This clip is from the '80s, but it's still pretty damn funny:



[Via xbrokenx.]

After a production delay, the show I've been working on with Logan (the guy from Bachelor Cooking) is almost ready. The website is up:

72nd to Canal

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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Robot alarm clock, via Gizmag: Clocky over here sounds the alarm, then runs willy-nilly around your room until you catch it and shut it up.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I still maintain that developing robots that elude capture is not a good idea, and the first step in our undoing as a species.

In high school, something was always funnier if you were trying to stifle a laugh in class or in the library.

This clip is quite long, so you should only click it if you're looking to kill ten minutes at work.



Also, I'm curious: which parts did you laugh at? For me it was the slapping machine.

Can't tell if this is real, but it looks cool:

Octopi are one of my favorite animals, because I like multitasking and they have all those arms. But this one takes the cake, an octopus that makes blankets!

I wonder if there are regional differences, like if Scottish octopi can make Argyle.

[Via PinkTentacle.]

Judging by the rash of new alarm clock designs, the regular kind are not doing a good job of waking people up. These latest two were apparently ripped straight out of Jack Bauer's bedroom.

The Gun-Operated Alarm Clock, above, will only go off after you shoot it with the attached pistol.

The Danger Bomb Clock, below, gives you a three-minute vocal warning before it detonates one of three "bombs." Defuse it with the appropriate-colored wires and you get to snooze.



Hard to believe we used to get by with a rooster.

A "rescue" robot that collects human corpses.

Well, well, well.

Am I the only one who sees a problem here?

[Via TokyoTimes.]

Another company (this one called SecureDesign) has developed a USB fingerprint scanner with an integrated processor. Plug it in and it replaces the password system, giving you another reason to forget your wife's birthday.

[Via PlasticBamboo.]

I have no illusions that any organization would deem me important enough to spy on, but I really hope this Fox News clip is a hoax. They're saying the FBI can listen to you through your cell phone--even when it's off.

[Via Madville.]

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Today’s soundtrack: ringing like a fire alarm

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Today at 9:02pm: shirking

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Me and Tone are on our way to the bar. Not just any bar, my favorite bar, 169. It's not quite a dive-bar and it gets unfortunately hipstered out on the weekends, but you go when it's dead and the music is golden. Guy who runs the place, Charles, has killer taste in tracks. The only place where you're gonna hear Rick Derringer, Rick James and James Brown all in a row.

The bar used to be a Chinese gangster hangout back in the day, and by "back in" I mean "before my." So it's located in deep Chinatown. Me and Tone bang a left off Allen and head down a sidestreet. It's dark out, nighttime, and suddenly I hear a woman screaming.

You hear people scream all the time in Manhattan. It's normally just a bunch of drunken fools getting a little big for their britches because they've spent their first six months living on the Lower East Side, were under the mistaken impression it was still dangerous, and now that they've found it's not, think they're dangerous.

But this was different, this screaming; it sounded sober, and fearful.

"You hear that?" I said, stopping.

Tone stopped, cocked his head. "Yeah."

I swung the melon left and right and my eyes came to rest on a door. A ways down the block, just a plain door in the middle of the brick, seemed like the back door to a restaurant or a store, and definitely the source of the wailing.

I crossed the street and headed towards it. I didn't have any idea what I'd do once I got there, but sometimes you just do things, right? Like when you meet some chick at a bar, and thirty minutes ago you were total strangers, but now it's a couple drinks later and you find yourself tilting your head and leaning in even though you can't quite remember her name (and that gives you a sick little thrill, because you're a guy and you've got problems).

Me and Tone get halfway across the street, the screaming amplifies, then I get a good look at what's going on in that doorway and we do a quick about-face. Don't want any part of that mess. I get a quick glance at the guys and specifically, their haircuts.

Chinatown gangsters are mostly invisible in the daytime, but you see them here and there. Punk kids with the haircuts, occasionally with an older big dog who runs the show. This time it's two lookouts on the door, surely more inside; and by the sounds I can now tell what the action is, somebody's getting shook down.

In addition to the woman screaming I can hear a young man yelling violence and an old man doing a combination of groaning and crying--basically, making the sounds you'd expect an old man to make if he was slowly having the shit kicked out of him.

I didn't get a look inside, but my ears told me the young man was delivering punches and kicks to the old man, who I'm guessing didn't have the money he was supposed to cough up. The screaming woman was probably the old man's daughter or maybe wife, shrieking her heart out in protest. But as loud as she screamed, the beating continued, and the old man sounded like he was having a rough time of it.

