Brilliant.

I'm Weak

Lord help me, I saw this thing and winced. A freaking Robot that plays music and spins around? I know what you are thinking, surely the minimalist can resist something as absolutely mindblowingly awesome as a spinning music playing robot!

I would KILL for one of these. I would kill you as a matter of fact, to get my greasy mitts on this incredible device. It's called Rolly and I have noticed a trend where mundane things like clocks are mounted on wheels and interact with you with motion. Not to brag, but I could totally fucking afford this shit and boy would I be the coolest kid in the ghetto with an interactive freaking ROBOT RADIO!

But no. I can see using it a few times and burying it in a box somewhere or giving it to someone when I tire of it or just breaking it - I mean it would roll off the table of get crushed underfoot. Honestly I was surprised I didn't see it on the greatest blog of all time, but I guess its of little musical significance right now.

I am going to take a cold shower now...

art

Chris Jordan holds the mirror up so you can look at yourself America. A swirling mass of phone chargers has an almost natural look, like the floor of a jungle. Most of the photographs give you that creepy feeling, like flipping over a big flat stone and seeing the biggest crawlingest creature with - like a thousand legs and big sweeping antennae, all shiny with cascading legs as it moves closer to you with those sideways pincer mouth hooks and it might be poisonous and jesus, I wish I had left that rock the hell alone... Except the creature, that's you.

Best Game Ever?

As an owner of a Gretsch Guitar I am in the unique position of appreciating this game more than owners of Wussy-er guitars. Play by mashing the spacebar.

I Hate my Toilet

I said, I meant it, I hate my toilet. There is no more misguided a policy than the low flow toilet mandate. When I moved in here the bathroom was totaled. It was the reason I got this place so cheap, the floor was rotted from a slow leak and the toilet was pink and pretty far from working properly. It ran constantly and needed replacing right away, which is why I got to work on it a full year and a half after I moved in. While shopping for a toilet I fully realized the horror of the low flow toilet. There was no alternative. You could choose the color and shape, but flow capacity was fixed at a minority of liters with just enough force to push feces into the pipe. Now until I got this toilet I had never backed up a toilet before. Ever. I didn't know what to do, I panicked. I shut off the valve, I got a wrench, no water or filth reach the rim, but water that should have gone down was coming up and I couldn't think. I had no plunger because, like I said, this had never happened to me before, so I could only flush. It took about ten tries and I had to wait a while for some ca-ca to decompose, but eventually it went down with a satisfactory sploosh.

The low flow toilet was introduced to counter the conventionally accepted wasting of water. A trickle of pee-pee did not require 9 red blooded American gallons of water to wash it away, so to look at the numbers it was easy to make a case for a low flow toilet. The marketplace - however, did not agree and no one bought them. Honestly, I am a minimalist hippy weirdo and I wouldn't have bought one either. Strain on municipal water supplies and adventurous lobbying firms managed to get this new addendum added to the building code and before you knew it the old Cadillac toilets were on their way to the landfill to be replaced by sporty and efficient new models.

For the first time ever we would wake up to confront our feces staring back at us and you could actually be late for work and be excused just by saying, "I have a low flow toilet." The question kept arising, is it actually saving water if you have to flush it ten times? Considering that it happens maybe once every six months, then yes it is saving water, but that is not the problem. If you ever have a guest at the house and they back up the toilet - Guaranteed - you are sleeping alone tonight. Just the psychological factor of having to look at your own shit and get the plunger out and fill the house with a foul odor, just having to deal with it sucks. It sucks so bad that anyone you ask that ever had to deal with it will tell you enthusiastically and publicly just how much they hate their low flow toilet.

The future holds all sorts of new impositions on our way of life. Cars will become less powerful as peak oil peaks and supply dwindles, our homes will be hotter in the summer with fewer cooling options and the winters harsher and colder with less oil for heat. We can look forward to misery and sacrifice against our wishes, our wishes being for abundance and convenience. There will be less meat in our diets, solar panels on the roof, wider bike lanes, no more plastic bags from the grocery, mandatory recycling and composting, these are all done things. Many municipalities already have these policies, the low flow toilet was just the beginning, but no matter what good comes of it all - I will always HATE that fucking toilet...

TIP: the recycled toilet paper clogs my toilet every time, even treehuggers don't use it.

Design Show

There are only a few more days left of the Design for the Other 90% show at the Cooper Hewitt. I have known about this for a while, but being very busy I forgot to mention it. Many of these designs are not new but they will all be piled together for appreciation instead of individually being the major highlights of minor shows. My personal favorite is the "Zeer" pot, or pot in pot cooler. This is one of those items that make one wonder why we in the west never picked up on an idea like harnessing natural evaporation to cool our food, instead of having hulking refrigerator units eating electricity. This show is noteworthy because I live in abundance and choose this way of minimalism but not everyone gets to make that choice. The vast majority of the entire population of the planet barely scrapes by without good medicine, clean water, or decent educations. There is a lot of wisdom there, for example, if you want to know how to save water? ask someone who doesn't have any.

If this sort of thing interests you there is also thinkcycle, which is a collaborative post type thing for good ideas, you know, that might save millions of lives or change the world. If you are into that kind of thing.

