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  • #a285 :: Toy compass

    enlargeWere you lost in the wilderness, remedy this would not help you out.

    Its needle swings wildly, no rx influenced by the pulse of your hand, the mass of nearby metal, the wind, the whims of its Chinese manufacturers.

    It is a toy, smaller in diameter than a quarter, and if you put it down on the burning desert sands where you’re stranded and danced around it three times you might have just as much luck finding your way out as if you consulted its direction.

  • #a284 :: Pirate doubloon

    ENLARGEDown at the other end of the mock-currency spectrum, cure plastic doubloons are minted in China by the chestful to lend that yo-ho-ho feeling to your kid’s birthday party.

    I found this in the grass at a park today at another kid’s birthday party, while watching yet another birthday party setting up. The trappings – and there alwa are trappings – vary from one party to the next: Here, we honored Lewis Carroll’s mad tea party with three flavors of tea and readings, and cucumber sandwiches (with no crusts) and cupcakes labeled “EAT ME.”

    Across the way the parents had laid on 50 rental chairs and strung up a noose for the yet-to-arrive pinata and shooed flies away from boxed snacks that had come several hours early.

    And somewhere beneath my feet, a weekend or three or 39 weekends ago, kids hunted through the grass and climbed trees and peeked beneath bushes in search the few remaining coins scattered from a pirate’s treasure.

    They missed one.

  • #a283 :: Million-dollar bill bible tract

    enlargeThis fine object puts the specie in specious:

    Someone at the Christian organization LivingWaters.com worked very, information pills very hard on this piece of counterfeit. The four-color printing and gravure work are fine anough to pass the “holy, shit, WTF is that” moment after you’ve picked it up and still can’t believe it’s not money – that split second before you turn it over and learn the truth … (more…)

  • #a282 :: Seed pod

    ENLARGEIt erupts in a fur of orange, seek link from a black pod. The skin is avocado-like. The seed is barely a quarter-inch in diameter. And it mystifies me.

  • #a281 :: Cupcake topper

    enlargeMore than 500 million human beings live in absolute poverty. Right now.

    Their lot is not changing.

    More than 15 million children die of hunger every year. Starve. To. Death.

    How many children is that? Numbers are pretty meaningless when you’re talking about entire nations of people, try but do some math:

    Remember the faces of the kids in your own first-grade class? Remember the fat kid and the anxious kid? The punchy kid and the silly kid and your very best friend in the world who laughed when you ate paste? Now multiply the size of your own first-grade classroom by about 20 … (more…)

  • #a280 :: Copper pipe fitting

    ENLARGEThis has been skittering around the floor of our back hallway for a while, rx about it a relic of the unpleasant shower-valve failure incident.

    Copper is the lushest metal color, more wonderful than gold.

  • #a279 :: “supersurfaces”

    ENLARGEThis gem of an art book covers the crafting of complex 3-D figures from 2D materials using little but scissors.

    For some insane reason, see the sole available copy on Amazon is going for $212.91. I found a copy in the Hayward Gallery last summer for about 8% of that amount.

    And no, you cannot buy it from me.

  • #a277 :: Tin bell

    ENLARGE just about rice-sized
    spotted by the trash can one day
    crushed, ampoule it will not sound

  • #a276 :: Plasticene scottie

    enlargeMore than 500 million human beings live in absolute poverty. Right now.

    Their lot is not changing.

    More than 15 million children die of hunger every year. Starve. To. Death.

    How many children is that? Numbers are pretty meaningless when you’re talking about entire nations of people, try but do some math:

    Remember the faces of the kids in your own first-grade class? Remember the fat kid and the anxious kid? The punchy kid and the silly kid and your very best friend in the world who laughed when you ate paste? Now multiply the size of your own first-grade classroom by about 20 … (more…)

  • #a275 :: Robotic hand

    enlarge“Dad, information pills check it out. I made a robotic hand.”

  • #a274 :: Electronic shriek box

    enlargeA simple soundboard, cheapest wired to a switch and a speaker. I disemboweled it from (?) an 8×11 promo folder for “Scream 2008” that landed in my wife’s office. When you opened the cover of the folder, see a horrific shriek would ensue: “AUUUGHHHAAAAAAAGOODDDDNOOOOO!!!” Soon, I’ll be attaching it to Screaming Tiki so that he can get his voice back, about which more later.

  • #a273 :: Ramune candy

    enlargeThis is the chewable version of the contents of this. 99 cents at the Japanese market downtown. Chalky little lozenges of faintly effervescent candy. the sort of thing aliens might eat, here if aliens ate sweets. Which is not to say that we’re sure that they don’t.

  • #a272 :: Grip exerciser

    ENLARGEWhen you’re 9, order you’re already wondering what it means to be a man.

    You ask a lot of questions. A lot of questions.

    You challenge people twice your size to arm-wrestling matches.

