See me, feel me, touch me, heal me

Forget the iPod Touch. Tenori-On has arrived! (Well, if you live in the UK that is...)

Superfamily

Norwegian rock band Superfamily sounds just like Hall & Oates. I can't get enough.

Have spacesuit, will travel?

Can you survive in space without a spacesuit?

Spoon!

"Infant Terrorized by Spoon Creature from Beyond."

Naked Penguins

Feeling creative? Penguin Books has launched a new website called My Penguin where they're selling classic titles with blank covers for you to make your mark upon. Be sure to check out their gallery of submitted covers. My favorites are the covers created for "Crime and Punishment."

File Under Unreal

Guaranteed to be the most incredible, beautiful photo you've seen today.

If This Ain't Love

I picked up Nicole Willis & The Soul Investigators' new album "Keep Reachin' Up" from emusic last month and since then it has become one of my most heavily listened to albums this summer. Willis and her band have a classy, classic soul style that I really dig. Check out the beautifully shot video of album standout "If This Ain't Love (Don't Know What Is)."

I Want to See All My Friends Tonight

Great essay about LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends," one of my favorite songs of the year.

(via Soul Sides)

Doo-Dah News

Lore has created a rolling news ticker that you can install on your blog. But it isn't just any news ticker. No, it displays news headlines in the meter of Camptown Races. Awesome.

(via Geekbloggings)

"How can a train be lost? It's on rails."

There's a trailer for Wes Anderson's upcoming movie! Looks great.

You Are Beautiful

Chicago art collective You Are Beautiful would like you to order some stickers and take part in a participatory art project.

(via Harriet)

Tees for the King of All Cosmos

I played video game Katamari Damacy a couple of times in grad school and found its surreal-silliness to be pretty fun. I can see how a somewhat rabid fandom has sprung up around the game.

Although I haven't played the game in a few years, I love the designs on these Katamari t-shirts from Panic Goods. Great colors and layouts! Most video game shirts lean towards being ironic, so its nice to see some with classy design.

UniPo

Portland-based urban vinyl toy company UNKL produces cute and colorful figures. Above is my favorite figure from their UniPo line - I love the brown/blue color combination and the dripping paint look from his eyes and from the clouds adorning his chest. UNKL, like all good urban vinyl producers, has many limited edition releases under its brand - including an awesome set of UniPo in the likenesses of Wilco! They have a hard time keeping their UniPo in stock, so if you see one you like you should jump on buying it.

Urban Retro Lifestyle conducted a short but interesting interview with UNKL's founders which you can read here.

See UNKL's full stock of vinyl critters here.

The Play's the Thing!

A. and I are very excited about the new season of plays and musicals coming to Portland Center Stage. In particular, we both can't wait to Get Our Bard On with a double-dose of Bill S. in "Twelfth Night" and "The Beard of Avon."

Gigantes y Cabezudos

Link to a wonderful gallery of San Fermin's "Comparsa de gigantes y cabezudos" (parade of the giants and big heads). The parade, which features weirdly-beautiful and towering cartoneria-caricatures of townspeople, happened last week on July 12 in Pamplona.

I'm not sick but I'm not welllll

It's Friday! Have some fun in your office.

bookPod

Flickr set of a iPod cozy carved out of an old book. "Savage Survivals," indeed.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

DJs Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, AKA Daft Punk, wear awesome, LED-animated robot helmets every time they perform and nearly every time they are photographed or filmed. I was curious about where those helmets come from - after a quick Google search I found that they were designed by a company called LED Effects. LED Effects, who has also produced lighting for various Disney park attractions (Pirates of the Caribbean!) and light-as-art installations around the world, has a PDF write-up on their site about the design of the helmets.

Oh, and if you've got the digital love they can build a Daft Punk robot helmet for you too...for $65,000 plus copyright permission from Daft Punk!

Is there a Pathetic Child?

The Face Knife's brilliant Summer Movie Comparison Chart soldiers on. Can't wait to read their write up of Transformers. (Awkward Romantic Moment: Kid makes out with girlfriend on hood of his pal Transformer.)

Spear and magic helmet!

"What's Opera, Doc?" turns 50 years old this week! Happy Golden Anniversary, Bugs!

This cartoon, along with "The Rabbit of Seville," is one of my favorite Warner Bros. cartoons of all time.



(via Drawn!)

10 Google search responses to the words "In the future we will"

1. "In the future we will all be connected by a network."

2. "In the future we will expect all hypothesis to be exercised in a simulation."

3. "In the future we will all levitate to work."

4. "In the future, farmers will be faced with producing crops that are specifically designed for energy production."

5. "In the future, we will begin."

6. "In the future we will not have time for leisure activities."

7. "In the future we will have another section of the site for ideas rather than instructions, where this would go."

8. "In the future we will all wear shiny suits and watch bright red televisions."

9. "In the future, we will have to convert millions of non-green, matter-of-fact people to environmental thinking and lifestyles."

10. "In the future we will confront adversaries who will use space systems to support their forces."

"I'm not wearing any underwear today"

Make Blog has a great post today pointing out someone who made a knitted hat that contains a secret message in Morse code...

Bio-Deisel Fired Brewpub!

Belmont Station Beer Forum has a great interview with Christian Ettinger, a former Laurelwood brewmaster, whose Hopworks Urban Brewpub - the HUB - on SE Powell Boulevard is a "20-barrel bio-diesel fired brewery." Awesome.
(via Portland's Future Awesome)

Bike Portland also thinks that it will be a fairly bike-friendly locale. I can't wait to check it out!

