Holy Smoke!

At midnight, my Native Land banned smoking in pubs. When the kids and I were in Ireland before Christmas, there was a great deal of phoney outrage from the country’s publicans, one of whom (the proprietor of the Brazen Head pub in Limerick) promised to close his pub if the ban actually came into force.

(I haven’t been able to check if he has been as good as his word. Oh, hang on, thanks to Google, I have. It seems that his firm has gone into receivership. So maybe his business was in trouble anyway.)

But I digress… What was really amusing was the name adopted by the lobby group formed last year to fight the smoking ban. Nothing brutal like “The Pro-cancer Campaign” or “Smoke Free” but “The Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance” if you please. According to the Irish Times, the Alliance is now consulting m’learned friends:

“Mr Finbar Murphy, of the Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance, said it would be referring the regulations to its lawyers to seek their advice on a judicial review.

The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, appealed to the powerful lobby group to stand back and think before taking any such action.

‘Why would you take legal action against a measure designed to protect and improve public health?'”

Hmmm… Doesn’t the Minister know there’s a lot of money in peddling ill-health?

How professionals handle high-volume image flows

Absolutely riveting article by Rob Galbraith explaining how the staff of Sports Illustrated handle the thousands of digital images that flood in from a big sporting event.

CNN discovers News Readers

Finally Big Media gets it. Nice and accessible article on the CNN site about RSS feeds and the significance of the technology. It’s a bit breathless and gee-whizzy. For example,

“Hang on to your hats boys and girls, because your experience of the World Wide Web is about to change, possibly for the first time since Mosaic, one of the first graphical browsers, was unleashed in 1993 from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois….”

But, on the other hand, it communicates well to non-techies. And gives lots of useful links. Author Christine Boese has performed a useful service for her industry.

The paradoxical US of A

From the Economist of 28 February.

1. “America is one of the most religious countries in the industrialised world. Over 80% of Americans claim to believe in God, compared with 62% of the French and 52% of Swedes. About two-thirds of Americans claim membership of a church, 40% go to church once a week, and 43% describe themselves as born-again Christians. Three times as many people believe in the Virgin birth as in evolution.”

Further down the same column….

2. “But America is also one of the most secular countries in the world. The Constitution guarantees a rigorous separation of church and state, and secular groups are assiduous in using the courts to enforce that separation. (On February 25th, the Supreme Court ruled that states could withold scholarships from students studying divinity.) Public schools recoil from even the mildest religious imagery. More than 29m Americans say that they have ‘no religion’, a number that exceeds all but two religious denominations, Roman Catholics and Baptists. For the most part, the people who run America’s media industries in New York and Hollywood are aggressively secular, combining intellectual hostility to Middle America’s religious fundamentalism with a generous measure of cultural disdain.”

Valuing a ‘brand’

From James Gleick, writing in the NYT:”The word NIKE is thought by analysts to be worth $7 billion; COCA-COLA is valued at 10 times as much.” Hmmm… The latter has just depreciated a bit, at least in the UK.

Gleick’s piece is full of examples of the absurdity of the world we are creating. For example:

“An Atlanta music writer known as BILL WYMAN received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stones bass player known as Bill Wyman: demanding, that is, that he ”cease and desist” using his name. In responding, Bill Wyman No. 1 pointed out that Bill Wyman No. 2 had been born William George Perks.

The German car company known as Dr. Ing. h.c.F. Porsche AG has fought a series of battles to protect the name CARRERA. But another contender is a Swiss village, postal code 7122. ”The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark,” Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche’s lawyers. ”Porsche’s use of that name constitutes a misappropriation of the good will and reputation developed by the villagers of Carrera.” He added, for good measure, ”The village emits much less noise and pollution than Porsche Carrera.” He didn’t mention that José Carreras, the opera singer, was embroiled in a name dispute of his own. The car company, meanwhile, also claims trademark ownership of the numerals 911.”

Though presumeably not of the string 9/11.

Engineering and Design

Just found a lovely essay by Scott Berkun meditating on the way engineering, design and aesthetics have become separated. He uses the Roeblings’ Brooklyn Bridge as a focus for his thoughts. For them, the equation was:

design = aesthetics + engineering + performance

“Every sketch and diagram John Roebling made considered not only its physical purpose and structure, but also its visual appeal to those walking on the bridge, and those looking at it from across the river. Like DaVinci and Michelangelo (who both had major efforts in architecture), Roebling saw his works from multiple perspectives. This is probably, at least in part, why Roebling was able to convince the government of Manhattan to fund the project at all. It was a bold and crazy idea for its day, and Roebling’s ability to consider and make arguments from the political, business and social points of view must have been an asset. Had he been a engineer (little e instead of big E), he probably would have failed to even get the project off the ground.”

Scott grew up in New York, but paid no attention to the bridge. Years later, however, “in a course I took on the history of NYC, I finally read the book The Great Bridge by [David] McCullough and was blown away. During the last class we took a walk out on the bridge, and I will never forget that day. It was a sunny January afternoon, sun just starting to descend as we stood at the center of the span, quietly looking out over the Hudson, imagining in my mind all the things the Roeblings did to make it possible for me to stand there. Think about what you do for a living: will you ever attempt to do something half as great as the bridge?”

Things get worse with Coke

That’s the headline on today’s Guardian report of the saga of Coca-Cola’s attempt to muscle in on the huge and growing UK market for bottled water. Excerpt:

“First, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that.

The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

So now the full scale of Coke’s PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it “pure” and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for “taste profile”; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide – which is not a problem – into bromate – which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre).

The Drinking Water Inspectorate confirmed yesterday it had checked the Thames water supplied to the factory and found it free of bromate. Because it is unsafe at high levels, standards for bromate in tap water are strictly monitored.”

If you wanted a case study in the fatuity of the contemporary obsession with ‘brands’ and branding, then this is it. Would you buy anything from a company which engaged in this kind of cynical nonsense? Sadly, many people do.

Useful phrases when governing Iraq

From a lovely New Yorker ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ piece.

“The next train to Basra will depart in 2009”.

“I can’t hear you over all that ‘Death to America!’ chanting.”

“There is no soap in my hotel bedroom. Also, no walls or ceiling.”

And my favourite:

“Could you please direct me to the weapons of mass destruction?”

Catherine Cooke: another perspective

Following my little piece about Catherine Cooke, I had a lovely message from Paul Dorrington.

“I read your note on Catherine Cooke”, he writes.”I also have fond memories of her. I bought her parents’ house at Upnor, Kent after it had been advertised in the Twentieth Century Society newsletter. This was the house where she lived with her parents when she was not up at University.

She was just as you describe her. The house reflects her father’s interest in all things Scandinavian and includes a small suana/summer house designed by Catherine. When we viewed the house with my five year old twin daughters I will always remember her welcoming us with the remark. “Oh, I see you have brought some little people with you”. She was not used to relating to small children. However she was extremly charming and during the process of buying the house directly from her we came to love her as she unselfconsciously regaled us with stories about the great and the good who touched her life. The villagers say she was very much her father’s daughter.

Catherine was also not adverse to putting on overalls and doing a spot of DIY. We had moved into Hammond Place and she was still helping out putting the place in order, sanding down and painting windows. This was up to ten o’ clock at night when the nieghbours, whom she knew well, came out and told her to stop using the electric sander. Other stories abound of her being out in the garden on Christmas Day putting a new felt roof on their summer house.”

That sounds like Catherine!

Medical humour

Lovely photographic joke on Quentin’s Blog.