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kottke.org posts about Greg Allen

Rotating the dishes

And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That’s right, the same ones.

I think about this every time I put our dishes back in the cupboard. I assumed it was just me and that I was crazy.


Design actually within reach

Greg Allen finally finished his version of Enzo Mari’s 1974 Autoprogettazione dining table made from wood from Ikea’s Ivar shelving system. An example of the Mari’s original table went at auction a few years ago for $14,000; Allen paid $120 for his Ikea raw materials.


LAPD stolen art poster show

Stolen art in the Los Angeles area results in some unorthodox art posters. Here’s a missing Warhol print of Mick Jagger:

Stolen Warhol

Looks like something Warhol himself might have come up with.


Old whitehouse.gov down the memory hole

Greg Allen raises a good point regarding the new White House web site: why did the old site get completely erased?

It seems problematic to me that the entire official web presence of the Bush administration, as tainted and manipulative or enraging as you may think it is, just gets wiped clean from the web like that. People need to remember, reference, discuss, and link to that publicly owned, previously published information; it shouldn’t be tossed to the curb like a dead plant or buried in the National Archive backup tape repository.

Perhaps there needs to be a simple directory structure put in place, something like:

whitehouse.gov/42
whitehouse.gov/43
whitehouse.gov/44

The files for each President’s site would live under the associated directory and would never need to be taken down to make room for new files. Of course, maintaining all that, and the different systems and platforms potentially used by each administration would be a total PITA.

Update: Here are the Clinton whitehouse.gov archive and the George W. Bush whitehouse.gov archive. Nice but they don’t address the broken links issue and snapshots don’t capture any dynamic functions (like search, for instance). Also, shouldn’t every page on the site function like a wiki so you can go back and see the history at any time? Quite a few people suggested using subdomains (e.g. 43.whitehouse.gov) instead of directories to keep everything straight; I concur. (thx, arnold & kate)


Flatscreen madness and other Costco adventures

Greg Allen’s ode to Costco, flatscreen TVs, and bottomless jars of peanut butter.

So we go to Costco for lunch and formula Friday, my dad, the kids and I, and it’s a flatscreen frenzy. Like Rodney King-grade looting frenzy; every cart has a flatscreen and a bale of toilet paper, and I’m like, I have a flatscreen I don’t even watch, and yet I want another one. I couldn’t fit that box in the car, and I still want one. My dad and his wife bought the biggest flatscreen in the Triangle last spring, and I can see he wants one, too.

The kid’s sitting in the cart, and she sees a guy carrying a 19” flatscreen, and she goes, “Look! He has a tiny one!” and the guy looks at her, looks at the box โ€” I’m not making this up, my dad told me; he was investigating the flatscreen aisle while I was in the bathroom โ€” and goes and puts it back, and picks up a 23” flatscreen.

I’m still working through the toaster-sized box of Mach3 razor blade refills that I bought at Costco almost four years ago.


Suck Cola!

Greg Allen still has his bottle of Suck Cola from when the now-defunct web site Suck was handing them out at a trade show in 1996. He’s building a registry of Suck Cola bottles…if you’ve got one, send in the details.

After your Cola information is reviewed and validated, you will be issued a Suck Cola Registry Number. I have designated my bottle SC0005, having reserved the first four Registry Numbers, SC0001-SC0004, for Suck.com co-founders Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman.

Suck the web site has now been dead for as long as it was active, but the Cola lives on.


The NY Times list of the 53 places

The NY Times list of the 53 places to go in 2008.

Update: Greg notes something about the list that I noticed as well:

I was intrigued as the next guy by the list of 53 Places we’re supposed to go in 2008, then I realized that almost without exception, the “reason” to go is the opening at long last of that destination’s first “luxury” accommodations. Which seems about the dumbest reason I can think of for choosing where to travel.


Greg Allen gives us the scoop on

Greg Allen gives us the scoop on how big art auctions work. “People come to me and want to bid with a signal that they don’t want anyone else to see. He may hold his pencil in his mouth, or say, ‘I’m bidding as long as I have my legs crossed.’ And I’ve got their number, and they never show a paddle. That’s the way it’s done.”


“If there was any doubt about where

If there was any doubt about where the contemporary art market is going, they were dispelled this morning at Christie’s Baghdad, where the US Government paid a record-setting $286 billion for this portrait of the dead Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.


Greg Allen rips into the Smithsonian for

Greg Allen rips into the Smithsonian for selling their archive (actually *our* archive) to Showtime for $6 million. “So not only did Smithsonian executives sell out America’s patrimony to a single, giant media corporation, they sold it for practically nothing.” Wank. Ers.


Greg Allen keeps winning free Diet Coke

Greg Allen keeps winning free Diet Coke but is having trouble redeeming the prizes. “Coke put me in this situation where I feel like a wronged, government-cheese-stealing welfare queen, whose resentment builds with the fresh taunt of each unredeemable winning lid I find”.