there’s an article in the nytimes about high-end kitchen garbage cans, talking about the previously unexploited market for very beautiful and stylish containers in which to store our smelly refuse, and the fine line between beautiful objects and useless design:
In short, they are receptacles for cash as well as trash. With sales of $33 million last year, Simplehuman is projecting sales of $55 million for 2004.
Mr. Yang is not alone. Two European companies, Leifheit and Brabantia, make versions of what the housewares industry now calls “upscale trash cans.” OXO International, the Good Grips kitchen utensil company, introduced a trash can in March, to arrive in stores in September.
“It’s a new challenge, a moment of truth for this type of product,” said Ravi Sawhney, the founder of RKS Design in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and the head juror for the 2004 Industrial Designers Society of America awards. “I have mixed feelings about it. How rich can you make the experience of putting trash in a receptacle?”
Mr. Sawhney explained that consumers appreciative of design were now appreciably cynical about its much-heralded pervasiveness.
“Imagine going in for surgery,” he said. “And the surgery room is highly designed — Philippe Starck — beautiful. I would never in a million years allow them to do surgery on me. I would be so skeptical about a lack of substance, from all those highly designed knickknacks in my kitchen.”
possibly more interesting is the fact that branding is now so important that the company, with the exact same garbage cans, credits a lot of its success to having renamed itself to its new moniker:
Michael Barr, president of NameLab, said of the decision to make “Simplehuman” a single word, “It’s taking two natural language words and making them a `thing’ — making the brand name itself a design object.”
…
Sally Geller, senior buyer for Williams-Sonoma’s catalogs and Internet site, where Mr. Yang’s garbage cans are sold, explained that the brand, as well as the garbage can, was what made Simplehuman appropriate for her customers.
“If they had been CanWorks, we probably wouldn’t have tagged it,” she said, referring to identifying the products by name in the catalog. “If they had been called `Porsche Trash Cans’ we would have been suspect too — more hype than function.”
it makes me feel a little silly for owning one of simplehuman’s garbage cans. but… i love it.
the problem with having a job where you do nothing all day is that people assume that you do nothing every day.
and so once in a while when you’re really busy and can’t fuck around, people either a. don’t believe you’re actually working, which is irritating, or b. actually get annoyed that you won’t spend time with them fucking around.
i guess the solutions are:
a: don’t pick up the phone when you’re actually busy
b: pretend like you don’t have a job where you do nothing all day and instead have a job where you’re relatively busy every day
c: shut the fuck up because most of the time you’re doing nothing all day
they just released this report that says, once again, us suckers in the bay area are being overcharged for shit. this time, it’s milk, which is getting close to $5 a gallon, over $1 more than elsewhere in the country.
and the crazy thing (or maybe not) is that it’s the big chains that are really gouging us:
She acknowledged, however, that small stores set milk prices relatively low so customers will be drawn in and buy that and other goods. Small grocery market workers said that’s clearly the practice.
on one hand, i’m outraged, but on the other hand, i don’t really like milk at all. hell, i might even be mildly lactose intolerant. it sounds like more excuses to drink orange juice to me. but then again, speaking as someone who keeps breaking bones, maybe i should be drinking more of this stuff.
i’m waiting for the back alley transaction: “pssst! buddy! you want some milk? straight from the farm. fell off the dairy truck!”
i’m so tired of this mydoom virus. while it’s been back in the news the last few days, it’s actually been running around pretty active for a few weeks now. how do i know? apparently someone i know (or who knows me) has an infected computer, and so i keep seeing bounced emails and bounces of virus-cleaned emails to people who i don’t know come back to me.
which keeps me paranoid that i’m infected. and so i keep checking my computer, and i’m not. but i keep thinking i am, or feeling guilty about it, because all these virus-laden emails are floating around with my email address on them.
and not even the hundreds of tagged emails i use for whatever websites, but my super secret personal email address.
it’s like hearing all these rumors going around that you’ve got some horrible venereal disease. only you don’t. but that’s not what they’re saying.
