Furniture Reporter

IH9 Black Alarm Clock for Ipod

From iHome

Family Furniture

Extend your relationship with your iPod. iHome is the leading manufacturer of clock radios with built-in iPod docks. iHome’s iH9R Dual Alarm Clock Stereo Radio for your iPod has a built-in dock for your iPod so it can play through the radio’s stereo speaker system. Listen to tunes any time, or fall asleep and rise to wakefulness with them too. There’s also a digitally-tuned AM/FM radio. Adjustable controls let you customize the sound. Several alarm modes help make life easier too. If you don’t have an iPod, you can listen to MP3 players of other brands through the auxiliary input port. Control your radio and iPod menus using the convenient remote control. With the iH9R, your dockable iPod can now play a more prominent role as a music provider at home. Enjoy your iPod at all times.

I wanted an option to wake to music, so an iPod alarm was a perfect fit. My son owns the Altec Lansing inMotion iPod alarm clock but when I saw the iHome in an Apple store I decided to give it a try. I have been more than happy with my decision.

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Xtra Flex 2 LED Book Light, Silver

From Mighty Bright

Family Furniture

Our Newest Light! Two Super LED lights in one head gives you the lighting power of 6 normal LED’s. Brilliant light output! You have the option of using one or two of the Super LED lights with just a simple tap to our proprietary sensor switch. The flexible neck allows you to position your lighting anywhere you want it.

Before purchasing the Mighty Bright book light in silver, I wanted to know if it could clip to paperback books, which, after reading the reviews, I found that, yes, it can clip to paperback books. However, the main thing I wanted to know was if someone could use it without disturbing his or her partner trying to fall asleep. Based on the reviews, I found that no one had any complaints of this kind. This was a first-time purchase of a product like this for me. I bought it for my boyfriend because he likes to read in bed at night, while I’m trying to go to sleep.

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Little Garden is a metal low table available in two heights. Its round top is perched on a central, circular stem which includes a flower vase at the base. Little Garden can be used indoors or outdoors and will add an attractive touch to residential or contract environments.
This apparently simple design is the fruit of an extremely complex research into the ideal proportions of form and materials and a meticulous attention to details. Poetry and magic in a simple yet brilliant design. Tokujin Yoshioka

Sofa. Structure in stainless steel, upholstery in polyurethane foams with fixed quilted leather cover black colour. Female figure back in polyurethane with black lastomer finish. Fabio Novembre

Every now and then, an experience brings about a sudden and mind altering shift, or an expansion of my awareness. One might describe this as an epiphany, except in the instances I am describing there is no great understanding gained. I think it may be the opposite of an epiphany, if there is such a thing.

The closest I can come to describing the feeling is to say it must be how an arctic explorer must feel when crossing an ice field when suddenly the snow gives away, revealing a bottomless expanse of a crevasse below. At that moment the explorer knows exactly what fate lies in store for them, and that there is absolutely nothing he or she may do but keep moving across the snow bridge, waiting for the final collapse that will bring about their doom.

I most regularly feel the floor dropping out from under me when I fly outside (meaning outside the state of Alaska, or to the lower 48). Whenever the plane descends, provided it isn’t dark and I’m awake, I watch the brown haze over the skyline with a sense of wonder and alarm. I always wonder who else in the plane may notice it, and if they care. I always assume no one does, that it is accepted as a natural event, as much a part of the sky and air as the sun and clouds.

My unease with the brown air is reinforced by the scale of the microscopic neighborhoods and the miles, miles, and miles of roads and infrastructure. It is a delicate thing, our society, all held together in one complicated interactive mess by the thin tendril of plants and animals that dies eons ago. From the air, I see it’s delicacy, it’s folly, and eventual demise. The panic hits me so hard it makes me gasp for air.

It would be easy to pass off my experience as an intellectual act of delusion, except for the fact that this feeling, or drowning epiphany, comes about with no will or act on my part. Much like a true epiphany comes about in a sudden and startling clarity, this dark vision of our shared future comes upon me without effort on my part, it is as though my unconscious mind has pieced together a complicated puzzle to release upon my conscious self out of some deep seated level of depravity.

So, imagine my surprise when I’m walking innocently though, of all places, a furniture store, to suddenly feel the snow bridge drop from out from beneath my feet. There, in all of its stain resistant, overstuffed, plaid, solid, or striped glory was the story of our demise.

It may be a leap to go from a fold-out sofa to the collapse of civilization as we know it. At least it was for me, so it has taken me a while to process why a furniture store would initiate an instantaneous and completely involuntary feeling of impending disaster.

It doesn’t take too long to see the connection. Consider the size and proportion of contemporary furniture ensembles. Many people in our world today live in homes about the size of one American sofa box. We recently lived in a small house by American standards, about 1,200 to 1,300 square feet, built around 1940. We couldn’t have fit one of those couches in our living room, much less a whole set. It takes a good contemporary suburban home with disposable floor area to fit that type of furniture.

Within the furniture store, the pieces huddle across the show floor like pompous little men, each trying to outsize their neighbor with their bulk and their stature, features entirely irrelevant when it comes to measuring ones actual usefulness. Walk the entire showroom floor, and it is next to impossible to find a piece of furniture that reflects the aesthetic and functional utility of historic furniture styles. Its all about wealth, about presentation, about false pretenses.

And apparently it sells.

What does that mean for us? That we care more about appearances than we do equity with the people we share this planet with. That our furniture boxes would be a step up in housing for the world’s poor.

And so furniture stores don’t appear so innocuous now. And that has nothing to do with taste- that would require an entirely separate treatise on design.

Which isn’t nearly as relevant as wondering where humility and compassion fall amongst our cultural standards, if they do at all.

And so it is on to the next snow bridge, to rediscover warnings already seen but buried somewhere beneath my everyday facade, forgotten to allow some semblance of day to day function, or to uncover warnings anew, the next furniture store along a path that I fear holds many.