Tiny Pineapple Tidbits

Choice morsels elsewhere...

December 2007

Tiny Buildings
A “collection of tiny buildings handcrafted from business cards, packaging and other nice papers…” [via Coudal Partners]
SnūzNLūz - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock
“The SnūzNLūz uses the very complex psychological phenomemon known as ‘HATRED’. Basically it’s human nature to wish harm upon your enemies. Similarly, it’s human nature not to give your enemies gobs of cash so that they can grow big and dominate the world with their totally wrong, stupid and invalid point of view. ThinkGeek realized that. That’s why everytime you hit the snooze button, the SnūzNLūz will donate a specified amount of your real money to a non-profit you hate. The problem of sleeping in is solved…” [via Coudal Partners]
Antisocial Networking
“All social-networking systems, as currently designed, demonstrably create social awkwardnesses that did not, and could not, exist before. All social-networking systems constrain, by design and intention, any expression of the full band of human relationship types to a very few crude options - and those static! A wiser response to them would be to recognize that, in the words of the old movie, ‘the only way to win is not to play…’”
Do We Need a Return to the Browser Wars?
“I’m so tired of everyone being compliant all the damn time. I want to see some people running around with no pants on, already…”
Santa?
“This menacing mechanized Santa stood about 8’ high, with one hand clutched into a claw and the other in a fist. Seconds later he tried to swallow my soul.”
family
I think that second photo is one of the publicity stills of Helena Bonham Carter from Sweeney Todd…
Do Film Critics Know Anything?
“By the time I’d got back to my office I had realized that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we’re essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us…”
Delivery Status Widget for Mac OS X
Mike Piontek’s Delivery Status widget is an absolute thing of beauty. I’m using it to track seven different Christmas purchases at the moment. I don’t have to check seven different sites with seven different tracking numbers every day just to see if there’s been an update or delay. I just set up a different widget for each package, it checks for updates every hour, and if there’s a status change it notifies me via Growl. Download it, marvel at its utilitarian and aesthetic genius, and then donate.
The Superest: Micro Cat
The current champ at The Superest, in response to Sigmund & Rory: Skilled “Big Cat” Subjugators. I’ve been snickering for the past twenty-five minutes…
The Four Clauses
Kevin Cornell, the creator of one of my favorite T-shirts, has created a desktop wallpaper version of his design for AIGA New York’s 2007 Holiday Party wrapping paper. Read the background story and then peruse his other desktop offerings.
Wishing for Neverland
“The Girl is waiting for something amazing to happen…She wants adventure. Not a vacation to a foreign country or supervised pony rides. A real, proper adventure with danger and excitement and heroes and villains and magic and saving the world…”
Is This The Greatest Living Englishman?
“Who is the greatest living Englishman? It would be hard to argue against the merits of Tim Berners-Lee, the sole begetter and inventor of the world wide web, an organism whose initials, www, have (in some languages, including our own) three times more syllables than the phrase they’re abbreviating, which is perhaps the only flaw in Berners-Lee’s grand design…”

November 2007

Facebook and Your Privacy
“Did we really think Facebook’s investors just wanted us to have fun? Did we believe if there was a way to make a dirty dollar, they would scorn it on ethical grounds? This isn’t ‘The Well,’ people.”
How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook
“For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, ‘Am I your friend?’ yes or no, this instant, please…”
Accordion Hero II
“Hit all the right notes and get the crowd on their feet waving their beer steins in unison — you are an accordion hero! Includes all the great accordion melodies you’ve ever gotten really, really drunk to…from Ein Munchen Steht Ein Hofbrauhaus to Rock You Like A Hurricane….”
Tinned Pineapple — Just The Thing For A Royal Meringue

Buying a gift fit for a queen is no easy task. But 60 years ago, when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh married, the governor of Queensland did it with feeling: he sent 500 cases of tinned pineapple…

Two on Two

“…the boys who just learned to walk staggering across the floor like drunken sailors and falling at the slightest touch, my daughter loud lanky in her orange socks sliding from place to place without benefit of a dribble but there is no referee only me on my knees, dribbling behind my back and trick-dribbling through the plump legs of the boys, their diapers sagging, my daughter shrieking with glee, the boys confused and excited, and I am weeping weeping weeping, in love with my perfect magic children…” [via Spherical Chickens]

Anthony Bourdain On How To Use The Internet To Find A Good Restaurant

“His answer was to take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you’re after. Then got to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you’re looking for at one of these restaurants. At that point…nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and — most important to your quest — will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.” [via Kottke]

Jonathan Coulton’s You Ruined Everything

On becoming a parent: “I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated…”

October 2007

The Superest: Who is the Superest Hero of Them All?

