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I Forge Iron

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I used to use the pun as a tag line on my cards. "If it ain't forged it ain't real." And the rest of it. Bummer was it wasn't effective, most folk didn't get it. I ended up going with "Stuff done with metal." which worked nicely.

 Frosty The Lucky.

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Never underestimate the ability of people to misunderstand.  I once had business cards saying, "George Monsson, smith" (note the small s in smith) and often got communications addressed to Mr. Monsson-Smith.  

I was once visiting my folks in Chicago and asked my mother for the big Chicago Yellow Pages.  She asked me what I was looking for and I told her I wanted to look for forging tools.  She got upset because she thought I meant the fraudulent meaning.

Since jokes, humor, puns, etc. are based on a shared knowledge, experience, and world view it probably isn't surprising that people with different frames of reference don't catch the intent of a joke, pun, meme, etc..

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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My work will have to improve to be a Forgery, right now it's a Joke, a real bad one at that.  

 

Being misunderstood is so easy these days.  Went into the little rural P. O. with my required mask on, when the post mistress asked how I was doing I said fine but  haven't seen so many masks since I gave up Robbing Banks,   A lady standing at the window heard it turned looked at me and raced to the door and flew out of the parking lot leaving her mail behind.     The Postal Lady said she would be exp[aining that tomorrow when her husband comes in. 

 

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Jokes and humor can only be understood if everyone can see both sides of the comments.  Many comments can be interpreted in multiple ways. You need to review all the ways and then choose which you feel applies to the situation.  Even then, your choice may not be the proper one based on the intent of the person making the comment.  Add in different countries, different languages, different cultures, etc and it can become a real problem trying to communicate on a straight forward manner.  

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I spend a fair amount of my time trying to track down viable manufacturers of weird stuff that Architects stick in their designs.  It's generally a two to three phase process.  The first phase is trying to identify the correct term for whatever the weird thing is.  The second phase is trying to identify the market that the weird thing is directed towards.  The third phase is often a long slow process of trying to get the maker(s) of weird things to answer two very simple questions.  #1 How much does it cost?  #2 How long does it take to get?

In 99 out of 100 cases, if the Architect used the correct terms to describe the weird thing, or it's intended market, it would be instantly found.  

Here's a good example.

We have a project where we're installing a lot of pole lighting at a mall.  There are couple of poles with these weird projector heads on them pointing at an amphitheater.  They're not theatrical lighting fixtures, and they're not your typical pole lights.  The Architect asked for an accessory to these projectors and the only description was arbor something or other.

The arbor people don't have a thing to do with pole lights, or stage lighting.  They make these cast metal discs that have cut outs shaped like a tree.  All sorts of tree species.  They're generally installed in front of windows and skylights where they cast a tree shaped shadow on your floor.

It turns out that the Architect didn't intend for the projector heads to hit the stage, they wanted them pointed at the ground in front of the stage!  I suspect that the arbor people used a similar setup at a trade show to illustrate the effect of their discs.

With all that said, if the Architect had used the term "Shadow Art" we would have found these things rather quickly.  

 

 

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Heh, heh, heh. One of my hats on the drill crew was expediter. Ever try to locate a tool when the guys ordering it were calling it something a different tool was called by the guys they learned from maybe 50 years earlier? 

You should've seen the look on their faces when I actually ordered "Fishtail" bits rather than a hollow stem pilot bit. And there are lots of those but they'll work unlike a "fishtail" bit. They retired needing someone else to order their tools and equipment because they couldn't or wouldn't learn the correct terms. Nobody makes slang tool catalogs. 

Another one I LOVE is, "What it means to me." is just gibberish to everybody else. <sigh>

 Frosty The Lucky.

 

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Oh foreign slang can be so entertaining it almost hurts. Sometimes leaves bruises and knife wounds even. Olivia Newton John on the Johnny Carson show is a classic of innocent slang one place being really insulting elsewhere. It happened at the Americas Cup race when it was held in Australia too. The newsies trying to interview average folk watching were really catching grief, even slaps. It turned out "Who are you rooting for?"  has or had an entirely different meaning down under.

