A hands-free solution for the wirelessly-connected yet orthodontically-challenged.

The title of the next installment in the Star Wars saga is “Attack of the Clones,” which nearly everyone I know thinks sounds ridiculously silly. This poster, on the other hand, looks promising — which in itself might be a small but hopeful clue that Lucas might be looking to redeem himself for the heinousness of his past crimes. Props to Suction.com for the tip.

I have my own store now. For real! Seriously. Amazon.com is now adding a new tab to its venerable pantheon of tabs — this one has your name on it. If you’re a registered Amazon.com customer, that is. The megaretailer is leveraging their formidable recommendation engine to push more customized recommendation items to all of us buying machines.

Forget the “X-Men” and even next year’s “Spiderman” movie. The best-ever cinematic adaptation of a comic book is Terry Zwigoff’s “Ghost World,” based on the work of the same name by Daniel Clowes. “Ghost World” was, admittedly, my least favorite of the serialized stories that appeared in Clowes’s brilliant “Eightball” comic book, but it remains head and shoulders above most anything drawn and written by hand. Zwigoff has turned it into a sublime and incisive feature film that’s likely to leave just about anyone laughing satsifactorily at its pathetic cast of characters and their prosaic circumstances — and there’s no simple, Hollywood-esque redemption at the end, no tidy comedic denouement, no happily ever after.

The spam filter in Microsoft Entourage is useful beyond words, but once in a while it disqualifies emails that shouldn’t be. Which is how I nearly never got to look at Awesome Factory, Aaron Bergeron’s hilarious collection ofcomics. Bergeron draws like a kid but has the sharp, dry, faux-naive wit of an, er,adult. It’s gut-busting stuff. His casting of Batman as a vice-principal is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen onthe Internet.

Design Within Reach has an August Sale going on right now. I took advantage of it to buy myself a Baba counter-height stool, which fits in neatly with my desk and shelves at home.

“Design is like a corpse — beautifully laid out but not going anywhere.” Adbusters has a new design issue out, which takes to task the motivation and complicity of today’s designing class. Maybe not exactly a must-read, but probably a should-read.

It says something about the Superman mythos that it can be reinterpreted as a Buffy/Dawson’s Creek-style teen drama, as the WB Network is doing this fall with “Smallville.” What it says exactly, I’m not sure.

  NASA’s Landsat program aims “to see the Earth’s surface in terms that can be visually classified — ‘thematically mapped,’ to use the jargon.” Now in its third decade, it has yielded some beautiful photographic renderings of the Earth, many of which can be seen here at this site. Take, for just one example, the aerial approach to Mt. St. Helens. Gorgeous.

Engrish, a complilation of quirky Japanese attempts at English, is hilarious and worth a look, but there’s a mildly sinister culturalism at work here. I’m sure nearly everyone I know would tell me to just lighten up, so I’ll just leave it at that.

For its pure and obscure kind of design styling, dform(one).shiftfunc has fascinated me for days now. Among its triumphs is its ambient motion and quasi-ambient soundtrack, if only insofar as I’m happy to leave it running idly on my screen just so I can enjoy its intricate yet unspecific beauty. An impressive end unto itself.

The post-Napster promise of Gnutella has seemed largely illusory to me. BearShare sounded promising, but it yielded next to nothing. But KaZaA is another story. Within a few minutes of installation, I was downloading some hot shit. I just hope this lasts.

Will Lee has been plugging away in Brooklyn, translating the whole world into Flash. First things first though. He’s starting with board games — his latest is Quatro Deluxe.

Netscape is the bane of my existence as a Web designer and I know I’m not the only one that feels that way. The fact that it’s part of the AOL Time Warner behemoth doesn’t help, but let’s not get into that — I come not to bury Netscape but to praise it. Faintly. I don’t know what possessed me, but I downloaded the latest version — 6.1 preview — the other day and installed it on my Windows 2000 machine. It’s still fundamentally unusable if for nothing more than the fact that it behaves in an almost inimitably slow, clunky manner. But I have to admit, there are some nice things about the feature set and their intended behaviors. Here are some quick notes on that.

Last summer I finally got on the R&B tip when I took some time to actually listen to the incredibly inventive vocal and production wizadry driving the non-stop Destiny’s Child tunes available on Napster. That opened up a whole new section of the record store for me (a point clearly lost on the RIAA), and I eventually discovered Aaliyah, whose new eponymous album is really, really impressive. It’s been playing on my CD player for a few weeks now, and every time I think I’m tired of it, I find something new in her amazingly assured delivery to make me want to listen to it all over again.

Method just re-launched Method.com, and it’s probably the smartest, most tasteful site from a design shop ever. Make sure to see the case studies.