Chore time

Serpentine,
originally uploaded by Greg Gladman.

I was wondering why people didn't turn to the ancient device of stilts when it comes to doing something productive such as cleaning out gutters, cropping tree limbs, or knocking out wasp nests. I know there is the obvious product liability concern, but it is not as if they are necessarily much more hazardous than the usual alternatives (ladders are especially common sources of injury), and if the kind of work being done is mostly in one place, rather than walking down the street or whatever, steps could be done to help stabilize the worker. Perhaps a harness around the midsection could be added, either rigged up to the work area or with a long third attached as a sort of seat could be arranged to create a stable tripod. The advantage is that the person would be more mobile and could move (with care) more efficiently than one who has to move a tall ladder from place to place.

Crisis averted for now

Name for the last decade: The kooky glasses era

via flickr.com

Makers of novelty eyewear have had to be more inventive than usual this year because of the missing double-aughts in the middle of the year. I predict that next year the available strategems will prove to be too strained to come up with a viable marketable product.

Posted via web from Poor Poor Thing

With this ring I thee hex

I would take this pincushion ring one step further and make the cushion in the shape of a tiny person, thus making it a Voodoo Ring. I would then market it to ladies unlucky in love and with certain hurt feelings to work out. It would be sized appropriately for the ring finger rather than the thumb. Perhaps if the wearer has a diamond engagement ring, the voodoo ring could be made to fit around it with the stone occupying an anatomical region of some importance, thus making the whole thing that much more pointed.

The novelty eyewear crisis of 2010

We have had a decade now of years with the digits 00 in the middle, providing a boon to manufacturers of novelty eyeglasses as they provide a convenient place to put the eye holes to peer through. No more! The next several decades all have a numeral in the tens digit shaped to stymie any attempts to see through it. What will a reveler be able to do in the way of ridiculously topical fake spectacles this time next year? In order of increasing outlandishness (which, in this context, is not construed as a bad thing):

• Go off-center. Make novelty eyeglasses which use the two zeroes for the eye holes, with the "1" falling roughly over the bridge of the nose. Perhaps one could tack an exclamation point on the end to balance out the "2" on the other end.
• Cyclopeanism. Maybe one could concoct a novelty monocle using just one of the zeroes.
• Classical antiquity. The Roman numerals "MMX" are even less hole-y than the conventional ones, but their angularity is always nice looking. Maybe they can sit up atop the top of the frame, looking like a set of spiky glittery eyebrows. Or if you stack them vertically, the "X" could work well as the nosepiece in a futuristic design.
• Throw technology at the problem. Forget about making actual physical numerals altogether and mount a scrolling LED marquee atop a sturdy set of specs. It could be pricey, but it is to be hoped that we shall all have pockets stuffed with cash by that time anyway.

I pose this question now so that designers can have a good twelve months to look at the looming crisis and implement the best solution (possible with Federal funding), assuring that confidence will not be shaken among the fashionable/silly New Year's reveler segment of our citizenry, both human and other.

Update: Various stratagems came to the rescue.

Purely descriptive

I was chatting with my buddy Daryl today and this concept for a T-shirt came up.

It is suitable for nursing mothers and for the strictly childfree alike. If it's been done before, I have been unable to find a citation to the concept.

I wasn't scared until he went back up my walk

News reports abound that former Chicago Bears great and current coach of the San Francisco 49ers Mike Singletary made a point to his team using his prat. In those two cities, I think it would make a decent Halloween costume to pair a football jersey with an amazing rubber simulation of the famous athlete's middle lineback side. Maybe in Minneapolis too.

Urgence de feu

I was thinking for hipsters in French-speaking Switzerland and in the Haut-Savoy region of France, one could adapt this T-shirt design

to one that takes advantage of the local fire-roasted culinary specialty, raclette

To wit: "break the glass to get a wedge of cheese and some potatoes."

Even though people usually use a machine nowadays to make their artery-clogging treat, rather than open flame, I think the gag would likely get across anyhow.

Urban finger

Dan's Head,
originally uploaded by Canadian Veggie.

Has someone thought to promote the use of foam hands flashing gang signs yet?

