A house.

Like it?

"Chairs designed by architects for high-profile commissions increasingly are for sale in stores."

"They are often pricy, but the appeal is the chance to bring a slice of cutting-edge international design into your home."

Mentioned in the article are the Arne Jacobsen chairs that we sat in here. Identified in the comments as Arne Jacobsen chairs by Palladian.

Here's a great book: "The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design." (Hey! It has a new cover, and one of the chairs pictured on it is a chair I have. Cool! Not sure I'd call that a "chair" though. Or... yeah... it's a chair. A chair long.)

"You know, I have to admit that I look at the 46″ TV in my basement — which seemed huge a couple of years ago..."

"... and now I think 'Hmm, maybe a 60″ would be nice.' Is that wrong?"

It's not wrong, but have you ever noticed you can make the TV you already have bigger by just scooting your chair closer? Only get a bigger TV if you watch with enough other people to make it impossible or inappropriate to move your chair forward. But if you do want to buy a new TV, get a nice one. Go all out if you can and get something extravagant that just became available today. If you're watching alone or with one other person, and you want bigger, but you're thinking of getting a relatively ordinary but larger TV, may I suggest these?

"[T]he new Beach Garbage Hotel in Madrid, Spain, which was made entirely out of trash and constructed to draw attention to pollution in the world's oceans."

Looks great in the pictures. Not as a hotel.

"This is my little hourglass, and it has like over 5,000 little diamonds in it. And they're real."

A view from inside what Kimora Lee Simmons calls her "brain" — that is, her closet, her "satellite closet, a smaller version of the the mother ship."

***

Meade overhead me playing the video that's at the link, and asked, from across the big room, who it is...

Me: Kimora Lee Simmos.

Meade: Mara Liasson? NPR?

Which — you've got to watch the video — is really quite hilarious. Imagine Mara Liasson showing off her fancy shoes and handbags like that. But maybe the NPR folk actually do go home to posh mansions and wealth beyond belief.

Now, "go in peace, and be fabulous." That could be an NPR sign-off, don't you think?

Pink...

... bathrooms.

"It's not that I want to prevent someone from having a beverage, but there were mugs, Super-Slurpee kind of things with straws coming out."

The judge will have order.

[Judge Gene Gasiorkiewicz] bought two big boxes of custom-printed plastic travel mugs. The silver mugs have the scales of justice in black on two sides, with the words "RACINE CIRCUIT COURT BRANCH 2" printed

[He] paid about $300 for the roughly 100 mugs - all "made in the U.S. of A." - and said he will give every lawyer who comes before him their first mug free. If it gets lost, he said, the attorney's on the hook for the replacement.

"They can put whatever they want inside it," he said. "When it sits on the counsel table, it's
uniform."

It's good that a judge has a strong feeling for uniformity. It has something to do with being consistent and treating people as equals... doesn't it? In any case, people look totally unprofessional drinking from straws. In fact, I hate to see any adult drinking from a straw, and I loathe when a restaurant serves your water or other drink with a straw already stuck into it. Do you just go ahead and drink from the straw when that happens? Do you realize that the person you'rewith may see you as looking childish — as if you'd worn shorts out to dinner? When there's a straw in my drink, I have to take it out and put it on the table, not that I'm trying to punish the bus boy. But it's really those fat plastic straws that I hate. If a drink came with with 2 paper-wrapped paper straws, I'd be tempted to use them and perhaps drift off into all sorts of straw-prompted nostalgia. Oh... sorry. I'm ranting. But then, I never portrayed myself as a person with judicial temperament.

"I know Arianna doesn’t like it. But I like taupe."

Obama stands up to his critics in the press.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...

"President Barack Obama is helped by Vermont Governor Jim Douglas to move a couch in the Oval Office, Feb. 2, 2009. Governor Douglas met with the President about the economic recovery plan."

"Andre Jones and Richard Wise have a 700-gallon trank suspended from the ceiling of their West Village town house apartment."

"The filled tank weighs more than 6,000 pounds and has cost the couple some $200,000 in equipment and service."

How much would it cost to get rid of it? Because that's the calculation I'd do if I were buying that place.

Oh, here's the next picture. Caption:

Mr. Jones, left, and Mr. Wise sitting next to their suspended fish tank. "At night, we sit in the living room and sort of get lost in it, instead of the television set," Mr. Jones said of the tank.

