My fault. As usual.

The opening of the Westerwald Prize for European Ceramics 2009 exhibition in Höhr-Grenzhausen last Friday and being somewhat of a leading light in the ceramics scene over here having been press-ganged into opening a couple of ceramic exhibitions recently, I couldn't really give it a miss.

The usual suspects there, including my friend Petra Bittl in a moderately foul mood (which is highly unusual for her, being one of the more placid and gentle souls I know)

"They could have spelled my NAME correctly" she said, flipping open the massively heavy (almost 700 applications, 200 artists selected, 500 individual items on display) catalog to "B".

For "Bittle"

Which is outrageous.

Outrageous to spell ANYONE'S name incorrectly in a catalog for an event of this quality, but it's not as if Petra's an absolute unknown.

She's frequently described as one of the country's leading young ceramicists, she's had major solo exhibitions (including one in the Leeds City Gallery in England) and if you're selected to represent Germany as an Artist in Residence at the Fuping International Ceramic Museum in China.....

You get the idea.

But it's probably my fault.

When she started working on her flask forms (that's them in the picture), I piped up with "Hey, you can call them 'Bittl Bottles'......"

The word must have got around, it's evidently stuck on someone's cranium and floated to the surface while they were proof-reading

And while we're on the subject of "outrageous":

Is it really too much to ask that Bernd Neumann, Minister of State for Culture does his HOMEWORK (for an event that's under the patronage of Angela Merkel) and learns the CORRECT PRONUNCIATION of the prizewinner's names.

When you travel Cathay Pacific or Singapore Airlines in Business Class, the first thing they do after you get settled in is to welcome you by name and ask you if they're pronouncing it correctly.

It has everything to do with respect and it has everything to do with professionalism.

Laughing it off with "I have problems with foreign names" just isn't good enough.

You're representing the Chancellor. You're not a stand-up comedian.

And it's "Bittl"

Not "Bittle"

Write it out 100 times as punishment.

No 2 Cardboard Pile, Polythene Sheet Avenue

Just how dim ARE these Americans?

Shouldn't that be "Sail"...?

Bloody education system's going to pot....

Digging deep

Cousin Dave reports:

After having dug to a depth of 10 metres last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, English scientists dug to a depth of 20 metres, and shortly after, headlines in the English newspapers read:

"English archaeologists have found traces of 200-year-old copper wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the Scots."

One week later, "The Kerrymen," a south-west Irish newsletter, reported the following: "After digging as deep as 30 metres in peat bog near Tralee , Paddy O'Droll, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Paddy has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Ireland had already gone wireless.

Snap courtesy of Fish and Chips

They've got it all wrong

Robin (who's too young to remember Jamuna the elephant..) over at RCB nudged me in the direction of Personas, an MIT project that

"creates a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity.

In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you."

It's a shame that I share my name with

• The Professor of Soil Engineering at Imperial College, London, who remedied (or at least mitigated) the list of the Tower of Pisa
• A holy-roller songwriter Christian educator and composer of music for children and adults in Australia
• My cousin Dave who now goes by the name of John for reasons unknown. (Probably to bask in reflected glory, methinks)
• An author
• Various other odds and sods.

because it bundles us up together and puts us through a mincer before slicing and dicing us.

So the management/military/professional bits are probably about right, but art/design/music/books/media/film are decidedly undersized.

(And if you ask Mrs jb, online would make up 110% of the spectrum.)

Education's a joke.
Squeezed through Universty Entrance by the barest of margins (divine intervention?) , which I took as a sign from above that tertiary education wasn't really for me.

Although I did go on to become quite an authority in Revenue Management, which led some gullible individuals to inquire whether my degree was in Economics or Maths.

Not too sure about aggression, though.

But if you don't like it, you can FUCK OFF before I smash yer face in.

Twins?

Got talking to a Gran and some kids - as one does - at the ice-cream parlour this afternoon (Heidesheim, main drag, the Tiramisu ice-cream is a dream...) and asked two of them if they were sisters.

"We're twins" they piped up in unison.

Well, they didn't look as un-twin-like as the two in the picture (the Balasco twins if the Daily Telegraph's to be believed and thanks for the snap, btw), but "chalk" and "cheese" did drift through the cranial vacuum.

One of them had straight red hair, the other was a curly-haired brunette, one of them looked like Julia Roberts and the other one looked like Gena Rowlands, so I said

"I don't believe a word of this. Not for one minute"

We REALLY ARE twins" they chorused "Look, we've even got the same earrings"

Talk about feminine logic...

