Most food products have nutrition information labels that tell you in minute detail what they contain, from calorie count to milligrams of Sodium. All very edifying, to be sure, but boooring!

So the other day I saw this box of cookies, and below the logo of the English Cake bakery it says – in Hebrew – “Very tasty“!

Isn’t this something they should add to every food label? We could have cookies labeled “Very tasty“, “Tasty“, “So-so“, or “Yecch!“, just like the “Hot”, “Medium” and and “Mild” on Salsa jars. Now, wouldn’t that be useful to us consumers?

We veteran road warriors know the drill: go thru security, then hunt for a power outlet to recharge our computer at as we wait for our flight. This often involves scouting the terminal halls hoping to find the occasional wall socket intended for the janitor’s vacuum cleaner, hoping there would be a vacant chair near it. Of course, these are scarce, and as likely as not to be taken by a fellow traveler.

But on my recent trip to Boston I saw a much different approach to our problem. At Logan International airport, there are rows of seats at each gate with power outlets built right into them – lots of outlets, enough for all of us business travelers – and for those serene kids with iPods and ear buds…

Note the variety of sockets – 110VAC, 5VDC via USB… These guys have thought of everything! Add the hassle-free WiFi they have, and you have the most notebook-friendly airport terminal I’ve ever seen.

Wayda go, Logan!

We all know the usual “Private Parking” no-parking signs: stark red and white, with wording in fat letters forming threats of the sorry fate – towing, usually – awaiting violators. They’re designed to jar and scare the thoughtless driver. Nothing pretty about these signs, and usually that’s exactly the intent of their owners.

But  here you see a sign I saw in Jerusalem on the wall of a house, next to its private parking area. It too says “Private parking – unauthorized vehicles will be towed”. But it does it in a much more friendly way… because of the little rose engraved between the lines. No idea who had this strange idea. Perhaps the owner likes flowers, as attested to by the bed of geraniums right under the sign? I can’t recall ever seeing  a sign forbidding anything that left me in a cheerful mood, but this one  certainly did.

Here is a brass Hanukkiah, a 9-candle Hanukkah lamp, that we got in the seventies. It was made by Maskit, the pioneering maker of folklore-inspired clothing and art items in Israel’s early years.

It can accept candles or oil, and is as lovely as it is functional. However, what gets it a place in my design blog is the seemingly abstract pattern on its back plane. We’ve had it in our living room for some years before it suddenly hit me that this was not just an abstract shape. Do you see what it is?

What gave it away, for me, was the butts of the two lions, sticking up in the air. Suddenly I realized that I was seeing a traditional decorative pattern familiar in Judaica art, especially on Hanukkah lamps and on decorations on the Torah Ark in a synagogue: the two lions guarding the tablets of the law. You can see them in the two examples below:

Image source

Image source

The overlay below will help you see it, and then it’s obvious; but what I really admire in this piece is how the artist managed to capture so exquisitely well, in just a few lines, the anatomy of the two lions. Good job!

When we spent a while in the US in the eighties I was amazed and amused by the silly warning “serving suggestion” found on food packaging. I mean, what were they afraid of… a flood of lawsuits by people that opened the soup powder sachet and failed to extract a steaming soup tureen?…

Like many a silly idea this practice hit Israel a few years later, and I stopped noticing it – until this caught my eye:

This has the ubiquitous “Serving Suggestion” in fine print; what makes it unusual is two incongruities:

1. Slicing one tomato in half hardly counts as a serious serving suggestion.
2. These tomatoes would require a Magician to be served in this way. You see, the caption on the green stripe says “Crushed Tomatoes”!

I don’t expect the marketroids at Yakhin food products to be fluent in the laws of thermodynamics and entropy, but even they must know that you can serve a whole tomato by crushing it, but you can’t make a crushed tomato whole again.

Bon Appetit!

The idea of a time traveler messing up the present by changing the past is a Sci-Fi staple, and is used to good advantage in Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story, “A sound of thunder”. Bradbury’s subtlety is sadly lost in the 2005 movie of the same name; here, silly looking monsters run amok in the perturbed present of the movie. If you haven’t watched it, you may wish to save your time for something better.

