string can phone

Some delighful shots of what the photographer erroneously calls “Roadside Junk,” but we prefer to call Classic Vehicles.

SCP, wishing for happier times, paid a visit to The Online Guide to Whistling Records.

This website is the result of over ten years of collecting whistling records. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only site of it’s kind in all of cyberspace. You’ll find over 100 MP3s from whistlers around the world, discographies, album covers and more. Don’t miss the section on vintage training records for parakeets and canaries!

Having so visited we would be smiling, but our lips are otherwise occupied….

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Cinderella’s Castle and environs—Disneyland, in other words—circa 1968.

Thank you, Mr. Doctorow, whose website is a way a lone a last a loved a long the

Before the cornucopia of pornography that is the internet was readily available, before the waves of 1-900 numbers that offered aural gratification in exchange for per-minute-fees on one’s monthly telephonic invoice, there were pornographic 8-Track cassette tapes.

SCP would like to draw your attention to a quietly-designed page humbly-entitled Like slide rules? Welcome to Sphere Research’s Slide Rule Universe, literally everything about slide rules, sliderules and sliderulers! In this case, grandiose claims of “everything” may indeed be correct, as the site is filed to the brim and beyond with information, photographs, and the most obnoxious webpage design this side of a flash interface.

Highlights include the archives, with pages on such oddities (odd, at least, to this son of the digital age) as circular slide rules, information on use and cleaning, online auctions, and the bizarre Frankenrules (real and imaginary). Sphere would also like to remind you that

[….] in 50 years, the computer you are using to view this webpage will be landfill, but your trusty slide rule will just be nicely broken in!

Having been directed directed here by BoingBoing, we prefer to let the site speak (at length) for itself:

A phono-radio without the phono, a cassette receiver sans cassette, and a non-turning turntable are the first three pieces in a series called “Bootleg Objects”. Obviously, something has been stolen here from these three right honourable design classics. Or rather, was something added? The name gives a hint: Bootlegging, historically a pseudonym for illegal liquor-making, was later also used for unauthorized recordings of music. Today, “bootleg” is one name for the musical style of recombination, of mashing up pop music pieces (preferably done undercover) of the most disparate origins. Both diluting and revamping, carelessly sampling objects, like a self-service shopping spree in the design museum. Creation that’s happily or witlessly unconcerned by commercial or jurisdical regulations such as copyright or marketability. An expression of deference to the qualities of the original object. But also its iconoclastic deconstruction. The subject of this manner of designing no longer is – as traditionally – interrelating form to function, but rather a positioning into a target context by “meta-design-decisions” as, for example, choosing the right citation or the rearrangement of the found objects. The three objects presented follow three deliberate methods of appropriation of a form: In “ReBraun”, recombination is paramount – while most features remained present, they slide along the surface, into new meanings. At the ReBo, nothing has been moved. Instead, an alien object – the touch screen – has slyly integrated himself. Lastly, the record player object Re-SP has not changed at all (apart from three clownish minimanipulations). Rather, its whole usage context has been taken. All of its working functions are completely different than it might seem, and all of its previous controls are now dead. “Skinning” is the name for the process that makes computer software freely designable. With programs that are skinnable, look, layout and even logic are free to redefinition. The designers have here applied the same principle to the tangible object: A general-purpose personal computer – nothing else is hidden inside the “bootleg objects”- is optimised for a specialized task and gets a new, old, amiable disposition.

We are lettingg the site speak for itself, because—although we enjoy the sights of the site immensely and do approve of the mingling of theory and practice—we are getting to the point where we cannot quote post-modernistic theory without giggling, guiltily, to ourselves.

BoingBoing has tipped us off to Retrogamer , the companion website to a retronymically printed fanzine published in the United Kingdom. The orange-flavoured website has games for sale, back issues of the periodical, photographs of the editor’s collection, and—which is what drew our attention in the first place— a few nice quality British television adverts from the early 80s. Although why the Atari ad even bothers to show Pac-Man is beyond our ken. At least it wasn’t E.T.

While SCP ungraciously acknowledges our age and lack of hep, we hope we aren’t betraying too much by professing our fascinated fondness for ASCII ROCK, a grouping of “classic” “rock” “videos” wherein the image-stream has been replaced by ASCII-characters and the audio by a MIDI rendering. An editorial commentator might be tempted to label the audio as delightfully cheesy, but we shall attempt to refrain from such judgement.

We are tangentially reminded of the Dictionaraoke project, and Mr. Chronovore’s recent post on Command-Line Web Journal Management

Obtained from the willfully wily Mr. Wiggins.

If you are looking for an idle pursuit, perusing the plentiful pages at Wikipedia is not, perhaps, the worst choice you could make. Indeed, your indolent perigrinations might take you to the entry on the Victor Talking Machine Company, where you would learn that [t]he company was named “The Victor” in honor of legal victories by Johnson and Berliner over Zonophone and others concerning their rights to patents on and distribution of their products.

Wikipedia pages are generally, in this reviewers opinion, quite excellent, illustrated, and pleasantly hyperlinked (in the nature of good wikis everywhere). Which means that we can spare ourselves the trouble of ascertaining certaining Internet references to the origins of Victor’s famous logo, and let them do it instead.

In addition to providing both AM and FM radio signal reception, this Japanese-made, venerable appearing audio device conceals the arguably modern contrivances of a compact disc player and standard audiocasette recorder. Be aware that the radio receives only Japanese commercial radio frequencies, which are of a different spectral range than is used in its American counterparts. (attribution: engadget)