SoCal Artist Bob Dob, whose punkish paintings I’ve admired since before I knew who created them, is the latest artist to team up with STRANGEco to produce some wicked collectibles.

Raging, Smoking, and Drinking are Bob Dob’s three vinyl interpretations of Luey’s, his normal angst-ridden/bad-boy characters. In Bob Dob’s paintings, Lueys (also known as the “Universal Bad Habit”and minions of the devil) are the guys that always seem to be up to trouble, yet still manage to make you feel that — were they a real person — you’d post bail for them in a heartbeat. You can get a better look at the toys on the STRANGEco site, or, if you happen to be in the L.A. area, swing by La Luz de Jesus Gallery on October 5th for Where Crows Die, a Bob Dob solo show and toy release.

Related: STRANGEco Archive

If you’re anything like me, then you’re pretty bent outta shape wishing for more wall space on which to slap more wall vinyl. Sound familiar? Then look away, this post will only make you itch with envy — or itch for a bigger apartment.

Swiss design team +41, along with nine other designers, has teamed up with Parisian uber-design-store Colette to create a new, limited edition collection of wall decorations for Domestic. Unlike some of the other wall vinyl I’ve seen, the +41 art is designed to be customized. It arrives in three sheets: one sheet of open circles, one sheet of closed circles, and one sheet of art supplies. Do with them what you will, but if you’re planning to grab one of these, hurry up; only 500 prints of each work have been made, and they’re all exclusive to Colette.

Related: Think Free in Colette Paris

There’s no doubt about it: we’re unabashedly devoted groupies of Takashi Murakami, who we featured here a few weeks ago and continues to hold his place as one of the main powerhouses behind the Japanese pop art movement. With a highly anticipated (seriously, my palms start sweating when I think about it) show in October at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, his cult status shows no signs of dwindling, even as 2007 begins to close. The latest news is on his hot collaboration with Supreme, a kingpin of streetwear. He’s designed three decks, each with a Crayola color on the top with an animal flanked by his signature curvy and eyelash’d designs on the bottom, made in limited supply and already sold out everywhere, from what I can intelligently deduce from their going rates on eBay. I’m weeping as I write that last sentence, so I hope a sympathetic and enterprising Santa Claus will come through for me this Christmas. For now, most of us will just have to do with the photo. Wah!

Loving this new cutlery set by my uber-design pal Jens Marin Skibsted (Biomega, Skibsted Ideation, et al). The design idea was to incorporate a chopstick rest (Hashi Oki) into some dead-sexy Scandinavian design cutlery. Methinks it worked; the whole integration gives the cutlery the ability to stand on its own without touching a potentially dirty surface. They were manufactured by Mater Design and produced in a family-owned factory located in the Guangdong province of Southern China. No word on pricing and availability, but sign me up — these look fantastic.

Back in the late 60's/early 70's heyday of the muscle car, the need for speed often trumped the importance of safety on the road. The Dodge Challenger, a latecomer to the muscle car game, was best known for its role as the featured automobile in the high speed car chase cult classic Vanishing Point, in which a driver and his blind DJ navigator, Supersoul — I didn't make that up — elude cops in a quest to make it to from Colorado to San Francisco in under 15 hours. It's this very outlaw appeal that Dodge embraces in their latest ad campaign for the revamped 2008 Challenger. The campaign incorporates a moving billboard of the Challenger being tailgated by another moving billboard of a police car effectively harnessing the image it cultivated in the 1971 film that made it an automotive icon. So if you happen to be cruising the strip and you catch an eyeful of a 2008 Challenger, it’s best you slow down; Smokey — 70’s euphemism for the fuzz — might be hot on your tail, too.

You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself needing tools to manage tools. Fuser (currently in beta), is a newly launched site that works by aggregating all your social networking accounts into one. Rather than logging in to MySpace, Facebook, and your various email accounts, you can simply visit one site. Similar to how web portals (MSN, Google Homepage, Yahoo!) work, Fuser allows you check email, and messages from your friends on both major social networking sites; all the messages trickle into one inbox so you get a constant feed of data rather than separation. There are other fun features too such as a “leaderboard” displaying which of your friends communicate with you the most — sort of like the Top 8 on MySpace but more relevant, in my opinion. The site is free and we’ll have to see if it ends up being a tool we can’t live without or “yet another Web 2.0″ product that is thrown to the wayside. Let us know what you think!

We’ve written about Portland-based Hecklewood a fair bit around here. What do you expect us to do when we find a completely badass brand and/or store doing their own thing and doing everything right?

TANNER, Hecklewood’s sub-brand for leather goods, has been producing messenger bags and wallets for about a year now — I’m in serious need of one of their Lscape messengers; that’s a piece of beauty right there — and they’ve now moved on to the land of belts. Not these department store, last-a-year-and-fall-apart kind, but the old school could-serve-as-a-weapon-in-a-pinch belt, where the leather pretty much stands up on its own. “All of our belts are cut, edged, assembled, and branded by hand from super heavy-weight 9 oz. premium strap leather…This stuff will last a lifetime – no joke….” And, to top it off, they’re offering our faithful readers a 15% discount with the first 25 orders getting a free key leash to boot. Just enter “joshspear” as the coupon code when you check out. Then get back here and tell us who’s the first to get spanked with your new belt…or what kind of pants they’re holding up.