Year: 2005

     I’ve lately gotten into the bad habit of drawing faces on each milk jug I come across, as seen below.

     I was taking a picture of my latest effort in his natural environment (The fridge) when it occurred to me that there should be somewhere online where people can share images of the insides of their refridgerators (a la MTV’s Cribs), JUST BECAUSE. Then I realized that someone smarter, stronger, and faster than me had probably already started such a group on Flickr, and I was right. There are, in fact, two distinct groupings of this variety: whatsinyourfridge, and whatsinmyfridge. Here’s mine (Click the image for a larger, ‘Nosy Neighbor’-sized version):

     Now, should you feel the compulsive need to add faces to Milk Jugs as I do, I encourage you to upload photos of your creations to Flickr tagged with ‘Milkjughead.’ The world would be a better place if you did.

     After reading this Ask Metafilter thread about life-altering experiences in childhood, I was reminded of the first book I was ever able to read on my own – or more specifically, the book I was perusing when the entire process of reading finally ‘clicked’ for me.

     It was “Look Out For Pirates,” volume #22 in the Random House Beginner Books collection, originally published in 1961. I searched Amazon to see if it was still available, and found this page – filled with comments recommending that it be reprinted for both nostalgic and educational purposes.

     As I recall, we had it checked out from the library for so long that we eventually had to buy it. I’m amazed I still remember this, so I’m curious if other people remember the first book they were able to read on their own. Post in the comments if you can.

     This one requires more explaining than the others, as it ended up being a ‘failure’ in some respects. Having exhausted my supply of nerdy reading material on automated music machines in early 2004, I moved on to reading / learning about rudimentary animation technology, since knowledge of praxiniscopes and the like is in such high demand in today’s job market.

     As Christmastime rolled around, I set out to combine a praxinoscope / phenakistoscope (sometimes spelled with an ‘i’) hybrid with the faux ‘music box’ concept I had constructed the previous year. The first step was to find something to animate. I ended up using frames from an old phenakistiscope disc that I found here. If all went according to plan, the animation should look like the image below:

     I divided the CD face up into 12 equal wedges in Illustrator and dropped each frame of the animation into a wedge. I ended up with a pretty decent recreation of the Phenakistiscope disc. Animating this disc required devising a way to construct a 12-sided, reflective cylinder. I tried several different methods, and what I finally ended up doing was getting some reflective cardstock and folding the cylinder together from a template I cooked up in Illustrator.

     In theory, the reflective surfaces on the 12-sided cylinder in the center of the photo below should reflect each frame of animation as it rotates. In the end, it never really came together as well as I wanted it to. The animation sort of works, but the seam in the cylinder disrupts everything. If, for some reason, you share these bizarre interests and would like to make an attempt at smoother animation, I’ve included .pdf files containg my template for the 12-sided cylinder and the CD Label below. You’ll be relieved to learn that this concludes the ‘Out-of-Season XMAS Crafts’ portion of our broadcast.

Music Box – “Caroline” (Harry Nilsson)
From: My Diningroom Table

     Yet another in a long series of ridiculously packaged mix CD’s. Check out the three-tiered pop-up text! NERD.