AMERICANS LOVE stuff, particularly if it’s new and/or wacky and/or ingeniously-thought-up stuff.

Here’s some of the funnest stuff I’ve found lately.

• Joe’s Cool Website of Mid-Century Modern Design: Cool phones, concept cars, Howard Miller clocks, lounge chairs suitable for Austin Powers set decorations, assorted “houses of the future,” graphic design fads, and more, all from the jet-stream ’50s to the late-mod ’70s. Some stuff’s for sale, some for rent, some just to admire.
• Incredibly Strange Religious Records: You can laugh at this music if you wish, like the webmaster of this site apparently wants you to. I, however, prefer to sit a little further back and be inspired by these amateur and semipro songwriters’ absolute 100-percent sincerity and irony-free conviction. Part of the same “Post-Fundamentalist Press” site that also brings you the “Adult Christian Sex Tour” and “The XXX-Rated Bible.”
• Sex Gum: From Mexico (one of the less completely-devout of the Catholic countries), and “based on the wisdom of the American pre-Hispanic cultures,” chewing gums laced with herbal ingredients which will supposedly “increase and strengthen sexual power in men and sexual appetite in women.” The site sells three different types (Sex Gum, Love Gum, Extasy Gum), in wholesale quantities. (I’ll let you make your own “stick” or “chewing” puns.)
• Stupid Candy and Gifts: “Bad taste never tasted so good,” or so this site claims. It sells edible novelties such as Choka Ca-Ca, described as “chocolate fudge in a diaper (Yep, we’ve hit a new low).” Plus Lick’n Erasers (“eraser-shaped candy that fits over the end of your pencil”), computer-shaped pasta, Wheel of Fortune logo wristwatches, gummi pizza, gummi rats, a Jell-O mold in the shape of a human brain, and something called Lava Lick (“It’s like putting the Sixties in your mouth”).
• Vinyl Video: John Logie Baird, a Scotsman who spent decades on a doomed effort to invent “mechanical telecision,” once tried to preserve his signals on phonograph-like discs. Some enterprising Austrians claim to have finally perfected the process. They say their adepter, added to any LP turntable, will play 15 minutes of lo-res, b/w video with mono sound, on collectible picture discs. The site’s sample scenes involve haunting, near-abstract imagery (almost as beautiful as the images made by Fisher-Price’s beloved, discontinued PXL toy camcorder), set to Euro-electronica dance music.

IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.

IN OTHER NEWS: After 17 years as the virtual living room of the Belltown arts community, the beloved Two Bells Tavern, where some of our live Misc.-O-Rama events have been held, is in the process of being sold to ex-NYU prof Tina Morelli-Lee and hubby Jeffrey Lee. So far, the new mgmt. promises to keep everything the same (i.e., no hard alcohol and no Bud Light; and it’ll still serve some of the city’s best burgers but won’t serve French fries).

TOMORROW: The return of bad-white-boy rock; just as stoopid as ever.

ELSEWHERE: Zero Population Growth claims Seattle’s America’s most kid-friendly city. (As long as you’re not a kid who wants to see live music or put up street posters)… Surreal, haunting, quasi-Goth–who doesn’t love dream stories?…