thorsten van elten

Once in a while I check my Internet links to see where people who visit my site have come from, so today I was very amused to see that 822 visitors in the last month have come to me via a Spanish porn site called putalocura.com (no, I’m not going to put a direct link there… I couldn’t possibly encourage that sort of thing). I obviously had to scroll down a while to see where or what could possible be featured on a site like that…and on page two…there it was… Still Life. So, any Spaniard buying a Still Life in the near future….I know where you have been! Dirty!

Anyway, in the name of research I looked a bit further and found this little tresure of a website, The London Banana Project (www.londonbananas.com). It’s a site full of photos of banana skins found in the streets of London. Brilliant.

At least I can see why they would feature Bananas on their site!

I went home to Germany last weekend for my mum’s birthday and as mine is two days later I made a long weekend of it. As it ws a round birthday for my mum, the whole family was in town, all uncles, aunts etc. On the Friday we made a little excursion to the Insel Hombroich, a great little place. It’s next to a small River (sorry, the name escaped me) so all very lush and green. I’m not going to bore you with all the details, it’s basically a museum which is situated in a large park and separated into various building, each built specifically to house parts of the collection. Have a look for yourself on their website (sorry, it’s all in German). Here are a few pictures I took. Enjoy.

PS: Be warned, since I bought a new camera recently I have turned into a right little amateur photographer, snapping away. I will bore you with more of my pics soon.

Tat - a term, found particularly in England, referring to anything which appears shabby, cheap, and tasteless.

Welcome to my new section, ‘Thorsten says tat’. No further explanation required.

Part 1 - His and Hers Chair by Fabio Novembre for Casamania.

Trade fairs are a never ending source of entertainment for me (well, once I get over the initial shock of being confined to a few square metres in a giant air conditioned hall where outside the world could have ended and you would know nothing about it). So I spent my weekend at Pulse in London’s Earls Court Exhibition Centre and it wasn’t all that bad. In fact, I actually quite enjoyed myself.

The stand next to me was award winning Kalthleen Hills who as usual had a great looking stand (as you can see) as well as great products (obviously). All of her cards/brochures were hung on small nails all over the back and side wall of her stand (which by the way drove me crazy during the set up, all that hammering). To our amusement she overheard a couple of ladies talking about her products and stand saying: ’ She should have used better nails’.

So apparently my moon is in aquarius today which is the opposite side of the zodiac (I read that in the newspaper I found on the tube this morning). They advised me that this will slow me down and and I might not be very productive today. Damn, what excuse am I going to use tomorrow???

As my first contribution here, I thought I’d share this beautiful series of matchbox covers this designer collects.Via 37signals.

Although on paper I might appear middle-aged (haha, middle-aged, me!!) I’m not completely past it, there is life left in the old dog yet.  I went to see The Cold Bloods doing a gig at the Metro Club on Oxford Street in December. Well, there was  a good reason for it as Richard who works with us is on drums so I thought I’d better go down there and support him.  Now check out their video. Rock’n Roll!

Now that I have re-discovered the joys of Saturdays off, I have also noticed that morning TV just isn’t the same as it used to be. Ok, admittedly I am a little (ok ok, a lot) too old for Kids TV but it sort of did the trick on a Saturday morning with a bad hungover last time round I had weekends off. I look back on the days when Ant & Dec did SMTV and I found one of my favourite clips thanks to the wonder that is You Tube. So, have a look at Ant & Dec and Brian (from Westlife). You can skip the first 30 seconds but then…classic TV. Yep, I know, I’m still a big big kid!! Enjoy, I watched it about 15 times over the weekend and it still cracks me up.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German authorities were able to pin a burglary committed in April on a suspected serial thief after he left a half-eaten slice of salami carrying a sliver of his DNA at a crime scene, police said Thursday.

The 37-year-old Romanian man is accused of breaking into a workshop office in the western city of Darmstadt, stealing cash and two locks and causing damage worth around 3,400 euros, Suedhessen police spokesman Ferdinand Derigs said. “He didn’t bring the salami with him — it was just lying around in the office,” Derigs said.

The man was already wanted in connection with 19 burglaries and had been taken into custody in January after a routine police road check, he added. Investigations are continuing.

You don’t honestly believe I’m going to tell you how to make your own Pigeon Light.  I just needed a header for this entry and this was the best I could come up with.

I just thought I’d give you a little insight into the high-tech world of thorsten van elten products. Firstly, take one high-quality wooden clothes peg. Not any old clothes peg but top-of-the-range clothes peg. I used to buy them from John Lewis on Oxford Street where I regularly cleared them out of pegs, until one day to my horror I discovered they changed suppliers and the new pegs were just not up to our high standards. So we ran around London like headless chicken looking for any John Lewis related shop (Peter Jones, Waitrose etc) to see if anyone anywhere had some left. We found some but thought we’d better get to the source of said pegs which we discovered was Denmark. I think last time we bought about 80,000 pegs so we should be ok for a while.

Anyway, so we have the peg, now get one pillar drill (mine was about £ 29.95 from screwfix direct) and start drilling. In the image you can see a very high-tech jig, produced by the very Ed Carpenter himself when we first started making the Pigeon Light. I think we might have glued it back together a few times but otherwise - still the original!

Last but not least get some fine grade sand paper and sand the edges of drilled holes until nice and smooth.

That’s your first part completed! We’ll do step two in a coule of weeks when you all had time to go out and find some top of the range clothes pegs.