It wasn’t until after I filmed this that my boss mentioned to me that this particular hair dryer was designed by Dieter Weiss, not Dieter Rams. So I can’t tell influential designers apart, so what? My boss stays up all night bidding on old womens’ hairdryers and no one has anything to say about that?!
Tagged in: review
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Dieter
RamsWeiss Hairdryer Review -
From Me to You: Podcast Directory Favorites
Sometimes you have to take a break from all your Dutch Les’s and just sit down and listen to some good old fashion English. Here are some of my favorite free podcasts and internet radio channels.
♥ STEPHEN FRY’S PODGRAMS
Stephen Fry (purveyor of fine words and conversation, host of QI and various BBC Documentaries, and all-around fascinating chap) babbles enchantingly on for thirty minutes or so about this, that and the other.
♥ BEST WEEK EVER COMPLETE EPISODE PODCASTS
Subscribing to the the feed does mean filtering through all the mini-episode podcasts, so buyer beware when selecting “Get All” unless you want your iTunes to explode. For expats like me, BWE helps me keep up on what I secretly consider “news”.
♥ NPR MORNING EDITION
Although I typically listen to Morning Edition every day through the KCRW Simulcast channel on the iTunes “Public” radio stream (so that I can listen to the Los Angeles traffic report and remember simpler times), NPR also has a fairly reliable pop-up player that can play right from your browser.
♥ MUCKPOO’S AUTOMAGIC PODCAST
I know it’s my brother’s mix of music and we’re practically the Wonder Twins when it comes to music you can dance like a slut to, but his mix has Stevie Nicks on it.
♥ RICKY GERVAIS PODCAST FEATURING STEPHEN MERCHANT AND KARL PILKINGTON
Sure, this one is kind of old, but every now and again the boys will find the time to wrestle Karl down to the floor and kick a stupid man while he’s down.
♥ THIS AMERICAN LIFE
The bog-standard podcast, This American Life is the show that was meant for this medium. Each week, stories that feature a theme hosted by Ira Glass in anywhere from one to four parts.
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HEMA Eyelash Review – “Miss Helen’s Lovely Eyes”
To everyone’s surprise, HEMA does indeed sell fake eyelashes (not that the Dutchies need it, they are very good at growing things at length, except for cheese which they grow in a wheel). Along with the glue, you get some kind of eye prod that looks like it would be genius but sadly isn’t. We’ll talk more about that later. For €3.96 a set, I was only able to find 3 different flavors and an he eye prod I personally didn’t find very useful. As far as eye prods go, the new False Eyelash Applicator from the reigning king of false eyelashes seems to be the way to go. It may be fifty times more expensive than its competitor, but this Christmas, gouging yourself in the eye with a two dollar plastic stick probably won’t say “glamorous” as much as it does “hospital”. If I were you, I would go ahead and splurge on an instrument that can at least be sterilized, if you know what I’m saying.
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Hotel Marionettas
Puppet theater turned Melrose Place style bed and breakfast became my Barbie Dream House™ for five full days. A bed and breakfast about 8 blocks away from the main square and 4 blocks away in the other direction to supposedly the best tacos in town. I personally could marry and divorce time and again the tacos at the truck in front of Pasadena’s Nishikawa Auto Service for both the love I have for them and the hate I have for what they do to my butt.Four nights at Hotel Marionettas ran us $340, plus an extra $12 for beers, coffees, teas, and internet. That’s about how much I paid just to spend one night in a modern shoebox at the Hudson Hotel in NYC.
Instead we got a room with a king sized bed that had enough room for two people to open their luggage and walk around and even sit in a chair or two without bumping knees. The room itself was very large and airy with two-toned colored walls (cyan/sky blue) and vertical wooden windows that opened completely to let the breeze in. We only used the air conditioning at night, going for a dip in the pool whenever the humidty felt too unbearable. The bathroom like all bathrooms in Merida, had a room with a toilet separated by a the third shower wall, (the shower being a huge tiled box). I have preference for these kinds of bathrooms that are continuously tiled as they remind me of the bathrooms I grew up in Singapore.