My favorite so far: “The Ring Leader: So underpays clowns that they become incapable of joy…”

Is It Christmas?

In case you’re wondering…

Sparky Not That Into Kids; Dumbledore Not That Into Women
“Since Dumbledore got outed over a weekend, maybe I can beat David Letterman to this List of Things That Are Also Now Officially Gay, gee, thanks, J. K. Rowling: Half-moon glasses, calling lemon drops ‘sherbet lemons,’ wand-dueling…”
The Trouble With Indie Rock
“It’s a cliche to picture indie musicians and fans as well-off ‘hipsters’ busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based…This is the music of young ‘knowledge workers’ in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire.”
Friendly Atheist’s Interview with Ken Jennings
“Until recently, I thought the LDS Church had pretty effectively mainstreamed itself over the last fifty years. Being Mormon made you an interesting oddity at a dinner party — like being a raw-foodie, or a unicyclist, or a Canadian — but it didn’t elicit any lip-curling scorn. Then Mitt Romney decided to run for president, and now I can’t go a week without reading a clueless blog post or Sunday-paper think piece in which it’s 1850 and apparently Mormons are sinister, secretive outsiders. Thanks Mitt!”
2007 Spooky Sock Monkeys
I especially like Guillaume, who stands 15.5” tall (with head).
Joe Penrod in Blanket Magazine
Blanket Magazine features an interview with Grant’s father/agent: “I have two little kids and work 40 hours a week, but I’m still able to make my art because I found something that works for me. I would say, if you don’t have time to work in your studio, figure out what you do have time for and see where it goes…” (Joe’s interview is in Issue 6, Release 2.)
Font Talk with White & Sajak
“Hmmm, my long-dormant Vanna White crush is beginning to stir, cicada-like, from its 17-year hibernation. Something about the way she says ‘Helvetica?’.”
3 Pack Short Boring Socks
Boden engages in some good-humored truth in advertising.
Confessions of a Twitter Convert
A splendid primer on all things Twitter.
Cover Art for In Rainbows
Jon Hicks has put out an RFP for cover art for Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. Hmmmm, where’s my unicorn clip art?
Everyone Loves Mummies Desktop
Desktop wallpaper to match my shirt.
Everyone Loves Mummies
I’m glad it’s October, because now I can wear my “Everyone Loves Mummies” shirt without everyone thinking that I’m holiday dyslexic.

September 2007

Friends School Plant Sale Video
“My partner, Pat, has been heavily involved with the annual fund-raising plant sale at Friends School of Minnesota ever since our daughter started kindergarten there nearly ten years ago. For the 2007 sale, she wondered if it would be possible to do a time-lapse video of the event to help promote it. After investigating a number of possibilities, I decided that the simplest way would be to use the iSight camera built into my MacBook Pro along with Boinx Software’s iStopMotion…”
Go, NBC! You’re SMURT!
“It’s amazing how 100% of the companies that make their living distributing other people’s content are run by absolute morons. Like, they fulfill no meaningful purpose in society — these are the guys from the Hitchhiker’s Guide that got sent in the first ship. I mean, you literally could put an African Grey parrot in charge of NBC and it’d make better decisions. (For one, there’d be a lot more shows about pirates, which would be awesome.)”
James Gosling Sounds Off
“‘What do you mean the killer app for Internet is advertising?’ I’d love to believe it was all about building communities on the Web. But building communities is just a scam for getting people to pay for advertising. Search is just a scam to get people to pay for advertising…”
A Kid’s View of Laptop Design
“A group of kids from one of our local elementary schools has formed a ‘mini-laptop club.’ They don’t use electronic machines. Instead, these first-, second- and third-graders draw their own laptops on construction paper and pretend to e-mail each other. They dedicate a surprising amount of time to this activity. I once had a chance to examine one of their ‘keyboards.’”
Still Life

“Combining the silence of Eadweard Muybridge’s horse pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.” [via Signal vs. Noise]

Twitter Twins

Cabel Sasser and Dan Benjamin… separated at birth?

