Ultimate Lists

The Best 2008

PHOENIX STAFF — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:33:54 GMT

Our readers pick the best places to eat, drink, party, and shop. Plus, special tips from Phoenix staffers.

I scream, you scream

DAVID MASHBURN — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:51:15 GMT

A salute to ice cream trucks
Kids still stream toward the siren song and that holy grail — frozen treats in paper packaging, paradise in the guise of a push-up pop.

In 1927 Paul Hawkins rigged a mechanical music box to the roof of his ice cream truck in California and started blasting the Polish folk tune "Stodola Poompa" from it. Forget Pavlov's bells and that drooling dog. Irrefutable proof of aural conditioning is that 80 years later, kids still stream toward the siren song and that holy grail — frozen treats in paper packaging, paradise in the guise of a push-up pop.

But that little ice cream truck jingle turns out to be not so innocuous. After all, there's a thin line between the nostalgic recollection and the obnoxious cacophony reported by many Boston City residents. City Councilor Sal LaMattina worries that some vendors are trampling that line. According to LaMattina, several ice cream truck operators blare their chime at levels far above the legal limit of 70 decibels.

"We need to empower the police so that if they go out and hear loud music and loud noise they can issue a violation and fine," said LaMattina at a hearing in August. He's also suggested enacting laws similar to those in New York City that prohibit ice cream truck vendors from playing their music while parked in an effort to cut down on the “noise pollution.”.

Somewhere along the line, between Hawkin's music box and the booming digital sound system currently drawing the rancor of Boston, the ice cream truck and its jingle achieved iconic status, immortalized in pop culture. Like soda fountains and tie-dye, ice cream trucks evoke a nostalgia that has little to do with their tangible impact on our lives and more to do with their presence in the collective conscious of pop culture. Because of the threat facing ice cream trucks and in honor of the many years of service on our streets and in our television shows, films, and songs, we present the top ten ice cream trucks in pop culture.

10. “Fahrenheit 9/11”—When Michael Moore learns that almost no one in Congress read the Patriot Act before voting to pass it, he decides the only patriotic thing to do is read it to them. And how exactly to attract the attention of Congress? Logically, being a man of ample stature and not above self-deprecatory irony, he drives around in an ice cream truck playing the jingle and reciting the Patriot Act to anyone who'll listen.

9. "Today"—The Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “Today” was inspired by Billy Corgan's childhood memory of the local ice cream truck. On the day the driver quit, he passed out free ice cream to the children in the neighborhood. Maybe, like Corgan, he drove off through the desert, picking up a beautiful hitchhiker and repainting his truck to resemble the Merry Prankster's acid bus.

Masters of Muppets

CARLY CARIOLI AND RYAN STEWART — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:04:17 GMT

The 20 best musical moments on the original Muppet Show .
Here are some of our fave muppet musical moments.

VIDEO: Escort, "All Through the Night"

Our old pal Cami's post on NYC dudes Escort and their insanely fun, muppet-tastic video (reason #798 why it's awesome to have full seasons of the Muppet Show on DVD, finally) reminded us that said vid — a genius editing of various muppet clips, so that the entire cast appears to be singing Escort's "All Through The Night" — would have been impossible without the famed Debbie Harry episode from '81 — in which she sings "Call Me" backed by a synth-punk band, and "One Way or Another" backed by a group that looks suspiciously like the Muppet Strokes.

By coincidence, we'd been seeking out Muppet seasons on the internet for months (not realizing the DVDs were coming out) in search of episodes we remembered starring people like Debbie, Johnny Cash, and the late, great Senor Wences. So here's the Escort video, plus some of our fave muppet musical moments. We're not counting Muppet-only classics like "Mahna Mahna," Floyd's version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," or "I'm In Love with a Big Blue Frog," an early songwriting effort by future Blue Oyster Cult member Les Braunstein, who gave it to Peter Paul and Mary, who — this is what we still can't understand about the '60s — actually recorded it. On an album! We also did not consider the many, many musical guest spots from Sesame Street, which is why REM's "Shiny Happy Monsters" isn't here.

