News 2 – Helium release

12.1.2008 #2 – Helium release

There were quite a few behind the scenes or ‘housekeeping’ fixes here, including the conversion (finally) of our Transformers, Matchbox Cars, Smurf, and Strawberry Shortcake groups and members.

That’s about it.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

News 1 – Hydrogen release

21.12.2007 #1 – Hydrogen release

(The Big Bang.)

Kollecta is born. Again.

But with a bit more finesse this time.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

Mark and Microphonies

Collecting is different things to different people. Am I a collector, gatherer, hoarder, accumulator, or none of the above? Hmm. Some people collect to make a profit, some to simply ‘get the whole set’, others to step back in time. Yes. The act of thinking, searching, finding, evaluating, remembering a specific object… that is also a form of collecting. Let me give you a personal example.

The first record I ever bought was ‘Microphonies‘ by Cabaret Voltaire. Microphonies was released in 1984 on glorious cheap vinyl, through the Virgin Records label. Many hailed the album as ‘groundbreaking in its field’ which could mean absolutely anything you wanted it to. I still rate it in my Top 10 Albums of All Time though. It had two tracks released as singles (‘Sensoria’ and ‘James Brown’), both on 7″ and 12″. Both had great B-sides (‘Cut the damn camera’ and ‘Bad Self Part 2’) making the records double A-sides, really. The video for the 12″ version of ‘Sensoria’ appeared on a Cabs’ VHS release (Betamax had already been floored like HD-DVD this month), mixed in with another track from the album, ‘Do right’.

I could go on and on but that’s part of my point. I know a lot about Cabaret Voltaire’s recordings. So do a lot of people. But what makes it all special, is my copy. The ‘me’ in ‘my copy’. When I bought it. How much I paid for it. Why I bought it. How it introduced me to new sounds, and new people. And what was happening in my life when I bought it.

Early in the week that I bought the LP my friend Mark, a forklift driver at the produce market where I worked, played a tape of Cabaret Voltaire to me in his car. Most of it was pre-1981 Cabs, and to be honest, most of it was (still is) a tough pill to swallow, even after a few drinks. Not many Philharmonic Orchestras that I know of include ‘Nag nag nag’ or ‘Photophobia’ in their set lists. The two tracks at the end of Mark’s tape changed that. They were from their 1983 album, ‘The Crackdown’ and were much more… palatable. I remember Mark’s words very clearly: “You get yourself some Cabaret Voltaire, put on the early experimental tracks, the chicks will cringe. Put on the recent stuff after that, they’ll be all over you. Works a charm.” I laughed to myself.

And then went to get me some of this ‘Cabaret Voltaire’.

My copy of ‘Microphonies’ came from a second hand record store. The hand-scrawled price on the sticker was five dollars. The bottom left corner of the sleeve had a coffee cup stain on it. I argued successfully to the disinterested store owner that it should be reduced to four dollars. The store, the record and its sleeve, even the gum-popping goth behind the counter – all of it had a warm, musty smell to it. Very ‘High Fidelity‘.

It was a special day. Outside, it was hosing rain as well as inside the store, over in the dark corner marked ‘Alternative and Other’. They had a bucket to catch the ping-ping-pings as they dropped from the ceiling, and a plastic sheet to protect Neil Diamond and Glen Campbell in the neighbouring ‘Easy Listening’ section. I went back to work (after taking the opportunity to also pick up a copy of OMD’s ‘Architecture and Morality’ – three dollars – essential listening) to show my Mark my new purchase.

When I arrived, I could see Mark was having woman trouble. He was in his car, grovelling to his soon to be ex-girlfriend. She was screaming at him to take his ‘Cabarette Vulgars’, his ‘Monica’ who that morning called their flat three times asking for him, and shove them all somewhere dark and odious.

So there you are. Cabaret Voltaire didn’t sell millions of records, maybe thousands, but even so my little story is probably unique. I bet you have stories like it too, although yours probably won’t feature Mark, a clapped out Nissan with a cassette deck in dire need of a head clean, and the mysterious Monica who by all accounts had ‘slept with all of Hamilton’. You might have a special book, or toy, or stamp, or… whatever. What makes it special is you. Aww.

