The city never sleeps. Neither do its colors. These high-energy hues vibrate with spontaneity and rebellion. Neon bright, graffiti bold and digitally enhanced to 3-D luminosity, they’re the colors of technology, of avant-garde art and of the entrepreneurial spirit that celebrates shaking off dull routine to do what you love. The eclectic global influences range from the Cynical Realism art movement of urban China to the carnaval spirit of Rio de Janeiro, host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Anything goes, and self-expression is the new metropolitan mantra.
I'm fascinated by these annual color forecasts. They are not a prescription for the color schemes people are obligated to use or specify of course, but the trend research that goes into them is as exhaustive as it is impartial. This palette and the three that follow are a snapshot of contemporary life and a hedged bet about how things will look in six months.
While not a definitive look at culture, they are fascinating snap shot.
The central image that sums up Sherwin-Williams' Bold Invention is this:
After having read the description above, the image makes sense and definitely gets across the global, experimental nature of the culture shifts it summarizes.
As intriguing as the underpinnings of this trend are, the palette leaves me somewhat cold. Despite its claimed now-ness, it strikes me as a bit nostalgic. I think it's an attractive palette, I just can't see the futuristic nature of it. Here are the colors.
SW 7589 Habanero Chile
SW 6938 Synergy
SW 6947 Tempo Teal
SW 6711 Parakeet
SW 6445 Garden Grove
SW 6963 Sapphire
SW 6800 Something Blue
SW 6696 Quilt Gold
SW 7664 Steely Gray
SW 7036 Accessible Beige
What do you guys think? Am I missing something here? Now that I can see the colors in order I'm beginning to think that maybe it's the inspiration image that's throwing my eye. So, is Sherwin-Williams onto something with this palette from their 2011 color forecast?
On June 21st, Apple released its new iPhone operating system, the iOS 4. The new operating system coincided with the release of the iPhone 4. And an enthusiastic public enthused. Some of that public anyway.
I've been an iPhone fanatic since the first iPhone came out way back in 2007. From the start I couldn't believe that I'd finally found an electronic device that made good on every promise it made. In a very short time, that phone became much more than a phone, it was my connection to the world. So long as I had that phone with me, I could work from anywhere. I could manage everything in my life from a piece of electronic wizardry that lived up to the hype surrounding it.
When the 3G came out a year later, I upgraded to it immediately. 2008's 3G surpassed my first iPhone by every measure I could think of. If it were possible to love an electronic device, then that's what I would call what I felt for that phone.
In 2009, Apple released the iPhone 3GS. The 3GS had a video camera, an improved still camera, more memory and more storage. Since the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS used the same operating system, it made more sense to hold onto the year-old phone. I continued to love my 3G, and the operating system Apple developed for the 3GS made my 3G work even better than it did before. I thought that Apple was being forward thinking. Both their new model and their current model reaped the benefits of an operating system upgrade. Who needed a new handset? Mobile phones could improve every year with software upgrades alone. Brilliant.
On 21 June, Apple released the iPhone 4 and the new operating system, the iOS 4 at the same time. All iPhone owners were going to reap the rewards of this new software. Everybody on the train was going to get an improved phone. I still loved my 3G and since the operating system was going to make it even better, why buy a new phone and sign up for another two-year stint with AT&T?
It took three days to get my hands on the iOS 4 upgrade and when I managed to get hold of it, it took three hours to download and install. That was unusual, but it seemed like a small price to pay for all of the improvements I was sure to get.
When I finished the download and restarted my phone, something seemed odd. Most of my apps were missing and all of my photos were nowhere to be found. At first I thought that I had made some kind of a mistake when I followed the steps to run the upgrade. In iPhone speak, it was a restore not an installation. So I restarted my phone. When it came back to life, half of my missing apps reappeared. I restarted it again. This time, another handful of apps reappeared. I repeated the restart routine three more times. After five restarts, I had all my apps back, but my photos seem to have been lost for good.
I still thought that there was something I'd done wrong. After all, Apple surely couldn't have screwed up a software upgrade.
