We’re big fans of Valentine’s Day here at MSLK. In keeping with tradition, we’re sharing some of our favorite things to set your heart aflutter. Whether you’ll be spending the 14th with your sweetheart or rocking it solo, we’ve found a little something for everyone to love.

I can see the writing on the wall, and it’s full of grease.

Our friend Bex tipped us off to an amazing site that allows you to add bacon to any website. Yup, a healthy side order served up  from bacolicio.us.

Want to baconize your site? Easy. Simply add your URL after “http://bacolicio.us/”

I love cake and I have to confess, I especially love cakes from a box mix, which I think is a virtue because my mother never had to bake me one from scratch. With this in mind I’m sure you can imagine why I was freaking out to discover these instructions for how to use a box mix, to bake a rainbow cake. I can’t tell if I love, or if I am frightened by, the fact that the recipe calls for all diet products to make it ‘fat-free’, but I can assure you I’m going to have to try this masterpiece soon. Maybe I’ll bake it for Allison, who sent me this hot tip!

Japan, was amazing….
LEDs everywhere
rabbits everywhere
no sushi anywhere
low level electricity in my bath water
both of my friends are a foot taller than their mothers
I ate a fish head
our friend, Aaron Meshon, is big in Japan
love hotels are amazing
cat cafes are for crazy people
we are never allowed back at the karaoke bar

Sit back, relax, and take a trip to Japan, without the 17-hour plane ride and 2 weeks of jet lag. View our photo journal here.

I was recently thinking about the “stuff” we surround ourselves with, and the degree to which good design plays into our lives, making it better or worse. Some designs are brilliant, rewarding the user — while others become dated, or were simply ill-conceived, resulting in disappointments.

In an effort to bring clarity to the “Form vs Function” debate, I asked the designers at MSLK to make a list of the items they encounter every day, grouping them into four categories:

1) Beautiful  &  Useful
2) Beautiful  &  Not Useful
3) Ugly  &  Useful
4) Ugly  & Not Useful

Click below to read what we came up with…

This year we bid 2008 farewell with the MSLK Holiday Party at our favorite burger joint: Pop Burger.While a massive rain thwarted our plans to check out the department store window displays along 5th Avenue, we enjoyed an assortment of burgers from a variety of flora and fauna (Sheri turned us all onto the guilt-less pleasure of the “invisible burger” — a battered & fried portabello mushroom).

Recently, it seems as though everywhere you look there is a new quirky product giving people the possibility of having a momentary mustache. I feel for the facially follicly-challenged and their desire to accessorize (especially after wearing the Real McCoy for over a year) but this trend has gotten out of control.

MSLK probably inspired this whole thing years ago when Sheri and I created handkerchiefs to give out to folks at Burning Man. The place is so dusty that a handkerchief around your face is practically a fashion statement. We figured why not give everyone a mustache?

Well, it must’ve caught like wildfire. Move over Tamagochi, bread-machine, and Wii — this year’s gotta-have-it gift is better than cash… it’s “the ’stache.”

We’ve assembled a stubbly gift guide for you after the jump.

As the end of our season and that time of the year draws near, I just wanted to say thanks to all of my fellow Pigeon softball players for helping make my summer complete. Every week we all make time within our busy work schedules and family commitments to get together and play as a team. And like any good team our success or loss really depends on us all being there. Some friends, like our greatest sub ever, Ayako, often rally to fill in a spot in a pinch, with little or no notice, which is really above any beyond.

That kind of commitment is truly what friends are for and my summers simply wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t get out and smack a few balls just to prove I still can.

Marc, Sheri and I all attended the Chanel Mobile Art exhibit in Central Park this past weekend. To be honest, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I had heard more buzz about the structure (a Zaha Hadid “mobile gallery”) than the exhibition itself. Though not all of us agreed, I thought it was an interesting experience and a unique way to view art. On a whole, it seemed to fall somewhere between attending an exhibition at gallery in Chelsea, and attending a red carpet event.

Heading into their 8th season, my softball team the Pigeons are still going strong. It was certainly a love of my hometown baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals that inspired me to throw the name, The Pigeons into the ring eight years ago. It was certainly the Cardinals classic logo of the two birds perched upon a bat that inspired Aaron Meshon to illustrate our logo with five soft and cushy looking birds roosting together as if taking a nap.

The other weekend, Sheri, Katie, and I all went to see “Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea” at the latest Deitch gallery… in our own neighborhood of Long Island City, no less.

To me, one word represents all that is artistic, progressive, creative, and distinctly NYC: Deitch.

Unlike others, Jeffrey Deitch’s galleries never disappoint. His gallery concept is very simple: find the most talented young artists, and allow them to exhibit — or rather transform — enormous warehouse-sized galleries with whatever they want.

Artinfo put it best in their write-up of the exhibit:

“On August 15, a fleet of seven handcrafted boats — each a “floating sculpture” designed by Swoon from repurposed materials — set sail from Troy, New York, with Long Island City, Queens, as a destination. The traveling community of more than 40 artists stopped in eight cities along the Hudson River to perform music and a play about the imagined origins of the “Swimming Cities” written by the multidisciplinary artist Lisa D’Amour.”

By definition, this should have been an awful, pretentious disaster: performance art, large-scale installation… acting. Trust me, it all worked. The performances were great, the boats were incredible, and the music was absolutely captivating, and the art was fantastic. Click below for more info….