"So if I saw someone walking down the road wearing the same (spiffy pair of Chucks) shoes, he'd be my brother and my twin to boot...?"

Got them on that one.

So I asked one of them how old she was.

"Eight" she said.

"And you?"

"Ha! I'm also eight" in a can't-fool-me voice.

I can tell that they've pulled this stunt before....

Loch Ness monster revealed on Google Earth

Someone who appears to have even idler hands than me has been trolling Google Earth and discovered ...the Loch Ness monster.

Don't believe me? Key in 57°12'52.13"N 4°34'14.16"W and see for yourself

Appears it surfaced at the exact instant the satellite zipped overhead and I think I can barely discern a flipper (or whatever monsters have) being waved in greeting.

Unless of course it's a couple of blokes out fishing, having just discarded an afternoon's worth of beer cans (clearly visible to port) from the fizz boat.

In other news

Windsurfers and other water sport fans are confusing locals in Nackenheim, Germany by asking for directions to "the lake", a new feature which Google Maps displays prominently on the outskirts of the village to the west.
(Long skinny blue bit = Rhine river; small triangular blue bit = Google lake)

Your eager local reporter took it upon himself to research the issue and found only a freshly harvested barley field at the designated location.

Didn't even get his feet wet.

(Well, did, in fact, splash the boots, but that was down to an unpredictable gust of wind...)

Well, what's wrong with having a hobby?

Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data. Eh?

Some brainy buggers in America have made an amazing discovery.

They say:

Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals.

This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.

So does that mean that people are quite blurry about when they met someone a) who isn't that important to them and b) it happened a long time ago?

And if people call each other frequently and if they're often...ahem....physically close to each other, there's a fair chance that they're friends?

Thought so.

Then again, you could get them to walk around with their heads stuck in a picture frame.

No guesswork needed at all....

Thanks to Frau Professor Doktor Fish and Chips (who appears to be a really smart cookie and an ace photog to boot) for this one.

Just what were they finking......

Mrs jb has had some winter ankle boots for about 10 years now.

They look as good as new (pat on the back for jb the Shoe Cleaner..), but the rubber sole's getting a bit crumbly, so a new pair's on the immediate horizon.

And given that the summer fashion turned up while we still had snow on the ground this year and the winter models have been around for a couple of weeks already (and we didn't have a day below 30ºC last week...), the immediate horizon was last Saturday.


French brand, only a couple of stores around here stock them, they're HORRENDOUSLY expensive, but at €30 a year over 10 years, that's less than 10c a day.

Finkschuhe is one of the major shoe retail chains around here, they stock the brand, doors are open, we walk in.

"We don't open until 10"

Not "I'm sorry, we aren't open yet, would you mind coming back in "x" minutes?"

Effectively: "Go away"

"x" was 12 minutes, which is fair enough, so we do some other stuff and we're back just before 10 and wait outside while the staff set up their pavement displays.

They've got this down to a fine art, because they're finished at 9:59.

They then PULL TWO DISPLAYS ACROSS IN FRONT OF THE OPEN DOORS and retreat inside.

"Forget it" says Mrs jb "Let's go". (Which is normally my line, with an expletive thrown in for good measure)

I pop my head inside the door and let them know (which I think is fair enough) that they just lost a €300 sale.

"Well, you could have come inside" says a salesgirl.

By clambering over the barricade. Yeah right.

"Bit difficult" I said "Putting up a barrier sends a pretty clear message to someone you know is waiting to buy something"

And then someone (who's obviously more senior) chips in (and this I still don't believe)

"Ich habe ja AUCH was zu tun!"

("Well' I'VE got things to do as well, you know..!")

Maybe.

I would have thought that - in the middle of a recession - serving customers might be pretty high up on the list of priorities.

Or "things to do"

But - then again - what do I know....?

Insanewiches

insanewiches.com

Mrs jb had a tenant who worked for Subway.


On the apartment rental contract, she listed her profession as "Sandwich Artist".


Yeah, right...


(Marginally better than "Sandwich Mechanic", I suppose..)

Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty - Seth Godin

Anything Seth Godin writes is worth reading.

This is ESSENTIAL reading

Excerpt:

Multiply the population of the US by three. That’s how many people around the world live on about a dollar a day.