if only whomever started it would shut the hell up.
just got a new digital camera, a canon powershot sd10. this is another in a long line (well, two, actually) of digital cameras i own but did not pay for. however, seeing as i did redeem 50k amex membership rewards points for this, you could argue that i did pay for it, in some way or another. but we’re not here to discuss the merits of a credit-based economy or lifestyle, or whether or not it would have been better to get a mountain bike, but instead talk about the latest digital doo-dad of the day.
it’s pretty slick, goddamn tiny, and a hell of a lot better than our old digital camera, a sony mavica fd73 which is so old school that it only shoots 640x480, but also only shoots directly onto floppy discs! which actually is pretty handy, although it’s becoming less so as floppy drives are starting to become more and more scarce. the downside is the limited number of pictures i could take with that thing, as opposed to the 400+ 4MP shots i can stuff onto that 512MB CF card.
i guess the real question is whether/how this will displace my use of all those other toy cameras, such as my beloved lomo or my recently acquired medium format plastic holga. perhaps it’s for a different purpose entirely, so there won’t be any problem, but on the other hand, how many cameras do you want to carry around? three? four? and then there’s hmc’s serious nikon with all the zoom lenses…
in the interim, it just enables lots of photos of stupid shit:
meanwhile, hmc just won an old 110 camera this weekend, adding to the esoteric madness, forcing me to buy 31 rolls of 110 film on ebay.
now the big question is: where do you develop 110 film?
grrr. tickets for pj harvey at the great american music hall on aug 19th went on sale this morning at 10am. i knew about it, and i was planning on buying tickets, but i got distracted because caitlin came over this morning at 10am to pick up the land cruiser to borrow it to move furniture because she’s leaving to drive to new haven to go to yale law school on tuesday. and then i went to a birthday brunch. and then a rs meeting.
and so i forgot.
and now it’s sold out.
f. me.
so after watching f9/11, and being horrified at that whole scene at the beginning where no one objecting to the florida elections was able to get a single senator to sign their peitition to have it formally accepted, i emailed my senators, barbara boxer and dianne feinstein, to ask what’s up. here’s dianne’s response:
Mr. e
San Francisco, California
Dear Mr. e:
Thank you for writing to me about Michael Moore’s film,
“Fahrenheit 9/11,” and the protest of the 2000 Presidential election
by the Congressional Black Caucus. I appreciate hearing from
you.
Please know that at no time was I approached to be asked
to sign a petition to challenge the allocation of Florida’s electoral
votes. I strongly believe that any violation of civil rights during
the 2000 Presidential election or any election, for that matter, must
be fully investigated. Please know that I have and will continue
to work hard to represent not only the best interests of California,
but the Nation while in the United States Senate.
Thank you for writing me. I hope you will continue to
keep me informed on issues of importance to you. If you have any
further questions, please feel free to contact my Washington, DC
office at (202) 224-3841.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
http://feinstein.senate.gov
Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the
Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov. You can also
receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at
http://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html.
no response from barbara as of yet. i may have to get rid of my barbara boxer shorts.
xz just emailed me a news article about what has instantly become my favorite new church and my religion of choice: the church of spongebob! who needs these hippy new age lovey-doveys when you can instead escape your squidwardness and be yellow and absorbent?
Have you rummaged through the spiritual offerings of a planet that is so morally bankrupt, little seems good? Honest? Reliable?
Have you battered your way through churches that make you feel guilty? Offer little for introspection or personal edification beyond “worship?” Attract followers by hating others?
You may be like Squidward.
Are you ready for something new and better? Something honest, earnest and fun? Something that can make you feel good without making you feel bad?
Perhaps you have never considered going underwater to find a belief system worth investing in…you probably never, in your wildest dreams, thought that the secrets to living a happy, contented and fulfilling life could come from a tiny animated sponge.
Well, we’re The Church of SpongeBob Squarepants and we bring to you, today, Good News!
