Organised chaos

As is frequently the case I'm indebted to Norman Blogster  for the Hema site.

Give it a second or two to get going and you'll see why I also suggest this url . It's one of the Japanese Rube Goldberg Championships. And there is some more of the same here and here and here.

You may get sniffy and say, surely it's really Heath Robinson, but Robinson and Goldberg were more or less contemporaries. And hey, we're just a colony.

This chain reaction stuff has a distinguished postwar lineage. Some of you will remember Heinz Wolf's tv series, The Great Egg Race and that fantastic Honda ad, The Cog at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGngcQb_0qg. There is, I think, a pre-war Dada original, but the seminal version is Fischli and Weiss's 1987 Der Lauf der Dinge. The video is called The Way Things Go and, to give you a flavour, there's a four minute clip of the half hour original.