Nieuwsartikelen

[wolf]

ja 't is een wonderfull world

[GuyS]

Look, it's us. Nouja, soort van 

[Heinzelmann]

Nog even een vrolijk artikeltje op de vrijdagavond:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp

Brrrr.

Wie, wat en waar ook al weer?

Zo lang er gevangenissen zijn, zijn er zulke verhalen.
(Sjalamov schiet me te binnen, naast natuurlijk al de schrijvende overlevers van de shoah –holle kost, zegt men nu hier ook steeds vaker– terwijl 'holo' dezelfde is uit die 'gram' met Tupac, en die 'caust' als gootsteenontstopper met soda wel bekend is. Nuja.)

Heel erg allemaal, maar het zal wel... "They still have a long way to go."

Waar we ons echt zorgen over moeten maken is dat er op de hele wereld niet genoeg grondstof is als straks alle Chinezen in een stenen huis willen wonen (nee hoor, ze willen geen TV, koelkast en auto enzo. Welnee!), en dat onze belangrijke exportproducten kip en tomaat nu juist importafhankelijk zijn. Wat maakt het ook uit eigenlijk.

En wacht dan maar tot Afrika wakker is en gedoucht heeft! Die rekenen nu al in Yuans en hebben Chinese CC's!

[GuyS]

"The Fall of the Creative Class", over professor Florida's theorie van een economisch versterkende Creative Class - die leidde tot lokale overheden die probeerden hun stad zo aantrekkelijk mogelijk te maken voor een volledige generatie aan freelance hipster-ontwerpers die de hele dag met hun macbook in de Starbucks zitten - en hoe die waarschijnlijk helemaal nooit bestaan heeft.

http://thirtytwomag.com/2012/06/the-fall-of-thecreative-class/

Florida’s idea was a nice one: Young, inno­v­a­tive peo­ple move to places that are open and hip and tol­er­ant. They, in turn, gen­er­ate eco­nomic inno­va­tion. I loved this idea because, as a free­lance writer, it made me impor­tant. I was poor, but some­how I made every­one else rich! It seemed to make per­fect sense. Madi­son, by that rea­son­ing, should have been clam­or­ing to have me, since I was one of the mys­ti­cal bear­ers of prosperity.

[GuyS]

The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn't A Crook, He's An Artist: Over Hans-Jürgen Kuhl, een Duitse schilder die toevallig ook de meest perfecte fake $100 biljetten maakte.

Kuhl wanted to get back to the simpler (and legal) business of being a graphic artist. But one aspect of the bust stuck in his head: An expert witness from Germany’s central bank had extolled the quality of Kuhl’s forgeries. There was also something poetic, Kuhl thought, about demonstrating to the world that those coveted, almost sacred US dollars were nothing more than intricate images mass-produced on fancy paper. In a way, that point of view itself was borrowed from Warhol: “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” the artist wrote in his Philosophy of Andy Warhol.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/ff_counterfeiter/all/?pid=263&viewall=true

[GuyS]

Cheap, Chic, And Made For All: How Uniqlo Plans To Take Over Casual Fashion, een kijkje achter de schermen bij het Japanse Uniqlo, dat plannen heeft om Zara, H&M en Gap van hun troon te stoten.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/167/uniqlo-tadashi-yanai

Yanai found his own new opportunities in the family business. In the same year Yanai was born, his father, Hitoshi, opened a suit shop in Yamaguchi, which was a medieval entrepôt and has a long history of openness to outside ideas and culture. As Japan's economy recovered, Hitoshi built a successful chain of 22 stores. In 1984, Tadashi became president and also opened a store in Hiroshima called the Unique Clothing Warehouse. The name, later shortened to Uniqlo, was unintentionally ironic. There was almost nothing unique about it--sportswear from Nike, Adidas, and other ubiquitous foreign brands made up much of its stock.

[gusto napolitano]

Over Crockett & Jones....http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG9395106/Mencyclopaedia-Crockett-and-Jones.html

[Clay]

Over Crockett & Jones....http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG9395106/Mencyclopaedia-Crockett-and-Jones.html

"From left: Ashdown Derby, £485; Tetbury Chukka, £290; Hallam, £320, all Crockett & Sons"

[Charlie]

Als 't goed is, is het nogsteeds in familiehanden - dus zo vreemd is dat niet.

