Slumberland

Well, this will only be interesting to those of a certain age who grew up in Seattle, I guess: the J.P. Patches Whirligig. Combining J.P. and the Hammering Man — I love it!

But speaking of J.P., his website now shows J.P. bobblehead dolls and action figures! EEEK! I have got to have these. Yep, I’m still a Patches Pal.

The Aurora Flower Shop is closing. I guess I’m not surprised — it’s been looking more and more run down. But I will miss it terribly. The elephant on their sign was a landmark that I always watched for as a child, and still today, though it is looking weatherbeaten these days.

My mom once told me that the elephant used to be closer to the ground, and she had friends who would climb it. (She went to junior high in the neighborhood.)

Anyway, the retiring shop owner says he doesn’t know what he will do with the elephant. I suggest the Museum of History and Industry, or maybe somewhere at Seattle Center.

Go Fug Yourself is a blog about celebrity fashion faux pas. Faux pases? Whatever. Tabloidy as it may be, I can’t resist seeing that celebrities can look as bad as I can, and the snark posted by Heather and Jessica, the site’s maintainers, makes it even better. The site’s been up since Spring, and I’m shocked I didn’t find it sooner.

Apparently EC disagrees with the anti-piracy warning on his own CDs. Still angry if no longer a young man — that’s one of the reasons I’m a fan of his.

OK, they are just cat pictures. But, dammit, they are really freaking neat. Check out those action shots. (Scroll down to see everything.)

Want to build a haunted house this year? The Halloween Technology Roadmap has all the information you could possibly want—sources for gargoyles, fake lightning, plasma lamps, and LED creature eyes; instructions for making your own black light fixtures and strobes; techniques for animating your zombies, and more—including lists of specific projects like the Slide Trombone of Doom, the Jeep from Hell, building corpses, and building giant spiders. Honestly, I can’t do justice to the amount of cool info for Halloween geeks there is on this page. Scroll down… then keep scrolling down… there is a lot here.