The Consumer Category
We bring you the chic and unique, the best and most bizarre shopping offers both online and offline. We offer you tips on where to buy, and some of the less mainstream and crazy, individual and offbeat items on the internet. Anything that can be bought and sold can be featured here. And we love showcasing the best and worst art and design.
The Starbucks mermaid reimagined by South Korean artist Soo Min Kim
Via Soo Min Kim, Hint
Posted: 15th, May 2017 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Evolution of Douchebag Style – the man bun vaper and beyond
Inspired by 100 Year of Beauty, some bright sparks have nailed the running joke of men’s fashion with the “Evolution of Douchebag Style”.
Spotter: BlameItOnTheVoices
The Frida Khalo action figure is coming to a store near you
Today Is Art Day’s Kickstarter is raising money to make a Frida Kahlo figure. At 5 inches tall, fashioned from quality plastic, Frida Kahlo action doll features a monkey on her back and a detachable surrealist heart.
It is, of course, what she would have wanted.
Posted: 12th, May 2017 | In: Celebrities, The Consumer | Comment
Drug Dealer Magnet Set
The “DRUG DEALER MAGNET SET – Another Quality Education Tool for Junior Entrepreneurs”.
Buy it here.
Posted: 12th, May 2017 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Russian aerobics to electronic music (1985) is brilliant
The backing tracks to this slice of Russian 1980s culture was published by Melodiya. It’s brilliant and as horribly catchy as the man-made fibres on those leotards:
Spoter: @flashbak
Posted: 11th, May 2017 | In: Fashion, Music, The Consumer | Comment
Computers fines drivers for ‘parking’ in a traffic jam
Computers can be wrong. Yes, we know what the system says but it is wrong. This bit of computer knowing resulted in human beings fined £100 per carload:
Parking cameras went live at the Ashford Retail Park in Kent in April, with signs telling drivers the new maximum stay is three hours.
But motorists got caught in gridlock on Easter Monday, and were trapped in the car park for hours when they struggled to join traffic on adjoining roads.
Says one customer parked in neutral:
Mr Donald continued: “On Monday we received a penalty charge notice from Highview Parking who enforce the three hour time limit on parking at this site.
“They must have had a flood of Penalty Charge Notices from this day.
“What troubles me is that there’s no quality control. It was utter madness. It’s just a money making exercise.
“I find it rather disappointing that these companies apply no common sense or quality control to their issuing of parking fines to innocent motorists who have over stayed due to no fault of their own.”
They apply computer sense.
Spotter: Daily Mail
Posted: 10th, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Eating more salt makes you less thirsty and burns fat
Eating salt is bad for you. So goes the message that has been hammered into us for an age. Salt improves the taste of things but a cost to your health. Eating too much salt means dying younger. But more research tells us that science is not settled. This is true to such a degree that we know learn that eating salt makes us less thirsty.
The New York Times reports:
The crew members were increasing production of glucocorticoid hormones, which influence both metabolism and immune function.
To get further insight, [Dr. Jens Titze, now a kidney specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research in Erlangen, Germany] began a study of mice in the laboratory. Sure enough, the more salt he added to the animals’ diet, the less water they drank. And he saw why.
The animals were getting water — but not by drinking it. The increased levels of glucocorticoid hormones broke down fat and muscle in their own bodies. This freed up water for the body to use.
But that process requires energy, Dr. Titze also found, which is why the mice ate 25 percent more food on a high-salt diet. The hormones also may be a cause of the strange long-term fluctuations in urine volume.
Scientists knew that a starving body will burn its own fat and muscle for sustenance. But the realization that something similar happens on a salty diet has come as a revelation.
Eat what you like, then.
Posted: 10th, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
United Airlines cancels flight man because he recorded his complaint
Air travel has become an ordeal, a trail of weight, size and endurance. And that’s all before you board the plane.
United Airlines booted Navang Oza from a flight because having been asked to pay $300 for an overweight bag – he says the same bag cost him £125 on a previous flight – he wanted to record any conversation he had with the agent. But this annoyed her. So she canceled his ticket, forcing him to buy another ticket on another airline to get home.
Spotter: SFGate
Posted: 10th, May 2017 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
Costa Coffee Salford offers its toilet as a birthday party venue
Anyone looking for a compact and bijou venue for a birthday party, a UKIP conference, an intimate wedding or just a place to mingle with fellow urban badger enthusiasts after work can head long to Costa Coffee in Salford. The toilet is available for hire.
Spotter: @ThePoke
Posted: 9th, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Dutch building features emojis as modern-day grotesques
Dutch architect Attika Architekten has included emojis in place of more traditional roundels on a block of flats in Vathorst. The emoji gargoyles grotesques date the building for future historians.
