HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#111 :: Tube worm shells

I spent too many of my addled high school and college years staring at Roger Dean paintings. Staring at these, you could get lost in reveries of microscopic subway networks, elven mineshafts, fossilized toothpaste. You want to figure out what made them, and why they live in the tide pools of Malibu. They are an invitation to wonder.

#110 :: Strobe-Yo

An oscillating object moved past the eye will appear in multiple, optical clones strobing across your field of view like the doppler howl of a speeding Ducati receding in the distance. Tiny button-cell batteries feed power through an oscillation circuit to a single old-school red LED on either side of the Yomega Strobe-Yo. Switch them on by brushing your fingertip across two sensitive pairs of electrodes, and fling it to the bottom of its string, where it sleeps like a flatlined cat, its circuitry's cosmic red staccato throwing untranslatable Spirograph semaphores in the darkness to a unfathomable and as-yet undiscovered alien audience. Then again, it is just a toy.

#109 :: Low-capacity Storage Device

The first time I saw a floppy disk, it was a 5-½-inch model, with the massive hole in the center and a capacity of something like 256 kilobytes. My Kaypro II required two of them, one in the left-hand drive to carry the CP/M operating system and Wordstar, one in the right-hand drive to carry freelance articles I would occasionally print through my dot-matrix printer, the model of which escapes me. The Kaypro II was the classic Heavy Big Object - a metal-cased "portable" computer weighing a good 30 pounds. The keyboard clamped onto the face to protect the drive bays (remember the little "eject" levers that swiveled across the slot to block further insertion and engage the write head?) It had a massive spring-mounted strap handle and slotted vents cut into the steel case. It retailed for the then-obscene price of $1,595. They called it "Darth Vader's lunchbox." When the industry graduated to these little marvels (1.3 megabytes on the high-density double-sided models!) it felt like someone had finally brought us flying cars. The little spring-loaded tin shutter, the stamped-metal drive hub embedded in the media disc, the closed face through which you couldn't see, so reminiscent of the first time I saw a BMW motorcycle with that trick one-sided rear axle. I moved on to Syquests, Zip drives, CD-R/RW, memory sticks and onboard cerebral implants. I don't know about you, but I have boxes and boxes of old applications, photos and documents on these things, and I can't bear to throw them out as long as I have a drive in the housse that can read them. Do wish I'd hung onto the Kaypro, the casualty of a yard sale. I think it sold for about $25.

#108 :: Fellow

Yin to the rubber ghoul's yang, ego to the ghoul's id, this little fellow is inscrutable. Perched on his kidney-shaped patch of street, he gestures in raptorous (no, not the like the upcoming Big Christian Faith Jump, but predatory and mantis-like) anticipation, raving like a tent preacher, sleeves cuffed to his biceps and imparting the Lord's perennial Exhortations to Heal. It's impossible to tell what world he came from, but he takes on a tremendous amount of weight and might when paired with the rubber ghoul. Their postures are eerily identical.

#107 :: Isbrytare

I was a theater geek in college. Too generally shy (and probably untalented) to translate my run of lead performances in high school productions of "Sound of Music" and "Anything Goes" into acid-tinged audition-winning roles in "Tooth of Crime" and "Romeo and Juliet" against the Machiavellian conniving of pre-professional college-age actors, I contented myself with building sets and rigging lights. My favorite place was the grid - the steel grated rigging floor some 40 feet above the stage, where you used a crescent wrench to bolt bulky, high-wattage arc-lit instruments to pipes, and plug in their fat connectors to the 220-volt control circuits. Powerful, heavy, they vomited light so blindingly hot that you had to tame it with colored gels, barn doors, rheostats and soft focus. I always thought it would be fun to own a few, kept on low power to read by, but they're too huge and costly. A few months ago, I stumbled across this miniaturized marvel at Ikea - a tiny Lekos projector - a powerful halogen lamp with a pair of rails screwed into its snout. It comes with four dichroic glass filters, a set of punched-aluminum gobos (patterns for projecting silhouettes), a few chunks of frosted glass for texture, and a lovely little convex lens - so that you can shoot a blue moose, red windows or an absinthe-green op-art pattern 10 feet high onto your back wall at night - for less than 40 bucks. I almost bought two.

#106 :: Wooden Tree

This is made of the very thing it represents. This represents the very thing of which it is made. Symbolic cannibalism, the Ourobouros myth made wood. Just as pop will eat itself so too does meaning applied to something rob it of the potential for meaning something greater. Perhaps someone at the wooden trainset factory cut this by hand from a sheet of half-inch pine with a coping saw, sanded it smooth, hand-stained it and painted it with three coats of clear lacquer. Maybe it was die-stamped and triple-dipped by machine. No matter. It's just a tree. And it's just a "tree." And it's "just a tree."

#105 :: Monster Door

McDonald's gave these out with Happy Meals. The monsters were unremarkable - nicely built and faithful representations of the Monsters, Inc. characters. The doors, however, carry significant symbolic weight. You could stare into one of them for hours over your espresso and clove cigarettes, contemplating negative space, alternate universes, the depths of the human soul, and the crushing potential of every future second of your life. The second you're wasting reading this. The one that follows your decision to shut off the computer and go outside. The next second after that. And the next.

#104 :: Death Star

Utter destruction and evil in the palm of your hand. What sets this apart from the vast majority of Star Wars toys are its weight and construction. Instead of injection-molded plastic, Kenner cast this thing in hemispheres of pot-metal. The halves are connected through the polar axis via an axle fitted with internal cogs to a fluorescent green disc behind the business end (ray projector, hellmouth, whatever you care to call it). When you turn the hemispheres, the disc spins and flickers, as if it is powering up to wreak tiny havoc on any baseballs or oranges that might be hovering in the cosmic vicinity. It is quite heavy.

#103 :: Analog Remote Viewer

Chrome-plating came into vogue as a protective measure, rust-blocker, bulwark against time. Before long, it was appropriated as street armor, fetishized as erotic surface and totemic protection, codified as evil and good and dubbed bling. It is also extremely toxic. Some of the best HLOs are all of the above. This chromed mirror's head pivots on a double-ball joint and telescopes to 36 inches to extend your view beneath the engine block where you just dropped that vital hexbolt for the fifth time on your fourth attempt to insert it through the goddamned water pump into the motherfucking block just beyond the very edge of your (*SHIT!!!!*) fingertip reach. It also collapses to fit into a coveralls pocket by means of its handy clip.

#102 :: Shark Gun

Squirt guns were forbidden in 6th grade. It didn't stop me from collecting them. I had two favorites - the "secret" gun shaped like brass knuckles cast in plastic that was army-man green (you could make it all the more secret by snapping off the knuckleguard so that the only thing visible was the nozzle peeking up out of your fist); and the "sneaky" model, whcih had a little pivot wheel on the business end that you turned at a 90-degree angle so you could look like you were innocently aiming the gun away from someone until you soaked them point-blank. This month is birthday season among our kid friends, which means an endless parade of goodie-bags into the house, bearing trinkets, gadgets and crap. This one has teeth.

#101 :: Bell Telephone Operator's Headset

Fossil tech, the earbone of a giant. Fifty years ago, thousands of operators huddled at thousands of switchboards, plugging and unplugging calls from millions of jacks at the Bell Telephone Company nearest you. The nationwide American Telephone and Telegraph conglomerate was as close as anyone had come to building a nationwide monopoly without inviting antitrust litigation. It wasn't until the mid-80s that lawsuits from a put-upon public finally brought down mighty Ma Bell and splintered her like an enormous, brittle tree, her branches taking wild, chaotic root in the hundreds of telcos that have sprung up since. Chances are, if you called information back then, the operator was talking on one of these. Like everything else Bell made, it is extremely durable and thanks to the (now missing) wire headstrap, reasonably comfortable. My first six years as a newspaper reporter, I was on this stupid macho head trip, convinced that only obit writers and women wore headsets for interviews, real reporters crunched the phone 'twixt shoulder and ear while typing and drawling from the side of their mouths, "Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Is that riiiight." After a lovely bout of crippling neck spasms and trips to the chiropractor, I relented, and began using one of these while at the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to a web site maintained by an antique phone phanatic, this is a telephone supervisor's headset, model 52BW. It's fitted with an HC3 receiver, an N1 transmitter, an L4AH cord with a 289B plug, and 29A connecting block. I used it for years, cutting the huge brass double-pronged cord off and splicing in a standard 4-pole modular phone plug so I could use it on the LA Times' Rolm PBX system (if memory serves) but eventually they phased it out and began using phones with digital jacks that took only shitty Plantronics headsets made of plastic, with staticky, short-prone plugs. I can't tell you how many interviews I conducted through this thing. But I did stack up every single clipping I ever wrote, and the stack of tiny shreds of newsprint is close to a foot thick.