Recombobulating books are everywhere and there are various approaches to recombobulization, chemicals seems to be preferred over mechanical or electrical devices in general. Be suspicious of universal combobulaterators though, any device that does everything does nothing well.

 Frosty The Lucky.

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Put up another piece of equipment on craigslist: Local, Cash, Text Only, No Emails!  So far a text from a NYC area code and one from a Los Angeles Area code telling me they can't text send an email..."Fish gotta Swim, birds gotta fly, Scammers gotta scam, I don't know why..."   So more a case of "words ignored"  rather than "not needed".

 

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On 6/1/2020 at 12:52 PM, rockstar.esq said:

  They make these cast metal discs that have cut outs shaped like a tree.  All sorts of tree species.  They're generally installed in front of windows and skylights where they cast a tree shaped shadow on your floor.

I used similar things for casting shadows in the photography studio but they were called scrims or less commonly gobo's for go betweens. They attached to the front of the speedlights between the light source and subject, hence go between. The proper term in photography though is scrim. 

Pnut

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In the theater world, a scrim is a loosely woven cloth that is hung between two parts of the set, usually dividing the upstage from the downstage. When the downstage side is lit, it appears to the audience to be a solid backdrop; when lit from the back, it disappears. It's an easy way to make a set change without having to actually move anything.

The term gobo is pretty common in the theater for what you describe. Very useful for creating foliage effects and the like, especially if you play with the focus of the light to create different degrees of fuzziness or sharpness.

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pnut,

Thank you for sharing those terms.  "gobo" for go between is exactly the sort of wordplay nobody outside of that industry would know!

I seem to recall the shaping apparatus on the end of a theatrical light being called a "snoot". 

There's an absolutely enormous chasm separating theatrical lighting and "normal" lighting from the perspective of an electrician.  The people involved with making, selling, and controlling theatrical lighting operate as though they've never even considered the possibility that they might need to work with an electrical contractor to build a theater.  In my area, they certainly don't comprehend fussy details like deadlines, or understandable proposals. 

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working at the coliseum I deal with both sides, commercial/industrial wiring on one hand, and theatrical/stage on the other for the shows and the people from the one side are mostly clueless about the other hands demands, and dont even try to explain building code to anyone

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2 hours ago, Steve Sells said:

working at the coliseum I deal with both sides, commercial/industrial wiring on one hand, and theatrical/stage on the other for the shows and the people from the one side are mostly clueless about the other hands demands, and dont even try to explain building code to anyone

Steve,

I think this is a failure of engineering on all sides.  Several years back, I was bidding on a modest middle school remodel in Denver.  There was a bit of work in the school's theater.  One key-note on a single page of the plans referred to some kind of dimmer.  I ran the make and model to ground, eventually working my way from the manufacturer, to reps, to vendors, etc.  My search ended with a theatrical lighting rep working in Las Vegas.  Her proposal was over $200K, and really didn't make any sense at all. To look at the construction documents, you'd think this thing was a 2' square box.  Turns out it's a five ton theatrical dimming monstrosity that requires dedicated cooling, sound proofing, and a reinforced concrete foundation!

Naturally, the design team didn't bother to consider any of that when they stuck it in a broom closet.  According to the Rep, "someone from Denver" reached out to her six months prior to ask a few questions, then disappeared.  As far as I can tell, nobody on the design team spent any effort beyond throwing a "gotcha" note where no reasonable person would looking for it.  I'm guessing that one of the General Contractors made a special effort to line-item that cost just so the Denver Schools people couldn't pretend to overlook a $200K difference in bid amounts.

Three months after that deadline, it was back out to bid.  Out of morbid curiosity, I downloaded the plans to see what they updated.  This time, there were twenty five pages of plans showing how the theatrical lighting comes together!  Along with all of that was an addendum from the school system basically asking the bidders to make suggestions to get the job back in budget.  

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