At Artists UK we recently received a handwritten letter from a prospective customer seeking information about a number of posters he was trying to get hold of. The letter was addressed to “Dear Sir or Madman”. Since then we have been trying to figure out which one of us is the Sir and which one is the Madman. The girls are out of the running for either title so it must be down to one of us guys to be Sir and another to be Madman. I quite like the idea of being Sir Keith (yes, that means you know who’s writing this one ) but the vote so far seems to be that I’m more likely to get the other title, although I’m sure that Madman Jim has a much better ring to it, but the consensus appears to be that he is more likely to be Sir Jim than I am to be Sir Keith. Oh well, Madman Keith it is then … at least until I can write a sentence with less than two “buts”in it

Someone was asking us today about Elric prints by a particular artist and although we are fairly sure they are not available we thought we’d check the artist’s own website just to be sure we haven’t missed something. Bash in the URL and up comes this blank screen with a “download plug-in” message. Didn’t have time for all that messing about so I left it and wondered at the logic of presenting a new visitor to your website with the choice to download software or go away!

Hmmmm?

Any prizes for suggesting the answer we came up with?

The only member of the Artists UK team who may have thought that a Flash Intro (especially without an obvious ‘Skip’ option) is a really good idea was Mitzi … and since she is the cat and we can only interpret her reaction from the purring she makes when she gets stroked, we decided that that was as close to unanimous as unanimous ever gets. Plus we decided that Mitzi would be extremely pleased at the mouse in unanimous

“Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink!”

No matter where you live in the world the tap water is somewhere on a scale of foul to undrinkable. The tap water where we live in the north of England seems to have been distilled from the perspirations of a camel’s gonads on a particularly hot day and then disguised with chlorine and flouride. For this reason we decided that before we start growing humps and getting ill-tempered we’d have a look around for some decent water to drink and make tea and coffee with. Carting bottled water from the supermarket soon made us realise that although a transformation to camelhood was less likely the lengthening of our arms from carrying all these heavy bottles might well get us access to the gorilla compound at London Zoo instead. As soon as we saw the danger signs of overbuying of peanuts and a desire to drink PG Tips instead of decent tea we decided enough was enough.

Searching the web we came across a company appropriately called Detox who sell a range of water purifiers. We’d found one we liked the look of but had a number of questions to be sure it was the right one for us. It wasn’t. I phoned up and a very friendly and professional guy called Simon explained the benefits of another system that he personally decided to switch to himself that you can see here. At £249 it is way below the normal retail price. The fitting is more of a DIY job than a plumbing job but even if you have a plumber it shouldn’t cost more than £80 to get it done unless you live in a small kennel on the top of a castle turret (in which case a large funnel and a barrel may do the trick until the acid rain gets to the point it eats through the funnel). The filters need changing once year (one of them) or twice a year (four of them) and this ends up at about £80 per annum. Sounds a lot but for around £1.55 a week you get almost absolutely pure water, far purer than any mineral water you can buy. Ask nicely and they’ll send you a free TDS meter so you can see for yourself how the tap water has a 200 - 400 total dissolved solids reading and your new little drinking water tap is coming in at between 8 and 20! How’s that! The tea tastes like real tea and not like you’ve made it with water from the local swimming pool. Coffee has a real aroma to it that is no longer flouride flavoured columbian. Apparently, if you break open the filter cartridges at the end of their life you can see what you used to be drinking … yuck! I think I might pass on that offer! So; just in case anyone was starting to feel that all I do is slag things off here and have a moan, let’s award full marks to the people at Detox!

We should have info soon from artist Ed Org regarding his autumn shows and fairs. The summer was a bit of a washout as you can imagine and especially because several of his shows were in flooded areas and in one case his stall was under several feet of water. He might draw a lot of nice mermaids but that is getting ridiculous! Here’s hoping his autumnal excursions are blessed with better, or at least a bit dryer, weather. You can buy Ed Org prints here.