Hasta La Ideas

All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

Oh, Daddle, you are one of the most special unitaskers I have encountered:

I don’t even know what to say. I’m at a complete loss for words. Or, rather, at a loss for words that are appropriate for a family-friendly website. I can think of a number of double entendres and completely inappropriate jokes. So, those of you over 18, simply imagine that I have written those jokes here and chuckle to yourselves. Ride on!

Thanks to reader Sharon for trotting this unitasker out for our attention.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Troika recently unveiled a kinetic sign that directs visitors to London’s V&A Museum from the tunnel at South Kensington tube station. Referencing the simple beauty of Alan Fletcher’s celebrated identity for the museum, the designers created the stand-alone artwork, Palindrome…

The piece is essentially a revolving V&A monogram suspended in a cylindrical ceiling-mounted capsule. According to Troika “the logo decontructs and reconnects itself with each half turn forming a playful palindrome legible from either side, while the wheels produce a gentle ticking sound reminiscent of a Victorian automaton clockwork.”

While the piece looks to be made from three floating sections of lettering, the installation in fact features some 85 handmade elements including fasteners, gears and a housing case, which hark back to the objects (and the ways that they’re displayed) in the museum itself.

To view the piece in action, check out the video clip below. For some more imagery and details on the making of Palindrome, see Troika’s description at the bottom of the post.

Palindrome is installed in the “museum tunnel” leading from South Kensington tube station to the V&A museum in London.

Troika explain how they made Palindrome:

The technique of mirror-polished high-quality brass and stainless steel was followed with an acid-etching process resulting in a highly contrasted decorative pattern. Using traditional machine processes proved unfeasible for gears of this particular thinness and the complex surface design required a bespoke method of cutting.

This distinct work process required that the gear profiles were developed within the limitations of its process. By adopting high precision water-jet cutting meant that we could allow the stainless steel plates to be acid-etched, then filled with gloss black acrylic varnish before being cut into their final profiles. 

Suspended from a lit casing, the bright blue letters are each 0.5 metre high, and balanced by an internal pocketing to ensure a minimal load on the purpose-built mechanism. As a result, the work can be powered by a small motor and generate the revolving motion using only the three small mitre gears seen on the top of the ampersand.

The entire delicate compilation is encased in a clear acrylic tube of 0.7m diameter wide and 1.3m long. The tube is closed off with rings, each 0.74m diameter wide produced from solid aluminium to give it its spectacular finish.

Around the mid-point of last month, many were caught off guard to read on his site that Khoi Vinh, the popular designer and blogger, had decided to leave his job as the design director of the New York Times‘ site and various mobile outlets. Having taken the role four years ago and turned the paper’s online presence something other news outlets tried copying or desperately aspired to, Vinh announced that it was time for him to move on, later followed by an optimistic post about how excited he was to be starting something new. Now he’s recently spoken to the New York Observer, offering a little more about what that “new” might turn into, what he thinks about the Times‘ second foray into paywalls, and working for a big media company in general. He says mostly positive, but adds some minor negatives here and there. Here’s a bit about his future and why he needed to make it happen:

After some contract work for companies in the coming months, Mr. Vinh might launch a start-up of his own. He’s interested in social media. “I have some ideas of my own. I have a really specific great idea that I’m hoping I can make happen. We’ll see. It’s all new to me. I haven’t ever been in a position where I need to raise capital or put together a technology team,” he said.

“As much as I liked it there [at The Times], I really wanted to try something different,” he said. “Ultimately I decided that if I don’t get out and try to do something small, or start something new on my own, or join a startup that’s much scrappier, then I would never have the opportunity to do it.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

CH exclusive: The making of Kanye West’s newest music video “Power” with its artist/director

Kanye West has been kicking up controversy right and left recently—showing up at both the Facebook and Twitter HQs, turning his teeth to diamonds and engaging the public with his crude and prolific Tweets. After noticing Marco Brambilla‘s “Civilization” video installation in the elevators at The Standard New York Hotel in 2009, Kanye not only wrote about it on his blog, he commissioned the experimental filmmaker to collaborate on the video for “Power,” his new single.

We’re premiering the behind-the-scenes video with the artist created by The 88 (above) and directed by Jenna Elizabeth, which starts by introducing “Civilization” and then shows how “Power” was made. We’ve also got an exclusive interview with Brambilla below.

