Coming Soon To A Computer Near You

I opened the emails at home this morning and found an advertisement for an antique sales company. I do not buy antiques but I opened it anyway - it turned out to be from some firm that is trying to sell antique photographic gear at auction - or what may purport to be an auction.

I like antique photographic gear - I could look at it all day. Sigh... I DO look at it all day...Either at home in the studio or here at the shop - there it is. I have no desire to augment the collection but still I looked at the list.

One item on offer was a Spirograph. The blurb said that it was similar to one in the Smithsonian Institution and that it was expected to fetch $ 10,000. I am glad that I was not eating at the time I read this as I would probably still be cleaning cornflakes off the the computer screen right now....Reading further I saw a long address in Chinese at the bottom, leading me to the cynical speculation that there must be someone who thinks that the Chinese people are either seriously rich or seriously stupid.

Then I remembered Nürnberg and a visit I made to that city in 1995. I wandered through the business district, pretzel in hand, and passed a camera shop. In it were a vast collection of ex-Soviet cameras and 50's film cameras at eye-watering prices. It was a nice set of premises until you considered the premise that the owner - Boris  - was trying to sell the unworkable to the unwitting. I think he must have succeeded because he pops up in eBay all the time doing the same thing from Germany, and has lately established an outpost in Hong Kong. I can only presume business is brisk, but I cannot say whether this makes me happy or sad, nor for whom...

As it is, I shall pass on the $ 10,000 Spirograph. If there is one in K-Mart for $ 9.95 I might be tempted as the swirly patterns that they make can be quite lovely. I wonder what would happen if you put it on a Wacom Intuous computer tablet and traced up a storm. It would probably look like some of the computer-generated patterns you get as screen savers. I wonder if you could use it to draw a picture of Boris?