designswarm thoughts

A little sadness on this rainy Sunday in London. I opened yesterday’s Guardian to find that Douglas Keen had died. I didn’t know him personally nor did I even know his name, but his work is a key part of my childhood. He was the one to teach me english, or to be perfectly accurate Peter and Jane, the main characters of his books, did. I was about 7 living in Kuwait and suddenly parachuted in an American School, having previously spoken only french at home. His books helped me in so many ways as I learnt about western ideas and culture while living in a very different country and environment to the Paris of my youth.

I’m happy I grew up with his little people.

I also feel I’ve suddenly entered that phase in my life where companies are trying to cater to a sense of nostalgia. In the same Guardian, there was an advert for the Ladybird Vintage book for Girls and I have to admit I feel really tempted to add it to my Christmas list.

I just came back from a sort of really stupid back and forth on 6 eurostars in the space of a week…but the friends i got to see again, the meals i got to eat and the events I attended made this a really beautiful week, with the real satisfaction of just traveling by train. The level of exhaustion is really quite different than if i had taken planes.

I hardly had any internet access, haven’t opened my rss reader in weeks and generally enjoying doing some real thinking about my current adventure. I need to do this more often.

I hope you’ll excuse me for the lack of new content, in light of this…I’ll come up with something witty soon, I swear!

I had the extreme pleasure of attending Open Sauces in Bruxelles yesterday which was organised by the great people at fo.am. I was invited to give a toast and did so on a course that was served with a plate from the Topoware collection. I thought I’d archive what I said.

Before I take a bite

I’m thinking about

- what i wish i hadn’t eaten yesterday
- what i will eat tomorrow
- the millions of obese children in the UK

- how i used to be able to carry a really heavy laptop around all the time
- how its so easy to get kids to exercise but not adults
- how many staircases will i have to go up and down to  burn this off?
- how I wished we weren’t so addicted to elevators and escalators

- how i should make an effort to eat more locally
- i hope the people involved in picking this food were well treated
- i hope the food miles of this meal aren’t too high
- how much of this will end up being thrown away
- could i have grown it myself?
- how much did this cost?

-  how many calories this is anyway
- i wonder if the ingredients list is lying
- is this part of my 5 a day?
- is this too much? not enough?
- how much salt is in this?
- how much sugar is in this?
- what kind of vitamins am i getting from this?
- am i equipped to digest this?

- how my mother told me its not polite to leave food in your plate
- how certain foods stopped being part of my diet after childhood
- how I can still remember my mom’s chicken sauce recipe just by thinking about it

And then I take a sip and take a bite and let my tongue do the thinking for me.

I’m curious about the various time-trapped bits of the internet these days such as Barack Obama’s Twitter feed, abandoned land and marketing exercises in Second Life and blogs that people no longer write in. All eyes in one direction for 15 minutes or 6 months, then onto something else. Are these the abandoned memories, newspapers, magazines and books of the 21st century? In 50 years is this what people will turn to to do archeology, sifting through millions of blog posts, pictures on Flickr, Facebook statuses to tell how we lived our lives….?
Time always tells.

Will be felt tangibly in whether me and my friends open a bottle of champagne or vodka on Wednesday morning…Go Obama!!!!

So as a light exercise, I thought i’d map the headlines of the New York Times Alert emails to the value of the NASDAQ for most of the month of October. Really interesting both in terms of the quantity of emails sent out, their timing and the subject addressed. Only 1 of some 11 headlines addressed the elections, all of the others talked about the economy.

Large version here