Big loofa? Check. Good mayo? Check. Dong bags, ass wash and white people bread? Um... come again?

A contributor at Reddit claims to have stumbled on this list at his local Walmart and the items thereon are causing much discussion.

We're assuming that "Sh*t fo' yo pitz" is referring to deodorant and that "dong bags" is not-too-subtle code for condoms. But is there a specific kind of wash for one's ass?

The one that is causing the biggest back-and-forth is "white people bread," which commenters take to mean anything from Wonder bread to expensive artisanal loaves.

Personally, I want to know the back story on "good mayo" and why anyone would ever purchase mayonnaise that isn't good.

Seattle-based writer, photographer, filmmaker and artist, Christopher Boffoli creates amazingly creative miniatures using people and food. Here are 13 that I’ve curated. Many many more over on his Web site. What’s your favorite of the bunch? Let us know in the comments below.

For more, visit Christopher Boffoli’s site.

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Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian illustrator and cartoonist living in Brooklyn. Visit her at jilliantamaki.com or read her webcomic at mutantmagic.com.

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See more posts by Jillian Tamaki

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Sign Of The Times of the Day: This must be what the American system looks like to people who use metric measurements.

[arbroath.]

Where the photographs are:

Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s. In fact, ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months.

[Video Link] From Laughing Squid: "To announce the grand opening of Westfield Stratford City, which will soon be “the largest urban shopping centre in Europe”, Westfield created this fun short film, 100 YEARS / STYLE / EAST LONDON. The film, directed by Jake Lunt with The Viral Factory, amazingly gives the run-down of 100 years of East London fashion, dance and music in just 100 seconds."

If you're traveling the world at all this summer, chances are you'll come across homes smaller than your average U.S. house. We found the above chart at the BBC (love its Josef Albers-esque aesthetics) and we converted to square feet after the jump:

Midwest-born, Brooklyn-based artist Mark Wagner cuts up thousands of dollar bills to construct meticulous collages. See George Washingtons chopping down a cherry tree, mowing the lawn, and cranking the clockwork inside the allegorical innards of the Statue of Liberty. With a little razor and glue action, “the most ubiquitous piece of paper in America” gets reborn in narrative scenes and creative portraits, with each little branch, line, silhouette, raindrop, and metaphorically misleading shadow crafted from tiny cut-outs of $1. His latest epic, multi-panel Liberty collage consists of 81,895 pieces of 1,121 bills and can be seen at his solo show at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea through August 12th.

Courtesy Mark Wagner

The city of Seville might be best known in art circles as the birthplace of famed Spanish painter Diego Velazquez, but now the city has another claim to fame — it is now the home of the world’s largest wooden structure, a 5,000 square meter canopy over the central Plaza de la Encarnacion.

Reminiscent of Zaha Hadid alien buildings but decidedly less futuristic, the Metropol Parasol, designed by Jürgen Mayer H., is made out of cross-hatching timber planks on top of a steel structure. The undulating surface of the canopy is also home to a walkway that curves in and out of the Parasol’s branches. Walking along the promenade would be like walking on top of an ethereal cloud.

Photos of the structure show the curvilinear Parasol segments contrasting nicely with classic European architecture, the contemporary against the timeless. But the two aesthetics aren’t fighting each other — the monochrome stretches of the Parasol compliment the stiffness of Seville’s rectilinear blocks. Seen from the air, it’s like a wooden spaceship landed in the city’s main square, an extra-terrestrial market place that’s a soft version of Chinese architecture firm MAD’s Superstar, an angular intergalactic “Chinatown.”

Aside from being an awesome viewing platform and boon on hot days, the Metropol Parasol also holds “a farmers market and multiple bars and restaurants underneath and inside the parasols.” So are inhabitable canopies the new High Line of international urbanism? Are we going to start seeing cloud platforms instead of renovated railways? What will NYC do to catch up!?

Via Yatzer.