1. Alice Cooper, "Welcome To My Nightmare." You get the sense that nobody told Alice he was on a comedy show, but you also realize that it didn't matter: Jim Henson's crew loved monsters and novelty and play -- see the infamous Vincent Price episode -- which is why the Muppets and Alice made such a perfect fit. On this episode Cooper also performed his then-recent pop hit, "School's Out," but "Nightmare" offered an excuse to have him wear a Dracula cape, climb out of a coffin, and walk with a ghost. What more could you want?

2. Debbie Harry, "One Way or Another." It's surprising that there weren't more punks on the Muppet Show: the Ramones, when you got right down to it, were basically muppets with guitars. The muppets themselves felt more in tune with the handcraft of folk and the showmanship of glam -- their heroes were vaudville and the music hall. By '81, punk was as hammy as Borscht-belt stand-up -- and once this was so, it was ripe for caricature. (Elsewhere in the same episode, Debbie helps Robin and his froggie friends get their punk merit badges by learning to pogo.) Twenty years before Is This It, the felt-skinned backing band looks remarkably like the Strokes.
SEE ALSO: "Call Me"

Maneaters: A history

PHOENIX STAFF — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:34:37 GMT

A list of the beasts -- real and imagined -- that feast on human flesh
Sometimes the most ferocious maneater looks like an ordinary rabbit… and sometimes it looks just like you covered in a flesh-gobbling pus!
Read more

Political cartoons

DAVID MASHBURN — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:44:22 GMT

The 20 Best Animated Politicians in Cartoon History
Among its hordes of firsts, The Simpsons helped transplant politicians from the cartoon funny pages to our television sets.

With the aggressive hype machine surrounding the release of The Simpson Movie, you don’t need us to tell you the impact of The Simpsons on modern culture. But here are a few tidbits to mull over anyway: the show garnered 23 Emmy Awards;Time named it the 20^thcentury's best television series, and “D’oh” is in the Oxford English Dictionary. What merits the show’s now ubiquitous presence in pop culture and is its 23 Emmys is its role in removing cartoons from Disney and Hanna-Barbera’s realm and redefining them as pop culture savvy vehicles that could be crude, satirical, and hilarious.

Among its hordes of firsts, The Simpsons helped transplant politicians from the cartoon funny pages to our television sets. They lampooned political figures on prime time and provided us laughs at the expense of the political establishment, all in 2-D. The Simpsons, and those cartoons indebted to The Simpsons — Family Guy, South Park, Futurama, American Dad — have now skewered politicians with trenchant wit and caustic satire for five Presidential administrations and counting.

In honor of the July 27 opening of The Simpsons Movie, we’ve compiled the 20 best politicians in (recent) cartoon history.

20.Lil’ Bush proves that comedic timing is everything — and this show is off by about four years. Gags about Bush’s incompetence are more depressing than funny at this late stage. But Lil’ Bush does provide one good moment in the first episode when Lil’ Dick Cheney seduces Barbara Bush in a hilarious parody of the infamous “Are your trying to seduce me?” scene from The Graduate.

19.Simpsons creator Matt Groening tackles politics of the future in the Futurama episode “A Head in the Polls.” Richard Nixon’s head — attached to a giant robot’s body — wins the presidency of Earth by two votes after Fry and Leela forget its election day. Predictably, Nixon goes on a tyrannical rampage. Some things never change.

18. When Bush Sr. moves next door to the Simpsons after leaving the White House, Bart goes Dennis the Menace on his cranky ass. Right after H.W. finishes typing his memoirs — the final line is priceless: “Since I achieved all my goals as president during one term there was no need for a second” — Bart shreds the entire stack of papers and receives an old-fashioned lesson in corporal punishment over bended knee.

Potter-schmotter!

ELLEE DEAN AND MADDY MYERS — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:43:58 GMT

25 fantasy films that lock horns, swords, and wands with Harry Potter
No reading required.

Breaking the spell: Harry Potter’s story comes to an end — but will readers, or reading, ever be the same? By Joyce Millman"The last Potter: The end is never easy, is it?" By Sharon Steel.

