November 2, 2007 – 2:02 pm
(Photo fitaloon)
You’ve made your gazillions and now you need somewhere to get away from it all, a place that’s safe and secure, secluded but not too far from civilisation? You like messing around in boats? Of course you own your own helicopter? Then have we got the place for a swashbuckler like you!
As The Independent [...]
November 2, 2007 – 12:58 pm
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but you can make a Vulcan’s ear out of a human ear…
no, hang on, you can’t, it’s all a fake, dammit, there goes the joke about women are from Mars and men are from Vulcan.
Well, something about that reminded us that at least you [...]
November 2, 2007 – 11:59 am
A quick addendum to our last post. You can be sure that archaeological sites all over Iraq are in danger. The Art Newspaper has just reported this, a police barracks being built on a site next to Samarra’s famous spiral minaret.
Alastair Northedge, Professeur d’Art et d’Archeologie Islamiques, Universite de Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) comments
From the [...]
October 28, 2007 – 5:50 pm
You can always rely on the military to make a right mess of a place. Sometimes it’s incidental, sometimes it’s intentional and often its downright consciously genocidal. The US military in Iraq have probably been responsible for all three categories of mayhem.
Unfortunately, their appalling adaptive reuse of the archaeological site of Babylon
(Photo labanex)
as a [...]
“Avant-garde and kitsch“, an early essay by the once almighty US art critic Clement Greenberg, defined kitsch as “ersatz culture” manufactured for the urban masses
… who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.
But for this definition to make sense [...]
We’re back. Maybe. Although the others have been piling up research I’ve been out of action with the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome so I haven’t been able to write stuff up. So I’ll start off slowly again over the next few weeks, see how I go and try working through a few things that may [...]
There’s no doubt that some big companies have worked out that green is good and getting better every day and that the companies who push hard and fast into developing seriously green and sustainable products will win out big time. Furniture manufacturer Herman Miller worked it out quite a while back and don’t mind telling [...]
February 24, 2007 – 11:38 pm
We’re back at last, with a shiny new network running Linux (Fedora Core 6 because it is so rigorous about open source) with Windows reduced to either dual boot or virtualisation. Free at last, free at last. Not that we want to see Windows disappear entirely, this post over on Table of Malcontents expresses our [...]
February 14, 2007 – 1:08 am
(Photo by busymonster)
This blog developed from our search for adaptively reused quarries and when we relaunched it back in April last year our first post was about the adaptive reuse of a cement works near Vancouver, now the Butchart Gardens, one of the most visited tourist attractions in Canada. We were trying to prove that [...]
February 5, 2007 – 11:28 pm
We’ll confess we’d like to be corrupted and this post is a straight out attempt at getting some payola. Admittedly the subject, the Dutch designers Meesters & Van Der Park, deserve all the praise we can give them but unfortunately they have just announced the split up of their partnership.
So we’re saying nothing but the [...]
