What would you make from retired carpet samples? That’s the challenge coming from Tricycle’s Ample Sample contest, now in its fourth year. The event that asks designers to “make it useful, make it beautiful” has logged entries like shoes, a hammock, pendant light, and a magazine caddy. And the best thing about the contest? Not only will the finalists be showcased at NeoCon World’s Trade Fair 2010, their designs (and how-tos) will appear on the Ample Sample website. To see past designs and download their instructions, click here.

To learn more about the challenge, click here. You have until May 26th to enter!

Have you ever hated a person you didn’t really know, precisely because everyone else wouldn’t stop telling you how great he is? I’ll be the judge of that, you tell yourself, and then proceed to deliver your verdict: everyone else is an idiot and this person is the biggest fraud since Milli Vanilli’s voice coach.

Well, that’s essentially how I’ve always felt about Broken Social Scene, ever since a writer at Pitchfork plucked them out of the slush pile and turned them into indie-rock superstars. When ReadyMade asked me to write about the band’s upcoming release, Forgiveness Rock Record, I gave it a summary spin, licked my cracked, cynical lips, and replied that I’d be glad to lay into this “silly little record.”

I had so much to criticize: the pseudo-profound lyrics, the self-indulgently “noisy” transitions, the also-ran hooks, the endless and indistinguishable guest contributions, the complete and utter lack of stylistic cohesion. I was even able to confirm my dark suspicion that Broken Social Scene had accepted a grant from the Canadian government. A government grant?! Rock bands are supposed to destroy the government, not suck on its socialized tit!

But something kept holding me back. As much as I wanted to fling my righteous indignation in the face of every music snob who’d ever sung the praises of Broken Social Scene, I was also wary of going out on a limb without first building a little scaffolding to break my fall, should it come to that.

So I listened to Broken Social Scene’s albums again and again, looking for evidence to back up my criticisms. I found plenty, but I also began to feel my resistance melting away as I realized that, in their own minds at least, these guys aren’t the world-straddling musical saviors their media boosters would have us take them for. These guys are underdogs.

The story of Broken Social Scene is the story of how the music scene of an entire city—in this case Toronto—arranged itself around two men.

Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene.

Viewed from one perspective, singer Kevin Drew is an insufferable operator—the kind of guy who goes around hugging everyone, telling them how great they are, inviting them to play on his album (even if there’s no space for them to be heard), and then dropping their names in interviews and press releases. But by all accounts, or at least those collected in This Book Is Broken, Stuart Berman’s 2009 oral history of the band, Drew is more or less irresistible to those who know him.

He may not be the world’s most accomplished musician, and it’s clear even on Forgiveness Rock Record that he still doesn’t entirely trust his singing voice, but he has the only qualities that truly matter for a front man: electrifying charisma and a fearless belief in himself. “Kevin’s neither calm nor experienced,” says Stars singer Torquil Campbell told Berman. “But [the other people in the band] need that; they need his naïveté and his energy and his willingness to question why things are the way they are.”

The calm and experienced half of Broken Social Scene’s molten core is Brendan Canning, a veteran guitarist whose past bands include hHead, By Divine Right, Valley of the Giants, and other outfits no one south of Mississauga has ever heard of. By the time he befriended Drew, seven years his junior, Canning had a personal connection with virtually everyone on the Toronto music scene, including Leslie Feist, who went out with him a good decade before she took up with Drew.

The combination of Canning’s connections and Drew’s enthusiasm was potent indeed. Before long, they were inviting the best musicians in town—as well as Drew’s old art-school pals Emily Haines (of Metric) and Amy Millan (of Stars)—to join them onstage for experimental live shows at local clubs. Toronto had long been the center of Canada’s underwhelming major-label scene, and most of the good musicians in town had been through that soul-crushing ringer at least once. But Drew had a different vision: he wanted to follow the American indie-rock model, and step one was creating a little excitement on the ground.

It worked. What you hear on Broken Social Scene’s 2002 album, You Forgot It in People, is the sound of an artistic community finding its voice. The songs are all over the place—a circumstance that producer Dave Newfield tried to compensate for by adding a sheen of white noise and lots of eerie transitions—but in fact the stylistic chaos was part of the point. This wasn’t the work of two or four or even eight people. It was everybody, all at once, together. Canning was the backbone. Drew was the Pied Piper. But the sound belonged to the people!

