The Laboratorium : Furniture Retroville

Today, walking around the neighborhood, I poked my head into the retro furniture store, a place still stuck in that horrible period of roughly 30 years ago when the visual design aesthetic nearly completely shoved the whole comfort thing out of the way. Two women were in there shopping and looking at stuff. One picked up a cocktail shaker, turned to the other, and said, "I want to get a martini maker." Count-to-three-pause. "To make martinis." They had a set of six-foot-high metal letters, spelling out, I think, "O-P-E-R-A." If they'd had a letter I liked better ("J" would be good, "Q" is hard to argue with, "M" has a pleasing solidity), and if they hadn't been $300 each, I might have bought one. That's the problem with junk. At some point things stop getting cheaper with age and start getting more expensive again.