Eight months after hitting the headlines the Franklin Mint is contracting: Franklin Mint closes 30 retail stores, museum.
I wonder how the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund is doing? Even it’s web site tells a tale: www.theworkcontinues.org.
Orchids at Kew
The 10th annual orchid festival at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, opened yesterday and orchids exposed is proving very popular. Today the Princess of Wales Conservatory was crowded with orchid fans, which made viewing the impressive displays rather difficult at times, but it was still well worth it.
The six-foot tall Phalaenopsis swan.
The exhibition is sponsored by the cruise ship company, Swan Hellenic, and someone had the bright idea of constructing a giant swan out of white Phalaenopsis orchids. As you might expect, it’s displayed prominently at the entrance to the exhibition.
The same flowers were used quite artfully in the main display around a pool of giant carp. A large group of moth orchids were placed as if they’d just fallen out of an enormous terracotta urn.
There must be thousands of orchids on display in this exhibition, which runs for the next month; and if you can visit on a weekday you might even be able to enjoy the numerous blooms without the thousands of amateur orchidologists.
Managing expectations
Almost two years ago I wrote:
The railways in Britain have suffered from a lack of investment for decades, and commuters are now paying the price. I don’t think the general public appreciates how difficult it is to rejuvenate an industry like rail. It could very well take as long to renew as it took to decline, which puts the current Government in a difficult position. What can it possibly do to improve the railways before the next election?
Well, it looks like the answer is — nothing.
Now, given this morning’s Guardian story headlined Blair: fixing key services will take 15 years, it seems the Government hopes to change public expectations instead.
Surprise, surprise.
Virtual plane-spotting
My better half flew to New York last week on business, and I took the opportunity to update my knowledge of online air traffic tracking applications (as you do). To my surprise I found that things have moved on significantly in the last couple of years.
It’s still possible to listen to live air traffic control communications for several airports in the USA. For example, JFK’s ATC is available in Windows Media Player format at http://audio2.km3t.org:8010/jfk_gnd_twr. Of course, it’s more interesting if you understand ATC jargon, but several ATC glossaries are easily accessible online.
CheapTickets Flight Tracker
The oldest flight tracker for North America of which I’m aware is still available care of the CheapTickets web site. It displays a map of the region over which the flight is flying and uses Java to move an aircraft icon across the map as the flight progresses. Three instrument dials indicate speed, heading and altitude.
FlyteComm’s route map
Now a few more flight trackers have taken off. FlyteComm offers real time flight information, including current position and altitude for any flight in the USA or Canada. It provides a stationary map of the world with an icon indicating the aircraft’s position and details about the weather at the relevant destination.
Lycos Flight Tracker route map
The Lycos Travel Flight Tracker, provided courtesy of FlightView, offers similar information for all flights in the US and Canada, and illustrates the flight path on a map.
Airport Monitor 2.0 uses a stationary map to display the position of all the air traffic in a given airspace, not just a single flight. In the case of JFK, for example, the aircraft icons are colour coded: blue for those landing at JFK, green for those departing JFK, and red for whichever JFK flight you select with your mouse. Details for your selected flight, such as altitude and aircraft type are provided as well.
Airport Monitor 2 for JFK
It’s a veritable plane-spotter’s heaven, but why would anyone go to the trouble of providing all this information for free? Well, it seems it’s all about airport PR. Here’s the explanation from the company’s web site:
Give Neighbors A Better View Of Your Flight Operations
Until you let airport communities see the airspace with their own eyes, you will never create the trust and partnership you need. After all, seeing is believing. Our web-based visual tools help transform community relations by putting clear arrival and departure information at the fingertips of your neighbors.
When local residents have a clearer picture about what’s happening in the air above them, it’s better for the community. And the airport. Planes make noise. But neighbors don’t have to — if you’ve given them the right tools to understand the airport’s operations.
That strikes me as a fairly enlightened approach to community relations, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it helps. Perhaps such a system would have prevented that ridiculous case of plane-spotter spying that occurred in Greece not long ago. On the other hand, I suspect diehard plane-spotters would argue that there’s no substitute for the real thing.
Walcott the islander
The Pitons, St Lucia
This week’s edition of The New Yorker magazine has an interesting article on Derek Walcott, the nobel laureate from the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Here’s an excerpt:
As a young man, Warwick [Derek’s father] worked as a copyist at the Education Office. (Subsequently, he worked for St. Lucia’s Attorney General and Acting Chief Justice.) At night and on weekends, Warwick painted, read Shakespeare and Dickens, and gathered around him like-minded friends, who put on amateur theatricals. One of the members of this group, which Warwick christened the Star Literary Club, was Alix Maarlin [subsequently Derek’s mother], the daughter of Johannes van Romondt, a white estate owner on St. Maarten, and Caroline Maarlin, a brown woman. Alix had moved to St. Lucia as a young girl, apparently to finish her schooling. Her guardian, a Dutch trader, was part of a small clan who helped establish the Methodist presence on St. Lucia. Alix, too, practiced Methodism, which was practically a cult on the Catholic-dominated island.
