April 3, 2009
Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounts to the most reprehensibly disposable and insulting form of non-lethal ammunition known to man: the rubber dart. It’s got a belt clip […]
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April 2, 2009
I have a thing for pocket knives, as you’ve probably noticed by now. At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel. The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the mythically beautiful multi-layered metal as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp […]
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March 15, 2009
In all my years on this blog, I’ve never unpacked the symbology of a key. It’s almost so perfect a metaphor on its own, that trying to explain a key pretty much dooms you to being accused of mental masturbation. But a car key is profound. It represents a heavy, expensive and rather large member […]
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March 9, 2009
Thanks to my dear longtime friend, former college classmate and co-conspirator John, I am now in possession of ten of the coolest, most perfect HLOs known to the art of manufacturing. Back in college, John and I poured an absurd amount of time (and hard-earned library wages) into pinball machines. There may have been other […]
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January 25, 2009
My old Kershaw. I carried it 12 years ago, then laid it down three or four years later after the liner lock quit holding the blade stiff, and the rubber in the handles began to degrade. It’s still an elegant little tool and feels wonderful to open. I hang onto it because, well, you never […]
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January 21, 2009
I never repeat heavy little objects. I mean, never. My little daily obsession can be a cruel taskmistress, sometimes commanding me to find something cool to post even when nothing cool has come through my life. But like an idiot samurai, I live and die by a code set in motion long ago and over […]
Filed under: Adornment, Artifact, Ephemera, Facsimile, Fetish, Objet, symbol, Tool, weapon | Comments (0)
January 19, 2009
I scoffed at these things, mind which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, sea monkeys and GRIT on the backs of Marvel comics when I was a kid. Potato gun. Hah. My friend Phil has a BB gun that he once used to nail the pillar on a house nearly a block away […]
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January 18, 2009
There’s a thick magnet in the base of the mirror, website like this information pills two smaller ones with their poles pointed counterclockwise to each other in her base. Push the mirror towards her, she pirouettes away. I scoffed at these things, visit web which used to appear alongside ads for X-ray spectacles, prostate sea […]
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January 7, 2009
She fiddles with it. Finally squeezes a needle onto it. And fixes up. Big fucking horse syringe. Soup spoon full of horse. The snap and heat of the Bic under the spoon brings her to:
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January 6, 2009
Split shot. Y’know, for fishing. From Ideal. No, this is not an advertisement. Just a sweet little slide tin of carefully formed lead pellets that clamp onto your line.
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January 1, 2009
A New Year’s Day hike through the Angeles National Forest. Right about here, treat I walked through a picnic ground and spotted this knife flattened into the mud. Raw-boned, approved Pakistani-made, mind its four-inch blade is sharp, held tight between the brass sides. Someone dropped it one night around the fire, everyone else trampled it […]
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December 27, 2008
I rarely post two distinct objects together – usually it’s a thing or a group of like things. But these two landed on my desk last night – a gift from my son and a piece of office equipment (you decide which) and they spoke to one another.
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December 19, 2008
I’ve been cleaning the office. We’re having a party. I found this.
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November 15, 2008
“Dad, information pills check it out. I made a robotic hand.”
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October 26, 2008
Ittybitty, approved spherical monster-robot-creatures, physician about the size of a large marble, with rare-earth magnets in their butts. Roll them or drop them down onto a sheet-tin battle card and spring-loaded wings, necks and feet flip out. Grrrarrrghh, I guess. Nobody ever went broke overestimating the obsession of 9-year-old boys. If I were a kid […]
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October 24, 2008
You own a lot of shit. You accumulate more of it every day. Sometimes, story you have to pick through it to get your desk clean. And you make little piles. That might or might not be photographs of your life told in debris. And yet, help you never seem to get rid of the […]
Filed under: Adornment, Art, Artifact, Blahg, Ephemera, Facsimile, Fetish, Found Object, Instrument, Jetsam, Life form, Miniature, Model, Objet, Part, symbol, Tool, Toy, weapon | Comments (0)
October 15, 2008
THE U.S. MEDIASPHERE (Oct. 14, website like this post-debate) (HLO) – Joe the Plumber. Indeed. Look, this blog isn’t political. I don’t dump my heart out about the government here. Most days, this stuff is just one more step in my years-long tabletop parade of things. But please, if you’re thinking of voting for one […]
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August 28, 2008
Faith 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 […]
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August 27, 2008
Faith 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 […]
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August 19, 2008
My 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 […]
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August 18, 2008
The 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 […]
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August 17, 2008
The 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 […]
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August 16, 2008
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 […]
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August 9, 2008
Two 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 […]
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August 2, 2008
Electricity 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 […]
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