Neon Graveyard

In Las Vegas.

Ikea

You can now buy a house on Isle 3. Called Boklok, they are energy efficient, cheap, and, of course, prefab. Excellent. (Let's hope they don't fall apart in 5 years).

Some Ikea facts:
10% of Europeans are likely conceived on an Ikea bed.

3 people were crushed to death when the Saudi Arabian store opened its doors for the first time.

Ikea has opened a free hotel for those who want to shop the next day. Free meals and you can take the sheets home too. What will stop the homeless from moving in??

As for those odd names for Ikea products: there's meaning, and a system. Here's a sample:

Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, bookshelves, storage: Swedish placenames
Beds, wardrobes: Norwegian placenames
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish placenames
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: men's names
Materials, curtains: women's names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Carpets: Danish placenames
Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives

Gregory Colbert

These exraordinary images are from Colbert's "Ashes to Snow" exhibition:

Spam concrete poetry

Well, maybe. Received today:

checkerberry coralberry daley crackle
cardiff conservatory.
allied candelabra anomaly
argue committee circumscription bit
arab deficit bundle carload.
asphyxiate anselm checkmate
aldehyde brigade bristle birthright

Iphone..... 1983

Time to collect early Apple products.


http://fudder.de/artikel/2007/07/17/origin-of-the-iphone/

Compagni di Viaggo

Whilst commuting, Robert Benocco punched in his entire 384 page sci-fi novel (translation: "Fellow Travellers") on his Nokia 6630 cell phone.

Meccano computer. 1935

This differential analyser was built by J B Bratt at Cambridge University in 1935, largely of Meccano. Its many uses included aiding Barnes Wallis in the design of the bouncing bombs, of Dambusters fame.


http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/tech/7627
BB58BAFE998DCC257317001AA6D1

Ampersand

I've always thought this a strange word. The symbol was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., but it didn’t get its name until much later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned the symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. They ended their ABCs with "and, per se, and" meaning "&, which means ‘and.’" This phrase was slurred into one garbled word. Perhaps Tiro should have come up with something at the time.

Link: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/09/
the-origin-of-everyday-punctuation-symbols/

One thousand toilets

In one new 30,000 sq.ft. 4 storey public washroom building in Chongqing, China. Not sure I like or understand the symbolism of peeing into the stomach of the Virgin Mary, as she watches. What is she smiling at?

Link: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/
asiapcf/07/06/largest.loo.ap/index.html

Maserati

Say no more. Click to enlarge.

The Lives of Others

For those who saw the movie, here are the real smell jars stored by the Stasi. They used a special chair for interrogation which had a removable lower seat layer, allowing smell samples for later dog sniffing identity.

Erich Mielke, the head of the East German secret police, actually had his second floor office renamed Room 101, matching the torture room in Orwell's 1984.
See post below, "The Tenacious (Henckel von) D", on the director.

Link:
http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/2007/04/05/smell-jars-of-the-stasi/

Yotel

A capsule hotel in the vein of mobile architecture has opened at Gatwick Airport. I love these minimalist bed units. I'd like to see them in every city as reasonably affordable hotels. (They are, after all, only 108 sq ft per double occupancy room).

Here's the link: http://www.yotel.com/