Do it again and now you have the number closer to $2. About forty percent of the world lives on $2 or less a day.

What’s that like? What happens to you when you have two dollars a day to live on. It’s almost impossible to imagine. I mean, $2 is the rent on your apartment for about 35 seconds. $2 buys you one bite of lunch at a local restaurant...

And yet, two billion people survive on that sort of income.

The key issue is ‘survive’. Subsistence income means that you have the barest possible cushion, that every penny is spent and you are on the edge at all times. It makes life an emergency.

When's my birthday? When's my birthday?

This I need.
You have no idea how badly.
Shame about the price, though...

Give 'em what they want

Bernard Hickey (who - together with Gareth Morgan - makes more economic sense than all the financial gurus you're likely to stumble across put together. OK, Clive Crook, too) tweeted (yes, I know - even at my age...) the other day:

"I am so sick of all this crime and grief porn on TV news. So many cringing i/vs with grieving people and breathless crime reports"

Flashback to 10,000 Maniacs and "Candy everybody wants"

Check out the incomparable Natalie Merchant in the original MTV vid.

And here with Michael Stipes (no, I'm NOT going to say "from REM". You're meant to know that sort of essential stuff) at Clinton's 1993 inaugural ball.


And the lyrics. (Did I hear someone say "Lowest Common Denominator"?...)

If lust and hate is the candy,

if blood and love tastes so sweet,

then we give 'em what they want.

Hey, hey, give 'em what they want.

So their eyes are growing hazy 'cos they wanna turn it on,

so their minds are soft and lazy.

Well, hey, give 'em what they want.

If lust and hate is the candy,

if blood and love tastes so sweet,

then we give 'em what they want.

So their eyes are growing hazy 'cos they wanna turn it on,

so their minds are soft and lazy.

Well... who do you wanna blame?

Hey, hey, give 'em what they want.

If lust and hate is the candy,

if blood and love tastes so sweet,

then we give 'em what they want.

So their eyes are growing hazy 'cos they wanna turn it on,

so their minds are soft and lazy.

Well... who do you wanna blame?

Special treat - These are the days.

Can that girl dance, or what....?

I REALLY am sorry about this...

...

Not.

This I need...

..and try as hard as I can, I can't get the buggers to answer my emails.

Bloody French....

Best line in years

"It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated"


Choice stuff from Congressman Barney Frank from Massachusetts.

(And don't get me started about the health reform debate. Clive Crook and the FT editorial do it so much better)

This I need

Well, my mate Houghton actually.
But if only they'd had this stuff when I was a kid.
And especially for wallets.

We were up in the Bay of Islands and bumped into Charlie Barnes and his family
(His boy, Robert, and I were at Northcote Primary at the time and Robert later became my solicitor. Until I found out that he a) had absolutely no intention of getting an email address and b) turned his fax off in the evening and at weekends "because fax machines need time off, too..."

We're on the wharf in Russell and somehow (don't ask me how, but somehow) Mr Barnes' wallet ended up in the water.

This was back in the days when you carried cash, because there were no ATMs, no credit cards, probably not even a branch office in Russell.

And we're all looking down at 2 weeks worth of accommodation/holiday spending/whathaveyou money bobbing around in the harbour.

Much hectic activity, with Mr Barnes being constrained from jumping into the water (because he wore a back brace and would have gone straight down like a lead-booted deep-sea diver), women screaming and fishermen trying to snag it with their hooks.

Someone commandeers a dinghy and they're A L M O S T there, when a gurnard looms up from the depths AND PULLS THE WALLET DOWN WITH IT.

I kid you not.
I can see it as clearly as if it was yesterday.

Which is why wallets should come in green and blue and look like pliers....

Not bad.....(Rural France)

...even if I say so myself

The Right Hand Rule

Never heard of the Right hand Rule?

Not a big surprise, really - the only place in the world where it applies in in New Zealand.

The car turning right has priority over the car turning left.

Logical?

Of course not, and it directly contributes to over 2500 accidents and a couple of fatalities a year.

As well as making any New Zealander who travels overseas and drives into a time-bomb on wheels.
As well as confusing the hell out of the 100,000 self-drivers out of 2.4 million annual tourists to New Zealand and making THEM time-bombs on wheels.
(And yes, I'd like to see the statistics of intersection accident involvement differentiated by resident/non-resident status, please...)

The rule was introduced in Melbourne in Australia to address intersection conflicts between trams and cars and the bureaucrats in Wellington thought it was a GOOD IDEA and introduced it in 1977.