At least that was the idea. Canadians love their collectives, you know. Reality eventually intervened, however, in the form of grueling tours and the attentions of wheedling sycophants and opportunistic business types. Maybe Drew’s head got a little big; it certainly got harder, as he joined forces with Jeffrey Remedios to turn their little imprint, Arts & Crafts, into a successful full-service management company. (They invented the now-common “360 deal,” wherein a single company serves as an artist’s record label, manager, tour manager, merchandising rep, and so on.)

I hope you don’t think I disapprove. Musicians deserve to get paid, and there is much to admire in the Arts & Crafts model. But it’s hard to be everybody’s best friend when you’re also their boss.

And it’s hard to capture the sound of a city when your touring schedule makes it impossible for you to be there. Broken Social Scene’s self-titled follow-up, released in 2005, disappointed fans holding out for the second coming of You Forgot It in People, though it’s not nearly as bad as its detractors suggested. Sure, there’s some time-wasting filler, but like all the best divorce records (Drew and his wife, Jo-Ann Goldsmith, split while the band was recording) it thrums with pathos and unleashed passions. The hooks aren’t bad either.

So now we are presented with Forgiveness Rock Record. In the weeks that I’ve been pondering this post, I’ve resolved most of my differences with Broken Social Scene. I realize that what I once viewed as their insufferable arrogance is really the puffed-up bravado of a bunch of Canadians trying to prove that they belong on the international stage. I realize that the stylistic ripoffs of everyone from Sonic Youth to the Sea and Cake probably qualify as tributes, as Drew tries to share the sounds that inspire him with a younger generation. I realize that the nonsensical lyrics are an attempt to penetrate beyond logic to a deeper truth—and I acknowledge that they sometimes sail right into the bulls-eye. (You can’t really improve on “All these people drinking lover’s spit; they sit around and clean their face with it.”) I’ve even made my peace with the fact that the guest artists so prominently touted in every interview and press release are so often impossible to hear in the final mix. (To quote the rapper k-os, “At times I didn’t know where my vocals began or ended, or if it was Feist, Kevin, or myself I was hearing. It didn’t matter, though. It was moving me.”)

And, having listened to it a couple of dozen times, I find that I really, really like Forgiveness Rock Record.

I like that it’s brimming with real emotion, without ever coming close to being sappy. I like that Drew feels comfortable enough about his obsession with film scores that he was willing to make a song as wonderfully silly as “Chase Scene,” which is destined to wind up in some Atom Egoyan movie or other. I like that the band didn’t shy away this time from making a straightforward pop song—“Texico Bitches”—and placing it third on the album, where pop songs belong. (While making the self-titled album, Drew and Canning lost their nerve and re-arranged their catchiest song, “Major Label Debut,” into a diffuse affair that successfully warded off would-be listeners from beyond the indie-rock bubble.)

I like “Ungrateful Little Father,” period. Its stuttered rhythms, out-of-left-field tone bursts, and angrily confused lyrics are exactly what I want out of arty rock music. I like the Crazy Horse looseness of “Water in Hell,” the anthemic abandon of “Meet Me in the Basement,” and the exquisite sorrow of “Sweetest Kill.” I like “All to All,” even though it sounds like the token “chick song.” And I hate everything about “Art House Director,” but nobody’s perfect.

In short, I was wrong. Broken Social Scene isn’t the enemy. In fact, they’re pretty damn great. But who am I to complain if you decide to hate them anyway?

Michael Hogan is Vanity Fair’s executive online editor. He writes with self-appointed expertise about music, politics, Hollywood, and who knows what else. He’s also mildly addicted to Twitter.

I’m a big fan of Whip Up and was even more excited to learn that Kathreen, who runs the site, has a fantastic new quilting book from Chronicle chock full of small quilting projects and patterns called Whip Up Mini Quilts: Patterns and How-To for More Than 20 Contemporary Small Quilts. I love that the book includes projects from some of my favorite crafty ladies including Alicia Paulson and Malka Dubrawsky and that the projects prove that quilting doesn’t need to be a year-long process.