Cool Hunting: What is the concept and how did it come about?

Marco Brambilla: To me “Power” was about a symbol, an icon of power about to fall, like an emperor about to fall. That’s when I thought I’d like to do a sort of moving portrait, a video portrait of Kanye as an authority figure in a moment when everything is about to collapse. I wanted to make it really sensual and use a lot of baroque imagery that I had used in “Civilization” and create this kind of decadent imagery around him and have all the decadence and sexuality and excess conspire against him. By the end of the video there’s a change in his position. So his position is compromised at the end of the video.

CH: Are you interested in doing more collaborations in the future?

MB: Kanye is more connected to the art world than other artists, so I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to work with someone who really understands how far you can push things and how experimental you can be. A lot of people will tell you they want to do something experimental but it becomes commercial. I thought Kanye would let me be true to my vision. I’ve never done a music video and one of the first things I said to Kanye was that I’m not interested in making a music video, but if we want to work on something that’s experimental, I can definitely do that because I really connected to that song.

CH: Is it strange that a celebrity would depict their fall from power?

MB: I think he’s a true artist—he doesn’t react to what people think of him. He’s aware, but he’s not the type of person who’s going to react to things in a way that is better for marketing. He wants to push the limits. I think using part of his public image as part of the way of illustrating his new album will resonate.

CH: What was the production process like?

Once we locked in on that concept it was pretty fast; essentially a three-four week process. The post production was pretty intense because there’s about 22 layers of video in the piece and each piece has to be choreographed—it’s almost like a very complicated matrix. The shoot itself was shot in extreme slow motion on a Phantom camera.
The characters come to life, but they’re moving in a very stylized way. I knew exactly what I was going to shoot the day we went on stage. I actually shot images of the models at the casting and then I put the models together in Photoshop, so we had it pretty well figured out.

CH: Are video collages your signature now?

MB: One of the reasons I took this project is because conceptually it made sense to explore celebrity, sexuality, self-consciousness, self-destruction. This idea of being in the center of the universe becomes a little intimidating to people. I’ve explored it in my work before. Regardless of whether I do a video work based on sampling or based on collage, those themes come through in my work.

Marco Brambilla and the Christopher Grimes Gallery are currently working on a show called “Evolution” that will open in 2011 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

One of the reasons I dislike using the phone for work is because eleven years ago my number belonged to a guy named Dave. This Dave character isn’t a former employee, he’s just some bloke who has fallen on hard times with his bills and who constantly has creditors calling after him. I thought for awhile he might be using my number on new credit applications, except I once asked a caller trying to harass Dave how she got this number and she said it was the fifth number they were trying for him, one their records showed working in 1999.

No matter how many times I tell the collection people that this is not a current number for Dave, no matter how many times their calls go to voice mail and they hear my greeting, no matter what I do to get the folks to stop calling, the calls continue to pour into my phone relentlessly. And, because I don’t typically know the numbers of the legitimate people calling me, I waste time answering the collection calls and listening to the messages at least long enough to know to delete them.

Thankfully, our office phone system has a new feature on it where I can type numbers into a form and have the harassing creditors’ numbers blocked. And, there was already a service on our system where every number comes up on caller ID, even ones that the callers believe are spoofed or hidden. Unfortunately, the new blocking method means I have to get at least the initial call to be able to capture the number, and also some creditors use hundreds of outgoing numbers so it can still be a three or four day project blocking calls.

Now that the number of collection calls are starting to reduce, I’ve been wondering how people on cell phones and home landlines deal with situations like this. I can’t be the only person out there being harassed by persistent wrong numbers. So, yesterday, when Lifehacker ran their post “What’s the Best Way to Block a Number from Calling my Cellphone?” I let out a very happy squeal.

Adam Dachis, author of the post, suggests transferring your number to a Google Voice account where you have similar controls like I now have on my office phone:

1. Log in to your Google Voice account.
2. Find the call you want to block (or the voicemail that resulted from it).
3. Select the checkbox next to the call or voicemail.
4. Click the “more” link underneath the call.
5. Select “Block Caller.”

He gives other options that don’t include transferring your cell number, and there are some really good ideas in the comments, too. If unwanted calls are cluttering up your phone line, I strongly recommend checking out Lifehacker’s “What’s the Best Way to Block a Number from Calling my Cellphone?“

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.