Lighter Side's Peanut Butter Machine does exactly what its name implies, in either chunky or smooth, and can be used for other varieties of nuts besides. $49.98, but I'm almost just tempted to get a Giclee print of the picture and hang it on my kitchen wall: although peanut butter technology has certainly advanced in the century since George Washington Carver traveled back through time to gift it to us from the future, I simply can not believe any device can deliver peanut butter as mana-like as in this picture. This is a photograph of the Platonic Ideal of peanut butter making machines: I can not believe it is the actuality.

Peanut Butter Machine [Lighter Side via Gearfuse]

Beyond the Tron-esque wireframe landscape, invisible barking dogs and eyeteeth-aching techno soundtrack, this conceptual video for a wearable, mech-style motorcycle is pretty cool, until you take a moment to consider motorcycle accidents in which the rider, instead of merely taking a spill, is pulled apart like a meat-filled wishbone.

Quoth the creator, between snorts of Substance D.

“It’s like riding two skateboards at once, but stable, because the machine supports the rider’s body… This isn’t fantasy, it’s a green vehicle, and all of the numbers are based in the real world.”

Those real world numbers? 12, 83, -3! Do the math, geniuses! Green? I'll show you green... it runs on magic! But don't you dare call my concept a fantasy! In the Platonic nether realm, all concepts are real.

I snark. But come on: it's even called the Deus Ex Machina.

A Wearable Motorcycle [Pop Sci via Crunchgear]

Found at BMW's museum in Munich, the kinetic sculpture's 714-ball sculpture is held together by invisible cords. The music, however, is held together by pure emotion.

The comments at YouTube approach the Platonic form of a YouTube comment thread.

via Geekologie

By BBG Staff

Perfection? Some gadgets are already perfect. They don't need further technological advancement. They're pure. If you change one thing about them significantly, you make them worse. You change their nature entirely. When someone finally comes up with a significant improvement to a pure gadget's tech, it will cease to be: it becomes something else. We're calling these gadgets "perfectly pure" and here's ten of them, for the passive absorbption into your cerebral membranes.

The Wristwatch

From the automaton-makers of Rhodes to the battery-powered blinkenlights of a crazy Tokyoflash timepiece, we've always loved machines that work to a schedule. Strip out the modern fad for electronics, however, and the basic workings of the not-so-humble wristwatch haven't changed an awful lot since the mechanism was miniaturized about a century ago. Permitting pocket watches — and a lot of genuine advances in accuracy — and we can look back as far as the 16th century.

In an uncharacteristic flourish, even Wikipedia's army of officious tone-editors allows its entry on the matter to note our enduring love for the wristwatch's "old world craftsmanship." For the rest of us, however, this is a mere a prelude to its introduction to another world—one of escapement mechanisms, differential gears, and other cogporn—that we know we'll love to revisit even when we all have personal atomic clocks embedded in our marrow.

The Toaster

For millennia, the cloddish neanderthal method of toast production reigned haute cuisine — much like a gazelle's torso or the scooped out brainmeats of a blood enemy, toast was best prepared by lancing it with a skewer and holding it over an open flame. There were, of course, sophistications: silver-coated cages used to dangle, to toast unevenly. But it wasn't until the 20th century that the toaster perfected itself, transforming from a helpful kitchen accessory into a nearly Platonic form: the pure mechanical interpretation of the verb to toast.

In 1919, Charles Strite patented the world's first top-loaded bread toaster, with a spring-loaded ejection system that satisfyingly popped a crusty slice of raison cinnamon feet into the air upon completion. The design was picked up by the Waters Genter Company in 1925, christened the Model 1-A-1 Toastmaster and mass-produced. Within decades, there was not a single first-world kitchen that did not contain a toaster: what cooks a mere hundred years before had used a fork to prepare came a galvanic kitchen gadget obligation.

Over the course of the next 75 years, superfluous perfections of convenience have been added to the toaster. The bread crumb tray. Thermal sensors that can detect burning. Jesus-producing pareidolia toasters. Cramming a toaster into a coffee maker. But the ultimate test of the design's perfection? Put someone into a kitchen without a toaster and tell them to make you a couple slices. Chances are, it'll take quite a few minutes for them to trudge up primal gastronomic instincts and suss out that all they really need is a heat source and a slice of bread.

