The 20 Best Interiors Blogs

by Gareth Wyn Davies, The Telegraph

Abigail Ahern

Ahern’s white-text-on-black-background blog looks as dramatic as the zeitgeisty interiors that she creates. Like them it is also intimate, with chatty tips (illustrated with lots of arresting pictures) on everything from hanging art to 'zoning’ space, as well as trends and tricks of the trade. abigailahern.wordpress.com

Apartment Therapy

No top 20 would be complete without that behemoth of blogs/forums, Apartment Therapy. Despite its size and reach - and it really is huge, with dizzyingly frequent updates, and posts from around the world - it retains a sense of community. It’s primarily pictorial, with the main feature being House Tours of hipsters’ homes, though it mixes these with practical tips. apartmenttherapy.com

The Beat that My Heart Skipped

'A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations’ reads the sub head. Which roughly translates as 'nirvana for rubberneckers’. The aesthetic is pretty catholic: one day it might be an austerely simple Georgian country house, the next something mid-century modern in the south London suburbs. thebeatthatmy heartskipped.co.uk

Ben Pentreath
It’s not just Ben Pentreath’s interiors shop in Bloomsbury, London, that we’ve fallen in love with; we’re huge fans of his charming blog and even more charming parsonage in Dorset, too. Gratifyingly for nosy types, the parsonage and its enchanting cottage-style garden often crop up in said blog. He’s a cultured so-and-so, is Pentreath, and even his most chatty posts have an erudite but self-deprecating edge. benpentreath.com/inspiration

Bodie and Fou
Karine Candice is a French expat living in London who shares her inspirations, life and all-round creative ingenuity with the world via this blog. Go to the My Home section and sigh at the beauty of her residences (note the plural there). Then click on other links to check out the wonders she’s worked in different rooms - the naff old kitchen cupboards that she has transformed with black paint and a stainless-steel worktop, the charcoal-grey daughter’s nursery, the old pallet turned into a chic (no, really) coffee table. bodieandfou.blogspot.com

Decor8
Decor8 is the name on virtually every other interiors blogger’s blogroll, and with good reason. In six years it’s become such a popular design resource that its American founder, Holly Becker, now has a bestselling spin-off book to her name and is a regular on the lecture circuit. decor8blog.com

Emma’s Designblogg
This Stockholm-based blogger is nothing if not prolific. You could lose yourself for hours in all her archived pages. There aren’t too many words (and those that there are, are English rather than Swedish), just photograph after photograph of beautiful interiors best described as Scandi-rustic. A must for anyone seeking design inspiration or simply to get out of chores. emmas.blogg.se

Famille Summerbelle
If you didn’t know that Julie, the Frenchwoman who blogs (in English) under the name Famille Summerbelle, was a designer of prints, textiles and interiors accessories, you’d guess pretty sharpish. The way that photographs are artfully grouped according to their subjects’ form, pattern or colour is a bit of a giveaway. Fans of the artist Rob Ryan would do well to follow the link on the blog to a shop selling her work. famillesummerbelle.typepad.com

Habitually Chic
'Glamorous Lives & Stylish Places’ is the tagline to this utterly compelling blog from a New York interior designer, a woman of unashamedly uptown taste, both modern, slightly Mad Men uptown and the more traditional. She’ll post photos of everything from the late Jackie O’s swag-tastic Fifth Avenue apartment to her own well-stocked dressing-room. Yes, it’s that fabulous. habituallychic.blogspot.com

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Photo: emmas designblogg

Immunity and Impunity in Elite America

by Glenn Greenwald, Guernica

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding—indeed, an integral part of it.

Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades.  (...)

The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top 1 percent of earners in America have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.

In addition, substantial wealth inequality is so embedded in American political culture that, standing alone, it would not be sufficient to trigger citizen rage of the type we are finally witnessing. The American Founders were clear that they viewed inequality in wealth, power, and prestige as not merely inevitable, but desirable and, for some, even divinely ordained. Jefferson praised “the natural aristocracy” as “the most precious gift of nature” for the “government of society.” John Adams concurred: “It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the… course of nature the foundation of the distinction.”

