If you do not have Stumble as an add-on to your browser, you should. It’s a good way to waste time on the internet. I have come across many fun and useful sites using it in my downtime. Also my composing time.

Anyway, this morning I was up early, and resisting the urge to a) clean up my desk, which needs it badly; or b) take even a look at the cello sonata (you remember the cello sonata, yes?), I was Stumbling around the internet when this popped up: 100 Creative Furniture. Bad title, but fun post.

I love posts like this. I like seeing what other minds can do with ordinary objects, to make us “pay attention” to them again, as Milton Glaser would have it. Most of them are like the clothing you see on the runway in Paris or Milan, just conceptual pieces to show off. Just as you wonder whether anyone ever really wears that stuff, you have to wonder whether anyone ever really sits on some of those things.

Still, many of these look practical, and most provoke a little squee of delight as we recognize what the designer has done with “chair” or “sofa” or “shelf” or “table.” Almost none of them solve a problem other than the aesthetic “what if,” but that’s OK. Sometimes, as Lear says, it’s good to have superfluity.

It would be fun to put these into a slide show and show them to students (omitting always the buttocks) and assault them with the overwhelming fecundity of choice here, then challenge them to write about their favorite, or categorize them, or do something to engage the designers. Write a letter to one of the designers asking for changes in the design. Draw a sofa to go with the chair. Pick out a chair and a shelf unit for your bedroom. Examine your reaction to the “worst” of them and explain yourself. Match one of those outfits from Fashion Week to wear if you’re going to sit in that chair.

So many choices.