Fashion and global warming
I was fascinated to discover that the fashion moguls in America are now consulting the scientists concerning the weather forecasts, as global warming and the changes in climate have serious effects on their business. Apparently, and I quote from the Daily Telegraph, someone called Beppe Modenese, the founder of the Milan fashion week, has predicted ‘that the whole fashion system will have to change,’ and accept there ‘is no strong difference between summer and winter any more ; you can just imagine the confusion that this will have with all the big fashion houses sending out spies to find when the competition is going to have their shows, what they are showing and why. They won’t be able to have their bashes at the start of the four seasons, or whenever it is that they do so, it’s going to throw the whole industry into chaos. We have been dancing to their tune for a long time, it looks as though they are going to have to dance to ours.
Government Thoughtlessness
There seems to be a certain imbalance in who is required to take responsibility for what. Take just one example of hundreds; if a government Minister makes an appalling error of judgment, costing billions in money and I don’t know how many lives, there seems to be no comeback .If through computer error, carelessness or incompetence, a government department hands out over £5 million pounds in error, because the recipients either don’t choose to or are unable to check that they are overpaid, the government wants to claw back the error from people who can ill afford to refund it. To poor people, living on a shoestring, when they get a windfall, the psychological effect is to spend it, probably on replacements and essentials, but irrespective, they are not likely to sit down with a pen and paper and go back over years to see why this has been given, and I would suspect that more than half of them couldn’t do it anyway. Need I say more?
HRT Misinformation
More than once I have written about journalists, finding a report of some research in a field that has considerable public interest, themselves then writing and publishing articles which gives the impression that this research is well founded and of a high-quality. it is strange how often months or years later the same research is questioned as being flawed. This apparently is the case where a million women in the UK abandoned hormone replacement therapy, because in 2002 – 03 it was reported that it could cause heart attacks, strokes and breast cancer. It would also appear that some doctors accepted this research and acted on it. This is the price that we have to pay, unfortunately, for the current rate of communication, which was much slower, and in consequence possibly more reasoned in the past. These interpretations of researchers, along with the rescinding of them, are more often in the sphere of health than elsewhere, and I believe that those advising us should be cautious, and examine the research closely, before acting on it.
Art Appreciation And Interpretation
I have previously told the story of my photograph of a bunch of flowers waiting to be arranged, with the scissors ready, submitted for criticism, and was told by the specialist photographer that he couldn’t look at it, because he couldn’t pick the scissors up as they were the wrong way round. Having exhibited photography in an international exhibition, and had both an oil painting and sculptures accepted by the Royal Ulster Academy, I have discovered not that art appreciation is subjective, we all know that, but that people who are alleged to be the leaders of taste, have some strange interpretations. Years ago there was a piece with bricks laid out in a rectangle on the floor of the Royal Academy, and praised would you believe, I see them regularly as I pass our builders yard, and nobody seems to take any notice of them. And now we have a crack constructed on the floor of the Tate Modern, entitled Shibboleth by the Colombian Artist, Doris Salcedo. It is 169 metres long and starts as a hair crack and becomes a void into which a visitor fell. As a construction engineer I’ve peered into a number of openings in roads that looked like this, but I never at any time found them to provided the intricate thought patterns that this crack in the floor seems to have done. I recommend that you view the various entries concerning this piece of art on Google, it gives a whole new highlight on the intricacies of the artistic mind.