Let’s Reach into the Inconspicuous Grab Bag
Thirteen short items of interest to help ease you into the new year.
As you know, IC posts sometimes include a short addendum called the Inconspicuous News Roundup, which is a bullet-pointed list of a few items of inconspicuous interest. Each Roundup usually contains three or four entries, and each entry is usually just a sentence or two with a link, and sometimes a photo.
For a variety of reasons, it’s now been more than three weeks since the last Inconspicuous News Roundup, which is a longer gap than usual. As a result, I now have a bunch of Roundup items that have been piling up — so many that I’ve decided to devote a whole post to them. And instead of doing a bulleted list with quick one-sentence descriptors, I’m going to give each item a slightly longer treatment.
Let’s start with the amazing Christmas tree ornament illustration shown above, which is from a 1930s wholesale catalog. I love the colors, the composition, the seemingly endless variety of birds and baubles, the sense of obsessive completism, and even the little catalog numbers. Obviously, I realize it’s a little odd to be sharing this with you in January, but it’s so mind-blowingly good that I figure nobody will mind. I stumbled upon it on Etsy, where you can buy a reproduction of the original page as a poster.
That’s the first of 13 items I’m featuring today. Ready for the rest of them? Here we go…
R.I.P. to a Pioneer of Inconspicuous Design
You know the little arrow on a car’s fuel gauge that indicates which side of the car the gas cap is on? That classically inconspicuous detail didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. The idea for it came in 1986 from a Ford employee named James Moylan, and the arrow is therefore known in the auto industry as a Moylan arrow. Moylan died last month; here’s one of the many resulting obituaries.
(As an aside: Right after I learned of Moylan’s death, I watched the 1978 movie Blue Collar, which includes a scene featuring a car whose gas cap is situated behind the rear license plate, an old format that I’d forgotten about. No need for a Moylan arrow in that car!)
One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Artwork
There’s a guy in Baltimore who’s embarked on an unusual project: He’s collected hundreds of discarded hubcaps that he found on the side of the road (talk about a specific collecting category!) and turned them into super-cool sculptures, like the fish shown above. This link has a good article and a fun video. (From Jason Hillyer)