Bloxorz

There goes my night off… [via Daring Fireball]

Jobs Offers Apple Lisa Early Adopters Store Credit

“In an overlooked announcement, Jobs said that early adopters of the Apple Lisa would be receiving a $7000 in-store credit. Apple released the Lisa in January of 1983 for $9,995, and the similar Macintosh was released a year later for $2,495. ‘I’ve felt bad about people who bought the Lisa for a long time. Anybody who bought one of the first Apple Lisas really got screwed,’ said Jobs. ‘Now that we’ve got some cash, I think it’s about time we made it right…’” [via Daring Fireball]

Fake Female Me is Busted
“Sometimes it’s hard not to see success as a kind of creeping inauthenticity.” Brilliant. [via 43 Folders]
The Eyes Have It
“I scanned the trees and brush with my headlamp trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was out there…GLOWING EYES stared back at me. I am sure I gasped audibly. My split second thought process was, Moose? Bear? If moose I should not antagonize it any further unless I wanted to be trampled. If a bear I should antagonize it as much as possible so as not to be mauled…”

August 2007

Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not
“The Wikipedia entry on Dada—the World War I-era ‘anti-art’ movement characterized by random nonsense words, bizarre photocollage, and the repurposing of pre-existing material to strange and disturbing effect—may or may not have been severely vandalized, sources said Monday…” [via zeldman]
Sigur Rós’ Heima
“I sometimes get this strange and sort of uncontrollable urge to go home…”
Odopod Sketch
Create your own, or use the arrows at the top to browse other people’s sketches… [via NorthTemple]
Church Magazines in the 1960s
“On this mini-site are examples of great 1960s design I found when helping my mother-in-law move a few years ago. The spreads and detail shots are from The Improvement Era, the precursor to The Ensign, a publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints…”
It’s—a Mii!

“I’m now a permanent part of a Mii controller battery cover, fulfilling a life-long dream. I will let no one touch this controller, for it is clearly mine. If you come over to my house, and you use this controller, and you lose in a game and say ‘my controller is broken’, I will retort back in an annoying tone, ‘actually, it’s not your controller!’. Then I will request you return it. ZING ZING!”

July 2007

iPhone, Wiimote, or Newborn Baby?

“In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son…”

In Sweden, No One Can Hear You Scream
“I bet this is the only Bergman obit to use the phrase ‘zombie attack,’ unless that turns out—in a shocking twist!—to be the great man’s cause of death…”
There’s a Lack of Depth on the Internet

“What does it all mean? Maybe we’re happy with living in simulation. Those people who ‘buy the download to listen to, but …get the vinyl to own’ are clinging to the last few bits and pieces that are no longer bits and bytes. Objects are dematerialising, reduced to little square jpgs that you can shuffle through…”

[via zeldman]
Boys Own Books

Penguin Classics UK re-issues six classic adventure novels for young male moderns. Love the covers. Makes me want to re-read my Don Sturdy collection. [via Coudal]

A Letter to Optimus Prime From His GEICO Auto Insurance Agent
“Since becoming a GEICO customer in January of this year, you have reported 131 accidents, requesting reimbursement for repairs necessitated by each one. You have claimed not to be responsible in any of them, usually listing the cause of the accident as either ‘Sneak attack by Decepticons’ or ‘Unavoidable damage caused by protecting freedom for all sentient beings…’”

