The Wrmth Heated Modern Muskoka Chair
Warm your buns with this chair from the Great White North
It is President Kennedy in his 1962 State of the Union address who is credited with the adage “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” He was announcing anti-recession financial measures, even though the economic outlook was generally positive at the time.
J.F.K.’s aperçu would not have come as a revelation to several hundred generations of roofers, but it is nonetheless habitually used today to justify a course of action that does not obviously fit the season.
Which is why your columnist has chosen the height of summer to recommend this new, electronically heated, app-controlled Adirondack chair for the coming fall and winter. Because it is hand-made in small numbers in northern Ontario, it will be several weeks before buyers receive theirs, by which time the idea of sitting outside enveloped in a gentle 111 degrees from the back, seat, and arms will be more appealing.
The Wrmth chair’s inventor, John Pomeroy, says the chair will keep you warm even when the temperature is down to 14 degrees—5 if you’re really pushing it—although you’ll want a blanket to keep the heat in when it’s that cold. “Colder than that, you really should just go inside,” says Pomeroy. “In fact, the chair shuts off when it gets down to five Fahrenheit.”
The Wrmth chair also has optional ambient lighting, directed gently downward so as not to spoil the atmosphere of a rural night but also to ensure you’re not tripping over things in the darkness.
Interestingly, orders are coming in for Wrmth’s $3,800 Adirondack chair from as far south as Florida and the Gulf Coast of Texas. “I think if it’s over 100 during the day and down to the mid-60s at nightfall, you still feel chilly,” says Pomeroy.
Less surprisingly, Wrmth is selling well in Canada, where the style of chair is named Muskoka, after one of the country’s most popular vacation destinations. The Rimrock, a resort hotel in Banff, has six Wrmth chairs, and Pomeroy reports that, despite the price being several times that of a typical Adirondack chair, private buyers are typically purchasing them in fours.
If the name, Wrmth, sounds a little techy, that’s because Pomeroy and his co-founder have a tech background. They had a semiconductor company in Toronto, and they dreamed up the heated-chair idea after feeling cold from a swim during the pandemic. “So yes, we think of it as a piece of technology in the form of a chair,” he says.
As for power consumption, the chair is quite modest, drawing 200 watts when it’s heating and 50 or so when it’s warmed up. You’ll need outdoor outlets, as the power cable is just nine feet. And regarding safety, there’s no danger of it accidentally becoming a Canadian version of Old Sparky, because the voltage is scaled down by a transformer at the outlet to a benign 24.
In case you would prefer to try before you buy, there are a few dealerships in the U.S. and Canada. Half an hour from Manhattan, there’s one in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.
The Teenage Engineering EP-1320 Medieval Instrumentalis Electronicum
Finally, a synthesizer that plays the sonorous strains of the Dark Ages
Stockholm’s Teenage Engineering specializes in highly unusual but deeply desirable audio products with a distinct retro vibe.
None of their wares has ever been quite as retro as this new electronic instrument, though. The EP-1320 Medieval synthesizes dozens of medieval instruments and hundreds of musical clips, phrases, and sound effects. Hurdy-gurdies, lutes, thundering drums, citoles, bowed harps, gitterns, chain rattles, clappers, Gregorian chants, and more are all on tap for your compositional delectation.
You can always trust the Scandinavians to take a joke and run with it. So the keyboard, the controls, and even the L.E.D. indicator lights are labeled not only in a medieval font but in Latin, or a made-up, ancient-looking language when there’s no Latin word available. What to call a fader in ancient-ish? Well, “faedr” will do.
The Instrumentalis Electronicum, to give the EP-1320 its full name, is very amusing and, in the right hands, able to create some innovative sounds. Hey, nonny, nonny.
The News in slow french Web site
If overhearing conversations at the Olympics left your head spinning, this will help slow things down
Although French is the mainland European language we borrow from more than any other—“restaurant,” “entrepreneur,” “menu,” “joie de vivre,” “cause célèbre,” etc.—it is also, oddly, easier to misunderstand and mangle than German, Spanish, or Italian.
A language-learning company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can help you improve your French by slowing down French-radio news and simplifying it on a variety of levels.
With News in Slow French, you can also speed up or slow down what you’re hearing on-screen yourself. It’s ideal for those with a basic but rusty knowledge of the language, and, as the perpetrator of the rustiest French imaginable, this writer loves it. They also do news in slow German and Italian and both Latino and European Spanish.
This free news service is the shop window for a serious language-learning method that the company, Linguistica 360, advocates, called Progressive Code Switching, based on the unorthodox idea that mixing French and English freely, but in a structured way, can be the key to combatting xenoglossophobia—the fear of trying to speak foreign languages.
THE FOCAL AZURYS HEADPHONES
A superlative pair of French-made headphones
If there is one audio company that is universally respected by hi-fi lovers, it is Focal, which was founded in 1979 in Saint-Étienne, in the South of France, and still designs and manufactures its products in France.
Accordingly, Focal’s gear is expensive and beautifully made. Their new on-ear headphones, the Azurys, are the lowest priced in a range that goes up to the $5,000 utopia.
The Azurys are wired rather than Bluetooth-compatible, and they are astoundingly good. The mere fact that the headphones are hardwired may partly account for their vivid sound. There is a loss in quality with wireless technology—it’s just radio, after all—although only highly trained ears can detect the deterioration.
Listening to Azurys, you somehow don’t feel like you’re wearing headphones—but in a huge room with outstanding acoustics. It’s rather uncanny. The Azurys’ fabric covering is also a delight when it comes to look and feel. On the head, they’re tight but not at all uncomfortably so.
The Azurys are ideal for listening to music while working at your computer because they need to be plugged in. However, the sound output from a computer audio outlet is really not good enough for headphones of this quality. To take full advantage of the Azurys, you need a headphone amplifier that cuts out a computer’s built-in amp.
The British company Ifi has a huge selection of such niche audio accessories, including a remarkable new $299 device we are testing right now and will report on in a subsequent Landing Gear.
But this writer recently bought their simplest and smallest Uno model, which costs just $79, and it has been a revelation, making the Focal Azurys sound even more magical. The Ifi Uno can even travel with you and spice up your smartphone audio on a trip.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