All tied up

Ulterior Motive is a Stockholm, Sweden-based clothing design group that produces ultra-hip men's clothing accessories, like neckties, cuff links, pocket squares, and money clips. I'm not really a money clip or cuff link man myself, but I love love their ties. Many of them make use of bright, simple designs and patterns that have a pre-faded or washed out look. They make me think of sharp-dressed mods passing neons signs on the way to the nearest dive punk rock show.

He likes turtles

They did it. They found him. Jonathon, the zombie boy who likes turtles, has been located!

I've been Simpson-ized! You can too.

"It took me 20 minutes to erase it that much"

Miranda July has a new book out. I haven't read it yet, but her wicked website for it has won me over enough that I want to pick it up.

Sony Ad Art

A. pointed out this beautiful Sony BRAVIA commercial to me and now I can't get enough of it. What an amazing piece of advertising art!

Spook Country

Holy crap! William Gibson has a new book coming out this summer! It's called "Spook Country" and, according to his site, seems to be about surveillance, journalism, and drug-use. There is a great video on his website in which he talks about writing the book. It's worth taking a look at, which you can do here.

I loved Gibson's last book, "Pattern Recognition," a novel which seemed to predict by just a couple of years the very modern obsession some folks have with seeking meaning in internet video. (LonelyGirl15 anyone?)

PC Magazine did a very short interview with Gibson in February which you can read here. I quite like this response Gibson gives when he's asked where he thinks technology is headed:

"I've always assumed that we'll have fewer things, but things that do more. I think that what will seem strangest, or cutest, about our consumer tech, when the future looks back at it, will be how we had a phone for phoning, a TV for watching TV, a computer. All these one- function platforms will seem fabulously quaint."

I think Gibson's right...there will always be certain devices which do a task, however, modern consumers seem to be looking for more one-stop devices, like the iPhone.

Tiger, Tiger

If I had a kid, I'd buy this print (above) by illustrator Joy Ang for his or her room in a heartbeat. And it's only $25 from inPrint! Ang's storybook style of illustration is very appealing - it's cute, but not overly saccharine. There is a ferocious sense of wonder to this piece and several others on her website that remind me of the best fables and children's stories. I'm also quite fond of these Chinese Zodiac cube-animals that remind me of Playmobil toys.
(via weheartprints)

Grow Your Own, Take 2

Last week I posted about Fung + Blatt's sod-covered lawnchair ...this week, why not sprout a couch. ReadyMade shows you how.

More Cool Workspaces

Alexander Kjerulf posts on 10 very cool, very unique workspaces. Red Bull's London offices look like the interior of the spacecraft in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Nude No More

Cool technology dude Guy Kawasaki recently visited the offices of Threadless. I wish my office was in an Airstream trailer!

Pixar and Google are also well known for their fun and innovative workspaces. This makes me wonder: how important is it for the physical space you work in to reflect playfulness and creativity? Is work better when it is in an environment that physically reflects the grounding philosophies and ideologies of the work? Can creative work still come from cubes?

PulpHope

Paul Pope is one of my favorite comic artists. His style is fluid and romantic but also tightly wound with energy. I love his look into the near-future of New York youth culture "100%" and his oddball Martian sci-fi story "THB" (about a girl and her inflatable robot!), both of which I'd highly recommend to anyone looking for unique comics stories. He now has a retrospective monograph out called PulpHope: The Art of Paul Pope and I can't wait to check it out.

Check out more of his artwork at his flickr photostream and his blog.

Now With 100% More Movement!

Animated New Yorker cartoons are much funnier than their motionless counterparts.

Grow Your Own

Let's say you're looking for some organic, sustainable furniture. Really organic. Super cool L.A. architecture and design group Fung + Blatt will soon be selling a lawnchair (pun intended) that includes a layer of real sod. (via coolhunting)

Daft Steam Punks

Brass Goggles is an excellent blog on all things Steam Punk. It leans towards posting most often on DIY steam punk artifacts but also includes other tasty steam punky news items. If you are a fan of Victorian-era science fiction, crafting, or just anachronistic technologies, it should be on your list of blogs to check daily. Check out their recent posting on a guy who built a beautiful jar of mechanically operated fireflies!

O RLY??

Yes, it's true. The internet has achieved its finest moment. Behold the Best Internet Video Ever:

Tripods!

I stumbled across these odd looking audio speakers online today.
The O'hEocha Audiophile's Speakers, which are produced in Ireland and were imagined by a BMW designer, stand 3 1/2 ft. and are crafted from aircraft aluminum. They look not so much like speakers as they do tripods from "The War of the Worlds." They run about $9,000 and are currently sold out.

Then again, perhaps these speakers aren't quite as menacing as a "real" martian tripod that currently menaces Woking, England.

Know When to Fold 'Em

Susan Orlean writes in this weeks New Yorker about physicist Robert J. Lang's journey to becoming a rock star of the origami world. Link

A Blog That's True to Its Title

I Did Not Know That Yesterday is a blog that stays true to its title, unlike this blog. (Big face? Small razor?) Visit IDNKTY for a daily dose of fun facts.

Rocking the Bottom of the Planet

Pitchfork has a great article today about the music scene at McMurdo Ice Station in Antarctica. Which makes me wonder, if Ernest Shackleton had been in a band, what would it have been called?