Archive for the ‘Furnishings and tools’ Category

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A custom-made eggcup

May 4, 2024

Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)

But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.

The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.

A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:


In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup

Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Movies and tv, Music, Puns, Technology | 5 Comments »

Lit up in Paris by amz

April 15, 2024

From Ned Deily, reporting from Paris on Facebook today, this shop sign, suggesting that amz is everywhere:


(#1) As you can see, this isn’t Arnold Melchior Zwicky, but Anne Marie Zahar, of LUMINAIRES DECO DESIGN ANNE-MARIE ZAHAR CRÉATION (website here); what she’s selling is lighting: a small number of high-concept (and expensive) floor lamps and ceiling lights

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Posted in Art, Design, Furnishings and tools | Leave a Comment »

Daffodil poem

February 16, 2024

I slept from 7:30 to 4:15 last night, with some of the most distressing grotesque dreams I’ve ever had in my life, awakening frequently with terrible muscle cramps. Eventually I turned the dream around to something life-affirming and pleasant, but I awoke dead-exhausted from the night, confused and bewildered, and with screamingly sore muscles all over my body (for the record: I have had no fever or other clinical signs of infection, and I test negative for COVID).

Not really able to face the day, I retreated to botanical art from the 19th century, as presented to me recently by the Sierra Club, in a set of five greeting cards with flower illustrations from The American Flora of 1840-1855; see yesterday’s posting “My wild valentine”, about the plate of the wildflower Potentilla atrosanguinea. Another plate from the Sierra Club set — this time for a garden flower, a daffodil — caught my eye and moved me to toss off a little poem leading up to the label on the American Flora plate:


(#1) A poem to the intriguingly named three-anthered rush daffodil

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and plants, My life, Names, Poetry, Taxonomic vs. common | 4 Comments »

Two exercises in cartoon understanding

November 9, 2023

From cartoonist Charlie Hankin in the 11/13/23 New Yorker (which has not yet arrived in my mailbox), a big black bird, a writer at his desk, and a penguin. And then today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with a geneticist reluctant to order fusilli at a restaurant, asking for linguine instead. The first one is pretty easy, so long as you recognize an American poet and his most famous subject. The second is more challenging, requiring that you know about both pasta and genetics, plus a concept that unites fusilli and DNA.

This is another Small Posting Through Pain (see my previous posting, on boletes), which will probably take me several hours to get through, because my poor fingers hurt like hell.

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Posted in Biology, Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Understanding comics | 6 Comments »

A remarkable table lamp

October 4, 2023

The generalization is that almost anything of the appropriate size can be used as the base of a table lamp, especially if it’s vertically oriented. If you happen to have a sculpture of the right size, or a piece of ceramic art, you could just display it as an art object, sitting around somewhere for admiration. Or you could put it to a good use as a lamp base, in which case it will be displayed right in the middle of things. And all sorts of art work has been exploited this way.

Suppose, more specifically, that you have scored a high-end sculpture in bronze by George Sellers — one of his insect sculptures, in particular a magnificent staghorn beetle cast in solid bronze, on a walnut base, which Sellers has made into a lamp base:


As reported on the 1stDibs site, where the lamp sold for $14,000

From the site:

Dallas based sculptor George Sellers studied in Italy, where he was trained in the traditional methods by a master carver. He creates seductively Gothic home furnishings and objets using plaster and bronze as his primary mediums. … large staghorn beetle sculpture table lamp cast in solid bronze on a walnut base, designed in a fine arts foundry using the lost-wax method of casting

The whole thing is 3 ft tall.

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and animals | Leave a Comment »

IIlusory penguins

July 27, 2023

From my regular correspondent Ellen Kaisse yesterday:

I was walking around the grounds of a nearby high school and saw these black and white creatures off in the distance.


(#1) [AMZ:] Are those penguins, advancing upon us?

I knew they had to be football training sleds (see picture below of the closest thing I could find on the web), but they sure looked like penguins. I immediately thought of you. [AMZ: notorious penguin fan that I am]


(#2) [AMZ:] Football training sleds; you charge into them (I have actually done this)

I think if you enlarge the picture [in #1], it will keep looking like penguins, at least up to a certain magnification.

There’s a little lesson in perception here. If, for whatever reason, you are primed to search out certain things in your visual field, you are likely to “see” your target in some of the wrong places, in visuals that merely resemble the thing that so engages your attention. Penguins are one of my totem animals; I live surrounded by images of penguins and simulacra of penguins, and friends keep giving me more; so I’m attuned to penguins in a way that few other people are, and am inclined to unconsciously seek them out. Through long association with me, Ellen Kaisse has picked up some of this inclination. (My daughter and grandchild and various other friends who have been supplying me with penguiniana over the years have similarly gotten attuned to the flightless birds.)

