Wrong Place

Nothing odd about this brand-marketing tourist tat array, except it's in Melbourne's Tullamarine airport.

Presumably there's now Manchester United gear available in Liverpool; CN Tower gift sets in Vancouver; leaning tower tat in Firenze, and so on. Wrong place, folks!

Only in Italy

While we were last strolling in Florence, we passed this little vignette, and I grabbed a (rather average) snapshot. My initial interest was from being an ex-professional in the field (I can justly state I've written manuals on how to do window dressing) but there's so much more to it. For a start, I'd never seen a pintled revolving display window like that before.

But really, it's fascinating because it could only be dressing the window in Italy. The accessories; from shoes, to cigarette, shirt-fronted glasses, to 'phone, the carefully rumpled or unrumpled clothes - and hair, and the extended team to dress one window.

Inspiring lust with a boathook?

James

The Advanced 1300 Lego Set...

...offers unrivalled construction opportunities.

Batteries and plan for the dome not included. (Dome available in the 1400 Brunelleschi expansion pack.)

An electric turn of phrase

A view past a lightning conductor from inside the tower of the Duomo, Florence.

"upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground;...Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!"

Benjamin Franklin

In Response to Sahlah's comment below:
As is often the case as an editor I was distracted while checking a fact on the web. After establishing, as my author had claimed, that Benjamin Franklin had indeed invented the lightning conductor, I was impressed by his writing about it; including the scattering of capital letters and what is to us an antique vocabulary of concerns - yet he achieves a clarity that few designers today manage - what will they expect for their bright ideas a century or two hence?

Benjamin was on any measure a remarkable man, one of the many that I didn't get to learn about at school in England, because he was on the 'other side' of that war.

We never learned about the incredible courage required to challenge a government and king and seeking independence as Franklin's fellows and he did (just though we were taught their cause was). The American War of Independence, was important, however it is but one event of Benjamin Franklin's life and works. His achievements, intellect and virtue are exceptional, on the level of a true Renaissance man - so much so that it's a relief he had a face like a second-hand pear, with spectacles, for if he had good looks as well, he'd have been all-too-much.

Where are our Benjamin Franklin's today?

James

New angles on Florentine Icons

We were lucky when we were in Florence that the weather was pretty good, and the tourists were at only a 0.7 of a RK 'Seethe'TM. Sometimes the light showed a view of something that's just so familiar you just don't see it properly any more. Above is an angle that just leapt out at me when we were down-sun of the Duomo. The backlit cross and ball on the dome were magical. (But of course, not quite as good as the far more classy Lucca Duomo. One must maintain one's loyalty to one's own Italian town. Florence remains just a slumming option for a Luccese boy.)

Then again, I know I'll never look at David's knees quite the same way in future.

James