Wizards and teenage angst in the form of broken wands is no new spell. The Harry Potter series, with its centaurs, giants, and invisible cloaks, is a neat little package ― but it’s just that. J.K. Rowling didn’t invent the genre, after all, and, when it comes to movies, a whole lot of fantasy films exceed the Potter pap in brains, humor, quests, spells, and imagination. On the eve of Rowling’s last book in the Potter series, we offer a list of those movies. Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, we unearthed 25 fantasy films that lock horn, swords, and wands with Potter. No reading required.

THE DARK CRYSTAL

The Dark Crystal, with its three suns and misshapen Muppets, is not kiddie fantasy. The vulture-like Skeksis of planet Thra do more for sci-fi than real aliens. And, compared to SkekUng — the evil Skeksis Emperor — Voldemort looks like a regular Muggle.

LEGEND

Tom Cruise walks the woods of stolen dreams and stolen horns as Jack O’The Green in this fantasy film about, well, good and evil. Search the Internet Movie Database far and wide: there is no Harry Potter quote as good as this: “She was so sweet, I could eat her brains like jam!” Thank you, Blunder (Kiran Shah). Shah has since been reduced to a mere stuntman by the Harry Potter franchise. Though, he does currently hold the Guinness World Record for “Shortest Professional Stuntman Currently Working in Film.”

THE LAST UNICORN

Before Red Bull was a shitty-tasting energy drink, it was a fiery, white-eyed apparition with frothing fangs. The Last Unicorn, with Butterfly, Skull, Mommy Fortuna, and Red Bull, is a classic tale of enchanted forests and extinction. The Unicorn is on display in Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival and with it in its cage are all of our imaginations. So beguiling is a cartoon of tides, white with the immortal unicorn.

WILLOW

Unable to secure the rights to The Hobbit, George Lucas wrote Willow, a 1988 J.R.R. Tolkien knock-off starring dwarfs and Val Kilmer as who-can-forget Madmartigan. Queens, rogues, sorcerers, and possums — this cult wonder has it almost together. And, it was the first film to use morphing special effects, which was a really good idea at the time.

THE WITCHES

The goggles do nothing

RYAN STEWART — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:15:45 GMT

The 25 greatest movies in Simpsons history
On July 25th, The Simpsons Movie will hit theatres.

On July 25th, The Simpsons Movie will hit theatres. But throughout the show’s 18-years-and-counting run (and think about that for a second: kids who were born when the show debuted are now about to be freshmen in college), the family has more than its share of experience with the cinema. Here, then, are the 25 best “movies” in the show’s history, excluding actual films that existed in our universe as well. (Screenshots via Duffzone.org; links go to YouTube.)

'Tis the season

RYAN STEWART — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:22:16 GMT

To stay inside and watch awesome movies
Yeah, yeah, summer . Go outside, hone your tan, toss a Frisbee, blah blah blah.

Yeah, yeah, summer. Go outside, hone your tan, toss a Frisbee, blah blah blah. Sometimes you don’t feel like going anywhere or doing much of anything. Sometimes you all you want to do is loaf in your apartment on your couch with some snacks, a fan, and a mindless movie. Here are ten films perfectly suited for summer, ones that will keep you entertained and won’t give you a farmer’s tan.

BATMAN BEGINS
We love Christopher Nolan’s treatment of the character as an uncompromising ass-kicker with a gadget fetish. But really any comic book superhero movie will do: substitute Donner’s Superman, Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2, or even Burton’s campy Batman depending on your preference.

BEVERLY HILLS COP
Your vacation this year will not be as entertaining as the one the Detroit Police Department forces Axel Foley to take, so why not accompany him for the ride? Incredibly, Eddie Murphy is still as funny in this in 2007 as he was in 1984.

DAZED AND CONFUSED
Thing is, you can jump into this movie at any point and still get transported away to suburban Texas on the last day of school. This film captures the freedom granted by youth that most people don’t appreciate enough when they’ve got it. (Plus you’ve got Ben Affleck as the rock-dumb jock in overalls, and Parker Posey yelling “Wipe that face off your head, bitch.”)