#100 :: Bicycle chain

This all began as a way of codifying one of my most organic impulses. To hold a thing that is small, has some weight and purpose in the world is to own it, whether it takes up space in my drawer or just in my mind. I have acquired these 100 (so far) objects as a way of fulfilling that need quickly - in the mercurial snatch-it-now breath of the moment I first picked them up - and tried to make sense of them as sort of a test. I don't know if I have succeeded. I did it to see if I could do it, to see if it would amount to anything. It's become popular, thanks to Mark at BoingBoing. It has invigorated my drive to write and shoot again, though I'm not sure if it has any deeper meaning. At the very least, I have completed the traditional Japanese artist's exercise of creating 100 demons in tribute to the Buddhist challenge of defeating 100 demons in a lifetime. If you have followed HLO at all, you have my humblest thanks, and if you want to introduce a friend to it, this entry is as good a place as any to start. In gratitude, I can only offer you this chunk of chain, which I've fiddled with for years at my desk. It is considered a deadly weapon, yet the strength, weight, intricacy and integrity of its 6-piece links and the unholy pressure used to force them together as one are taken for granted. You can twirl it like a watchman's keychain, whip it through the air like a bullroarer, or crush ice in a dishcloth with it when your highball gets low. Put it around your neck and go punk. Dip it in paint and make prints. Hook it up to any number of drive systems and it will work flawlessly, without maintenance, for thousands of hours without a failure. There are few archetypally perfect machines left to invent in the world. This was one of them.

#99 :: Cosmojetz

Clockwork generates the slow release of energy over time. In a clock, a series of measured events are fed by the mainspring - ticking, chiming, the slow sweep of the hands. In Cosmojetz, the spring drives an eccentric flywheel, and the whole rig shudders and bounces in a spastic frenzy on its eight spidery wire legs. It's another infectious toy like this one, by Brazilian mad genius Chico Bricalho and built by Kikkerland. It's a reminder of the giddy joy of analog toys.

#98 :: Carapace

The grill-work of a large crab is a freakish wonder of bioengineering - burly as the Maginot Line, and baroquely bristly as an Antonio Gaudi cathedral. Built to withstand rock-crushing tides and predatory attacks while allowing for exploration of environment and the capture, disassembly and ingestion of prey, it is a perfect machine. Until disease or mishap caught up with it, this fat bastard was as big through the body as Shaquille O'Neal's fist. Parts of it littered the beach, as though a massive submarine had exploded and sunk offshore, scattering flotsam to the waves. Knuckles were everywhere.

#97 :: Moon globe

As with all globes, the topography of this Replogle moon engrosses me beyond reason. Not the mountains, craters and pressure ridges printed on its surface, but the way it's put together: chunks of pressed cardboard made spherical are covered with little trapezoids of four-color-process map, all meticulously aligned and made more apparent by the dent I inflicted on it as a kid. I fondled it often, memorizing the names - Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, and the one I stared at the most after 7/20/69 - Mare Tranquilitatis. I pored over the craters, picturing them a-crawl with tiny 2001 spacesuits and moon buses - and imagining an Ice Station Zebra scenario played out by rival U.S. and Soviet expeditions, the icy weaponless standoff frozen in tension until someone would pull a top-secret raygun and touch off World War III.