However, there is one monster that caught my attention. This is a 50-foot eel-like monster that happily chases the humans in the flooded subway tunnels. here are two shots of its head:

These photos don’t do the eel justice -this is one creature you don’t want to be close to – but what struck my associative imagination at once was the certainty that I’ve seen this face before!

You can see where I’d met it  in the image at right. This is a detail from John Tenniel’s illustration of the Jabberwock, the monster in Lewis Carroll’s immortal nonsense poem from the second Alice book, “Through the looking glass”. Here is the very same bulbous head on a long neck, with the four tentacles and the bulging eyes. Only the dentition is different.

So how did the Jabberwock and the Eel come to be so similar? I see two possibilities. Perhaps the movie’s effects people had seen the Tenniel classic and copied it, consciously or otherwise. But if they haven’t, we may have here a strange case of convergent evolution, where two unrelated creatures evolve in parallel under similar constraints and attain the same outcome. What parallel constraints, you ask? Well, in both cases the artists were striving to objectify nonsense. Carroll’s Jabberwock is part of a wonderful nonsense poem; whereas the movie, though far from wonderful, is itself a sorry piece of cinematic nonsense!

People who design signs ought to be careful, because thoughtless signage can so easily lead to confusion…

Public restroom signs are a case in point, because people who see them make assumptions. For instance, as someone once pointed out, if one sees a WC sign of the opposite gender and the one for one’s own use is not next to it, one can go seek it at the opposite end of the same floor, or in the same position on the floor above or below… there is rarely a sign to tell you which is the case.

And here is another example in this domain: I saw the sign on the left near the door to a single restroom in a large building lobby. The immediate assumption of the user is that this is a handicapped-only room, and they go looking for the Gents’ or Ladies’ room. Which is not there, because this is the only restroom in the place. The intent of the sign, no doubt, was to indicate “here is the restroom, and it is wheelchair-enabled”.

The sign on the right is far better – it is again a single facility, but there is no mistaking the fact. Though it is interesting that the fellow on the left seems to be levitating…

Here is a screenshot from the form you fill to join the El Al Frequent Flier club. The form has the usual fields (take my word for it, you to whom Hebrew is Greek), but the one that drew my attention is the Title field preceding the first name. This uses a drop-down box, which presents a very comprehensive set of options: there’s Mr and Mrs, There’s Dr, there’s Prof and Rabbi (hey, this is El Al), and there’s even Adv and Judge. But the one highlighted in the screenshot is – get this – Lord.

Which is really amusing… for one, El Al is Israel’s airline and we have no Lords in our system here. Nor do we have a flood of British nobility flying in and out all the time; I’m sure some Lords may fly El Al on occasion, but hardly enough of them to justify such consideration. In any case, if we have Lord, why not Earl, Baron, Marquess, Viscount, or – more useful – a plain generic Sir? And why stop at British noblemen – surely a traveler might be a Graf, or an Alderman, or a Fellow of the Royal Society?

And, while they’re at it, what about Lady?

I was in a building where someone decided to give the signage a modern look, and I saw this sign outside a restroom. The people have this angular look, with slanted heads – why not? Anything for effect…

But it does occur to me that the guy on the wheelchair with the nonagonal wheel (yep… look it up!) will have a rather bumpy ride. There’s a reason why the inventor of the wheel chose to make it round!

I never dreamed I’d be blogging a post with the word Eyjafjallajökull in its title…

Anyway, this volcano is belching again, and airports are closing again – and one can’t help but wonder at the shoddy maintenance practices of these Icelanders. I mean, it’s not like they don’t know a volcano needs to be properly maintained; it’s well documented in the literature:

“He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.”

- The little prince, ch. 9.

From what we hear Iceland uses its geothermal energy extensively, whether or not they use it for heating breakfast… you’d think they could do the preventive maintenance part too!

When will they ever learn?…