I love the tagged-on  phrase "of the tank." Like there was ambiguity before. You might have thought they got lost in their living room. And I love the implication that this home Sea World makes them superior to peons who watch actual television. Because... why would that be? You can get a big flat screen TV and play a DVD of fish swimming. It looks pretty much like that fish tank these guys have. And you'll have at least $180,000 left to buy 60+ years of cable service.

Then there's this couple, the Wilzigs, who have an aquarium with a lighting device that allows them to choose any of 64 colors to reflect off the colorless fish inside. Posing with his wife on a white settee, Mr. Wilzig said:

"The whole essence of the house was to be push-button color-changing. The apotheosis of that was to take the fish themselves and have them be swimming in whatever color you want."

I was going to say this article should be blogged over at Stuff White People Like, and then I thought about how the Wilzigs, when they had their white friends over, could use their push buttons to make them any color they want. Come on! That would be the apotheosis.

(By the way, Mr. Wilzig looks like a character in one of Eric Bogosian's performance pieces.)

ADDED: "Trank"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Sixty Grit said, "There was a line in BttF2 about 'tranks' and other drug users. Or maybe they spelled it 'tranqs.' Do not know. But I think it is a city thing." Found!

(The police car arrives. The signs outside say "Hilldale - The Address Of Success" but have been altered to say "The Address Of Suckers". The car lands outside a house and the officers open the door.)

Reese: Hilldale. Nothing but a breeding ground for tranqs, lobos and zipheads.

Foley: Yeah, they ought to tear this whole place down.

(The officers press Jennifer's thumb to a panel next to the front door, and it opens.)

Voice: (v.o) Welcome home Jennifer.

(Jennifer is beginning to wake up.)

Jennifer: What?

Reese: You got a little tranked, but I think you can walk.

Well, it makes sense. The fish are presented as tranquilizers. So get a fish tank and get tanked. But that's so lowly. In NYC now, you can get a fish trank and get tranked!

Tiny houses.

You know I'm fascinated by them — check out the video at this link. But, as tiny houses go, isn't this one a tad twee?

Is the "shabby chic" trend coming back? Because I lived through that in the 1970s — and stayed clear of it myself — and it goes to a terrible place where you do not want to go.

ADDED: Ironically, in the the old post of mine (at the first link), I raised the question of the difference between living in a tiny house and living in a trailer, and in the new material (at the third link), the owner of the twee tiny house also lives in a trailer. The twee tiny house is kind of the woman's playhouse, and the main house really is a trailer. There's also a man who lives with her and he's got his own playhouse, so — don't worry — he's not de-balled by that little dollhouse. He retreats to his mancave, "a truck-size shed covered by an enormous tarp...  furnished with a big-screen TV, lots of videotapes, cooking equipment and two lamp-warmed cages for the chicks and pheasants." The husband is "a great bear of man." The woman "is 42, a size zero and wears pink wellies, black tights and a paint-spattered Irish knit sweater over a brown jersey." Oh, lord! The couples that get themselves written up in the New York Times!

"I used to think diversity was my best friend marrying a black guy."

"But the guy graduated from rich-kid private schools and has tenure at UCLA and, at this point, I think diversity is not skin color but rather social upbringing."

Writes Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist blogger, who married a farmer. The link post is actually about remodeling the farmhouse, or that's the factual context anyway. It's titled "How to cope with diversity." There's a list of 7 tips for coping with diversity, all explained in remodeling-the-farmhouse stories.

***

Here's a spoken-word performance that I love on the subject of home-remodeling: "Terrors of Pleasure," by Spalding Gray. God, I miss Spalding Gray.

And we missed Penelope Trunk, when she went almost a month without blogging after writing that post.

The NYT has an article about Mickey Kaus and his Senate campaign, but...

... it's in the "Fashion & Style" section.

Getting to a peek at his living conditions seems to be a big point of the piece:

...his two-bedroom apartment in the Venice neighborhood.... Ikea furniture buried under a flurry of political tomes, magazines, printouts, cellphone manuals, and two-year-old Christmas card photos starring his friends’ children. A red laptop balances on a stool. 

A stool or a DAVE?

A small TV sits on a table. In the kitchen, spilled coffee grounds share counter space with a spread of vitamins and nonalcoholic beer....

He offers his guest water in a disposable plastic cup (“I hate doing dishes,” he apologizes). 

