Hey! Is that Alvarado Boulevard, with Pizza Buono wayyy in the background, in that Boing Boing picture?! Why, good golly, it is. Or was. There I was last night, in my living room, happily drifting around some of my favorite sites, looking to get beyond the hyperlocal in which I am so steeped (happily for the most part), checking out Boing Boing, when the Boing Boing sandwich board pops up--in front of .
It was a Mark Frauenfelder post about a recent Boing Boing meetup at the Echo Park gallery. As per BB’s mission of sharing wonderful things, people brought cool, portable stuff.
According to Frauenfelder:
“Bruce Sterling showed off a nifty iPhone app from String called the Augmented Reality Showcase that displays 3D creatures and other objects when you point the phone's camera at encoded pieces of paper.
“Jasmina Tešanović had a beautiful silk scarf patterned with headshots of heroes and villains throughout history.”
And David Acevedo, a graphic novelist from Puerto Rico, “brought along a devil doll made of string.”
The rules were as follows:
“One of the rules of the ‘Wonderful Things’ was that the things we brought should have personal value but not intrinsic value. Nobody paid heed to this more than [one] fellow, who showed us three lowly objects: a paperclip, a rock chip, and a barleycorn. The barleycorn was found at an event honoring the Dali Lama. The rock chip is from Tiananmen Square. The paperclip is memorable, explained the fellow who brought it, because when he tossed it on his desk it landed on its edge. (Freeman Dyson once remarked that statistically, a person can expect a miracle to happen to them once every four months or so.)”
While the post dates June 16, the event actually took place in the vaguely not-too-distant past, as Frauenfelder, the founder of Boing Boing, explains. He sat on it for a little while–clearly not realizing the relevance to Echo Park.
wishes she had been there. I might have brought my little hen, Cutie Patootie, who is not a thing, it’s true, but she is wonderful. Maybe when they have a meetup dedicated to wonderful hens.
In the meantime, have I mentioned that Frauenfelder writes beautifully about chickens in his book Made by Hand, a highly entertaining and sincere tale of DIY gone mostly right, but sometimes very wrong? Well, he does.
