This is a short video my Grandpa made this weekend, as an entry for this BBC competition, demonstrating the system he devised for detecting whether my Gran’s car was in the garage or not.
This is far from his first invention; it accompanies his remote controlled garage door opener, for example, which long-predates the commercial kind. His system is, like the mauve car detector, made out of wire coat-hangers and other household stuffs. His genius even lent itself to one of my most reputable album covers, as I mentioned on this blog at the time, by offering me engineering advice on how to make the lights from the Now More Than Ever artwork.
When he sent this video through to the family this weekend, we were all taken aback by how brilliant it is. My dad hit the nail on the head: “It helps to explain so much about me, you, my life and pretty much everything!”.
And that’s why I’m posting it here!
I live in Rickmansworth. It isn’t really fair to call it my motherland; I just couldn’t resist the alliteration! I might not have been born or brought up here, but I have been living here for a good few years now and am kinda attached to it. In fact, the townspeople seem to like having me here too, as every May, they get together and celebrate ‘Ricky Week’!
At Ricky Week a couple of years back, the church at the bottom of my street opened its tower to the public, so Lilly and I went up there as it offered a nice view over our village. While we were up there, I overheard an older fella muttering about how the village has been ruined by all the modern architecture.
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I should probably write about the things that influence me more often. A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered The Secret Life of Machines, a Channel 4 TV series from the late eighties / early ninties. I used to watch this with my Dad when I was really small- it was on TV when I was between the ages of 2-7 apparently (!) – and despite being so young, it clearly made an impression on my tiny mind!
Here is a clip from the show, where Tim Hunkin describes what the concrete ballast in a washing machine is for, with the assistance of Rex Garrod:
Genius. They picked such an expressive washing machine for the demonstration too! It’s great watching this stuff again as the longstanding lines of influence are pretty apparent. For example, here’s a series of post-it notes from 2007 that bear a subtle resemblance to the above clip:
Which is a concept I revisited last week:
Now there’s an idea that is going somewhere!
Anyway! If you like washing machines, you can see more of my washing-machine-related daily artwork by clicking here, or if you just like machines in general, you can find links to watch more of the secret life of machines on Tim Hunkin’s website.