Hasta La Ideas

How do you take two things most people don’t like—airline travel and advertising—and combine them into a pleasing experience? That was the task online retailer Zappos set for Mullen, and the Boston ad agency came up with a client-pleasing solution. This Thankgsiving Eve, travelers through Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport found their baggage claim conveyor belt festooned with what appeared to be Zappos advertising banners, but which were in fact prize markers for clothing, appliances, accessories and gift certificates. The entire conveyor belt had effectively been transformed into a giant roulette wheel, with travelers’ individual pieces of luggage serving as the ball.

“Zappos wants to intercept people in their everyday lives and bring surprise and delight,” Mullen executive creative director Tim Vaccarino told Ad Age. “So right away we’re always looking for something fresh in approach.”

Zappos staff were on hand to verify prize winnings, with at least one of them dressed like a turkey. And unlike America’s usual Black Friday shenanigans, there were no fistfights, stabbings or shootings reported.

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If only there were, for every kid glued to an XBox, another kid like Wesley Souza. After observing how an escavadeira (excavator) works, the Brazilian teen replicated the hydraulic mechanisms using syringes and plastic tubing; with a little help from family member Lidio, he even carved up some wood scraps to create a working scale model.

See it in action:

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If this video was just about a guy who makes things using only pre-1949 shop tools, it would be awesome (check out the wicked picket-cutting machine at 1:47). If it was just about a guy who can turn 1,200 cornerblocks by hand with machine-like accuracy, it would be awesome. And if it was just about a guy who teaches kids who have been thrown out of multiple reform schools how to make things, it would also be awesome. But it’s all of those things and a fourth, much more important thing. Like inventor Ralph Baer, craftsman Eric Hollenbeck explains with brutal honesty why he continues to do what he’s done for so long, and while his reason is wholly different from Baer’s, it touches on a truth a portion of us will well recognize. It’s no surprise this video is a Vimeo Staff Pick:

The beautifully-shot video was done by filmmaker Ben Proudfoot (who at 23, is perhaps too tender to immediately grasp why Hollenbeck didn’t want to go to town for supplies). As for Hollenbeck, he runs Blue Ox Millworks and Blue Ox Community High School out of Eureka, California. For those of you living in the region, on the 29th and 30th of this month they’ll be hosting their biannual Craftsman’s Days local showcase event.

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In the past two years, residents of North America’s west coast have received some “gifts”: Soccer balls, wooden flooring and even entire boats have washed ashore. Amazingly, this stuff traveled all the way, untended, from Japan.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the tsunami of March 2011 washed some five million tons of Japanese debris into the Pacific Ocean. Seventy percent of that debris is estimated to have sunk to the ocean floor around Japan, but the other 30% was buoyant enough to keep going. And yes, some of it has washed up on American shores, and if the experts are to be believed, there is more to come.

Earlier reports have been panicky. In September, NOAA released this graphic based on a computer simulation:

That shows a field of garbage larger than Texas, and about two times the area of Japan itself, on a collision course with California. In an update released just this week, however, NOAA points out that that is not a solid mass of debris:

…Whatever debris remains floating is very spread out. It is spread out so much that you could fly a plane over the Pacific Ocean and not see any debris since it is spread over a huge area, and most of the debris is small, hard-to-see objects.

We don’t care if this island of garbage is contiguous or not; what’s distressing is that there is 1.5 million tons of trash headed our way. What’s more distressing, however, is this:

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L: Photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair; R: Sotheby’s

About a month ago, we couldn’t help but take notice of the Jony Ive / Marc Newson-designed custom desk, which anchors the upcoming (RED) Auction alongside the Leica M that made rounds that week. At some point in the past four weeks, Sotheby’s has published the full catalog of the 44 art and design objects in the charity auction, and it’s quite a star-studded list. Besides Ive and Newson, the roster includes works by the likes of Azzedine Alaïa, Ettore Bugatti, Achille & Pier Giacomo Castiglioni (not pictured) and Damien Hirst (who curated the first edition of Bono’s auction in 2008), to name a few.

From left: Typewriter by Ettore Sottsass, boots by Christian Louboutin, armchair by Dieter Rams

I’m partial to the Dieter Rams pieces myself—along with the Vitsœ 620 and 606, there’s a Braun Hi-Fi—and the Cinelli Laser remains something of a grail bike for me (vintage ones command close to the $15,000–20,000 estimate for the 2013 Laser Nostra in the auction).

Not to scale

As for the (RED) desk, the Neal Feay-produced beauty comes in at a solid $300,000–500,000; only the Leica M comes in with a higher estimate at $500,000–750,000. (A Steinway grand piano and a Takashi Murakami trunk filled with 33 alligator leather Louis Vuitton handbags come in next at $150,000–200,000.) Ive/Newson diehards who miss out on the big-ticket items might have to settle for the sculptural NASA space shuttle window ($100,000–150,000).

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