Melbourne found out that it didn't work and got rid of it in 1993.

Number of intersection accidents plummets.

The bureaucrats (and parliamentarians) in Wellington - being a bit slow/dimwitted/cranially challenged (take your pick) - do nothing, despite vocal support for revoking the law from the Ministry of Transport, Minister of Transport Safety, police, local government, Institute of Professional Engineers, cycling groups, and the AA

"Too hard for the public to cope with", says Cabinet.

I would have thought that 35,000-ish accidents and 30 fatalities in the intervening period of 15 years would be more hard to cope with...

Lost in translation

BoingBoing is a godsend (or a curse) for we trivia heads.

They have just such interesting ....stuff.

Here's one.

translationparty.com

Enter an English phrase and the machine translates it into Japanese and back into English - backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards - until it finds what it calls "Equilibrium", which I suppose means that the reverse translation from Japanese matches the original English phrase.

I'm not convinced that it works that well, but maybe Meg can tell us.

I started out with "Good morning"

It came back with "That didn't even make that much sense in English"

So I tried that.

After 25 iterations, it said "It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium."

So I tried that.

It only took 8 tries to come up with "This is necessary to achieve the balance of the phrase."

So I tried "Lost in translation"

"ROSUTOINTORANSURESHON"

Now THAT'S more like it.

And you can even have them print it on a t-shirt.

お茶のマイカップ、かれらは言う。

We are most amused

Thanks to Virginia for this one

I know I'm cynical, but...#1

..this is REALLY a bit much.


Valerian (Valeriana officinalis) is a medicinal herb with sedative attributes.


I've never tried it personally, but I read recently that it also works on COMPOST HEAPS, as well as on people, so I might give it a go.


According to the recipe, you take a couple of handfuls of valerian leaves, steep then in a bucket of water for two weeks, filter the stinking mess fermented liquid and then - get this - DILUTE to something like 3 ppm.


Pour this on your compost heap, which will then be sedated, not overheat and provide compost that smells of rose petals.


Or something like that.


This dilution business got my suspicions up - sounds distinctly like homeopathy, which has more than enough charlatans in its ranks - and I always thought that the idea of composting is actually to make SURE that a compost heap gets a good temperature to kill off all the nasties.


But then again - what do I know....?


(Listens. Do I detect the faint sound of snoring from the vege patch...?)

Rule #1 - Don't run with scissors

Rule #2: Don't let confused old men get their hands on this Gerber Crucial Multitool

Can't find my way home - Blind Faith

Steve Winwood (just turned 21, I hadn't quite...), Ginger Baker on drums, Rick Grech on bass with Clapton playing a solid 6 minutes of delicate fillers with a choice solo thrown in for good measure.

Does it get much better than this?

Can't find my way home - Blind Faith.mp3

And close the gate, too...

Leaving home

The Bruce and Denny Show

The McLaren M1C replica



Article in Wired

Plus a good video series on NZ on Screen (Clip 5's about CanAm, but the rest is choice stuff)

Micromanaging

New Zealand's Commerce Commission has come to an agreement with Visa, a credit card issuer, that will allow retailers to pass on transaction costs to customers.

You see, in the past, retailers took the cost of providing credit card facilities as a "cost of doing business" and factored it into their prices.

No more.

When you use your credit card (as from 17 April next year), you'll likely see a surcharge of 1.8% on your bill.

And knowing the way that almost everything in New Zealand is micro-managed - go to a restaurant on a public holiday and they'll surcharge you, because wage costs are higher on those NINE DAYS out of 365... - you'll also be charged for paying cash ("because someone has to count the money and take it to the bank and then there's the theft insurance premium to pay") or by cheque ("because we then have to hire people who can read...")

Forget the fact for a minute that a BIG chunk of a retailer's sales on credit cards are either impulse purchases or planned purchases that are brought forward out of the convenience of "being able to pay later".

And if you take it to extremes (which someone surely will) they'll start charging at supermarkets if you don't use self-checkout ("because we have to provide staff, you see").

And buying a bottle of wine will attract a "Supervisory Charge" ("because an adult has to walk over to the till to approve your purchase")

File this under "Disappearance of common-sense".

Or Irony

Freedom's just another word......

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure' - grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, 07.10.1990

What you think I am - a fucking jukebox?

