Test Kitchenette

Just finished a little husband-and-wife project based on chocolate chip cookies, photography, and America’s Test Kitchen. See more on Rachael’s blog.

Bright Music

Springtime Mix CD as baby-shower thank-you note:

Upholstery Update

FLOR is a company that makes modular carpet tiles, prints extensive catalogs about them, and then sends me one. I am not in the market for modular carpet tiles, but I feel obliged to flip through the catalogs over my A.M. Wheaties. Lucky for me, the most recent one included this little scene. How great is that couch? I’m not sure the alligator part is the world’s most raging success, but the odd houndstooth cushion with contrast piping just might be.

Schoolyard Chant Foils Armored Heist

There’s a lot of great things going on here, not the least of which is the title.

Making Waves

“Functional maturity of the cerebral cortex is suggested by fetal and a neonatal electroencephalographic patterns….intermittent [EEG] bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks.”  -New England Journal of Medicine

Mustaches vs. Wigs

The theme of this year’s Beaux Arts Ball (Harvard’s annual Design School gala) is Mustaches vs. Wigs, a party concept of which I am an enormous fan.  This clever theme solves the eternal party-planning paradox: the same theme that is necessary to brand the event as unique and exciting inevitably turns out to be Too Much Work to pull off for 80% of the audience, half of whom use it as an excuse not to go and the other half of whom go anyway, disregard the theme, and mask the awkwardness of their evident non-participation with an ironic disdain for those who actually Took The Time to dress up as a pirate.  And that ruins the fun for everyone.

The great thing about mustaches and wigs is that it takes about 2 minutes to throw together a fake mustache or put something on your head, which means that you can almost guarantee total participation.  Also, it is equally silly (gender norms? whoops!) and benign, which makes it perfect Facebook fodder for future employers (the challenge here being that not enough photos makes you look lame and anti-social, but too many photos and they will inevitably pick up on your drinking problem).

For comparison, consider the Beaux Arts Ball of 1931, in which famous architects came dressed up as their own buildings:

These, obviously, were the only seven architects who came.  Because who has the time to make a costume that intense?  Incidentally, the only reason Mr. Chrysler Building (middle) showed up was because he could reuse his outfit from his night job as a villain/monster on the Power Rangers.

Lobster, stuck on repeat

There’s always room for one more lobster in that pot.

Paper towels, Happiness

From The Mezzanine, where Nicholson Baker discusses paper-towel dispensers in corporate bathrooms:

Each time I pulled, a new but identical towel-flap was there for me to grasp: if you had blinked at the right moment, you might never have known that it was different from the towel you had been looking at; but it was!  This renewing of newness – whether it was

– the appearance of another identical Pez tablet at the neck of the plastic Pez elevator, or

– the sight of one parachutist after another standing for a second in the door of an airplane before he jumped, or

– the rolling-into-position of a pinball after the previous one had escaped your flippers, or

– one sticky disk of sliced banana displaced from its spot on the knife over the cereal bowl by its successor, or

– the uprising of yet another step of the escalator,

was for me then, and is still, one of the greatest sources of happiness that the man-made world can offer.

What’s in the bar

Grace and Josh visited this weekend, and brought with them the most delicious part of Philadelphia.  Root is a “rustic spirit inspired by a potent 18th century Pennsylvania folk recipe.”  Made by Walter Benjamin-inspired arts-collective-ists Art In The Age, “it is an alcoholic version of what eventually evolved into Birch or Root Beer.”  It is fantastic, especially when mixed with ginger beer, but especially when it’s Barritt’s ginger beer.

SizeUp

A cool thing I learned about today: SizeUp, for Mac, which gives you easy keyboard shortcuts to resize windows and make the most of your screen space.  Simple, snappy, and pay-as-you-like ($13 suggested).  I was also playing around with making gifs in Photoshop, a quick tutorial on which can be found here.