Happy Good Lucky

Paint.

It took my coworker Brian, entering a Munny contest to get me to finally customize a vinyl toy.

Here’s the concept so far. Heart shapes make up the facial features, eyes, nose, mouth and ears.

The back of the head is decorated with an image of a rotary telephone. The back of the torso becomes a ‘Snoopy’ face.

Stay tuned for more updates – I am working to get this finished in a week or so.

I was floored the other day when watching this record covered by the Ting Tings on Yo Gabba Gabba. I loved Altered Images back in the day. This album was in heavy rotation on my portable cassette tape player.

Check the YouTube. Happy, indeed.

Happy New Year! Now, check this out:

Yeah, it’s pretty awesome good. I don’t know much about bikes but I know what I like. This is a white – kinda beat up – seat for my Raleigh Sports 3-speed.

It even comes with it’s own padlock which I am going to have to cut off with bolt cutters.
Coco’s Variety Store in Elysian Valley has really good stuff right now. They always have really good stuff but now they have even more, especially of the Bicycle variety. They had a vintage Brooks Saddle – the pro kind with the big copper rivets – for cheap (around 60 bucks) but this beauty caught my eye for cheaper (just 6 bucks). You can’t front on that.
New Years resolution, finish (or start) a new bike project and know that you will find help at Coco’s – they do repair work, too.

This just arrived in the mail from Insound, a record store located New York. It is a music player created by the ambient music artists Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian, known collectively as FM3. It plays 9 ambient music loops, making this a Nine-Track Player (one more than eight.)

About the size of a deck of cards, or say, one of those iPod things, it is a joy to hold, and to behold. Yes, the music is very beautiful coming out of the tiny speaker (I’ll have more to say about the music after a listen for a few days) but the thrill comes from the matching of the aural experience with the physical experience of the small device which seems to have come from some other time and place. There is no USB port. You can’t add or remove content. Instead the music stays locked in, incased and inseparable from the object that contains it. This is the part that floors me.

(more…)

I just downloaded the new WordPress app for iPhone. I expect this will be a watershed moment in my blogging career. Or not.

I expect the next moment like this to be – I don’t know, Cut and Paste? As I write this from my phone it occurs to me what it was to like to write before word processors, BEFORE cut and paste. Maybe I will just go slower.

Good work, Mr. Carroll!

When I was in 6th grade we scrubbed our trucks against the curb by hand in an effort to create an illusion of ‘gnarly grind skillz’. This is what the real thing looks like.

I am happy to say I saw this evidence on the curb first hand on Fairfax Avenue yesterday.

Mike detects curb accretion here. No parking in the Red Zone. The Red Zone is for grinding only!