The Dieline examines 50 such bottles that would get my business whether or not the product is any good.  Despite the overabundance of Absolut Vodka bottles, it’s nice to see three Portland spirits make the list. 

That both 12 Bridges Gin and Lovejoy Vodka (both are crafted by Integrity Spirits, whose Trillium Absinthe also made the list but I haven’t partaken yet) are excellent tasting spirits in their own right is an added bonus.

If you’re wondering that’s the Hawthorne Bridge on the bottle.

You can download the free virtual appliance of Chrome OS here. The tarball is containing vmdk and vmx files, so you’ll need a free VMware Player or VirtualBox in order to run this appliance. 

Not sure if this is on the up and up but Google did hold a press conference today with details of their much bally-whooed OS and it sounds impressive. 

It won’t be officially launched until first or second quarter 2010 and it really will be a browser-based interface.

Excess and Lamborghini go hand and hand.  Though I still prefer the classic and sophisticated lines of the Ferrari, the other Italian automaker still creates an intimidating beast of a car.  There is something primal about a Lamborghini — it is a swirling mess of super-ego and id raging on two axels. 

The V-12 supercar looks like an attack vehicle from the future. ”The 6.5 liter, 12-cylinder mill puts out 662 horsepower. The car does 0 to 62 mph in 3.4 seconds. It tops out at 205 mph,” according to Wired Magazine.  “But the most important number is 20. As in that’s precisely how many Lamborghini will build.”   

Which means you probably have to know a few people and have $1.6 million dollars to shell out for it.

The design of this coffee table to mimic the wooden sleds of yore is nice, but it’s the details of the ice blue rug, with two deep grooves cut out to mimic the compressed snow from the sleds that makes this worth having.  It’s possible to move the sled back and forth from one side of the rug to the other.  A nice feature if you move your coffee table around often like I do.  [via]

All I want to do is to slide down into one of these tubs with the hot water running.  Everything a bathtub should be. The company also makes washbasins and oval-shaped soaking tubs, even though Unique Wood Designs began in 1979 as a boating company. [via]

All other dresses can go home. You have lost the competition. Would I start rocking dresses if I owned this garment?  Yes, yes I think I would.  [via]

“Notice how all the elements in the interior create the overall feeling of out-of-space:. The bathtub resembles an oval spaceship connected to the ground by futuristic elements and is also enriched by modern faucets. The light spot on the ceiling emits a blue, out-of-this-world light that is directed to the tub just like  in the UFO movies. Same goes for the washbasin, which has a unique shape, fitting perfectly in this thematic Sci-Fi scenario.”

Yup, it looks more like a science lab than a bathroom, but that’s what I’m drawn to.  I suppose if I had the money, I’d want something a bit more serene, but this is pretty cool nonetheless.

Mr. and Mrs. Eaves here I come.

Mars missions from 1960 to present by Bryan Christie Design for IEEE Spectrum’s special report “Why Mars? Why Now?” You can check out a larger version at the IEEE site.  Totally worth it.

[via]

“The Vancouver Olympics made a smart choice in deciding to use precious metals from old electronics. By salvaging medal materials from old products, the Olympic committee is saving perfectly good gold, silver, and bronze from ending up in landfills,” writes Ariel Schwartz. “ Because it makes no sense to mine for new gold when a single junked PC has more of the stuff in it than 17 tons of ore. And if the medals are promoted well, they could bring awareness to the cause of recycled scrap. With the entire world watching what happens at the Olympic games, there is no better venue to promote such an important–and easy-to-implement–solution to electronics recycling.” 

Word.  It makes for a good story, except that, according to the Ottawa Citizen, less than 1% of the metal used to make the medals came from recycled materials.

One of the problems of any kitchen, especially small ones, is how to store spices.  Sure you could throw them in draw or get one of those rotating carousels, but honestly, those aren’t particularly good solutions.  Right now, I’ve got these small magnetic tins attached to the side of my fridge.  The problem with that is they aren’t particularly attractive and they always get knocked off into the vortex between the fridge and counter.  You know, that nefarious space where things go to disappear and die.

Anyway, for $44 Yanko Design has created this cool Zero Gravity Spice Race.  It comes with 12 custom spice canisters and a magnetic base that half of them will stick to, making use of vacant wall space. So you can get your spices to hang above the stove or where ever, but definitely out of the way.

Oh, hello.  I didn’t see you standing there.  Are you having a good morning?  If you begin to wonder where I am all day, just know that I’m cruising through Extreme Pumpkin and getting baffled/amazed by the creativity people show when carving Halloween pumpkins.  These aren’t your standard jack-o-lanterns, no siree.  Which is to say that the name of the site is apropos to the pictures they post.  A few of my favorites to get you started: there’s the radioactive pumpkin, the strapped to a board pumpkin, the p-section pumpkin seen above (personal fave), the baby eating pumpkin and last but certainly not least, the pumpkin monster burning a city down.  So look, we know you’re going to dress up as the slutty (fill in the blank) this year (guys that applies to you too), but do us a favor and spend some quality time on your pumpkin.

