If you live in Rhode Island you may have noticed that lately all the dogs are lurching about on their hind legs and all the sparrows are circling ‘round and ‘round in endless, frantic circles and every day at noon the sky turns midnight black—how strange; no idea why that is. In unrelated news, Taylor Swift moved into her newly purchased Rhode Island mansion on Wednesday. She also brought the seat of all her power: a lucky chair.

The print book publishing business was growing by huge margins and raking in ever-growing amounts of money—until now. Ikea has ruined it. Why do Swedish people love lingonberries but hate the printed word?

California crackpot Lou Balducci found the face of Jesus in one of his rotted, unusable rocking chairs earlier this year. Now he's doing what any good, respecting Christian would do to serve God: He's selling it. How much will they fetch?

Here's a news broadcast from Denver that tells the harrowing tale of a family whose glass-top patio table from the Martha Stewart Living collection spontaneously exploded, showering them with glass. Horrifying! And not the first time this has happened.

This guy always has Chewy in his house; every back and forth from this cabinet door lets out another Chewbacca grunt. Soon enough they'll sell these cabinets as "special edition."

Read: this great piece on how Design Within Reach—who sell shiny pretty expensive tables and chairs—got popular and fell from grace, all while keeping their headache-inducing name. IT'S NOT WITHIN REACH IF I CAN'T AFFORD IT. Ugh. [FastCompany]

Nancy Cartwright is the voice of Bart Simpson. She is also a famous Scientologist. She is also selling her son's bedroom furniture for $500. Need some shelves?

Here is an odd commercial for a North Carolina furniture store showing black people and white people agreeing that this is a good furniture store, in North Carolina. What is this?

It's hard for the rich to find good, expensive things to spend their money on these days without causing a populist uproar. So a $28 million chair is, like, perfect!

The first-ever IKEA store is opening in the borough of Brooklyn tomorrow, a development which has the local media all atwitter. Close to 40 people have lined up for the chance to be the first ones in the rapidly gentrifying Red Hook neighborhood to buy mass-produced Swedish furniture. To celebrate the occasion, the gruff and hilarious Park Slope guy who goes by the name of Blognigger (just to make you uncomfortable) has posted his own Onion-esque take: "Red Hook Blacks Line Up to Rob First 100 IKEA Customers." But he doesn't forget to make the scheduled robberies a multicultural endeavor for the Curbed.com-reading gentrifiers themselves, too:

Popular pretend-life game The Sims is now selling $20 add-on packs of virtual IKEA furniture to decorate their virtual houses. Advertising like this in video games seems, on its face, to be a win-win business proposition; companies get captive, slack-jawed audience for their virtual ads and products, and game developers get a new revenue stream where none existed before. The only problem: nobody really knows whether these types of ads work. Oh, and the other problem: The entire concept is incredibly sad.

Ah, the good old days of 1947: a simpler time, when titans sat astride the corporate world, and those titans had desks appropriate to men with superhuman prestige—desks that were acknowledgments of the widespread on-the-job alcoholism that was the style at the time. Modern Mechanix digs up a Popular Science story from '47 about an executive dream desk with everything a man could possibly desire: a 'work' side with a six-tube radio, Teletalk Intercommunication Master Unit, and electronic dictaphone; and a 'play' side with a wet bar and fridge. Oddly, the personal safe is also on the 'play' side, but the cigarette lighter is on the work side. A different culture. The cost of this masterwork? "Well into the four figures." Larger image of the story, after the jump.

It turns out, according to today's Times, that when you have children, you might have to slightly compromise your aesthetic design sense and maybe even tape the corners of your designer furniture. Or put it in storage! All because the little puke you finally conceived after putting it off for a decade or two spent finally snagging that prewar apartment and filling it with dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit might hurt himself on the sharp edges of your Barcelona chairs. Or smudge your glass-top Noguchi coffee table. The obvious answers to the problem—belt-delivered beatings should young Atticus get near the Ligne Roset brown microsuede one-arm sofa, locking young Libertad in your minimally appointed sleek modernist basement until he's 18, abortion—are not provided. [NYT] Photo: Evan Sung for The New York Times