And that’s what Kollecta is all about. Yes, you can be a full-on Cabaret Voltaire nut who knows that New Zealand was the only country where ‘Drinking Gasoline’ was released as a single record played at 33rpm, rather than 2 x 45rpm records. Cool. Or you might be the kind of person who just has the one Cabs’ record and the memory attached to it, and you want to relive and share that memory. Cool too. Kollecta is also for you – welcome.

Add it, got it, want it, rate it, value it, recommend it, share it, live it. Kollecta it.

And Mark – if you’re reading this – I left my Simple Minds compilation in your car……..

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

Collecting Chemicals

Last week we dealt with collecting insects, which were simple to collect in light of this week’s potential collection: the chemical elements.

Sure, there are hundreds of thousands of insects, so you’d need a big house and a lot of patience to build your collection, but at least you can see everything you’re collecting. Insects aren’t invisible like gases, won’t explode violently if you get them near water or air (the alkali metals), and don’t radio-fry you if you get too close to them.

Finding, classifying, and collecting elements has been a popular pasttime of mankind for millennia. Like Maggie the Kollecta Magpie, Homo sapiens has always had an eye for shiny things including gold and silver. As a Roman, relaxing while deciding where next to invade, your legionnaires could be putting a grand shine on your beaten copper breastplate or their tin kettle. Back in those days, a collection of elements was pretty simple. It was basically metals – the aforementioned, plus iron, lead and the strangest and most deadly of them all, liquid mercury.

In the 13th century, arsenic was unearthed and in the 17th some poor soul, no doubt working by candlelight into the wee small hours, discovered phosphorus. He was no match for Martin Klaproth, however, who pulled off a hat-trick of elements around 1789 – zirconium, strontium, and uranium, the latter named after the recently-found furtherest planet in the Solar System – Uranus. This feat of three in a row was next repeated in 1898 by Sir William Ramsay who raised the bar somewhat – his elements were all invisible gases! And no Emperor’s clothes here, thank you very much. These were very real. One of his discoveries was most illuminating, one useful in flashing, and the third was the base of the only known substance that could down the Man of Steel (answers at the bottom of this post).

In between all of that one-up-manship (“Mine’s a liquid, how’s that!”, “Mine has double the atomic mass of yours!”, “Mine glows in the dark!” – The Curies), various suckers for punishment tried to catalogue and order the increasing collection of elements, many killing themselves through igniting, watering, heating and tasting. Nothing like a little Rubidium Roulette to make chemistry a little less boron (ouch).

Lavoisier had the first stab in 1789, but his market strategy was poor and like Beta video tape, never really saw the light of day. A chap named Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois proposed an impressive sounding ‘telluric helix’, and while that alone would sound great in any sci-fi flick (c.f.’flux capacitor’), his name was simply too much of a mouthful to say. Like the promised-so-much laser disc, the theory was doomed from the start.

A man called Mendeleev piped up, suggesting that similar elements should be grouped together because they responded to similar things in similar ways. And, based on his back-of-the-napkin scrawlings, there were gaps between known elements… and he hypothesised that these were elements that were yet to be discovered. Give that man a Nobel (gas). The Periodic Table was born.

The world of science erupted when the Periodic Table Show came to town. T’was a cheeky cabaret featuring 60 scantily clad ladies of dubious repute (one for each element shown in the Table). Them harlots did all form pairs and octets as they twirled around the tables like valence shells, teasing and cajoling those loose, free electrons in a most inappropriate manner! Oh, what a night! Seriously, Mendeleev’s idea was great – it was here, it was now, it was happening, it made sense. And the right people pushed it in the right places. Like VHS, kind of. Since then, the collection of elements has grown rapidly – to around 160, give or take a half-life. They’re very popular too, don’t you know. To this day, most households would contain around a third of all known elements, if you know where to look.

