"A snake charmer, a wine buff and a welder go into a bar - the rest is history." So cool, the chain wine bottle holder.

"The animated story of one man's epic journey, created entirely from public domain symbols. In other words, an airport story told in the language of airport infographics." Airport.

We love flipping through books with Grain Edit. Today it's the fab 1967 Design Coordination and Corporate Image by FHK Henrion and Alan Parkin.

Our Field Notes Brand is mighty proud to share the stage with a fearsome T-Rex for Day 47 of the 365 Toy Project.

Fri. Sep 5th, 2008 @ 8:45am - 12:30pm SCORE Chicago, Counselors to Americas Small Business Score Chicago, CITIBANK CENTER Address: 500 West Madison Street, Suite 1250, Chicago Fee: $ 40 Pre-Paid online; $ 50 At the door click link to register Marketing is vital throughout a business to give you direction, to help you to set goals/objectives [...]

Labor Day recently passed. That means you may have received a shared photo album from a friend or relative. You know the type: It’s usually dozens (or hundreds) of shots of vacation fun.But you’re not into it. Now, it’s not that you don’t care; It’s fun to peek in and see what happened. But who wants to sort through a glut of 200 photos of someone else’s vacation (or baby photos or whatever)? What actually happens: You wind up deleting the email with the link and don’t even bother seeing any of t

"I've seen the yellow eyes of an animal when it thinks it's going to bum-rush my property and take a leak on everything I hold precious." Eric Spitznagel is a Field Tester. Read his and all the other reviews online, or better yet, please buy the book.

An interview with author and occasional co-conspirator Dan Pink for Melissa Pierce's film Life In Perpetual Beta,Elegant Design For Your Whole New Mind.

The photography of Tod Seelie.

A different sort of Friday Drink Link, the Scotch and Soda peacoat.

Gorgeous work from photographer Bill Steber.

"The Wrong Door is a new sketch show set in a parallel universe where the special effects you see in the movies and on TV are part of everyday life." Get a sneak peak at the new BBC show here.

So you know, 15 strange moments in anti-theft inspiration.

PingMag talks to designer Tom Hingston about visualizing music.

Eric Etheridge's Breach of Peace. Mugshots of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders set against current photos and interviews. Heroic.

"If you can get Morgan Freeman's and Ashley Judd's heads floating together, God help you." An interview with the designer behind Hollywood's most famous floating head movie posters.

A Friday Drink Link and the song/video of the moment: Dancing, by The Walking Man.

Jones Day v. BlockShopper.com, No. 08 C 4572, Order (N.D. Ill. Aug. 18, 2008) (Darrah, J.).*Judge Darrah entered the parties stipulated temporary restraining order ("TRO").  Plaintiff Jones Day sued defendants, BlockShopper.com and two individuals allegedly associated with the website, for allegedly using plaintiff’s service marks and linking to plaintiff’s website in at least two articles that discuss Chicago real estate transactions of plaintiff’s associates. Plaintiff claimed service mark infr

Over at the official Ruby on Rails blog, DHH is asking people to share their Rails stories. Okay, here's mine. I can actually date this with some precision because I have an email that I sent to my tech-book agent Feb 11, 2005. She was asking me if I had any ideas for books to pitch. I [...]

Trailer for Milk.

magCulture on OK Collections, a sweet, new magazine from The Netherlands that would be perfect in the MoOM Museum Shop, if there was such a thing.

New: order anything we sell using coupon code "WILLCALL" and pick it up here at the studio.

The details are just coming out. They're embarrassing. They're lurid. They could derail the entire Republican ticket, or just win it fans among the sports-radio set. Evidence exists of the time when John McCain's vice-presidential pick was.... ... a TV sportscaster. And she had 1980s hair.... in the 1980s! Here's the clip, now on YouTube (this shorter one replace the original, four-minute-plus one that I first found, but that was apparently taken down). What's striking about it is not just...

Ugly Overload. MS, don't scroll down too far or you'll see the Stowaway Spider and won't be able to sleep tonight.

Damn. Well, there's only one thing to do when one of your favorite sites stops publishing. Link up one of the many entries that made them a favorite. Red Hot and Filthy Library Smut.

Modernism in Australia.

Blawg Review #175 is up at Jamie Spencer's Austin DWI Lawyer (another LexBlog site) -- click here to read the Review.  Fitting with Ed.'s sense of humor, a DWI lawyer was chosen to host the Labor Day Review, instead of a more traditional pick, like a labor lawyer.  Of course, there are lots of interesting DWI posts, and a few good IP links.  Spencer links to Victoria Pynchon's post at the IP ADR Blog about the arrest of a blogger who posted new Guns N' Roses tracks before the group released its n

"Slight poverty is what drives music forward. It only works if you're in the red." The Futility Of Flogging Music. A great read, but probably not an easy one for struggling musicians to get through. Via I Like.