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my perceptual sensitivity to the letter Z, ’cause I’m a Z guy. That occasionally leads me to misidentify symbols that merely resemble Z, or to fix on certain forms of the capital letter S as if they were Zs. For me, Zs lurk everywhere. (I notice spoken /z/ in much the same way, especially in word-initial position.)

 

Posted in Furnishings and tools, My life, Penguins, Perception | Leave a Comment »

The dinner art installation

June 9, 2023

Assembled yesterday morning, on the teak coffee table in the living-room area of my condo, an art installation that doubles as a dinner-table setting. Some of the elements in this composition  are components of both the installation and the dinner setting; some are part of the installation only — or, some would argue, actually constitute a centerpiece for the dining table, in which case the whole thing is a dinner-table setting, but viewed either as artistic display or as dinnerware (think of Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, but with a lot more parts and with the stuff actually capable of serving its usual function.)

Photos (by Erick Barros):


(#1) View of the installation from the front


(#2) View of the installation from above

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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and food, My life, Penguins, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

Another new thing

June 4, 2023

On order via Amazon — and now, the tracker tells me, three stops from delivery to my house (along with a huge container of Tide free-and-gentle laundry pods, as I approach the end of the previous supply) — a new hand mirror, to replace the old one, with a long chip out of its rim from when a housecleaner dropped it some years ago, but, more significantly, with a thin handle that either had to be gripped (awkwardly) like a bat or held with thumb and forefinger (which, since the mirror itself was heavy, is now difficult for my disabled hands) — oh, it has now arrived, before I could finish this sentence! — I thank Emily Dickinson for my punctuation — and wow! it’s actually lighter than the old one.

But enough of this burbling; you want facts. And a picture. Like this:


With a 6.1″ diameter mirror (the company uses the all-caps TASALON as its name, but references to it often use Tasalon, which I find more congenial)

From Tasalon’s puffery on Amazon, seriously edited down, but still tending towards the manic:

— Unbreakable: Made of high-grade tempered glass, the glass mirror is firmly embedded in the plastic frame using ultrasonic technology, so it won’t break when dropping.

— Anti-slip design: There is a comfortable rubber grip on the handle to protect the mirror from falling off. The handle can be used for hanging on hook for easy shaving, showering and makeup.

— Durable and versatile: The unbreakable mirror is 5 times more durable than most glass mirrors on the market and won’t break when dropped, stepped on, pressed, vibrated.

For me, it’s mostly about the rubber grip, and then the light weight, which Tasalon doesn’t even mention. It has a place right by my desk chair, which is where most of my self-care goes on. (And lots of other stuff; I fold the laundry sitting down in that chair, for example — gotten pretty efficient at it, too. A benefit of practice: skills can be routinized and then performed smoothly without thought about the step-by-step process; and the skills can then then be honed, made more effective and more efficient.)

And now a break to take a walk around the block with my walker, on a beautiful warm day, in the safe interval between whizzes (which will sometimes stretch out a bit over 25 minutes if I am fully engaged in some activity). I’m wearing my PUT YOUR CLITICS IN SECOND POSITION t-shirt, which is what was on the top of the t-shirt pile; given the current political climate, I should probably change to something that’s flagrantly queer (like GAY AS FUCK, in big bold letters), but I’ll be lazy.

(I’m slowly working up to doing a posting for my man Jacques’s death day, today, but that’s hard rowing and right now I’ll just do the tiny tour of the neighborhood he loved so much.)

 

Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and the body, Language in advertising, My life | Leave a Comment »

Two household photos

May 29, 2023

Following up on earlier postings about additions to my domestic environment, which came with mumblings of getting pictures of these things (I have no way to take photos myself any more) — now fulfilled by Erick Barros and his phone.

First, the new photo gallery “Street Life”. Then, the new equipment in the kitchen: wheat straw bowls, mugs, and cups to add to the plates from an earlier order.

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Posted in Art, Color, Furnishings and tools, My life, Photography | 1 Comment »

The right angle knife

May 28, 2023

That’s the right-angle knife ‘the knife with a 90º angle (between handle and blade)’, not the right angle-knife ‘the correct knife with an angle’; hyphens can be your friends.

But right angle knife is what the ABLE-T company (more on them to come) calls one of its “affordable adaptive tools” that help to afford independent living to people with disabilities. Like me.

My right angle knife was a gift yesterday from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky; I field-tested it at dinner last night for slicing celery, and it’s truly wonderful. (I had simply abandoned slicing and chopping celery and carrots — I eat a lot of celery and carrots — because it had become too difficult and painful for my sad afflicted hands.)

[Linguist’s note: I don’t often get a chance to use transitive afford (to) ‘provide or supply (an opportunity or facility)’  (NOAD) — with an oblique object marked  by the preposition to — so it was a pleasure to deploy it above.]

The actual object:


(#1) I know this just looks preposterous, but you need to see it in use

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Posted in Argument structure, Furnishings and tools, My life, Punctuation, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

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