Irresistible

My favorite thing in the world as a kid was the Johnson Smith catalog, a one-stop home for bugs in ice cubes, rubber snakes, and switchblade combs.

The company is still around, and is still selling the awesome, but it's tough to recapture the retro charm of an ad like this one:


I sent away for one thing from Johnson Smith: the X-Ray Specs. Sadly, I never received them. Probably because I ignored the instructions to send "check or money order only" and instead put six quarters into an envelope. But one thing was always maddening in its allure: the "Surprise Box." What could possibly be in it?! Well, surplus inventory and other crap, but the mystery was irresistible anyway.

That's why I fell head over heels for the Something Store. For $10, they'll send you "an item selected randomly among many things from our inventory."

I am so all over this.

Iron Man Casting: Marvel Universe Edition

If you caught the Iron Man secret ending, you saw Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The not-so-inside joke is that writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch first remade Nick Fury in the image of Sam Jackson back in 2004's The Ultimates, a comic series that reinterpreted the Avengers for Marvel's alternate "ultimate" universe.

Just to make sure there weren't any readers who didn't get it, Millar included this panel, which was meta at the time and has now gained +10 meta:


Nick Fury then decides who should play Tony Stark in a movie:


And don't miss his opinion of Robert Downey Jr:

Simple Ideas With Transit Maps

A good friend of mine recently gave me the book Transit Maps of the World, a gorgeous compendium of subway/rail/tube diagrams that has a lot to say about design.

Transit maps don't reflect reality -- they're simplified diagrams that often bear very little resemblance to real-world geography. They aren't even "maps." They're more like process diagrams, visually laying out the steps you need to take to get from King Street to Fort Totten.

This is a fun design story for two reasons. First, the basic conceits used by all modern transit maps (colored lines, station circles, 45-degree diagonals) have been around since 1933, when Harry Beck had the genius idea to create a schematic of the London Underground rather than the confusing, literal maps that were in use at the time. Take a look at Beck's design -- he laid down all the rules that are still in use today after nearly 70 years.


Second, the tube map concept can be used to simplify any complex concept. Like, say, the Internet?

...or the entirety of popular music?

...or Shakespeare characters?

or the comments of Miss Teen USA South Carolina?


Once you notice the visual tricks you'll start to see them everywhere, like on this Domino's Pizza flyer where it becomes visual shorthand for "New York."

iPhone Tech: Ever Forward, Sometimes Back?

Got an iPhone. One of the first gen (discontinued) 4GB models, but still a device capable of triggering gadget-drool.

And honestly it's worth it -- the user interface, the touch screen, the web, map and video applications are paradigm-breakingly good, and I keep discovering new shortcuts and cool nuggets the deeper I go.

But technology should move ever forward, never back. I had a touchscreen PDA back in 2001. Here are three things I could do easily with my Palm IIIc that are impossible on the iPhone:

1) Write on the screen
2) Cut & paste text
3) Sync docs from the handheld to the desktop's word processor

If you're a writer, this completely borks the iPhone as a writing tool. The lack of cut & paste alone is a fatal flaw.

The Palm IIIc was like a lil' notepad -- I wrote the majority of Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Characters using my fingernail. Sure, it was Graffiti -- which was a bit like Tolkien's Elvish runes -- but once you learned it was as smooth as writing on paper. And, unlike paper, you could move sentences and text blocks around, then drop the whole file into Word when you were done without having to retype it. Communities like Writing on Your Palm sprang up to share tips and tricks.

I've admittedly been annoyed by many things lately, but losing this functionality after buying the most advanced device on the market is a real downer. My bus-stop writing tool is still a spiral-bound notebook.

Worth Your Ears: The Seatbelts

I've been suddenly, belatedly turned on to The Seatbelts, a Japanese jazz outfit active from 1998-2004.

The Seatbelts are mostly the creation of one woman, Yoko Kanno, who acted as composer and leader of a deep, rotating pool of backing musicians. But most people know The Seatbelts as the band from the anime series Cowboy Bebop. Here's the title sequence, eaturing a truncated version of The Seatbelts' "Tank!"



And here's the same song performed live:



If you like this track (and honestly! how could you not?!) you'll probably dig their entire range. Not everything is as brassy as "Tank!" and the style veers from blues to funk to electronica to noodling light jazz. Yoko Kanno wrote seven albums worth of music for all 26 episodes of Cowboy Bebop, including the 2001 movie.

It's tough to find The Seatbelts online. Nothing on iTunes, nothing on Amazon, nothing on eMusic. But here's a few tracks I put into a mixtape:
"Piano Black"
"What Planet Is This"
"Space Lion"

And if you're comfortable with torrents (software here, search here), you might have some luck.

Experimenting With Mixwit

New BigDog Robot Footage, Complete With Parody

I'm a big fan of the creepy BigDog "robotic mule."

Now, two years later, new footage has been released. It's more amazing and even creepier than ever. Watch for the part where it tries to walk on ice like Bambi on a frozen lake.



That will put you in the right frame of mind for this parody, which is accurately labeled "so stupid it's hilarious."