#96 :: Cake-toppers

Having gamely served their duty to decorate and delight, these hand-painted, cast-resin beauties continue to flounce and pirouette in the residue of their natural habitat. They are artifacts of the ubiquitous, now worldwide cult of the Princess. The Disney heroines have become the fountainhead of lore, iconography and financial operations for this cult, which capitalizes on the desire of many little girls to dress up and feel special, a movement propagated by the blandishments of carelessly doting mothers and fathers who have only the faintest inkling as to what puberty will be like if they keep this up. But that's a cynic's view, falling like a harmless cloud of spiteful ash on the shoulders of these three as they dance on, blithely, prettily, endlessly, their light steps barely slowed by the butter cream frosting clogging their petticoats.

#95 :: Flash bulb

"Flasbulbs popping" remained a cliché long after electronic strobes took over for these pearlescent, one-shot marvels. Snapping the shutter on a camera would close a circuit, allowing electricity from a battery to jolt a hair-fine cloud of zirconium wire into ignition in the pressurized oxygen barely contained in the bulb's glass capsule. Instant daylight - or a harsh approximation thereof. Once the bulb went off, a photographer - particularly a news shooter - would quickly pop the bulb out of its clip, usually to clatter on the street below, and shove another into the socket before the previous one quit bouncing. In the days when photojournalists relied upon the plate-format Speed Graphic, taking a string of photos meant popping and replacing the bulb, then sliding a dark-slide in to the film holder to cover the 4"x5" film sheet just exposed, pulling the filmholder out, flipping it over, sticking it back into the camera and pulling its darsklide to ready the next frame. Flashbulbs were what gave Weegee's photos their garish, hyper-real edge - the sudden explosion of light and flash of heat that revealed the rawest nature of humanity at its peak. This history gives more details on the lowly flashbulb's origins and evolution.

#94 :: Sage

It grows wild in the desert here. One of the ironic blessings of wildland brushfires - which can devour entire housing tracts and splinter their communities forever - is that they smell intoxicating as destroy lives. In Native American ritual - as in coastal Southern California, the burning of sagebrush is a process of cleansing and renewal. This bundle was collected and bound by an old hippie who works the Venice boardwalk on weekends. He heaps raw sage on a weathered Guatemalan blanket, and with great patience and something of a distant, worried look in his eye, bundles the stalks together with cotton yarn and sells them for a dollar or two. We smudged our house in Venice a few years back - half giggling, half solemn as priests - in a ceremony that was by turns awkward and reverent for two people who despite Catholic upbringing had found their spiritual centers somewhere far away from organized religion and ceremony. Now that we've moved again and settled in, perhaps it's time to do it again.

#93 :: MEAL Ready-to-Eat / E3 Swag

I can't say what upsets me more - that tens of thousands of U.S. troops tear these open every night, ignite the little chemical food heaters inside and chow down on them for probably the 365th night in a row in many cases; or that the military is giving them away to geeks and swag hounds at the world's largest video game convention to promote a game the U.S. Army developed to teach you how to kill without the risk of actually dying or taking someone's life. The army booth at E3 sprawls across some 2,000 square feet beneath a 2-story Moorish village wall - surrounded by sandbagged bunkers, and staffed by real-life soldiers brandishing next-gen weapons. It was packed. This rather amazing little artifact weighs about three pounds and claims to contain chicken and noodles. I'll just toss it in the camping basket so we can "eat like the grunts" and think of a video game next time we're lounging in camp at Yosemite while my countrymen are dying for an unjust, unwinnable war they never should have been ordered to start. Ashamed to be an American these days, I'm going to feel helpless until November to change the way we're headed.

#92 :: E3 Swag

I have no clue what Nyko.com does. I may never even visit them to find out. I'd rather keep the purity of this piece of swag from this year's brain-rattling E3 convention (many more of my words and pictures here) intact. Swag is the faux currency of E3, the cool-now logoed crap that everyone runs around collecting, and then promptly forgets at the bottom of some drawer or in the back of the glovebox. Push the chrome button on the end of this bullet-shaped keychain and an LED suffuses the perspex logo with soft white light. Push it again - the light flashes. Push it again - the light switches off. Three simple technologies conspired in its making: mechanics, simple battery power and assembly-line electronics. At some point I'll figure out a way express my unified field theory of all things (animal, vegetable, mineral, mechanical, chemical, biological, digital) in multimedia. But I fear if I succeed, I'll wink out of existence entirely.