We have five copies of the book to share with you today!

Here’s how to enter:

1.) Become a follower of Readymadetweets on twitter.

2.) Post “Hey @Readymadetweets @ChronicleBooks @whipup Mini Quilt Me! http://bit.ly/aiiKrc #quilting” in your twitter feed between now and 5 pm Central time today.

We’ll post the winners first thing Tuesday morning so be sure to check twitter then!

Not only does Todd Gillman of Seattle’s New Belgium Brewing company get to prowl the city as a New Belgium Beer Ranger, assuring quality in the retail outlets and bars where New Belgium beers are sold, but that’s really him in the ’50s Park Ranger getup in New Belgium’s Ranger IPA ad campaign. Here he talks to us about what it’s like to work for a company you truly believe in.

VITAL STATS
Occupation: New Belgium Beer Ranger
Location: Seattle, WA
Age: 30somethin’
First Job: First job ever = mowing lawns in the neighborhood; First “real” job = Account Services Rep for Airwalk
Best Job: I’ve had some great jobs in my life. As a kid, in the summer I worked a “beach box” renting umbrellas & boogie boards to tourists, which was a great way to meet girls and surf a lot. I also ran a kayak shop in the heart of Appalachia’s best whitewater, so I pretty much got to kayak every day before and after work for a year or so.  The first five days of my employment for a very well-known energy drink company happened to be in the Bahamas! But honestly, I’d have to say that my current gig as a New Belgium Beer Ranger is the dreamiest adult job I’ve had for many, many reasons.
Greatest Professional Challenge: Being part of a “sinking ship” and still having to perform “service with a smile.” And shortly thereafter, being called into an all-staff meeting where we were all informed that we were being laid off and to gather our belongings & vacate the premises (needless to say, this happened before my New Belgium days).
Salary During 20s: I don’t remember exactly, but it was barely enough to make ends meet for most of those years!

1. Hi, Todd Gillman. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
I attribute getting this f*&%ing awesome job to the perfect storm of “who you know,” “what you know,” a long list of shared values with New Belgium, and a whole lot of perseverance. It’s not uncommon in our company to hear of new hires having gone through the process of applying, interviewing, and being rejected numerous times, over the course of several years, before finally being let in the gates! You’ll hear about people with graduate degrees trying to get a job in packaging or in the Liquid Center (our tasting room). It’s widely known that many of our upper management positions are filled by folks who got in and paid their dues on the bottling line or slinging kegs onto trucks.

2. Tell us a little bit about New Belgium. It sounds like an interesting place to work.
New Belgium has grown into an internationally known craft brewery from really modest beginnings. We were the first American commercial brewery to concentrate on Belgian-style beer, and that started in the basement of a really small house in Fort Collins.  Today, nearly every brewer worth his or her salt in the US is tinkering with Belgian styles. Our founders, Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan, established a list of “core values & beliefs” for New Belgium before the first bottle of beer was sold. Things like “promoting beer culture,” “environmental stewardship,” “high-involvement culture,” “committing to authentic relationships,” and “having fun” are woven into the company culture. Our beer seems to be ubiquitous in some markets, so a lot of people think we’re this giant corporation or that we’re a subsidiary of one of the big domestic breweries. But we’re just 340 very engaged people committed to taking care of this awesome employee-owned project. Most of us think of the company as one big family and because of that there’s a lot of pride and love within NBB…though from outside it probably seems like a cult.

3. What’s a typical day in the life of a Beer Ranger like? Have you had any notable adventures in the line of duty?
One of the things I love about being a Ranger is that there’s really no such thing as a “typical day.” I work a lot with our distributor partners helping them sell our beer. I work a lot with our retail accounts making sure we are meeting their product needs, ensuring the quality and freshness of our product when it’s at retail, and also partnering with them on fun retail-level marketing projects. I also work directly with consumers, educating them about our brewery, our beers, our ethos, beer culture in general, and dreaming up fun ways to promote New Belgium. I spend a day or two per week in the home office and most of the rest of the time out in the trade. Some Rangers cover a huge geographic territory, like our man in Montana, but I work a densely packed urban area, so I can sometimes do my work from the seat of a bike. I’m constantly responding to urgent customer or distributor needs, so that part of the job keeps me on my toes and means being very flexible and prepared to shift focus from one thing to the next with little notice.