FINALLY…
A Church that finds joy in the little things in life, and isn’t afraid to say so.
A Church that offers complexity for the complex, and simplicity for the simple. You can even mix the two up if you want.
A Church that doesn’t want your money and only wants you to be happy.
A Church that presents it’s precepts and spiritual instruction in an easily accessible format.
A Church you can enjoy in your own home - no special building to go to.
A Church that realizes that simple things, like having fun, using your imagination, and enjoying what you do, are important in life.
A Church that doesn’t attract people by hating or excluding a certain type of person.
A Church that is ready eddy eddy to have you as a member!
xz asked about this, so i might as well post it:
what happened about hmc’s lawsuit hearing yesterday?
1. our lawyer, charles bonner didn’t show. he sent some contractor woman lawyer in his place, who had no foreknowledge of the case and just looked over the numbers just before the hearing.
2. an hour and a half before the hearing, the other side offered to settle for the maximum amount the insurance company was liable for, which was $25k. this is far less than the damages claimed of $150k, and even less than actual medical bills and lost income of $50k. however, this was a switch as they stopped trying to deny liability.
3. the hearing was pretty much a formality, and the arbiters kept trying to get hmc to accept the settlement, which the lawyer had warned her (against).
4. at one point, the arbiter asked the rent-a-lawyer a question, and she said, “hey, i don’t know! i’m just a contractor doing a favor for charles bonner!”
5. the arbiter said that above and beyond the insurance company’s $25k offer, to recoup more would involve starting a separate civil suit against the other woman, trying to go after her assets if she has any. and then even if won, would be very costly and long in trying to actually get money out of any decision.
6. the other option would be to go after our own insurance, which may have coverage for uninsured/underinsured motorist.
7. it turns out charles bonner really now specializes in racial/gender employment discrimination cases. in fact, he was in sacramento dealing with such a case. instead of in san francisco. dealing with ours.
8. next steps are that the “lawyers” are going to do some investigation to see if the other party has any assets to go after, and then decide from there the next course of action.
so it’s done, but not really done. at worst we get 2/3 of $25k minus fees for making copies of all the documentation that we compiled and wrote. it’s not much but it’s something i guess.
in case you were wondering, if you’re ever out at a weekend party, and you happen to do something that results in a lot of, uh, recreational teeth grinding, it turns out that it’s not a lot of fun to have a dentist appointment to get your teeth cleaned the following monday. and really, when the hygenist asks, “so how are your teeth doing? are any of them sensitive?” what are you supposed to say? “all of them! don’t touch me!”
meanwhile, while dancing i managed to pull that muscle or whatever in my hip again. also, someone stepped on my foot with the broken toe.
i’ll be in the infirmary if anyone needs me. i’m in room 71, in the dumbass ward.
on another note, i had my yearly 1-on-1 with my boss. no, unfortunately this isn’t where we play a game of hoops to determine my raise (but how cool would that be?), but just my yearly review. besides the normal how am i doing (great, fantastic, blah de blah), this whole promotion to STAM position came up. and i basically told him that if the higher ups decided that i wasn’t the right fit for the position, i really didn’t give a shit and that’s ok. i can do it or not do it, and either way is fine with me. i’m basically not being ambitious about it, but to be honest, i think we’ve all realized that i’m not ambitious about doing this job, so what the hell, why pretend?
the cool thing is that i can just say that to my boss and it’s pretty much ok.
for months now my outlook hasn’t been reminding me of appointments.
they were in my calendar, but there was some crazy thing wrong where it claimed that it couldn’t “locate the recurrence information for this appointment.” whichever appointment that was. amongst the 1500+ appointments in my calendar.
i finally got around to googling to try and fix it, and it helped me figure out what was causing it.
a cinema jejune appointment. or more accurately, a phantom cinema jejune appointment that no longer existed, but claimed to, but couldn’t figure out how to repeat a non-appointment.
this is what i get for trying to learn more about film. or maybe skipping out on all the classes.
