Category: etc.

So we go to Costco for lunch and formula Friday, my dad, the kids and I, and it’s a flatscreen frenzy. Like Rodney King-grade looting frenzy; every cart has a flatscreen and a bale of toilet paper, and I’m like, I have a flatscreen I don’t even watch, and yet I want another one. I couldn’t fit that box in the car, and I still want one. My dad and his wife bought the biggest flatscreen in the Triangle last spring, and I can see he wants one, too.
The kid’s sitting in the cart, and she sees a guy carrying a 19″ flatscreen, and she goes, “Look! He has a tiny one!” and the guy looks at her, looks at the box–I’m not making this up, my dad told me; he was investigating the flatscreen aisle while I was in the bathroom–and goes and puts it back, and picks up a 23″ flatscreen.
So I go over to the palettes of Vizio 37″ and 42″ screens, and they are indeed rather low-priced: like $599. And so I turn to the guy with two 42’s in his cart who’s helping a woman put a 37 in her cart, “What’s going on?” And he’s all, “I’ve got two.” “But is there a special?” And he rustles through a Costco mailer of some kind, trying to show me the $100 off while supplies last! coupon, and he finally just says, “It’s another $100 off today,” and points at the $599 sign, “so it’s like $400!”
Seriously not needing anymore flatscreens, and being of such an age and technological sophistication that I only buy flatscreens that pass the, “But how does it look if I drop 250,000 rubber balls down a San Francisco hill?” test, I decide I’m not going to spend a thousand dollars on three flatscreens from Kirkland or whoever, we go buy an entire office partyful of Brie instead, a 550g wheel which, embarrassingly, is almost gone not 4.5 days later.
But here’s the thing about buying a 3lb jar of Skippy [1] peanut butter. No one has a knife long enough to reach the bottom, and you can’t just toss it out and open the other 3lb jar it was shrinkwrapped together with, because a) there’s like a depression or something in the news, b) why go all the way to Costco to save 50 cents on a year’s supply of peanut butter if you’re just going to toss it, and c) in fact, that blob down there is actually like half a regular jar from the deli; it only looks like a small amount because it’s at the bottom of a peanut butter bucket.
Wait, so the knife. No knife that can reach the bottom, so you have to stick your hand in there, and you get peanut butter all over your knuckles, because it’s not like you are actually going to get a rubber spatula out–you’re not baking a cake here, just making a breakfast snack–to make a freaking PBJ, which you’ve already psyched yourself into, so you don’t want to screw it and open the microwave-sized box stuffed with the pillow-sized bags of Honey Nut Cheerios instead. And now that you think about it–i.e., right after you centrifuge and shake and coax the last splurge out–why don’t they have squeezable half-gallon size bottles of Welch’s grape jelly? Not that you have any room in the fridge, unless you finally get rid of that almost-full gallon of lingonberry juice concentrate, like you’d ever be away from Ikea long enough to actually develop a lingonberry jones.
[1] whoops, it was Jif.

If you shop at only one blogger-curated pop-up store this holiday season, make it Andy Beach’s Reference Library Mini-Exhibition at Kiosk in SoHo.
Despite his fame as a retail artist/design guru/dad/ex-DT guest blogger is probably best known for his invention of the “things I didn’t win on eBay” tag.
Among the dozens of items on sale starting tonight through Dec. 7th: select vintage finds that Andy did win; stuff for kids; union-printed posters; art; and custom manufactured limited editions by artisans around the world.
Kiosk Mini-Exhibition #8: Reference Library [referencelibrary]
Kiosk main page [kioskkiosk.com]

It’s like unfinished project night around here. Hermes unveiled its reskinned a 1989 Citroen 2CV6 Special at the Paris Auto Show to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Deux Chevaux. Not that anyone needs a reason to luxe out a 2CV, of course.
All the plastic dash and door panel elements have been outfitted in stitched Hermes leather; the rubberized roof has been replaced with Hermes canvas, and the seats–which are removable, remember, and could thus be used in a pinch as picnic or beach furniture–were recovered in leather and canvas. The whole thing was given a paint job that probably cost as much as the donor car itself.