It is with great regret that our dear Katie will be leaving MSLK this month. Since Ms. Katie has never worked anywhere other than MSLK, I cannot blame her. She has been with us for 2 years and that’s a long time in the design world. Young, talented designers get restless and must see what else is out there to be conquered. I know because I stayed exactly 2 years at my first position at Two Twelve Associates, which was a wonderful place to work and full of people who are “lifers” and still work at 212 to this day. I knew from the moment we met that Katie was a “Sheri” in training so I had to expect that she would need to fly from the nest and see what else is out there. A new, different, experience is after all the ONE thing we cannot give her.

We all wish her the best!

A few weeks ago, Katie and I rode our bikes out to Coney Island with some friends. As many of you know, this is the last summer Coney Island will exist as we know it. At the end of the summer, much of Astroland will be torn down to make way for condominiums. We went to get a last glimpse of an era, but also to see a public art project, in which several artists were given the opportunity to repaint merchant signage. Each artist was assigned to a different merchant and given stylistic freedom to interpret the signage. Organized by former street artist ESPO, this was an opportunity to bring back the spirit of individuality that had eroded over the years as old signs were replaced with cheaper standards. The result of the project is a beautiful mix of styles that celebrates the distinctive nature of Coney Island. See more photos after the jump.

I’m not a big car person, but I tend to have a soft spot for certain vintage cars. I find most modern cars (mini-excluded) to be rather boring and personality-less. The bodies all look similar to me, and they all come in the same handful of colors. Occasionally I’ll spot a car like this one that makes me wonder what happened to designing a beautiful car? This Ford Thunderbird (circa 1970s?) may just be my perfect car (hybrid engine forthcoming). The lines are so perfectly long and elegant. Not to mention it comes in my favorite color. If I owned this, I think I’d have to move into the neighborhood so I could park it in front of this mural everyday. It was even parked on the corner of Ellen Street!

It makes sense that cars like this are still around and people care for them. Let’s see if we feel the same nostalgia for 2008 Camrys in a few years…

For years now we have this one game that we always play on vacation. We call it a very sophisticated title, “the drawing game,” but it does in fact have a real name or at-least the concept has a name, Exquisite Corpse.

On a piece of paper you draw something from the head to the shoulders. Then you fold the paper down, hiding everything you just drew except 2 guidelines for the next player. You pass your paper to the left and pick up the player to your right’s paper to draw from the shoulders to the waist. Again you pass papers and draw from the waist to the knees, pass and draw from the knees to the feet. The result is a completely spontaneous creature created by 4 different people.

The virtues of good friends are widely known. Yet it’s great friends who continue to expand the definition of what great friends can be. Case in point: Rick & Karen Juneau, who sent Sheri and I a mystery basket which turned out to be a jarful of M&Ms with our faces on them. They just upped the ante.

Here at MSLK, we’re trying to educate ourselves on city composting. We’re just beginning an initiative to instate an office compost. To be frank, none of us here have much experience with a compost pile, so this could get interesting. I recently attended a lecture where one of the speakers was Wendy Brawer, an artist turned designer who designed the Green Map system to visually engage people in local environmental “hotspots” and encourage sustainable living. I picked up the Compost Map of Manhattan, which outlines a lot of useful information for city dwellers interested in starting a compost. I found out that composting is seemingly easier than I originally thought…

While I am more comfortable being a spectator throughout much of life’s activities, Sheri dives head-first into whatever interests her. And if she doesn’t know how to do something, she learns. Case in point: hula-hooping, her new obsession. Over the past few months she has been taking a hooping class with other like-minded adults (yes, it’s no longer just a fad for the pre-millennial set) at a Y in the east village. Her extra-curricular endeavor has now become entertainment for all, as she now entertains friends after dinner, and has even taken to encouraging everyone in the studio to give a whirl from an ever-growing arsenal of customized, multi-colored hoops of varying diameters.There’s one hoop which stands out from the rest: her LED-infused “PSIhoop” which is a spectacle to behold…

When I moved from St. Louis to NYC I came for three reasons: 1. the art, 2. the people, and 3. the water. Finally, I’m able to say that I am making progress on the water part. For the past two weekends, Marc and I have been taking sailing lessons off of City Island in the Bronx. It never ceases to amaze me that this great city is surrounded by water. Within 30 minutes I can be at the beach or off on a boat in the ocean. One of the nicest things about sailing is how very little you need—just sails and wind (even very little wind will do the trick). It’s incredibly eco-friendly and quite peaceful. I hope you, too, have plans to get outdoors this summer and enjoy mother nature, believe it or not it’s all around you.

While visiting my parents’ farm just south of Syracuse, New York this weekend, I noticed my neighbor sporting a fashionable new trend: arm socks. Harry, who’s lived on the farm since I was born, is the trendsetter among us. Never afraid to mix colors or try new styles, it wasn’t surprising that Harry was once again pushing the envelope. But Harry is never one for frivolously indulging in fashion for fashion’s sake. There is a method to the madness for sure. These arm socks provide essential protection for clearing brush while allowing you to remain cool in that key area just below the shoulder and above the elbow. Forget the hassle of removing a sweater when it gets too hot. With arm socks, you simply slip the socks off each arm. But that’s not all…