As someone who is enamored by a well-made business card, I loved these cassette tape varieties.  Th0ugh it looks as though the creator took actual cassette tapes and put some information on it.  I think I would much prefer to have my business card be designed to look like a cassette tape.  Especially if I were running a music blog, or something to that effect.  [via]

This is the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state located in what is now modern Nigeria.  The empire lasted from 1440 until 1897. [via]

A London couple have found the ultimate space-saving solution for a city-dwelling book lover: a staircase bookshelf.  The shelves/stairs were created by UK-based Levitate Architects.  This is pretty amazing and a good way to utilize storage.  It also makes the stairway, which are generally architecture and design afterthoughts, into something useful and interesting.  [via]

Eyeball created PBS’s new branding and it looks fantastic.  I love the simplicity of the slogan “Be More” and how evocative the color scheme is.  Well done.  As part of the campaign, which will roll out on September 27 during Ken Burn’s new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Eyeball designed 630 different on-air, online, and print elements to push the new branding into the public’s consciousness.

You can check out other images and videos of the rebranding campaign at Eyeball’s site.

I was pumped Polk got his own coin — afterall, he is one of my top five favorite US presidents (what, no one else keeps a running list like that?) – unfortunately the US Mint turned him into creepy egg-face Vader at the end of Jedi. 

And if that wasn’t insult enough, the other presidents in the series are some of the worst Presidents to ever get their pimp on in the Oval Office. 

First, it makes no sense to honor Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or Monroe with a dollar coin since they’ve already been mintified in some capacity.  Secondly, it makes no sense to honor Martin Van Buren (well he did help build the trans-continental railroad), John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, or William Henry Harrison because the general public have no idea who they are or what they accomplished.  Because they were horrible presidents. 

But James K. Polk?  I can get down with him.

As much as I love Chuck’s, I prefered the durability and higher quality canvas of the One-Star.  Except you can’t really find them and let’s be honest: Chuck’s aren’t worth the $40 since they just fall apart with heavy wear.

But with the new additions to their 2010 lineup, it looks like Converse might have won me back.  Among the highlights are Converse’s Jack Purcell in two-tone canvas offerings, the Fast Break II, Star Player 1977, and a set of Chuck Taylor Slims, popular within the John Varvatos line.

Damn, I love those Star Players.  Definitely going to have to get a pair or two. [via here and here]

Man I want one of these.  They would be great for hot chocolate and a cookie or coffee and a english muffin in the morning.  Buy it from UK company Mocha. [via]

But it’s worth looking back at the 142-acre Forest Hills Garden, 100-years-old in 2009, a prototype of the British Garden movement, as inspiration in designing “walkable, transit-oriented” communities that are architecturally diverse and integrate a variety of housing structures and business zones in a single planned space.   In my mind, any development should be a mix of high-end and affordable residencies inter-mingled. 

The current suburban model has to be rethought for sustaining American life and the Forest Hills Garden model is but one possibility. 

Check out more photos of Forest Hills Garden on its Flikr set.

Artist Neill Cameron’s A-Z of Awesomeness, a series which gained noteriety this summer for including such, well, awesome alliterations like “Indiana Jones Inching away from an Inebriated Iron Man” and “Wolverine Wishing Wonder Woman Weren’t So Wasted” and “Xena eXperiencing Professor X’s eXtravagant Xenophobia.” 

Now the whole thing is available on one poster, which Neill will also sign and do a custom sketch on per your instructions. It can be ordered here for the low price of £7.50 (GBP), with a postage and packing charge of £2.50, wherever you are. 

There’s only 250 prints, so… get on this pronto.  You, or the geek in your life, will be thankful to no end.  [via]

“This Sèvres Vase Clock by Georgios Maridakis actually works with any vase. You can place any you like on the stand and then adjust the hammer. Every hour the hammer will knock on the vase, the sound will depend on the vase of course. The combination of a hammer and porcelain is quite nice,” says Pieter over at Today and Tomorrow.

I like it.  Not sure when it was switched over, but it’s very clean, easy to navigate.  Many newspaper sites would be wise to hede this aesthetic.