The Toilet

Sorry, folks, it's an urban legend. Thomas Crapper did not, in fact, invent the modern toilet. As a Galileo of the porcelain throne, however, he did much to promote and popularize an already-outstanding theory.

The other legend is also false: the word "crap" predates Mr. Crapper's birth, meaning that his name, and its association with the act of defecation, is but a cosmic coincidence.

Toilets have a long and illustrious history, but since the invention of the cistern-based, ballcock-toting, water-flushing modern model in the 18th century, little's been done to improve it. In fact, they've got markedly worse as modern-day restrictions on water usage threaten the efficacy of this classic invention.

The Mouse Trap

The filthy vermin which afflict us must be exterminated. Animal-lover or not, the human extinct is pure: to pluck from our scalps the bulbous, blood-filled ticks; to drown in baths the dust mites that feast on our skin; to chop in half the tiny rodents that so delight in perching on our upper lips while we slumber and meticulously squeeze dropping after dropping into our snoring mouths. As they do.

But mice and rats are a canny lot. How to kill them, not only with ruthless efficiency but with negligible pangs of guilt? In 1894, William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois received a patent for his design for the first spring-loaded bar mouse trap. It was later perfected by Hiram Maxim to be the mouse trap we all know today: a simple plank of pine, attached to which is a clamp triggered by a spring and depressed with a slice of cheese. When a mouse or rat pokes its plaguey snout at the cheese, the spring depresses, the clamp snickersnacks and the mouse has its neck cleanly broken.

What the guillotine is to the French, the mouse trap is to unhygienic Americans. A spring-loaded mousetrap is (usually) a clean way to kill a mouse. But spring for a non-lethal trap out of the kindness of your heart and when you release that mouse, you'll see it poking out of your Cheerios the next morning. Try a glue trap, and you'll hate yourself for years as you torture a cute, fuzzy animal to death. And poison is a painful crapshoot.

Oh, sure. It's a cruel gizmo. But it is perfectly designed: "build the better mousetrap" has become an ironic cultural shorthand for "waste of time."

The Radio

Radio's always been there, an endless ocean of electromagnetic nonsense shrouding humanity's nascent civilizations. It took Scots scientist James Clerk Maxwell to figure out that you could add a signal to the noise, but who actually made it work is a matter of some controversy. Nikola Tesla conducted public tests, but Guglielmo Marconi was first to design a purposeful, manufacturable apparatus, for which he was awarded a patent in 1896.

Since then, there have been countless refinements, from the radar systems used to defeat the Luftwaffe over southern England to WiFi and high-speed cellular data. But the basic principle — systematically modulate an electromagnetic wave's frequency and amplitude — remains the same.

The Bicycle

There are a billion of them worldwide, serving dutifully in work, leisure and even artwork: "The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets," said Christopher Morley.

Though operating on a simple mechanism of wheels and pedals, their thermodynamic efficiency is so remarkable that almost nothing has changed in the basic design since the 1880s. And as Morley was drawn to write eloquently about our most eloquent form of transit, so were many others.

Einstein dreamed the theory of relativity while riding one. "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live," said Twain. "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race," said H. G. Wells.

To this day, their wonders inspire little but wonder: "I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity," London mayor Boris Johnson recently remarked.

Not to miss: We are the Cyclists

The Scissors

Even over the bicycle, a pair of scissors is the most perfectly perfect invention in all of gadgetdom. Created (at the latest) by the ancient Egyptians in 1500BC, scissors can be used to cut almost anything there is to cut. You can use them to cut paper. You can use them to cut steel. You can use them to garden. You can use them to circumcise. You can use them to trim hair. You can use them to carve someone out of a flaming car.

The physical forces that make scissors so efficient are well known: they are sharp double levers with a pivot as a fulcrum. That's not to say there haven't been improvements, but they've been subtle (in 1761, Robert Hinchliffe started making scissors out of steel) or specialized (the Jaws of Life). And most scissor "improvements" are decidedly lame: flipping them enantiomorphically for use by the sinistral, or attaching a motor so you don't callous your thumbs.

Scissors. You can scarcely improve them. So perfect are scissors at what we do that it was only at the end of the 20th Century that we started dreaming up "better" ways to cut things... like slicing it in half with a 1.3 petawatt laser beam. We're a few millennia yet before we stop using scissors entirely when there's something to cut.

