HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

Blog

  • #a109 :: Wacky Packs

    ENLARGEAt some point in 1967, treat the creative department of the chewing-gum-and-baseball-cards giant Topps took a wild stab at a new product:

    They hired comic-book artists (Art Spiegelman, web Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith, (among others) to draw wicked parodies of major brand labels. Marvelous anarchy bloomed.

    They printed the gags on to stickers – Suffertone suntan lotion, Bone Ami cleanser, Blisterine mouthwash, Crust – stacked three or four of them with chalky slabs of gum, wrapped them in lurid wax-paper and turned them loose on America’s young for 25 cents a pack. (more…)

  • #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.

  • #a107 :: Mexican figurine debris

    ENLARGEShit. This was whole at one point.

    Then I moved the fridge to futz with the water feed line and it toppled off, medical shplattering all over the kitchen floor.

  • #a106 :: Nano clips

    ENLARGEMy keyring is getting out of hand. Time to reorganize.

    I ordered these online, rx taking a guess at the size. They’re too small. So now I have 10 each of three kinds of precision-made, healing stainless-steel fasteners. A still-gnarly fistful of keys and tools. And a new order in to the manufacturer.

  • #a105 :: Branded M&Ms

    ENLARGEThese are extraordinary M&Ms for two reasons.

    For one thing, sildenafil they are red and battleship gray – a color I have never seen in M&Ms.

    For another, and Mars imprinted them with “Panda” – in honor of the thoroughly excellent movie that my wife just finished producing.
    (more…)

  • #a104 :: Chocolat Michel Cluizel, Paris

    ENLARGEMy wife’s boss brought these back from Cannes – a tightly-boxed array of wicked little chocolates.

    Put aside, visit web pour une seconde, the drug-nerve reaction that ordinarily would have you gobble these down with all the brainless gluttony usually reserved for chugging-Hershey’s-kisses-until-the- growing- pile- of- foil- wrappers- threatens- to- interfere- with- the- wi-fi …
    (more…)

  • #103 :: Cast-iron mermaid

    ENLARGEShe waits, information pills coyly fanning her hair.

    Demure yet voluptuous, site sensual yet pensive, she waits for the tide to rush in and bear her away.

    At barely five inches tall, she weighs more than a pound. And she is magnetic, both figuratively and literally.

    With no maker’s mark to introduce her, no indications of origin to lead us to her story, she’s a perfect blank slate for fairy tales.

    She’s simply what you want her to be.

  • #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.

  • #a101 :: Lens mechanism

    ENLARGEClockwork is a wonderful thing to begin with. Couple it with optics and it carries the promise of alchemy.

    I once spent hours poring over used-gear cases at camera shops, try camera shows, flea markets, staring at oblong packages of brushed aluminum and black leatherette.

    I was a photo geek …
    (more…)

  • #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.

  • #a99 :: Neodymium cube magnets

    ENLARGEOne hundred twenty-five cubes of high-power synthetic magnets, prostate each barely three millimeters on a side, discount stick together tightly.

    Pull them apart and they align into strands, sickness each North pole sticking to the next one’s South. Strong polar attraction plus weak sideways attraction means a strand bends and flops – and defies efforts to reassemble them into a cube.

    Perfect is the joy of manually-operated narcotics.

  • #a98 :: Refrigerator magnet

    ENLARGEHome turf’s on my mind today.

    Senator Ted Kennedy’s illness left a vacancy on the commencement program for Wesleyan University this Sunday.

    Barack Obama is stepping in.

    So, click it’s a big deal but:

    I grew up on the Wesleyan campus (Mom and Dad have worked there for decades).

    Let’s hope they hold it somewhere more secure than the athletic field. The whole thing is surrounded by sixth-floor book depository windows. The blood curdles just thinking about it.

  • #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.

  • #a94 :: Lesney station wagon

    ENLARGEMy wife found this excellent machine at a garage sale, and and garaged it in our bedroom alongside the others in her collection, physician which includes a purple travel trailer, stuff a hot-orange Stude custom and a thrashed yellow fuel tanker.

    She’s a collector not of brands (Lesney, Dinky, Matchbox are all the same in her eyes) nor of mint-ness (most of her two-dozen little cars are chipped and beaten escapees from probably more than on e toybox). She collects something deeper: The inherent, undefinable coolness of body design, paint color, fit and finish – which is one of the myriad reasons I love her so.

    The pot-metal chassis of this old Lesney declares it to be an “American Ford Station Wagon.” Looking at the beetled brows over its headlights, the slightly-sinking fins sprouting from its flanks, I’d put it at 1959 or 1960, the era in which America was detoxing from its sick jones for baroque styling – and stepping away, perhaps forever, from the height of automotive art.

    Dig the tinted window plastic, two-tone paint and trailer hitch. If gas weren’t $4 a gallon, I’d be out hunting down the real thing on eBay Motors right now.

  • #a93 :: Hawaiian fishhook

    ENLARGEI hunted it down, this web searching from gift shop to gift shop in Kona last summer, stomach wiith a will.

    I wanted something real – of bone – something distinct from the beautiful, sildenafil overly-copied and -cheapened polynesian talismans littering the tourist coast of Hawaii’s big island.