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE
No list of summer movies is complete without the brainless action film. The first Die Hard might be the most entertaining movie in said category, but it takes place at a Christmas party, and Christmas isn’t summery. The third though, Die Hard With a Vengeance, takes place in the summer, and, contrary to what Mr. Willis says, it does the job quite nicely.

DIRTY DANCING
"That was the summer we went to Kellerman's." There's nothing unsummer about Dirty Dancing. It's the epitome of sex in the hotter months: backseats, rearview mirrors, nylons, and eyeshadow. "I carried a watermelon," Baby mumbles, trying to seem so cool. But she's just hot, and charmingly aloof in the Merengue.

FRIDAY THE 13th
If you haven’t watched it in a while, you’ll be pleased to know this summer camp slasher is still scary.

GHOSTBUSTERS
So, admittedly this doesn’t have a lot to do with summer, but if you live in an urban setting, you can grab some friends when the movie’s over and head to your roof and re-enact the scene when they roast the hell out of the Stay Puff Marshmallow man. It’s fun. No, seriously.

Digital strips

JOE BERNARDI — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:49:31 GMT

The rise of webcomics and four artists leading the way
In the not-too-distant past, telling someone you were interested in webcomics was met with awkward stares and changes of subject. (Trust me.)

In the not-too-distant past, telling someone you were interested in webcomics was met with awkward stares and changes of subject. (Trust me.) Web-exclusive comics have existed just about as long as the internet itself but, commensurate with the web’s early demographic, the early comics’ subject matter typically dealt in science-fiction, computers, and video games. Sluggy Freelance, Player Vs. Player, and the still-ubiquitous Penny Arcade were among the most popular. At that point, the internet commerce model was still too shaky to support any revenue generation.

Over the past few years, however, a small group of webcomic artists experimenting with diverse subject matter and stylish writing with a genuine interest for advancement of the medium have emerged as the new vanguards of the form. Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, Nicholas Gurewitch of The Perry Bible Fellowship, Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl, and Joey Comeau of A Softer World are some artists making their living from their relatively esoteric art.

These four artists are, in their own ways, paving the way for both artistic and commercial models on the internet. The success of their highly personalized, small-scale models seems to simultaneously laugh in the face of more bloated startups and paves the way for a new form of artistic distribution and commercial viability. By taking financial and artistic risks and just generally doing weird stuff, they’re in no small way changing what it means to be a cartoonist and a so-called “starving artist.” That might sound like exaggeration, but try not to be impressed at someone who can make their living creating a comic that regularly references things like “temporal presentism.”

DINOSAUR COMICS

Ryan North’s comic, Dinosaur Comics, is almost perfectly self-explanatory: it’s a comic about dinosaurs. DC’s most remarkable quality, however, is that North has used the same six-panel art every day in its four-plus years of existence; the dialogue is the only thing that changes. North, a twenty-six year old Toronto resident with a graduate degree in computational linguistics, freely admits that he can’t draw, opting instead for the relatively crude clipart that’s become a backdrop for jokes pertaining to everything from linguistic descriptivism to kissing. He maintains, though, that his choice of static art isn’t as restrictive as it might seem. “A month in I was going to change it,” he says, “but couldn't find new art that I liked. Keeping the same pictures every day isn't actually as restricting as I thought it was: Yeah, the pictures tell a story, but you can alter that almost as much as you want by simply adding narration that reads ‘THREE YEARS LATER:’ or ‘MEANWHILE, IN TUDOR ENGLAND:’.”

Stealing culture

MIKE MILIARD — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:07:59 GMT

A free must-see movie
The following review of Good Copy Bad Copy does not appear in the Phoenix ’s film section.

BFFs, bosom buddies, and dynamic duos...

PHOENIX STAFF — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:24:58 GMT

We salute you all in honor of Best Friends Day, June 8, 2007

Smoking hot

PHOENIX STAFF — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:24:32 GMT

Cigarettes on the silver screen
In honor of May 31, International No Tabacco Day, we’re listing the some of the most seminal smoking scenes on the silver screen.