I didn't feel good walking away, but instincts from Old New York kicked in, that voice that tells you to mind your own fucking business in a persuasive Brooklyn accent. I don't know the full story, and even if I did I'm not about to get stabbed by a bunch of undocumented punk fucks for some total stranger; if I'm going to be killed I'd prefer it was by a citizen with decent hair, and I'd rather the coroner pulls a real knife out of me and not some hardware store shank.

I didn't turn around to see if the punks were hawking me because I didn't want to know. But halfway down the block I started to feel a little guilty, and me and Tone stopped. "We oughta do something," I said. I turned around. The punks weren't looking at us. I looked around to make sure we weren't being observed, then I broke out the cell and dropped dime.

"Nine one one, what is your emergency," said the operator, who sounded like she was flipping through a magazine. I told her the story, gave her the location and hung up.

Tone and I hung around on the curb, far enough away that the lookouts wouldn't notice us. We wanted to see the Crown Vics with the blazing gumballs, the constabulary denouement.

Five minutes passed, then ten. Then fifteen. Occasional traffic, but no police.

This whole time, the woman kept shrieking her staccato Chinese invectives. Sounded like Fukienese to me. She even appeared in the doorway, as did five or six more punks (I was so right not to go back there), all milling about and looking irritated while Chinatown's Jack Dempsey worked up a sweat inside. I thought for sure one of them would slug the woman, she was right up in their face, but no one touched her; they acted like she was a ghost.

After twenty minutes Tone and I realized the police weren't coming and that there was nothing to be done. Superheroes we ain't; tipplers we are. We made for the bar.

Shortly we had our elbows on the wood, amber fluid on the rocks, and the sounds of the woman's screaming, which had rang so loudly in my ears, completely drowned out by Rick Derringer.

Sorry, auntie, I gave it a shot. Hope your man's okay.

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Office Supply Theatre.

Been a while since I've seen a good flash mob, so it looks like this will have to do: on Saturday, March 24th at noon, some kind of bubble-blowing fuckfest is being organized at Union Square, with bubbles apparently distributed free of charge. It's technically some SVA student's thesis, but maybe it'll be worth a flick or two.

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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You have to love this. No more trying to wet the bottom of the curtain and adhere it to the side of the tub!

This thing will only cost you 30 bucks, and an explanation to houseguests that the thing hanging off your shower rod has nothing to do with enemas.

Kids always want to act more like grown-ups. With Trunki children's luggage, now you can let them have the experience of hauling their own bags through crowded airport terminals to discover their flight's been delayed.

You can also plop your kid on the bag and drag them around, providing an extremely disturbing metaphor for parenting.

[Via RedFerret.]

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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RedFerret shows us the Spy-Cye, a so-called domestic robot. From your PC, you can remote-control the floor-level, camera-equipped Spy-Cye to vacuum the floors or scandalize women in skirts.

I admit I'm a bit of a robophobe, but I don't know if remote-controlled robots with cameras is a step in the right direction. It reminds me of the Asimo robot demonstration at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, which revealed Honda engineers have taught the little bastard to run. Robots that can outrun us, gee, what a great idea. Maybe next we should teach them Karate.



Flee!

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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In the mid-'90s, Star Trek fanatic Tony Alleyne's wife left him, and then he converted their apartment into a replica of the Voyager spacecraft. (Kind of a chicken-and-egg thing going on there).

While the mission statement of the apartment might seem to be "To Boldly Go Where No Woman Will Ever Go"--or, as Gizmodo's Charlie White puts it, "Alleyne has [created] a bachelor pad where he'll probably never, ever get laid"--demand for similar spaces by other fans has led Alleyne to open his own "Science Fiction Interior Design" firm, 24th Century Design. Well, whaddaya know.

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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The newest innovation in laceless shoes: North Face's Boa System (spotted on CoolHunting) which secures the shoe to your foot by means of a crankwheel on the rear. Stainless steel cables keep your foot solidly anchored within the shoe, even while screaming and trying to outrun a bear.

Currently sold in adult sizes only, which, for the sake of the metaphors we use to teach children to tie shoelaces, is just as well.

Then: "The rabbit goes around the tree, and into the hole...."
Now: "Grab the rabbit's ass and twist it until he hugs your foot."