I once worked with a guy (that's him on the left...) who (I thought) was the spitting image of Willy DeVille.

I meant it as a compliment, but I don't really think he took it as such.

Even less so someone else's assessment that he bore a striking resemblance to Lucky Luke.

Klaus came to me with the reputation of being "difficult" (people used to roll their eyes at the mere mention of his name, and I got words of sympathy when he moved into my organisation), but I guess "like poles attract", because we got on famously.

Willy DeVille fits that mould.

At the first concert I saw, people were yelling for "Hey Joe" - his strongly Mexican-influenced take of Jimi's original.

"Do you see a fucking Mariachi band anywhere here on the fucking stage?" he asked.

Shut them right up.

Saw him again and again and again

"What you think I am - a fucking jukebox?" he'd say when people annoyed him with their constant yelling of requests.

"You know, you have to understand" he said at one his last concerts in Germany "I'm an artist, I'm not a pop singer. I don't write for 12-year olds"

"People come to see me because they come to see something different. That's all"

And that in the laconic drawl that you hear on "Southern Politician". Lyrics here.

A bit like Lucky Luke, probably...

He died last week and it made me quite sad.

It also pissed me off mightily, in fact.

His concerts were ALWAYS choice and ALWAYS a good place to bump into my mate Martin Kijaszek aka Billy Crash.

Last time we saw him (at the Schlachthof in Wiesbaden) Martin wrote and said "That was REAL music"

That's for sure.

Definitely not for 12 year olds....

So here's a recording of the concert on 6 March 2008 in the Muffathalle in Munich

Willy DeVille in concert (courtesy of Bayern 2 Radio) - 55 minutes/123 MB

Sometimes, I think I expect too much....

Opened a ceramics exhibition at the excellent Kasino Gallery the other day - all v. serious stuff and some fairly big names, a couple of whom I know quite well (and like a lot).

"Don't expect any arty-farty stuff" I said "You know me better than to expect that"

"No, no" chimed the girls (Sandra Nitz, Petra Bittl et al)in chorus "It'll be REFRESHING not to have any arty-farty stuff"

So I talked (to a seriously arty-farty audience) about finding your own wavelength when it comes to ceramics.

Frequently, there's an instant empathy between the viewer and the object, but it mostly takes time (years, even) to tune your aesthetic antennas to recognise the superb from the merely excellent.

(There's a nice story that Karl Scheid, 80 years old and one of the true greats of German ceramics, told me last year. He was at an exhibition many years ago with his friend and gallery owner, Henry Rothschild, and was surprised that Henry didn't buy a pot he was admiring.

Henry said "Yes, it's a fine pot, but it didn't say "Henry" to me...")

I said that it's like tuning an old-fashioned radio - you spin the dial and hear snippets of programs and then stop on a station that sounds interesting and listen a bit more.

"Pink Floyd" I said "The introduction to "Wish you were here" illustrates it perfectly"

Blank looks.

They all - EVERYONE (and it was a sizeable audience) - looked at me as if I was trying to explain quantum mechanics through yodeling.

So I had to EXPLAIN it to them - fragments of music and talk, a BBC Radio 4 discussion, a snippet from Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony (they woke up at that...) and then the distant and distorted first notes of the acoustic guitar as it leads into the song.

Now, I KNOW that I'm not your average geriatric, but I thought that EVERYONE knows that song.

Or that they'd at least HEARD of Pink Floyd.

I was in fact tempted to take along my vinyl and get the soundboard man to play a cut at the appropriate time.

Good thing I didn't.

I'm convinced they would have fled the room, screaming.

Which would have been guaranteed if he'd spun the Kinks' "Around the dial"......

(Did you see me on the TV by any chance? Talk about a media star.....)

Talk about notey....

Baden-Baden is about as flash as a rat with a gold tooth.


Huge villas, a casino, spas here there and everywhere.

And loads of rich buggers.


Which explains the bill at the Rive Gauche.

A bottle of mineral water and 2 iced coffees for a mere €17.80/£15/NZ$40/US$25.


Bloody hell.......

Don't ask me.... (about "The Joker")

Alexei von Jawlensky's "Portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff" at the stunning "Die Blaue Reiter" (Kandinsky, Klee et al) exhibition at the ever excellent Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden.

The late and sorely-missed Keith Ledger as the Joker in "Batman: The Dark Knight"

Frighteningly similar, separated by a mere century....

Steve Miller Band - The Joker

Choice stuff