The Keyboard

Forget about Dvorak for a moment: no one's talking about keyboard layouts here. There's a surprising number of tattooing patterns for the flat protrusions of the modern keyboard... some better for different countries, some better for Unix dorks.

But isn't that, in itself, some sort of wonderful commentary on the conceptual purity of the keyboard? That the only bickering going on is in the way alphanumeric keys are arranged... but not the base technology of the device?

It's true that the construction of all Latin languages gives the keyboard a certain necessity. The smallest unit of a written word is the letter, without breaking things down into line strokes: it follows that we would all use a typing device that arranges itself by letter. In the case of the typewrite keyboard, a reversed steel imprint of that letter is damply pressed against the page when it is typed. On a computer keyboard, it simply sends the electric signal.

But using a keyboard has never been intuitive. People know how to write long before they can type, and speak long before they can write. Yet advances in computer handwriting technology are sloppy, and speech-recognition technology even more so. The keyboard is so swift and elegant, there's little real need for these technologies... and thus, no impetus in perfecting them.

Ultimately? Yes, mobile phones may finally hobble the keyboard. But it's worth noting, with a confident shrug, that even the touch screen iPhone only allows text entry via virtual keyboard.

Etch-A-Sketch

If it seems a poor and labored candidate for a "perfect gadget" — especially given the difficulty of producing anything that isn't a straight line — one merely has to look at recent attempts to improve on the Ohio Art Company's classic Etch-a-Sketch to realize how wonderful it was, and remains.

For example, asking for an Etch-a-Sketch nowadays carries a risk of receiving this electronic atrocity, which replaces the simple elegance of the original with a flimsy-looking, TV-required clone that doesn't even add any substantial new features.

I'll confess to hating the Etch as a child, preferring the artistic range offered by magnets and colored iron filings. That, however, was not a gadget: that was someone's else's hazmat operation!

Printed Money

This is the one that almost didn't make the list. A dollar bill isn't really a gadget. It doesn't even have a moving part... surely the minimum requirement for a piece of tech. It's a piece of paper, ink dampened with the morbid visage of a dead, pompous patriarch. We almost left it off the list entirely. Except for one thing: while it's not the only gadget on this list to change the world, it's the only one to change the world for everyone.

Rewinding human history back a spell, trade was initially achieved by exchanging one object for another object. For example, an apple is traded for a roll of toilet paper. This, as you know, is the way the cavemen did it. If one caveman had more apples than he had toilet paper, he'd be willing to trade more of them for the prospect of a nice wipe. It was all very straightforward, until some utter madman decided he coveted gold... the utterly worthless "bling" of the Cromagnon periodic table. At this point, gold somehow became symbolic of goods and services in a trade... the variable x in a consumerist equation, always opposite a tradable good or service on the other side of the equal sign.

But x always stood for something concrete. It stood for gold. And while promissory notes eventually took the place of gold (because promissory notes could be more easily carried than a large sack full of metal) the true revolution was realizing that gold could be divorced from currency altogether.

It wasn't easy. Early attempts at printed money were failures. But we now live in a society of abstract wealth. Brownlee lives in Berlin, paid abstract wealth in dollars by an American company, and he is able to translate it into tangible euros at a local bank. Printed money? They're fairy promises. Everyone in the world willingly exchanges the possessions that can give them nourishment and comfort for a specified amount of ornamented paper rectangles... good for absolutely nothing, except to be spent, and only because we all believe they can be spent.

Now that's a gadget.

By BBG Staff

Perfection? Some gadgets are already perfect. They don't need further technological advancement. They're pure. If you change one thing about them significantly, you make them worse. You change their nature entirely. When someone finally comes up with a significant improvement to a pure gadget's tech, it will cease to be: it becomes something else. We're calling these gadgets "perfectly pure" and here's ten of them, for the passive absorbption into your cerebral membranes.

The Wristwatch

From the automaton-makers of Rhodes to the battery-powered blinkenlights of a crazy Tokyoflash timepiece, we've always loved machines that work to a schedule. Strip out the modern fad for electronics, however, and the basic workings of the not-so-humble wristwatch haven't changed an awful lot since the mechanism was miniaturized about a century ago. Permitting pocket watches ??? and a lot of genuine advances in accuracy ??? and we can look back as far as the 16th century.

