The In-Sect - products

Japanese love building stuff from paper, and most Japanese companies offer free paper models of something or other on their websites. Many of those models are amazingly naturalistic and intricately detailed – and correspondingly difficult to build.

Honda Motors takes another approach, however: Akira Mizorogi’s paper models bear only a crude resemblance to the real thing, but they have lots of charm. The instructions are in Japanese, of course, but completely superfluous to begin with – the models are so simple that there is just no way to get them wrong.

Feel free to click around when you are there – there are other nifty things around, including a few Flash (actually mostly Shockwave) games. Just be careful not to order a new car by accident…

....but don’t worry if you do, they’re supposed to be good cars.

Creating an army of merciless, unstoppable robotic soldiers has always appealed to me as being the most gentlemanly road to global rule – unlike either necromancy or politics, it doesn’t involve selling your soul.

All of my attempts (as pictured above) failed, however, mostly due to a nasty habit of focusing more on aesthetics than on more practical considerations, i.e. the need to include up-market options like rail guns and heat-seeking missiles. If I had instead invested my money in the kind of robots that were commercially available throughout all those years, mostly in the toy aisles, I could already be in command of a quite sizable army, much like Lee.

Some of those look pretty cool even, although I doubt that “Verbot” sold well in German speaking markets – there is something vaguely off-putting about a toy being named “Prohibition”.

And “CompuRobot” looks suspiciously similar to a certain movie robot – I sincerely doubt that the manufacturer has paid for the use of that likeness. But then, I sincerely doubt that anybody would pay for a license to associate their products with that particular movie … in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney actually paid people for not mentioning it. (If that’s really the case, I’m perfectly willing to remove this whole paragraph for as little as five bucks.)

Really: Who said grown ups do not need cuddly toys? In European cities you will find that 50% of all households are run by singles, so there is a huge market for Karakiri. You can order your own Karakiri by sending an eMail to Embrace
Visit Karakiri’s homepage and read its blog.

The wishbone is a bone that developed by the fusion of the two clavicles. The first fossil record of it is the dinosaur Longisquama insignis.
Every year around Thanksgiving millions of Meleagris gallopavo are killed, plucked, baked, their corpses dissected, their meat eaten and their furculae ritually broken. If you like the wishbone breaking part more than the butchery part, Lucky Break Wishbones are made for you!
You can test their product by buying the 4-Pack or, if you want to break a bone every day: The Galaxy Pack!
Lucky Break Wishbones

The Oneyes are a creation of Marianne Roosa from The Hague. I think they are really novel, I like Rebel’eyes most. She gave me a little interview:
When did you start your business?
I started my graphic design business about 4 years ago and it is developing in a different way than I thought it would. I started with the Oneye character just for fun. But it took on a life of it’s own. Now I spend more time as a plush designer and illustrator then as a graphic designer. And I love it!
Did you experience something bizarre selling your Oneyes around the world?
Something bizarre? Not really, but I was very surprised to see how popular the Oneyes became with people who own/owned a dog that had some kind of eye problem that resulted in only being able to see with one eye. They asked me to make custom-made Oneyes that looked like their dog. Not something I had expected! You never know why people love the things you design and that’s great! Always expect the unexpected!
Studio 12Punt3: Startpage, Blog and Shop

I love potatoes and everything that is made out of potatoes. Dumplings, mash, roasted, schupfnudeln, gnocchi, rösti, french fries and -yes – crisps(UK/Australia)/chips(Rest of Earth). When I first visited the United Kingdom in 1983 I nourished 100% on crisps. There were about a few million different products and they were sold in little plastic bags in every pub. When I visited Cornwall last year I still found strange flavors available, like marmite, caramelised onion, bullshot, gammon or paxo stuffing. Plastic is almost completely replaced by tin foil and one special flavor is not available anymore: Hedgehog – quite popular in 1983. They were flavored with pork fat obvisously – so Mr. Lewis Phillips – founder of Hedgehog Foods Ltd. was hauled into court by Britain’s Office of Fair Trading for false advertising. Finally a whimsical arrangement was found: Mr. Lewis interviewed gypsies (Famous for their spicy hedgehog recipes – or is that just an urban legend?) – and paid a flavoring company to meet their description of the taste as closely as possible. This PR stunt made the crisps popular throughout the island and everybody had to try them at least once. If I remember correctly, they tasted like burnt bacon… This maybe the reason why hedgehog flavor is not to be found anywhere…
Now go and visit I love Crisps, a wonderful website filled with about 70 entertaining reviews of crisps.
(BTW: I found the advert here.)

Related at the In-Sect: Shoots. Kills. Seasons., The Bacon Cooking Alarm Clock, Wurstteppich, Squirrels Are Forever.