Neon, tungsten, lead, nickel in your lights. Americanium in those smoke detectors, copper in your pipes, calcium in your milk. Mercury in Grandma’s old thermometer, polonium in the spark plugs of Grandad’s old truck. Don’t even start me on cigarettes. Titanium and other metals are fashionable in jewellery and bicycle spokes, and lithium features in rechargeable batteries, anti-depressants, and as a classic track on Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’.

So there you are, a most popular collection.

Every home should have one.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

(answers: neon, xenon, krypton)

Order, order…

Continuing from last week’s Outliers post, I’m going to consider some of the more extreme things one could collect. Think not ‘extreme’ as in extreme sport, where goatee-bearded men on motorcycles roar off a 100 metre ramp only to rejoin their machines (after somersaults and a quick guzzle of the Sponsor’s product) three minutes later in another State. Think ‘extreme’ as in extreme possibilities.

Think animals. It would be rather daunting to collect the whole set – there seems to be an awful lot of them. Let’s see, you’ve got your five animal kingdoms, they each contain a number of phyla, which in turn contain classes. A class has orders, they hold families, which contain genuses (not geniuses – very few families have those), before you finally drop down to species level. Oh, and sub-species. Hmm.

In terms of collecting animals, many categories are kind of self limiting. Take giraffes. They’re gorgeous and most people would love to have one as a pet. Collecting-wise, there aren’t that many different species of them, you can’t get them at your local pet store, and they’re also very large – out of reach of most collectors. On the other side of the vast taxonomical savannah, however, is something more accessible. More collectable. Insects.

In a square mile of farmland, it has been suggested, there are more insects than all of the people on Earth. Chances are, there’d be a fair few in your backyard too – so you’re already an insect collector… probably without even realising it.

What they lack in size, insects make up in sheer numbers. Over 80% of all known species are insects. There’s an insect for everyone, and everyone knows an insect. Maybe it’s one of the 1,400 types of flea tagging along on your dog, the 1,900 types of termite undermining your foundations, or the 6,000 types of roach documented thus far. And they’re just the niche bugs.

Let’s assume an average sized insect is two centimetres long, and it would fit (with spacing around the outside) in a glass-lidded specimen box maybe four by five centimetres, and maybe two centimetres deep. If you were collecting Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) like this, you’d just fit all 150,000 of them in a generously-sized home. Of course, they’d cover every wall, floor to ceiling, and you could forget about windows or doors. If your partner had a thing for Orthoptera (grasshoppers, around 20,000 species), you could kiss the floor goodbye as well.

Should you possess a complete collection of Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), you could put unique species end to end and they would stretch across the Golden Gate bridge. All 2.3 kilometres of it.

And, if you had one of each of the 370,000 types of beetle (Coleoptera), all in their little wooden specimen boxes, they’d pack out a double decker bus.

Nearly.

You’d still have room for a giraffe.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

Outliers

Collectors are outliers. Not out-and-out liars, except maybe to their partners when confronted with how much their latest collectable cost (limited edition of 211, released on one day only in a remote Norwegian fishing village). No, I mean they’re statistical outliers.

Statistics are a useful tool in understanding our world, although it has been said that 43% of all statistics are meaningless, so caveat collector. Loosely put, a statistical outlier is as an ‘occasional or infrequent observation in data that differs significally from its co-data’. Collectors turn the statistical world on its head. On Planet Collector, outliers rule. Weird is normal. Up is down. Expect the unexpected.

Try this. If you ask some people to name the top ten things that “people collect”, this is more or less the list you’d likely get back:

Books | Coins | Comics | DVDs | Music | Toys | Stamps | Sports Memorabilia (Your results may vary. Serving suggestion only.)

Look at the list again. Yes, I know there are only eight items there, but this only serves to strengthen my next point. There exists quite a narrow view on what humans out there actually collect – this is the middle-of-the-road stuff that one might assume fills a home’s spare room. And, the 20 million people who collect stamps would probably agree.

