Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here

Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.

Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?

Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It

. But they start with the big red rhino, too.

From the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The text of warning tells you not to touch the piece, because it’s fragile. But the design of the warning implies that you shouldn’t cross the line. It’s a nice example of persuasive design.

Wind-and-rainstorm-related power outages today brought telecommuters in my area out of the woodwork.

I stopped at the hardware store, bought a power strip , covered my old 280Z with a plastic tarp in the parking lot, and settled in for a day of work at a local cafe that still had power and a functioning internet connection.

The power strip was a good move-made me instantly popular.

A couple squeezed over to make room for me. They were talking about going to a movie, so I looked up the times for them, and then checked some reviews at RottenTomatoes.

This is how a café should be,” said the guy sitting on my right-an MBA student named Steve, I soon learned. Within a few minutes, we had talked consulting and LinkedIn.

Years ago, when email and chat terminals first started appearing as a kind of novelty in cafes, I thought it was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. Wasn’t the point of going to a café to be around people? Who would go to a café and then sit on a terminal and type messages to people who were somewhere else?

Seven years of freelancing and periodic telecommuting later, I understand. Working at the café is social in a non-social way. We get proximity but not interaction.

Today however, we got Live Social Interaction. There must be a tipping point of crowdedness or unusualness that causes people to break the invisible barriers and interact–collaborate, really–in a way that our normal social conventions and level of insularity preclude.

The irony is that it takes a storm or a disaster to break these barriers. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t really enjoy connecting with people in this way, which begs the question: why don’t we just live like this all the time?

• The former (and future?) location of “Flickr: Photos from steve.portigal”
  As of this writing, flickr has decided my account is not active. After uploading 5000 pictures and while in the midst of a big trip? Let’s see how long it takes them to restore things (as this seems to be some sort of known problem that is happening with some accounts)

Update:

We took a look into the issue with this account. It appears your “steve.portigal” account was deleted by someone who had access to your Yahoo! ID and password. Investigating, we think there is a possibility your account was phished.

In short, in most cases when someone’s account has been phished, a link to a fake Flickr page was left on a photo. Often it is a link that was left for a bogus award. These are usually fake login pages that send the ID and password to the person who has posted this fake page. In a small number of cases, invasive software has been installed that logs keystrokes on the Windows operating system. We have no way to know how you were affected, we do want to make this clear.

Unfortunately the content from the account cannot be restored. When accounts are deleted by someone who has access to the ID and password, we presume it to be the person who created that ID and is acting upon their wishes and then the data is deleted. We can restore the account itself which will restore it’s pro status.

We are definitely sorry this has happened. We know this is disruptive to your experience on Flickr and work you have created is lost. We don’t like seeing this affect our community.

These full page ads for Audéo have been running in magazines for the past few months.

The copy tell us that “hearing is inversely proportional to your life experience.” What an incredible reframe this is! Aging becomes experience, with a real vanity appeal (the more experience you’ve had, the more you are like this rock-n-roll dude, the more you have hearing loss). Hearing aid becomes tech accessory or even better personal communication assistant (both phrases that appear in the ad).

The cliche is that eyeglasses make you look smart; will a hearing aid (or personal audio monitoring system) make you look tough? Sure, if I was a traditional candidate for this product, I’d rather get something cool that reinforces a positive sense of self, but is the manufacturer Phonak going to be able to grow the market by getting new customers into on-board acoustic support?

Excerpted from this story

Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. One result has been a growing craze for Indian education.

Many are looking for lessons from India, seen by many in Japan as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard in Japan. And the few Indian international schools in Japan are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.

At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian, and classroom posters depict animals out of Indian tales, including dancing elephants in plumed turbans.

Little Angels is in Mikata, a Tokyo suburb. Only 1 of its 45 students is Indian. Most are Japanese.

As with many new things in Japan, the interest in Indian-style education has become a social fad, with everyone suddenly piling on.

Indian education is a frequent topic in public forums, from talk shows to conferences on education. Popular books claim to reveal the Indian secrets for multiplying and dividing multiple-digit numbers.

Interesting to see how “foreign” India may be to the Japanese, such that a mythology emerges. Reminds me of the tantric sex mythology (one of many, no doubt, over the centuries) that the West has built up around India.

• Lake Superior State University 2008 List of Banished Words
  Perfect storm, webinar, waterboarding, organic, surge, post 9-11. Some of these should have been banished years ago (perfect storm?). Is waterboarding an abused term or an abused practice? I prefer Matt Groening’s list for humor and insight.

What sort of stuff is “popular” in another country? How do we, as visitors, experience, catalog or contextuallize pop culture? More posts on this to come.

Being in Japan means constant encounters with kawaii, or cute, characters. Some will be familiar to visitors, whether imported (i.e., Stitch, Snoopy, Miffy, Mickey, Pooh, Pink Panther) or domestic (i.e., Hello Kitty, Totoro, Domo-kun). We were intrigued to come across a new character, then, and wondered who he was.

A display at Tokyu Hands featured this plush toy and a catchy song, in Japanese.

Then we saw him (with friends) in an arcade window.

And then we saw a complete window display in Harajuku featuring this (presumed) bug.

And that gave me something to Google: bug, and mono comme ca (the name of the store). Success! It’s the Bottom Biting Bug (Oshiri Kajiri Mushi).

As my New Year’s Gift to you all, then, here is the video, with subtitles in Japanese and English. This is what started it all, and is an awesome, awesome earworm. Someday soon, very soon, you will awaken with a slight startle, and as the real world comes into grey focus, you’ll grasp at the fading threads of your dream only to realize that it’s been the Bottom Biting Bug song as your internal, nocturnal soundtrack.

Biting is important business, indeed.

Note: the first of what should be over 1000 images and stories are up on flickr here.

It’s January 1. Why is Amazon running this banner?

• Why Starbucks actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses
  Unlike WalMart and Home Depot, Starbucks grows the category without price-cutting the small businesses already in place.