I present a non-smoking sign found in several places in the hallways of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

There are 47 different member nations in the Council, and many of them have found different ways of drawing a cigarette with a circle through it - including some squares.

The guy second from the right looks like he’s going through withdrawal shakes.

And … I swear I see a Barbapapa in one of those signs.

It has to be a tough day, sitting in a folding lawn chair in a public square, a dozen or your artworks displayed on easels or pedestals around you.

Which is why I feel for the forty-odd artists packing the Place Broglie in Strasbourg this Sunday.

Because the people walking this square have distinctly bourgeois tastes, and they’re letting it show.

Now, I am the last person to claim authority, taste or style when it comes to art.

But even I can tell that most of the people here are drawn by the physical qualities of some pieces of art, not their inspiration, their execution or presentation.

What do I mean? They’re shopping for art that will fill a space and impress their friends.

That means a big crowd around the lady who applies photoshop filters to her photos of lone wolves on the horizon, or a fishing shack on a beach. That her photos are mounted in a relatively popular 1:6 proportion doesn’t hurt either.

Ditto for the graffiti artist actually creating near-photo portraits right here on the sidewalk.

“Oh this? The artists also did the “screw authority” tag under the A70 autoroute. He’s authentic in his passion.”

Or the “abstract” painter who layers textures and paint mediums in distinctly angular patterns - a style first popularized by Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson

Strangely, the Keith Haring rip-offs aren’t moving, and the startlingly good pop art isn’t drawing a crowd at all.

And forget anything that shows a touch of anger or anguish. The lady with the angry nude watercolours is having an exceptionally cold reception.

Thankfully, the guy trying to move rough charcoal sketches of naked ladies isn’t getting much slack either.

It is depressing, though, to see artists producing more and more of their work in tryptchs or series of small postcard-sized images, to suit the suburban sensibilities of sidewalk art browsers.

O.G.S Crawford seems to be an example of the eccentric English expert, someone who achieves relative success in an esoteric or overlooked field, but carries along with them a number of personality or character faults that often serve to distance them from the rest of conventional society.

Significantly, Crawford was the first to realize that aircraft could be used to survey tracts land for signs and evidence of prehistoric settlements. He also seems to have rubbed people the wrong way and made some poor choices in ideology along the way as well.

A new biography, Bloody Old Britain, presents a comprehensive look at his life, and has been reviewed extensively by the British press.

Eccentrics often produce the best biographies - and the best book reviews - because they are apt to channel their emotion and their obsessions into witty and observant statements, like:

“bungaloid eruptions” - the suburban homes that began to dot and then overwhelm the English landscape in the years after World War Two.

As reviewer Luke Slattery describes Crawford, “He was not so much a whingeing Pom as a splenetic Basil Fawlty, animated by a generalised anger, set at a sharp angle to the world.”

I can enjoy a recent note on the work of Marko Pecarevic, a Croatian biologist who just finished up a Master’s at Columbia, for a number of reasons: he thought up an interesting thesis subject that dug into intensive behaviour that occurred daily right in front of millions of oblivious humans; he made up a uniform that would allow him to poke around unfettered, and he managed to make ants interesting.

“… If people, viewed from a great height, look like ants, do ants, viewed at close range, look like people? Of course not. Ants have six legs, compound eyes, no lungs, and impossibly narrow waists, and they tend to hang around with aphids and mealybugs. Still, behavioral similarities make them excellent analogues. Ants, like humans, are into career specialization, livestock herding, engineering, climate control, in-flight sex, and war; for them, as for us, free will may or may not be an illusion.

… Employing Google Earth (forgive him, he’s from Zagreb), he chose three median-rich stretches—Park Avenue, the West Side Highway, and Broadway—then made himself an official-looking ID, dressed in parkish green, and started collecting ants, travelling the city with a duffelbag of garden tools and Evian bottles filled with antifreeze. No one bothered him …” (New Yorker)

I spent the last three days at a resort in the Muskokas, wedged right alongside the majestic Algonquin Park. There is nothing more relaxing than a crisp and clear early autumn morning, sitting on a deck perched on an outcrop of the giant Canadian Shield, looking over a lightly misted bay framed by a ridge of pines, oaks birch and elm trees tinted in a palette of orange and red hues, the silence only interrupted by the far-off honk of Canada geese.

Which does nothing to explain why THIS was the only photo I took all weekend:

An AMC Eagle on display at the Huntsville old car days. Cherry.

Case studies are being rewritten. The photocopiers are warming up. The powerpoint specialist has had her vacation days cut back. The cerlox machine has been pulled out of storage: it’s time for a new management fad!

Malcolm Gladwell will be bringing out a new book in January: Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

You can hear the business consultants salivating. Sure, “Tipping Point” has had a good run. It’s provided the intellectual heft for thousands of rehashed conference presentations and breakout meetings. You had to know, though, that the concept would become stale. Showing up in the food section is a good sign.

The smoke signals began in earnest earlier this month, as Fast Company tagged Blink as an idea reckoned with in 2005.

What idea is this, exactly? Let’s hear from Malcolm Gladwell himself:

Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings–thoughts and impressions that don’t’ seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It’s thinking–its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with “thinking.” In “Blink” I’m trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on in inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better? (gladwell.com)

Interestingly, British newspapers seem to be the first to be thinking through the work:

“Gladwell’s theory of Blink is both liberating and dangerous. You know whether your hunch was right only in hindsight. Human creativity is a wonderful thing � and it is inextricably linked to human error.”(Daily Telegraph, free reg. req.)

Of course, this idea has been germinating with Gladwell for some time. He first explored it in a 2002 article: The Naked Face: Can you read people’s thoughts just by looking at them?

Preorder the book, it’ll make nice Festivus gift and you’ll be at least two months ahead of the USA Today featurette on the idea.