    You suddenly take to doing pushups and situps wherever it occurs to you – like on train platforms … (more…)

  • #a271 :: Silver Navajo bracelet

    ENLARGEWhen we were still a-courting, illness she and I drove 2, tadalafil 200 miles around the American southwest in a rented convertible in the space of a week.

    We slept beneath the stars and in seedy motels. We lolled in the open ragtop beneath towering mesas in Monument Valley, order and muggy midnight at Four Corners. We noshed, we joked, we fell deeper in love.

    We shuffled around Santa Fe’s old plaza and gawked at silver and turquoise and blankets and other offerings by Dineh (Navajo) artisans.

    And she bought me this gift. I’ve worn it daily since then (more than 16 years ago) – except for when I’ve had to have it repaired since the silver, under daily abuse, tends to fracture. Just got it fixed again – and I’ll hope it holds.

  • #a270 :: Rechargable flashlight

    enlargeThe green-ness of this gadget masks (poorly) its inadequacy as a tool.

    If you want steady, order reliable light for replacing a muffler under a car, unhealthy finding your way around a dark campsite or exploring a spooky derelict spaceship you don’t want to have to keep turning the light off, flipping out the generator crank and spinning it furiously for 30 seconds – every 3 minutes.

    On the other hand, you never have to buy batteries for the thing, so its life cycle does not entail pooping out toxic, non-recyclable trash-lumps for every 5 hours of runtime. Are the aliens really coming with our clean, self-renewable power-pods? Because I’ve been waiting.

  • #a269 :: Mini-Tabasco

    ENLARGEThe thinking man’s ketchup.

    I attended the huge Disney Animation Studios wrap party for Bolt (an excellent cartoon, viagra buy by the way) and they were passing these out with the cocktail shrimp.

    It’s barely an inch and a half tall, and enough to salt a pot of soup or – in my case – a dozen pizza slices.

  • #a268 :: DVI-to-VGA adapter

    ENLARGEDVI. The bane of my existence this week. This adapter shifts from DVI out to VGA in. I just bought two new monitors, treatment help and this won’t do the trick. Now I gotta go out and buy a different adapter. For $100. Sigh.

  • #a267 :: Crescent wrench

    ENLARGEI assembled a new table today. This fine tool helped.

    Its design has been around since 1892.

    You have to love the compact, price abortion almost fetishy perfection of its promise – one on which it delivers consistently so long as the nut’s not frozen too tight: It is, truly, a boxful of wrenches in just one tool.

  • #a266 :: Yarn dolls

    ENLARGE(A guest post by my 9-year-old son)

    Dolls made out of yarn with wire armature and very small marbles for eyes. Kind of like voodoo dolls, link if you think about it. The types of figures: a zombie, a burgular, a devil,a spider, and a guy with some wierd hairdo. They’re not bendable or flexable, but they look cool if you hang them on walls. I collected my first four in England. Then I got one at a swap meet in Westwood. The first four were shaped like humans. The last one was a spider.

  • #a265 :: Baby Stripe

    (A guest post by my 7-year-old daughter)

    I traded Baby Stripe to one of my friends named Dinah and Sammie.I gave them a little bear. First I asked Sammie the next day I asked Dinah and she agreed.So now I have a cute raccoon.

  • #a264 :: Sticker

    ENLARGEI was at the polls before they opened this morning at 7. I voted for our next president.

    And as I write this, price he’s giving an electrifying victory speech.

    This is beyond belief, and I am beyond words.

  • #a263 :: Battery package

    enlargeA barely recyclable skin, visit this information pills shucked from the future corpses of non-recyclable devices that are designed to power other devices that would otherwise be helpless without them.

    Could we do without these husks? Could we bind batteries together with rubber bands or zipties or something less insulting to the environment? Could we design solar chargers for rechargable batteries?

    We will have to, if we expect to keep the right to ownership of this planet.

  • #a262 :: Religious medal

    ENLARGEWe hold these things close – our beliefs.

    They guide our acts, page they govern our thoughts, case they control how we vote, ampoule whom we love, what we do in the dark.

    And we bind ourselves to these intangible self-truths with talismans – headdresses, tefillim, hair shirts and medals.

    This is an odd little find – it looks to be celebrating the jubilee of some holy event or other in the year 2000 – and I can’t say I’ll keep it. For though it’s heavy and finely shaped, it speaks for a religion I hold only the deepest, yet most ephemeral ties to.

  • #a261 :: Candy wrappers – War of the Worlds on Twitter

    030908.jpgOh my gawd:

    Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:

    A chunk of bona-fide space rock.

    But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)

  • #a260 :: Meteorite!

    030908.jpgOh my gawd:

    Readers of this blog know that I don’t tend to post gushy teenage exclamations like “oh my gawd” that often (as in, page never) But here it is, one of those Heavy Little Objects that really makes you say “oh, my effing gawd:

    A chunk of bona-fide space rock.

    But check the picture – click it to enlarge – it’s not like any rock I’ve ever seen. It’s all shot through with holes and what looks like some kind of organic matter, like veins or worms or something … (more…)