[Clay]

Als 't goed is, is het nogsteeds in familiehanden - dus zo vreemd is dat niet.

"currently run by the great, great grandson of its co-founder, Charles Jones. "

Dus Jones&Sons?

[carpe diem]

Cross post uit het Brussels topic over Degand

[GuyS]

http://www.voxsartoria.com/post/28410122168/savile-row-jargon



The close community of the journeyman tailor was forged through generations of hardship, of long hours, miserable pay and discrimination of all kinds.  Taking refuge among themselves, the tailors developed a private language almost incomprehensible to outsiders.  Some of their expressions have survive in the daily dialogue of the tailor and his guv’nor.
— Richard Walker, The Savile Row Story: An Illustrated History

Balloon…having a balloon - a week without work or pay.

Bodger - Crude worker. Common to other trades.

Boot - loan until payday. Can you spare the boot? - can you give me a loan? Dates from crossed-leg days, when a tailor recorded the loan by chalking it on the sole of his boot.

Bunce - a trade perk, like mungo and a crib (see below).

Bushelman - Journeyman who alters or repairs.

Cat’s face - a small shop opened by a cutter starting out on his own.

Chuck a dummy - to faint. Allusion is to a tailor’s dummy tumbling over.

Clapham Junction - a paper design draft with numerous alterations or additions.

Codger - Tailor who does up old suits.

Cork - the boss.

Crib - large scrap of cloth left over from a job, usually enough to make a pair of trousers or a skirt.

Crushed beetles - badly made button holes.

Cutting turf - clumsy, unskilled working.

Doctor - alteration tailor.

Drag…in the drag - working behind time.

Drummer - trouser-maker.

Have you been on the board? - are you experienced?

Hip stay - old-time name for wife.

Jeff - a small master: one who cuts out his garments and also makes them up.

Kicking - looking for another job.

Kicking your heels - no work to do.

Kill - a spoiled job that has to be thrown away.

Kipper - A tailoress. So called because they sought work in pairs to avoid unwelcome advances.

Log…on the log - piecework: the traditional and complex system of paying out-workers.

Mungo - cloth cuttings, which by custom the tailor used to retain to sell to a rag merchant for a little extra income.

On the cod - gone drinking.

Pig - an unclaimed garment.

Pigged - a lapel which turns up after some wear.

Pinked…pink a job - making with extra care.

Skiffle - a job needed in a hurry.

Skipping it - making the stitches too big

Small seams - warning call when someone being discussed enters workroom.

Soft sew - an easily worked cloth.

Tab - fussy, difficult customer.

Trotter - fetcher and carrier: messenger.

Tweed merchant - Tailor who does the easy work: a poor workman.

Whipping the cat - Travelling round and working in private houses: common practice in old days when a tailor would be given board and lodging while he made clothes for a family

[GuyS]

How Companies Learn Your Secrets, over waarom grote bedrijven zo ontzettend hun best doen om meer over jou en je koopgedrag te weten te komen. Inclusief het ondertussen bekende voorbeeld van de supermarkt Target, die begin dit jaar in het nieuws kwam omdat ze dankzij het werk van hun marketeer/statisticus Pole zo goed konden voorspellen welke klanten waarschijnlijk zwanger waren op basis van hun aankopen, dat ze een boze vader aan de lijn kregen. Zijn dochter kreeg namelijk aanbiedingen voor babyspullen van ze, terwijl het tienermeisje uiteraard niet zwanger was. Je snapt wel wat de clou was.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp&pagewanted=all

Identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

[GuyS]

Deze column over de Lonely Planet en Rough Guide en soortgelijken, uit de Foreign Policy, moet het hier wel goed doen
"Leftist Planet: Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators?"

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/13/leftist_planet?page=full

To establish the quality of the political education they're serving up to a new generation of travelers, it's useful to begin by skimming their guidebooks for undemocratic countries like Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. There's a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.

[paulbrussel]

Interessant! Maar waarom zou dat het hier goed doen?
(Overigens geef ik toe dat vanwege die 'ondemocratische' (eufemisme!) regimes ik de vier genoemde landen inderdaad nooit heb willen bezoeken.)