{"id":436,"date":"2008-03-06T20:50:49","date_gmt":"2008-03-07T07:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=436"},"modified":"2008-03-06T20:53:54","modified_gmt":"2008-03-07T07:53:54","slug":"a22-printer-cartridge-caps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=436","title":{"rendered":"#a22 :: Printer cartridge caps"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"030608.jpg\"<\/a>The printer<\/a>‘s box doesn’t mention two things:<\/p>\n

1) You’ll blow through a complete set of eight 12-dollar color. cartridges every three months or so. (Do the math. Ugly.<\/em>) And …<\/p>\n

2) Every time a cartridge runs dry, ampoule<\/a> you must strip off fistfuls of crap – Cardboard box, cellophane envelope, cellophane shrink-wrapped rip-strip, cellphone wrapper and throw it away.<\/p>\n

Denude the new cartridge – the comically tiny plastic box filled with a few mililiters of neon-colored ink. Shed its many layers of carefully manufactured skin into the trashstream.<\/p>\n

And now you can print – more neon-colored pictures. Some of which will wind up in the trashstream, too.<\/p>\n

The last things to tear off and throw away are these: 2-inch-long levers of injection-molded, carnival-orange plastic.<\/p>\n

Snapped off, they allow ink to flow from the cartridge into the printer.<\/p>\n

And now useless for their original reason for existence, they pile up in little boxes and baggies around my house.<\/p>\n

I own dozens: bright. Cheery. Compelling. Useless.<\/p>\n

They’ll just wind up in a landfill – or perhaps a slow freighter full of junk plastic headed for China – if the bone-tired trash-pickers at the city recycling plant can even spot them on the conveyor belt amid the relentless surf of bottles, cans, porn magazines, newspapers and TV-dinner boxes.<\/p>\n

Fresh from being ignored, they fall into the main cashstream. Millennia from now, archaeologists will be judging our people’s degree of civilization based on physical cruft like this.<\/p>\n

But things of inherent beauty should not be cast off when doing so would only serve to make the rest of the world uglier.<\/p>\n

So I’ve started adding mine to a necklace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The printer‘s box doesn’t mention two things: 1) You’ll blow through a complete set of eight 12-dollar color. cartridges every three months or so. (Do the math. Ugly.) And …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artifact"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}