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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Available at Orange22 Design Lab LLC: Designer Paul Kelley has come up with a "revolutionary" desk that hides away. But it's not just aesthetics, as the copy indicates: "When not in use, the chair can be invisibly tucked away again, allowing for maximum usage of space." Of course, if you don't have this desk you could try this other crazy thing, which is to slide your stool underneath the desk you do have.

Anyways, if this emotionally frigid blue acrylic cube is a must-have for you, good news: It's priced for the masses at only $29,921! Though something tells me if you're the kind of guy who buys one of these, you're the kind of guy who sends your kid to military academy for spilling orange juice on the piano.

Something else spotted on BoingBoing:

As reported in the Online Journalism Review, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, a web-usability consultant, did a fascinating study that tracked people's vision as they looked at web pages. The study revealed that men tend to stare at crotches.

The study further revealed we men stare at not just human crotches, but even animal crotches. And I have to admit, if you put the letter "Y" in front of me, I'm staring at that part where the lines meet up.

Equally fascinating was a study done by two Norwegian researchers (also spotted on BoingBoing) that tracked the vision of artists vs. non-artists.

The left side of this photo looks like a serial killer scratched out someone's face with a crayon, but the yellow marks represent people's glance-lines. And yep, non-artist on the left, artist on the right. I guess we creative types tend to take in the whole (at least when there aren't any crotches around).

Spotted on BoingBoing: This is a photo of $53 million in cash, confiscated by police at the Mexican house of a man presumed to be a druglord.

I'm guessing the druglord later complained he had a hell of a lot more than the $53 mil the cops showed to the press, but maybe after falling down a couple staircases he changed his mind.

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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From Gizmodo and Unwired: Designers at Sony Ericsson are patenting a combination cellphone/universal remote control. In my book, any design concept that leads to us having less objects and clutter is a step in the right direction.

Of course, if product convergence continues unchecked, it will just be a matter of time before you're ironing your shirt, the phone rings, and you end up burning your ear.

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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From an article in the Times about automated parking garages. If you buy a Volkswagen in Germany and go pick it up at their factory in Wolfsburg, you get to hang out at the bottom of this cylinder while a robotic elevator arm "serves" your new automobile to you. Bring Morpheus and liberate the Rabbits.

Originally posted two weeks ago on Core.

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(Photo taken from Peter Payne's J-List.)

Vodafone (known as Softbank in Japan) has released a line of mobile phones in Pantone colors. Can't you just picture the marketing meeting?



MARKETER: I wonder what we should name our new line of brightly colored handsets.

DESIGNER: Maybe we should name them after the Pantone numbers, ha ha ha.


The marketer gets a faraway look in his eyes.


MARKETER: Hey, say that again...

DESIGNER: What?

MARKETER: ...the part about naming them after the Pantone numbers...

I feel like I've been cheating on my blog.

I haven't posted here lately because I've been blogging for someone else, a website called Core77.com. They've graciously allowed me to re-post entries here two weeks after they originally "air."

For the current posts, go to Core.

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I'm going to tell you why your bedroom is an unholy mess: because of a lack of design, and because of your clothes.

What do you do with clothes you've worn once? They're not quite dirty, so you can't put them in the hamper, but they're not quite clean, so you can't put them back in the dresser. So you end up throwing them on a chair, your bed, or a slow-moving pet. And since you're not going to wear the same thing tomorrow that you did today, the pile soon grows (and if you've gone with option three, your pet dies).

People have been designing beds, dressers and endtables for hundreds of years; now someone needs to design a new piece of furniture for the bedroom, something that will air out several days worth of clothes without looking like some monster that sweatshop workers have nightmares about. You could call it a Clotheshorse or something like that. (To the Core higher-ups reading this, you guys feel like sponsoring a design competition?)

Until this piece of furniture is willed into existence, apartmenttherapy readers have come up with some solutions here. But c'mon, with all the useless crap being designed, here's an opportunity to actually design something truly new and useful.

Spotted on DesignHole, some cool-ass sinks from Italy's Agape.

Folding balcony, spotted on Noticias Arquitectura.

Image from Fullaluv, spotted on Reluct

Image from the Red Bull Illume photography exhibit, held in Aspen back in January.

Spotted on CoolHunting

Coming soon to a theater near you (if you live in Austin, Texas): Helvetica, the movie. My guess is it's not going to be a heart-pounding thriller about a renegade cop who plays by his own rules.