June 2007

The Splasher Speaks
“Why are anarchists always so verbose? These ‘criticisms’ could have been boiled down to five bullet points…”
Resolved
Greg Whiteley’s follow-up to New York Doll.
retrievr
“retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch” or uploading your own image…
The “Pants Suit” Has Its Day In Court
“Pearson paused. He struggled to breathe deeply. He could not continue. Pearson blurted a request for a break, stood up, turned around and walked out of the courtroom, tears dripping from his full and reddened eyes. When he returned, he called that moment when Chung offered him the wrong pants ‘a Twilight Zone experience,’ and again, he welled up and had to halt the proceedings…”
Mom, It’s Not Right
“We were the generation that would take the job of raising our children and turn it into…PARENTING. We were the generation who applauded every move they made. Every step they took. ‘Good climbing, Brandon’ was our hue and cry. We were raised by people who didn’t ‘understand’ us and now we don’t ‘understand’ why our children are so messed up…”
Largest Island in a Lake on an Island in a Lake on an Island
As opposed to the largest lake on an island in a lake on an island… [via kottke]
Plaid Pineappleheads
“Very interesting monsters that sometimes have tails and they do look sort of sometimes scary for little kids, but not so scary for second graders…” [via cas]
If nothing else, it helps you appreciate just how much Salt Lake 2002 got it right…
Sam’s Banana Monkey Cake
It tasted good, too, though I didn’t get a monkey…
RSS in Plain English
“This is you, and here are your favorite websites. You log on to your computer, and you’re looking for something new. You go out to your favorite blogs. Anything new? No. You go out to your favorite news sites. Anything new? Nope. Every time you look for something new and its not there, you’ve wasted valuable time. This is the old way…”
Stewart Copeland: Our First Disaster Gig
“We get to the end of the first verse and I snap into the chorus groove — and Sting doesn’t. He’s still in the verse. We’ll have to listen to the tapes tomorrow to see who screwed up, but we are so off kilter that Sting counts us in to begin the song again. This is ubeLIEVably lame. We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea. And so it goes, for song after song…” [via Waxy]
Guardian Unlimited’s Guide to Paper Planes
“Slip the surly bonds of earth with a folded sheet of A4…” [via kottke]

May 2007

Answer: “I’m Here to Shoot a PIlot”

Question: What’s the worst possible response a film and TV director could give to a US immigration agent when asked, “What is the purpose of your visit to the United States?”

Bugglebear
When we picked Emma up from her dance rehearsal tonight at BYU, we happened to walk through the atrium of the Harris Fine Art Center and stopped to admire the works from Bryan Beus’ senior art show. The consensus was that Bugglebear was the “coolest” piece in the show…
Mormon Guy to Internet: Shut Up and Think a Minute
“That’s just dopey. I don’t know how many churchgoing Americans Weisberg hangs out with, but let me assure him: most of them are just as sincere about their faiths’ improbable divine origins as Mormons are. Does he think modern Baptists and Catholics and Jews read scripture and think to themselves, ‘Wow, I’m sure glad my splintered, moderated religion doesn’t believe these nutty metaphorical miracles ever really happened’?”
Cap’n Crunch’s Full Name Revealed

Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. Also up for consideration:

  • Captain Ferdinand Hornblower Crunch
  • Lt. Col. Fitzcarraldo Crunch
  • Lord Nelson with Crunchberries
  • Master and Commander Crunch: The Far Side of the Bowl

April 2007

What Price Pants?
“He says he deserves millions for the damages he suffered by not getting his pants back, for his litigation costs, for ‘mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort,’ for the value of the time he has spent on the lawsuit, for leasing a car every weekend for 10 years and for a replacement suit, according to court papers. Pearson is demanding $65,462,500…”
Left Hand Turn
“You see, I use my right arm for all kinds of important things. Eating, high-fiving, arm-wrestling, thumb-wrestling, button operation, dishwashing, throwing, and much, much, more. But the most important right-arm operation is probably drawing and painting, since that’s how I earn a living. So, much like the professional athlete who pursues product endorsement just in case his knees explode, I began formulating a plan for when my right arm gets torn off in a cotton candy machine…”
Keeping Score
“Recently I’ve found myself wishing that iTunes had an overall sales rank counter, similar to the feature on Amazon.com. The reason? Enhanced ability to monitor flucuations in consumer behavior and adjust my level of despair accordingly…”
Jonathan Coulton’s You Oughta Know
“So I was thinking about Alanis and covers, and in messing around a bit yesterday with my now very dusty recording equipment, I came up with this. If you’re offended by bad language, adult situations or cringe-inducing lyrical honesty, please don’t listen (you can practically hear me blush in spots)…”
In Search of Stock(y) Photography

“That’s right: in the alternate universe of stock photography, attractive people outnumber fat people 84 to one…”