    I eventually tracked this down at a shop specializing in such Oceanian symbols. Hand-tapered and shaped, from a single cow’s vertebra, it hangs from a nylon thong around my neck. The artist shaped the points to razor sharpness, around a circular space that keeps the points from severing my jugular veins in my sleep.

    It is transparent to airport metal detectors, impervious to all the chemicals I bathe my body in daily
    in the shower, inscrutably timeless in its design and beauty. It was an object of pure obsession until I found the right one, and fulfillment the moment I chose it. Even now I can’t say for sure why I’m so attached to it, but that it’s honest and powerful and beautiful.
    (more…)

  • #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…)

  • #a91 :: Magic starfish – How the Web feeds the seven deadly sins

    ENLARGEI’m bench-testing this theory:

    Everything on the Internet – every single human endeavor online – can be mapped against one or more of the seven deadly sins.

    Too simplistic? Maybe not. Just consider the primary sins that we ever-so-weak mortals commit by running, pharmacy populating or using services like these:

    Gaming? – Anger.
    Celebrity news? Envy.
    Porn? Heh. Lust, silly.
    eCommerce and mass media? Basest greed.
    Food and gadget sites – Gluttony, pure and simple.
    Blogs? Social networking? art communities? Vanity, vanity, vanity.
    (more…)

  • #a90 :: Pull tab

    ENLARGE“Hold him, order Teck, approved I wanna piss on him.”

    Boomer loomed over the prostrate sophomore and began unbuckling his pants.

    Kyle looked up – as much as Teck’s kung-fu grip on his neck would allow, at least – sighed, and resumed staring inches away at the defocused glitter of burst Lowenbrau bottles and Molson caps in which he knelt.

    He really needed to figure this out.

    Stoned, Boomer was harmless. Just another burly, ugly, dumb asshole dropout loser from Hull, who bailed out of junior year and found work sheetrocking crackerbox condos for Beacon Hill yuppies to feed his beer and pot habit … (more…)

  • #a89 :: Rubber LED pendant

    ENLARGEIn the realm of burned-out rave gear trends, more about the blinky LED pendant burns on – loud and frenetic as an 8-year-old on his fourth bowl of Cap’n Crunch. In fact, for sale it’s always as perpetually in style as the good Cap’n himself.

    Squeeze this complex polyhedron in the right place and it bursts to life, information pills its RGB-LED heart pulsating with the promise of an endless string of nights in Ibiza or Goa with no cover, no closing time, no hangover, no guilt.

    Squeeze it again, and it dies. Or reverts to what it is – an ounce of exotically-molded silicone wrapped around a mass-produced irritainment generator and hung from a chintzy ribbon necklace. I imagine after it goes for an extended swim in the kids’ toyboxes it will stay in that state permanently, as there’s no clear battery port anywhere on it.

    Ah, well. Factory hands in China get to eat for another 5 minutes because we now own their work.

  • #a88 :: Foldz-Flat pen

    ENLARGEIt’s a slick little gadget that seems like a brilliant idea: a full-sized pen that you can fold up and stuff into your wallet – until you realize it’s as thick as six credit cards.

    Still – piano-hinged chrome-steel panels and a triangular profile when assembled give it a charming retro-space-age cachet, cialis 40mg rx and the leatherette trim feels extra-ginchy.

    Get ’em here, health and you can be as embarrassed as I was to have paid $14.95 each for two of them.

    Oh, wait, the price is now $24.95. Bargain!

    Spotted at Cool Tools.

  • #a87 :: Fabric from Christo’s “The Gates”

    ENLARGELet’s skip the art theory and get right to the point: Christo’s work impresses on a visceral, order monumental level.

    I’ve been fortunate enough to see two of their works:

    Surrounded Islands (1982 or so?) – drove down with a colleague to Miami to where the artist had floated skirts of bubblegum-pink polypropylene around 11 or so of the Biscayne Islands. (more…)

  • #A86 :: Tape ball

    ENLARGEThis keeps your straight lines covered, what is ed fends off errant brush strokes and roller hits.

    When I finished painting the bathroom, I pulled this off the walls and away from switches and fixtures.

    It began life as a tree somewhere, and got pulped, rolled, died, cut, glued and re-rolled, wrapped in cellophane and shelved. Now it’s an undifferentiated blob of linear splatter and stickum – about 10 inches in diameter and barely two ounces.

  • #a85 :: Australian stamps

    ENLARGEThe lickety-split digitization of all human commerce runs into a brick wall when it comes to sending physical messages.

    Until mass production sufficiently cuts the cost of 3-D printing and, viagra thus, the 3-D fax, humans must carry hand-made documents and machine-made objects from one place to another.

    To subsidize the cost of the trucks, trains, planes and numb-minded civil servants who move our stuff, we rely on the most archaic and quaint of constructs: A law requiring us to buy elaborately-printed squares of paper and glue them onto packages to prove we’ve paid for the service.

    This odd lot of Australian stamps came into the house as a gift and is handsomely shrink-wrapped and labeled – oddly – “GIFT.” Which mirrors the same sort of moebius-strip recursion that gave rise to the practice of using postage stamps in the first place.

    Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Again.