And 1666 was an annus horribilis by any account (apart from that of one John Dryden, (how the much random information can one brain possibly store?))… still, we’ve replaced those problems with other, similar problems… and now we have these:

Which are really quite beautiful pill dispensers from the creative powerhouse that is Hans Alexander Huseklepp who’s website doesn’t provide a way of copying and pasting anything, which makes me feel slightly insane around the edges, but I’ll be fine. Not to worry, I’ll be fine.

He’s from Norway and these pill-dispensers are remarkably similar to pomanders:

from giveawayboy@flickr

Which were once used to ward of foul-vapourf, as well as the Plague, back in 1666.

Didn’t work terribly well I wouldn’t have thought, but they’ve kindof morphed into Christmas decorations etc now… if you were ever wondering where these things came from, now you know.

Obviously there’s a whole Flickr group devoted to them… because the amount of random information that The Universal Mind can hold, is truly staggering.

Strangely enough though, when you google pomander cloves and look at the large pictures, you get page after page of this:

Which is composed of:

from and by:

In case you thought I was making it up.

Here’s a silver one from Wikipedia:

A pen with which you can write with blood, and who can honestly say they haven’t at some point needed one of those? Anyone can “say it with flowers”. Saying it with blood shows true commitment.

Anyway, (obviously) this reminded me of that, the “that” in question being this:

(from www.robotlab.de)

Which brings us back to the source… we’re currently experiencing a second Guttenburg Shift... the revolution that happened about 500 years ago is happening again… and there’s a beautiful circularity in the idea that one of the first things to be restored in the new wave, is something that was destroyed by the last… the printing of individually written, illuminated bibles.

And as a principle it holds. The printing press was a tool of mass-production from a single genotype/ideotype… the revolutions that came in its wake were (more often than not) also to do with mass production from single genotypes. The phase we’re entering is returning to one-off production from a single, (or multiple) geno/ideotypes.

The last time around, the people who got knocked sideways were those that attempted to monopolise the distribution and interpretation of the Christian geno/ideotype. This time around it’s people who try to monopolise geno/ideotypes full stop… and they’re getting hit from two directions – 1) they can no longer control their own “Intellectual Property” and 2) their consumers are increasingly more interested in producing their own.

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So… (and I’m not going to do it myself), if any of you feel suitably commited, you could write a bible in blood and sell it to a goth for a million dollars.