So charming. By Ian Huebert for the Chronicle, via @RonCharles.

You may not know Julius Shulman’s name, but I guarantee you know at least a few of his architectural photos. I’m very sorry to hear that he died last night, at the age of 98.

Thanks to @DesignObserver for the link to this trailer for a new documentary of his life and work. He was also interviewed for the Dwell Design Leader series.

Two of the most popular things these days are Mad Men and ephemera, so it’s not surprising that mid-century advertising is all over the web. I spent a bunch of time a week ago looking at Container Corporation of America ads from the early 20th century, which were a steady source of inspiration for me when I was in design school. I’ll post more on them separately, but then mid-week Carin Berger was tweeting about Herbert Bayer ads (separate from his work on the CCA series). And then toward the end of the week, Sandra Gulland emailed me about this list of 50 great vintage ads, which included the one above. I’ve never seen this before and have no idea who created it, but I would like a poster-sized version to hang on the wall so I can stare at it all day long.

Earlier this morning, I was lying in bed listening to the sounds of the Sunday morning pundits wafting in from the other room. Eventually some senator or other was asked by George Stephanopoulos whether he thinks Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed for the Supreme Court. He said of course and began to rattle off the many reasons why she should be, one of which was her — brace yourself — “compelling life story.”  I have no opinion on Sotomayor, but I am increasingly irritated by our need for public figures to have Compelling Life Stories along with — or even instead of — actual job qualifications. This, after all, is how Sarah Palin found herself in line for the Vice Presidency. (Although, no matter how many times I’ve heard her praised first and foremost for it, I can’t find a single compelling thing about her particular life story.)

It seems inarguable to me that we, as a nation, are problematically motivated by stories we are told or, perhaps moreso, that we tell ourselves. Just look at the rabid consumerism that has led us into this economic crisis — largely an act of trying to rewrite our own life stories. We, the people, are living lives we can’t afford in an attempt to measure up to other people’s stories (other people who themselves often can’t afford the life they're living). While I don’t exclude myself from this by any means, it’s one of my favorite reading subjects.

So I was interested just now to read about a rather fascinating experiment called Significant Objects. It’s the brainchild of Joshua Glenn (Taking Things Seriously) and Rob Walker (Buying In): “Our question was this: Can stories, even fictional ones, transform insignificant objects into significant ones? If so, how to measure this qualitative transformation?”

They’ve picked up a bunch of thrift store trinkets and enlisted a group of talented, well-known writers (from Stewart O’Nan to Kurt Andersen) to invent short histories for those trinkets. They’re posting the trinkets and stories on eBay and seeing what they sell for as compared to the price they paid. Unsurprisingly, a compelling life story can really boost the auction price of an unexceptional doodad. Especially one that gets 15 minutes of fame on BoingBoing.

And that’s what this really comes down to. The compelling story these things are benefiting from isn’t the made-up history itself — none of this is being done blind. The benefit is that they’re part of a larger project, one that has garnered the involvement of people whose names you know, one you read about at some hip website. And if you buy one of the objects involved in that project, you become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you.

So when someone says they really like your funky ashtray, you have a compelling story to tell.

Here's my Twitter process: before getting out of bed, I do a quick check via Tweetie, where I “favorite” (forgive me) anything I want to come back to. Once at my desk, I launch TweetDeck and catch up with the interim posts. Then I call up my Favorites and go through the morning’s additions — clicking, replying, and retweeting as appropriate.

Once in awhile, I call up the site on ye olde web, where I have the PowerTwitter extension to Firefox installed. I love PowerTwitter for several reasons, number one being the inline images. I’m a visual person and also a time-strapped person, and when I look at PowerTwitter, I get an image-enriched version of my tweetstream. I see Twitpics and YouTube videos and all sorts of things I wouldn’t have seen without having to click each and every link, and there are way too many great links for me to be able to click even half of them. (Here’s a mind-blower I would have missed this morning had it not been right there in front of me.) So a trip to PowerTwitter is a little treat, doled out carefully.

Enter @CarinBerger, who recently followed me and I instantly followed her back. Carin is a designer and illustrator, currently in Kyoto (check her blog for regular photos from there), and she is always on about something — vintage Japanese illustrations, Dadaist collages, Geisha hairdos. And as you can see from those links, she doesn’t talk about it: she posts images. Lots and lots of images. So now every morning, as a new part of my routine, I call up the website and go directly to her profile, where PowerTwitter lays out for me whatever amazing stream of images she’s posted since the previous day.

My current book project is not design-related and contains not a single photo, and I’ve been feeling cut off from the flood of images that is usually the biggest part of my daily worklife, so Carin is helping to keep me sane. But she is also demonstrating what a rich medium Twitter can be. Given their troubles with porn spammers and server overload, I understand why Twitter won’t make inline images a native feature, but it’s incredible what a different experience it creates. If you know anyone else who’s making imagery an integral part of their stream (as opposed to linking out, like most people do) please let me know! I want more and more and more.

The crowdsourced Polaroid gallery at Lens is fun to click through and highly recommended. I have the analog equivalent on our hallway wall — a grid of images taken over the course of several years with various JoyCams. Landscapes, family and friends, adventures, sand sculptures, still lives, party detritus, a sweet cat since deceased. The hole is for an image that never turned up when we moved to this house. My favorite of them all, it’s of a taxidermied moose in a cage, along a roadside somewhere on the way to the desert. Maybe it’ll turn up next time we move.

Seed has an interactive exploration of Oliver Sacks’ desk, and although there’s no indication of this (apart from it having been labeled, Workbench) I’m hoping it’s the first in a series.