The National Toy Hall of Fame, one of the collections of The Strong educational institution in Rochester, NY, has announced 12 finalists for this year’s two spots. The contenders are: dollhouse, Dungeons & Dragons, Hot Wheels, Jenga, Pogo Stick, puppets, R/C vehicles, Rubik’s Cube, Simon, Star Wars action figures, Transformers, and Twister. The finalists will be announced in November. You can submit a story about your favorite of the 12 on their site. Perhaps the oldest toy, the stick, was inducted in 2008. The Nintendo Game Boy was inducted a year later, the Atari 2600 a year earlier.

Bride and groom Sara Faith Alterman and Sam Hawes’ wedding rings may look traditional but they took a very personal route for their jewelry. With the help of Adam Clark at Scintillant Studio the couple started with a metal ingot and made wedding bands for each other. Alterman is a writer (among other things) and she’s written about shopping for her wedding dress for the Boston Globe and “localizing” her wedding in San Francisco.

As the food truck trend spreads across America, the L.A. Times takes us back to the late 1800s when tamale wagons served customers on the streets of Los Angeles. They’re the forerunners of today’s taco trucks (loncheras), powered by horses instead of gasoline. There were over 100 of them by 1901 and some deemed them unsafe as they supposedly gathered a bad crowd, especially after the saloons closed. But they perservered as fans of Mexican food grew and now their descendants are everywhere, even, some might say, in the spirit, though not the flavor, of the Taco Bell on the corner.

After reading Caroline McCarthy’s tweet about the Oscar the Grouch Mac extension I wanted to see it again too. YouTube to the rescue:

The authors: Eric Shapiro and Ken Hornak (graphics). I don’t think I used this for long since it got old quick, but thinking about it now, as Caroline said, does make me smile.

It’s getting onto fall in Seattle which means it’s bulk Zoo Doo time at the Woodland Park Zoo. Interested gardeners can send in a postcard for a drawing to purchase large quantities of Zoo Doo or Bedspread (that contains more chips and sawdust and you can shorten it to “B.S.” on the postcard). There’s a poop line for phone questions. You can fill up one pickup truck with an 8×4 bed for $60. If your needs are more modest, the Zoo has buckets of Zoo Doo in its store anytime.

The typewriter age hangs on in India where bureaucracy (meaning paperwork in triplicate) has not moved entirely onto computers. “Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits,” says a typist outside the Delhi District Court. Even several Indian governments that have adopted computers still require a manual typing test for jobs. So the typewriter repair stores and typing classes linger on. India’s Godrej & Boyce, the last typewriter factory in the world, shut down its last production line after the financial downturn accelerated the decline of orders. When the electricity goes out, as it often does in India, the bureaucrats keep on typing.

Andrew Kolb decided to illustrate David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and put it into children’s book format. The PDF is freely downloadable from his site (unless some lawyers get to it). The people he put in the control room are nicely diverse in sex and race. But with the bleak ending of the song you might not want to show this to any young kids. (Thanks Robert!)

My parents still have our old board games. I went through them recently and will be writing about a few. My favorite of the bunch is Careers. That’s our copy above on the left with the masking tape. It never achieved the popularity of Monopoly or Life and very few people I’ve mentioned it to have heard of it. When I went searching for Careers fans on the Internet I found two write-ups, both from players who had discovered it recently. One researched different versions of the game as it was updated through the years. The other, over on ReadyMade, actually got in contact with the daughter of James Cooke Brown, the creator of Careers. Turns out he lived the philosophy of his game in real life. Careers, you see, is aptly pluralized as you move around the board trying different career paths to gather fame, fortune, and happiness points to meet your 60 point Success Formula, the sum of all 3 allocated by your preference. You might go into business and politics and become a movie star. In the different versions of the game you might become a farmer, a teacher, a uranium prospector, an astronaut, and sit on park bench or in the unemployment office. You might enjoy, as I did, getting stuck on the stock market square, buying stock and rolling a die hoping for a big profit (in my memory it was the “gambling career” square). James Cooke Brown had several careers and interests himself. He was a statistician, professor of sociology, wrote science fiction, and invented Loglan. He programmed a university computer to play Careers and analyze the different formulas and he catalogued completed score cards that players sent in for replacements. The goal of Careers is not to stay in one field but to do many things in your life to achieve your own Success Formula.

Pie jousting has spread to Burien! What’s pie jousting you ask? Every April 1st at Sully’s Snowgoose Saloon on Phinney Ave. in Seattle a jousting competition is held where competitors ride bicycles and throw cream pies at each other. It’s a lively spectator sport with delightful crowd reactions. Last week in Burien, which is south of Seattle, they held their own pie jousting tournament which included tricycle matches for the little kids. The event raised funds to purchase bike racks for downtown Burien. When visualizing how you might excel at pie jousting, keep in mind that you are riding a bike while holding a pie in one hand. And that your opponent is coming towards you doing the same thing. Here’s the Seattle Times video coverage.

The September issue of Dwell takes you behind the scenes at textile company Marimekko. Founded in 1951, the Finnish company’s bold prints received a boost in the U.S. from Jacqueline Kennedy who wore several of their dresses in the 1960 presidential campaign. More recent publicity came from clothing and tablecloth appearances in the TV series “Sex and the City.”  Crate & Barrel’s partnership with Marimekko started in the 1960s and their designs are available on pillows, sheets, and other housewares. Their colorful patterns are silkscreened in up to 12 colors. Dwell’s slideshow runs through 13 patterns and the designers and inspiration behind them. The article describes the design and printing process.