Good vibrations

ELLEE DEAN — Thu, 24 May 2007 19:51:50 GMT

The 15 dirtiest dancing music videos
In honor of dancing dirty, as well as Patrick Swayze’s open-shirt-pelvic-thrusting summer camp fantasy, we offer this list of the dirtiest dancing music videos we could find.

The former Marky Mark, shirtless

This year is the 20^th anniversary of Dirty Dancing — and yeah, we’re celebrating the cinematic ode to the sweaty teenage pastime all year long. And then there’s Dancing with the Stars, the hugely successful B-list celebrity dancing show that had its season finale this week (which obviously doesn’t hold a candle to Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, especially when wet, and practicing lifts in pond scum). So, in honor of dancing dirty, as well as Swayze’s open-shirt-pelvic-thrusting summer camp fantasy, we offer this list of the dirtiest dancing music videos we could find.

15. “Freak Me,” Silk
Doesn’t the title say it all? Nighties and a hot pink set elevate this low budget Silk music video to high-octane bedtime story. Goodnight, and… freak me, baby. Aw, yeah.

14. “Wicked Game,” Chris Isaac
Helena Christensen’s face is a vision in the rolling clouds in this five-minute black-and-white, soft-core wet-dreamscape. When she is realized, shirtless, she runs down the beach, clumsy and stumbling, from Chris Isaac. Both Isaac and his supermodel are covered in sand. Christensen does the ultimate demure booty dance, preparing a future generation of young women for what we now call, fondly, “butt cleavage.” Thank you, Helena.

13. “Candy Rain,” Soul for Real
This music video isn’t dirty dancing, per se. Besides the fact that you’ve got a bunch of adolescent boys singing and dancing to a song about seeing their “candy rain” in too-cute matching black-and-white outfits bobbing before a dazzling, pink tinsel background.

12. “Good Vibrations,” Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch
A large piece of bling rebounds off Marky Mark’s hard, clean-shaven chest. “Can you feel it baby?” Marky asks. To which he answers, “I can, too.” Then, the former male fashion model performs a street water dance, kicking washout into the air. This is the ultimate bench-press/chain-link-fence/moving-window-blind dirty dance. And, it is, in one word: titillating.

11. “I Touch Myself,” Divinyls
You could watch this video and think that it’s not particularly dirty — singer Christina Amphlett prances around fully clothed, by an ironing board at one point. But there are a few subtle touches here and there, mostly involving Amphlett under satin sheets. You know, because the song is so subtle, they needed to make sure the images stayed in a similar vein.

10. “Cradle of Love,” Billy Idol
This video gave hope to the nerds everywhere – if you just sit around and mind your own business, then maybe some day, some hot young woman can come by your house, strip, and wreck all your shit, too!

The 100 Unsexiest men 2007

PHOENIX STAFF — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:02:35 GMT

Who will win this year's Golden Gilbert Award?
The 100 Unsexiest men 2007 has been released

Don't look under that rock

RYAN STEWART — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:28:12 GMT

Domestic animals with opposable thumbs means certain doom
Someone on the internet has actually gone through the bother of copyrighting the concept of “What if Cats and Dogs Had Opposable Thumbs Day.”

A chilling vision of things to come?

Someone on the internet — they’re called “Wellcat.com” — has actually gone through the bother of copyrighting the concept of “What if Cats and Dogs Had Opposable Thumbs Day.” They cast it as a fun little idea: imagine if your animals had free access to food, or possessed the ability to take themselves for walks. Wouldn’t that be silly?

We say no. This is not a situation that would be ripe with cuteness. Exactly the opposite, in fact — we see this scenario as ending in nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it, with humans becoming enslaved and some sort of “petocracy” taking over. Observe:

Step One: The Basics
Pets with evolved digits would learn what to do with them. It would start with picking up morsels of food off the floor (or off any unattended plates within reach). Gradually, the animals would mimic the process of opening doors (toy breeds and smaller cats would likely still find themselves helpless in this regard). For a while, there’d be a few cases of animals — mostly cats — letting themselves out the door and simply not coming back for one reason or another. But for the most part, life would not change a great deal for humans in this phase.

