 It
might be a bit of a risk telling you this, but I saw an advertisement
appear on the RF Cafe homepage that struck me as so funny that I
had to investigate. The risk involves the terms of use agreement
with the ad serving company that prohibits bringing attention to
a particular ad that might encourage clicks. So, rather than providing
a screen capture of the banner ad, let me describe what I saw. An
imaginative guy named Ramiro Cairo, who lives in Brooklyn, New York,
created a "family" of electronic novelty characters called
Los
Boludos that are made from salvaged vacuum tubes, colorful rubber
computer keyboard spring cones, clothing snaps, and toothed metal
clasps. According to Mr. Cairo's bio, he was born in Buenos Aires,
Argentina in 1971, then emigrated to the U.S. in 2011. "The word
'Boludo' is slang from the city of Buenos Aires. It's often used
as a filler word in sentences directed towards someone. The phrase
most often heard is, 'Che, boludo,
..."
I'm guessing it's akin to "Yo, dawg..." Adding to the intrigue
of Los Boludos is a Storybook of their adventures. Brought to life
by a chance bolt of lightning, these tubes from an old, long-forgotten
B&W television set came to life. Finding themselves in a strange
environment, they set off to explore the house around them. This
first chapter, with a promise of more to come, lands them in a perilous
situation when they mistakenly assume a device on the kitchen counter
is another TV set. Read on to discover their fate...
Here are a few scenes from the
Storybook:
    
Prices start at $35 apiece, which might seem a bit high, but
consider the work involved in gathering and assembling the components,
plus the cost of advertising in a pay-per-click campaign can be
very high. Accordingly, in order to safeguard my participation in
such programs, I hereby request that you get to the
Los Boludos
website from a hyperlink on this page rather than clicking on the
ad if it happens to appear in the page border. Think of part of
the cost going toward promoting recycling of electronic components
rather than having them end up in a landfill somewhere.
Posted February 4, 2014
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