Kieran Clayton writes, "I saw this music video based on "The Droste Effect" and after two minutes, I had to pause and wrap my head in a cold towel."

Awesome paper sculptures by Zoe Bradley. Via d*s.

THE, a quarterly magazine from The Future Laboratory.

Friday. Liverpool. Giant spider.

Remodelista's roundup of Architect-Designed Flatware.

Fast takes on Web news: 1 The FBI arrests a blogger for putting leaked songs from Guns N' Roses' very-long-awaited "Chinese Democracy" LP on his blog. The hard part wasn't getting the songs; it was transferring them to MP3 format from the wax cylinders they were recorded on. 2 A new Web site, HowManyofMe.com, tells you the number of people in the United States who share your name. You can feel pretty insignificant as one of 9,659 Steven Johnsons, for instance, until you discover that there are...

A common request we get from readers is to describe in more detail how our server infrastructure is setup. That question is so incredibly broad that it’s hard to answer it in any kind of comprehensive way, so I’m not going to try to. Instead, I’m keeping the general desire for more technical details in mind as I work through day-to-day issues with our configuration, and I’ll try to occasionally write about things that I think might be of interest. The topic for today is HAproxy. HAproxy is a

Activist, poet, and musician Saul Williams is catching gruff from fans for allowing Nike to use his song “List of Demands” in commercials.Williams wrote an open letter defending the use of the song.I received a lot of questions from some about why I would allow my song ‘List of Demands’ to be used in a Nike campaign. Ironically, half of the people now reading this post never heard of me until that commercial aired. That, indeed, was one of my reasons for allowing it. A small circle of poets and c

Far out, sunglasses from the sixties and seventies.

"Let's extensively raise goats in all families!" North Korean Propaganda posters.

Song and video of the moment. Raquel Welch sings Bang Bang. Via PCL.

Page Two was redecorated this morning.

"Every two months, urban outfitters invites artists to make an installation for a set of windows that face the institute of contemporary art in philadelphia, pa. this weekend we installed our piece and are ready to launch our new project: your message here." So, leave your message here.

Trailer for I Served the King of England and a review.

The Shining (with robots). Silly, but fun. Thanks Mike.

"I listen to Johnny breathing beside me and feel a cloying terror. Not because of Johnny's capability for violence, but because he is reading the book manuscript I wrote about him." Lori Andrews is a Field Tester. Read all the reviews online or better yet, buy the book.

"I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill and I'm sitting here on ..." If you can finish that sentence, you may be ready to take the Schoolhouse Rock Anti-Trivia quiz.

So you know, the 100 oldest companies in the world.

The always stable GyroBike, sort of like a Segway bicycle. Via Arbroath.

The awesome Gallery of Pocket Protectors goes straight into the MoOM. Via ISO50.

So adorable, Creatures from a Square.

My car is so boring in comparison.

I've been an iPhone 3G owner for about six weeks now - six weeks of love, loathing, cool apps and connectivity problems. Rather than complain about poor network coverage, though, I'd like to delve into some of the vexing usability problems that hamper the phone's user experience. No ability disable autocorrect completely Like pretty much every autocorrect [...]

Steven Heller on Paul Rand's can.

100 year forecast.

Love this salt and pepper set.

Cute as a button! Not sure if that has been said about a car before.

Vogue's recent fashion shoot on location in India, where impoverished members of society model Fendi and Hermès, has predictably provoked a lot of debate.

Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell have made the Citizen Kane of Fantasy Football movies called 10 Yards and you can download it free. Hunter also signed on recently as an Executive Producer on our over-time and over-budget film project 72° which may help since he seems to actually get movies finished.

Song and video of the moment, The Wave Pictures Just Like A Drummer.

Geff Hinds has just sent in his Field-Tested Books entry about reading The Haunting of Hill House in his sister's house near a state facility for the mentally ill. Have your own memory of "a certain book in a certain place?" Send it in!

Oldie but so very much a goodie, 300 love letters.

Funny graffiti from the abandoned Michael Reese Hospital makes good use of a morbid old quote often attributed to either Tom Waits or Woody Allen, regularly used on gravestones, and even the inspiration for this great book.

Noted without comment, an exploding banana mask.

Hunting the 62mph Autobahn Skateboarder.

Nakki Goranin talks to Smithsonian Magazine about the once ubiquitous photobooth and about her new book, American Photobooth.

Flash technology has gone a long way from simple vector animations. Today it has support for video and audio, 3d rendering and interaction, all kinds of advanced data visualization libraries, great components of all shapes, sizes and purposes. What caught my eye lately is that there is a lot of 2D and 3D Physics engines being added to the list.