I spend a lot of time in bars at odd hours, like at 10 a.m., when the owners or managers are able to take care of the administrative parts of running the bar.  Some places are already open and serving at that time. Those early patrons can often be attention starved and just looking for a conversation. This has led to lots of interesting and hilarious interactions. The most notable thing I’ve been involved in lately though, was being picked to be the “poster boy” for our new IPA. So now everyone knows me as a 50’s-era park ranger from the print ads in national publications,and on our new coasters,and in grocery store beer displays…that whole experience has been somewhere between fun and torture.

4. How many of you Rangers are there?
We’re up to about 100 people working in the field throughout our entire footprint. That number includes Rangers, directors and managers and our field Quality Assurance team.

5. Did you have any idea, starting out, that you’d end up doing something like what you are doing now? Before you started working, what were you expecting, or looking for?
When I started my career, I had no idea that anything like what I’m doing now even existed. When I started out, I just wanted to work at a “cool” job where I was passionate about my company and where I could leverage my creativity and problem-solving skills. Beyond that, I wasn’t really all that tuned in to what was up with the so-called real world.

6. What are the biggest pleasures of the job? What could you do without?
There’s so much to love.  Beer and beer culture, for one. But also, waking up every day knowing that I represent an organization that’s doing well by doing good. NBB takes such great care of us: a Subaru Outback and all the related expenses are covered; employee ownership means we each have a voice in big company decisions (it also means dividends); a truly equitable, progressive and empowering management system; and constant investment in continuous education for all employee-owners.  Also, the perks that come with building great relationships with many of the people who help make Seattle a world-class city.

The beer industry can be very cutthroat, and I’m not your typical sales jock. So I could definitely do without some of the drama that is inherent in the industry side of things. I could do without some of the arrogance and negativity that some new-era beer lovers are bringing to the scene. But all that stuff is easy enough to either ignore or enlighten.

7. I hear you had a hand in developing a new beer, the Ranger IPA. What’s
the story there?
I was invited to be part of a small group of brewers and upper management tasked with helping to shape the overall profile for what was to become Ranger IPA.  Initially, being a Ranger out in Seattle, I had no involvement in the beer. But I had strong opinions about an early prototype of the IPA and so I was asked by one of the Directors to submit my thoughts in writing. So, I suppose my involvement can basically be traced back to an articulate and apparently compelling email I wrote. From there, I was looped into the development group, which was a huge honor and an opportunity I took very seriously. For years, New Belgium stuck mainly to its Belgian heritage and let the IPA craze run its course. But in certain parts of the country, IPA’s were never simply a style fad, they’re a staple in the regional beer culture. Today, IPA is the fastest growing category in the U.S., but is also the most polarizing. Everyone has an opinion on what makes a good IPA, especially here on the West Coast.  Throughout the development process, with each subsequent incarnation of our IPA, I acted as the gatherer and disseminator of information and feedback from my teammates and my contacts at key accounts throughout the region.  We tested prototypes in informal focus groups and tasted a lot of different IPAs next to ours. I also did a ton of research on the country’s best IPAs, digging for recipes, correlating the maltbills and hops schedules with common keywords found in the tasting notes…and yes, I had to actually drink all these beers to really know what I was talking about.  Throughout the process, all this info was fed back to the development team and much of it was taken into consideration and applied to subsequent versions of the beer.

8. What advice would you give to someone who wanted to do something similar to what you’ve done?
An organization like New Belgium receives so much interest from lots of highly qualified people. I don’t envy our HR people at all.  So at a place like this, having established relationships inside the organization of your choice, someone who can go to bat for you, is often a great way to make sure your resume is moved to somewhere close to the top of the pile. Being able to demonstrate that you’re a good cultural fit is important at any organization that was founded on a particular code of ethics or ideals. The best way to do that is to not just align with those ideals, but to actually live them. Passionate organizations want passionate people, so just do what you love, love what you do, & the rest will take care of itself.