Whatever happened, my beloved iPhone 3G no longer worked with anything approaching the speed and efficiency it once did. I noticed that my battery life had been cut in half. It crashed regularly. It was enragingly slow. After a week I started asking around to see if anybody else was having the trouble I was having.
I was far from alone and my experiences were shared by many iPhone 3G users.
The more I dug, the more I learned that the new iOS 4 was never intended to be run on the the 3G. There was no warning anywhere on Apple's website before I "upgraded" my phone. Apple being Apple, there's no way I can go back and install the old operating system that made my phone work so well. It's almost as if I'm being pressured into buying a new iPhone and along with it, one of AT&T's onerous, new, tiered data plans.
It gets increasingly hard to think of this as a coincidence. Every time that I turn on my GPS and my phone checks my mail instead I start to question the train of planned obsolescence I've been riding since 2007. I used to think that Apple was one of the good guys. They represented value, sharp design and exclusivity. Now I'm beginning to see that I've been duped.
Whether this software problem was planned or accidental, I'm not happy and I'm not alone.
I'll be back with fresh, compelling new content bright and early tomorrow morning. In the meantime, don't forget to watch the season premiere of Mad Men tonight. Woo-hoo!
Lat but not least, no set of reruns would be complete without including what I believe to be my number one traffic generator of all time. It's from 29 March 2009 and here it is again.
Help! My husband, my son and I were over at my cousin's new house last weekend and while we were walking around the master bath and oohing and aahing over the size and decor it was hard not to notice that she had one of those things (I blush when I say the word) next to the toilet. I can't help it, every time I see one they just scream out to me "We have lots of s*x and don't shower afterwards." Anyhow, my four-year-old asked why they had two toilets in the bathroom. I was embarrassed and didn't know what to say, so I told him that there were two so that no one had to wait while the other one finished. He said "nasty" and didn't push it any further. But seriously, what do you tell the kids?
Mother of God woman! Part of me wants to be calm and reassuring but an even bigger part of me want to throttle you. I'm really floored by this. I mean really. What the hell kind of a question is that? Based on your description and your shame-based reaction to it, I'm going to assume what you're talking about is a bidet. There, I said it. Bidet. Repeat after me. Bi-day. See? Nothing happened. It's just a word.
Similarly, a bidet is an object and as such it can't good or bad, it just is. Whatever discomfort you feel about bidets is coming from your own sick mind. Bidets don't scream anything. They can't because they're objects. Sex is another word that's just a word. You might have a better grip on what to tell your son if you could bring yourself to spell out the word sex in an e-mail to a stranger. Similarly, penis, vagina and anus are just words. As words they can't be anything but neutral. As body parts they can't be anything other than morally neutral either. What ever meaning or significance they have, their rightness or wrongness, comes from you. They are also the body parts that get washed in a bidet. See? Simple words describing simple, every day acts. No big deal. No cause for alarm. No sweeping statements about my character for the simple act of describing something.
Your skittishness about spelling out the word sex or even writing the word bidet speak of much larger issues you have about your body, other people's bodies and the biological functions those bodies perform. For the sake of your son, please talk to somebody about this stuff. You owe it to him and more importantly, you owe it to yourself. How can you expect to be an effective parent if you can't call things what they are?
So to answer your question, "what do you tell the kids?" The answer is the truth. Tell them the truth about this and about everything else. Rather than making up a lie and getting the response you got (which by the way is the seed of your neuroses taking root in a new generation --good job!), you could have told him something as simple as "some people wash themselves in a bidet." That way, you could have called a thing what it is and you could have told him the truth at the same time. If it led to more questions, then you could have answered them. Truthfully. Pretty simple stuff, really.
And while we're on the subject of the truth, people do use bidets to clean themselves. Really. That's all they're for. Having one doesn't say anything, because it can't. It's a thing if you remember, and things don't talk. So do me a favor if you haven't already stopped reading. The next time you're in the presence of a bidet, climb on board. The Pause that Refreshes will take on a whole new layer of meaning, believe me.
