WWD Co. Novelty Catalog

Never Underestimate the Value of a Paint Tube (Smithsonian)

Old punk flyers (tumblr)

Any baseball is beautiful (design observer)

Electric Banana- Masters of Psychedelic Art

Mug shot paintings by Mary Gibney

AMOK, the new album from Atoms for Peace  (Thom Yorke, Flea, joey Waronker, Mauro Refosco) is streaming in its entirety at the band's site.

A visual history of Corvette logos [part1] [part2]
(Via Core77)

Mars colony program lands first investors
Managing the selection process could prove challenging, as Mars One anticipates receiving hundreds of thousands of applications from people interested in becoming Mars colonists.

Mars One plans to launch a series of robotic missions between 2016 and 2020 that will build an outpost on the Red Planet. The first four astronauts will arrive in 2023, and more will touch down every two years after that. There are no plans to return these interplanetary pioneers to Earth.

Message in a binary bottle
Notes from game developers hidden in ROM, found later (sometimes much later) by curious fans armed with diasassemblers.

Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering (believermag)
Representations of value, or the unexpected double history of banking and the art world.

If Mars had oceans it would look like this (theatlantic)

Metal Robots - Compressorhead: Ace of Spades (youtube)

The full workout of all that may be some years further out, but the blowout will commence in 2013. The glue that held these markets together was faith that they meant something -- and that faith has been pissed away by fools in high places who drained all the honesty out of them. It was a classic case out of the Joseph Tainter playbook: diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants. In other words, borrowing a term from Taleb, they are hopelessly fragile. Any little vibration could reduce the whole creaking arrangement into a heap of rubble and ashes. There's plenty of vibration available out there. Events are humming.

James Howard Kunstler predicts 2013

The New York Knicks logo that should have been

Real hobbit house
Actually, this is rural Chester County, Pa., about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, where Vince Donovan lives. A lifelong fan of The Lord of the Rings, for the last 50 years he has been amassing an enormous collection of all things J.R.R. Tolkien. So much so, he hired an architect to design a house to contain it.

Mike Watt runs down every song on 'Double Nickles on the Dime'.  If you're a fan of the Minutemen, it's worth the read.

Amazing strobe-scupture from Gregory Barsamian.  Click on the sculpture link.

A critics case for critics who are actually critical (NYTimes Mag)
A couple weeks old, but a good read, as is the supplemental commentary from DesignObserver