So, the other day, I became temporarily obsessed with these little plastic nuggets:

Just one word. Plastics.

I have fond childhood memories of filling up little metal frames with these plastic bits and melting them in the oven to make stained-glass suncatchers. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what the heck they were called. A lot of Googling time only brought up a company that makes Jewish-themed ones, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t making stained-glass dreidels and menorahs when I was a kid. It was more like mushrooms and butterflies and frogs — y’know, good ’70s stuff. Just when I was ready to give up, I found ‘em — they’re Makit & Bakits. And they’re still making them!

Kindergarten-level glazier

Well, that meant a jaunt to my friendly neighborhood craft store was in order. Sure enough, there was a very small selection of kits. They even make glow-in-the-dark ones now. I had to buy one. I picked out this little flower one, just because the colors were more interesting than the ones in the other sets. It rang up at $1.35 (!). It was definitely at least $2, maybe even $3, worth of fun. That’s value, my friends.

I cheated and mixed the colors on the petals, because I like it when the nuggets blend together like that. I’m happy enough with how it turned out, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with it; it will probably live a prostrate and nomadic life, moving about the house from one flat surface to another along with random scraps of papers and other doodads, until I throw it out.

So, now what? Here’s what — I’ve got a whole mess of those little plastic nuggets left. They seem to have designed these kits to come with enough pellets to recover from a spill onto the particle abyss that was a ’70s shag carpet. I think I might actually somehow have more of these plastic bits than I started with. It’s the melting of the plastic bits that’s the most fun with these — the frames are kind of ass — so I can’t just throw these out, I’ve got to melt them. But how? In what shape?

My current thinking is that I want to lay them out in a disc shape and melt them, and then, while they’re still warm, shape them into a little bowl. Kind of like they do on television cooking shows with grated parmesan. But I can’t help but think that this is worth pondering a little bit more.

Got any ideas?

This started as an April Fool’s joke, but the 8bit tie was such a huge hit that ThinkGeek decided to start working on it as an actual product, according to Kotaku.

It’s an 8-bit graphic (think original Nintendo graphics) video game tie. I think it is seriously cool, and i want one, although I can’t think of an occasion in the past where I would have worn it if I had it. And yes, it’s a clip-on. As the article explains, you need it to be a clip-on to keep the pixelated look.

Easter is coming! There’s a lot of great art out there …

[Via A Sampler Of Things]

Bacon tuxedo, from Archie McPhee

Yet another way you can be bacon-clad: Arche McPhee is selling this bacon-print tuxedo… and it’s bacon scented. I tried to infuse my bacon costume with a bacon scent, and it didn’t really work. I don’t know how they do it. They say it’s “tailored from chemically treated latex print fabric.” I still don’t know how they do it. It’s a miracle of modern science, people. How long does the bacon scent last? If you hang it in your closet, will your entire wardrobe start to smell like bacon? The mind reels. Thanks once again to Miss Delirium Tremens for the heads-up.

In a comment on the Bobby Darin post, I was prompted by the always-on-it-like-a-bonnet Mr. Bali Hai to ask my friend Jim Cherry about his cars-of-the-future book project, Cartopia.

Predicta, the Personal Car With a Hint of Tomorrow

Science and Mechanics magazine cover

A funny coincidence — it just so happens that Jim Cherry met with Taschen this afternoon to sign the deal for the book. It turned out the agreement paperwork needed a little work, so it’s not actually a signed deal yet, but it’s “definitely on.” Taschen has turned out some real beauts over the years, so it’s great to see them taking this one on. They want Jim to expand the book to include futuristic prototype cars from throughout the 20th century, so it’s going to be an even bigger book than he thought, and he gets to make some field trips to Detroit to hit the manufacturers’ archives. No word yet on a release date, but a rough draft is scheduled to be done by August, so maybe early 2008? Congratulations, Jim!

To tide you over until Cartopia the book arrives, spend some time at Cartopia the website — there’s a trunkload of great midcentury images of futuristic cars, including advertisements, magazine covers and even toy models.

I adore some of the signage used on apartment buildings during the ’50s and ’60s. Here are some great signs I saw just today in Mountain View, CA:

I was doing a lot of “this one’s my favorite! no, wait, this one’s my favorite! oh, wait, this one….” etc, etc today… but this one might really be my favorite. Today. Of the ones on that block. On that side of the street. I think. No matter — it’s clearly fantastic. It was also one of the better-maintained buildings, and looked fresh as a daisy. The lettering is just gorgeous — I especially love the combination of the scripty “Elena” with the staid “the” and “apts”. Tres elegant. But of course the real standout here are those lovely poodle bushes. I do so love poodle bushes.