Many of my paternal ancestors were prominent Methodists in the Caribbean. It’s amusing to think that they were at the centre of a “cult”. It explains a lot!
Public toilet explodes
This just in from the BBC:
A so-called ‘superloo’ exploded in a town centre when an electrical fault caused water to surge back into the toilet, blowing off its roof and lifting the pavement.
Luckily, however, we can all relax. A spokesman for the utility company said “We would like to reassure domestic customers this isn’t something that is likely to happen in their own homes.” Phew.
Happiness is working at Whistler
Writing in The Spectator this week Victoria Lane had nothing but praise for her recent skiing holiday at Whistler, British Columbia:
…Now this is all very nice, but a distraction from the main point of Whistler. This is not the skiing or the snowboarding, but the service. The service! You are bombarded with attention. In the ski-hire shops there are more assistants than customers, and they treat you with incredible solicitude, inquiring lovingly after your toes.
All the attention, combined with the upbeat demeanour of Whistler’s workers, was too much for one of Victoria’s friends:
Another of my companions was having a struggle. Everyone was too cheerful, and it was putting him in bad humour. “They tax everything here,” he observed at one point. “They should tax happiness — that would sort them out.” He reminisced fondly about a skiing holiday in a small town in Spain, which was run by a family or company called Crap. There was the Crap restaurant, the Crap bar, the Crap ski-hire. Oh for something Crap!
Her friend is right. In terms of happiness, most Canadians are incredibly rich.
To breed or not to breed
The Woman’s Hour web page
…is not the question. Instead, it seems to be when? The BBC Radio 4 programme Woman’s Hour discussed the subject of “late motherhood” the other day, and all kinds of passionate opinions were expressed during the phone-in about the dilemma faced by modern women in choosing between children and a career.
Isn’t it odd how the tables have turned? Twenty years ago, when my generation was just about to graduate from university, preganancy was almost the worst thing that could happen to a girl. Now, the inability to have children is the great tragedy of my age group. From one extreme to the other in 20 years. Hindsight is often considered a wonderful thing, but what will we tell our daughters to do when it’s their turn to choose?
Business fiction
The New Year has started strongly on BBC Radio 4, with several thought-provoking programmes:
Last week In Business examined why so few novels are set in the world of work, and attempted to explore the consequences for both business and society. As presenter Peter Day said “fiction normally shuns the working world or is deeply suspicious of it”. He wanted to investigate “why creative types don’t respond to this thing called work”.
Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor of the Economist, was interviewed and expressed a feeling I’ve had for a long time:
“We’ve really lost that sense that business is about progress and doing good. There’s no sense of that anymore. It’s very, very hard when people don’t feel strongly about something to create fiction out of it.”
Peter Day then pointed out that:
“The way business is presented to people is part of the culture. If decent people think that it’s not a subject that engages the imagination, or the intelligence, or the humanity of themselves, and don’t go into business, then you kind of get the second-raters all joining up for it. So we need decent artistic representation of the business world.”
However, the hottest tip of the year came from Rocco:
“We do review a lot of fiction in the Economist. We review it every single week and I’m always looking for great books. But a book that really told a story that developed a fantastic hero, that armed itself with this person’s struggles and fears and difficulties and problems and triumphed in the end, in a business setting would be truly fantastic. I think that one of the enormous difficulties that exist now is that we’re more comfortable with the idea of business than we may have been in the 19th century, and that makes it much harder to explore, it’s a much bigger challenge to create something which is subtle and interesting and not a caricature. Somebody should do it.”
So there you go. There’s still time for one more New Year’s resolution — write a great novel about business. For inspiration, here are a few of the authors or novels mentioned in the programme:
- Hard Times by Charles Dickens.
- The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope.
- Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos.
- Nice Work by David Lodge.
- Free to Trade by Michael Ridpath.
- Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
Upgraded to nowhere
The server on which this weblog is stored suffered a fatal disk failure earlier this week, and its replacement wasn’t fully operational for two days. I could live with the inconvenience if that’s all it was, but when replacing the machine my hosting company installed a different (more recent?) and incompatible version of the server’s database software.
Consequently, all my previous posts are no longer in the database, and I must now start from scratch. I have copies of all my previous individual posts, and perhaps I will replace them individually over time, but as of now they could be hard to find.
Sorry, but that’s progress for you!