Some signs, particularly the two-handed sort, are rather contorted, hampering the user's ability to handle anything at the same time. In fact, the slot in the bottom of the hand cutout might be a useful thing to have access to out on the street, it seems to me. With the right sort of cutout, one could even fashion it as an open carry accessory of a sort.

The foam and imprinting would come in red, blue, and gold, to appeal to the broadest number of customers.

It's what wool is for

electric chest hair 141,
originally uploaded by fuzzbearchest.

Many long-distance runners have a problem, which some attempt to address using unorthodox garb. Besides the risk of embarrassment, it seems to me that such measures involve a bit too much inconvenience.

Why not take advantage of nature's natural version of fiberglass insulation? Those who are not naturally furry in the right place could turn to pharmaceutical enhancement. Or instead if one does not care so much about the trouble of preparation, but still has concerns about maintaining a natural masculine look, there are artificial means toward the same end.

Clean house in style

Time to tidy up around the homestead but not sure whether some unexpected company might be stopping by? How about doing it in a $300, dry-clean only, apron?

And a pair of bejewelled rubber gloves to protect your manicure?

(Scary, methinks.) Add a rhinestone do-rag and a four-figure pair of shoes and you should be good to go. Just be careful when you're unclogging that drain.

Some thoughts while sorting my sock drawer

1. A pair of socks I found in a sort of Paisley motif made me think that someone should produce clothing with actual protista shapes in the design. That way I could be styling at work with a pair of socks with an attractive Naegleria motif.


2. Instead of video games where young people shoot people up or run them over or whatever, how about a nice sock drawer simulator where you have to pair up the matching patterns as efficiently as possible? There could be some socks with designs not found in real life, such as animated weaves, luminous thread, flaming toes, or whatever the graphic designer dreams up. I think this would be a fine way to inculcate important life skills to the next generation.


3. I ended up with some leftovers which lost their mates. Thus, "All we like socks have gone astray." (via)

Electromagnetic wear

So I grant you that one can buy bras and pants, shoes, neckties, and shorts. (The magnetic "chi-belt (broken link)" just confuses me.) What about

• Magnetic teddies, cummerbunds, or corsets (for therapeutic use)


• 60-cycle gloves and mittens


• Electrostatic earrings which would naturally stand away from one's face, an a Van de Graaf fashion.


• RF-emitting wristbands, Wonder Woman-style


• A superconducting neck pendant might just barely be feasible, assuming one has a supply of liquid nitrogen for the dewar.


• Tesla coil cufflinks

At least somebody has reportedly developed a laser monocle which I imagine to look a bit like this.

Signs for the colorblind

I'm putting this out now even though the cool illustration of the concept has not worked out to my satisfaction.

Color blindness is a condition that a bit over 1% of the population possesses, something like ten times more prevalent among males as compared to females. Here is a typical colored dot test for one of the most common types of color blindness:

If you see the number 21 instead of 74, you probably have red-green color blindness.

The issue is one that web designers need to be concerned with as they put together websites. Here is a tool (broken link) that lets you visualize what a given website looks like under the different types of color blindness - you can try typing in the URL of this page to see what happens. It would be cool if they could build this into a head-mounted display so a person could go out into the world and experience what it is like to see things with altered color perception.

My idea is to use this phenomenon to make signs that display different messages to different people. For instance, suppose a couple is made up of a normal vision wife and a red-green color blind husband. We could make a design for the bathroom floor out of appropriately tiles that would show the word UP to those with normal vision and DOWN for the color blind viewer, as an aid to behavior modification. My discovery last night is that even though it isn't terribly hard to make words when you're working with just two colors of tile, one needs a hell of a lot of tiles - hundreds, preferably - to display even a short word in a random color pattern in this way legibly, and as tiresome this would be to depict in a drawing program on the computer, it would be even more of a chore to do in actual colored tiles. (Even if the tile-setter isn't color blind.) Perhaps it would be better just to reproduce a pattern in miniature, as a wall hanging instead.

Another idea would be to make little tags which you would sew into your clothing, identifying which tops and bottoms go together when viewed by someone of the majority group - the color blind person would just have to match A with A and B with B instead of relying on their own distinctive color sense.

