We have all seen those pavement artists on their knees with boxes and boxes of chalk beavering away to produce reproductions of famous paintings. And we throw a few coppers into their hats in appreciation of their efforts and as a thank you for brightening up our day.
But this is a piece of pavement art with a difference....
The image comprises 3,604 cups of café con leche each cup with a different amount of milk in the coffee thus providing the variations in colour to produce the illusion of the Mona Lisa.
OK it was a publicity stunt for a coffee maker in Chinchiná, Colombia but no less spectacular for that.
Donald Trump has been denigrated and called an idiot by those who want him removed from the face of the Earth, but he called this correctly along with much else.
It is often said we get the politicians we deserve. Recent events have proved that to be true, and the video below shows a classic example of a script reader clinging to the narrative, let them eat cake…
This seems to have been a week of stupid promises, as potential leaders officials, think tanks, ministers and businessmen offer silly solutions to the energy crisis as a way of being seen to be doing something, It should be said that as they are responsible for the majority of the mess we are in after decades of denying practical ways forward, preferring be in awe to the great green god, they should come up with solutions, but all I see is back of a fag packet knee-jerk reaction to problem of their own collective making.
Perhaps as they get energy allowances they are not that bothered about what happens to the plebs, but they should be careful, in times past this sort of situation resulted in heads on pikes across Westminster Bridge; not likely to happen in what has become a largely apathetic nation, but who knows?
Onward, such a hopeful name, a government think tank, has suggested a halving of stamp duty to those who would install a heat pump. You can tell this was made up over a couple of Mojitos on the terrace at Westminster as none of the obvious downsides are mentioned.
The rebate is an incentive to those being’ hesitant about adopting new technologies’; no, people are declining the fitting of heat pumps because without a suitably insulated property and underfloor heating the are an expensive mistake.
Naturally net zero and its addicts trump any sensible proposals. As a former environment secretary said ‘Liz Truss ought to know the devastating consequences of failing to reach net zero.’Do these bubble dwellers ever stop to think that if we actually reach net zero, we won't, that it will not make one jot of difference in the scheme of things other than reduce our standard of living?
James Kirkup writes a scathing article in the Spectator about Liz Truss' and Rishi Sunak's dismissal of solar farms. There is nothing wrong with solar power, apart from the fact that no sun no power and the much vaunted storage ‘that will save our nation’ is still a far distant fairy story; and how much will we ever be able to store for those long dark winter months when the sun doesn’t shine?
Kirkup goes into great detail about how cheap solar power is. It really isn’t: as I have said before, no renewables are cheap if you have to have a parallel source of energy on stand by for those dark windless days. Until renewables can stand alone, why don’t we invest in an energy source that works and gives us independence, or is that too simple?
Before the crisis, I received an email from a major energy supplier that claimed that all their energy was from renewables. They are not alone, several companies say the same. It is a blatant lie: no energy company can possibly have a choice in the source of their energy, they simply use a Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin certificate REGO to enable them to say such twaddle.
It enables companies to claim they are 100% green when they actually only need to have 30% in the mix. Wherever they claim to get their energy from, in fact all companies get it from the national grid which cannot stream different sources of energy. These companies take people for fools and get away with it.
From the above link…
‘Both Ecotricity and Good Energy source enough renewable electricity to match their customers’ usage though this tends to mean that their costs are higher and as a result their tariffs are more expensive.‘
So Kirkup's claim that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels falls at the first hurdle as the green consumer actually pays more and gets the same energy as everyone else
The energy companies have themselves come up with a plan to ‘help’ the public. Keith Anderson, boss of Scottish Power, wants to help by setting up a government-backed (i.e. taxpayer funded) deficit fund running to £100 billion. Other companies are backing him and you can see why as the self-serving plan is popular: it effectively underwrites their businesses takes away risk of bad debts and takes away any windfall tax extensions.
It involves freezing the cap at £2000 for two years then covering the gap between the cap and the wholesale price of gas with the deficit fund. The repayment would be spread over ten to fifteen years with a mix of energy bills and taxation.
I am sure there is a better way of ‘helping’ those struggling with bills than this and it doesn’t involve giving ‘insurance’ to energy companies; again, the public are being taken for stupid.