This is pretty close to what I planned to do when I bought my 2CV Charleston in 1995. At the time, I was a pretty heavy Ghurka customer, and I had become friends with the executives and owners of the Connecticut-based company. They had just begun a furniture upholstery sideline a couple of years before, so they were pretty amenable to my request to redo my 2CV seats in Ghurka saddle leather. Rather than bring the seats–or the car–from France to Connecticut, we figured it’d be easier to ship the hides to an upholsterer in France.
Which is where the project died. Ride-pimping culture was not too prevalent along the Cote d’Azur. The carrosserie folks I contacted in Monaco were extremely uninterested in working on an insignificantly scaled project on a dumpy little car like a 2CV. But the Citroenistes were even worse. “No. A Charleston seat is grey, quilted tissu,” said the indignant Citroen upholstery specialist when I asked him about recovering my seats.
So I kept the seats I had, but I added a bamboo sunshade on the roof, which, I’ll point out, the Hermes 2CV does not have.
Paris 2008: Citroen 2CV6 by Hermes [autoblog]

From the AP Bureau in Utterly Incongruoustan:

Paris designers defy economic woes
Filed at 11:34 p.m. ET
PARIS (AP) — As retail stocks plunged on Monday, Paris designers came up with antidotes to the economic blues plaguing the luxury industry.
British designer John Galliano tapped tribal influences in his ready-to-wear show for Christian Dior. Yohji Yamamoto created a haven for Zen contemplation, while Vivienne Westwood had simple advice for fashion addicts hit by the downturn: do it yourself!
French fashion label Cacharel celebrated its 50th anniversary as the Dow Jones index lost nearly 800 points.

I’ll let you know when this headline is changed to “Paris designers blindsided and rendered ridiculously irrelevant by economic woes”.
AP EU France Fashion Week Day 1 [ap/nyt]

someone died across the street, originally uploaded by gregorg.

This morning I watched as a masked and gloved demo crew emptied an apartment in the building across the street. Shitty traditional furniture from decades, not centuries, ago; an emptied bookcase; a disgusting-looking twin mattress; a couple of large garbage cans full of stuff small enough to stuff in a garbage can.
All the kind of stuff left behind by someone who died old, and thrown away like the stuff of someone who died alone.
When I finally realized they were done, I thought I ought to take a picture, not enough time to open the screen on the window.
The autofocus on my phonecam caught the grid and created an unexpectedly beautiful pixellated effect, which I thought was nice. Dying alone and having your entire life summarily tossed into a landfill, not so much.

I’m not sure, but I think the references to porcupines and garage doors in this editorial in the Anchorage Daily News is some kind of GOP code.

Keep right, quills
I’ve never seen a porcupine sprint.
The other night I almost hit one while riding a bicycle home. Waddle and roll, old quills was in a hurry on the right side of the trail just shy of the overpass that leads to the landfill outside of Eagle River. Headlamp light caught his tail a few feet before my front tire would have. I swerved. Quills kept going in a straight line.
No dash to the safety of brush and shadow. Just straight on, huff and puff and still slo-mo.
I had a vision of a leg full of quills if I’d hit the critter and fallen on it. Having pulled quills from the swollen muzzles of yelping dogs, I’ve got no desire to feel their pain.
Quills can kill, but the porcupine never seems to mean any harm.
Good thing they’re nocturnal. They don’t move fast enough for daylight living.
“Death on dogs,” is how an acquaintance once described them. He recommended shooting them. Another old Alaskan once told me they were walking wilderness survival kits. Easy to kill with a stick. Fresh meat.
Deal death to a porcupine? Its very nature rules out fair chase. I once watched one go up a birch tree to escape a dog. The leaves grew faster than the porcupine climbed. Fortunately for both dog and porcupine, it was already out of the dog’s range by the time the dog saw it.
Another time a porcupine huddled, head tucked between front paws against a garage door as I walked up to it in the dark. It raised its head once and looked back to see if I was still there, then put its head back down. It seemed to be thinking that if it didn’t see me, I wouldn’t be there anymore.
So I left. I waited half an hour before checking to see that it was gone. I figured the porcupine needed at least that much time to get away.
— Frank Gerjevic

I’m sorry, but I think the deracinated, uncredited, untraceable image orgy Ffffound to be the nadir of the eye candy, surface-uber-alles design world. And the people at Things offer my contempt a half-full glass of niceness:

We’ve always known that the object in isolation is not as fascinating as the object within its cultural context. The internet provided not just a new context, but a new way of looking at existing contexts. It took a while to realise it, but the collection, presentation, and curation of objects has become an intrinsically revealing way of tracing the ins and outs of modern culture.

“Just from what little I’ve seen of [Michelle] and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,” Westmoreland said. Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”
-Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, Republican congressman from Georgia’s 3rd District, as quoted in The Hill

You know, I was going to make a joke about how John McCain had said, “We’re all Georgians now,” but then I realized Westmoreland is the guy could only come up with three of the Ten Commandments on The Colbert Report. And I can’t top that.
This is the classic, Southern good old boy in the building industry racism that we have in North Carolina, too. Only stupider.