Training and marketing as taxes “Training is a tax you pay for a lousy hiring environment…Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.” -Robert Stephens of Geek Squad in A Geek’s Guide to Great ServiceComplex UIs “Why do software designers want their work to appear more complex instead of less? I just don’t get why they don’t get it.” -David Pogue in It’s the Software, Not YouChoosing between safety and risk “Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for

So you're at the typical baby shower, silly games, finger sandwiches, oohing and ahhing over all the precious gifts. Set your gift apart and keep it real with what could be the coolest onesie ever.

Related again. Solid copy writing is important but it ain't the only thing. Ahem. Helmut Krone. The Book.

The most compelling tv spots are always the most direct ones. Like this American classic and this Dutch one, both of the same era, for the same product.

Gone. Touching 3D animation by Bard Edlund. Via The Cartoonist.

Related to the last. "But we'd rather be less efficient and better. Instead of just efficient and not as good." Everything you need to know about how to write advertising copy can be found in these vintage Doyle Dane Bernbach print ads for Karmann Ghia.

When things get tough, you gotta ask yourself, WWBD?

Fab collection of graphic design books.

So you know, the biggest and heaviest tanks in history.

Alex Steinweiss album covers.

Gorgeous, the LUM lighting collection.

Forever and ever.

Funky and very cool photography by Jeffrey Vanhoutte.

Related to the last. Aren't they an attractive family?

Order anything we sell using coupon code "WILLCALL" and pick it up here from Jen at 400 North May Street.

Miyano Machinery USA, Inc. v. MiyanoHitec Machinery, Inc., No. 08 C 526, 2008 WL 236610 (N.D. Ill. Jun. 6, 2008) (Nolan, Mag. J.).Judge Nolan granted plaintiff’s motion to quash defendants’ subpoenas of plaintiff’s counsel – who represented: 1) plaintiffs and perhaps individual defendants in plaintiffs’ earlier trademark prosecution; and 2) plaintiffs in this case. The Court denied defendants’ motions to compel production of communications between plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ counsel and to pierce

Midtronics, Inc. v. Aurora Performance Prods. LLC, No. 06 C 3917, 2008 WL 2745941, (N.D. Ill., Jul. 11, 2008) (Shadur, Sen. J.).Judge Shadur construed the disputed terms of plaintiffs’ electronic battery tester patent. The patent taught a form of “dynamic” battery testing and each disputed term revolved around the meaning of “dynamic.” The Court adopted plaintiffs’ definition – varying over time – without limiting dynamic to require an AC current (a current that varies regularly over time). The C

For fellow Battlestar geeks, Tigh/Roslin 08.

Badasa v. Mukasey, — F.3d —, 2008 WL 3981817 (8th Cir. Aug. 29, 2008) Illegal alien Badasa sought asylum in the United States. To establish her identity, she submitted to the Immigration Judge a “laissez-passer” issued by the Ethiopian government. Opposing the application for asylum, the Department of Homeland Security submitted a number of items, including [...]

Red Band trailer for Kevin Smith's latest Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

So I downloaded Google Chrome, the new (beta!) browser from the people who brought us Google Answers and, um, some search engine. Early review: looks nice, especially if you like baby blue, but I'd like it a lot better if I were able to use it to browse the Internet. Put another way, it's the perfect browser if you don't want to blow a lot of time surfing the Web. It seemed to install just fine, but here's how my experience trying to call up Web sites went (click on these for detail): . . . . ...

Pablo Corral wrote me an email after I posted this tweet about managing on-again-off-again side projects.I’m very curious about how to use Backpack to have a better experience on braindumps for side projects.I switch a lot, and my side project sometimes is off for many days, and some weeks. Can you explain more about this?It’s hard to find steady uninterrupted time for software side projects. Maybe you only have time on weekends or the occasional free night for your project, and sometimes weeks o

Posted without comment: JetAngel, advertising using branded, decommissioned military aircraft, or rather, "Turning on the afterburners on advertisement!"

Sweet, the Slink chair.

Afternoon project for BB and MS, create a Harry Potter avatar.

Tommy Penton's brilliant illustrated walk in book form, Tate to Tate. More on the CR Blog. Via Ace Jet 170.

So you know. We have an slot open for September in The Deck, our ad network for reaching web, design & creative professionals.

Cha-Ching. Just got what is now my favorite tee in the mail.

A great documentary / interview with Saul Bass: Bass on Titles.

See the word, pick the color.

Interesting photographic notes from the field from the crew making the upcoming documentary about surfing in the Middle East, God Went Surfing With the Devil.

Stair porn, totally SFW.

For BB: Metallica channels Sam Bayer's Wake Me Up When September Ends by making their own pretentious war-themed music video.