Not only have the overwhelming majority of Americans long acquiesced to vast income and wealth disparities, but some of those most oppressed by these outcomes have cheered it loudly. Americans have been inculcated not only to accept, but to revere those who are the greatest beneficiaries of this inequality.  (...)
 
This is the mentality that enabled massive growth in income and wealth inequality over the past several decades without much at all in the way of citizen protest. And yet something has indeed changed. It’s not that Americans suddenly woke up one day and decided that substantial income and wealth inequality are themselves unfair or intolerable. What changed was the perception of how that wealth was gotten and so of the ensuing inequality as legitimate.

Many Americans who once accepted or even cheered such inequality now see the gains of the richest as ill-gotten, as undeserved, as cheating. Most of all, the legal system that once served as the legitimizing anchor for outcome inequality, the rule of law—that most basic of American ideals, that a common set of rules are equally applied to all—has now become irrevocably corrupted and is seen as such.

While the Founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasized—over and over—that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.” Benjamin Franklin warned that creating a privileged legal class would produce “total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections” between rulers and those they ruled. Tom Paine repeatedly railed against “counterfeit nobles,” those whose superior status was grounded not in merit but in unearned legal privilege.

Once it’s obvious that a common set of rules no longer binds all the competitors, the winner will be resented, not heralded.

After all, one of their principal grievances against the British King was his power to exempt his cronies from legal obligations. Almost every Founder repeatedly warned that a failure to apply the law equally to the politically powerful and the rich would ensure a warped and unjust society. In many ways, that was their definition of tyranny.

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Pearl Jam

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A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

by Mona Simpson, NY Times

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

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Photo:  Business Insider

New Dream for Fields

by Ken Belson, NY Times

Mike Dollar had a faraway look as he watched his wife, Laura, hit baseballs to their son, Jesse, who fielded them at shortstop in an Atlanta Braves T-shirt. Abby, their daughter, played catcher. The sun was bright, the sky was clear and the cornstalks were waving in the breeze.

“They really captured the purity of it,” said Dollar, who had driven 900 miles from their home in Georgia so they could frolic here. “This field, we’d hate to see it change.”

Change, it turns out, comes creepingly at the Field of Dreams Movie Site. In the film “Field of Dreams,” a farmer hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield so the ghosts of the disgraced 1919 Chicago White Sox can return to play.

The movie so touched a chord that since its 1989 release, hundreds of thousands of fans have come to this corner of Iowa to run the bases, walk in the cornfields and soak up the feel of the place, which looks much as it did in the film. Retired major leaguers like George Brett, Lou Brock, Catfish Hunter and Kirby Puckett have been here. Politicians on the campaign trail have stopped by. Kevin Costner, a star of the film, returned with his band in 2006.   (...)

But on Sunday, Don and Becky Lansing, the owners of the 193-acre farm that includes the field, are to announce that they are selling their property to an investment group led by a couple from the Chicago area. The group plans to keep the field as it is but also to build a dozen other fields and an indoor center for youth baseball and softball tournaments.

For the Lansings, who have no children, it is a bittersweet transaction. The property has been in the family for more than a century, and Don grew up in the two-bedroom house featured in the movie. The couple tended the grounds, gave tours and sold souvenirs. They spurned offers to commercialize the site and tried to maintain their privacy even as each year 65,000 visitors from around the world pulled into their driveway.  (...)

The Field of Dreams has become a tourist attraction in the most unassuming way. Other than its Web site and a few brochures, it is barely promoted. No billboards alert drivers to turn off the highway; only a few signs point the way to the farm. The Lansings placed a donation box near the guest book at the backstop. Shirts and other souvenirs are for sale, but there are no neon signs or corporate come-ons. The site is closed in the evenings and in the winter.

