bookofjoe

Skateboard sculptures

Japanese

sculptor 

Haroshi

creates

his

pieces

from

used

skateboards.

[via Milena, DesignFloat and Brandon Shigeta's flickr]

World's most radical toaster

Created by Kraków-based Mateusz Główka who wrote,

"Roastie is an unconventional toaster. Transparent sphere shielding the user allows constant observation of your toasting bread. The heaters are immersed in the arms, which rotate around the toast inside the sphere."

"As a result the bread toasts evenly without becoming singed. Arms are shielded with a mirror finish, so that the produced heat concentrates in the middle. The control panel is projected on the front."

"Because of the enclosed space and shielded arms, heat accumulates and the time and amount of electricity needed for toasting are reduced."

[via Fancy]

Ben Franklin's daily schedule

[via Maira Kalman and Dave Dawson]

Tack Beach Chair and Bench

Think outside the beach space. Got desert?

Clever, the holes that let you stack them.

From the monocomplex design group out of Seoul, South Korea.

[via Yanko Design and Fancy]

Modern Art Easter Eggs in Woody Woodpecker Cartoons Revealed

Excerpts from Michael Cieply's April 10, 2011 New York Times Arts section front page story follow.

.............................

Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, "The Loose Nut," when he started seeing things.

Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall.

"What was that?" Mr. Klein, now an animation professor at Loyola Marymount University, recalled thinking. Only later, after years of scholarly detective work, did he decide that he had been looking at genuine art that was cleverly concealed by an ambitious and slightly frustrated animation director named Shamus Culhane. Mr. Culhane died in 1996, a pioneer whose six decades in animation included the sequence of the dwarfs marching and singing "Heigh Ho" in the 1937 film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

In the March issue of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Mr. Klein relates an intriguing theory. He says that Mr. Culhane broke the boundaries of his craft when he worked on the Woody Woodpecker cartoons in the 1940s, going well beyond the kind of commonplace puckishness that supposedly led later animators to stitch frames of a panty-less diva into "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Mr. Culhane’s stunts, Mr. Klein posits, were of a higher order. He worked ultra-brief experimental art films into a handful of Woody Woodpecker cartoons.

"Culhane essentially 'hid' his artful excursions in plain sight, letting them rush past too rapidly for the notice of most of his audience," Mr. Klein writes in the 15-page article, titled "Woody Abstracted: Film Experiments in the Cartoons of Shamus Culhane."

Mr. Klein writes that one of those experiments was a two-second piece of an explosion in "Woody Dines Out," from 1945.

The longest such experimental sequence was in the seven-second steamroller smash-up in "The Loose Nut," also from 1945. And, later in that cartoon, Woody is blown into an abstract configuration [top] that Mr. Klein, in his article, calls "the convergence of animation and Soviet montage."

.............................

Below,

the "The Loose Nut" in its entirety.

Hand-Stitched Vogue Cover

By Inge Jacobsen, who wrote in response to a commenter who wanted to purchase it, "I'm afraid it isn't available to buy yet. This is part of my final degree show which takes place in June. After June, it will be for sale."

Another person asked how large it is and how long it took to make, to which Ms. Jacobsen replied, "It's the same size as a Vogue magazine, maybe a bit smaller — so a little bigger than A4. If I spend 2-3 hours doing it every day they take about two weeks, otherwise it can take a month."

[via Fancy]

Interactive 3-D Solar System Model

From Open Culture: "We turned off the lights and switched to the biggest monitor in the house, to get the full planetarium effect of this wonderful website. It's called the Solar System Scope, and gives you a chance to observe space from within it, rather than dutifully studying it in a textbook or on a screen."

"Clicking on the telescope icon to the left lets you toggle between three different perspectives:  The heliocentric view, with the planets and stars spinning around you; the panoramic view, which replicates the feeling of watching the skies from the Greenwich Observatory; and, since after all we are the center of the universe, the geocentric view, which puts the rest of the cosmos firmly in their place, orbiting the earth."

"In a section called 'What’s Next' the site's creators (who are you, mystery designers?) tell us that they are working on a kid-friendly version of the site as well, but  we're not sure that’s even necessary.  When we let a curious 8-year-old try it out earlier today, it took us about an hour to get our computer back."

Fair warning: there goes the day.

[via Metafilter]

iPhone 4 Glow-in-the-Dark Decal Wrap

From the website:

............................

Decal is specially made for the AT&T iPhone 4 from durable high grade gloss finish vinyl.

Decals are self-adhesive, making them easy to apply and remove without leaving residue.

Decals can only be applied once.

............................

$3.99.

[via Fancy]