Tim Lillis (Wind Powered Generator illustrations) is still waiting for the hand-drawn blueprints that he sent to Hasbro as a young lad to be made into Transformers, but in the meantime, he works as a freelance designer and illustrator. A recent arrival to San Francisco, Lillis once worked with Kaiju Big Battel, the world’s only Live Monster Fighting Tournament, making monster costumes, miniature cityscapes, and giant cartoonish props out of foam, and acting as a producer for their live events. Tim’s hobbies include ruining karaoke, making way too many puns, and designing whatever he can at narwhalcreative.com. He loves AMC Eagles, the best car ever.
Cy Tymony (Sneaky Uses) reads six newspapers a day. “I am inquisitive about all aspects of how life works,” the Los Angeles author/inventor says. His career started as a child, when he made a sleeve-mounted shocker device to defend himself from schoolyard bullies. His Sneaky Uses books explore the delight of finding. He also roller-skates, practices aikido and judo, plays with cardboard boomerangs, and eats tuna salad when he is not working on finding still more sneaky uses for everyday things.
Jenny Elia Pfeiffer (Woody’s World photos) is a San Francisco-based artist and photographer. Her portraits and travel photography have appeared in several local and national publications. She also collaborates with her sister, Lisa Pfeiffer, on multimedia works that have been featured in galleries in San Francisco and Prague. Her favorite food is ice cream (Oreo cookie).
George Dyson (Treehouse) is a historian of technology whose interests range from the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak to the evolution of digital computing, telecommunications, and nuclear bomb-propelled space exploration. Dyson, who lives in Bellingham, Wash., divides his time between building boats and writing books. He considers himself a follower of Nathaniel Bishop, who, while paddling a paper kayak to the Gulf of Mexico from Québec in 1874, urged his audience at Princeton University to “seek in his friendly canoe that relief which nature offers to the tired brain. Let him go into the wilderness and live close to his Creator by studying his works.”
An inveterate tinkerer and “broad-spectrum hobbyist,” Steve Lodefink (Soda Bottle Rocket) just can’t say no to a cool project. At 3, he was already reverse-engineering the peanut butter and jelly sandwich: “I figured out where all of the parts were, found a good tool, and built one. I’ve been doing it ever since.” He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons, two cats, five tarantulas, and 24 African cichlids, and thinks that one of life’s great pleasures is a really sharp aged cheddar cheese. “I’m a simple man,” he says. He looks at life’s debris at finkbuilt.com.
“Tall and skinny, with an affinity for firecrackers and vinyl records,” Larry Harmon ( Underwater Vehicles) has been exploring San Diego’s underbelly for years. His fanzine, Genetic Disorder, is an ode to anything “that would embarrass our Chamber of Commerce.” When not at the library doing research for a book about the history of San Diego’s punk rock scene, he plays guitar in the Dissimilars ( myspace.com/thedissimilars), “a trashy garage rock band.” He spends his days as an editor at a community newspaper, three blocks from the beach.
If Tom Owad (Retrocomputing) could be any animal, he’d be something from the Galapa-gos. His interest in extraordinary and incomparable things extends to his human existence as well. He spends his days tinkering and learning, and is the owner and webmaster of applefritter.com, an online Macintosh community of artists and engineers dedicated to the “obscure, unusual, and exceptional.” He serves on the board of directors and is webmaster and archivist of the Apple I Owners Club, and is also the author of Apple I Replica Creation.
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