In an uncharacteristic flourish, even Wikipedia's army of officious tone-editors allows its entry on the matter to note our enduring love for the wristwatch's "old world craftsmanship." For the rest of us, however, this is a mere a prelude to its introduction to another world???one of escapement mechanisms, differential gears, and other cogporn???that we know we'll love to revisit even when we all have personal atomic clocks embedded in our marrow.

For millennia, the cloddish neanderthal method of toast production reigned haute cuisine — much like a gazelle's torso or the scooped out brainmeats of a blood enemy, toast was best prepared by lancing it with a skewer and holding it over an open flame. There were, of course, sophistications: silver-coated cages used to dangle, to toast unevenly. But it wasn't until the 20th century that the toaster perfected itself, transforming from a helpful kitchen accessory into a nearly Platonic form: the pure mechanical interpretation of the verb to toast.

In 1919, Charles Strite patented the world's first top-loaded bread toaster, with a spring-loaded ejection system that satisfyingly popped a crusty slice of raison cinnamon feet into the air upon completion. The design was picked up by the Waters Genter Company in 1925, christened the Model 1-A-1 Toastmaster and mass-produced. Within decades, there was not a single first-world kitchen that did not contain a toaster: what cooks a mere hundred years before had used a fork to prepare came a galvanic kitchen gadget obligation.

Over the course of the next 75 years, superfluous perfections of convenience have been added to the toaster. The bread crumb tray. Thermal sensors that can detect burning. Jesus-producing pareidolia toasters. Cramming a toaster into a coffee maker. But the ultimate test of the design's perfection? Put someone into a kitchen without a toaster and tell them to make you a couple slices. Chances are, it'll take quite a few minutes for them to trudge up primal gastronomic instincts and suss out that all they really need is a heat source and a slice of bread.

The Toilet

Sorry, folks, it's an urban legend. Thomas Crapper did not, in fact, invent the modern toilet. As a Galileo of the porcelain throne, however, he did much to promote and popularize an already-outstanding theory.

The other legend is also false: the word "crap" predates Mr. Crapper's birth, meaning that his name, and its association with the act of defecation, is but a cosmic coincidence.

Toilets have a long and illustrious history, but since the invention of the cistern-based, ballcock-toting, water-flushing modern model in the 18th century, little's been done to improve it. In fact, they've got markedly worse as modern-day restrictions on water usage threaten the efficacy of this classic invention.

The Mouse Trap

The filthy vermin which afflict us must be exterminated. Animal-lover or not, the human extinct is pure: to pluck from our scalps the bulbous, blood-filled ticks; to drown in baths the dust mites that feast on our skin; to chop in half the tiny rodents that so delight in perching on our upper lips while we slumber and meticulously squeeze dropping after dropping into our snoring mouths. As they do.

But mice and rats are a canny lot. How to kill them, not only with ruthless efficiency but with negligible pangs of guilt? In 1894, William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois received a patent for his design for the first spring-loaded bar mouse trap. It was later perfected by Hiram Maxim to be the mouse trap we all know today: a simple plank of pine, attached to which is a clamp triggered by a spring and depressed with a slice of cheese. When a mouse or rat pokes its plaguey snout at the cheese, the spring depresses, the clamp snickersnacks and the mouse has its neck cleanly broken.

What the guillotine is to the French, the mouse trap is to unhygienic Americans. A spring-loaded mousetrap is (usually) a clean way to kill a mouse. But spring for a non-lethal trap out of the kindness of your heart and when you release that mouse, you'll see it poking out of your Cheerios the next morning. Try a glue trap, and you'll hate yourself for years as you torture a cute, fuzzy animal to death. And poison is a painful crapshoot.

Oh, sure. It's a cruel gizmo. But it is perfectly designed: "build the better mousetrap" has become an ironic cultural shorthand for "waste of time."

The Radio

Radio's always been there, an endless ocean of electromagnetic nonsense shrouding humanity's nascent civilizations. It took Scots scientist James Clerk Maxwell to figure out that you could add a signal to the noise, but who actually made it work is a matter of some controversy. Nikola Tesla conducted public tests, but Guglielmo Marconi was first to design a purposeful, manufacturable apparatus, for which he was awarded a patent in 1896.

Since then, there have been countless refinements, from the radar systems used to defeat the Luftwaffe over southern England to WiFi and high-speed cellular data. But the basic principle ??? systematically modulate an electromagnetic wave's frequency and amplitude ??? remains the same.

