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Facebook, 1976

20 Apr

As mentioned in Design 3 this morning (just before Bob Barker, yo). Credit: How To Be A Retronaut, who also gave us Ikea Stonehenge.

Ikea Stonehenge

17 Feb

This just in from the “It’s a Rather Gloomy Day and I Need a Good Laugh” Department:

Ikea Stonehenge, from How to Be a Retronaut (be sure to check out their 1976 version of Facebook, while you’re there). I don’t know how many of my students have experienced the universally exasperating experience of assembling anything from Ikea (the closest locations are in Chicago and the Twin Cities), but if you’ve worked your way through one of Ikea’s picture-based instruction sheets–which are designed to make sense to all of Ikea’s international customers, regardless of the language spoken–you can see that this parody is right on.

I can’t resist quoting Spinal Tap (again, it is a dreary day):

In ancient times…
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people… the Druids

No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock… Of Stonehenge

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge! Where a man’s a man
And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan
Hey!

Turn it up to 11, all….

Catalog Living

30 Dec

Good news, Gary. Another couple has declined our New Year’s Eve invitation because our living room makes them seasick.

Meet Gary and Elaine, fictional occupants of the super glossy pages that arrive bound as catalogs in your mailbox. I needed a break from some tedious assembly work this morning (the 3-ring binder kind, sadly not anything that would appear in this resource I’m sharing), and Catalog Living came to my rescue, thanks to a reference heard on NPR last week. It is the creation of a Los Angeles writer & actor named Molly Erdman. I’m going to put it right up there with Regretsy, Cake Wrecks, and Unhappy Hipsters. I’ve drooled over catalogs since I was a girl, and the older I get, the more I realize that they portray an improbable–and sometimes irrational–world.