Little Toy Robot

The Big Bento Box Of Unuseless Japanese Inventions sounds like a delightful book that no card-carrying absurdist should be without.

In Japan Kenji Kawakami is famous for his tireless promotion of Chindogu: the art of the unuseless idea. Meant to solve problems of modern life, these bizarre and logic-defying gadgets and gizmos are actually entirely impractical.

Addicts of the unuseless will love this collection of 200 Chindogu, including the Drymobile (your laundry dries as you drive), the Solar-Powered Torch (never runs low on batteries), Duster Slippers for Cats (now the most boring job around the house becomes hours of fun…for your cat!), Walk ‘n’ Wash Ankle-attachable Laundry Tanks (a perfect solution for the problems of inadequate exercise and hygiene), and many, many more…

[via LHB]

Related:

• Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist with an engineering background who stretched usefulness to its limit.
• The Center for the Public Domain has a little page called Patently Absurd, which shows what happens when inventions and their patents go wrong…

Yahoo Mindset: Fine-tune your search results along a “shopping-research” continuum. Still in beta, but I think all serious search engines will have this feature before long.

Soldiers of Christ: The recent Harper’s article, discussed at Orbis Quintus, is finally online.

The Word Nerds: A weekly podcast about language. Includes a recent show about baseball terminology. Ever think about how hard it is to describe baseball to someone who wasn’t born knowing how it’s played?

Mind Hacks: Blog for the interesting looking book. I just started reading Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, newly available in paperback.

1. Total number of books I’ve owned:

Four.

2. The last book I bought:

Chicken Soup for the Soul-less Robot.

3. The last book I read:

The Claw of the Concilator, by Gene Wolfe

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

Lanark, by Alasdair Gray
Star Wars, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Woodring Stover
Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls, by Bennett Madison
Ulysses, by James Joyce
In Viriconium, by M. John Harrison

5. Tag five people:

- Samuel Pepys
- Nick Denton
- Lawrence Lessig
- Seth Godin
- Scott Lapatine

Should we just rename ESPN the Yankees-Red Sox Channel? I know a lot of people watch this rivalry. Heck, it gets my blood boiling. But I’m an old man with a bad heart, so that’s not a good thing. I can only hear Rick Sutcliffe talk about Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball so much before I explode. Please, let’s get some hot Royals-Mariners action or something.

Thank you for listening.

1. The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you.
His name is Jeff, and he lives here.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.
According to iTunes, I have 2,560 songs, 6.6 days worth, coming in at 8.89 GB.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.
Actually these are all here.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.
“Time,” by Ben Folds. I don’t think this album is his best; it doesn’t have the humor or energy that his older recordings have. But damn he can sing a pretty song!

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)
Lately:
“I’ve Changed my Plea to Guilty” by Colin Meloy (Morrissey cover)
“I’ve Forgiven Jesus” by Morrissey
“Rael” by Petra Haden (Who cover)
“Everything I Try to Do Nothing Seems to Turn Out Right” by The Decemberists (catchy B-side of the “Billy Liar” single)
“Flesh & Bone” by Brendon Benson

6. The five people to whom you will ‘pass the musical baton’
Anyone.

Lint is a hilarious fake biography by Steve Aylett. (Good luck finding it: in my local Borders it was in the Sci-Fi section under “L.”) There’s more than a little Steve Aylett in Jeff Lint, an oddball writer of pulp and esoteric fiction as well as some comics and many (mostly rejected) film and tv scripts. But there’s also plenty of Philip K. Dick and Harry Stephen Keeler and god-knows-who-else in Lint. The good news is, even if the book is a roman-a-clef of post-WWII Science Fiction, it can be read and enjoyed on its own merits. Lint is portrayed as a character whose own life was art, an art that serves to baffle, irritate, obfuscate, and just plain subvert the world.

There’s some great Lint stuff online, such as this supplement on Fantastic Metropolis and the Lint Web site, which serves as a good introduction to the project:

Lint was the author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical pulp SF of the late 20th century. As well as writing satirical classics such as Jelly Result and Fanatique, he also created TV cartoon Catty and the Major and cult 70s comic The Caterer. Like his contemporary, Philip K Dick, he did not gain any widespread recognition until a movie adaptation of one of his stories (The Jarkman) appeared shortly after his death. He was the first person to steal Michael Moorcock’s ‘Multiverse’ idea and the first to point out to Jack Vance how unfortunate the title ‘Servants of the Wankh’ really was.

Update: Lint’s comics career is highlighted in this excerpt on The Alien Online.

The giant bee-people of Titan, documented by the pulp artist Frank R. Paul, look up to the sky in anticipation of a visitation from the Earthlings. “Where are the humans and their carbonated beverages?” they cry. And here I sit, too, wondering why we were never delivered to Titan, the glorious, colorful, if overwhelmingly phallic, moon of Saturn.

You know what? I’m pissed. You know why? Because the world has defaulted on its promise of the future.

For example, where is my robot guardian?!