but now that it’s fixed, i’m getting reminders on my computer again. look how much more productive i am! wheeee!
they actually did it.
they actually traded shaq.
i mean they said they were going to do it for days, and sure, claimed it was going to be final, but who really thought they would trade possibly the best player in the game?
hell, it’s not like i’m that huge a shaq fan, but he’s fucking gi-normous and really is an incredible force of nature.
this is like trading your cow for magic beans. only the beans aren’t magic. and you’re getting a jumping bean, a garbanzo bean, and a old baked bean.
but it is hmc’s. drop her a note to tell her she’s young and beautiful. call me if you need contact info.
sometimes people ask me, “how do you find all of this music that you listen to?” i used to point to listening to the radio, like kxlu and especially kcrw, but honestly, i don’t really listen to them anymore since i moved out of lost angels. plus the fact that hmc gets all freaky about people speaking on the radio kiboshes that as well.
so, to be honest, i’m not really sure where i pick all this stuff up. there are certainly labels that i pay attention to, like ninjatune, g-stone, k7, etc., and then bands that i’ll follow and subsqeuently side projects and collaborations of those bands that i’ll follow, but really, i have no idea where i stumble on a lot of this stuff.
but now i’ve got a good answer, because i can just claim that i found it on an mp3 blog! i’ve been reading a couple in the last few days, and while i didn’t find anything really new, i did stumble on some tracks that i didn’t realize were out: a couple of new tracks from fiona apple (1, 2), some old incredible moses leroy, and a beck/emmylou harris cover of a gram parsons song.
hell, maybe i should roust an mp3 posse and start up our own mp3 blog! i figure if you find seven people, then at minimum, that’s only one song a week. and who doesn’t have a song a week to hoot about?
after a particularly grueling thursday and friday where i really couldn’t walk much at all (it took a good fifteen minutes to hobble down the block to the doctor’s office), saturday was better, and sunday much much better. it’s to the point where today i’m able to get around, although my hip is still a little sore.
i don’t think it was actually a hip pointer after all, since it’s not really in the right place: a hip pointer is more towards the front edge of the pelvic bone, whereas i’m hurting more towards the back, on the top side of the femur. maybe it’s a bone bruise or some crazy sprain, but again, without any traumatic event!
while i was sitting in hospital, waiting to get x-rays to see if i had actually fractured my hip (no), i remembered those daydreams i had about getting hit by a car while crossing the street, and having to deal with broken bones and not being able to get around with hmc not around to help. and then i also thought how ridiculous it would be if i actually had broke my hip out of nowhere, due to osteoperosis from milk avoidance, becoming like that samuel l. jackson character with the glass bones in m. night shyamalan’s unbreakable.
cheryl hypothesizes that it’s probably me overcompensating from having broken my toe on my right foot, thus doing something funny to my gait and causing me to strain something the opposite hip. where are the alexander technique and feldenkrais practitioners when you need them?
i’m trying to take it easy still, since i don’t want to overdo it now that i can actually move again and then hurt myself before i’m fully recovered.
however, my right arm, being the last limb uninjured, is currently scared shitless.
much thanks to w for bringing me miso soup on thursday, and mamaluna for bringing me a boatload of food on saturday, so i wouldn’t have to only eat crackers.
although to be honest, i’ve eaten nothing but crackers today.
because sometimes you just want to eat crackers.
to think i’m so out of touch with what our government is doing…
Senator Feinstein and her fellow women Senators lighten up the Senate by joining their male counterparts for “Seersucker Suit Day.” (6/24/04)
well, according to espn, shaq has ok’d a trade to the miami heat in exchange for lamar odom, brian grant, caron butler, and a draft pick.
after one all-star dream team season, it’s all over. the owner jerry buss has picked kobe as being the future of the team. kobe in turn has forced coach phil jackson out, and this has pissed off shaq so much that he refuses to return.
