knives shimmers with the fetishy beauty of orange anodized aluminum. For just $6.75, store the Chinese export company will cough up a decently sharp 4-inch drop-point blade wrapped in satiny orange metal and emblazoned with an enamel “peramedics” (sic) emblem.

    Bonus features – a seat-belt cutter and tetrahedronal window-breaking point buried in the butt of the thing.

    It’s slippery to handle on a regular basis, visit but pretty beyond any description. I need a good, stout backup camping knife, to be sure.

  • #a184 :: Maxam “Assisted Opening” Liner Lock Knife

    ENLARGE
    Larger image

    Mom and Dad, medications being loving, clever parents, took pity upon me after reading about the pocketknife incident.

    They Googled around and stumbled on BuynSaveDirect.com, a sort of geek-heaven/tactical-weapons porn shop masquerading as a knife’n’flashlight supplier. For barely $7 you can buy (among other things including Tasers and swords) solid, Chinese-made pocket knives in myriad styles and colors, so they bought three.

    When the package arrived, I opened this one first …
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  • #a184 :: Message fan

    enlargeYou can keep your Adobe Photoshop, cialis 40mg your diffraction foil, your glitter-gel pens.

    For my money, mankind’s greatest contribution to democratizing flashy art and entertainment has been the light-emitting diode.

    This programmable, Chinese-made fan lets you spell out messages that it miraculously traces in the air by spinning eight tiny LEDs at hundreds of RPMs and flashing them to the mysterious rhythms of an embedded microchip. Insult your friends! Confuse your enemies! Annoy total strangers! This device is so coming to the playa with us.

    My son picked it out for my birthday. Or, maybe I picked it out, and he paid for and pocketed it for later gifting.

  • #a183 :: SuperGlue Future Gel

    enlargeIt took me years of accidentally cementing my fingertips together using the old Super Glue before I discovered two things:

    1. This stuff was originally designed for closing wounds in triage situations; and
    2. Future Gel is much more manageable – it never gooshes in a stream from the tube when you puncture a plug of dried glue to get at the fresh stuff, look more about and it goes only where you put it.

    My wife tore a nail this morning. We glued it up fine with this stuff. Highly recommended sticking power in a teensy package.

  • #a182 :: Bluetooth headset

    enlargeSix weeks ago, case California law did not require me to wear this while driving and using my cellphone.

    Five years ago, treat this sort of gadget did not exist.

    Fifteen years ago, doctor I counted myself lucky to be using a cellphone the size of a brick – one that had been issued by the Philadelphia Inquirer news desk.

    Sixteen years ago, I carried extra quarters in case I had to call in from the road.

    120 years ago, I, the quarters, the road and the phone lines did not exist. People counted themselves lucky to get a handwritten letter within a month, and especially lucky to receive a telegram hand-clicked and transcribed by people who knew Morse code.

    Which should make me feel lucky to own such a thing, but all I can say about the Motorola i375 is that I dislike being yoked to it because the damn thing doesn’t fit my earhole.

  • #a178 Gerber Harsey Air Ranger

    enlargeTwo odd things about trying to catch up with a “daily” blog that you’ve sorely neglected while traveling like mad is that: a) you’re essentially lying to your users if you don’t admit that things are being backdated; and b) you can’t remember when anything really happened to you, stomach or which objects occurred to you to blog on which days. I’m actually posting this on 8/20, but can’t say exactly when the events herein happened.

    So we come to the story of my beloved, and now lost, pocketknife. This is a terrific tool – I’ll probably never buy a different knife for myself as long as these are made.

    The Harsey Air Ranger is sturdy, easy to open and close, and stays sharp all along its traditional and versatile serrated drop-point blade. It’s low-profile, won’t frighten the women and livestock, and the knurled handles give it a sure grip. So, I carry it in my pocket pretty much any day I don’t already know I have to go through a metal detector.

    Which explains how I came to lose my main knife, and you’re looking at a photograph of my backup – an older, more chewed up Air Ranger that I had to press into service after this happened …
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  • #a176 :: Modeling clay

    ENLARGEThick cylinders of slick plasticine, information pills pure of color and form.

    Someone’s gonna mess them up very shortly.

  • #a175 :: Printing blocks

    ENLARGECarved in Africa or India or perhaps on some island, buy I know not where, approved these found their way to the gift shop of Brighton Pavilion.

    They were lumped in mysteriously with all the other gift-shop trappings of chinoiserie, the Chinese-design fantasy that George IV lost himself in while having Sir John Nash design his summer palace.

    They have a rough majesty of their own.

  • #a173 :: Chewable toothbrush

    ENLARGEBritish ingenuity has concocted a perfect offering for airport vending machines:

    For a £1 coin, order you get two of these: It’s a spherical plastic capsule. Split it open, web and there’s a circular sheet of instructions and an oddball chunk of nylon with bristles on one half and a capsule on the other.

    Pop the capsule in your mouth, hospital and chew, and the capsule splits open to release chunks of crunchy what-tastes-like candy. The instructions direct you to work the thing around all corners of your mouth, which turns out to be more amusing than prophylactic, but when you’re done, at least your breath smells good.