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Photos: Mark Hirsch for The New York Times, and Joe Scherrman/DreamCatcher Productions LLC

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The Best Little Whore In Texas

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Early morning in a nearly filled corporate ballroom at the Cobb Energy Centre, a second-tier event stadium on the outskirts of Atlanta. It's late September, and a local conservative think tank is hosting a get-together with Rick Perry, whose front-runner comet at the time is still just slightly visible in the bottom of the sky. I've put away five cups of coffee trying to stay awake through a series of monotonous speeches about Georgia highway and port reform, waiting for my chance to lay eyes on the Next Big Thing in person.

By the time Perry shows up, I'm jazzed and ready for history. You always want to remember the first time you see the possible next president in person. But as every young person knows, the first time is not always a pleasant experience. Perry lumbers onstage looking exceedingly well-groomed, but also ashen and exhausted, like a funeral director with a hangover.

In a voice so subdued and halting that I think he must be sick, he launches into his speech, which consists of the following elements: a halfhearted football joke about Texas A&M that would have embarrassed a true fan like George W. Bush, worn bromides about liberals creating a nanny state, a few lines about jobs in Texas, and a promise to repeal "as much of Obamacare as I can" on his first day in the White House.

"I will try," he says, "to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can."

Then he waves and walks offstage. The whole thing has taken barely 10 minutes.

I can't believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That's it? It's over? That was Rick Perry's stump speech?

"Low energy, low substance," sighs Justin Ryan, one of the conference attendees. "That's sort of the candidate in general."

But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.

Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.

In an era when there's exponentially more money in politics than we've ever seen before, Perry is the candidate who is exponentially more willing than we've ever seen before to whore himself out for that money. On the human level he is a nonpersonality, an almost perfect cipher – a man whose only discernible passion is his extreme willingness to be whatever someone will pay him to be, or vote for him to be. Even scarier, the religious community around which he has chosen to pull his human chameleon act features some of the most extreme end-is-nigh nutcases in America, the last people you want influencing the man with the nuclear football. Perry is a human price tag – Being There meets Left Behind. And sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than nothing at all.

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Bombay Bicycle Club

Good Design

Jonathan "Jony" Ive is an English designer and the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is the leading designer and conceptual mind behind the iMac, titanium and aluminum PowerBook G4, G4 Cube, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

After cofounding the London design agency Tangerine, Ive was hired in 1992 by Apple’s then Chief of Industrial Design Robert Brunner after a Tangerine consultancy with Apple. He gained his current position at Apple in 1997 as Senior Vice President of Industrial Design after the return of Steve Jobs, and since then has headed the Industrial Design team responsible for most of the company's significant hardware products. Jobs made design a chief element of the firm’s product strategy and Ive proceeded to establish the firm’s leading position with a series of functionally clean, aesthetically pleasing and remarkably popular products.

The work and principles of Dieter Rams, the Chief of Design at Braun from 1961 until 1995, have influenced Ive's work. In Gary Hustwit's documentary film Objectified (2009), Rams states that Apple is the only company designing products according to Rams' ten principles of "good design".

Rams' ten principles of "good design"

• Is innovative - The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

• Makes a product useful - A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

• Is aesthetic - The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

• Makes a product understandable - It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

• Is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

• Is honest - It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

• Is long-lasting - It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

• Is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

• Is environmentally friendly - Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

• Is as little design as possible - Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Source:  Wikipedia

Cargill - Quiet Giant

by David Whitford with Doris Burke, Fortune

Greg Page's only misgiving about the job offer he received from Cargill in 1974 was that it was from Cargill. He had grown up in tiny Bottineau, N.D., six miles from the Canadian border. His dad was the local John Deere dealer, who also owned an 800-acre hobby farm with 40 cows. "Cargill has historically had probably mixed sentiments about it out on the prairie," says Page. "That's who you sold your grain to." Farmers knew that if they didn't keep their wits about them, they might well get squeezed by the food giant. You knew to "keep a weather eye out," he says.

Page took the job anyway. He labored happily "in close proximity to livestock" for his first 24 years at Cargill, beginning with the feed division, then in meat, at home and abroad, until he was picked for bigger things. Eventually he was promoted all the way, in 2007, to chairman and CEO of the country's largest private company. Today he runs a business that is vastly larger and more influential than the Cargill of his youth.