“In classical architecture they used heads of the king or whatever, and they put that on the façade,” Attika architect Changiz Tehrani tells t Verge. “So we were thinking, what can we use as an ornament so when you look at this building in 10 or 20 years you can say ‘hey this is from that year!'”
Originally designed by Shigetaka Kurita and released by the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo in 1999, emojis started out as 176 very basic 12 by 12 pixel designs (which are now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art). The set has since grown to include 1,088 symbols, with everything from a wad of money with wings to a top hat, ready to serve your every texting need.
PS: thanks to reader for telling me: “Not water spouts, so not gargoyles. Grotesques.” Change made.
Posted: 6th, May 2017 | In: The Consumer | Comment
The Nomadic Gardener: this man will hire your garden to grow his vegetables in
Jim Kovaleski is the nomadic gardener, a doyen of “portable farming” at one point he hies your garden to grow his produce in.
This nomadic gardener travels between Maine to Florida gardening leased front yards. With a frugal lifestyle and revenues as high as $1.5K a week, he’s living the dream.
It’s win-win. You rent out your land for an itinerant worker to farm. You, the gardener and your land become useful and profitable parts of society. If the price of land is lowered because of this new industry, then good. Landu s the largest inout cost. Reduce that and we should rejoice.
Spotter: Kottke
Posted: 4th, May 2017 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment
Have our ashes pressed into an playable vinyl LP
When you die And Vinyly will work your remains into a playable vinyl record. No, they won’t turn your arm into a novelty stylus limb and play the wrinkles on your flattened face. You need to be cremated and have your ashes pressed into an LP.
If you want to, as the company promises, “Live on from beyond the groove”, it’ll cost you $4,000 for 30 copies of the record, each with a dash of you and running for 12 minutes per side. The one downer – other than being dead (vinyl never dies!) – is that you cannot “use copyright-protected music”.
But looking aside from the restrictions, as Dan Colman wonders, what music would you forever like to be linked with?
Spotter: Mental Floss
Posted: 3rd, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover sketch is for sale
is everything a famous name does worth preserving or owning? When the owners of John Lennon’s former home found one of the singer’s old sketchbook they noticed it contained a small sketch of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. It’s for sale at auction, where the 4 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches doodle is expected to fetch up to $60k.
Julien’s Live auctions trails the find:
An ink on paper sketch by John Lennon of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover with Lennon’s handwriting of the album’s title on the central bass drum in the image. The drawing was found in a sketchbook left in Lennon’s former home, Kenwood in Surrey, England, and recovered by the new owners. The design of the album cover is known to have been executed by artist Peter Blake based on drawings provided by Paul McCartney. All of The Beatles contributed to the design of the cover in some way. It is unknown how this undated drawing figures into the history of the album cover and Lennon’s involvement.
At the same auction you can buy a Paul McCartney signed copy of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for $1,000.
Where there’s ink there’s brass.
Posted: 2nd, May 2017 | In: Celebrities, Music, The Consumer | Comment
F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook: the recipe for every faddish dinner you’ve ever had
Faddish, modish food was played with brilliantly in 1932, when Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) published Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, a cookbook that would trigger a “revolution of cuisine”. Humans, said Marinetti, “think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink”.
The introduction is choice:
Contrary to the predictable criticisms, the Futurist culinary revolution, illustrated in this volume, is aimed at the high end, noble and useful at all to radically change the power of our race, fortifying, dynamizing and spiritualizing it with brand new dishes in which experience, intelligence and imagination economically replace the amount, the banality, repetition and the cost. Our futuristic kitchen, set like a seaplane engine for high speeds, will seem crazy to some trembling and dangerous traditionalist. It wants to eventually create a harmony between the palate of men and their lives today and tomorrow… It is optimism at the table.
Suzanne Brill notes:
Futurist food was full of suggestiveness and provocation. Sex was one topic, the thrill of air travel another. Along with recipes for “Sculpted Meat” and “Man-and-Woman-at-Midnight” came whole scenarios for acting out themed meals while sitting in a biplane. The art chefs of our day, Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià, surely perpetuate what Marinetti began.
By way of a taster, here’s the recipe for The Excited Pig: A “whole salami, skinned” is cooked in strong espresso coffee and flavored with eau-de-cologne.”
Spotter: Flashbak, which has a lot more on FT Marinetti’s recipe book.
Posted: 1st, May 2017 | In: Books, The Consumer | Comment
The year my father got my mother a hoover for Christmas 1984
On Reddit, Mr-Irrelevance recalls Christmas 1984, when his father gifted his mother a hoover. The picture of her present is fabulous.