Step Two: Adaptation
Regardless of cats’ and dogs’ newfound ability to do things with their forelimbs in this scenario, the canine and feline brain would still operate at a relatively low level. But they’d still be highly trainable, and this, readers, is what would become humanity’s undoing. Lazy souls would show their pets how to operate a can opener. Some might show their dogs how to scoop their own excrement. Cats would learn how to empty and change their own litterboxes. All it would take would be a few abnormally intelligent dogs — border collies, poodles, German shepherds, and mutts are generally considered to be the smartest breeds — to put two and two together and realize that humans do most tasks with the aid of simple tools. This could lead to them crafting their own tools, aschimpanzees in the wild have started doing recently.

Year of the Pig

RYAN STEWART — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:25:24 GMT

The top 20 porkers in pop culture history
In Chinese astrology, 2007 is the Year of the Pig. To celebrate the swine, we’re counting down the top 20 oinkers of all time.

iFun for phone nerds

MIKE MILIARD — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:06:30 GMT

Dept. of new stuff
Apple’s iPhone was unveiled last week to much chattering and drooling.

Apple’s iPhone was unveiled last week to much chattering and drooling. No doubt, it’s a beaut: gorgeous graphics, caveman-simple touch-screen interface. And what a paragon of convergence! Cell phone! iPod! Camera! PDA! Wi-Fi! It even comes equipped, as “Steve Jobs” (Fred Armisen, disguised in black mock turtleneck) boasted on SNL last week, with a clock and an on/off button.

Still, its rapturous reception has not been unanimous. The iPhone won’t work with any carrier but Cingular, and it’s trussed up by Apple’s restrictive “FairPlay” copy-protection software. Plus, I’ll bet that sleek, futuristic screen gets pretty smudgy after a few minutes of use. Never mind that it costs $600 and won’t be available for six more months. While you wait with baited breath, consider some other cell phones that haven’t gotten as much attention.

The iPhone isn’t the first device to eschew a real key pad in favor of the virtual kind. The Onyx, unveiled in August by Pilotfish and Synaptics, is a gorgeous slab of gleaming black. And not only is it keyless and touch-sensitive, but it responds to other arts of your body: when you receive a call, put it close to your cheek and it automatically knows to pick up. This one is still in the prototype phase and doesn’t yet have a release date.

The über-elegant Onyx isn’t swank enough for you? Then consider the Vertu Signature Cobra. Bejeweled with pear-cut and round white diamonds, two emeralds, and 439 rubies furnished by French jeweler Boucheron, it’s a steal at $310,000. Alas, only eight were made, so you’re probably out of luck. Which is just as well: imagine losing all your contacts and being out 300 grand to boot?

Maybe you don’t care what your phone looks like. You just want to use it to pump your enemies full of hot lead. The.22 Caliber Cell Phone Gun is for you. You won’t find this one at your local mall. These babies are manufactured in Croatia and Yugoslavia and then sold on the black market. Press keys five through eight to fire four rounds in quick succession from the “antenna” stub. And beware of wrong numbers.

Useful friends

CAMILLE DODERO — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:50:16 GMT

Brookline’s Mimoco Mimobots blur the boundaries between form and function
Ramona is a tattooed rockabilly chick with cat’s-eye glasses and a twin-lens-reflex camera strapped around her neck.

BETTY-LOU: posed in her adopted environment.

Ramona is a tattooed rockabilly chick with cat’s-eye glasses and a twin-lens-reflex camera strapped around her neck. She shops at vintage clothing stores, loves horror movies, and wears a red-and-white polka-dot dress that makes her butt look big — but she likes it that way. Her best friends are Betty-Lou, a pink-haired girl who’s into jitterbugging and bulldogs, and Link, a chain-smoking greaser with an affinity for hot rods and pin-up girls. Ramona and her friends are known as the Ginchys, and, for between $44.95 and $169.95, they’ll remember anything you want them to.

The Ginchys are Mimobots (pronounced Mee-moe-bots), meaning that Ramona, Betty-Lou, and Link are electronic-silicon creatures whose ancestors originated from planet Blõôh. What this means is that they’re USB flash drives — thumb-size portable data-storage devices with between 512 MB and four gigabytes of memory. They are also designer toys created by West Coast artist Lili Chen and manufactured by a company in Brookline called Mimoco.