Meanwhile Rishi Sunak, hoping to become PM, has issued this statement about how the Covid period was mishandled:
“This is the problem… If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed… We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did.”
He concludes that had we not done so, and had we acknowledged trade-offs from the beginning
“... we could be in a very different place… it could have been shorter. Different. Quicker. There were often times the officials would do a “pre-meeting”, decide what they wanted to push through, then ram it through in the main meeting with the PM/ministers.”
This process wasn’t helped when, on occasion, ministers would go into the key Covid meeting and be handed a set of 100 papers by officials, with no chance of being able to digest them before a decision was taken....
“Mr Sunak recalled the moment when Prof Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London presented their Report 9, which claimed Covid casualties could reach 500,000 if no action was taken but would be reduced to 20,000 with a lockdown.”
As wriggle-free statements go it is quite good, but what it actually says they blindly took the path laid out for them by ‘experts.’ Not only have experts prospered on their misleading of the nation, but those who govern us just sat on their arses and signed anything put in front of them without any scrutiny. Now he wants us to believe it was none of their fault.
Why was Ferguson even invited to give his opinion? His track record in modelling was there for all to see. You, Rishi, along with others were a minister at the time but you failed to raise any alarms or resign in protest; nor did anyone else for that matter, so it’s bit late now.
Boris has no exit plan so has gone on holiday and laid low until he sees a further opportunity to gloss over his multiple failures and visits Ukraine again, promising them almost anything and telling the people back home they will have to ‘suck it up’ re energy prices as the Ukraine is more important than your granny dying of hyperthermia this winter.
Strange words from a Prime Minister whose prime concern should be his nation, his borders, and most importantly the safeguarding of his people, but when you are seeking a life beyond Westminster and a legacy all that goes out of the window.
Of course, Boris doesn’t pay any energy bills and as long as he stays an MP he can claim on expenses, while a growing number of people at the bottom of the pile will not be able to turn on the heating.
His and previous governments have pandered to the green lobby and become evermore reliant on importing energy to cover the shortfalls when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun stays in, rather than build our own infrastructure and be secure, and now he wants us to suffer to save Ukraine.
These come from the late 50s or early 60s, from a more innocent and more optimistic time. And this was reflected in the music, bright and breezy. The guitar sound that set the tone for most of this music was invented by Dick Dale, King of the Surf Guitar' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Dale
I have added a few other popular guitar based hits as, at that time, guitarists were starting to be recognised as stars in their own right and the music is still an influence to this day.
When I moved to the US in 1978, teaching was a fairly well-respected union job that could keep someone solidly in the middle class. The pay was not huge compared with union truck drivers and auto workers, but school districts had a pay scale which rose with additional education, and seniority pay bumps every 1-3 years for the first 20 years or more, on top of cost of living adjustments. Pension and health insurance were totally paid by the school districts. Overall, the pay package was more generous in many places than I received as an Assistant Professor at a state university.
Then came the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's . A large percentage of the population became convinced that government, unions, pensions and taxes were all terrible things, which could be replaced and improved by the private sector. The conviction that 'private is better' extended to education, even though standardized measures such as the ACT show that public schools outperform private ones. Once one factors out special education, which most private schools do not do, the per-pupil cost is even comparable.
This hatred of government and taxes led many communities to fail school levies, meaning layoffs and benefit cuts, larger classes, and cuts in offerings, except for the all-important athletics.
These financial issues coincided with studies showing that the average results of the US education system were at best mediocre in world rankings.
This led to a great many self-proclaimed 'experts' to offer their solutions.
Those people included Bill Gates, with his conviction that we could replace teachers with AI. The past couple of years, including the lockdown period, have shown how important the human interaction is to learning and that he is dead wrong.
Other 'solutions' included requiring ever-higher largely useless qualifications for teachers, costing them a great deal of time and money, and making Colleges of Education further inflate their sense of importance.
2001 brought the delightfully-named No Child Left Behind act, yet another attempt to 'fix' education. Rather than adopting the European model of testing mastery at various levels, the act went the route of egalitarianism. Each state was allowed to set its own standards, with the utterly insane mandate that every single student, regardless of ability or disability, would demonstrate 'proficiency' by 2012. In one extreme case in Florida, a blind, wheelchair-bound, non-verbal and brain-damaged student was ordered by a court to have to take the tests.
