Artist Chris Jordan has created some amazing prints that really rubs home the consumerist madness that is the US, with us in Australia likely not that far behind.

If you have children, be very very scared for their future.

Spotted by way of this post by John Maeda.

When you have no real differentiation, and you are selling a commodity product, and you don’t really give a damn about doing any better; you resort to gimmickry.

I had a case of deodorant can failure this morning. I pressed down on the trigger of a new can and no freshness came out. I looked closer at the can and saw this:

WTF?!! Someone invested effort, brain …

In the mad dash to make yet-more-money before Christmas, the pet shop chain Pets Paradise and Pet Goods Direct are selling the latest in throwaway crass pet torture chambers in the form of the iPond (no relation to Apple).

Essentially it is a little speaker with a fish “cup” stuck on top of it. You fill the “cup” with just over two cups of water, …

“[America has] two values: How much can a man consume for the highest possible price, and how much can he produce for the possible pay?” said the character Chambord in Robert Ludlum’s The Paris Option (by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds).

This is likely true of all Western civilisations, including Australia.

We get paid less and less to do more and more work. And yet at the same time, we …

There’s been quite a few stories in the media lately about dodgy Chinese manufacturers. Lead paint on toys, bad pet food and so forth. Without endorsing these bad practices, what I want to know is, how much of this is actually our own fault?

We sit in our safe, clean and large homes well away from the factories of China. Our consumption-mad society demands ever more stuff at ever …

David Dale’s blog post on the Sydney Morning Herald provides food (and stats) for thought.

My 10 minute take on what the patterns are:

Important reference books (Guinness World Records:2007) which makes great gifts for just about anyone, even if you don’t remember their last names.
The twins of food and diet - Get fat with Jamie (just look at him drowning everything in yummy oil), then lose weight …

“Cynthia Vanderlip, manager of the State of Hawaii’s Kure Atoll Wildlife Sanctuary, cut open the dead body of a fledgling Laysan albatross (nicknamed “Shed Bird”) to find more than half a pound of plastic in its stomach.”

This is the bits of shit we throw away without a second thought!

This one image sums it all up, without ambiguity, and without unnecessary “designer” fuss.

Read A …

Another thought from The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff (ISBN 0-416-19526-1):

“[Although] we live in what is commonly described as a Materialistic Society … ours is in reality an Abstract Value society – one in which things are not appreciated for what they are so much as for what they represent.”

So why is Abstract Value so attractive? I reckon it is because Abstract …

Read Meow Mix Academy Puts New Yorkers in Touch With Their Feline Side.

What was your honest uncensored reaction to it?

What a brilliant marketing campaign!
Ho hum, so what?!
The world is soooo f*cked.

I picked c.

This just seem so … wrong. I do have a cat I love - but this just smacked of spoilt, rich, bored, neotenised brats with nothing better to do than just pointlessly consume …

I have never really understood the reason behind liquid stock. You know, the type you buy in 1 litre bricks from the supermarket.

Stock cubes are much easy to carry around, take up less room, and results in less waste (less packaging). Assuming both products essentially come from the same production line and contains more or less the same ingredients, why are we wasting all that …