#91 :: Nazi Magic Lantern Slides

Mussolini famously said, "Character is what you are in the dark." This little stack of glass magic lantern slides shows that character - of a people who believed that their cause in war was right, oblivious to the fact that they supported a regime committing atrocities beyond the darkest possible imagining. I post this object this evening in light of the ignorance unfolding in the Senate regarding prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. I'll spare you my soapbox speech, posted elsewhere. Instead, some background on these loathsome, compelling little objects - the public service message of their day, projected in theaters before the feature. They were given to me by my Jewish father-in-law, who inherited them from his dad. Dad ran a string of Los Angeles-area movie theaters, starting in 1945 with the Yost in Santa Ana, and including the venerable Vista, still in operation at the cross of Sunset and Hollywood - the kind of theaters where you could sit in the balcony for 15 cents, and get your dates admission and candy for free because your old man ran the joint. My father-in-law's dad collected movie memorabilia - lobby cards, props, wonderful items like the golden spike used in "Union Pacific." Somewhere along the way, he picked up about a dozen 3.5"x4" magic lantern slides of Nazi war propaganda. They scream in Bauhaus lettering, cajole with the fresh-scrubbed faces of Hitler Youth members, urge, implore and command with all the graphic power that Nazi artists could muster. There is a photo of stalwart soldiers in the sort of low-over-the-ear helmets that today's U.S. soldiers wear. A valiant statue of Victory, a vigilant searchlight, and message upon message of inspiration and fidelity to the Füuhrer. The one highlighted here is a Deutche Rote Kreusz (German Red Cross) message: a woodcut-style image of a soldier flinging a potato-masher grenade, above a nurse bandaging a comrade's head. Just three valiant people enacting the pantomime of a war for what they gullibly believed in - and to which their creator hoped to rally their equally gullible countrymen. If anyone out there reads German, I'd welcome a translation.

#90 :: Rubber Geek

When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too - he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It's one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child's toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it's just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I'm taking nominations on its name.

#89 :: Xylophone

At some point during my climb out of the smoking dot-bomb crater, I built myself a xylophone to pass the time between job interviews that never came. I followed general instructions found here. Not for this toy, but a heavy big object - a fully functional, floor-standing 12-key xylophone weighing more than 80 pounds. It's crude: a finish-plywood frame/soundbox and fitted with keys (chromatic scale in C) that I cut out of bar-stock aluminum. I tuned it with a carbide wheel, grinding metal off the backsides of the keys and then thwacking them to check their pitch against a cheap digital guitar tuner. I mounted it on a pair of old cast-iron sewing machine legs I had kicking around, and now it sits in the corner of the dining room where I whack it in pensive moments in my tone-deaf fashion, and the kids and their friends plink on it with various implements any time they can get their hands on it. It takes up a ridiculous amount of space. The fun they got out of that and a big tubano drum we've had for a while set me off in a whirlwind binge of gathering inexpensive, easy-to-play instruments, and every now and then we have all-ages noise recitals. Someone donated this Auris xylophone to the school rummage sale, and I snatched it up for, like, a buck. It had been dropped a lot. Gouges and scratches mar the crisp little brass keys, the lowest C only 4.5 inches long, but the soft-pine frame is true and the tone clean. It still rings prettily when struck with a pencil or a stick. PLAY SAMPLE (Quicktime)

#88 :: Stock Car

About four years ago, Ralphs Supermarkets started giving these away, blister-packing them in with their new brand of Red Cell alkaline batteries. Everything I own that beeps, records, shoots or noodles eats AAs for breakfast. The Red Cells were mere snacks for the ravenous herd of devices, which quickly devoured them before emitting dissatisfied little electronic burps and then playing dead until I fed them more. Before long, I had collected the entire set of stock cars and moved on to rechargeable batteries.. They're *not* Hot Wheels, but have a rumbling authenticity about them, from their tiny window-mounted debris nets and internal rollcages to the logo'ed racing slicks and sponsor confetti on the quarter panels. They look pretty hot when all five park together.

