But there are a handful of sneaker heads around the world that are gladly willing to pay the price just to lay hands on a pair of custom Nike “All Black Everything” Air Force Ones for a good cause.

Nike and Jay-Z, in conjunction with the Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation, teamed up to help host the World Basketball Festival in New York City. Two pairs of custom shoes, each from five different countries around the world, were made to celebrate some of the premiere teams participating in the festival including France, Brazil and the United States.

Each winning bidder is guaranteed a pair of the shoes that they’ve won (in their size), a letter of authenticity and custom box to store their kicks in.

They look slick. I’m definitely a fan of the “Puerto Rico” pair, but the USA Ones are winning the “bidding battle” right now with a staggering $3,050 with more than four days of bidding left. If you have the disposable income to stake your claim I suggest you do it soon, because the 30 or so people who’ve placed their bids seem very serious about these particular items.

Another noteworthy piece seen at the Hurley Campus in Huntington Beach was a collaborative bike series with Livery Design Gruppe.

Featuring a geometrically vivacious blend of color and form, these bikes showcase the artwork of world-renowned artist Dalek (James Marshall). These rolling art pieces were commissioned by Hurley to compliment their ultra high-end line of Phantom boardshorts and swimwear.

The bike pictured above is being raffled off at the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, CA this weekend.

Anybody with decent access to the Internet has probably received an e-newsletter or Twitter/Facebook post announcing the new line of high-top designer shoes. Granted, I was a little skeptical of the finished product, mostly due to the fact that people can barely put their finger on BEP’s “It Factor” let alone what each individual brings to the group dynamic.

The Jump TD3 "Delegate" Shoe

Taboo surprised me, to say the very least.

The line is very futuristic; somewhere between TRON and a Lady Gaga video,  if you will. A higher-end collection, the “DeltahTM 3008″ line available right now at Foot Action under the “Jump TD3″ label.

The A to D Battery, as it’s so cleverly called, utilizes Memory Foam technology to allow users to essentially squeeze the battery to any size they may need between AA and D. Once secure in the device, the battery then expands to fill the appropriate space.

A very cool concept, indeed, except for one minute thing: the energy cell is size AA. This means that if you’re trying to obtain enough juice of a full-sized flashlight or any other D-cell-sized gadget, you’re going to be rather disappointed when it runs out within the first five minutes or so. They are also rechargeable, but that might not be saying much when you have a set of batteries that may or may not last through the night.

I think the main point here is the fact that people are making honest efforts to cut down on the consumption and subsequent waste that comes with having to buy multiple sets of disposable batteries over time. Perhaps there will come a time when design is perfected, but until then, we can at least keep our hopes up for a brighter future with ideas like the A to D Battery.

Advertising agency DDB of Berlin Germany created this clever campaign for BOSCH fridges new VitaFresh technology.

Juicy dinosaur legs, fresh mammoth steaks, and tender sabertooth filets were placed in super markets for a week. Check out these classic reactions from shoppers in the video below. Advertising at it’s best.

Cheng's philosophy is to hide things "in plain sight" where people won't question their integrity.

I came across a site in my ever-abundant free time that showcases a young, post-graduate that could easily give the CIA a run for its money. Yiting Cheng has devised a series of simple yet modern ways to hide and stash some of our most important knick knacks and trinkets away from the prying eyes of the overly curious.

Design genius? Yes. Mainstream potential? Perhaps. But in a situation like this? I wouldn’t want the whole world knowing where and how I store my most, ahem, “sensitive” materials.

Official Press Release:

The third annual Internet Week New York will host over 150 events between June 7-14 at the festival’s first-ever headquarters at Chelsea’s Metropolitan Pavilion and at dozens of locations throughout the City.

A complete schedule, released by organizers today, reflects both the rise of New York City as a new tech capital and the festival’s emergence as a top annual gathering for Internet leaders. The diverse slate of programming for Internet Week New York, presented by Yahoo!, includes everything from panels, conferences, and educational events to art installations, live performances and parties.

Serving as a hub for festival-goers, the first-ever Internet Week New York headquarters will showcase technology demos, art exhibits, panel discussions, product launches, lounge spaces, and a host of other activities. Internet Week New York headquarters passes are available for purchase at http://www.internetweekny.com/attend/expo-pass ($10 for Monday through Thursday access).

