Urban legend has it that when Atari’s sorry adaptation of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” showed disappointing sales figures, they took the remaining copies from their warehouse and had them crushed into a cement cube at a landfill in New Mexico. If this is a fallacy, whoever still has that warehouse full of cartridges might have a potential buyer, after all.

Geekware, a quirky upstart out of Edmonton, Canada, has taken it upon themselves to repurpose technology as fashion, creating a boon of cool items for the geek niche — among them, analog clocks made from rescued Atari cartridges, currently available in Asteroids, Centipede, and Ms. Pac-Man models (24.95 USD). Numbering among those getting the clock treatment are vintage film reels, Commodore Vic-20 carts, microwaved CDs, and this blogger’s personal childhood fave, the Little Professor math tutorial toy.

5-inch floppy disks vie for their return to your desktop, as the front and back cover of a cute 100-page notebook (9.95 USD). A piece of advice — don’t put your secret formulas on the center of the first page. Also at the ready is a handy pocket-size 3.5-inch 50-page edition. We have it on good authority that if you put a magnet on top of these notebooks, the writing inside remains intact. Progress!

Keys from various models of Macs and PCs past have been made into keychains, pendants — even cufflinks. At 9.95 USD, a six-key refrigerator magnet set won’t be enough for you to replace your magnetic poetry, but if you were looking for a fun way to get rid of your latest six-figure bonus, this could be your calling — and, if you order over 49.99 USD worth of stuff, they’ll throw in the shipping.

Will nobody address the elephant in the room when it comes to this awesomely wonderful Pac-Man bookcase? The mouth wedge eats up (pun intended!) valuable shelf space. But what’s the designer to do? The bookcase could be a full yellow circle to represent Pac-Man’s mouth in the closed position but people would argue, “Hey, it just looks like a yellow circle. Then again if you made the mouth wedge, you’d give up precious shelf space.”

There’s really no way around the mouth wedge. Without it, Pac-Man is just a yellow circle. You’d think he would have used that to his advantage when running away from ghosts. Just close his mouth and keep reaalll still. Since ghosts are color blind, they’d just assume he was an oversized power pellet.

“Oh, that’s just a big power pellet,” they’d say. “Let’s go through this passageway that magically warps us to the other side of town instead of investigating that big power pellet.” Ms. Pac-Man wouldn’t get away with that. Power pellets don’t have hair bows, is why.

Anyway, if you’d like to buy this bookshelf, you’re going to have to contact the design firm for a price quote. And the design firm is in Italy. You can also get it in colors other than yellow but why, oh why, would you do that?

Puckman bookcase [Ginepro.org via Nerd Approved]