With $119.5 billion in revenues in its most recent fiscal year, ended May 31, Cargill is bigger by half than its nearest publicly held rival in the food production industry, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Fortune 500). If Cargill were public, it would have ranked No. 18 on this year's Fortune 500, between AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) and IBM (IBM, Fortune 500). Over the past decade, a period when the S&P 500's revenues have grown 31%, Cargill's sales have more than doubled.

But those numbers alone don't begin to capture the scope of Cargill's impact on our daily lives. You don't have to love Egg McMuffins (McDonald's (MCD, Fortune 500) buys many of its eggs in liquid form from Cargill) or hamburgers (Cargill's facilities can slaughter more cattle than anyone else's in the U.S.) or sub sandwiches (No. 8 in pork, No. 3 in turkey) to ingest Cargill products on a regular basis. Whatever you ate or drank today -- a candy bar, pretzels, soup from a can, ice cream, yogurt, chewing gum, beer -- chances are it included a little something from Cargill's menu of food additives. Its $50 billion "ingredients" business touches pretty much anything salted, sweetened, preserved, fortified, emulsified, or texturized, or anything whose raw taste or smell had to be masked in order to make it palatable.

Despite Cargill's extraordinary size, strength, and breadth, it has long been remarkably successful at keeping out of the public eye. But the days when the company could get away with saying nothing and revealing less are over. "I think the world has curiosity about where its food comes from that is more earnest than it's been in the past," says Page, who earlier this year took the unprecedented step of allowing Oprah's cameras inside a Cargill slaughterhouse. (No video of the actual slaughtering, however.)

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The Psychological Study of Smiling

by Eric Jaffe, APS

A smile begins in our sensory corridors. The earcollects a whispered word. The eyes spot an old friend on the station platform. The hand feels the pressure of another hand. This emotional data funnels to the brain, exciting the left anterior temporal region in particular, then smolders to the surface of the face, where two muscles, standing at attention, are roused into action: The zygomatic major, which resides in the cheek, tugs the lips upward, and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, squeezes the outside corners into the shape of a crow’s foot. The entire event is short — typically lasting from two-thirds of a second to four seconds — and those who witness it often respond by mirroring the action, and smiling back.

Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. Psychologists call this the “Duchenne smile,” and most consider it the sole indicator of true enjoyment. The name is a nod to French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents. (The technique hurt so much, it’s been said, that Duchenne performed some of his tests on the severed heads of executed criminals.) In his 1862 book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, Duchenne wrote that the zygomatic major can be willed into action, but that only the “sweet emotions of the soul” force the orbicularis oculi to contract. “Its inertia, in smiling,” Duchenne wrote, “unmasks a false friend.”

Psychological scientists no longer study beheaded rogues — just graduate students, mainly — but they have advanced our understanding of smiles since Duchenne’s discoveries. We now know that genuine smiles may indeed reflect a “sweet soul.” The intensity of a true grin can predict marital happiness, personal well-being, and even longevity. We know that some smiles — Duchenne’s false friends — do not reflect enjoyment at all, but rather a wide range of emotions, including embarrassment, deceit, and grief. We know that variables (age, gender, culture, and social setting, among them) influence the frequency and character of a grin, and what purpose smiles play in the broader scheme of existence. In short, scientists have learned that one of humanity’s simplest expressions is beautifully complex.

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Night Fishing at Antibes, Pablo Picasso
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Tamara de Lempicka:  Succulent and Flask (1941)
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Friday Book Club - West With the Night

From Wikipedia:

West With the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa), in the early 1900s, leading to a career as a bush pilot there. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature, and in 2004, National Geographic Adventure ranked it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books.

Beryl Markham was a British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer, and racehorse trainer. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

When she was four years old, her father moved the family to Kenya, which was then British East Africa, purchasing a farm in Njoro near the Great Rift Valley. Although her mother disliked the isolation and promptly returned to England, Beryl stayed in Kenya with her father, where she spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing and hunting with the natives. On her family's farm, she developed a knowledge of, and love for horses. As a young adult, she became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya.

