Sunday Timewasters

I have recently been bombarded with all sorts of wonderful things from all four corners of the internet, and, in the interests of helping you have a happy and relaxing Sunday, I want to share them with you.

The first comes from my old pal Harvey Pew, who shared this stunning (and stunningly expensive) artifact of the security state: the Playmobile Security Checkpoint. Be the first on your block to train your children to comply with authority and to disregard the integrity of their persons for the sake of enabling the state to create and perpetuate an illusion of efficacy against allegedly omnipresent threats! Also be sure to check out the customer reviews.

Next comes an item from my rival and sometime friend-with-benefits Dr D, who forwards this little gem from the Captain Planet series. If ever you've wondered about the roots of the Catholic-Protestant divide in Northern Ireland, and the relatively simple steps that can be taken to rectify it, then wonder no more. I was completely ignorant of this program until a few days ago, so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that my own role in mediating the conflict had not only been dramatized in this way, but also that I had myself been rendered into cartoon form. That laser-ring sure did come in handy, too.



Dr D is also to be credited for bringing to my attention the existence of a bus-ad generator based on those London atheist bus ads I've been obsessing over. Make your own and post them in my comments section! Here's mine:



Chris Jordan is a photographer obsessed with documenting the scale of American consumption. In a series called "Intolerable Beauty," he created stunning photographs from junkyards, recycling centers, etc, that show the detritus of consumer society in all its mind-boggling volume: thousands of cell-phone chargers twisted around each other like snakes, towering mountains of sawdust, shimmering strips of steel from shredded automobiles. Lately, he's been messing around with statistics and Photoshop, taking pictures of prison uniforms, say, or plastic bags, and copying and pasting them hundreds and thousands of times to create massive, sometimes beautiful images that attempt to give concrete, visual form to abstract statistics. So, for instance, in "Cans Seurat", he reinterprets Georges Seurat's famous "Sunday Afternoon..." using 106,000 soda cans, the amount consumed by Americans every 30 seconds, in place of Seurat's pointilist dots. It looks like this:







Here's an 18-minute video of Jordan showing and explaining his work.

Finally, I'd like to call your attention to my new favorite t-shirt. Just the other day I was complaining to Kate that, for all the Obama merchandise out there in the world right now, it's nearly impossible to find anything celebrating vice-presidential cutie-pie Joe Biden. There are Obama bobbleheads, action figures, sandwiches, buttons, ice cream flavors, and hot sauces, but poor Joe hardly merits so much as a toothpaste. Now, however, the balance is beginning to be righted, thanks to the enterprising folks over at (the Happy Valley's own) Diesel Sweeties, who have begun selling Joe Biden Fan Club t-shirts. I saw one the other day being worn by one of the baristas over at the Haymarket, and was so excited I almost spilled my fair-trade organic Columbia roast all over the cafe. They look like this, and are available in a variety of sizes:



Get yours today!