The Bicycle

There are a billion of them worldwide, serving dutifully in work, leisure and even artwork: "The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets," said Christopher Morley.

Though operating on a simple mechanism of wheels and pedals, their thermodynamic efficiency is so remarkable that almost nothing has changed in the basic design since the 1880s. And as Morley was drawn to write eloquently about our most eloquent form of transit, so were many others.

Einstein dreamed the theory of relativity while riding one. "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live," said Twain. "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race," said H. G. Wells.

To this day, their wonders inspire little but wonder: "I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity," London mayor Boris Johnson recently remarked.

Not to miss: We are the Cyclists

The Scissors

Even over the bicycle, a pair of scissors is the most perfectly perfect invention in all of gadgetdom. Created (at the latest) by the ancient Egyptians in 1500BC, scissors can be used to cut almost anything there is to cut. You can use them to cut paper. You can use them to cut steel. You can use them to garden. You can use them to circumcise. You can use them to trim hair. You can use them to carve someone out of a flaming car.

The physical forces that make scissors so efficient are well known: they are sharp double levers with a pivot as a fulcrum. That's not to say there haven't been improvements, but they've been subtle (in 1761, Robert Hinchliffe started making scissors out of steel) or specialized (the Jaws of Life). And most scissor "improvements" are decidedly lame: flipping them enantiomorphically for use by the sinistral, or attaching a motor so you don't callous your thumbs.

Scissors. You can scarcely improve them. So perfect are scissors at what we do that it was only at the end of the 20th Century that we started dreaming up "better" ways to cut things... like slicing it in half with a 1.3 petawatt laser beam. We're a few millennia yet before we stop using scissors entirely when there's something to cut.

The Keyboard

Forget about Dvorak for a moment: no one's talking about keyboard layouts here. There's a surprising number of tattooing patterns for the flat protrusions of the modern keyboard... some better for different countries, some better for Unix dorks.

But isn't that, in itself, some sort of wonderful commentary on the conceptual purity of the keyboard? That the only bickering going on is in the way alphanumeric keys are arranged... but not the base technology of the device?

It's true that the construction of all Latin languages gives the keyboard a certain necessity. The smallest unit of a written word is the letter, without breaking things down into line strokes: it follows that we would all use a typing device that arranges itself by letter. In the case of the typewrite keyboard, a reversed steel imprint of that letter is damply pressed against the page when it is typed. On a computer keyboard, it simply sends the electric signal.

But using a keyboard has never been intuitive. People know how to write long before they can type, and speak long before they can write. Yet advances in computer handwriting technology are sloppy, and speech-recognition technology even more so. The keyboard is so swift and elegant, there's little real need for these technologies... and thus, no impetus in perfecting them.

Ultimately? Yes, mobile phones may finally hobble the keyboard. But it's worth noting, with a confident shrug, that even the touch screen iPhone only allows text entry via virtual keyboard.

Etch-A-Sketch

If it seems a poor and labored candidate for a "perfect gadget" ??? especially given the difficulty of producing anything that isn't a straight line ??? one merely has to look at recent attempts to improve on the Ohio Art Company's classic Etch-a-Sketch to realize how wonderful it was, and remains.

For example, asking for an Etch-a-Sketch nowadays carries a risk of receiving this electronic atrocity, which replaces the simple elegance of the original with a flimsy-looking, TV-required clone that doesn't even add any substantial new features.

I'll confess to hating the Etch as a child, preferring the artistic range offered by magnets and colored iron filings. That, however, was not a gadget: that was someone's else's hazmat operation!

Printed Money

This is the one that almost didn't make the list. A dollar bill isn't really a gadget. It doesn't even have a moving part... surely the minimum requirement for a piece of tech. It's a piece of paper, ink dampened with the morbid visage of a dead, pompous patriarch. We almost left it off the list entirely. Except for one thing: while it's not the only gadget on this list to change the world, it's the only one to change the world for everyone.

Rewinding human history back a spell, trade was initially achieved by exchanging one object for another object. For example, an apple is traded for a roll of toilet paper. This, as you know, is the way the cavemen did it. If one caveman had more apples than he had toilet paper, he'd be willing to trade more of them for the prospect of a nice wipe. It was all very straightforward, until some utter madman decided he coveted gold... the utterly worthless "bling" of the Cromagnon periodic table. At this point, gold somehow became symbolic of goods and services in a trade... the variable x in a consumerist equation, always opposite a tradable good or service on the other side of the equal sign.