Below the photo, others share their gift memories:
When I was a kid my dad pulled something similar. Mom had been dropping hints for months that she wanted speakers in the kitchen. Christmas morning arrives and Dad gives Mom her big present! I remember her saying “oh I wonder what this is!?” with a big smile on her face as she began to open it. When she realized what it really was the smile faded and the twinkle was gone from her eyes. Instead of speakers dad had gotten her a fucking ironing board. She looked at him hoping it was a joke but no…Dad was really that stupid. The next day Dad went out and bought some really expensive speakers. – foxpoint
I used to work for a charity and at Christmas we would have a stall in the mall where we wrapped up gifts in return for a donation to the charity. It was mainly men who used this service. I always remember the elderly gentlemen who came over full of excitement that he’d found a present that he thought his wife really wanted – it was an ironing board cover. Not even a whole ironing board; just the cover. Imagining Christmas morning in their house made me sad. – TrappedUnderCats
Posted: 26th, April 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
500 Years of “Vulgar Tongue” Slang In One Dictionary
If you’ve ever wondered about the meaning of obscure words, Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the place to go.
“The three volumes of Green’s Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers slang from the past five centuries right up to the present day, from all the different English-speaking countries and regions. Totaling 10.3 million words and over 53,000 entries, the collection provides the definitions of 100,000 words and over 413,000 citations. Every word and phrase is authenticated by genuine and fully-referenced citations of its use, giving the work a level of authority and scholarship unmatched by any other publication in this field.”
Green tells us a bout the roots of slang:
Slang is a product of the city and without cities there is no slang. London was a great city – in contemporary terms – by the 16th century, and was seen as such before that. It had upper, middle and working classes. But slang is also a product of the street, a bottom-up creation, and as such condemned as a debased and marginal lexis. In a world where printing was still a relative novelty, and books therefore tended to be devoted to the concerns of the educated and powerful, slang was simply ignored. It is my belief that just as the criminals of the 16th century used their own non-standard language, there existed alongside it a non-criminal slang vocabulary, used primarily, as it is now, by the poor.
He adds:
I would call slang a ‘counter-language’, the desire of human beings, when faced by a standard version, of whatever that may be, to come up with something different, perhaps parallel, perhaps oppositional. For me, that is what slang does in terms of language.
See more at Green’s Dictionary of Slang. I hope to featrrue his writings and work on Flashbak.
Air Canada bumps young boy from overbooked flight
Someone give Macaulay Culkin a hose down and get John Hughes on the phone: Home Alone has a sequel. Cole Doyle, 10, was on his way to Costa Rica last month. Travelling with his family, Cole was looking forward to sun, sea and sloths. But he was prevented from boarding the Air Canada flight because the airline had oversold tickets and bumped him from the passenger list.
His family hadn’t already all passed though checkin in, leaving young Cole alone at Charlottetown Airport. They didn’t put him on another plane – the wrong flight! – causing him to accidentally fly to North Korea. (Call me John , I have ideas.) They drove to Montreal in an effort to connect with a flight there. But that flight was cancelled. So they drove to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they stayed overnight in a hotel and caught a flight the following day.
(John, the movie is writing itself. And get Chevy Chase.)
Air Canada has apologised and offered the family a C$2,500 voucher (£1,495), which expires in one year. The airline also paid their expenses.
An Air Canada spokeswoman tells the Vancouver Sun: ‘We are currently following up to understand what went wrong and have apologised to Mr Doyle and his family as well as offered a very generous compensation to the family for their inconvenience.”
It’s not all that generous, though, is it? Cash would have been better.
Posted: 19th, April 2017 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Buy a flag that went to the moon
Aboard the 1971 Apollo 15 mission (July 26 – August 7, 1971) was a secret stash of USA flags. Astronaut David Scott had no idea they were there. “This [hidden pouch] was apparently unknown to anybody else until the (Portable Life Support System’s Oxygen Purge System where the pouch was stowed were) disassembled after the mission by some other member of the CSD (Crew Systems Division) and the flag package was discovered,” says Scott.
And now you can buy one of these well-travelled 7.5 by 4 inch wavers.
Spotter: Collect Space, which is selling the item.
Posted: 21st, March 2017 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Fashion windows: clear knee mom jeans
Are your knees your best feature? Or perhaps you have eyes where your knees are and need to see when you’re wearing trousers? Well – finally! – help is here with ‘Clear Knee Mom Jeans’, the height of peek-a-boo denim fashion.
Clear Knee Mom Jeans from Nordstrom are imported (from where, we’re not sure?):
Slick plastic panels bare your knees for a futuristic feel in tapered and cropped high-waist jeans.
Posted: 13th, March 2017 | In: Fashion, The Consumer | Comment