[Images: Top two, courtesy of New Belgium brewing; bottom, courtesy of Tye's Eye Photography]

We have seen a Ball Balancing Robot before but this one takes the cake! It was developed by Masaaki Kumagai and Takaya Ochiai from the Robot Development Engineering Laboratory and Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the Tohoku Gakuin University in Japan.

Via: Make and IEEE

“The robot they built rides on a rubber-coated bowling ball, which is driven by three omnidirectional wheels. The robot can not only stand still but also move in any direction and pivot around its vertical axis.”

Here’s some info to get your gears going:

The League of American Bicyclists has designated May as National Bike Month, and a bike to work week is scheduled for May 17-21. A lot of communities are sponsoring this week as well, so sign up with your local group and help spread the word. Find the closest one here.

People For Bikes, an organization that aims to make bicycling safer, more convenient, and get more people to enjoy it, has set a high goal for itself: one million names in support of their cause. Read more here.

[image via People For Bikes]

The Des Moines farmers market starts tomorrow for the season and I am itching to get my hands on some rhubarb so that I can make these Rhubarb Hand Pies with Orange and Cardamom from over on So Good and Tasty. And I think I’m going to have to serve them on pretty china just so I can recreate this image for myself.

Image via So Good and Tasty; Click here for the recipe.

Its creator, Marigold Haske (whose work I seem to be becoming a fan of), says at her original post about the toy,

It’s difficult to see in the picture, but the white satin fabric I used for his skin is embedded with bits of glitter, so he sparkles like diamonds in the sunlight. *sigh* Oh, Edward! Anyway, I plan on giving it to our little friend with a note that says, “Someone to watch over you while you sleep.”

[Image by Mr. Huckleberry & the Milosaur, on Flickr]

Go ahead…add your own photos of things you made to the ReadyMade Flickr Pool.

If you are looking for a new piece of test gear to help you with your next design have a look at what Matt from Openschemes has come up with.  He has taken a Top2005 EPROM Programmer and hacked into a Desktop Test Bench!

“Do you ever find yourself wanting an IC tester?  Some way to power up an IC and apply various voltages and signals to different pins, in order to either check functionality or to explore the inner workings of some mystery chip..? What we’ve done is traced out and bus-snooped a cheap EPROM programmer to decipher it’s inner workings in order to create an open, super-low-cost platform for digital IC testing and development.”

I am thrilled to share this week’s food blog of the week with you because I find A Sweet Spoonful to be positively delightful. From the photographs to the recipes and the stories about real life food, Megan Gordon does a fantastic job. I am particularly taken with her post on Banana Pudding, which tells of her enjoyment of the banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery, only to find out that it’s made with instant pudding when she considered making it at home. As I am a big fan of banana pudding with Nilla wafers and had my own lukewarm experience with Magnolia’s version, I’m definitely going to try her scratch-made take on the recipe.

Some of my other favorite posts include recipes for Blackberry Cornmeal Muffins, Moroccan Carrot Soup, and Fairmont Lake Louise Granola Bars.

[I found A Sweet Spoonful via Kelly's blog roll on Eat Make Read- thanks for the referral Kelly!]

Longform.org, a kind of RSS feed for lengthy journalistic endeavors, allows you to peruse summaries of stories and save them to read later on the Instapaper platform. Download the app and you can catch up on your iPhone (even when you don’t have an Internet connection), or read it on the Instapaper site directly from your computer. Both the account and app are free, and each story saves as text-only so you don’t have to worry about messed up formatting.

[via swissmiss]

They are obviously gunning for a major cool factor, but that’s okay, because they’ve squarely hit the mark. And because you have to love a place whose self-story begins, “Once upon a time, 5 years ago, Tom decided to stop complaining and to start something to make it better.”

Cozy, album-y bar.

“Band rooms” sleep a whole bunch of people in a loft.

Dear universe, I respectfully ask: please cause a reason for me to have to go back to Berlin.

[Images from Michelberger Hotel]

P.S. If you’d like to read more great ReadyMade travel stuff, head over to our travel blog, Escape Hatch.