Category: Commerce

Products, services, marketing, names

Architect advertising?

Waiting in line for the ATM the other day, I noticed something I’ve seen a couple times before: the architect’s name in metal on the side of a building (or house).

In this case the telecom building is a poster child for 1960s brutalist architecture, with the added twist of a 12 foot high north-facing glass facade. You can see dark transparent plastic has been applied and is now coming loose, and huge blinds to attempt to block the sun (being in the Southern Hemisphere, the sun is in the north). But basically what the architect has created is an enormous solar oven. And an ugly one at that.

Quite a legacy!

Knot useful?

When I go to the butcher, I always carry my stuff to the car. Today I had almost 16 kg (lots of dog food) and the butcher carried it to the car for me. Didn’t really give me a choice. When I got home, I saw that he had tied the loop handles of each bag into a knot, something I would have never thought of.

In fact, I’m not sure how useful it is to know.

Those nine dreaded words

In the last few weeks, a backhoe and dump truck, accompanied by a crew with shovels, have been cleaning the roadside ditches.

But if they’ve been cleaning them, the water should flow freely, no? Let’s take a look at the culvert (red arrow).

The culvert is black plastic. Here we can look into it from the top because the previous government worker, with a grader, sliced off the top of it. Do you see any sign of water inside it? No, you don’t: bone dry.

Likewise on the other side: standing water.

This is because the government workers didn’t just clean the ditches, they deepened them, to below the level of the drain pipe. Stagnant water, mosquitoes. Lovely.

And this is how far they got into trashing (note standing water) the ditch in front of our house. Why did they stop? Lunch time, I guess. A week ago.

“We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”