You are browsing the archives of 2009 August.

Advertising condoms is, by its very nature, a tricky business, since one has to ride a fine line between being too explicit in reference to sex, while also not being so oblique that people misunderstand what’s being sold. More than other condom companies, Durex has had a fun time playing with that line, deploying double [...]

As drought-prone areas experience some of the driest seasons on record ever, both the Southern and Northern hemispheres have witnessed some of the worst wildfires in years in 2009. This weekend a massive wildfire was knocking at Los Angeles’ gates, but California, the Northwest and even Alaska have been getting lit all summer, as have [...]

As children, we were often encouraged to play with our food, as doing so was seen as a way to promote creative thinking and unconventional use of materials and objects. There were french fry cabins, eggplant sunsets and, of course, the meatloaf locomotive, which we affectionately christened the “meatlocomotive.” The latter would fit nicely into [...]

Obviously, talk shows are generally a totally depthless and unexciting genre of television that pretty much never registers a blip on the old excitement-meter – all the planned and approved questions, teleprompted jokes, applause signs and elaborately choreographed “surprise” appearances. Every so often, though, a meticulously planned late evening’s programing can still go awry, as [...]

Let’s pretend for a minute that Nike doesn’t manage to pay its spokespersons more than their sports salaries and spend hundreds of millions because it pays a developing world labor force slave wages, and just enjoy the sheer visual splendor (and, often, musical complexity and sly humor) of their commercials. For instance, before perusing Complex’s [...]

There are so many terrific pop cultural robots to keep track of (funny ones, scary ones, utilitarian ones, oddly sexy ones, oddly human-seeming ones) that we’d really like some sort of encyclopedic chronicle of fictional robot types. Someone has designed the next best thing though, this design (available as a print or T-shirt) of 51 [...]

We’ve been listening to a lot of chiptune lately – you know, that genre of music created using video game audio technologies from the 80s that are capable of something like 60 different notes. We’ve especially been blasting delightful 8-bit versions of some of our favorite pop songs, and one of the most chiptuned artists, [...]

We just spent all night playing around with and printing the various signs, posters, magazine covers, tombstones, LOLCats, seals, stamps, etc. that can be generated using the great web apps covered in Mashable’s listicle of 13 Fantastic and Fun Image Generators. If we had to pick a favorite (we’d rather not) it would have to [...]

Admittedly, we may be on something of a pet- and dog-related list streak lately, but it’s damn near impossible not to make light of the ridiculous things proud pet-owners do to their best friends. The latest might be the most embarrassing (for the pet-owners, not the poor canine victims), something akin to extreme body modification [...]

We kind of have a thing for animated music videos, in that we think they combine two of the most pleasurable cultural artifacts of our time: cartoons and pop music. Of course, they don’t always have to be poppy, colorful and optimistic, as you’ll appreciate while perusing the entries in this listicle of 8 Beautiful [...]

Remember astronaut food? You know, those weird dried-out vacuum-packed foods they sell at science museums that are supposedly like the stuff astronauts in orbit have to eat? We always suspected these were actually designed as an early tactic for weeding out children with space travel aspirations who clearly weren’t up to the challenge. As in: [...]

Granted, the summer is basically over (we know, we know, so sad, right?), so checking out killer T-shirt designs isn’t exactly season appropriate anymore. On the other hand, right about now is when all those stylin’ Ts are going to go on sale, so we recommend perusing the sexy and stylish threads featured in Fishgun’s [...]

Every so often we wake up feeling pretty lousy, and nothing sounds more appealing than pulling on the absolute most functional item of clothing there is and slinking into the office and hiding behind a pile of press releases until we can drag ourselves back home again. Fortunately, we often resist this urge and simply [...]

Prepare to lose the rest of your day to a flood of obscure 80s hits and ensuing searches for the various bands’ virtually non-existent other songs with Gunaxin’s listicle of 35 One-Hit Wonders from the 80s. For instance, our favorite from the listicle, Italian New Wave group Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” (below) was just the best [...]

Call us huge video game snobs/product design nerds, but every time a new gaming system came out one of the things we were always most excited about was the controller design. After all, it tends to be the most iconic and creative-looking part of the system, and there’s something so seductive in the tactile object, [...]

We’ve long been fond of embarrassing pet costumes, although we’re starting to suspect that this interest says more about us than it does about the nutty owners who dress their domestic animals as other things. Nevertheless, the Web’s fondness for all things unicorn seemed to present the perfect foil to our love of pet costumes, [...]

Remember the way-back-when days when airlines and their employees were the coolest members of society? Pilots were like rich playboys and flight attendants their herem of sexily uniformed sky-babes, and they all partied high above our heads in floating discotheques. Let’s revisit those days before shoe-bomb scares, liquids in ziplocked bags, nutty fees and taxes [...]

As kids we had some killer cool lunch boxes. There was a Batman one for a little while in 5th grade that was totally hot. A couple years before we’d asserted our lunch box cool with a flashy red Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles number, but we eventually lost touch with our fans when we sported [...]

Exactly 140 years ago today, Cornelius Swarthout of Troy, New York patented the very first waffle iron. His was a simple model, which sat atop wood or gas ovens, and whose two cast iron plates were attached by a hinge. Though the mechanics of modern day waffle design are basically the same (except, you know, [...]

We can’t decide if the fact that co-stars in a summer blockbuster don’t even need to meet to film their scenes together nowadays is awesome of depressing. Despite your stance on how impoverished acting has become in the current era of spectacular visual effects, you’ve got to admit that our movies look more stunningly beautiful [...]