Look at the list again. Read between the lines, those little pipe characters that hide somewhere on the Eastern key-Bord. Each of those pipes represents a huge iceberg, and the text either side represents the thumb-sized tip of that mountain of ice. For every ‘normal’ collection type, there’re thousands of outliers, quietly sitting under the surface, lurking just off our radars. You’ll only find the outliers if you go looking. And the more you look, the more you find, and the more you’re surprised. You might know an outlier without having ever realised it. Don’t panic. They may otherwise be quite normal.

I’m talking about people who collect Gundam, jars, butterflies, flags, vintage walkie-talkies, speeding tickets, Durutti Column, newspapers, shells, frogs, autographs, soda cans, Atari, smurfs, costumes, Babylon 5, number plates, fountain pens, Toby mugs, kites, Warhammer, fishing flies, Asuka and Rei, beetles, Blythe, earrings, and coat-hangers.

Yes, there is someone out there who collects coat-hangers. In fact, there are three suspension de vêtements enthusiasts:

1. Bob Browning (see photo).

2. Penelope Cruz – yes, she apparently collects coat-hangers.

3. Someone in a remote Norwegian fishing village.

I’d like all three to join Kollecta. I’ll tackle the third person, if anyone out there knows Bob or Penny, please let me know.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

The second post

This is the second post. Hopefully it’s not going to be as painful as an author struggling through that difficult, second novel. What does one write about, in this terrifying second post? The weather? (16 degrees Celsius, light nor-westerly, some cloud developing with a 60% chance of showers in the evening). How your pet looks this morning? (Happy, the Kollecta mascot).

Anyway. One of the main challenges in getting Kollecta to reach its goal will be in reaching its audience. How will the ‘right people’ for Kollecta find it, in among the plethora of white noise and distractions that paradoxically confuses yet is the beauty of the Internet? Initially, it’s going to be very difficult – moreso than writing that second novel (but that’s another story).

Someone I know says starting a new website is like standing on Pluto, holding a candle, and hoping someone on Earth will see it. (Pluto, incidentally, lost the vote to retain its planet status – there are now officially eight planets in the Solar System). And, ignoring the technicalities of 1: how would you get to Pluto to light such a candle, and 2: a candle would not light because the atmosphere is not conducive to naked flames, he’s right. How’s anyone ever going to find Kollecta?

There’s good old Google, of course, the Jupiter of the Search Engine Solar System, followed by Uranus Yahoo, and hanging on for dear life (should it also be shunned by the community forever), MSN Pluto. There are other means too, ranging from forums and usergroups, you – yes, you – reading this blog, photocopying fliers or wearing a T-shirt shamelessly plugging my site. Pounding the streets in a sandwich-board, weather permitting. I will do what it takes. And, should Branson announce he’s starting trips to Pluto, I will be one of the first aboard.

I have my tattered suitcase stuffed full of candles, ready to go.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

The first post

Every story has a beginning. Every story has an end. This is this story’s beginning. I haven’t started working on the end yet.

For those that collect things, the end is always tantalisingly in sight. And bittersweet; it’s also the beginning. There are always more things to collect.

Welcome to my Blog. I run Kollecta. It’s just starting. Kollecta is a web site for people who collect things. That means everyone. There are 65,812 sites out there for collectors. That’s true. How will Kollecta be different? One word – Warmth. Yes, I gave it a capital, because it’s Very Important. True collectors have a Warmth to them, and it’s that Warmth I want to filter onto the site. Warmth, you say? I’m talking about the difference between a light bulb and a fluorescent tube. The difference between a valve amplifier and a transistorised version. A home-cooked meal with friends and McTasteless in the city. That kind of Warmth.

True collectors also have Passion. There’s another capital. Real Passion, the kind you see in people who travel 420 miles to attend a collecting convention. People who can tell the difference between the English and U.S.pressings of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” 12″ single. People who aren’t complete until their collection is.

Well, that’s it for the first post. I just wanted to draw a line in the sand and go from there. I’d like you to join me on the Kollecta ride. Please do. It’s going to be fun.
Barney

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]