In Which Retro Rocket Faucets Turn Me Into a Shadow of My Former Self

Filed under Found on the Web

I don’t consider myself a materialistic kind of guy. I’m not all starry eyed and goofy about it, but I don’t often find myself desiring things. Tools, yes: things, no.

And although there are quite a few home improvements I could make to my bathroom (and here, dear reader, I underestimate) I have never until today wanted thousands of dollars worth of bathroom fixtures so that I could design a whole new bathroom around them.

Maybe it’s a phase.

But look at these incredibly unnecessary faucets! Look, and desire them!

These (and more!) retro rocket styled faucets are from "New Retro Bath" – a phrase I believe I have never typed before – and they make me wish I was pointlessly wealthy enough to have a use for them. Which, you know, means being able to afford them.

Just picture the stainless steel walls and portholes of my new imaginary bathroom. The oscilloscopes! The blinky lights! The mysterious levers marked "DANGER!" And I haven’t even started to think about the sound effects.

Vintage Science Images from the Smithsonian: it’s MAD, MAD, I tell you!

Filed under Found on the Web

In my ongoing quest for more examples of things I don’t understand, but do admire*, I’ve stumbled on this collection of vintage science images from the Science Service of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Wonderful old photographs of lab equipment and industrial machines of all sorts!

There’s also this collection, which I found first and which (I think) is separate from the subjects menu at that first link.

These collections are a terrific resource for visualizing nearly plausible mad science labs!

* This is, in fact, a very large category.

Today & Tomorrow: Winsor McCay and Me

Filed under Hodgepodge, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

…from Winsor McCay, via Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Here’s hoping all our futures will be better ones.

Winter’s finally decided it’s really here at the Secret Laboratory and it’s doing its best to make me glad I’m in here, finishing up the last of the remaining characters for Part One of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, my first installment at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

This is the mysterious Doctor Rognvald. The big interior set I’ll still need to build is his laboratory – and to do that, I’ll have to sequester myself with Just Imagine and an old Boris Karloff film because they have such great mad scientist glassware. The sacrifices I make, I just can’t tell you.

That’s what I’ll be up to till that freelance job attains "check on the desk" status, anyhow. Then I’ll have to drop everything – carefully! there’s all that glassware to think of – for a bit.