Feist: 1 2 3 4
Single takes are the new montages… [via Byrdhouse]
The World is Changing
“The contest came at a timely moment corresponding with the death of an artist of a different genre: Kurt Vonnegut, who died this past week. I would like Grant to draw the end of the world as depicted by Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle…”
hot hot hot nurse action ! ! !
“a tradition of service…”
Does the punishment fit the crime?
  • Deserting your child with intent to abandon: 0.2 DVDs
  • Assault with a deadly weapon: 0.8 DVDs
  • Forcing your wife into prostitution: 0.8 DVDs
  • Kidnapping: 1.6 DVDs
  • 1st degree murder: 5-20 DVDs
A Picture is Worth…
A slideshow highlighting every photographic mistake I make on a regular basis…and why you shouldn’t let your real estate agent (or me) snap the photos for your real estate listing.
Pearls Before Breakfast
  • The conceit: Have one of the world’s best violinists pose as a street musician and see if anyone notices that he’s not just some schlub busking for beer money.
  • The result: In 45 minutes, only 7 people stop to listen and he pulls in $32 and some change.
  • Possible explanation: Joshua Bell isn’t a good busker.
  • More likely explanation: Only seven people weren’t already listening to their iPods.
[via kottke]
No One Belongs Here More Than You
“OK, here I go. I’m going to make this whole website right now on this dry-erase board…” [via Signal vs. Noise]
CSS: Cascading Surveillance Sheets
“In the proof of concept for this attack, every link of a page is set up so that if it is visited, a background image pointing to a CGI Script is loaded. This script informs the attacker of the IP address of the visitor and that the link is in the visitor’s history…”
Best Holiday Wishes
“Did I mention that I had my suit on because I was about to leave to conduct a funeral when all of this happened? Well it was covered with blood and milk and maybe a little pepper spray. Luckily I now have two suits, and I was wearing my old black one. So I quickly changed and went to the funeral leaving Emily, who had been awakened by the sirens and rushed down stairs to witness most of this to clean up the blood and milk as best she could. Poor mom. Instead of coming home to a neatly painted library ceiling, she will have to deal with putting the paneling back together above the fireplace…” [via Papa November]

March 2007

The Criterion Contraption: #65: Rushmore
“So to me, Rushmore is a movie where style and substance are pretty unified. And you shouldn’t scoff at Anderson’s achievement here; unified style and substance are a lot easier to do with a pessimistic film (e.g., Children of Men) than in one where the tone is something like “bittersweet optimism.” Which is not to say it’s a universally appealing film throughout; you either think the idea of a theatrical version of Serpico is hilarious or you don’t…” [via kottke]
Bembo’s Zoo
ASCII art on steroids… [via swissmiss]
Disney Hack: Find Your Lost Child With a USB Drive
“The account from our boys ‘finder’ was humorous and panned out like this: My little reheaded boy was SCREAMING for his mom. The ‘finder’ came to help him, the boy showed the ‘finder’ the labeled USB drive, the ‘finder’ then brought him to security, security plugged the USB drive in to his computer, saw the message and called me on my cellphone. When we went to retrieve our boy the security guard asked for our USB drive with the secret phrase on it. The USB drives performed just as set up to. It had my cellphone number, my boys’ first name (first name only!) to calm him down and his favorite treat…”
Art Attack
Chris claims that he was misquoted (he apparently does NOT see himself as an unabashed modernist), but, other than that, it’s a nice introduction to “the youngest of the region’s new curators.”
More Design Lessons from the Tooth Fairy
“You see, the Tooth Fairy forgot about the whole thing. My wife looked at me after breakfast, paused, and asked if the Tooth Fairy had come last night, pretty sure in advance of the answer. My daughter wasn’t up yet, so I snuck in to see what the situation was. It was a pitiful sight. She was awake, but still curled up in bed, facing the door, with a heart-melting tremble in her lower lip. ‘He didn’t come,’ she said plaintively.”
The Man on Stage
Concerning a presentation by Stephen Hawking at Berkeley: “Imagine the stage: huge, wide, dark — Zellerbach Hall at Berkeley. There’s Hawking in the middle: a crumple of brown suit in his wheelchair, in a pool of light. There’s a humongous projection screen behind him and a microphone stand set up in front of him. In the beginning there’s a long pause. Really long. The applause dies down (as an aside, I’ve never seen an audience as warm towards somebody as this one was towards him) and then…crickets. For thirty seconds…a minute…two minutes. Then suddenly, Hawking’s synthesized voice: ‘Can you hear me?’ The climactic scenes of blockbuster movies are not as thrilling.”
Oprah’s Ugly Secret
“And that’s the part that should bother us most: the diminishing, even implicit mocking, of genuine goodness, and of authentic spiritual concerns and practices…The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.”
Code Monkey
Thanks to Josh, I’ve now been listening to Code Monkey non-stop for the last half hour. “Code Monkey have long walk back to cubicle he sit down pretend to work, Code Monkey not thinking so straight, Code Monkey not feeling so great.”
Ira Glass on Storytelling
“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap…”
Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein
“Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. ‘It’s not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,’ he said…”

