SuperCraftsmen I: Abrasha

I decided to do a little series about amazing craftsmen I’ve learned about on the Internet.

I think of myself as a of a tradesman. I work right next to the jewelry district, but my work is less refined. I’m more of a plumber. A very neat and sometimes even artistic plumber, but a plumber nevetheless. Web develpment is like that. Web developers sometimes fancy themselves architects and artists, but almost never are. We are all engineers and craftsmen though, and as such can appreciate work of other craftsmen.

Once, looking for a titanium menorah, of all things, I found a website of Abrasha. Even though he does not list his prices, I clearly can’t afford his work. I’ll have to fashion my own titanium menorah, out of titanium tubing, like a jedi knight building his(or her) lightsabre.

While I was browsing about, I watched an amazing video that he has on the website. In it, he says:

“People call me a jeweler, I don’t. I call myself a goldsmith. To me a jeweler is a merchant, a person who buys and sells jewelry. I don’t. I design and make jewelry as it was done hundreds of years ago. I feel myself almost like a modern day fetish maker or a shaman, people come to me personally and get my work for other reasons than they get work at Tiffany’s or Macy’s or through a catalog. There’s a quality of my work that speaks to people.”

Boy, is he right. His work speaks, and it speaks directly to me. There are just so many things that are resonating with me: he is working on a series of 100 pins, just like I work on my 100 Views of the Empire State Building. He uses titanium and other unobtanium, which is a minor obsession of mine. He is inspired by Japanese art. He pays attention to the parts of his work that nobody will ever see, just like I always try to.

I highly suggest that you watch the video and look through the slideshow of Abrasha showing the process of making jewelry. This is pure engineering erotica. In particular, the slideshow for making the Pachinko Ball Bracelet is amazingly clever. I especially liked the part closer to the end where he makes the gold rivets line up. The gold rivets are my favorite feature of his work – I love elements of construction that are both structural and decorative at the same time.

Overheard Inside The Stainless Steel Worm

A slightly non-standard conductor’s announcement:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a red signal against us” (instead of the usual “ahead of us”).

Fellow passengers use slang from a certain industry:
“West 4th is the money stop” (because so many people get off there. Budum-pum.)

Another Disjointed Post In Which The True Owners Of America’s Senior Citizens are Revealed

I have about 30-40 very exciting posts planned, but don’t have the time or willpower to actually sit down and write them. Besides, I should really be working on two very interesting projects.. Three very interesting pro.. No, actually five. The Spanish Inquisition should really give me some Ritalin. Anyways, meanwhile I need to dash off a small observational post. I mean without these and cat pictures a blog is not a blog, right?

I am using SharpMT, a very nice little Movable Type client, to write this. I hope having a client that is similar to awesome Semajic will improve my blogging frequency. But I am very much annoyed at the fact that in this day and age almost all of what The Joel calls “real-time spell checker(s) with wavy red underlines” do not understand html markup and wavy-underline all a href= ? I mean, the spellchercker in this MT client is bad enough to not understand the word “blog”, but Outlook and Outlook Express are not any better.

Hmm.. Where was I? Oh, right, observational post. Last Monday was a miserable rainy day. I was already a little late for work when I boarded my train. The train was slow as usual – people who are already late are not in a hurry, right? And then the conductor uttered the two words that make every NYC Subway rider groan. “Sick passenger”.

You see, if somebody faints on a train the train usually stays in the station until an EMT arrives. The EMT arrival times are amazingly fast in NYC and MTA even has a few of its own paramedics stationedat major stations, but the delay in getting the “sick passengers” of the train makes the trains stack up and forces the dispatchers to rerout them sometimes causing major delays. There is a passage about the “sick passengers” in Randy Kennedy’s awesome Subwayland : Adventures in the World Beneath New York. One of the interesting observations there is that the highest percentage of “sick passenger” incidents happens on Modays. Amen to that.

The train that I was on was rerouted to Penn Station. I got out right next to the theater that plays “Monty Python’s Spamalot”. The street was full of actors dressed up as knights and there was a SPAM truck involved in distribution of free Spamwitches. As I was already pretty late I did not even have time to indulge in taking a picture with the knights or in free luncheon meat.

Later in the week I finally had a big ol’ titanium screw screwed in where I used to have a tooth before. Now I have a titanium wedding ring, titanium watch, titanium glasses, titanium coffee tamper and a titanium implant.

Next day I was standing in front of a drugstore counter waiting for my antibiotic and painkiller prescription to be filled out. The drugstore had a really cool ScriptPro Robotic Prescription Dispensing System. It works kind of like one of those mainframe tape retrieval systems – a robotic arm moves around in a glassed in cabinet, scans compartment barcodes and dispenses pills into bottles. To think of it, I think I’ve seen modern backup handling systems like that too. I always wanted one of those for my bookshelves.

Two oldtimers seated in the corner were obsessively discussing their prescription plans. What drew my attention was an interesting choice of words they used to describe their relaionship to the plans – it was always “belong to”. Not once did they say “what plan did you have” – it was always “what plan did you belong to”.

It Takes All Kinds

Have you ever seen a Chairman of a 57.19 billion dollar company with a weblog? What’s interesting about his blog is not the run of the mill left-leaning political content, but the comments. Suckups, crackpots, business idea pitchers who are both suckups and crackpots. Makes for good reading.

