nice wood trim

This guy has some pretty awesome ways of making the DJ's station into a functional work of art. I liked Gizmodo's description:

Raise your hand if this describes you: Bah, you say to the cheap turntables in the desert. You're a serious DJ, and you want a high-torque deck you can scratch on. You want it controlling a custom Max/MSP software patch for sound generation. And you want it in a tree trunk form factor, because there's nothing like a deck in a stump. You people are just so predictable.

Then I actually looked over some more of the guy's work and, well, damn.




That's pretty cool.

Safeway regains a little of my respect

Well I never. Safeway, of all corporations, has gone and done something responsible. They're purchasing renewable energy (including 78 million kilowatt hours of wind energy) to power their corporate campuses, their 15 San Francisco stores, and all 270 fuel stations.

And they're introducing a new line of organic foods. OK. Hmm...
It comes as a result of a summit held a couple weeks ago in Sacramento "to address California's obesity epidemic". Schwarzenegger himself baby-talked Safeway for being such an immediate responder to his "call for reform". Safeway is also coming up with several inane ways to "provide our shoppers more product choices and give them the tools to make healthier life decisions".
The ridiculously positive-sounding report is here, but I can pretty much sum it up for you...

Little pictures on Safeway brand foods will tell you how fat it's going to make you in an innofensive and therefore ineffectual way.

More 'special labeling'. Little pictures. All over the place.

Organic foods in California stores, where people will suddenly decide to them because they were impossible to find at other stores in California. *cough* Right... introduce organic foods... in California. As if the two haven't already met. Good lord.

"...An effort to provide a wider range of healthy food options to consumers in every facet of our store environment." Yeah. So that pretty much means putting a display of overpriced fruit leather than looks like cow tongue up next to the Oreos and Cheetos and when most people continue to buy the craptacular food, they can be like, "We tried. Oh well. Let's try again but give ourselves a raise first. Yeah, we must need to up the advertising budget!"

"Funding critical research and studies to better understand and improve consumer health and nutrition." Sure. No conflict of interest there. Just charity.
Now if they could just pay someone to tell them that "ingredients for life" is an incredibly pretentious and stupid advertising slogan... Come to think of it, I volunteer. Safeway, you're stupid. And so is your slogan. I just plain don't like you. Working for you sucked and I hope you have an awful weekend.

Get Fuzzy

Pretty much the best comic ever.

Oh Sweden

The Swedes pretty much appear to just be fucking awesome. First I find out that the Prime Minister has declared that the country is going to go for being totally oil-free by 2020 and now sweet sweet Volvo is going to build wind farms and a biofuel plant and generally be awesomely efficient and eliminate CO2 production round about 2007. At a truck plant. Hell yeah. Go Sweden!

fantasy is always closer to reality than we're willing to admit

Well, perhaps nerd fantasy and nerd reality. Whatever. I just hope this is someone's idea of a joke.
As Gizmodo says, "you’re more likely to see this at a Star Wars convention than in an American store anytime soon."

Anthony Hopkins = John The Baptist

Yeah. As if he didn't creep me out enough already, Anthony Hopkins has now revealed that he got really, really fucked up on Mexican tequila back in the day. No no, I don't mean drunk, I mean fucked up.

Hopkins says, "I was really sort of on a prolonged acid trip. I saw things and had peculiar quasi-religious experiences. I thought I was John The Baptist, and I would talk to the sea at Malibu and the sea would talk back to me. It was weird."

Wow. That's something to think about. Hopkins talking to the sea... and the sea talking back. ...hello Clarice...
The slightly-more-detailed Story

Recycled Building Materials - They're Flexible!

So this company, despite having a silly name, seems to already make a bunch of pretty cool things out of other things (well, I mean they recycle materials, I guess everything is made out of other things. Except quarks. Probably.) and they're soon to start making Recoflex:

which is basically the coolest things since rubber trees. Or cork. Unless cork is made out of rubber trees or something. If this stuff came in trees, I'd take one.

Biomimicry Kicks Ass

So how about a future where painted surfaces keep themselves clean? Sounds kinda crazy, I know. But have you ever seen a dirty flower? Yeah, well, OK, so have I. Flowers grow in the dirt, after all. But they mostly stay pretty clean. Compared to, like, rocks. And word on the street is that not only are lotus flowers cooler than the other flowers, they're... well, they're pretty cool. I don't know how to say it better than that, sadly, so I'll let these people try to sell you on the supreme coolness of the lotus.
I guess that pretty much everybody everywhere needs this paint right now. Because it's like living between walls made of moisture-wicking super-swank flowers. If you already have walls of your abode made out of lotuses, well, this offer doesn't apply to you anyway. But I digress.
Behold - the power of the lotus.

If you don't like flowers, I still have a paint for you.

The Power of the Coconut

So people seem to have rather suddenly realized that they can run their cars on all sorts of things. Perhaps you've already heard about the German fellow who happened upon his 15 seconds of internet fame for supposedly describing his biomass-diesel system in fuel units of dead cats... Then there's Frybrid, which is just a funny word no matter how you say it. And, well, in the South Pacific they're using coconuts. If only we could use cigarette butts or empty Starbucks cups or partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil sucked straight out of the collective American fat ass, this continent would be well on its way too. For now it seems we must only watch and dream of a world powered by the noble coconut.


85% coconut oil, 15% kerosene, 100% joy

never ask an artist why

So some clever chap has found a clever way to do something rather inane with Play-Doh. Why not? Sure, fast forward and rewind seemed to work well as buttons on, say, a remote, but why not make it into a complex tactile experience that's colorful and non-toxic if eaten?
Play-Doh as tactile video interface

but will it always have a little pen from the bank in it?

I have fond memories of the pneumatic delivery systems used by drive-thru ATM services, now all but obselete thanks to smarter ATM machines and the profound distaste that people seem to have for the act of talking to each other. Well, fashion is here to bring back these pleasant memories for all of us. Designer Carrie Scott has turned the little thing that you put money in and sent flying away with the push of a button into... a little thing that you put money into and, presumably, don't send flying. Hmm...

Carrie Scott - Plastique Chic Handbags

Starting Something

So. I've finally created a blog. I find so many interesting things here and there on the net, it seems like a reasonable method of sharing them, y'know, instead of copy and pasting links into hastily prepared emails, I can just post stuff here. It's my hope that many if not all of the people who I tell about this little site of mine will find some common ground with me in their definition of interesting, and be intrigued by the various and sundry things which I declare are intriguing. Please feel free to use this as an excuse to communicate, too - by putting stuff out there I'm inviting comments, criticisms, complements. Whatever. Sometimes I'll probably find myself just writing, and for once it'll be in a format that I'll share with other people. We'll just see where this goes...
One thing for sure, though - I won't turn it into a fucking e/n blog about what I had for dinner and the weather and who sat next to who in class and what I'm thinking about wearing tomorrow. Hell no. Even I find the details of my life fairly boring despite the intense personal connection I have with it. My life, that is. For everyone else I can only assume that such things are totally worthless.
Anyway. Only time will develop an actual pattern for my content. I need not try to explain for myself or anyone else what I'm planning, because it'll just be whatever the hell I feel like making it. So... onward!
-ELI