Sunday 27 March 2011

PR Wingpower

I'm giving the moths a rest this weekend, not just because it's gone colder but to avoid over-trapping. I don't know if this is a real danger - Ben & Co, advice welcome - but it seems common sense not to bring the same specimens to light over and over again. They mostly just doze away but it isn't a natural experience for them. Here instead is an advert from The Economist which caught my eye. A curious combination: butterflies and plastic car parts.


Top marks, though, to the designer who sorted the arrangement. It made me think nostalgically of tapes, which is where I used to see the initials BASF. I'll be most impressed if any reader knows what they stand for. Check out the company's interesting entry on Wikipedia to find out.

I said I was giving the moths a rest but that isn't entirely true. In order to show my mother-in-law and brother-in-law the felled trunks of our frost-destroyed Cordyline australis, one of thousands of such victims currently a sad sight in the north of the UK, I turned on our back door's outside light. Within minutes, a moth was fluttering suicidally close to both the light and an adjacent web spun by a cunning spider. Sorry the picture is so poor, but you should be able to make out both moth (to the right) and strands of web. I just checked this morning, and I am pretty sure it escaped.


I am recycling the Cordyline as (a) tree house thatch, using the leaves, as mentioned a few posts below (b) a raft modelled on Kon Tiki using the fibrous trunks and (c) also using the trunks, a floating platform for a duck and drake who have settled on our pond and may need somewhere fox-free to nest. You can read more about this on the Guardian's new Northerner blog btw, though now that the clocks have gone forward (have you remembered..?) you may not have the time.

3 comments:

Banished To A Pompous Land said...

Funny, BASF used to be a supplier in my past career as a dyer, the analine bit of the name.

Then the Portsmouth VA site was a client of mine over this side of the pond. Before it closed. Not my fault guvner honest.

Interesting that over the last few years the companies that came out of IG Farben after WWII have been tending to drift back together again thanks to buyouts, mergers and product rationalisations.

Anonymous said...

It's had a chequered history hasn't it, but pretty impressive to have survived so long and be so huge today. ICI, where are you..? Whatever happened to Sir John Harvey-Jones..?

Banished To A Pompous Land said...

Where and whatever indeed. Thats my old employer we are talking about. ICI fought off Lord Hanson in the early 80s but in the end they did his job for him and dismantled themselves.

Which was the time of course when I met Oor Gurdy, If we'd known then...