Author: Joey deVilla

One of my friends from Crazy Go Nuts University, Stacy Dillon, is now a teacher in New York City and does book reviews on her blog, Booktopia. She’s recently started a new blog in which she reviews books for the tween set (that’s ages 9 through 12) called Welcome to My Tweendom.

One of the books she recently reviewed had a title that made me laugh out loud: You are SO not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah!

(I see an opportunity to rip off this title and write books like You are SO not Going on my Blogroll or You are SO not Getting in on My IPO.)

Maybe I’ll buy it for Wendy for some airport reading. We’re booked for at least three flights in the next six months.

The device on the right is a Thingamagoop — a simple handmade electronic synthesizer made by Bleep Labs. Unlike the synths you see at music stores, it’s controlled not by a keyboard, but by a photocell. The more light the photocell receives, the higher the pitch of the sound it emits.

If the design of the Thingamagoop looks familiar, it’s because it’s done by the fine folks at Goopymart.

The knob acts as a frequency control. One of the switches determines whether the Thingamagoop emits high or low sounds, while the other determines whether the sound output is continuous or switching on and off.

That dangling thing with a light? That’s the LEDacle (Light-Emitting Diode tenACLE), which you can move to affect the sound produced by the Thingamagoop. Its blinking is affected by the controls, and you can point its light at the photocell to change the pitch.

Thingamagoops have built-in speakers and a 1/4″ jack so that you can route its output to an amplifier or through effects boxes.

My only complaint about these beauties: the price is a little steep — it sells for $100. Perhaps Make magazine will do a piece on building your own.

Chris “Turner” Turner, my fellow DJ at Clark Hall Pub back in my days at Crazy Go Nuts University, is currently touring the globe with his wife Ashley Bristowe and daughter Sloane, doing research on his next book, titled The Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need. The book, from what I recall of Chris’ description last summer, is a guided tour of things that people are doing to create healthy, sustainable places to live with a sense of community. Being a believer that progress and good planetary stewardship needn’t be diametrically-opposed mutual exclusives, a guy who likes to think about communities and being an optimist in general, I find the idea of Chris’ upcoming book fascinating. I look forward to getting a copy once it comes out next year.

In the meantime, Ashley’s been dutifully blogging their research trip, which has included:

• Berlin, where he caught up with Ian Conacher, whom I knew from the late Shift magazine, where he’s shooting a documentary about solving the plastic problem (made from oil, takes forever to break down, and yet we chuck it at an incredible rate).
• Staying in an Earthship in Taos. Earthships are houses that are designed to be as self-sustaining as possible while keeping environmental impact to a minimum.
• Restaurant recommendations, should your travels take you along paths near theirs.

In addition to the Geography of Hope blog and Ashley’s personal blog, they’ve also got a Flickr photoset that covers their travels.

Safe travels, Ash and Turner, and I’ll be reading!

Nobody believed Damian Penny when he insisted that there was a Ferris Bueller TV series, but I’d have backed him up. (I consider Ferris to be a personal hero — much to the chagrin of a playa hata friend of mine — and keep a repository of all sorts of information Buelleresque in my noggin.) Still, it’s nice to know that courtesy of YouTube, there’s more solid proof:

I saw a couple of episodes, and it was terrible, top to bottom. The sillier Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, a show that ripped off a good number of ideas from the Ferris Bueller movie, made for better viewing.

If you’re wondering if anyone from the show moved on to bigger and better things, here’s your answer:

In tribute to the Ferris in his true form — the movie — I give you the opening theme: Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11 [3.5 MB MP3].