now kobe’s got to try and win with coach rudy t., assuming that he actually comes back. (suddenly, kobe’s developed this meglomaniac ego: where’d that come from? he’s demanding that teams visit him at his house to lure him via free agency, instead of the normal visit to the respective franchises!) and sure, gp’s back, but only because he can’t get any decent money anywhere else after last year. the mailman may retire, and really, what the hell is left? the lakers weren’t that deep to begin with. all of a sudden they look like the magic a few years ago: a great player, a couple of really good ones, and nobody in the middle.
it’s really a tragedy that egos get in the way of it all. shaq and kobe are going to look back with remorse and realize how good they had it. kobe’s going to see how much easier it was to play with a dominant big man, and shaq’s going to miss that superstar wing player, and think he’s back in orlando back in the day.
the other day, i was watching this show on the first of kobe & shaq’s championships back in 2000, and the narrator said, “in the postseason, kobe and shaq learned the hard way that no player goes farther than the eleven other men wearing the same jersey.”
oh well, so much for that.
i’m still not quite sure of this digital music thing.
no, of course i’ve got my ipod and i love it: i can’t live without it!
i’m not talking about finding free music on kazaa or whatever; i gave that up long long ago as being too frustrating, since it was too hard to find complete albums, especially in whatever i was actually interested in. what i’m talking about is buying purely digital versions of music, say, on the itunes store.
i’ve bought the odd song here and there online, but didn’t really believe in having the only copy of something that i bought be a digital version somewhere. somehow i want the hard copy, the actual disk, which seems to me as a more tangible and secure entity.
granted, this may seem odd for someone who makes his living selling in the data storage industry, but then again, that just reinforces what i know, which is that 3% of all disk drives are expected to fail and thus you need to take extra precautions around that anticipated possible data loss. that’s how we make money, right? otherwise companies would just store their stuff on cheap ass hard disks from fry’s. which is essentially what this boils down to, right?
but, i’m slowly getting over it, and have bought a few albums, mostly stuff that it’d be hard to get used, or just stuff that was just as cheap as finding a used copy somewhere.
and it’s worked out all right, except for that last album which i bought, which was sort of ok, but then is maybe kind of sucky at the end.
and then i realized that buying digital versions mean that you have no out: if it sucks, you can’t sell it back. even if you only get a small percentage back of what you paid, at least you get some value out of it, and the tiny catharsis of getting it out of your house and out of your life. taking an aesthetic stand. with digital, your money’s just gone gone, and all you can do is delete it. and feel like a stupid spendthrift.
on the other hand, i just listened to some tracks from the savath+savalas album that i hated and sold back, and it didn’t sound so bad anymore. (ironically, when compared to the albums by mus that i bought on itunes.) so maybe all it does is help you practice opening your horizons? or living with the crap that you paid for…
meanwhile, at least you can keep entering the itunes 100,000,000th song contest for free.
motherfucker.
ok, next ailment: while picking up my dry cleaning yesterday, i got a hip pointer.
which just sort of hurt a little bit at the time, but has gotten progressively worse since then, to the point where i woke up in pain at 5 this morning. i tried a hot bath and went back to sleep, but it’s so painful that i don’t think i can even go to work today. or even walk.
hmc was noticing this weekend how w is more subdued these days, and wondered if it was just due to having spent six months in a more laid-back environment, or whether it’s just low energy from being malnourished because of that crazy raw food diet.
i guess i shouldn’t talk, since i’m the one slowly breaking down. maybe food is important after all.
what i really need is better stories for my injuries: there were these roving band of pirates trying to break into our house to steal our pot of gold, and i broke my toe kicking one in the face on his gold tooth. another one slashed my thumb with his cutlass as i shoved him back out the window, and then i got a hip pointer while doing a roundhouse kick on another one…
or maybe i just need to switch to hand washables only.
since i love basketball so much, i once in a while wonder if i would like to own a team if i were ever rich enough to do so. sure, you now have the team and get to be part of the action, but there’s so much responsibility to do well, to get the right players, and make all the right decisions to get a good team out there while you’re forking out millions of dollars a year. sure, you love shaq, but are you going to fork out $34 million a year to one guy? sure, of course. oh yeah, what about the rest of your team?