“Designer toys” are hybrid novelty items, falling somewhere between action figures and tabletop statues — toys regarded more as objets d’art than as playthings. The KidRobot line (kidrobot.com), for example, features cartoony rabbit-shaped characters called Dunnys, whose personalities range from a black-clad anarchist to a zombie vampire, depending on the artist who designed them (Frank Kozik, the former; Nic Cowan, the latter). But Mimobots — two-inch-plus portable drives resembling Russian matryoshka dolls with ears and arms — aren’t just decorations; they’re tools you can use like any flash drive to transport digital files. With this unexpected combination, Mimoco founder Evan Blaustein has merged technology and urban consumer culture in a way that few products have.

Blaustein, who lives in Brookline, is the sort of guy who describes himself by his sneakers (I am “a wearer of Air Max 95s,” he told atypicalliving.com) and has always thought Wired was the coolest magazine. He came up with the Mimoco idea while he was in business school at Babson College, where he and his now-wife, Cecile, started collecting art toys. Inspiration came one day when Cecile, digging through her purse looking for her flash drive, instead pulled out a Bearbrick toy figure. “I was like, ‘This is about the same size as your flash drive,’ ” Blaustein recalls.

He’s sitting in Peet’s Coffee in Coolidge Corner beside publicist Nicole Rosano, who’s been with Mimoco since August. “That’s when the idea all gelled together. . . . All these toys, they were cluttering our desks. At least if we give functionality to these toys that we love, we’ll have a reason to buy them.”

The gift of gadgets

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:43:10 GMT

Wish list

Bored? Not with these games

JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 19:25:22 GMT

Role-playing, railroad-building, and good ol’ spelling
One way of channeling family competitiveness at holiday gatherings is to bring out a board game and gently coerce people to play it.

One way of channeling family competitiveness at holiday gatherings is to bring out a board game and gently coerce people to play it. Though personality traits may pop out in sharper focus, game-induced conflicts almost always devolve into laughter and not arm-wrestling and the shyer members of the clan often blossom in these game situations. Our holiday-time games of choice have been Scrabble — the box even contains historic score sheets from well-remembered matches; Trivial Pursuit (various versions); and Pictionary, in which the clue-sketching can bring on wild hilarity.

Two-person games — from a pocket version of the word-game Boggle to a hand-drawn board for Nine Men’s Morris (also called mill) played with pennies and nickels — have whiled away many an hour in airports and train stations. A 5000-year-old game called Ur has engaged bored nephews for days at a time. And one of the nephews introduced me to Set, a worthy successor to Scan, both of which lay out cards to match, one through memorization and one through deductive logic.

On anyone’s list of the classics are Chess, Checkers, Clue, Life, Risk, Sorry, and Monopoly. The number-one seller worldwide is still the 70-year-old Monopoly, which is licensed in 81 countries and published in 27 languages, including Croatian and Thai. In English, it has been released in more than 100 themed variations, from cartoon characters like SpongeBob, the Simpsons and Family Guy, to dozens of sports-themed editions, many for specific teams, such as the Red Sox, the Patriots, and the Celtics. The longest Monopoly game ever played was 1680 hours long (70 straight days . . . or did they put money and properties in envelopes and come back to it months later, as we often did?)

The Hasbro website (www.hasbro.com/monopoly/) has a fascinating history of the game and lots of “fun facts,” such as the following: Monopoly had a strong following in Cuba until Castro ordered all the sets destroyed. Escape maps, compasses, and files were smuggled into German POW camps in Monopoly games. Parker Brothers once sent an armored car with one million dollars of Monopoly money to a marathon game in Pittsburgh that had run out of funds.

The Hasbro link to Scrabble (www.hasbro.com/scrabble/) has a detailed history of that game, which was first manufactured in an old schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, in the late 1940s. Sales were limping along in the early ’50s, when the president of Macy’s, so the story goes, discovered it while on vacation and immediately ordered the game for his store. Since then, demand for the game has never slowed.