I didn’t write this joke. I read it in a newspaper I found on the train.
- -
A big chess tournament was taking place at the Plaza in New York. After the first day’s competition, many of the winners sat in the hotel foyer bragging about their skillful play. As they had more to drink, they started getting louder and louder, until the desk clerk couldn’t take any more. He kicked them out.
The next morning the Manager called the clerk into his office. He had received many complaints about the clerk’s rudeness to the chess players. The Manager said, “Boy, you were wrong to kick those players out. You should have just asked them to be less noisy.”
The clerk responded, “I’m sorry, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
Sitting in the lounge of his two-bedroom flat, Cecil listened to the fire. The sound of metal expanding and wood turning to coal tinkered in the background. He breathed deeply and wiggled his bum, trying to relax in the brown leather chair. Today had been an important day. His only son Mark had just been married.
A voice pokes Cecil in the back.
“Cecil?”
“Yes?” He asks, turning around.
“Would you like a glass of gin?”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
As Cecil cupped the glass of gin, he wondered why he’d never imagined Mark might one-day be married. He had only ever thought about life within his own world. For whatever reason, Mark had never truly made it inside. You might think this would cause Cecil some stress, but he liked it that way. It made things simpler. And Cecil was a simple kind of guy. Mark on the other hand, was not so simple. He was a complex and embittered thinker. Mark also liked things this way. He saw no joy in simplifying the world. He liked Woody Allen films and books by Russian authors. It’s what made him, him.
Cecil sat some more, drumming his fingers against the glass of gin, attempting to turn off his brain. This is what Cecil calls ‘meditating’; a process he likes to practice often. After a moment, he closes his eyes, and opens his mouth to speak.
“June, why did we get a divorce?”
“Oh Cecil. You’re as stupid now as you were then.”
June is sitting on the couch with her legs crossed–her own glass of gin resting safely on the armrest.
“Thanks June. You’ve still got it, you know that?”
“You asked.”
“Yes, I did.”
Hesitating, slowly, June continued.
“You know exactly why we divorced.”
“I know why we divorced, but I still don’t understand why, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Forget about it.”
“This is why we divorced.”
Cecil and June had been separated five years before they signed those fateful papers. They told their closest friends they’d decided to wait until Mark had finished school but it was really because they couldn’t face the weight of failure.
“Mark doesn’t know what he’s in for.”
“Oh shut-up Cecil. He’ll be fine. Julie’s a lovely girl. She’s got her head screwed on.”
“What are you trying to say? That as long as Julie’s got her head screwed on they’ll be happy forever?” Cecil let out a forced half breath. “You might be right, seeing as we’re divorced and you’re as nutty as they come.”
“What we need, then, is practice in handling long sentences. It is relatively easy to feel confident in writing shorter sentences, but if our prose is made up entirely of shorter structures, it begins to feel like “See Dick run. See Jane jump. See Jane jump on Puff.” Primer style (pronounced “primmer” in the U.S.A.), it’s called, and it would drive a reader crazy after a while.”
“At the centre of the Sanctuary is the Stone of Remembrance. This is a marble stone sunk below the pavement, so that visitors must bow their heads to read the inscription on it:
Greater Love Hath No Man
The inscription is part of a verse from the Bible (John 15:13) “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. The Stone is aligned with an aperture in the roof of the Sanctuary so that a ray of sunlight falls on the word ‘Love’ on the Stone of Remembrance at exactly 11 a.m. on 11 November, marking the hour and day of the Armistice which ended World War I.”
“Then there’s the Coke incident when they were presenting a worldwide concept to Coca-Cola in Atlanta. As Watson recalls it, the two shuffled to the stage and Jo started tuning a guitar but were interrupted by McCann’s global creative director asking who their target audience was. “Stretching to his full five foot four, Mo said in a laconic mutter, fair to the microphone for all to hear: ‘Any cunt with a mouth’. The president of Coke thought this was the most precise targeting he’d heard all day,” said Watson.”
“Say you need to design an umbrella stand. Some sort of tubular object immediately comes to mind. But Fukasawa insists that we should eliminate this idea. He says all we should do is cut a groove 8mm wide and 5mm deep into the concrete floor at the building’s entrance. Visitors looking for a place to put their umbrellas would be quick to look for a spot to stick the top end. As if the umbrella itself were on the prowl for a place to stand, it would no doubt easily discover the groove that had been set there in anticipation, and all the umbrellas would stand in a neat row. And yet people using it may have no idea that the groove is an umbrella rack. The orderly row of umbrellas would be the result of unconcious behaivour. Fukasawa rests his case: the umbrella rack design is complete unto itself.”
“An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.”
“If an actor steps into a room with an armchair and a softball, Gibson’s original definition of affordances allows that the actor may throw the recliner and sit on the softball, because that is objectively possible. Norman’s definition of (perceived) affordances captures the likelihood that the actor will sit on the recliner and throw the softball. Effectively, Norman’s affordances “suggest” how an object may be interacted with. For example, the size and shape of a softball obviously fits nicely in the average human hand, and its density and texture make it perfect for throwing. The user may also bring past experience with similar objects (baseballs, perhaps) to bear when evaluating a new affordance.”
“Norman’s adaptation of the concept has seen a further shift of meaning, in which the term affordance is used as an uncountable noun, referring to the property of an object or system’s action possibilities being easily discoverable, as in “this web page has good affordance,” or “this button needs more affordance.”
“Don’t ignore the things that on the surface may not seem crucial to creating great advertising. Like spending time to identify what the real problem is — not just the advertising problem but the business problem, and embracing the limits imposed on you. It’s often there the real gem lies.”
Simplicity is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality.
Complexity characterizes the ordinary adult world view. It is characterized by an awareness of complex systems in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifying patterns and connections.
Informed simplicity is an enlightened view of reality. It is founded upon an ability to discern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures. Pattern recognition is a crucial skill for an architect, who must create a highly ordered building amid many competing and frequently nebulous design considerations.”
- 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick
“There aren’t too many places in the world where you can’t buy a Coke, and that includes some of the remotest parts of developing countries. Coincidentally, that’s often where aid organizations have the hardest time delivering medicine and other supplies. That’s why ColaLife is lobbying the international beverage behemoth to open up its distribution channels for some constructive piggybacking. The nonprofit is working on a wedge-shaped package that can deliver goods in the space between the bottlenecks in a full crate of Coca-Cola, and in partnership with another NGO, it has already performed a successful test of the idea in Tanzania. In its quest for global beverage dominance, Coca-Cola may have inadvertently built the best tool for international aid. You can’t beat that.”