There's stuff about his background — jumping from a law career into mainstream journalism and then to political blogging. But the campaign itself, per the NYT, is "quixotic" and "insane" with "grim" prospects. The writer, Janelle Brown, catches him complaining "I’m completely allergic to Washington, D.C. I was literally developing asthma." (He worked at The New Republic and lived in Washington before retreating to his homeland, California.) She needles him by pointing out that the Senate meets in Washington. He "grimaces" and backfills with "I’ll invest in a lot of air-purifying technology."

Then Brown makes one of the funniest gaffes ever in the NYT:

For a solitary blogger, Mickey Kaus is astonishingly social and well connected: It’s difficult to find a writer or politico in Los Angeles who hasn’t knocked boots (or opinions) with Mr. Kaus at a party....

That's a lot of sexual intercourse! (Glenn Reynolds has already pointed out this gaffe.)

We eventually get to his positions on the issues, and really, Mickey can't complain about this. When does a candidate with no chance at winning get written up in the NYT? They can't be covering the political positions of everyone who qualifies to be on the ballot, even in a big state. You have to go in by the "Style & Fashion" door.

Colors that affected us recently.

There was that acorn that made you want to repaint biggest room in the house...



There was this...



... which made me fantasize that I was a contestant on "Project Runway" and the challenge was to design a dress it inspired...

And this...



... which made me think of the old days when I painted with real paint on canvas. What was that red? Alizarin?

"[C]urio cases, taxidermy and other stylish clutter of the Victorian era have been taken up by young hipsters..."

Jeez, I never know what to believe when I'm reading about "hipsters" in the New York Times.

... he saw a young man dressed in a bowler, cape, breeches and knee socks on the Lower East Side.

“We’ve already seen the comeback of the butcher and the baker,” he said. “Next thing is going to be a hipster candlestick maker.”...

Country and city men alike have rediscovered old-school American brands like Filson, Orvis, L. L. Bean and Duluth Pack. Obsolete hobbies like wet-plate photography are finding new enthusiasts; long-outmoded farming practices are being revived. Even deer hunting with old-fashioned muzzleloaded rifles, which have to be loaded with gunpowder, a musket ball and a ramrod, has come back in force in some states.

When I read style pieces like this, the first thing I always think about is The Great Grunge Hoax of 1992. But then, I'm not a hipster. I'm a member of the tom-tom club.

Do you hate the dark, cold days that are upon us?

Or do you love the time inside, perhaps because you've got a great man cave?

Blight bulbs.

Howard M. Brandson sounds the alarm over our impending loss of incandescent lighting:

As a lighting designer with more than 50 years of experience, having designed more than 2,500 projects including the relighting of the Statue of Liberty, I encourage people who care about their lighting to contact their elected officials and urge them to re-evaluate our nation's energy legislation so that it serves people, not an energy-saving agenda.

I've been stockpiling incandescent bulbs, but I'm still uneasy. Last week, I walked through a beautiful Art Deco building lobby and hallway, where there were gorgeous bronze light fixtures that no longer glowed: The incandescent light bulbs had been replaced by fluorescents. The whole look of the interior was destroyed. I felt like crying. All of our rooms and lobbies and hallways are about to have the life sucked out of them, by a Congress that has no feeling for beauty and the effect of light on human emotions.

May they walk barefoot forever on a sidewalk paved with crushed CFLs.

"Man cave."

It's the July 23, 2009 Urban Word of the Day. Here's definition #1, with 831 up, 51 down votes:

A room, space, corner or area of a dwelling that is specifically reserved for a male person to be in a solitary condition, away from the rest of the household in order to work, play, involve himself in certain hobbies, activities without interuption. This area is usually decorated by the male that uses it without interferance from any female influence.

Definition #2 is similar. But watch out for Definitions #3 and 4, which have been strongly disapproved of by Urban Dictionary voters.

So do you have a man cave? Tell us about it. And I mean that in the Definition #1/2 sense. I know you've got one in the Definitions #3/4 sense, and you probably haven't got anything entertaining to say about it (unless you are Titus).

IN THE COMMENTS: Howard said:

Another depressing example of the continued sissification of America. Giving a special cute name to normal quiet behavior and/or a garage screams of estrogen.

If you have a garage band in that garage, you can call it Screams of Estrogen. And write a song called "Normal Quiet Behavior."

"William T. Georgis's panic room anticipated impending global catastrophe with a twirling disco ball..."

"... automatic weapons (reproductions, of course) and a Russ Meyer movie."

***

What's in your panic room?

AND: If you think you need to "'be your truest self' in bed," what's in your bedroom? Bales of hay?