Canter Bridge

Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Some of the polite arts that become trumped by technology on a functional level nevertheless preserve their potency as communicative acts. Such is the handwritten note in the age of email, voicemail, and Instant Messaging. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Let’s face it, us middle-aged guys really only read the third of, say, MOTORCYCLIST that concerns the big bikes with the fat seats. The rest of it breeds in us a slow boil of resentment—of course we’re not aware we’re feeling this, cuz were guys—at the little, fast bikes that are ridden by little, fast people.

We need a magazine about bikes with big, wide seats. Like ours. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

This cool-looking, petite but not-too-small-for-human-thumbs device goes with me everywhere in my car to record those thoughts that only reach their crystalline brilliance in the shower and behind the wheel.

Because I follow David Allen’s Getting-Things-Done approach of relieving my brain of remembering stuff so that it can do the creative and productive thinking it does best, I need to transition other thoughts immediately to a safe written or recorded medium that will allow me to return to them at the right moment. Written communication from behind the wheel of a car has always been a little precarious, so I’ve sworn off it entirely except at red lights. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

GQ is a publication that merits the adjective ‘legendary’. As a frontrunner in its genre, it takes potshots from many angles but – one thinks of Mercedes-Benz or Oxford University – keeps on doing well what it does well. (This reviewer drives a Ford and attended Cambridge, so I’m trying to be generous here …)

GQ is actually several magazines bound into one. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

In locker rooms and office corridors across this nations, a battle rages for the souls of men. Perhaps only the fratricidal dispute between boxers and briefs has more violently bloodied the masculine nose of our generation than this battle. Yet the jury remains out: wallet or money clip, what’ll it be?

Lives and careers are savaged by a choice of one over the other, yet the passion that drives guys in the direction of the traditional leather wallet or – alternatively – to the minimalist money clip continues unabated. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Maybe you’ve never placed luxury and motorcycles in the same sentence before. Then you’ve never stumbled upon Robb Report: Motorcycling, a bi-monthly glossy that actually brings the two together with a fair amount of panache.
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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Motorcyclist is a mainstay in the motorcycle magazine world, a place where cycle novices like this reviewer can begin to get a monthly diet of news, mechanics, advertisements, reviews, and cycle talk.

The format is busy, with very narrow margins. Think the opposite of those luxury goods magazines that seem bent on calming your mind. Motorcyclist wants to rev it up, or better yet, place it in a helmet and roughly equidistant between the two ends of a handlebar.
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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

Let’s hear it for the small inventions in the $5 – $50 price range that make life just a bit simpler with understated design and solid performance.

The Kamenstein Stainless Paper Towel Holder belongs to the genre.
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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at http://www.amazon.com.

This sturdy ceramic kitchen compost holder has become an old friend, one of those dependable if inert gizmos that’s there waiting by the coffeemaker every morning, prepared to do its job without complaint. If I find myself experiencing the odd sensation of affection for a piece of mass-produced pottery, I find some justification in the countless late-night trips on which it’s accompanied me, summer and winter, dutifully bearing its load of fruit and veggie waste out into the backyard darkness to the compost unit.
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