Patrick Bateman may not approve of this dorky old skool business card holder shaped like a Nintendo controller, but just about everyone else should.  You can pick one up at Geek Stuff 4 U, though the prices are in Yens, so there’s that.  Pre-orders are available now and it will be ready to ship in October. [via]

The design isn’t that radical, but look at the BMW Gina’s exterior shell.  It’s something to behold.  [via]

We spend most of our time on sites like Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Friend Feed, etc. so why not decorate your apartment with pillows representing your favorite hangout?  These FriendFeed, Myspace, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and RSS Icon Pillows are available from the Craftsquatch Etsy shop for $14.99-19.99 each.  I’ve got to say, I love the Reddit pillow the most, but that’s also because I love that site more than the others.  The little alien is so squishable.  [via]

The guys at Top Gear went to Dubai to square off yesteryear’s supercar, the McLaren F1 against today’s supercar, the Bugatti Veyron. I love the F1, but watching the Veyron (paddle shifts and all) go toe to toe with an amateur driver is pretty impressive. [via]

It’s like robot central around here with the Gundam love and then the Alaska mecha this morning.  Anyway, above is an 18-foot-tall, 1200-lbs. statue of Bumblebee – classic ’80s Bumblebee that you all know and love, obviously.

Tom Rhodes who lives in Lemoore, Calif. constructed the little guy using an actual Krom Volkswagon Beetle.

It’s easy to see Michael Bay’s logic in not recreating the classic look of the cartoons for the big screen — that would look quite silly — however, at least you can see the clearly delineated features on this robot instead of it looking like a massive dump of twisted steal, hydraulic parts and whatnot. 

Also?  This robot probably doesn’t talk with an offensive voice a la Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars or more pertinently, like Jazz, as stereotypical scatman Caruthers. 

Robots do not talk.  They communicate through radiowaves.   And, end of rant. 

Back to Rhodes, who’s next project involves some kind of semi-truck. Do with that what you will.   Check out more pics over at Daily Stab. [via Geekologie]

From Trend Hunter:

Coffee addiction drove Aimee Kick into fashion design. She is the “coffee cup girl” at Francis Howell North High School in Missouri. When it came prom time, she knew she wanted a one of a kind statement dress. So in her spare time she rounded up a few bazillion coffee filters and designed and made her own dress from the filters. She looked to veggies, tea bags, bubble wrap and aluminum foil but didn’t like the durability of these materials. Aimee, the “coffee filter dress girl” is a senior taking three courses at the high school, one online course and working part time.

I can’t even begin to express how rad this girl is.  Plenty of photos to gawk at. 

Coming on the heels of the elephant padlock, comes this sleek Elephant Bottle Opener designed by Jergen Moller for Georg Jensen.

Gentlemen, that would look much better on your makeshift bar than your college key bottle opener you’re probably still using.  [via laughing squid]

Tyznik does a few things right, demonstrating a keen understanding of US currency that few people in the design competition do.  For starters he’s kept the bills green, the US Presidents are still front and center, along with specific US landmarks on the back, and he’s made one crucial change that makes 100% sense.

On each bill he’s included two passages from the Bill of Rights.  Despite what Christian Fundies would have you believe, it is not God that makes America what she is, it is our government and the government starts with the Bill of Rights.  When America is gone, the Bill of Rights will endure for other countries to study and improve upon.

In addition, I think one of the most important things about America is our Bill of Rights. I think it is probably the most important information any citizen can have, and for that reason, it is printed on the back of the bills. It is sometimes thought the amendments are listed in order of importance, so it makes sense to have the first ones on the most common bills and the last ones on the less common bills.

I don’t particularly agree with him changing the denominations — getting rid of the penny, changing the dollar bill to a coin, adding a $2 coin and swapping the $500 bill for a $200 denomination.  But, though I don’t necessarily agree with him, it’s clear that he’s thought about those changes and has clear reasons for them.

Lastly, I changed the denominations of the bills. I think we need to get rid of the penny, because they’ve gotten to the point that they’re more expensive to produce than they’re worth. Instead, the coins would be 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, $1, and $2. The coins can keep their current design, and the $2 would be slightly thicker and larger than the $1, with a shape similar to the UK 50p coin. I’ve added a $200 bill because the $500 is entirely impractical, but the 200 € banknote is in general circulation and I think a $200 could be useful.

Again, the site is worth perusing for the humorous suggestions, the bizarre suggestions and the quality ones like the one above.  One thing is clear though, is that it is time to give US currency a much needed face lift.

And apparantly the Olympic committee took the city’s warm-fuzzies for gettin’ high as a reason to design the Olympic torch to look like a joint. 

Shit is hot. 

Composed of stainless steel, aluminum and sheet moulding, the torch was designed to evoke snow, ice, skiing and skating, but to many, the metre-long white torch looks suspiciously like a marijuana joint, especially when lit.

The observation has become so common in this city that it’s hard to know who was the first to say, “Hey, doesn’t that look like …”

But the torch’s resemblance to British Columbia’s biggest cash crop was evident right away to Jodie Emery, editor of Cannabis Culture magazine.

