HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Category: Tool

  • #a171 :: Step-down transformer

    ENLARGEElectricity surges out of British outlets at a blistering 220 volts – too powerful for western computers.

    While I’m blogging this from my Mac G4 laptop – a 6-year-old bulletproof box with a trim little power transformer built right in – my other work laptop (a Dell) requires a separate transformer to tame London voltage down to a palatable 110 volts.

    This thick brick does the job, site but at 5 pounds it’s so heavy it falls out of the outlet without me resting it on an updended drink glass on the floor for support. What the hell, it works, and at $25, not too bad a deal.

    Plus, you could brain someone with it if need be.

  • #a170 :: Lead “Indian brave”

    ENLARGEThe micro-war between the races of earth still rages on in English toy shops and adult imaginations – even though most young Londoners have graduated to XBox, what is ed find Flickr and Legomania.

    Most warriors wear meticulously handpainted uniforms. In the antiques stalls of Portobello Road they rest, medical weapons at the ready, approved medals ablaze in gold and polychrome, in carefully made beds of styrofoam with ridiculous prices on their heads, since they’re now considered antiques.

    All except for this specimen, who lurked at the bottom of the £1 bin, crunched beneath Hussars with chipped uniforms and fusiliers with badly broken muskets.

    He creeps across the plains, in U.S. cavalry trousers, the very picture of menace, his shiny hatchet at the ready.

    His near-black skin is a dead giveaway that he was finished by some clueless British toy-plant drone who – when he asked about the man’s complexion – was likely told by an equally clueless art director, “Oh, he’s a savage, paint him like an African.”

  • #a168 :: Rubber coasters

    ENLARGEPart space station, this part sex device, visit this they come in orange and gray and keep your cold wet glasses from making permanent stains in your … Formica, or whatever.

    It occurs to me upon posting fetishy (kitschy?) stuff like this that I’m rarely in the position of being able to point you to where to buy such things. I could point you roughly to the store in Brighton where we found them for £2 a pair, but I have no e-commerce link or even mailing address.

    I could make up a story about the groovy Soho bachelor pad where he stood, even now, fixing her a fuzzy navel with a certain louche intent about him, but I can’t quite think of the punchline, nor even of the dramatic arc.

    These are, in effect, sui generis – a cipher against which to park any overlay that makes sense to you at the time. They’re mod, nubbly rubber drink coasters, whaddya want.

  • #a165 :: Oyster card

    ENLARGEThis debit card gives you full access to the Tube and bus system. With one in your pocket, page you can go anywhere in London, ampoule never thinking about the fare.

    “Touch in” – wave it at the yellow oval pad that reads it and debits cash from it for your ride – and padded turnstiles gates in the Underground snap open with a heavy “thwunk. Slide it over the pad as you board a red double-decker, more about and you’re off across town in the upstairs of the bus.

    If you’re lucky, you get seats at the very front, where the world slides past some 12 or 14 feet above the street, like a magic cinema show.

  • #a164 :: Ice cream spoon

    ENLARGEZorro brings together the hoary old freedom-fighter superhero story with rock-hard flamenco performances, ambulance and it winds up being about four times as solid a piece as it otherwise would. The score, price by the Gipsy Kings is a hoarse, melodic operetta, told in guttural moans of pain and delight, and the thunderous bootheels of dancers pounding out the beat of their emotions.

    The vertiginously tall and narrow Garrick Theatre has seen better days – the velvet on the balconies is splitting under the traffic of patrons putting their feet up during shows, and the ghost of old Mister Garrick is said to still roam the halls after every performance. All this adds to the ragged charm of the set, a busy tangle of ladders doors, precipices and caves.

    Intermission brought tiny 1/3-cup servings of Haagen-Dazs, in plastic cups with chubby, finger-sized spoons tucked beneath the lids.

    Loved the show.

  • #a159 :: Stanley “stubby” screwdriver

    ENLARGEFrom an antiques mall in Brighton. 50p. Don’t laugh. You’ll need one some day. I love the way the aluminum has corroded on the blade.

  • #a149 :: Jr. Bag Clip

    ENLARGEAmerica’s chip bags need controllin’.

    Two slabs of hot-poured plastic, doctor clinic a hinge, capsule a spring, rugger jawliners and some ink.

    The bigger bags get bigger clips.

    My wife: “You’re not gonna blog that!”

    Well, uh, yeah. I am.