I think there are probably other applications if one just thinks about the subject for a bit more. I look forward to the comments.

Update (June 2008): In this post I have tracked down a source for those original color plates, if anyone is interested in owning a second-hand set.

Update (December 2010): This T-shirt (broken link) incorporates some of what I had in mind, although the non-textual part of the design kind of makes it less cool than the full-blown concept, along with a bit of a bad attitude.

Gift idea #4: Silicone stand-ins

Breast Inspector,
originally uploaded by Danfromdublin.

There comes a time in a young person's life when a certain lack of experience starts to weigh heavy on the mind. At least there does for boys, and the kind with a heterosexual orientation at that, who have enough fundamental decency (or insufficient opportunity) to be unable to satisfy this basic curiosity by means of first-hand exploration with the aid of a lady-friend possessing the appropriate qualifications. If you know a boy you suspect is facing this common quandary, there is a discreet way of helping dispel some of that distressing ignorance by means of an entirely legal gift.

Commando's HerLook Takeouts (broken link) are made of medical-grade silicone, important for portraying that realistic feel and consistency. The manufacturer's product information unfortunately does not mention whether they are microwave-safe, but it appears that immersion in water is not problematic and should be a suitable way to raise them to the proper temperature.

There are other venues selling a variety of items in this material, which I feel might be a bit less suitable for general holiday gift-giving owing to their startling realism. (An exercise left to the reader.)

The winds of entropy blow strong

The following items have broken or gone bad in the last couple of weeks:

1. I was working on someone's furniture, sitting on the floor as usual, when I looked down and saw that the sole of my left shoe, maybe two years old, was completely split crosswise. The thing was being held together by just the upper and insole. So now I'm down to one pair of work shoes in brown.


2. At my latest routine dental appointment, they brought out a new instrument that uses a laser to spot decay in its early stages. For most of my life, I have been pretty fortunate in having pretty good teeth, so I don't think I've ever been diagnosed with two cavities at one time before, in the crowns of my left side molars 18 and 20. I guess the placement was fortunate, as the dentist could install both fillings with a single shot of anesthetic.


3. My Treo 650 has been having fits of madness lately, sometimes spontaneously rebooting (and turning off the phone in the process, which is annoying), and then corrupting the Memos database. When you enter a new memo into it, the first line of the memo becomes the name of the memo. Occasionally, however, this name gets wiped out or altered somehow, so when you pull up the list of memos there's a great big gap where the item should be. It always seems to be the item which I was just working on, so I'm wondering whether it might have been caused by stray keypresses adding onto that important first line, maybe pushing it past its limit.
   
   Anyway, when this happens, what I typed into the body of the memo becomes inaccessible from the handheld, and when I sync it up to my desktop that becomes corrupted so that the Palm Desktop software crashes when I try to bring it up. I tried a bunch of different tricks to try to get it to heal over the damage, even reinstalling the desktop software, but it didn't work.
   
   So, currently everything that I've been entering on the tiny keypad on my Treo, over 200 memos, is stranded there. What I would like to do is to copy all of them over to plain text files, do a hard reset on the Treo to clear the memory, then restore all the ones I want. For some reason, even though the handheld accepts SD memory cards, they did not provide a way to copy memos over. And now that my old laptop died, I can't use the IR link to beam them, since my replacement laptop does not have an IR receiver. So I've picked up a USB Bluetooth adapter at eBay and hope to be able to transfer them that way soon.


4. I brought my work van in for scheduled maintenance with some dread, since the last time I did this the bill came to something like $900+. I mentioned to them the strange grinding sound that would come from the vehicle, especially first thing in the morning. It turned out that the power steering pump had died at around 55000 miles, a $430 part and $250 worth of labor to replace.

I've often noticed that certain kinds of misfortune tend to cluster. I'll lose something, then soon find that all sorts of things are starting to go missing. Some days I am attacked by a case of the "drops" when I'll notice an unusual number of unrelated items falling to the ground all around me. And there are times when directions go crazy and I can't find my way anywhere, even familiar places (a distinct disadvantage in my line of work). This feels like the same kind of thing, in which a spate of things all decide to wear out and die on me.

I think I'll wait a couple of months before booking my routine eye appointment.