WTF?

Mother, tear up the Christmas list I sent you. Forget everything I said I ever wanted. I will never expect another gift again if you get me one of these.

It’s unlikely we’re alone in loving nixie tubes. Maybe it’s a nod to our technological forebears? A love of vintage technology, perhaps? Or just a tinge of sadness that we never operated any enormous, deadly, secret cold war machinery that, uh, also told the time?

Anyway, to help bring that orangey, reddish glow to your bedside table, or evil laboratory, designer Mike Mayberry is selling Kloks – DIY housing kits for nixie tube clocks.

And, like all great DIY kits, it comes with just enough pieces missing to make it worthwhile. What’s a home electronics project without a global search for components?

That’s my holidays sorted, then.

Klok [via Cool Hunting]

In these security-conscious times, finding a decent place to hide a deadly weapon is getting harder and harder. So where else but in another weapon?

Lone gone are the days where we could stroll onto aircraft slinging rifles and wearing bandoliers. Concealed weapons are all the go.

In this spirit, we bring you the gun hidden in the flick knife.

Now, if we can figure out how to hide the knife, we’ll be ready to roll.

(Video) .22-Caliber Knife Gun [Tech E-Blog via Oh Gizmo!]

If you’ve $2500 to gamble, forget handing it over to some smarmy croupier and spend it instead on bringing the Casino Royale mise en scène to you with this Brooks Brothers poker set.

This isn’t just a handful of chips and a pack of cards, either. Included in the tres deluxe brass-accented, leather-covered box is:

• 2 decks of cards;
• 5 dice;
• 110 white chips;
• 110 blue chips;
• 110 red chips;
• 60 black chips; and
• 60 green chips.

That’s not a casual poker night among buddies. That’s a bloody casino. And if you’re running your own casino, you’ll recoup that $2500 in no time.

Brooks Brothers Poker Set [via Luxist]

It’s rare that we discuss crockery around here. However, kind of like the House of Manfred ties we featured in September, these plates set themselves apart because, put simply, they have naked ladies on them.

That’s kind of how things work here at TSL.

That’s not all, naturally. Apart from the ‘Naked Lunch’ series, two of which are pictured, Pop Ink make a whole range of other impressive pop art plates that we really like, too. Complimenting these risque silhouettes, designs include camp 50’s nature imagery, pastel paisleys, imitation woodgrain and myriad other retro iconography.

$40 (for a four-piece set) is a pleasantly vintage price, and the manufacturing process has a similarly old world feel:

Saturated color images are molded into 10 inch heavy-duty Melamine plates manufactured by the same company that makes them for the US military.

We have a feeling these aren’t the actual plates used by the military, for some reason…

To maintain the dignity of the girls (and because the manufacturers advise against it) keep these suckers out of the microwave.

Pop Ink ‘Naked Lunch’ [French Paper via Boing Boing]

Again we’re presented by something so practical and beautiful, we wonder why it’s taken so long. It’s a self-contained, portable cigar kit.

At a tiny 5 1/2″ x 7 1/4″ x 2 5/8″, this dark-polished timber box slides out to reveal a nickel-plated butane lighter, a steel cigar cutter and a cleverly removable nickel-plated ashtray.

The manufacturers of this revelation have complemented their ingenuity with generosity. Rather than giving into the temptation to fleece the cigar-loving community by throwing a ludicrously high price onto the ‘cigar lover’s kit’, $50 is all you’ll need. Sometimes in the cigar accessory market, you feel you’d be lucky to afford ash at that price.

(On a different note, given its dimensions, how long before someone mods this into a drive-bay smoking station for their PC?)

Cigar Lover’s Kit [Red Envelope via Uncrate]

In a heart-warming story of homecoming, the watch immortalized by a motor racing cinema classic has returned to its roots in a revolutionary (arf) new, motorsport-inspired incarnation.

The (now TAG) Heuer Monaco, made famous by Steve McQueen’s wrist in Le Mans, has been used as the model for the mechanically-revolutionary Monaco V4 and, according to the designers at TAG Heuer, the concepts are straight out of motor racing.

We won’t attempt to explain how it works, nor the intricate similarities with a high-end racecar engine – if we understood it, we’d have designed it ourselves. We know it involves 13 belt drives, a linear oscillating weight, ball bearings, barrels and other car-esque stuff. Instead, we’ll let the designers (or, at least, the corporate guff writers) explain it in terms they, themselves, describe as ‘audacious’:

Like a car engine, the fundamental mechanical dynamics operating upon a watch are: transmission, friction, torque and power. Working from this parallel, TAG Heuer’s team of designers, watchmakers and engineers hit upon three paradigm-shifting responses to the traditional dictates of watchmaking.

Now we just need them to build a prototype, 21st Century, cyborg Steve McQueen to wear it and we’ll all be happy.

(We realize we’re about two years behind the news here but, hey, the original Monaco was released in 1969 and McQueen didn’t wear it until ‘71, so these things take time, yeah?)

TAG Heuer Monaco V4 [via Wrist Watch Review, via The Watchismo Times]