Impetuous, single-minded and beautiful, Markham was a noted non-conformist, even in a colony known for its colourful eccentrics. During her lifetime she was married three times. She also had an unconcealed 1929 affair with the Duke of Gloucester, the son of George V. The Windsors promptly cut the romance short; Hubert Broad had an affair with Beryl and he was named as the accomplice in the divorce by Mansfield Markham. After her Atlantic crossing, she returned to be with Broad. He was also a great influence in her flying career.

Markham chronicled her many adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942. Despite strong reviews in the press, the book sold modestly, and then quickly went out of print. After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming for a time the most successful horse trainer in the country.

Markham's memoir lingered in obscurity until 1982, when California restaurateur George Gutekunst read a collection of Ernest Hemingway's letters, including one in which Hemingway lavishly praised Markham's writing (and attacked her character):

“

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West With The Night? ...She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

Intrigued, Gutekunst read West with the Night and became so enamored of Markham's prose that he helped persuade a California publisher, North Point Press, to re-issue the book in 1983. The re-release of the book launched a remarkable final chapter in the life of the eighty-year-old Markham, who was lauded for her three final years as a great author as well as flyer.

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PHANTOM WATER EDIT from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.

First known photograph taken of a surfer. Hawaii, 1890.
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Moon Shot

[ed.  History of the first golf shot on another planet.  Not the longest drive ever recorded which has been estimated to be nearly a million miles, but who wouldn't like to have this honor?  Interestingly, both shots were made with a six-iron.]

by Mike McAllister, PGATour

Somewhere in the Colorado home of Laura Shepard Churchley is a collapsible golf club consisting of five aluminum tubes held together with plastic o-rings. Running through the hollow middle is a thin string attached to a small handle. At the bottom is the club head of a Wilson Staff Dyna-Power 6-iron from the early 1970s.

It is a replica of the most famous golf club in American history -- the one Churchley's father, Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, used 40 years ago to hit two golf balls on the moon.   (...)

Not to worry. Another replica of the club can be found at the World Golf Hall of Fame museum in St. Augustine, Fla. It sits under a spotlight inside a glass case near the front of the museum's special "Shanks for the Memory" exhibit that pays tribute to one of Admiral Shepard's friends, comedian Bob Hope -- who, as it turns out, was the inspiration for the idea of taking a few swings on the lunar surface.

Unlike Churchley's replica, which was built a decade ago at her request by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Hall of Fame's club is one of three that Shepard himself commissioned in 1971. In a gesture of goodwill, the club was originally given to a space museum in Japan before the Hall of Fame acquired the piece for its permanent collection.

Mark Cubbedge, who has traveled around the world to acquire artifacts and memorabilia for the Hall of Fame, is the museum's collections manager. As such, he has touched -- delicately, to be sure -- every piece the museum owns.

Almost every piece.

"It may be the only thing in the museum I haven't handled," he says, a tone of reverence in his voice.

Other replicas are out there. One is in the Smithsonian. Churchley's two sisters each own one. But where is the real club, the one that Shepard used on Feb. 6, 1971 as he and astronaut Edgar Mitchell wrapped up their lunar stay at Fra Mauro base?

It resides in the Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History at the USGA Museum in Far Hills, N.J. Tucked safely under thick glass walls in a display simply labeled, "The Moon Club," it was donated by Shepard -- at the request of another comedian friend, Bing Crosby -- during a ceremony at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot in June, 1974.   (...)

"The moon club is the most popular artifact in the museum," museum director Rand Jerris says. "People come just to see the club. But what's fun for me is to see the people who don't know that it's here. When they see it, it's a moment of disbelief. They had no idea the club survived.

"Everybody just loves it. I get more questions asked about the club than any other artifact we have. They crave the information."

So, Jerris was asked, how would he describe the moon club?

"Well," he begins, "it's a funny-looking piece ..."

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