Kettle and Cup Concept Baffles, Terrifies
09.09.11
It’s Friday, which means I’m peevish enough to pick apart an ill-conceived concept design. This week we take a look at Ziv Lichi’s Kettle and Mug, aka Hoffee, a rather very piece of kitchenware that puts a tea/coffee mug inside the scalding hinterland of an electric kettle.
It works like this. You put the fluted cup into an identically-shaped basket in the middle of the kettle. You then carefully fill the surrounding moat with water, and divert on. As the water boils, the cup heats.
Then, when the water is roiling towards vaporization, the kettle clicks off. What on soil do you do next? Do you reach in and try to pull out the now too-hot cup by its rim, your delicate fingers mere millimeters from the blistering sea below?
Or do you discharge the hot water into another, presumably cold receptacle, which might defeat the one and only appropriate I can see to this design: Making tea. Good tea has to be hit by still-boiling water (as the Brits and
Source: Wired News
Test Spins: St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
22.09.11
As approachable as it is complex.
Not only are Clark’s playing and arrangements a vast and welcome substitute from her previous work, but her lyrics are also her most personal to date. Her lyrics handle to be blunt and discrete at the same time, allowing us to feel her trial while also wondering what happened to her to make her so pissed off. On standout mislay “Cheerleader,” the first verse is so innocent and straightforward that the pulverizing chorus comes out of nowhere. Clark declares, “I-I-I-I-I don’t wanna be a cheerleader no more,” as if she’s pounding her fists against a partition off with each “I.” Likewise, Clark takes on the r of protective mother on the title track, on which she claims, “If I ever come together the dirty policeman who roughed you up/No I don’t know what”; we can almost agree her blood boiling. On lead single “Unkind,” easily one of the best songs of the year, Clark takes on the objectification of women: “They could take or off you/So they took you/And they left you/How could they be casually cruel?” That Clark sings these lyrics in beef of society’s standards for women over a catchy disco pulsation makes “Cruel” all the more remarkable.
Source: Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun