Lapsang souchong with Lagerfeld

For just $8.30, you can take your tea with the king himself: Donkey Products offers this "teapot bag." (Is it a holder for your teabag? Is it a sheaf of sachets? I cannot tell! But I still want it.)

For $12.45, you can get a five-bag set featuring James Dean, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn (unfortunately, it looks like this is all sold out for the time being!). Fab.

Logorama

Wading through the links on "the creative Internet," a Google slide show, and came across Logorama (written and directed by H5/François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, and Ludovic Houplain, and produced by Autour de Minuit), which won an Oscar for best animated short film. Fanciful!

Lunching in Latvia

Who wants to vacation in Riga? I’m fascinated by Hospitalis, a new medical-themed eatery! According to Spotcoolstuff.com:

At Hospitalis patrons eat amongst skeletons, hospital gurneys and video screens playing medical clips from various popular movies. … An entree with appetizer and drink will set you back around Ls. 15 (which is about €21 or US$27 or about US$24,973 less than it costs to visit a real hospital in America). … Hospitalis is the world’s only medical-themed restaurant where diners can volunteer to be strapped into a straight jacket while being spoon fed by the restaurant’s staff.

In our image

Sura 84, Sandow Birk

Dying to see this: a series of suras illustrated by Sandow Birk, who is trying to make an "American version of the Qur'an." Unfortunately, looks like I missed it -- the show at the PPOW Gallery (511 W. 25th St., NY) closed October 9 (though Birk's Web site said it was there through October 30?). Nonetheless, fascinating. About the work:

An ongoing project to hand-transcribe the entire Qur'an according to historic Islamic traditions
and to illuminate the text with relevant scenes from contemporary American life. Five years in the making, the project has been inspired by a decade of extended travel in Islamic regions of the world and undertaken after extensive research.

It's World Mental Health Day

So, you know, check in with people. Or just read this photo essay on the Mental Floss blog: "10 Abandoned Psych Wards Photographers Love Sneaking Into."

About the image at left:

Cane Hill was a massive asylum on the outskirts of London, opened in 1882 and closed in 1991. Since then it’s been extremely popular with urban explorers (as well as arsonists), who damaged the place so badly that most of it had to finally be torn down back in January. Which is a shame — it was really something. Photographer Richard James took this impressive shot of the asylum chapel.

More Richard James photography on Flickr.

Comparative studies

Big old scissors. Huge honking pencil. Little little men: fabulous. This image (via Orange Crate Art) is from the Life archive, free on Google.

About the image:

“Movie stagehands pushing a 400-pound pair of gigantic scissors on a dollie next to two men carrying a 21-ft. pencil, just some of the props that created the illusion of a dwindling hero for the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man at Universal Studios.” Photograph by Allan Grant, September 1956, Hollywood, California.

Shoe-sies!

I want these. Very much. Because not only are they green, my favorite color, they have a print reminiscent of Hokusai's "great wave" on the sole (though the image is flipped).

(Link to Japanese Web site filtered through Google Translate, because what is lost is funny: "The playful and casual soles vivid colors, try to enjoy my feet fashionable?")

Coffee. Books. Yes, please.

The new D'Espresso outlet (317 Madison Avenue, at 42nd Street, (212) 867-7141), just one block from the New York Public Library, offers a twist on the crowded bookshelf, courtesy Anurag Nema and his team at nemaworkshop. Fastcodesign.com reports:

The "books" are actually tiles printed with sepia-toned photos of bookshelves at a local travel bookstore that ring the room, including the floor, walls and ceiling. In addition to painting unusual surfaces with intriguing patterns -- whoa, you're standing on books! -- it gives an Alice in Wonderland-esque sense that the room has been suddenly upended.

It's decorative gourd season

From a 2009 McSweeney's piece by Colin Nissan:

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

Oddly, it seems I've reached a point in my life where this is no longer a hilarious send-up of middle-class American proclivities, but rather an eerily accurate reading of my thought process last weekend.

Wigging out in 1903 Tibet

A portfolio of photographs taken by John Claude White, from Younghusband's 1903-1904 British mission to Tibet, the first known images to leave the region, is being auctioned by Bonhams. NPR presented a selection of these photos; my favorite is the group of nuns, kitted out in spectacular wigs, at left.