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Weird news: Monkey wearing a coat found in Canadian IKEA store

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:23:00 +0000

TORONTO (AP) -- Shoppers at an Ikea store in Toronto weren't monkeying around when they reported a primate on the loose.

Customers spotted a monkey - clad in a pint-sized shearling coat - wandering around the store's parking lot Sunday afternoon. The baby monkey, named Darwin, made its way through rows of parked cars and ended up outside a set of store doors.

Ikea staff lured the primate into a corner before calling police, who contacted the city's Animal Services department, said Staff Sgt. Ed Dzingala.

"It was just outside the store, just in a corner area where the monkey had nowhere to go, but it was pretty scared," Dzingala said. He said the monkey had escaped its crate in a parked car.

The monkey, which reportedly wore a diaper as well, never made it inside the store and was picked up by Animal Services officers within half an hour. The animal's owner later contacted police and was reunited with the pet, Dzingala said.

Word of the incident sparked a flurry of comments and photos on Twitter, as well as two parody Twitter accounts which took on the persona of the wandering monkey.

Shuttle contractor lays off 1,400 workers

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:33:00 +0000

The private contractor that handles the bulk of the work servicing NASA's space shuttle fleet is notifying 1,400 employees in Florida, Texas and Alabama that they will be laid off in the fall.

United Space Alliance this week began telling workers, including 900 employees at the Kennedy Space Center, that they are expected to be let go by Oct. 1 as part of planned reductions from the end of the space shuttle program.

Laid off workers will receive between four and 26 weeks of pay, depending on their years of service.

The shuttle program now employs about 8,700 contractors, down from 12,000 employees in October 2008. It also employs another 1,200 civil workers, who are expected to be assigned to new programs after the shuttle.

The last shuttle flight is expected next year.

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Information from: Florida Today, http://www.floridatoday.com

Inside the Ikea police state

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:13:00 +0000

Der Spiegel has corrected this story since it was published.

The founder of Ikea, the international Swedish home furnishing chain, is one of the richest men in the world. Yet Ingvar Kamprad is widely considered to be something of an average guy who lives a modest life. He's just like his furniture; simple, honest and a little wooden.

Anecdotes that support that image abound. The Swede from Smaland reportedly still has a 30-year-old "Klippan" sofa in his living room, along with another early classic developed by the furniture giant, the "Billy" bookshelf. These sorts of stories not only illustrate Kamprad's modesty, they also testify to the long-lasting quality of his modestly priced furniture.

The man who wants to turn this pleasant image on its head is Johan Stenebo. Stenebo, who comes from Stockholm, started working at Ikea more than 20 years ago as a trainee in the Kaltenkirchen warehouse just north of the German city of Hamburg. His career trajectory took him right to Ikea's highest management level. He was managing director of Ikea's subsidiary GreenTech and he even worked as Kamprad's personal assistant.

How do you solve a problem like Ikea?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:26:00 +0000

Not long ago I moved to Toronto, and during a recent dinner with a friend and his wife, the subject of my sleeping arrangements came up. By "sleeping arrangements," I mean the air mattress on the floor of my new shoebox apartment.

"Go to Ikea," said my friend.

"Oh, Ikea," said his wife, clapping her hands. "You must. Must."

Evidently their guest-room bed, in which I'd once slept, was purchased there.

"So cheap," my friend's wife said.

"We paid almost nothing for it," my friend confirmed.

Further investigation revealed this bed, the Javnaker, was the cheapest mattress set Ikea sells. According to the company it was "suitable as a guest bed." I was unsure what to make of a product description that seemed to imply: We wouldn't make our dog sleep on this, but it's fine for wastoid freeloaders or your great aunt Peg.

Nonetheless, purchasing anything for almost nothing was appealing. Truthfully, as an unemployed former school bus driver, almost nothing was still a little rich for my blood.