[Video Link]. Update: Previously blogged on BB. Here is a link to the "shred of the month" archive.

(via Jon Swaine / spaceghetto)

3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection.

There are lots of ways to show these interactions...the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done. (thx, janelle)

Submitted by: djempuiw
Posted at: 2011-06-05 00:07:37
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/134571

Some food trends stick around for years, others last only a few weeks. Here's a list of 10 dining fads that recently kicked the bucket:

10) Old-Timey Dining Rooms: For years, many of the city's hottest new restaurants had dark dining rooms with a bunch of retro junk on the walls, ornate chandeliers, vintage tables and chairs, and maybe a few pieces of choice taxidermy. But now, these kinds of restaurants are starting to look dated, in a different way. New York has officially reached its old-timey dining room saturation point. The hot new restaurant spaces of 2011 are the ones that feel like old-school classics, but that don't blatantly steal from the past. See: The Dutch, Peels, Fedora, The Brooklyn Star. [Photo]

9) Growlers: As a general rule, a dining trend is officially dead the moment it's co-opted by Duane Reade. And while there are still a lot of growlers available throughout the city, cans full of local beer are the new hotness. They're much easier to cary, and they don't require a hungover trip back to the beer store the next day to get your deposit back. [Photo]

8) Discount Fine-Dining: Gone are the Damon Frugal Fridays, the four-star early bird specials, and the Baucus Bail Outs. Two years after the economy tanked, the fine dining world seems to have rebounded to the point where the city's best restaurants don't need to offer truffled mac and cheese, or off-hour discounts to fill some seats (for proof, take a peek at Ryan Sutton's The Price Hike blog). Sadly, restaurants like Matsugen, Chanterelle, and Cru weren't able to make it through the dark times, despite offering these kinds of deals. [Photo]

7) Speakeasies: My Little Secret signaled the end of the trend when it put up an awning announcing itself as a speakeasy (it closed less than a year later). But many other "secret" bars and restaurants also disappeared in the last few years. Maybe undercover operations just don't play these days because there are too many food blogs out there to keep anything a "cool secret" for very long. [Photo]

6) Tiki: Painkiller, The Hurricane Club, and Lani Kai all opened within a few months of each other last year, and for a moment, it seemed like NYC was on its way to becoming the swizzle stick capital of the world. But the fad died, and New York was left with three and only three new Tiki bars, plus enough hollowed-out pineapples and cocktail umbrellas to last a lifetime. [Krieger]

5) Asian Sandwiches: The Asian Sandwich Boom of 2009 is but a faint memory at this point. A few tight operations continue to do really well — Num Pang, Baohaus, Baoguette — but many others have closed. And, thank the lord, banh mi sandwiches have stopped popping up at restaurants that don't serve any other Asian dishes. [Photo]

4) The Gastropub: Actual British gastropubs (of which are there are only a handful in New York) are still very popular, but the trend is most definitely dead in terms of other restauranteurs copying the style and laying claim to the title. These days, it's much trendier to offer "small, shareable plates of locally-sourced seasonal fare and raw bar items" in a dining room full of rustic American ephemera, than to blatantly rip-off The Spotted Pig. [Photo]

3) Tiny Menus: Although prix fixes are having a moment these days, a la carte menus with just a few appetizers and entrees, are on the way out. Restaurateurs now want to give diners as many options as possible, on a page full of boxes and sidebars. And the menus seem to be getting physically larger, too: if you go to The Darby, Osteria Morini or Donatella, you will be handed a piece of paper the size of a bath mat. [Photo]

2) "Pies are the New Cupcakes": This trend was DOA when it was first announced by several media outlets last fall. People aren't lining up for pies (unless it's the day before Thanksgiving), they don't debate which bakery or restaurant serves the better slice, and there just aren't that many shops in this city that are devoted to the dessert. Actually it's hard to believe that any sweet treat will every become "the new cupcakes" anytime soon, because New Yorkers have a deep, profound, and at times maniacal love for cupcakes, similar to what a mama grizzly feels for her baby cub. [Photo]

