The Playpump 


The Playpump

So far as I know ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) wasn't formally described when I was a kid; perhaps I just wasn't paying attention. At my age, I'm safely out of reach of a diagnosis. But really, why bother? The Internet is perfect for the likes of me, because the disorder really amounts to paying attention to too many things. It's not truly a deficit of attention, rather a deficit in sustaining attention towards stuff that isn't terrribly interesting for sufficient amounts of time.

From the perspective of my school desk I'd check-in occasionally to see whether the lesson might capture my attention. Sometimes it must have, nevertheless my most vivid memories are more likely to be the views out the windows from where I sat, or ideas I thought walking my way to school, or sensations like swinging very high or riding my bike very fast.

The invention pictured, the Playpump is brilliant.

Cavorting on a roundabout has always been fun for children. Now pure, clean borehole water can be pumped into water storage tanks while the playground roundabout equipment is in use. The Play-Pump is a specifically designed and patented playground roundabout that drives conventional borehole pumps, keeping costs and maintenance to an absolute minimum, while entertaining the children.

Imagine the sastisfaction children must feel knowing their turning the roundabout is pumping clean water into the storage tank above them.

The tank also provides staging for billboards. It looks the one in the picture promotes delicious and nutritious sliced white bread, enriched no doubt.

Four landscape billboards screen the tank creating an advertising opportunity. Two sides are used for health messages and the other two sides are rented out as billboards for commercial messages. This advertising revenue ensures ongoing maintenance and sustainability of each project.

So it turns out the advertising is a good thing,not unlike the advertising banner on the Hippo Roller.

Where to place advertisements is quite and open question these days. Click fraud as a recent Wired Magazine ominously predicts "May Swallow the Net." Some people are dastardly clever. If I were filthy rich, I suppose advertisements would be something I would buy, and billboards across Africa seem wonderful ad placement. I wonder what to put on them? Since I have to wonder, it's no wonder I don't have the money to do it anyway.

Most of us, even the very wealthy among us live with ads we have no choice about. Earlier this evening I was looking at a friend's photos at Flickr. He's often very clever about tagging or as sometimes called, disambiguation, a word I like saying just to feel my mouth move. Ornithagalum is another word I like. While there are many species of this pretty flowering bulb O. nutans commonly known as Star of Bethlehem is the most familiar to me. It's something of a pest, having spread over a wide area near my little house. As the bulbs divide and crowd each other, flowering is reduced. So the odd result is that the more I try removing them from garden beds the more flowers I get. I also notice that O. nutans is listed on the handy Web page Plants That Poison put up as a public service of the good folks at the World Chelonian Trust, whose mission it is: "to promote the conservation and assure the survival of all tortoises and freshwater turtles."

Oh yes, about my friend's photos at Flickr. They are marvelous, of course, and often the way he disambiguates them (tags) is poetry. And tonight I discovered that the ads on the page relate to his images and tags. What I must conclude from that is for advertisers there is no disorder in ADD!

More attentive bloggers than I made some especially good posts for the New Year. I still have a slow dial-up Internet connection, for those with faster connections, SoundRoots is a blog to know. This Year-End post is worth checking out without delay. It's a list of top world music recordings for 2005 with sound files.

BagnewsNotes is a favorite. Michael Shaw provides analysis and critique of images in the news and the comments left about the posts are some of the most thoughtful around. This December 30th post captured my attention. I especially enjoyed linking to two Washington Post articles by Frank Van Riper about the photographic techniques of David Burnett. This one about Burnett using the Speed Graphic and this one about using Holga, inexpensive plastic cameras from China.