The Big Cigar Means...

Xavier Cugat is happy to see you.

Knit Your Own Space Helmet

How sad that, during the sixties, the Soyuz program required its Cosmonettes to knit their own helmet liners:

I can't imagine this was ever comfortable or warm: just look at where the wool touches. Under the chin -- wear a sweater turtleneck, you can at least pull it away or wear something underneath it; in this case, you need it cinched tight. The 'earflaps' go right up to the corner of the eye. A little bit of cat fur on my face drives me crazy, let alone rubbing the only textile made from tiny, tiny needles against the edges of my eyelid. Maybe she knitted her iPod earbuds right into that thing and that's the appeal. It sure ain't the appeal of looking like an astronaut reject.

Keep A Gnome In Your Pocket

With this 2.5 inch pocket mirror with vintage gnome illustration.

1970s Dekotora - Crazy-Ass Japanese Semis

In 1975, trucker movies (starting with Truck Yarou) were all the rage in Japan, starting a craze called Dekotora -- putting as much crap on your truck as possible. These photos are from the January 1980 Popular Mechanics magazine:







The Popular Mechanics article does give credit to a series of trucker movies that started in 1975, but doesn't name it. The magazine calls these truckers "members of Japan's Utamaro Kai", crediting the name and origins to Kitagawa Utamaro, an 18th century Japanese arist "who liked to paint women and insects." Hopefully they mean likenesses -- you can only put so much paint on a spider before it gets angry. The trucks are done up in a modernistic style combining the classics with modern crome and power.



Are they still doing decotora to their trucks today? Of course they are!

(Photos credited to Joan Mann; article by Victor Chase and Milton Mann)

Modern Retro Media

Via Advertising Lab, you can see a bunch of retro-styled modern technology, from MP3 players that look like tape cassettes, to celphone headsets that look like a 1940s Bakelite handset, to a CD player that looks like it'll be just as ungainly, impractical, and scratch-prone as it's 1980s vinyl-album-player ancestor. The Cassette MP3 Player is the most practical of them all -- our van has no CD player, and we'd love to have something like this in the dash.