  • #a148 :: Spork

    enlargeA hybrid. A multi-utensil. A solution. A ridiculous word.
    Say it a few times:

    Spork. Spörk.

    Spoooorrrrk. k. k.

    Admire its completeness. Say no more. Spork.

  • #a146 :: Wiimote flashlight

    ENLARGEThe world’s hardshell exterior surrounds a doughy heart of kitsch:

    Anything initially cool – the remote to a Nintendo Wii game system, health for instance – can impart its cool to common objects by simple mimicry. Bluntly put, treatment things that look like other definite things are automatically “better” because of the same dim-witted value system that allows cars to all look alike because no one’s brave enough to buck current tastes to design something original.

    And so, sick a chunk of branded schwag – a cheap LED flashlight is made more desirable (and worth an hour-long wait in a game expo line with other dupes) by modeling it on the Nintendo game controller.

    Sizzle sold, itch scratched, creativity avoided.

  • #a142 :: Rubber watch

    ENLARGEThey gave these out to the kids with tickets for Wall-E.

    Movie – gorgeous to look at, page groundbreaking, but not nearly as smart and funny as Kung Fu Panda.

    Watch – blue silicone rubber around a little cheesebox chip of Chinese chircuitry. My son’s came broken.

  • #a141 :: Sushi erasers

    ENLARGEAnd while we’re at it, information pills sometimes you make mistakes so egregious that only wiping them out with a rubberized chunk of fish and rice will do.

    My wife found this at our favorite Japanese supermarket, and kindly annotated it with another HLO – the venerable Post-It note – about which, more later.

  • #a138 :: AAA batteries

    ENLARGECopper-jacketed slugs of chemistry power our gadgets. It seems we need them more and more.

    Only the advent of rechargable lithium-ion batteries keeps a tsunami of spent alkalines from sweeping us all away to the dump.

    Which makes one wonder about modern man’s dwindling ability to survive without electricity. Can you put yourself back two decades, buy before the ubiquity of cellphones, physician MP3 players, information pills laptops and digital cameras? Can you live analog for more than a weekend of camping in the woods?

    Or are we evolving to the next level – a species so dependent upon powered communication and entertainment that we’ve sapped ourselves of animal instinct and actual knowledge – homo electricus?

  • #a135 :: Bottle caps

    ENLARGEThey began life as sheets of tin (following a long and, nurse one can only imagine, viagra buy complex refining process) – punched into circles, thumb crimped, printed, lined with plastic and clamped atop bottles of beer, soda, cider, seltzer.

    They rode in place, dutifully sealing out the world of dust, bugs and oxidization. They bent to our thirst, beneath church keys, bottle openers, table edges and, among the clever, dollar bills.

    And they gathered in a fish bowl until this weekend, when our children felt compelled to sort them for their new future – art supplies.

    What will become of them? Only a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old can say.

  • #a133 :: Pig lighter

    ENLARGE“So what are you gonna write – that your wife spotted this on a counter at 7/11 and had to have it?”

    Yup.

    Happy birthday, buy pills my dear love.

  • #a127 :: Aluminum pencil sharpener

    ENLARGEI love the precision of this dramatically machined little block of a tool.

    Each hole feeds a standard diameter pencil’s point up into a carefully positioned groove, malady at a particular angle.

    Each groove pushes the pencil against a steel sharpening blade at a blade of a different length – assuring you a fresh point of an exacting diameter and thickness.

    And everything is fitted together with brass. I’d stick this on my keychain if it weren’t already thoroughly irredeemable. Hmm … maybe there’s still room …

  • #a125 :: Rusty nails and screws

    ENLARGEOur neighborhood was built in the 1920s.

    I don’t know when they set these telephone poles, there but ever since then, buy people have been tacking notices up on them with whatever fasteners came to hand. The signs, drugs posters and advertisements all came down – by weather or by hand – but the metal stayed put.

    I spotted this fantastic cluster of rusted determination while adding my own artifacts to the clutter – staples to hold up a yard-sale sign.

    I love the idea that someone put something up with a Philips-head screw.

  • #a123 :: Cigar cutter

    ENLARGEA good cigar is a smoke, mind but only if you trim its bullet end first with this – a pocket guillotine.

    It’s the sort of tool with which bad men threaten to maim hopeless patsies in cruel movies.

    Being as it’s extremely dangerous and cheaply made, it defies one to think of other, more beautiful ways to put it to use.