and so the owner of the dallas mavericks, mark cuban, has his own blog. mostly he rants about how the mavs were in some way cheated, like the refereeing wasn’t consistent, or how the rules should be changed in general, or more egotistical stuff like his new reality tv show “the benefactor” or how he made his money. cash in on the dot.com boom and make billions 101, right?
but the mavs just lost one of their main stars, steve nash, to the phoenix suns through free agency, and he just wrote this great entry about what happened from his perspective, his reasoning for how much he was willing to pay, how the negotiations went, and why he just couldn’t match even though he loves the guy.
Donnie wanted me to offer 10mm a year for 4 years straight up. Both were fair offers. Both had lots of risk. I knew that I was going to let Steve see if he could get another offer, and I knew that Steve would give me the chance to match, and I would if I thought it was reasonable.
if you don’t know basketball it doesn’t make much sense, but it was pretty fascinating…
i’m not really sure i’m coherent enough to summarize the weekend.
on the other hand, if you weren’t there, how would you know?
went up to bruinslair for the big camping weekend, with the bitchin’ carpool: hmc & her friend paula from work, wanda, and cheryl. of course hmc and then w means late and later departure. but we did manage to get to cheryl’s house before the absolute drop-deadline of 1pm she said jokingly, she thought. then it was off to sit in traffic for an hour and a half all the way past the carquinez bridge and again through fairfield. and then the new way to bruinslair freaked me out, because suddenly we were on the wrong side of sacramento (is there a right side?) and what the hell?
but we made it there, it was sunny, and warm smiley faces all around.
everything was great.
first off, we saw a bear. an honest to god bear, running fast across our car’s path right after we turned into BL.
saturday we set up our tents, and then grilled a couple of spatchcocked game hens (thank you martha stewart!) with a nice spinach, pea, and feta cheese salad for dinner.
sunday we got up, missed the non-creekwalk, and then hmc and i ended up hiking down to where the creekwalk comes out of the creek on the far end, and just sitting down in the creek for an hour, chilling out, and meeing lizard and snake friends. sunday night we rocked out under the stars, and of course i don’t really remember much details, but it was a lot of fun.
monday was pretty much chilling by the pond, and then a late ride back home, although oddly enough people were hurty.
a good time was had by all. i think paula had fun. i’m pretty sure. sort of. mostly. probably. definitely. maybe. yes. sort of. absolutely. i think.
and then up again this morning at 5am to get everyone to the airport to fly back to lost angels for their 8am flight. somewhere i had ambitiously thought i was going to go straight to work, but ended up going back home and sleeping for a few more hours. i even dragged my sorry ass to yoga tonight before coming home and falling back asleep.
are there lessons learned from the weekend? during our hike, hmc and i saw this big ass tree that looked like it had been struck by lightning, so it had broken off at the top and stopped growing, and then instead spurted out to the side instead and grew out anyway. almost like the side tine of a pitchfork. so maybe the moral of the story is that plants have it hard too sometimes, but you just gotta take the lumps and keep going.
i just sliced my thumb open with the bread knife.
i know, i was dumb, trying to cut it backwards. for no good reason. but it hurts just the same, whether it was the result of stupidity or not.
not a good week for health intactness.
i just hope i can make it through tomorrow.
i got my registration and sticker from the dmv today, and i guess there really is a grace period, even for late registrations. not only did they send me my sticker, they even refunded me the last late fee bump, which i paid because i postmarked it one day past the deadline.
hooray for the dmv! man, that arnold must be a great governator.
i’ve been playing this damn game bookworm for the past few days, and i can’t stop. it’s like boggle, but with penalties for crappy cheap words. this is sucking up so much of my time i’m not getting anything else (work or fun) done.
in fact, i hate these bastards at popcap games. a few months ago i got sucked into their game bejeweled and the same thing happened until i deleted it so i could get on with my life.