While these awful tests did nothing to improve student performance, they could be used to punish teachers, who were 'obviously' the problem. This in turn led to teachers in some cities to game the system by teaching the specific answers to questions, telling students the answers, or erasing and correcting wrong answers.
Interestingly, when some quasi-private charter schools tried to improve student performance by a combination of bonuses for teachers and firing 'under-performing' ones, it also failed. It is almost as if bad student performance is not primarily attributable to the teachers.
Now add more pressure.
In the past few years, we have seen the rise of the helicopter parents (hovering over their children), the lawnmower parents (who mow down all obstacles in the path of their children), and the jackhammer parents (who smash their way through everything). Teachers are criticized by parents and GOP politicians for discussing sex, slavery, or actual history. Some have been physically threatened.
Not surprisingly, many are leaving the profession in droves, especially those in the STEM areas, who can make much more money in insurance analysis and other technical jobs.
And what is the solution proposed by Republican politicians in Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and elsewhere? Require no college degree or other qualifications, under the argument that anyone admitted to college must know enough to teach every subject in K-12 education, even ones which they themselves have never taken. There are, after all, education consultants who specialize in training teachers to follow scripts to teach classes.
Another retread from my archive first posted at Nourishing Obscurity in 2011, I think. (As long ago as that?) Not sure of the date of the visit to Chinchon, it was probably December 1999 or possibly the following year.
One very cold December evening we decided to visit Chinchon, about 20 miles or so to the south of Madrid. No particular reason for the visit except that I hadn’t been there before and even if it was cold and dark, that was no reason not to go.
For those of you unfamiliar with Spain, Madrid is about 2000 feet above sea level and so in the winter it can be very very cold. On the plus side is the fact that it is dry with very low humidity in both winter and summer which makes the extremes of heat and cold bearable. The locals like to joke that they have 'nueve meses del invierno y tres meses en el infierno' which is not strictly true but you get the idea.
Arriving at our destination we are greeted with the splendid sight of a beautifully illuminated Plaza Mayor-
We then stopped off in this bar/restaurant http://www.cuevasdelvino.com/CuevasVino4.html for a small refreshment, after first visiting the cuevas which were filled with very large barrels full of vino.
Even though the fire was no longer ablaze, the fireplace in the background had stored the bulk of the heat (which is what fireplaces are designed to do) and was radiating a wonderful warm glow throughout the room.
We enjoyed a vino in that cosy ambiente and as you can see we are somewhat pixellated.
Had a stroll in the gardens and took a few photos. Did I mention that it was cold? They were sitting on a cold stone bench and telling me to hurry up and also laughing because I wanted a picture of their backs.
But I knew what I was doing with the above photo because I had ‘seen’ this, which I painted much later. This is a quick watercolour sketch which I did shortly after our viaje while it was still fresh in the memory -
And then a few years later I did this larger version in acrylic paint. The two 'models' in the photo have prints of this painting which are framed and hanging on their respective apartment walls.
(The original painting is better in reality, this digital version looks a bit washed out lower left for some reason)
And so, time for more vino and tapas. In this bar we had what can only be described as an instant hot-dog. A sausage cooked inside a large baguette, rather like a sausage roll but with dough instead of pastry.
Fresh from the oven and cut into slices it was delicious.
A very pleasant evening in what is obviously a nice location. Must go back in daylight sometime to see what it looks like.
It was while browsing a nursery catalogue and observing how plants of all types have gone up in price alongside everything else as a result of last two years in lockdown, and now add on the rising energy costs, that an article came up that linked with something I saw in one nursery listing.
The listing was one of a specialist in tropical plants and rarities. Some of the prices astounded me and at first I thought they were just attempting to scam the public on the back of those rare plants, but I was wrong.
A bit of digging into other specialists in this field revealed equally staggering prices, I found it difficult to believe anyone would actually pay for what in most cases were not especially rare plants, more versions of fairly common houseplants, but again I was wrong.