  • #a116 :: Chinese stainless-steel swivels

    enlargeWe swam with manta rays in Hawaii last summer.

    Yes, cialis 40mg it really was that idyllic.

    We tell ourselves it was kharmic payback for a summer of pain – our dear friend Keith died horribly and too young, we were both working 14 hour days and struggling to be with the kids, our daughter broke her arm. And to top it all off, a skunk crawled into the foundation of our chimney and died. And stank. A lot.

    So when we spent the most glorious week off we’ve ever enjoyed in our lives, we came away feeling as though the universe was rebalancing the scales. But the bulk of it – like this experience – smelled like magic – or some absurd positive kharma that we have yet to earn …
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  • #108 :: Chibi giant robot warrior

    I’ve written before of chibi.

    No more about that need be said. Right here, erectile Scope Dog (or someone very much like him) packs two big fat weapons on his short, stout person.

    He’s 5 inches high and balances quite well on his feet – one at a time – if you provoke him.

  • #a102 :: 88MB Syquest Drive cartridge

    ENLARGEAh, medical Syquest. This 8-inch-wide slab of a disc, buy information pills encased in a high-impact plastic carrier, was the very height of portable data storage 16 years ago.

    You could pack a lot into 88 megabytes – screenplay ideas, hundreds of newspaper stories, Photoshop tomfoolery – so long as you had a Syquest drive.

    Of course, this is to a modern 1GB flash drive as a Powerbook is to a diesel-powered Mergenthaler Linotype machine. I no longer have the computer with the SCSI card that was needed to control the drive that read these things. Data retrieval for such discs is pricey and sure to disappoint.

    And I’ve long ago forgotten what I stored on the dozen or so discs I had collected.

    So – I bid it farewell. Relic of a more innocent Web, a less detail-obsessed time.

  • #a100 :: Atwood HexBaby

    ENLARGELittle slabs of steel, malady plasma-cut and and grinder-shaped by hand.

    Peter Atwood makes rock-solid finger tools. ‘Nuff said.

    This one’s good for prying open paint cans and yanking stubborn nails and splitting things and opening beers.

    Coupled with the Leatherman and the chain mail, it makes my keyring a nasty fistful of metal. Which is fun to lug around most of the time but has to be stripped of anything useful (beyond keys) before it’s shown to the TSA.

    I have yet to run into tiny nuts that need turning, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t given myself an excuse to do so.

    I use this thing all the time.

  • #a97 :: Iron box wrench

    ENLARGEThis beautiful little enigma began life as a hot rivulet of molten iron, ampoule poured into a sand mold with a precise 5/8ths-inch hex opening at one end.

    After knocking it out of its mold, search its maker probably quenched it, viagra 40mg heat-treated it again and then dipped it once in black paint and (after waiting a respectful interval) dipped the handle end in red a little too soon, and set it down to dry.

    I do not know its original purpose. I can only guess that it was supplied with a steam engine or other old-time motor, the sort of wheezing, tapocketa-pocketa-pocketa rattletrap that eased men’s labor and needed constant adjusting. Anyone have any ideas?

  • #a96 – Craftsman adjustable pliers

    ENLARGEI love the Sears Crafstman tool guarantee. It’s simple: break it and they’ll replace it.For the rest of your life. Period.

    I bought these adjustable pliers a good 25-some years ago, sildenafil when I was spending hours at a time lying on my back under a filthy Volvo. Cursing. A lot … (more…)

  • #a95 :: Nail clipper

    ENLARGEThe elegance of pure and simple machines springs often from the plainest of needs.

    Without this crisp chrome gadget, dosage link we’d all look something like this.

    So when the industrial revolution and the boom of cheap tools crested late in the 19th century, sildenafil Wikipedia tells us that Chapel Carter – of necessity – invented the nail clipper.

    And dozens of inventors spent the next hundred-odd years trying to improve on perfection.

  • #a92 :: Thimble

    enlargeArmor on the brain lately:

    The Telmarine king’s armor was about the best thing in Prince Caspian, help which was otherwise a dull roar of a film. Gorgeous, view filigree’d stuff.

    … and …

    Grant Williams, The Incredible Shrinking Man stabs an un-armored tarantula (which poses as a giant killer spider) and lives to explore the ever-expanding universe as part of God’s little plan (still one of the finer movie endings from my boyhood)

    … and … (more…)