DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Nearly in time for your holiday spending spree, here’s a miscellaneous collection of stuff I think is neat. I’ve searched the entire planet to bring you the most intriguing stuff money can buy, at an incredible value to you. Well, not really, but you get the idea.

Art and stuff that looks like it

• Gorgeous photos of the World Trade Center and NYC skyline from 1976.
• Two online stores now offer prints of Art Radebaugh’s Jetsons-era futuristic illustrations: Keystone Pictograph and Palace of Culture. Check out the swoopy technology!
• Adbusters’ Corporate US Flag provides a subversive commentary on the influence of corporations upon government policy. You can buy a 5'x3' polyester flag, or, for free, download a high-res PDF and print it yourself.
• For the photographers and illustrators in the audience: make a photo calendar. PhotoAccess.com offers a nice product. If you have twelve images that someone could stand to look at for a month each, a calendar makes a great gift.
• Chock full of conspiracy theories (some of which are actually true), the Deception Dollar is a unique piece of political propaganda. Matted and framed, it will serve as a time capsule of the American political landscape in 2003. Be sure to get two copies, so you can show the front and back within one frame.
• The Sierra Club offers free World War II Conservation Posters (which I’ve written about, at length, before). As with some of the other free art downloads described here, these could be printed in poster size by your neighborhood reprography center, to make an inexpensive and uniquely noncommercial gift.

Gifts for Photographers

• Professional Photoshop is the one book every digital photographer has to have. My review contains before-and-after examples illlustrating the color-correction and image retouching techniques in the book, which is an instruction manual for image restoration experts.
• Peter iNova has published two hardware-specific books on CD-ROM covering Nikon and Sony digital cameras. I own the Nikon version, Mastering Nikon Compact Digital Cameras, and have found it to be a fantastic resource. iNova has a separate edition covering the Sony Advanced Cyber-shot

Gifts for People who wear Clothing

• Grass Roots Natural Goods sells a wide variety of hemp and organic (“green”) cotton clothing and accessories. I’m a repeat customer; I’ve found their service to be excellent.
• Hemptown sells, you guessed it, hemp clothing. Their 3-packs of Hemp T-Shirts are a great deal.

Important Books

• (Regular readers are invited to cover their ears while I bang this drum one more time.) Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Just read it, OK?
• I’m halfway through this: High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. It’s fascinating, both as a study of Detroit marketing and of the American psyche.

I generally don’t list mass-market items here, because you’re innundated with them 24x7 via television, radio, and the-entire-internet.com. But I just stumbled across a DVD that needs to be better known. I make that claim because I’m the perfect customer for it, and even though it came out last year I only discovered it this morning:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DVD is the classic TV adaptation of Doug Adams’ triumphant 5-book trilogy. If you know it, I need say no more, and if you don’t, buy the books first (e.g. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
• Which reminds me, I recently saw a companion book, a biography of Douglas Adams by noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman. It’s called Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion and it’s on my own wish list.

If you’re not yet sated, check out last year’s edition: 2002 Gift Guide.