Lose Yourself Daily

I wonder if I could import these coffee cups and saucers to sell to funky urban cafes with blackboard painted walls and haughty baristas... because I find a saucer is almost as useless in domestic life as a coaster.

Verdict: find it or lose it?

Insides Illuminated

My body is the host for a bit of a medical miracle* in the form of a double kidney.  I kind of like that I could put it on show for all to admire in the form of an x-ray lampshade.  The ovarian cysts on the other hand...

*not actually a medical miracle... quite common

Verdict: gross or fascinating or fascinatingly gross?

Bedtime Fun

You may not be able to see this from the widdle photo, but these sheets are marked with measurements that start at '0' in the centre and increase as the numbers get closer to the sides of the bed.  Could this be the end to the eternal question of who is on who's side?

They don't seem to come in queen size, which is unfortunate, but luckily I have very good spacial awareness and can pretty confidently say that 'he' is always on MY side.

Verdict: my side or your side?

Smell My Finger

Flying the flag for the Kingdom of Novelty is the Fingerstache... but this blog is in need of some silliness.  

I struggle a little with 'single use' items: I hang on to them forever and ever because I want to wait until the perfect occasion, but then three years later I realise that I've been clinging on to something that is essentially worthless and burn them on a 30 second prank, sometimes to an audience of none.

That said, I can imagine a particular three year old I am rather fond of throwing her curly haired head back in full throated giggle should I surprise her with a sneaky fingerstache attack.

Verdict: pass the moustache wax or the razor?

Roller Coaster

I tend towards the opinion that there is nothing less useful in the world than a coaster, but if all coasters were this beautiful I could learn to live with them occupying two millimetres of space under my water glass.

And who knew Israel was the mecca of design (I just had to Google 'Where is Mecca?' and the answer is Saudi Arabia, just in case you were wondering if that was a pun).

Verdict: protect my table or bring on the moisture rings?

Nice Way To Stack Plates

I love good ideas. 

Thanks to PC for pointing me in the direction of ChicTip, but thanks to the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design for instructing Inon Retting.

This one goes in the category of things that may never be available... but imagine a world where they were!

Verdict: stack 'em up or knock 'em down?

Tea For Three

This.  Is.  Clever.

I hate carrying mugs at the best of times, but multiples of mugs is by far the most challenging everyday activity an officeworker encounters.

I also like that the links also would force all the mugs handles to be perfectly parallel in the cupboard.... I'm sorry, is my OCD showing?

Verdict: hot beverage or cold beverage?

Wrapped Around Your Finger

For the literary nerd and book destroyer alike... rings made from the pages of your favourite book. 

Already written about them elsewhere, so this one is short but sweeeeet.

Verdict: 'if you want it then you oughtta put a ring on it' or 'oh oh no oh oh oh oh'

Every Day's A School Day

I spent my formative years carrying around half-chewed, second hand pencils gold embossed with my older sister's name.  I assume somebody somewhere is still making personalised pencils for Australian school children, but even so, these are an even better idea.

Can't help thinking, though, that the test that involves the questions that go with these answers is a test I would be only too pleased to sit!

Verdict: write it down or rub it out?

Green for Go, Red for Stop

I've always loved coloured pencils.  When I was a kid I wanted one of those tins of Derwent Pencils with two layers of fully leaded potential, just waiting to be shuffled and rearranged by eye.  My favourite pencil shades where 'Scarlet Lake' and 'Gun Metal Grey', though these days I'd be more in the 'Juniper Green' camp.

This bowl is beautiful.  It's design is an invitation to an order junkie like me to arrange and rearrange at will: one day a near facsimile of the colour wheel, the next a very deliberate (and no doubt much laboured) random.  Could almost be coupled with this product.

Verdict: does it change the colour of your day or is it a yawning shade of grey?

An Apple A Day

A memo pad's a memo pad's a memo pad, right?  Hells NO! 

Sometimes a memo pad is just like a piece of fruit, and even comes individually wrapped in one of those funny little foam mesh tube things they put around nashi pears to protect them from the mean streets of Woolworths.  Each sheet is printed to look like a slice of fruit too, and personally I would really appreciate the post modernism of writing 'fruit memo pad' on a shopping list written on one of those slices.

Verdict: 'Cut me a slice' or 'I'd prefer juice'?

Colour Me Happy

Would kind of be a shame to walk on it... but lying on this beautiful rug from Anthropologie would be like when Bastian woke up on Falcor in The Neverending Story: cosy, bumpy, woolly and warm... but with fewer dodgy eighties animatronics. 

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about creating a new bathmat right now by upending the bathroom drawer and stitching together every last cotton ball I find.

Verdict: sell all possessions at a garage sale and buy bulk, or continue with the cotton ball project?

Everything's Rosey

People would like these, wouldn't they?  Australian people specifically, I mean.

I bought a set of these 'Rose Nesting Bowls' for my friend's daughter Rosie for her third birthday (get it? Rose bowl... for Rosie) and the gift was gratefully received for it's function as well as it's form: anything that assists parents getting green stuff into the mouths of toddlers can't be bad, can it?   

I can imagine that they would get a good workout at a picnic or a kid's party, or even for everyday use in Australian backyards...and the big one also looks capable of comfortably containing a laksa, if picnics and children aren't your thing.

Verdict - putting out the welcome mat or turning off the lights and pretending not to be home?

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