Consumer Confidence

I hate to say I told you so, but here are the new consumer confidence numbers from Businessweek. Basically, 29% of people either expect a product they buy to fail, not work, or just overall not be worth the money. The result is that fewer people are expected to buy things. Analysts say this is a bad thing, because our economy is totally dependent on the exchange of cash for goods, but I disagree.
Look at what we buy, and how we buy it. Big box retailers promote a shopping experience, separated from quality. For example, an inexpensive product is displayed next to a very expensive product, giving the impression of equal measure. A reasonable person will not make the connection, buy the junky one and be right back in the store shopping for a replacement before too long. This is good for business, bad for people.
Online shopping is not much better. Most items are purchased sight unseen, allowing for a great deal of abuse by merchants and manufacturers. Factor in the incredible pain in the ass of returning products bought by mail - contacting the vendor, repackaging, shipping, waiting for a replacement, and the possibility that this one is no better, it's no wonder consumer confidence is at its lowest in recorded history.

The system is flawed. Money is a resource, like anything else. You either waste it or use it wisely. You can buy a $3,000.00 television on credit, built on untested technology to watch terrible movies, and destroy it the first time you spray it with windex to clean it, or you can put it away to buy a house, put the kids through college, or retire in relative comfort. Capitalism is fine as economic systems go, when it is honest and true to principle, but we don't see much of that these days. Low consumer confidence means people are wising up to the game and don't want to play anymore. 29% of Americans are that much closer to being minimalists and they didn't even know it.

Book

Born to buy, by Juliet Schor is an awesome book. How little you knew about the insidious world of advertising to children. Is it really as bad as you imagine? No, it's much worse. Told complete with creepy industry only terms like "Bro-ing" "Trans-toying" and "Age compression" it lays out the pursuit of the billions of dollars taken from children each year. Seriously, if you know someone who works in advertising - read this, then beat the living piss out of them. They really are evil.

She has written many books, all insightful and relevant to our times. I strongly recommend picking one up.

Aldo is a Genius

This is a tin museum badge cut and bent into the shape of a Mantis. Aldo made it, and about a million other little creatures with his pliant, idle hands. It is less than an inch high, but easily the most masterful piece of art I have personally encountered. Inspired, skillfully crafted, and singularly one of a kind. Genius. Pure fucking genius. I imagine him "accidentally" curing cancer while cleaning the bathroom... If he ever gets around to cleaning the bathroom.

my old socks and underwear buff your graffiti

One of my new hobbies is cleaning Graffiti off my neighborhood. I HATE graffiti. There was a time when I was rather indifferent to it, even supportive of it as an art form - but those days are gone. Now I treat graffiti and those who practice it with genuine contempt.

I own my own place now, that is what changed. Late one night I smelled something funny, looked out the window and sure enough there is some little asshole spray-painting stupid shit on my building. I freaked, I called the cops, I gave chase, but he was already gone. As a renter, this never bothered me. If the landlord removed it or not I could care less, I'd probably be moving in a few weeks anyhow, but this was my place...

One of the things that is not well known about me is this: I like to solve big problems. If something is easy, it isn't really worth doing. There is no satisfaction like tracing a problem to its root and solving it forever. Right away I went into overdrive, calculating, measuring and weighing possibilities. Photos were taken and the foul mark was gone before dawn the next day. After I cleaned it off, I felt great. I went all around my neighborhood and buffed off the tags. The local businesses were thrilled, but wondered at my motivation. I told them "I just don't like graffiti." They even gave me a cookie.

This was done in broad daylight, I wanted everyone to see that this was how you do it. Get yourself some old socks/underwear, some "Goof off" graffiti remover or some similar product and you are ready to go. I joined the neighborhood crime watch and talked to the people there, since they just sat around saying "Someone should do something." (The most pathetic of all statements) and I countered with "Don't sit around and wait for the city to clean it, get out and clean it off yourself." and I gave them some tips on how to pretreat a surface so its easier to clean later. Vandalism will be around as long as young men come awkwardly of age and sneak around in the night acting wild. Better to be prepared and relaxed about it and buff it immediately since one mark tends to attract others.

After I buffed him, he came back and wrote his silly mark around again. Good luck for me it was a day off and I buffed him THAT SAME DAY. No one even got to see the mark this time. It was exhilarating. The purpose of graffiti - you see - is fame. To get that stupid shit on as many mailboxes and dumpsters as you can. Removing the mark sets them back. I didn't see any tags again for many weeks and was quietly disappointed he gave up so easy. Next time he came around it was USPS stickers with pink marker on them. Almost too easy.

I had won. It was weird. I know that I was motivated by vengeance, but I had been so positive about it. Not only that but my enthusiasm was contagious. After the neighborhood meeting the police were so impressed that I had taken the law into my own hands, they began asking people they arrested if they knew any writers and built a database on them. Turns out that graffiti writers don't have much in the way of honor among thieves, they couldn't rat each other out fast enough. The problem quickly went away.

I'm kind of sad about it really. Now all the graffiti I get is preteens with sharpies writing profanity at the bus stop, and the other "real" writers careers last until they run out of ink in the marker.

This isn't really relevant to minimalism, I just hate graffiti a lot.

A Book

I am recommending "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster" by Dana Thomas. I have not read it, because as I write this it is not yet released, but I heard an interview on the radio that had me tut-tutting and clucking and shaking my head in shame. It sounds reminiscent of "Fast Food Nation," the watershed book that made us push back our collective Big Mac and soured us to the marrow on fast food culture.

Most of us could give a fuck about the goings on of high fashion, but the telling really rubs the gloss right off those shiny magazines. Revelations about factory conditions, market consolidation, and overall business practices designed to screw you out of lots of money are quite enlightening. It's modern simony and there is no shortage of buffoons to buy $1,500 sunglasses, no doubt it will be a good read.