This was the first hotel I have ever been where I have stayed on the grounds for over half of the vacation. Most hotels would commonly define “comfort” as a bed in a room with some free soap, but these people actually understand what the concept of that word actually to feels like in the environmental form.
I was in paradise up until the last night when a pair of white deviled children arrived with their father, who had decided to accent his Mexico look of a wife beater, cargo shorts, and gold chain necklace with only the tattoo on his left bicep (the Chinese character for Douchebag). My Chinese is rough at best, but I’ve learned how to recognize some symbols. Thankfully it was our last night, so Raoul (our trusty man of the night) fed us cervasas until it was time to siesta.
Sophie and Daniel Bosco (and Raoul) are at your service at Hotel Marionettas, Calle 29, Merida, Mexico. More pics of the hotel here.
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Nintendo
As a small shareholder of the company, I thought it was my fiscal responsibility to hit Nintendo first and make sure the company wasn’t going to eff up their 2006 Annual Report projections. My wandering aimlessly towards the booth had absolutely nothing to do with bright moving colors and shapes on the walls. It was pure, unadulterated greed.
Some exhibits went for the balls-to-the-wall 3D experience, but at Nintendo it was all about lines. Not the clean lines of the DS Lites that littered the demo halls or the neat line-art of the numerous Japanese cartoon games that they had coming out. It was more like the ridiculous Disneyland-esque lines of people trying to get to the coveted Nintendo Wii presentation or the irrational “Blue light Special” crowd around the New Super Mario Brothers demo.
I gave up on the line for the Wii after not being able to find the end of the line for (I kid you not) ten minutes. Apparently the line for the Wii demo was pretty unmovable for all 3 days. Ben was able to get into it on the last day, saying that it really was a pretty awesome console and a lot of people seemed to really enjoy playing it.
After licking my wounds, I decided not to be a punk and wait in the demo line for the New Super Mario Bros which, lo and behold, came with the gift of schwag:
A DS Lite case for all those who tried out the new game that comes out TODAY which happens to play exactly and as awesomely as the online demo. I’ll have review of the game in the weeks to come, I’m sure of it.Oh, and BTW, my stock has gone up $3.00 since the beginning of E3. Gee I wonder why.
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Playstation
Playstation was right next door to Nintendo and had a lot more bang for the buck exhibit wise with some really creative ideas for PSP demos. They included great photo-op stages in which people could play the PSP including subway cross sections, den room hallways, airplane aisles, etc.
As for the PS3 portion of the booth, well, that was significantly less impressive. Four rows of back to back demos of mostly the same games crowded their makeshift aisles. Those who couldn’t move around looked up for at a giant screen of trailers (with no actual game play) for some of the new games coming out for the Playstation 3. Those playing the demos were not playing them on PS3s, rather gigantic servers which Playstation acually thought was a good idea to show off through glass encasings.Playstation had an incredibly well-designed, inventive show but its lack of content was overwhelming. It was like when you do a double take on some one you thought was attractive, but on second glance you realize they really weren’t. It’s really quite depressing.
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My toaster can kick your microwave’s ass
You want to smell what the rock is cooking? If he had MY toaster, it would be lamb and mashed potatoes. Leftover Vietnamese imperial rolls that, yes, are not only warm, but as crispy as the day they left the deep fat fryer. My Panansoic “Happy Taste Box For You” toaster from Japantown kicks all ass. Forget light, medium, and dark, I am really not into racially profiling any of my foods. My mouth is not prejudice to deliciousness. It is, however, competely biased when it comes to Crappy Costco appliances that are utterly useless at microwaving, broiling, and cooking anything but those nasty tacquitos fat chicks in aprons are trying to foist on you while you’re picking up an industrial sized box of tampons (“No thank you, I would not like what looks like the cooked version of what I stick up my crotch for 5 days every month, but thank you!”).
You want to know what Costco Micro-Oven could do? It could make toast in no less than 20 minutes. It could explode soup from their pop-top cover in 25 seconds and still be cold. It could defrost the outside of my meats by searing the outside with intense heat and leaving the insides solid to the core. After countless dinners of steak pops and chicken noodle gazpacho, i threw down some mad cash for this toaster, and you know what, I love it.