My old friend Malcolm from antiweb has started selling Oggz — color-morphing egg-shaped squishy lights, about the size of a small ostrich egg, which glow slowly through the entire color spectrum. Strangely seductive, kind of meditative, gently surreal. An Oggz will glow for about four hours on a single charge (they come with a small charging base). Haven’t experienced anything quite like them before, although I did also see some of the color morphers by Mathmos in a store over the weekend. The Mathmos lamps are cool, but more expensive and not squishy/durable like the Oggz.
Pictures don’t really do Oggz justice, and it’s really hard to shoot decent video of them — video cameras seem to make them the Oggz look washed out as they struggle to color-correct or white balance in low-light conditions. No substitute for being in a dark room with an Oggz and a two-year-old whose face is lit up like the dude on the cover of ELO’s Discovery, naming the colors as they rotate through, trying to figure out what all the in-between-y hues are called.
Super-nice Mal sent us one as a promo; loving it so much I ended up ordering a bunch more as gifts for kids this year, though they’re also good clean fun for adults (try putting one in a fruit bowl in a darkened kitchen, or leaving one in the coat closet at a party, or using one at the dinner table in place of a candle…)
Weird coda: A man died recently when a classic lava lamp (which he left on a hot stove for unknown reasons) exploded, sending a shard of glass into his heart. Oggz don’t explode.
Re: the exploding lava lamp – one of my Oggz ads was targeting folks searching for lava lamps and lava lamp bulbs and touting Oggz as less breakable, and with no need to warm up and no bulbs to replace.
Every place the lamp explosion story ran people seemed confused about why he would put the lamp on a stove. He was probably trying to warm it faster on the stove (they usually take 20-30 minutes for the lava to bubble), or to run it on the stove burner after the bulb went out.
The heat caused the liquids to expand and boil and the sealed glass container exploded. Even then it’s still a freak accident that he died from it – and probably the only death ever by lava lamp yet in 40 years. Sad that it made international news as a spectacle. CNN interviewed neighbors in the trailer park he lived in, and the story made the rounds on the AP wire and hundreds of Web pages.
News months ago of Jesus sighted in a lava lamp didn’t get nearly as much press, especially compared to the recent Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich sold on Ebay for $28,000, or ET’s likeness in a piece of cereal selling for $800.
As a footnote on Mathmos, they made the original lava lamp in the 1960s. I’ve bought the Faze and Flip tumblers as well as an Aduki and one of the mini-lamps. The tumblers starting barely holding a charge and blinking after an hour or two. The Aduki only phases 2 colors and feels great to hold but also packs enough weight to cause a concussion if tossed. Their Bubbles are soft and flexible ike the Oggz but as far as I can tell are just a solid color and don’t morph. Mathmos pricing and the clumsier charger plug interface are the what really sets them aside from Oggz, plus the Oggz have this organic Egg/life symbolism that to me makes them more intriguing and mystical.
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RaveWorx has got ’em… Oggz eggs at a reasonable price at the online rave gear source.