But x always stood for something concrete. It stood for gold. And while promissory notes eventually took the place of gold (because promissory notes could be more easily carried than a large sack full of metal) the true revolution was realizing that gold could be divorced from currency altogether.

It wasn't easy. Early attempts at printed money were failures. But we now live in a society of abstract wealth. Brownlee lives in Berlin, paid abstract wealth in dollars by an American company, and he is able to translate it into tangible euros at a local bank. Printed money? They're fairy promises. Everyone in the world willingly exchanges the possessions that can give them nourishment and comfort for a specified amount of ornamented paper rectangles... good for absolutely nothing, except to be spent, and only because we all believe they can be spent.

Now that's a gadget.

A lonely LA Craigslist user is looking for Zune love in all the wrong places. He posted a “Strictly Platonic” personal looking for someone to share music wirelessly with. As we all know, if you own a Zune and you go looking for someone to share with, you’re probably going to wander for a long time. The whole draw of the Wi-Fi was originally to “meet” people randomly and rock out to each others tunes. The dearth of Zunes clearly puts a damper on this and we’re not quite surprised.

It’s cool that the Zune has Wi-Fi and I have nothing against the hardware. Sadly, however, I think MS bungled this early on by not talking up — and hobbling — the sharing. Maybe this guy should try Z4Z?

The Pebble, the iPod Shuffle... any of these low-capacity, display-less Flash devices that are flooding the market. The large sub-set of people who opt for these MP3 players over more full-featured models: they simply don't care about albums. Rather, they prefer to listen to their songs randomly and with minimal control. They want song selected, shuffled and spurted out through their earphones. For them, these small, low-capacity MP3 players are like portable, DJ-less radio stations pandering to their tastes. They may not have a lot of control over what's coming up next. They may never hear a full album being played. But they've always got a keychain full of music they like, at all times. Hell, they don't even buy albums anymore: they just load up their music service of choice and buy the tracks they like.

This is all very alien to they way I experience music. Even if I could accept the lack of control, the addition of randomness to my music-listening experience, I can't really accept listening to a song out of the context of the album to which it belongs. I believe that albums should be listened to as complete works, not just anthologies of musical vignettes. Albums should have their own beginning, middle and end: shuffling an album should shuffle its emotional tenor. For me, listening to a song at random without listening to the rest of the album is like reading a chapter randomly from a book. A song might be wonderful, but it is contextless out of its larger body.

I'd be the first to admit that it's a way of looking at music that is completely out of touch with modern music. Who in their right mind looks at a Britney Spears album as an artistically-coherent work within its own right? It's just a collection of singles slapped together with some glitter and PR. Most albums are just semi-random collections of songs crammed onto an optical disc: nothing less and only accidentally something more.

But even worse, my way of looking at albums would have been precious and delusional even a hundred years ago! Since the dawn of recorded music, albums were incidental to songs. In the early days of audio recording, albums weren't much longer than a few minutes anyways, and usually only fit one or two songs per side. It is only as the maximum capacity on audio recordings increased that anyone started playing with the idea of an album as a meaningful artistic entity, in and of itself.

The same holds true for radio: radio is not a format that encourages the playing of full albums, and never has been. And even if you drag me kicking and screaming a few hundred years in the past, I'd find myself looking ridiculous. Most of the music of the world before the dawning of the 20th century did not come in the form of symphonies: it came in the form of short songs. In fact, my way of thinking about albums probably dates back no later than the 1950's Cool Movement, and for most of the history of recorded mucic has only subscribed to be jazz musicians and musical avant gardists.

Still, I sputter and rage at myself. Buying a single catchy song off of iTunes. Purchasing an adorable novelty MP3 player off of Amazon. I'm so tempted: it means I'm giving up on the actual existence of the record album. I'm sacrificing the ludicrous, pretentious self-delusion that there is a musical entity distinct from the song, that an "album" is something more than the means of physical delivery and its packaging.

And then I start thinking to myself, "Actually, I bet one of those Pebbles would be pretty good for podcasts. I don't care what order those come down the pipe." Maybe there's a compromise to be had here, after all.

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Spearheading Platonic Fireplaces way back in 1984, Henry Harrison is a minimalist designer whose vision of the contemporary fireplace has led him into strange and wonderful territory over the years.