But my air mattress leaked. Every night I would blow strenuously into a clear plastic nubbin to inflate the damn thing. Did my labored breaths travel through the walls? If so the neighbors may have started to picture me inflating a heroically durable love doll for her nightly romp.

“Ikea, stop the Verdana madness!”

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:08:00 +0000

Forget about bogus health care reform townhall outrage: For a real grassroots rebellion, check out the firestorm protesting Ikea's decision to switch fonts in their online and printed catalogs.

Time's Lisa Abend has a good overview of the contretemps touched off by Ikea's decision to switch from Futura, a classic font created by the Bauhaus-influenced German typeface designer Paul Renner in the 1920s, to Verdana, a Microsoft product designed to look good on computer screens.

The protesters claim Verdana is ugly, dumbed down, and an insult to Ikea-fan sensibilities. But in a tough economy...

From Time:

So why would Ikea make such a change? The very ubiquity of Verdana seems to be part of the font's appeal. Freely distributed by Microsoft, the typeface allows Ikea to use the same font in all countries and with many alphabets. "It's more efficient and cost-effective," says Ikea spokeswoman Monika Gocic. "Plus, it's a simple, modern-looking typeface."

IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:11:00 +0000

My mother still owns, and uses, the same vacuum cleaner she bought early in her marriage, just after World War II. She still lives in the house my father -- not a carpenter by trade, but an electrician -- built in the early 1950s with the help of his brothers, a small but sturdy Cape Cod-style dwelling with hardwood floors and solid wood doors that close with a hearty, satisfying clunk (as opposed to the echoey click of hollow-core doors). Today the idea of anything -- a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house -- being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

Plastic fantastic bottle recycling

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:00:00 +0000

Intrigued by the news that IKEA plans to start charging its American customers 5 cents for each plastic bag, I started doing some research into the global plastics industry. But I was brought up short by a statistic that, at first glance, defied comprehension. In 1995, nearly 40 percent of all plastic PET bottles sold in the United States were recycled. Ten years later, in 2005, the figure was only 23 percent.

The vast majority of water and plastic soda bottles consumed in the world are made of PET, aka polyethylene terephthalate. And perhaps contrary to expectations, this is one petroleum byproduct that is eminently recyclable. Indeed, and here's a second baffling peculiarity, producers of ground-up recycled PET "flake" cannot keep up with demand. Prices per pound are strong, propelled by Chinese buyers who will buy all the flake or bales of flattened bottles that they can get, to turn into pseudo-polyester and other materials.

On sale at Old Navy: Cool clothes for identical zombies!

Thu, 23 Nov 2000 20:18:00 +0000

Read the story

Dude, chill out. It's a shirt, not a meta-statement of my soul.

So where would these people have me buy clothes then? Overpriced boutiques? Salvation Army stores? If it comes from Old Navy, but I find it on the street, is that OK?

Excuse me for wanting to have nice-looking and comfortable clothing at a reasonable price. I have neither the time nor skill to make my own ... I'm too busy working, reading about ancient history and culture (my hobby, as it were), listening to music, watching movies, going to museums, traveling to new places and -- oh, wait, I can't be doing all that and shop at Old Navy/Gap/Banana Republic too!

I must be hallucinating from all the fumes coming off the new clothes I just bought.

-- Eric Kingsley

So essentially, what you're saying is, people who buy into the idea that shopping at Old Navy or Ikea is cool are actually uncool -- they just don't know it because they're not in touch with "real" culture (which would be -- what, exactly?). Wow, thanks for the insight. I hadn't realized that buying a couple of couches at Ikea means I have become a marketing automaton. Should I have bought them at JC Penney instead? And what would that prove if I had? I mean, I enjoy Adbusters as much as the next gal, but I guess I should give up on the fancy book learnin' and start watching some more Must-See TV instead, since I obviously can't resist its charms.

Furniture buyers of the world, unite!

Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:30:00 +0000

Though it's still early on a Saturday morning, there are only three remaining parking spots among the hundreds in the lot at Ikea in this freeway-hugging "edge city" that spills over from Oakland. Trekking across acres of asphalt, I begin to comprehend the awesome scale of the store itself, a gargantuan box painted in a garish blue that's obviously intended to impart a warm fuzziness.

"Something for Everyone" promises the monumental sign, like a cheerful message from Big Brother himself. From Interstate 80 Ikea looks big; up close, it's so intimidatingly huge that even the extra-special blue can't compensate for the inhuman banality. And that's when I first realize what is happening to us: My girlfriend and I aren't just shopping for a couple of tall wooden bookcases for our living room. No, we are subjecting ourselves to the socialist shopping experience, exported directly from Sweden, a subversive paradigm offering a radical alternative to the social rifts that polarize arch-capitalist America.

On sale at Old Navy: Cool clothes for identical zombies!

Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:30:00 +0000

Thomas Frank walks by the candy-cane-adorned displays of Old Navy, passing the sign exclaiming "priced so low, you can't say no," and into the chain's San Francisco flagship store. The all-devouring Christmas rush hasn't started yet, but it's clear from the frown on Frank's face that he's not being seduced by the cheap but stylish clothes, the swirling neon and the bass-heavy hip-hop pounding in his ears.

"Oh God, this is disgusting," Frank says. This reaction isn't surprising. The bespectacled Midwesterner is a pioneering social critic -- one of the first writers to document how, starting in the '60s, American businesses have co-opted cool anti-corporate culture and used it to seduce the masses. His arguments in the Baffler, a pugnacious review Frank founded in 1988, and in 1997's "The Conquest of Cool" read like sermons, angry wake-up calls for consumers who hungrily ingest hipper-than-thou ("Think Different") marketing campaigns without ever questioning their intent.

The drapes of wrath

Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The first half of "Fight Club" feels like a remake of Woody Allen's 1978 film "Interiors" with the genders reversed. Where Allen's vanilla ice cream-looking study of Geraldine Page's cold beige rooms contrasted her womanhood (or lack thereof) to that of joke-cracking, red dress-wearing life-force Maureen Stapleton, "Fight Club" throws a squeaky clean corporate mouse played by Edward Norton into the grimy macho world of Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). You know Pitt plays a real man because his hair's messed up and he lives in what Norton's character calls "a dilapidated house in a toxic waste part of town."

Norton is psychologically castrated because of his office job, condo ownership and addiction to catalog shopping. Fincher's hilarious tour of the condo pans the living room and floats the Ikea catalog description of tables and chairs above the pieces, so that the catalog copy becomes the air Norton breathes. Similarly, Geraldine Page in "Interiors" arranged perfect white flowers in perfect white vases because she was a repressed aesthete, and Maureen Stapleton knew how to have a good time since she knocks over one of said vases -- drunk and dancing. If both maddening films are partly about gender, they are also partly about housewares. Namely, the neuroses not just of ownership and consumer goods, but the supposed spiritual void symbolized by a nice-looking room.

Rogue advertisers

Fri, 15 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

When we last left our friends at Speak, the world was coming to an end at the magazine's headquarters in San Francisco. Or so it seemed. In the Summer issue, publisher/editor Dan Rolleri wrote a heartrending editor's note about his struggle for survival in an industry dominated by fat-cat glossies with lame content and seemingly endless streams of revenue. Why, Dan wondered, did glossy titty mags like Maxim and GQ get all the dough while quality publications scraped by, issue to issue?

My response was that advertisers simply put the money where the eyeballs are. Four out of five eyeballs prefer crap to quality. Advertisers have a job to do. They want to reach as many eyeballs as possible, and preferably eyeballs that will be interested in what you have to sell. Hence, sports gear in Gear, cosmetics in Cosmo, and so on. If you want to have an intelligent, beautiful publication that's fine. But you shouldn't be shocked if subscription cards aren't overflowing your mailbox and advertisers aren't pounding down your door, wads of cash in hand, no strings attached.