Customize Your Cups

At Baked By Melissa, you can customize your own cupcakes. And order them. 
And then eat them.

Wot's All Dis Den?

Are you looking for something original and cute from the UK? You have found it (or I have found it for you). It's Tatty Devine, art jewelry from England that offers such things as a Crisp Necklace (left). We call them "potato chips" - oh, diversity!

Other cool stuff I like from Tatty:

Cartoon Eyes Rings

Price Ticket Pin

Volume Brooch

Cheerio! Hey, they should make a Cheerio necklace. Get on that.

Pop Art

I work at a balloon company, and I've seen a bunch of things made from balloons (a good number of them kind of shitty) but this guy is a NYC artist that does really amazing stuff. Jason Hackenwerth

Karim of the Crop

Here's an industrial designer I really like, Karim Rashid.

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn

This is the Maison Moschino located in Milan, Italy. It has themed rooms such as Alice's Room, The Forest, Sweet Room and Little Red Riding Hood. I've stayed at a theme motel before, but I imagine The Fort Motel in Shartlesville, PA was much more reasonably priced; featuring a Jungle Room, Circus Room and Dog Room. (I stayed in the Dog Room! No pictures available!)

A theme hotel I would like to visit someday is The Madonna Inn, a famous tacky hotel with many many themes in San Luis Obispo, California. Here is the Room Features Grid showing you what exactly is available (the pic above is the Sugar & Spice room). It reminds me of The Gobbler in Wisconsin, a hotel shaped to resemble a turkey for some reason, that no longer exists but can be viewed postmortem at the link. I recall staying in a Caboose Motel when I was in PA as a kid in the 70's, and the only clear memory I have is of the TV in the potbelly stove turning on when the light switch was on and there was no way to turn it off independently.

On a trip in 2006 I went to South of the Border in Dillon, South Carolina. I did not stay in the motel there, and I was curious about the Honeymoon Suite with the Sombrero Bed. It no longer exists, as they are updating and renovating. I hope they don't ruin too much of SOB because it's SUPER! If you love this kind of stuff it's worth a trip.

Wanna Shop for Pop?

There is a store in Lee, Massachusetts in the Berkshire Mountains that does not have a web site or an eBay store. I happened upon it by chance while driving aimlessly around and immediately did a u-turn to check it out. It's The Retro Pop Shop and it's run by an affable, Jim-Gaffigan/John C. Reillyesque fellow named Pierre who is in it just for fun, which is why he doesn't concern himself with Internet sites and online auctions. Requests are written in an old notebook. Things are cataloged by hand. If you make a reasonable offer, Pierre will probably take it. It's located at 395 Laurel Street, and you cannot miss it wih the bright colors and cool signs. I think my favorite piece in the whole place is the giant McDonald's M that was found in a warehouse somewhere.

Pictures used are from hotrodonline.com because those pics are better than the ones I took.

Ye Olde Tymey Stuffe!

Do you like retro food packaging and adverts? You DO?!?! Me too! Dude. Check out these Flickr sets from Dan Goodsell, of whom I have been a fan for many years, and Jason Liebig, who has some really cool shit also. Cookies and candy and soap and toys and really fantastic graphic design, and sometimes really awful design.

Model Girl

This is Filippa Smeds, a model from Stockholm, Sweden. Usually I am not a fan of models per se, but this girl is also a stylist on photo shoots and a fashion editor at Radar Magazine, as well as being just amazingly gorgeous. She and her incredible (natural!) red hair seem to have this life of photo shoots, wearing short skirts and European boots, drinking with beautiful friends and lounging around in a tangle of arms and legs and hair, smoking. Those Swedish kids smoke like crazy.

Oh That's Wacky!

My love of 1970's Wall SuperGraphics led me to this site, which make GIANT STICKERS of 1970's Wacky Packs for your walls. Now granted, it would take someone of odd character and a love for tackiness to plaster these in their house or office. Which is why I ordered a dozen.

Art Underground

Here is a map of all of the artwork that can be seen in the

NYC Subway system.

If You Cant Take the Cute, Stay Outta the Kitschen

This is the cover of Seventeen magazine in 1966, the year I was born.

And this is a refurbished dressing table by Casper James. Check out his Flickr account which is chock-full of amazing eye candy and rooms I would like to live in.

Alice in Old-Maidland

Ann B. Davis was born in 1926. When the Brady Bunch started it was 1969, so she was 43. The show ran until she was 48. In those days your 40's were super-old. Alice had grey hair, frumpy clothing and a bad back. She often made "jokes" about not being married yet, and for some reason pined over that dullard Sam the Butcher. She once went out with a creepy scam man that wanted her money. For these dates she slipped on hideous 1960's grandma-going-to-church dresses and poufed up her greying hair into some sort of Aunt Bea-hive. Here is Alice at age 45 on a date with the swindler, as seen next to Julianna Margulies, Demi Moore and Salma Hayek who are 43, 45 and 43 respectively.

Actually Good T-Shirts

There are so many crapass t-shirt stores out there, and so many dated, uninspired, stupid and oh-so-ironic designs that it's distressing (like those worn-out tees we wore five years ago!) But there is a light: three sites I will share with you now for cool t-shirts that are original, weird and nerdy. Wire And Twine feature sciencey stuff often sported by Chris Hardwick of G4's Web Soup and AOTS fame. TopatoCo has bazillions of different designers including stuff for Maximum Fun, home of The Sound of Young America and Jordan, Jesse, GO! And Glarkware is affiliated with Television Without Pity and cleverly gives you TV-inspired shirts without actually mentioning the shows, so there are no copyright issues and you have to "get" it, in order to get it.

Sit on the Food, Play with the Furniture

From the site jellio.com comes some very cool furniture made from toys and in the likeness of foods. Witness! The Ice Cream Sandwich Bench, the Gummi Bear Chandelier, Slider Game Wall Art and Cupcake Seat! Very expensive, but very awesome.