lornamatic

When you take introductory design classes, you often hear a piece of advice: See the world as if through a child’s eyes.

It’s good enough advice, although maybe not so simple to do in practice. It’s so rare to see that actually happen, especially when it comes to the most simple concepts. Everyone knows what color is. Everyone sees color, every day. But how do you talk about color, really?

When was the last time you played with a superball? Up close, so close you could smell the rubber, feel the torn and scarred surface, holding the nervously contained material between your fingertips, just waiting to let loose and send it flying so high it might never land. And the colors, oh the colors: pure dayglow, or white, red and blue marbled plastic. My favorite was the clear plastic style with swirled pigment inside, the superballs that looked like they might be made out of glass, like a cat’s eye marble. Like something you should never, ever throw as hard as you can at top of the tallest cement staircase around, because it would shatter right away, but it doesn’t shatter… it bounces in enormous arc after arc, startlingly graceful. Hypnotic.

So why not unleash a superball at the top of the biggest cement staircase you can find? Why not film it? In fact, why not drop 100,000 superballs? In San Francisco, that’s even better than a staircase! Wouldn’t that make a great TV commercial?

Of course that’s a stupid idea. Superballs cost money, and they bounce all over, they are a pain to clean up. We’d have to block off an entire city block, or more. Someone would have to cover all the NO DUMPING LEADS TO BAY storm drains. What’s the point? We have sophisticated computer graphics, we can just CG the whole thing.

But when you see the world with a child’s eye, it’s clear there’s really only one way to do it. And they did it.

I can’t stop watching the new Sony Brevia ad. They just put the extended version online, and it’s truly gorgeous. I don’t know much about the TV they’re selling, but I can look at superballs bouncing pretty much all day long.

The ingenuity of man has been excercised for years past to add to the beauty, convenience, and attractiveness of bird houses. One quite pretty cage brought out a few years ago has a fish globe on top of the cage with a hollowed center, thus allowing the bird to come up into the dome, so that by looking through the fish globe it looks as if he were standing on a perch in the center of the water. These cages are not popular, however, as they are quite expensive, and the glass being of such peculiar shape it is liable to crack from variations in temperature. See illustration, page 4.

- from Feathered Pets, Chas. N. Page, 1898

I’ve been meaning to post this gem for a while, and the release of Bernd Brunner’s new book, The Ocean at Home, an Illustrated History of the Aquarium, gives me the perfect opportunity.

I wonder how many unfortunate Victorian-era canaries met their demise from a wet crash caused by an errant sunbeam. Thankfully, our generation benefits from space age polymer fish containment technology, and the canaries of the future will assuredly be safe from this dreadful fate.

I wonder how much it would cost to have the nice people at CASCO build one of these.