1) American Comfort Food: There were a lot of new restaurant serving "elevated American comfort food" following the onset of the recession, and many of them failed. Now that diners have more money to go out, they seem to be choosing places that offer something satisfying, and out-of-the-ordinary. Perhaps that explains why the two big recent hits in terms of American restaurants are The Dutch and Red Rooster, which offer a number of ethnic soul food dishes, along with fried chicken, burgers and biscuits. [Photo]

I found this photo of Alfred Hitchcock with three children here labeled "Alfred Hitchcock and his kids" but since he only had one child and looks older in the photo, I assume those are actually his three granddaughters, Mary, Tere, and Katie.

Anyway, lots of other rarely seen celebrity photos here, including a few fakes -- notably the JFK/Monroe one done by Alison Jackson -- an unheartthrobby George Clooney as a teen, and Hitler's baby picture. (via ★genmon)

the 3-in-1 design allows you to nestle each of the seats into one another in a seamless way, forming one chair when multiple seats are not necessary.

The David Lynch Water Lily: America's Next Hair Craze. (If it works for Tilda Swinton, it can work for you.)

[World of Wonder via Daily What]

Read more posts by Amanda Dobbins

Filed Under: clickables, art, david lynch, hair

My conceit, when I started making infographics, was simple. I believed this was a *new way* of expressing and visualizing information, a thoroughly modern and zeitgeisty fusion of data and design. Oh you muppet David.

1900s

These infographics were created by students of American African-American activist W.E.Dubois in 1902. They’re so modern looking! Right down to the type. So much so, in fact, I had to double-check they weren’t fakes. But no, there’s a huge stack of them in the Library Of Congress. Read a fascinating post on how and why they were created. And a great side-by-side vintage vs modern display here. (Thanks to @JonAkwue for sending)

ISOTYPE

Then there’s ISOTYPE – the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education. It was an early infographical form, originated in the 1930s by Austrian philosopher and curator Otto Neurath “as a symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons.” Again, it’s eye-popping how modern these images look. Despite being fashioned from woodcuts and hand-printing methods. Gorgeous.

There’s a gorgeous small-format book on Isotype by Neurath’s wife Marie and Robin Kinross that’s worth a look. (Disclosure: they sent me a review copy)

Gerd Arntz

The vibe of ISOTYPE, and its tight visual language, depended heavily on the pictographic work of German artist Gerd Arntz. He developed over 5000 icons and pictograms, which formed the syllables of the ISOTYPE language. His work has had a strong influence on modern iconography.

Nice!

Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer (look inside) is gorgeous book, recently published by 010 Publishers, celebrating his work (Amazon UK | US). (Disclosure: they sent me a review copy).

Why Now?

So infography has risen and fallen in history. Could it ‘catch’ this time? Feels to me like it could. There’s now a viable medium (the web) and an increasingly visually-literate audience. But, again, is that my conceit? Could infographics and visualized information wipe-out again?

As part of the Scope Art Show, in connection with Armory Arts Week, four to five real-life bros are on display inside a glass box in a gallery on 36th Street. The "C'mon Guy (Frat Boy Box Party)" is not a joke: They've duped the dudes into this exhibit by supplying them with cases of Natural Light beer, a magic marker, and a bucket to piss in. So far, in their makeshift habitat, the specimens have been spotted "doing push-ups, chugging beers, and partying it up." Visitors are allowed to interact with the boys via text and flash them if they feel inclined. [Gothamist]

Read more posts by Mike Vilensky

Filed Under: neighborhood news, art, bros, fraternities

A list of things I'd like restaurant websites to provide.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Jason Kottke introduces it:

Isle of Tune is a musical sequencer with a twist...you build little roads with houses, trees, streetlights, etc. that cars can then drive past, making music as they go. This is currently the top-rated island. And here's Michael Jackson's Beat It.