whoa, flashback. BB was way cooler when you did everything, Mark.

I've got one and I've been looking forever to find more.

I wanted to create a "shoir" of them for on top of my bass amp and then make then modify them to glow when triggered by sound.

I'm with Stefan - gotta see what these are!

Amen to Sakusha--- we need more Mark Frauenfelder! (Well, plus a good bit of Cory!)

Edited by author 01-04-2003 11:53 AM
I actually like the mix of postings, including newcomer Xeni. It's gotten to the point that BoingBoing is my first hit of the day, and most other blogs can't compete (not that competition is the point) in terms of variety and weirdness.

Indexes like Blogdex remind me that there really only is a finite amount of good stuff out there.


Shocking, to think of the hidden world outside the search engines. Oh, the memory of sunlight.

There's a company in Hong Kong called Full Chau, a manufacturer of plush toys and other cheap novelties. Could it be a manufacturer name, and not a type of toy?

I'm in awe of the quality of postings that Xeni and Cory (and David -- ahem!) make here. Boing Boing would suck without them.

probably a toy made for the Chinese lantern festival, which falls in the weeks after Chinese New Year. Many kinds of hand-held lights are sold in the week leading up to the festival - all for children. Cheapo plastic flashlights are available in toy shops with the heads (often attached to bodies) of comic book heros, Japanese cartoon characters, animals, and so on.

boingboing downloads much slower the last couple of weeks.
I am on 56K and it takes my 40 seconds!

I made a couple tweaks today (and my server, craphound.com, came back online -- there was a bad ethernet cable and the sysadmin was on holidays) that should speed things up considerably. Is it still slow for you?

Thanks, Mark, for the Fulchau photos.

You just made my day really, really surreal.

The fact that there's a whistle in the base just makes things all the more wonderful.

Send it to the cornfield, Anthony.

Cory

It is a little better,
boingboing now at 23 seconds.
as a reference, fark downloads in 9 seconds.

Possibly a misspelling or misreading of Fuchau, which is probably a company name romanized by someone who does not know pinyin very well (pinyin is the standard romanization used in mainland China. Someone educated in mainland China would spell it Fuchao.) So this points away from mainland China to somewhere like Hong Kong or Taiwan. Unfortunately, there are so many similar and confusable spellings of Chinese words, depending on how accurate the romanization is, there are dozens or hundreds of possible translations. The "Fu" part can probably be relied on (wealth, prosperity) except for that troublesome l. The chau part could be variously rendered as chau, chao, chou, zhao, chow, kow, jeiow... it's all up to the person who attempts to do a mapping with zero knowledge of english. FWIW Fuchou is the name of a city in China, and company names (even in greater China) sometimes are inspired by city names in mainland China.

As another poster suggested, it could be a misspelling of Full Chau, if that is indeed a company name... sounds like a quite plausible HK company name.

Also the posting saying this is for hand-held use during a Chinese lantern festival is on the money I think.

The fulchau, when lit, has an eerie resemblance to the image shown from "The Operation", IMO. Scary.

I just can't believe there are other people in the world that know what a fulchau is. Where are all of you people? How did you hook up?

I'm live in Los Angeles, but I first heard about the fulchau when I lived in Pittsburgh. My friend in Cleveland found them and bought all four that were on the shelf. We were all amazed and revered Tamara differently then. Only now do I do another search for you guys. Horray for Fulchau!!!

Oh, and why hasn't anyone written since Jan 6th?

Holly