Andy Van Slyke
minibrix my wheatabix
Before there was Lego there was….Minibrix. The Museum of Childhood (is it weird to name a museum after a developmental stage?) reveals the predecessor of our favorite childhood toy, Minibrix, from 1930.
We wonder how the Museum of Childhood chooses what to collect–how can childhood be defined by objects which are so clearly a product of a particular time in history? Sure, toys are toys, but there’s an anthropologist inside of us that has major problems with this kind of representation. What say you?
save tesla?
We’re just going to post this without much comment, but the Tesla house on Long Island is being sold by AGFA, and the Teslaphiles out there are none too happy about it. SAVE TESLA.
chew on this
An enlightening documentation of the archival restoration process of a collection of old paper materials, in this case, the Chew Family Papers, from maps to scraps. Here’s a rundown:
Dry Clean / Surface Clean – Use vulcanized rubber sponge and strip yourself of all emotion!
Humidify and Flatten – Use a Flattening Press, not an old dictionary!
Wash – Make sure the Ink is not water soluble!
Mend – Especially necessary when somebody has CHEWED your paper. OK sorry. Wheatpaste, not just for street artists like Swoon.
kicking culture in the !@$%ing face
The (epic) Fales Library at NYU (an archive housed within the larger Bobst library, we believe) has a bitchin’ collection of anthologies, zines, writings, and other ephemera from the NY downtown scene in the 70s and 80s called the Downtown Collection. The website is barely functional, with lots of broken image links, but you can still get in there a little bit. Our two favorite titles: Just Another Asshole #6, and How German Is It
curated by michael jackson
MJ is auctioning off his goodies! There is so much for sale that its being held in a former department store.Here is a brief sample of the collection of the King of Pop, via the NYTimes.
78 rpm
We have a bunch of old 78s from our grandmother’s closet, but the best we can do is drink a whole lot of cough syrup and play them on our turntable at 45rpm. That’s pretty fun, but we wish we had a record player that could play them at full speed. We thought about digitizing them and speeding them up in Pro Tools, but, well, we’re busy, and lazy.
Luckily, the Internet Archive is a clearing house for old 78s. Also, the Cylinder collection, from Berlin-based phonograph collector Norman Bruderhofer.
brush yer teef
Continuing our micro theme from last week, another entry in the medical/anatomy/freakshow/creep museum column, this time via an israeli flash site Antique Dental Instruments. Complete with gothic german font, embedded classical music, and animated fireplace in the footer, this rather extensive collection of photographs of antique dental instruments still manages to be impressive, if not comprehensive.
May you have dreams of antique dentists prying out your molars with 100-year old antiseptic and anaesthetic technologies!
what’s a theodolite?
The transit theodolite is a surveying instrument which measures latitute, longitute, and altitude. There’s an old wooden one (~1840) in the collection of the mighty Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia. The theodite has been around in one form or another since the 1500s, and is still used today. Shown at left, a blinging bronze theodite courtesy the Antique Sextant.
We mention it not simply because it’s a neat word we’d never heard before (and has the prefix theo- without having anything to do with god), but as an example of the Powerhouse Museum’s online collection, which comes correct with user-generated and automated tags, similar objects and subjects (not to mention subjective and objective descriptions and tagging systems), and good use of the zoomify zooming software (a free and easy web imaging kit we’ve worked with before).
retrograde design
Patty is one of our favorite commenters. (Why aren’t you one of our favorite commenters? Maybe because you don’t comment? Please comment!) Weirdly enough we came home the other night to find her in our living room. We don’t normally encourage this from our commenters, but in this case it turns out she’s a friend and a colleague of our museum-employee roommate. So that’s cool. We didn’t even know we knew her (like knew knew her) and we were gonna post her blog anyway, so here it is: Retrograde Design. Keep it up, Patty. We hope you don’t mind if we steal some of your posts to bloat our own contnet. And don’t be a stranger.
open access
We like the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s website Dashboard. The fonts are large and it screams WEB 2.0 MOTHERUFUCKERS a bit too loudly, but we don’t see many other museums sharing info like this. We also like the prominent daily updates of open hours for the museum and gardens on the main site.
Seems there’s a whole interface design movement of business information dashboards. (dashboardspy)
amazon fail
This Easter, we celebrated not only the Zombie Jesus, but a bigoted retail exclusionary process by amazon.com. On Sunday, a supposed “glitch” somehow removed the sales rankings of hundreds of gay and lesbian books. This impacts sales ranks, which impacts listing and search results. You might think that all books with, say, the keyword ‘gay’ were removed, but a sample search over the weekend, for example, only showed titles which “prevent” or “heal” teh gay “affliction.” For twitter reaction, and a whole boat of links, just follow the hashtag #amazonfail.
Open Letter to Amazon Regarding Recent Policy Changes
Will Zombie Jesus rise again next year, or will we settle for a viewing of Return of the Living Dead?
library pr0n
Check these hot pixxx of stone cold smokin’ libraries all over the world. Yep, it’s “Red Hot and Filthy Library Smut“, brought to us by thenoist.com, featuring photos from the book Libraries by Candida Hofer.
They sum it up:
…one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. It’s like porn for book nerds. Seriously. They are gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered.
Enjoy!