“A lot of people come to Vancouver because it’s marijuana-friendly, so I think people who already enjoy a joint themselves will feel a little more kinship to the Olympics,” said Emery, who ran as a Green party candidate in the provincial election this month.

The alternative, of course, is that the sleek torch is supposed to resemble futuristic skiis.  All I see is a squiggly bullet train, a shiny pen and dental equipment.  Don’t ask, but I love having my teeth cleaned.

From The Infrastructurist:

Everybody knows what a cloverleaf looks like — but could you identify a volleyball, a double trumpet, or a “spooey” if you drove on one in the course of your highway travels? These are among the distinctive designs that transportation engineers have conjured up to keep traffic flowing and motorists headed in the right direction when major roads intersect.

For your driverly edification, we’ve compiled photo examples of more than 2o different kinds of strange and delightful highway interchanges found both here in the US and abroad. In fact, right now stimulus dollars are being spent t0 build or upgrade many interchanges into one of these forms.

Part 1 and Part 2 are both worth perusing for the highway porn.  Also, it should be worth noting that The Infrastructurist has quickly become one of my favorite new reads.  A nice specific topic that they cover so well.  [via Boing Boing]

“Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were ‘many browser sessions’,” Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website.

“Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.

“However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment.”

The question of the design challenge is what is the best way to navigate 20+ webpages from one browser.  Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has suggested moving tabs to the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by type — applications, work spaces, etc.

The logical extension of that suggestion would be Oliver Reichenstein’s design of Firefox as an iTunes-like interface.

To be clear: It’s not what Safari or Chrome do. The idea is not to show screen shots but to turn the browser into a media system organizer more than a media display application. Instead of structuring a browser to keep the screen tidy for the moment, we thought that it’d be awesome to structure the browser as a (multi media) file system. Like iTunes. With predefined folders. Like OSX. So whenever you open a new tab you see what you last saw in your iTunes, uhm, Firefox library.

Hopefully, Mozilla and Firefox make some radical and much needed changes for Firefox 3.2 or 4.0 or whatever the next version will be.  Regardless, the functionality of the browser hasn’t really changed much since Netscape practically invented it back in the early 90s and yet the web itself has gone through about three evolutions since then.  Shouldn’t our interface with that world evolve in the same manner?

The current prototype will go 400 miles on its 1.7 gallon fuel tank and reach speeds of up to 75 mph. 

The VW 1-Liter, developed in a wind tunnel, has a very narrow and very flat body configuration that necessitated tandem seating for the two occupants. Measuring in at 4.1 feet wide, 11.4 feet long, and just over 3 feet tall, the car features an amazing drag coefficient of just 0.159.

Essentially, it’s a two-person automobile, with little more than an engine and a cockpit for driving. 

The fuel sipping VW would probably be powered by a tiny single-cylinder diesel engine of 300 cc to 500 cc displacement, made of aluminum, using the latest direct injection technology. The 1-Liter concept car used a single-cylinder 300 cc diesel engine with an aluminum monobloc crankcase and cylinder head, resulting in a total 8.5 horsepower output. The non-turbocharged direct injection engine uses advanced high-pressure unit injection technology. It’s mounted transversely in front of the rear axle and mated to an automated direct shift 6-speed transmission.

Still, a car like this would go over well in Europe and potentially in many cities in America.  Can’t say Americans, as a whole, would embrace this for long trips or weekend getaways, but it would be nice to see something like this take root amongst the commuter set. 

There’s no timetable for this vehicle and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it at your local VW dealer. 

You know what the difference between today and yesteryear is?  Or one of a million differences, since I won’t pretend this is anything more than a trite observation.  But it seems like our culture used to find excuses to make anything seem more amazing.

We’d dress up to go to the grocery story, or take the time to create works of art for simple padlocks. Crooked Brains has a nice collection of padlocks, all interesting and unique in their own way.  The craftsmanship for everyday objects just isn’t there anymore.  Not with IKEA, Target and Wal-Mart providing those everyday objects.

[via somethinbeautiful]

It’s clear that the GOP specifically, and not the conservative movement, has no ideas on how to help the country when members of the RNC plan to meet next week to “approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the ‘Democrat Socialist Party.’”

Really?  It’s about as ridiculous if the Democrats met to pass a resolution rebranding the Republicans as the “Republican Fascist Party.”  I guess, every issue in this country has been solved since this is what they are working on. 

Though, I much prefer Stephen Colbert’s suggestion that the GOP rebrand themselves with the cockroach as their logo during last night’s episode.  Because the cockroach is resilient and will be around forever! 

“The GOP needs to make painful, soul-searching, superficial changes to their image without altering anything inside,” according to Stephen Colbert.

Maybe that’s their new plan to just outlast the Democrats after the nuclear holocaust.