A Filtered Water Jug for Company (2011/11/25)
   Some products just seem to resist good design. Filtered-water pitchers, for instance, which have squatted on refrigerator shelves for years. A few companies have tried to slim the profile, but the filter itself is enormous, said the industrial designer Karim Rashid, and water flows through so slowly, it is this frustrating process of filling it up.
   Mr. Rashid’s solution is the Bobble jug, which he designed for Move Collective he also designed the company’s popular water bottle. The 64-ounce container about $30 at Target has a small, spherical, quick-draining filter and the designer’s trademark curves and splash of color it comes in shades like Kelly green and magenta. But the key, Mr. Rashid said, was integrating the handle into the body, to give the pitcher “the elegance of a wine carafe.”
   This reporter tried it out at home and, aside from a tricky pour latch, found the jug sleeker and easier to maneuver than others. Still, Mr. Rashid’s hope that it will be taken out of the fridge and placed attractively on a dining table may be too much to expect of a filtered-water jug, even an elegant one.
   October has never been one of Roz Chast’s favorite months. The New Yorker cartoonist, who has made a career out of anatomizing anxiety, is particularly skittish around Halloween, which her husband, the fiction writer Bill Franzen, celebrates with gusto, in an annual spectacle involving a guillotine, severed hands, scented smoke machines and multitudes of other props, on their Ridgefield, Conn., front lawn. In recent years, though, he has scaled back the production, from 26 tableaus to just eight, she said.
   Ms. Chast had other reasons to celebrate last month, as well: She has a new book out, “What I Hate: From A to Z,” a catalog of aversions, irritations and fears, including alien abduction, spontaneous human combustion and the color yellow. And she has a small line of dishes, with a gaggle of her characters, called the In Crowd, which includes a cereal bowl , a mug , glasses and salt-and-pepper shakers , at Fishs Eddy in Manhattan . “There is even a celery dish,” she said proudly. This reporter talked with Ms. Chast last week, two days after the winter storm knocked out power in Ridgefield and other towns. But her cellphone was working.
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