Beyond the headquarters, organizations such Time Warner, IAC, The Onion, mediabistro, and Guest of a Guest, will present events at venues across the city, including The Times Center, NYU, CUNY, Galapagos Arts Space, the Jane Hotel Ballroom and The Knitting Factory.

The diverse roster of events includes:

• NY Tech Meetup, the week’s largest public event where over 800 people will see demos from New York’s hottest start-ups
• The Webutante Ball, a “prom” for New York’s tech media scene
• An exhibition of Facebook portraits at the Art Director’s Club
• Conferences for food and pet bloggers
• Geek speed dating
• Live dance music created on a Nintendo Game Boy
• A crash course in mastering Twitter
• The 14th Annual Webby Awards, a star-studded gala honoring the Internet’s best and brightest at Cipriani Wall Street on June 14th

Fortunately, I try to make it a point to include as many of brothers and sisters of this wide world of ours in everything that I do. An environmentally conscious (and emotionally jarring) website called, ItItWasMyHome.com, has taken up the task of creating a geo-location-based script that superimposes the most current area map of the oil spill onto your current location or any one that you type in the search fields.

Now, people in New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Los Angeles and the world over can catch a what-if scenario as to what the oil spill would look like if there city was the epicenter.

Granted, this is not going to do the hell of a lot to reverse the effects of the spill, but this can at least be one step towards heightened activism on a more global scale.

Steven Ellison a.k.a Flying Lotus

While the rest of us were pulling all-nighters and doing keg stands, Flying Lotus was hard at work crafting his first two studio albums, ‘1983‘, in 2006 and ‘Los Angeles‘, in 2008. But enough of the history of things, let’s talk about his latest release, ‘Cosmogramma‘

Considering the fact that FlyLo is the great-nephew of Alice Coltrane, much of this album has obvious (and not so obvious) jazz elements that hearken back to the days of Miles Davis-esqe freestyle sessions. This is one of the few albums, as of late, that actually sounds like an album. By this, I mean that the record must be played in its entirety in order to get the full effect of Ellison’s hard work and diligence towards the project.

Merely skipping around from song to song would only do you a disservice.

Album art for 'Cosmogramma'

The album as a whole is a very symphonic piece of work that requires more than one complete listen to experience every element that he seemed to have worked so meticulously on. Tracks such as “Do the Astral Plane” and “Zodiac Shit” have the makings of being breakout singles for ‘Cosmogramma‘ with pleasantly rhythmic back beats by Stephen”Thundercat” Bruner.

If you let me, I could go on and on about the album and all the intricately placed elements within this 42-minute-and-one-second opus, but a review is a review. Even it has it’s limits.

I suggest you pick up a copy if you haven’t done so already. That’s an order.

The doc, for the most part, does a very good job of sticking to the bare facts and nothing more. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Michael Moore films, so I tend to be a tad bit more critical when I see a documentary start to embellish more than report.

The most poignant part of this film came when they did a synopsis of the Monsano Group, an organization that is credited with creating a patented, pesticide-resistant seed, only to find out that the pesticide that they are resistant to is Roundup (a product of the Monsano Group). It was then reported that Monsano was sending private investigators to farms across the country to insure that subsidized farmers weren’t using a seed that was unapproved by the group.

A chicken warehouse that stores up to 5,000 hens at a time.

Many people warned me that that I was going to leave this documentary as a newfound vegetarian, but that simply wasn’t the case. Granted, I may never visit another fast food joint again, but I feel like you have to be naive to think that mass production techniques have not trickled into the way we get our daily bread.

The only thing I wish the documentary would have expounded more on was the hypocrisy of the organic movement and how even they tried the justify the use of assembly line-like methods to further expand their business, but I believe the point of this movie was to do more than just play devil’s advocate; it’s real purpose was to show that humans, at one time, relied and flourished on self-sustainability. This is not the case now.

We’ve become so complacent with the status quo that we fail to see that we’re slowly killing ourselves and future generations with the way we consume our food.

Food Inc. is a great film for anyone our there who needs a compelling reason as to why they should change the way they see, purchase and eat food.