I love it when the lettering is really and truly unique. I think that great big fat pancake of a dot hovering over the “i” is great, and I really like the added touch of the flag-points at the end of the letters. Very regal.

The lettering on this one is relatively common — don’t get me wrong, it’s gorgeous, and head & shoulders over dull modern signage. But I really grabbed this picture because I love the dramatic entryway, and that beautiful scrollwork globe light fixture. The whole look together is very fancy.

This one gets a B+ on the sign, and a C- on the building — I’ve seen military installations that were more inviting. Maybe it’s nicer once you’re past the fort-like exterior.

This is my other favorite of today’s apartments. Spanish-inspired architecture is still novel and exotic for me, and probably always will be — you don’t see a lot of it in Seattle. You can’t see the detail on those doors, but you can probably imagine it, and those light fixtures! Oh, I am a sucker for amber glass and ironwork. This is the kind of place I can see myself living in; it’s the kind of place I think of when I think of California. And I adore California. Completely.

If you’d like to see more and bigger pictures of these buildings, I’ve got a whole mess of them up at Humuhumu’s Life in Photos.

Miss Delirium Tremens,
photo by Ted D’Ottavio

My bacon costume inspired the delightful Miss Delirium Tremens to send me a sweet message… turns out she’s got a great bacon costume of her own, but hers is decidedly more sexay than mine. Click here to see it… it’s street legal, but probably NSFW.

Bobby Darin’s house, photo by Jim Cherry

Dale Sizer pretends he’s Bobby

My friend Jim Cherry just went on a tour of Bobby Darin’s midcentury Hollywood Hills home, and he wrote up the tour with photos in a recent blog post on his MySpace. Dale Sizer, who happened to be mentioned in my post earlier today, was also there to check out the digs.

The house is at 1411 Rising Glen Road, and has 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths. Jim reports that it’s relatively un-mucked with. It’s being offered for just shy of 3.7M. Here’s the property’s website, with a full photo tour.

This website features a life-sized image of a whale. Of course, even if you have an extremely large monitor you’ll still need to scroll the photo to see it all.

The little red rectangle represents the area of part of the image that fits on my laptop’s monitor

[via John Nack]

Easter’s just around the corner, and another holiday brings more Rankin/Bass. Yay! Rankin/Bass made two Easter-themed specials: 1971′s “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and 1977′s “The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town”.

Here Comes Peter Cottontail

I haven’t seen “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” since I was a kid. I don’t remember it very well, but it’s probably the better of the two, and I’m really eager to see it again. It’s available on DVD, and I’m going to try to get it before Easter.

Watch out: there’s an utterly despicable 2005 sequel called “Here Comes Peter Cottontail: The Movie.” About 20 minutes into trying to watch it, I developed Tourette’s. If you’ve seen the 2001 sequel to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys,” then you have an idea of how bad the Peter Cottontail sequel is. If you haven’t heard of either of them, just do whatever you can to steer clear of them.

The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town

“The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town” is a whole ‘nother egg hunt… and it’s actually just a re-tread of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.” Just as the Santa Claus in that special bears little resemblance to the Santa seen in the Rudolph special, this tale has nothing in common with the Peter Cottontail special — the protaganist here is Sunny the Bunny.

In both “Comin’ to Town”s: the narrator is a postman played by Fred Astaire; the holiday icon (Sunny in “Easter Bunny”, Kris Kringle in “Santa Claus”) lives in one town, and wants to deliver their holiday gifts to children in another town; delivery of the gifts is thwarted by the authority figure in the town, and sneaky ways to get the gifts delivered in the dark of night are developed; and along the way, today’s well-known traditions are spawned. Oh — and both figures also have trouble getting over a mountain between the two towns, because of a big scary monster type of obstruction that by the end of the special has learned to be good. It’s like they just took one script and filled it in Mad Libs-style to get two specials out of it.

Despite the strange deja vu feeling of watching “Easter Bunny,” it’s not half bad. The thing that bugs me is that the jelly beans look more like jelly noodles. It’s kind of weird.