I’ll be visiting the parents in Alabama this weekend. Keeping me company in the car will be the following four new CDs:

Cold Roses, by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals. I hope this doesn’t suck. I keep on buying Ryan Adams albums because there’s always a gem or two. His first solo album was so great, and so was his work with Whiskeytown. Maybe he peaked at 20 years old?

Songs for Silverman, by Ben Folds. Did you realize that the music genius behind William Shatner’s album also has a solo career? There’s a song on here called “Jesusland” and I can’t think of a more appropriate soundtrack for the trek from Georgia to Alabama.

Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out, by Petra Haden. An a capella reworking of the Who classic. I’m not a big Who fan but The Who Sell Out is among my favorite albums ever. (I wasn’t surprised to find it acknowledged as an influence on a more recent favorite, Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces.) Petra Haden is the daughter of jazz basist Charlie Haden and the newest member of the Decemberists (on violin and backing vocals), but she’s also something special by her own merits. Check this out.

Gimme Fiction, by Spoon. This man says it best.

It has been something of a joke that baseball’s “World Series” is really just a North American affair. The players may be coming from all over, but 29 out of 30 Major League teams are based in the U.S., and the one international entry is in exotic, faraway… Toronto.

So there has been talk for a while of a real soccer-style baseball World Cup. Now it looks as if there could really be one, called the “World Baseball Classic.”

Elsewhere, the news that Rickey “Peter Pan” Henderson has joined a Minor League team (the San Diego Surf Dawgs… I’m not making that up) in a new independent league in California and Arizona led me to the league’s Web site. Turns out that there will be a team called the Japan Samurai Bears featuring players from Japan (duh) that will play every game as the away team in America. You’d think the team could have a little more fun with their logo, but it’s an interesting experiment anyway.

I was absolutely speechless upon checking my ltr@littletoyrobot.com email address (I don’t check it every day because it’s mostly spam) to find that I was the recipient of a random act of kindness by Bill at Orbis Quintus. With no other way to say thanks, I thought I’d just point out how excellent his blog is. It’s a group blog with no fixed agenda: from what I can see, it’s put together by a group of friends in Louisiana with a diverse range of interests ranging from literature to science to current events.

I was also excited to find this post referencing Rhys Hughes’ A New Universal History of Infamy, a book that I just happened to edit!

I just read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson: A real solid thriller with an intriguing plot. A few things bothered me, such as the fact that the protagonist has the easiest job ever. But I forgot how good a writer Gibson is, and I didn’t feel abused and confused at the end of this book like I sometimes do after reading contemporary Science Fiction.

Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, the most anticipated album (for me) since the Decemberists’ Picaresque, comes out tomorrow (May 10).

I’m currently reading Gene Wolfe’s early Sci-Fi novel (well, collection of three related novellas) The Fifth Head of Cerberus. The first section is exceedingly excellent. I finally know what everyone else is talking about. Next up is Neuromancer, which I first read when I was 17 and didn’t get much out of.

I also recently subscribed to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, because why not? I’m trying to correct my bad habit of ignoring everything until it’s five years old.

This guy used steroids?

I’m glad this story came out. I had a very heated argument with my mommy during Spring Break, around the same time of the Congressional Hearings. I am for strict punishments for steroids users, since the sport has the right to set standards like these, but I am opposed to rewriting record books. Because where do you draw the line? Was the sport ever pure?

I’m not saying that Babe Ruth may have used steroids, even if they were around. He was fat and liked to eat hot dogs. I’m just saying that the news about House helps illustrate the fact that sometimes when we say things aren’t like they used to be, that they’re worse off than in the good old days, we’re whitewashing history. I’ve been reading Larceny and Old Leather, and it turns out baseball has always been full of liars and cheaters.

I have yet another completely fabricated disease, a malaise of the information age. Sometimes, when I have a free moment, I browse Amazon.com and add a lot of stuff to my shopping cart. I can’t even begin to tell you how much stuff. A lot. Then I order it.

I put it on my credit card.

It’s an Amazon.com Visa, so I get extra points towards an Amazon.com gift certificate when I use it. (This is called feeding the demon.)

I get a confirmation email.

Then I get guilty and go back and cancel my order. Because, really, did I need that stuff? And who knows how long it will take to get it. What’s wrong with just buying one book at a time, in person, or browsing a used bookstore? And also I like to be good with my money and not go into debt. So I just don’t need to do this.

Until the next time I have a free moment. And I wonder, “When is Lint coming out?” And “I wonder what other people who read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency are shopping for…” And the eternal cycle begins again.

Related link: My Wishlist. You know, you could spare me the burden of my pain by just buying me stuff.

Kung Fu Hustle (movie) - Very funny. I liked it.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (movie) - Moderately funny but still quite enjoyable.

Freaks & Geeks (tv show) - Why did this show get cancelled? It was great.

I’ve decided I’m feeling Science Fictional, so that might color my May reading. April was kind of a metaphysical detection month, capped by readings of The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. In the middle I read a lot. Some good, like Patrick Suskind’s Perfume. Some bad, like Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War.