By the way, this begs for an interesting question. Who is s the richets blogger in the world? Larry, Bill and Steve do not blog, Warren rants in his yearly reports, but technically that is not blogging. Pierre could probably win this contest.

Also of note: tree hugging, union friendly makers of Shit Be Gone Toilet Paper and Democrat bashing makers of W Ketchup equally benefit from capitalistic ideals of novelty product industry. As cool as these products sound, I try to make my purchasing decisions without involving politics. I don’t need the toilet paper because I have a fancy ass-washing Japanese robot toilet and I can’t have ketchup (which is mostly made out of corn syrup) because of my low carb diet. But I finally surrendered, and I am about to shell out a lot of money for the most expensive espresso machine ever. Which is …. is … is made in France.

Straight From The Horse’s Head

My wife pointed out this unusual plaque over the entrance of a skyscraper in lower Manhattan.

This thing just begs so many questions. Is it made out of zinc? Is there a lot of zinc in Jersey? Is zinc mining a profitable enough business to warrant building a skyscraper?

Turns out that New Jersey Zinc is now called Zinc Corporation of America after it was swallowed by Horsehead Industries.

But this only brings more questions. Was Horsehead Industries named after the hometown of the person who holds the leadership in number of comments in my blog according to ‘s LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.1? Does Neil Kurlander, Esq., Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Corporate Development of Spafinder.com who spent 10 years working for Horsheads industries enjoy his new job better?

Let this be a warning to you. Googling is a game nobody can win.

Poetry in Motion

Came up with this during my morning subway ride:

Magnetic flux in a white glass tube
Bounces greenish light
From stainless steel guts
Of a stainless steel worm
That travels beneath the waves.

An empty Greek cup
That held a drink
Of infusion of coffee beans
Is clenched in a hand of a woman who sleeps
Not seeing any dreams.

A holy book in hands of a man
Holds a promise of mystical lore
Wrapping words of wise men
Of time gone by
Around holier word of fore.

A cat in a box
With plastic doors
Looks outside with fear.
The stainless steel worm
Makes no sense
To a being with claws and hair.

Keys in a clip
On a belt of a man
In a jacket of steely-blue cloth
Can open doors
In a tower of grey
Containing amazing wealth.

A plastic red sack
With symbols of black
Carries cheap and expensive treats
That smell of a place
That is far, far away
Not connected by rails.

The ceramic song
Of passing stops
A swirling mosaic sets
In the minds of passengers riding the worm
That eats the electric thread.

Nitrogen Breathing Nuclear Hobos From Beneath Gotham

One of the things I like to think about when walking around Manhattan is what’s going on underneath the streets of big cities. There are amazing things happening there. Take for instance this amazing story that dredged up in the foul innards of Usenet. Unfortunately I only found one good book on the subject – Underneath New York.

So I still had to sift through the mind numbing chatter of Usenet to find out what is the deal with those liquid nitrogen tanks that are very common in the streets of Manhattan.

Apparently they use nitrogen to prevent underground fires and explosions. But who knows, there could be a race of nitrogen breathing creatures living there. Or it could be that city workers are making icecream down there.

Pure Gold I tell Ya

is pure gold. Brown and sometimes chunky gold. Workers in ‘s nightclub tell their stories. No stranger to toilet cleaning and puke cleanup myself (although not nearly as hardcore) I can fully appreciate the amazing poetic prose of and in :

“The Latex Gauntlet is probably the single most important piece of armor in the gnomish armory. They, along with a generous annointing of holy water, known to alchemists as “bleach”, can render powerless even the most foul and vicious attcks from excrementals and vomitzombies.”

“Had I known that the upcoming experience (lurking just beyond my sight, like some Lovecraftian THING living at the back of my Psyche) was even then unfolding in the Women’s bathroom ”

Titania-Mania

My Titanium fetish is well documented in my journal. Well, here’s more titanium stuff:

There’s this guy on an island off the coast of Canada who makes the best espresso machine tampers. A tamper is a little plunger that is used to pack coffee ground into a portafilter. Tamping is one of the most critical stages in making espresso. It’s almost impossible to get good espresso without proper tamping. In fact, I’ve never seen a barrista in New York do a proper tamp. The one reason why Starbucks coffee became more drinkable is because they use automatic machines these days that tamp the grounds themselves.

I don’t own a Reg Barber tamper because I already had and Ergo Packer, which is also very finely made and instead of having a flat bottom like all other professional tampers or rounded bottom like all the crappy ones, it has a very slightly curved one. “Very scientific!” would cry characters from this novel.

Anyway. Reg finally made a small batch of titanium tampers. Gotta get one.

Moving on. In the book “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”, Ben Rich mentioned a special set of titanium shot glasses that his boss used for drinking with the generals. You see, the awesom SR-71 Blackbird was the first plane made entirely out of titanium. I wonder who has those glasses now.

But these guys have excruciatingly pretty titanium stuff. Sake cups, mugs, beer glasses – all made out of titanium. Jewelry is also very nice.

They can even make a street sign out of titanium for ya.

You know, I don’t want a 1958 Plymouth Fury anymore. I don’t even want a 1948 Tucker Torpedo. All I want is a 1956 GM Firebird II, the first titanium body car with a gas turbine engine. Is that too much to ask for?