Woouf! Awesome Funky Furnishings
Woouf! rocks. This Barcelona-based company produces sofas, beanbag chairs, pillows, and other such odds and ends of a distinctly lighthearted and often musical or foody nature, as seen above in their wall of Marshall and Vox amp-shaped beanbag seats, or rather, Wooufall and Woouf amps. My personal favorite, however, is this:
The Miniwoouf sofa, a full-sized sofa modeled in painstaking detail after the legendary Minimoog synthesizer, one of the first portable synthesizers ever and a true revolutionary product. A badass instrument and a badass sofa.
I also like their ghetto blaster beanbag seat:
They also have stuff modeled after the Walkman, burgers, ice cream, and Skittles, or as they call them, Wooufies.
On top of this explosion of retro-chic awesomeness, everything is made entirely in Barcelona, versus, say, Shenzhen. I daresay Woouf! balls harder. Check out their site.
Holy Shit! The Light Cycle
Hammacher Schlemmer may be cheesy as all hell and otherwise never get a mention on WBH but LOOK AT THIS:
Yes, it’s basically the Tron motorcycle, and it is in fact a real motorbike that you can ride and buy for, gasp, $55,000. It may be insane to spend that on a bike, but really only one word can describe it: SIIIIIIICK!
http://www.hammacher.com/Product/Default.aspx?sku=11862 (click to see a video)
Killer Stuff: Tiny Mobile Phone Macro Lens
And now for the coolest thing I’ve seen all day: Look at these:
Look like they came from a sick macro camera setup huh? Correct. But I bet you have no idea just how sick….
Killer Sound in a Small Package: Klipsch S4i Earphones
Last night a friend asked me to recommend him some good in-ear earphones, saying:
“I want WAY better than iPhone, I don’t even consider those headphones.” And a fair point he has. While I am an iPhone user, and my friend and I both Mac users, those white earbuds sound crappy, don’t isolate noise, requiring them to be cranked up quite high, and the control buttons are glitchy as hell. Plus do you want to look like everyone else with that tell-tale white cable coming down from your ears? I certainly don’t.
I happily recommended the Klipsch S4i to my friend, the product I’ve been using for about two years now.
Killer Kicks: Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66
Not the damn Kill Bill shoe.
Possibly the greatest sneaker/trainer ever – the Mexico 66 by Onitsuka Tiger, a brand of ASICS, shown here in the ultimate color scheme. While you may think this is the Kill Bill shoe, think again, the Mexico 66 predates that one (the Tai Chi) by quite a bit and looks far more awesome. Created in 1966 for the Japanese team to wear at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the design has stood the test of time and appears to have made a serious comeback in the whole retro-sneaker craze of the last decade. Hip or not, they’re fucking incredible. Light as a feather, ultra-comfortable, and exceedingly stylish – I’ve received innumerable compliments and have even had people start entire conversations about them. The original color, yellow/black, inspired by a tiger’s coat, is almost impossible to find in the US (my three pairs have all come from England, both from mail order and physical shops), but numerous other color schemes are freely sold Stateside both online and in retail shops, and also look great. Prices range from the mid $70s to mid $80s for the ones available here, considerably more (about £60 ~ $100) if you order from the UK.
Let’s face it though, you really want the yellow and black ones….
You got to coordinate!
Killer Stuff: Manual Focus and Canon DSLRs
I’m not a serious photographer, but I strongly endorse having a proper camera. Ever want to take a picture of a castle in the distance only to have your point-and-shoot, or worse, cameraphone, focus in on the garish and embarrassing fanny-packed American tourists in the foreground, leaving your precious castle a blurry mess? I have. It sucks.
This can all be fixed with a little something called MANUAL FOCUS. While you don’t need an SLR, let alone a Canon DSLR to have manual focus, you typically need something more expensive than your $150 quicky-clicky contraption. Over here, we don’t stand by the belief that expensive is necessarily better, but we are strong supporters of buying legit stuff that works really well and will last, and just sometimes that costs more.
That being said, unless you’re still stuck in the twentieth century (or indeed the nineteenth, as some of my friends are) or miserably broke, your phone probably has a decent enough camera on it for casual snaps. Did your friend not believe you and then take the Cinnamon Challenge, and then fail spectacularly, coughing clouds of cinnamon up into the air for the next ten minutes?* By all means, use your phone to record the hilarity.
But sometimes you want really outstanding pictures, and a phone isn’t really sufficient, even it’s one of those newfangled 8 Megapixel ones. While a point and shoot camera can take great pictures, your chances of photographic awesomeness are higher with a camera over which you have complete control of every aspect, such as a DSLR. Canon is unquestionably the market leader, and I have one of their T1i models, and although it’s “entry-level” it’s Killer Stuff compared to my Canon point-and-shoot. Nowadays, models such as that can be had used for around $500, and less on Craigslist, which in my book is a valuable investment. Given the state of phones today, you can probably forget the point-and-shoot and just stick to your phone for quick snaps and your SLR for everything else.
* This happened a few days ago and was brilliantly amusing. I recommend you convince your more easily-convincible friends to try it, and then enjoy about half an hour of solid laughter.
We Ball Harder 