Sdtrk: ‘Ice age’ by Joy division

So yeah! Fellow iDollators Wanda, the RealDoll Doctor, and I have put in an appearance in the printed press yet again. Yes, again!

It may look like a fake magazine cover,
but no, it’s real

The article, ‘Love Dolls’ by Brittany Douziech, was conducted with us all via electrode mail a couple of months ago, and the end product is actually rather inoffensive!
If you’re ever wandering aimlessly on the California State University Northridge campus anytime soon, grab a copy; it’s the Spring/Summer 2006 issue. There’s an online version of Scene Magazine, but as of this writing, the site’s desperately under construction. Hrm. One would assume it’s a work in progress..

Also, I’m currently being interviewed by a reporter lass working on a RealDoll-related article for publication in, of all places, the United Arab Emirates. Who’d have guessed?

Sdtrk: ‘Thank your lucky stars’ by whitehouse

Normally I don’t do requests (unless, of course, there are delicious Synthetiks involved), but SafeT has been exhorting me to do a ‘This was the Future’ segment on the Millenium Dome. Well, you get what you pay for, mate.

pic taken from here, cos it’s funnier

The O2, formerly known as the Millennium Dome, is a large dome shaped building on the Greenwich peninsula in east London, the United Kingdom, at grid reference TQ391801. [..]

The dome was constructed in order to hold a major exhibition celebrating the beginning of the 3rd millenium. This exhibition opened to the public on January 1, 2000 and ran until December 31, 2000; however the project and exhibition was the subject of considerable political controversy and never quite achieved its objectives. [..]

The O2 is now normally closed. The failure of the project to match the hype became and remains a continuing embarrassment to the Labour government. It is still of interest to the press, the government’s difficulties in disposing of the Dome being the subject of much critical comment. The amount spent on maintaining the closed building has also been criticised. Some reports indicated the Dome was costing £1 million per month to maintain during 2001, but the government claimed these were exaggerations.
ta very much to Wikipedia

Also, it’s ugly. It looks as if someone placed a big white tarp onto the earth, draping it over those yellow towers, hoping the towers would support the tarp much like a big top, but the tarp was too heavy, and the towers ripped through. It resembles a.. errm.. huh. I don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at. It’s overly-vast, ill-designed, and ridiculous looking. Summation: dull, boring, corporate-designed ‘modern art’. Ugh.

Looking at the Dome makes me alternately sleepy, or angry. Which will it be today?

Sdtrk: ‘It is narrow here’ by Eric Zann

For this action-packed installment of ‘This was the Future’, I’d been scouring various World’s Fairs-related sites for a decent candidate. The problem I run across with going through assorted World’s Fairs is that there are sometimes far too many fab-looking structures, and it’s simply impossible to choose just one. It’s bad enough attempting to select a single exposition to write on, let alone a single building in that selection, so you end up with entries such as the one I did for the Osaka World Expo 1970, for instance. I LOVE ALL MY CHILDREN EQUALLY!! HOW CAN I BE EXPECTED TO CHOOSE?? Sorry.

It looks like once again we’re going back further than the Sixties, and landing squarely in 1933, during the Chicago World’s Fair. One of its many exhibits had ‘Homes of Tomorrow’ as its theme, wherein various houses were assembled by various companies to sing the praises of whatever material they manufactured. There was a brick house (mighty mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out), a lumber house and a log house (for the love of god, no smoking please), a masonite house (non-Freemasons welcome), and an Armco-Ferro house (Lustron before Lustron existed). Which one caught my eye? The rather austere steel-and-glass number known as the House of Tomorrow, designed by George Fred Keck, of course.

The standout even then was the House of Tomorrow, a three-story, 12-sided steel-and-glass structure designed by the early modernist George Fred Keck of Chicago. From the outside, the house resembled a glass-walled Bauhaus water tank. Inside, a spiral staircase wound around a central core containing utilities while a series of wedge-shaped rooms were furnished with tubular modern furniture.

A commemorative book issued at the time of the exposition says of the House of Tomorrow: ”Every modern convenience is made available at the touch of a finger. Absolute comfort is assured.”

Among the amenities were central air conditioning and a kitchen ”gas-powered to the nth degree” with a ”gas-fueled iceless refrigerator” as well as a ”mechanical dishwasher.”

The crowning touch, however, was ”an airplane hangar, which houses a small sized ship for family use,” attached to the back of the house.
quoted from this article

I honestly don’t know what impresses me more — the fact that the house has got a freakin’ airplane hangar, or that they used the term ‘the nth degree’. That’s a phrase that really needs to be reintegrated into popular speech, I think. ‘I’m enjoying this funnel cake to the nth degree,’ chirped Deirdre. ‘It’s really special.’ But I digress.
An airplane hangar! Back in the Future of the Past, the average American family was supposed to have their own personal light aircraft (undoubtedly in the Far-flung Future of 1970), hence the need for a hangar. Which would be really fab, but seeing as that we can barely trust people to be lucid enough when behind the wheel of a ground-based vehicle, perhaps that prediction was a wee bit over-optimistic..

The current fate of the House of Tomorrow is turning around. After the World’s Fair packed it in in 1934, it, along with the other homes of that particular exhibit, were placed on barges, and floated over Lake Michigan to their present location in Beverly Shores, Indiana. The plan at the time was to use the unusual homes to generate publicity for development of additional lakefront property along that area, but the plan fell through. For years, the houses were maintained by the Indiana park service, but as they weren’t really bona fide houses, so much as they were essentially model homes, they began to deteriorate, as they weren’t really meant to last. Thankfully, they’re now listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and the homes are currently being leased to private occupants who have agreed to restore them, in exchange for minimal or no rent. A happy ending!

The House of Tomorrow is no longer open to the public, but you can take a driving tour to see it, and take photographs from the front lawn until the owner chases you away with a broom

Sdtrk: ‘You trip me up’ by The Jesus and Mary chain

Good try, though — you get an A for Effort. Or whatever the equivalent grade is, as according to the Japanese school system.

This should also satisfy whatever furtive individual(s) who keep hitting ‘Shouting etc etc’ by typing ‘sexy anime girls’ into Google

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Posted in FIFA World Cup 2006 | 7 comments »