#87 :: Soap

A thick, fresh block of "Kiss My Face," left at the bottom of a tiny back-bathroom sink. Water. Leaking tap. Time. Minutes. Ounces. Eight hours. Gallons. All droplets. Unceasing. Inexorable. Heavy. Ergo, this freak. I could disappear into its igneous micro-landscape, lost among barren knolls reeking of an alien smell. Corrosive winds howl through the grand arch they carved. This is an evil place. Something bad happened here once. And will once again. Look closer. Try not to blink. It's a pulp fiction landscape, frozen in evolution from lurid melodrama to bleak existential tragedy, halfway between the sterile planes of its original form and utter dissolution and erasure. Something could live there. Something small, dark and ravenous.

#86 :: Lego Alien Warrior

We had a homemade corduroy sack full of Legos when I was a kid, it weighed maybe four or five pounds. A couple of huge green base plates, untold numbers of plain, rectangular 1x2s, 2x2s, 2x6s and 2x8s in red, green, black, yellow, white. There were three or four precious blues, and perhaps two clear 1x2s that served as the windows around which the fantasy would accrete - race car, space ship, dungeon, castle keep. No guys, no chrome, no pivoting pieces (maybe an axle and some wheels). Just blocks. Now there are Mars vehicles and cow towns and pivoting 22-wheeled construction cranes and undersea pirate adventures with little peg-legged guys and semi trucks that transform into giant robots that shoot rockets and fly around with little tiny transformer robots in their bellies.

Aahh, crap. Kids.

#85 :: Pen

Magpie compulsion moved my fingers to gather copper brads, steel bearings, red wire and brass fittings and fill a test tube with them. That I had test tubes to spare is damning evidence enough of the relentless subroutine commanding the part of my brain that collects heavy little objects. But the fact that I had corks to fit them - and that I then contrived to drill one out and fit it with a Bic Stic ballpoint insert is proof that I have a certifiable tinker's curse. I can stop any time I want.

#84 :: SuperSampler

The Lomographic Society did a very smart thing: A little clique of Viennese photographers latched onto the Russian-made Lomo rangefinder camera in 1992 and - shooting wild, free and from the hip - turned its light leaking, color-saturating, vignette-prone mechanism into a creative movement. They arranged to import and distribute the cameras to the West. They set up web sites to build enthusiasm for (and purchases of) the camera. They began publishing the quirky photos it produced - and empowering others to self-publish to the Lomo site. They began importing other cameras and photography products (including Soviet surplus night-vision scopes) and at some point, they hooked me with this slick little device. It shoots four sequential panoramic pictures onto a single frame of 35mm film - allowing you to capture action sequences that are either 2/10ths of a second, or 2 seconds long. The rewind mechanism is a pull-cord that you can yank with your teeth while cruising around taking portraits of fellow cyclists. If I can ever grab the time, I'll scan some of them and publish a few here. Even without the evidence, you can admire the slick design ethos at work - the cowled quartet of lenses, the pearlescent plastic. I love this device.

#83 :: Giant Robot

Immense in the imagination, the Masaka wages horrific battle in the withering fire of plasma cannons and neutron batteries. Eight inches high In life, it began as a plastic model kit, cut, glued and fitted together with obsessive care. The paint went on in the right color - but under dim overhead lights - the wrong consistency, so that the original ice-blue color peeks through. The claws grasp and menace from powerful shoulders bunched beneath the turret-head carrying untold power and a single, baleful red eye.

#82 :: Combination Lock

Here's another amulet of urban protection, rendered useless by my faulty memory. It's difficult to say how many of these I've owned over the years, for school lockers, bikes, gym lockers, strongboxes. Without the combination, it becomes a sturdy paperweight, thumb-twiddler, hammer-in-a-pinch. Back when I used them full-time, I wish there had been something like Master's new Combo Locker service. I might then have owned only one, and the lock you see here would be more nobly dinged and weathered.

#81 :: Dinky Tanker Truck

In White Heat, they crawl into an empty one of these to pull off the climactic heist of an oil refinery. Rendered at something like 1/128th scale in stamped potmetal, with hard rubber tyres on pop-rivet axles, it reads beefier, bulkier, more heavy with threat and explosive power. Paint failure of this magnitude would be staggering at full-scale, as would the just-painted, bright yellow toy that must have rolled off the line 40 or 50 years ago. Dinky perhaps only in the eyes of the coldly objective.