Artist Dave MacDowell creates some really strange and interesting paintings. He combines a myriad of of pop-culture references into his art: characters from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Stand By Me, Mallrats, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Alice in Wonderland and a slew of other well-known figures. The funky vivid colors create something you’d find in a carnival funhouse nightmare. Check out his interview at Blah Blah Gallery.

Gone are the days of storing your automatic watch in some kind of cigar box looking apparatus you cringe looking at. The Swiss Kubik company provides watch winding boxes in numerous sexy colors and materials– like anodized aluminum, leather, precious woods and even stingray skin (crazy). Versions of the watch winder are available for 2, 4, 6, or 8 watches. Know what’s even more geeky? Some come with the optional accessory of a USB computer cable and software which allows the user to program the direction and frequency of the rotations for any specific watch manufactuers requirements.  Hey, it’s important. Prices vary, but one thing is for sure– I want one.

The Global Lives Project, a large scale video project that will show a day-in-the-life of 10 people whose diversity represents the world’s population, recently brought a portion of their 240 hours of footage to San Francisco after screenings in Tokyo and the East Village. Creator David Evan Harris has set out to create “an online video library of human life experience” with the help of more than 250 volunteers in eight countries.  One of the most challenging things about synching tapings with 10 individuals who demonstrate humanity’s current regional, geographic, age, and religious makeup has been language differences (if you don’t count the effect slow bandwidth has on streaming video in sub-Saharan Africa). Users of the collaborative subtitling platform dotSUB have come to the rescue, and a great Flickr diary and video of subjects in Japan, Brazil, and Africa Malawi are now available online. The project’s team is also working to create citywide installations and a book coordinated with Sao Paulo’s Museum of the Person. For their sake we hope global time differences are an asset when it comes to burning the midnight oil.

Forget about today’s doorbuster deals, the DNA-as-art company DNA 11 is introducing mini-portraits to accompany their wildly popular larger framed genome sequence. The desktop DNA is 8″ x 11″ for $169 and available now — and what says Christmas more than a series of colorful dashes representing the building blocks of your humanity?

From its punch of color to stylistic photos, Spanish fashion and lifestyle magazine Neo2 magazine is a hot little number. While you can only get a tease of what’s underneath the hood of the current issue with the provided tiny flip-through feature on the homepage (click the left “EN” for English), Neo2’s flavor comes through on its blog, which, like Ffffound!, uses imagery as a portal to pique readers’ interests. Click on an image that grabs you and it takes you to a blog post with links that come in handy if you can’t read Spanish. But perhaps the best find on the site is the Typography section for design nerds, which provides a monster archive of fresh-looking fonts for the big cost of free that will keep you satisfied way into the night. This is the cheapest date you’ll ever have, so no doubt you’ll be coming back for more.