Consumed update-o-rama: Knitted watches and more

1. Re: The October 28, 2007 column on counterfunctional watches, here, at left, is perhaps the ultimate example — knitted watches. $60. Via Make blog.

2. The November 25, 2007 column on Guitar Hero got a fair amount of sour reaction from Guitar Hero fans who seemed to think I wasn’t suitably impressed by the game, or whatever. I found this puzzling. A few days after the column appeared, Slate published a piece by Carrie Brownstein, about Rock Band, a Guitar Hero competitor that I mentioned in the column. One blog (I’ve lost the link, sorry) referred to her piece as a “nice counterpoint” to mine, or something like that.

As it turns out, what she said wasn’t really at odds with what I’d written. Toward the beginning she writes: “Rock Band isn’t about music or about being in a band, it’s about pretending.” And here’s the conclusion: “These days, it might be easier to exalt the fake than to try to make sense of the genuine. But maybe by pretending to be in a band, there will be those who’ll find the nerve to go beyond the game, and to take the brave leaps required to create something real.” I’m not sure how that counters what I said. I certainly agree with it.

Anyway, the other interesting thing about the Slate piece is that Brownstein recounts learning about Rock Band “during a short stint at an ad agency in Portland, Ore., where I was asked to come up with a few ideas to help promote the game.”

This is never really spelled out. Did W+K try to hire Carrie Brownstein? Did she consider working for them, like as a job? Anyway, I’m glad to read that her attempts at coming up with promotional ideas didn’t really work out, and to read that whatever this “stint” was, it was “short.” Also, I recommend her blog Monitor Mix, it’s quite good.

3. The December 2, 2007 column was about Linzie Hunter’s spam-into-art project. Jen Bekman’s 20X200 project has not one, but two new and original Hunter pieces for sale. (More on 20X200 here.)

More updates after the jump.

4. The July 8, 2007 column was about Threadless. (Hilariously, the online version of the story carries the erroneous slug, “Threadlines.” Thanks for making me look good guys!) Unbeige recently spotted a site called Can U Believe It?, which is basically just like Threadless — except that “it’s a Christian site, with religious-themed-only designs.” UnBeige suggests that thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s business model.

5. The most interesting reaction to the December 9, 2007, column about the HomeHero fire extinguisher (which makes a de facto claim that stylish aesthetics are a virtue) comes from the site hyperexperience: “Recently it seems like making anything out of white plastic – with rounded edges – means ‘design.’ i totally disagree. … the new extinguisher is not good design – it’s just bland. lately, it seems like design means the type of simplicity that obfuscates the function of an object to make it seem ‘better’ than the competition.” Click through for compare and contrast images; the Sony Walkman does look surprisingly cool.

6. The November 21, 2004 column was about the Nalgene bottle. Since then, Nalgene has benefited, or so it is said, from the alleged backlash against bottled water. (I say alleged because this backlash shows up among trend-watchers, but not in sales figures.) Apparently Nalgene is affected by a recent decision of a Canadian retailer to pull from its shelves containers made of polycarbonate plastic, “over worries about the chemical bisphenol A, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive problems in animals,” according to this recent Reuters story.

7. The April 11, 2004 Consumed column was about Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life. Warren’s book was already a huge deal back then, but since then he has been written about in The New Yorker, showed up on Larry King and so on, and just generally become a well-known public figure. He and his wife Kay are interviewed for the full hour on a recent installment of Speaking of Faith.

8. The April 18, 2004 column was about Nimrods gear — the Nimrods being a small-town Michigan high school team whose name got out via some ESPN ads, resulting in people buying a lot of Nimrod shirts and so on from the school. Well, as you may know, the guy who made those ads now has a documentary series running on the Sundance Channel, called Nimrod Nation. The NYT says: “The eight half-hours loosely follow the boys’ varsity basketball team through the 2005-6 season, but Mr. Morgen’s observational documentary is less about high school sports than it is a portrait of a town of 1,400 people.”