February 2007

“Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth…”
“If ‘poor nations’ is really your target market, you’ve got a problem. Why not make ‘Microsoft Vista / Homeless People Edition’ as well, genius?”
Watch Your Shorts

Most of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Short Film (Live Action and Animated) are available from the iTunes Store for only $1.99 a short. West Bank Story and The Danish Poet are worth every penny.

“You Are Coming to a Sad Realization…”
If you’ve used Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system for any length of time, you’ll appreciate just how brilliant Apple’s latest “Get a Mac” ad really is.
in
“Grandma came over to help load everything. She spent the next ten minutes rearranging the crapola that was already inside station wagon. Pots, pans, antiques, mystery boxes full of costume jewelry…all got crammed into newfound nooks and crannies of the station wagon. Then she loaded her brand new “finds” on top of the old crapola. Grandma was really really good at this. I think she would have been an excellent Tetris player…”
New Life for the Noble Tree: The Dr. Arthur and Evelyn Krosnick Collection of Masterworks by George Nakashima
The “Arlyn” table eventually sold for $822,400, and the eight rosewood “Conoid” chairs could have been mine for just $96,000.
Hands
“Isn’t it beautiful what hands can do?” [via swissmiss]

January 2007

All those in favour say “aye”
“‘Saying ‘What’s wrong with Arial aesthetically?’ is a bit like comparing Greta Garbo to Jodie Marsh…” [via BrandSpankingNew]
UK “Get a Mac” Ads
Starring Mitchell and Webb as PC and Mac, respectively. From Pie Chart: “For example, this light grey area could represent ‘Shenanigans and Tomfoolery,’ while this dark grey area could represent ‘Hijinks.’ And you see, here we’ve further divided ‘Hijinks’ into ‘Capers,’ ‘Monkey Business,’ and ‘Just Larking About…’”
Bilbao, Los Angeles, Prague…Lehi?
“And while jaws may drop at an announcement that [Frank] Gehry will soon be designing an urban-inspired community in northern Lehi, it’s definitely serious…”
Geostationary Banana Over Texas

“‘The Banana is a Joke to Stupidity.’ It is odd, oddity with a sense of humor (thanks to the banana). Humoristic; unthreatening as an intervention.”

Big Pictures
“We’ve all watched hundreds of movies on old TVs, and taken endless pleasure from doing so, but to watch Citizen Kane on TV for the first time is a half-fulfilled promise; to see it on a big screen is a revelation. If watching movies at home becomes not just an auxiliary to theatregoing but a replacement of it, a visual art form will decline, and become something else. Kids who get hooked on watching movies on a portable handheld device will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don’t yet know it—even if they never know it. And their consumer choices could affect the rest of us, just as they have in the music business. If the future of movies as an art form is at stake, we are all in this together.”
And You’ll Be a Moviegoer, My Son
“Moviegoing, though unlikely to disappear, will probably never again be the universal rite it once was. This is not a catastrophe, just a change of habit. Going to the movies may survive as an acquired taste, and also, therefore, as an activity through which taste is acquired.”
Time’s Top 10 DVDs: #7 My Neighbor Totoro

“Miyazaki’s genius lies in seamlessly mixing characters that feel wholly human with peculiar and fantastical apparitions. The end result is a tripped-out daydream that feels like a refreshing blast of innocence.”