Twice before plants have actually traded at prices that would have got them into the FTSE 100 and in the case of Tulip Mania became more valuable than currency, such was the demand for rare bulbs as they became a trading commodity.
It started in the 1500s when the Dutch entered their ‘Golden Period.’ The first bulbs came from the Ottoman Empire in 1557 and first appeared in Vienna. This was the period when vegetables such as potato, pepper, tomato were first appearing here also. From Vienna they made their way to other capitols including Amsterdam.
The rise of tulips as a status symbol coincided with the Dutch rise in commerce as with the east India trade routes.
It was the colour breaks, unknown in European flowers at the time, that caused the interest. As with all plants or nearly all, variegation is caused by virus and crossing infected bulbs started to produce what at the time were amazing flowers.
The real trading mania started in around this period. From Wiki…
“Thus the Dutch, who developed many of the techniques of modern finance, created a market for tulip bulbs, which were durable goods. Short selling was banned by an edict of 1610, which was reiterated or strengthened in 1621 and 1630, and again in 1636. Short sellers were not prosecuted under these edicts, but futures contracts were deemed unenforceable, so traders could repudiate deals if faced with a loss."
And here…
“Tulip mania reached its peak during the winter of 1636–37, when contracts were changing hands five times. No deliveries were ever made to fulfill any of these contracts, because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt."
It was probably the first occasion in more modern times, equivalent to the economic bubble bursting in 1720 when the South Sea Company failed. The South Sea Bubble is a classic case of a company building on non existent trade and failing.
And then we had the Orchid trade that emulated the tulip one in a smaller way, when the rarity of plants demanded sky high prices only for the market to collapse again.
There is a very good book The Orchid King which traces the life of Frederick Sander whose name became synonymous with many orchid varieties. I inherited it from my grandfather who was a keen gardener and orchid grower.
In the early 1900s the craze for orchids reached its peak with rare bulbs fetching enormous figures, rare bulbs fetching £1,500 pounds. These would be split by the owners and grown on to sold at a profit down the line, but it was the beginning of the end. Sander was a classic case of a man with a passion, and a business brain who became the king of his field with a nursery in St Albans and a huge, for the time, production facility in Bruges, Belgium; but people no longer wanted to pay the prices asked and profits dwindled. It was a slow sad decline and the Second World War finished it off as a going concern with Bruges lost and no new species coming from the east to tickle the buyer's fancy.
This like the previous trends in plants is fuelled by a desire to own a rare plant and be prepared to pay over the top for it. The business behind this is small compared to the previous tulip and orchid fads, yet is based on the same desire as the tulip mania in that most of it is reliant on virus infected plants producing rare leaf colourings or contrasting patterns.
In most cases from what I have seen very few of the plants can compare with the rarity of found species from the previous bonanzas. A cheese plant whatever the leaf is still a cheese plant but who am I to say what people spend their money on? Strangely the article gives the Covid virus as a reason for people to up their game in buying these plants; in the same way that they purchased pets and paid silly sums, they may come to regret the purchase as the post virus era is now leading us into a recession and a cheese plant won't really have much credit.
As a final word, growing orchids is no longer the preserve of the avid gardener or expert. They provide amazing value as a house plant, being in flower often for months, with exquisite flowers and colours. Production techniques are such that today what were rare plants costing a year's wages can now be purchased for a few pounds. Supermarkets often have a good selection, and with a bit of love they will give years of pleasure; few houseplants come anywhere near.
Last Friday I watched the BBC Proms featuring the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang playing Franz Liszt's first piano concerto. A very good performance which she managed to surpass with her two 'encores', variations on Carmen by Bizet/Horowitz and then Gluck's Mort d'Orphée from Orfeo and Euridice.
Her 'Carmen' was a fiery performance which received a huge ovation in the hall. And then with the Gluck she showed herself to be a very sensitive and excellent pianist!
I don't begrudge the licence fee when the Beeb is so consistently good with its music. For those who demand an end to the BBC, be careful what you wish for unless of course you wish for more Love Island or Britain's Got Talent and all the other dross served up by the commercial channels. For the commercial TV stations the viewer is the product being served up to the advertisers and nobody ever lost money by underestimating the public taste!
