The best seats in the house give the best view of the action, the secrets of the stage you can only observe from up close. Like the orchestra ring seats of a Broadway show, which allows a view of the pit while the rest of the house gets only the conductor’s wand. Or a seat by the dugout steps or courtside for the Knicks, where you’re so close it blurs the line between spectator and participant. Like these Knicks fans who sat so close they got put into the game. That sim

After graduating college, a roommate and I considered joining the military together, visiting both the Army and Navy recruiting centers to enquire about the commitment. Which even at that time were not my thing, explaining my accidental tourism through paint. Which, like serving in the military, can be a person’s destiny. So when the paint used at the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington, DC began to peel, I again felt called to service. To protect that s

During a members-only meeting of the dealer-owned AllPro cooperative more than 20 years ago, a heated debate broke out in a room of several hundred. Those present were lamenting the circumstances of their relationships with Benjamin Moore, which at that time were bleak and seemed only getting bleaker. Raising my hand I waited my turn, before standing to address the room. What I said was lost to time, though I had bought my last drink for the weekend. Notoriety which wan

Either too old or too high to recall someone’s name when needed last week, I took to scrolling my list of subscribers confident I would recognize it when it scrolled by, though it turns out that confidence was misplaced. Still, the time spent creeping all your reading habits was not wasted, as it allowed me to identify my longest tenured subscriber. The AOL email address was my first clue that they’ve been following for a while, until I found the evidence that they'v

A spandrel crack is a hairline fracture which forms on a building’s perimeter beam, the structural segment spanning from a window head to the sill of the window directly above it. A fissure which might go unnoticed at a casual glance, but an engineer would never miss its warning. Because to that expert a spandrel crack is evidence that a structure's façade has shifted, changing the load forces so that further degradation is a risk. A nearly imperceptible flaw of that aest

On the front pages of the national news last week was a tank fire in California, which exposed the Garden Grove area to the chemical contents of that tank. Which at the time of that fire was 6,000 gallons of the hazardous monomer Methyl Methacrylate. In response to that risk of exposure, the government of California mobilized three state and one federal agency and installed 24 stationary air monitoring stations over the nine-square miles around the fire. To track every f

I’ll be recording a podcast live today, May 21st, at 3:00 PM Eastern summarizing the results of Big Paint’s most recent quarter, including updates on Sherwin-Williams, PPG, Behr, RPM, Pittsburgh Paints, Benjamin Moore, Home Depot and Lowe’s. And from Graco, the makers of professional paint sprayers which are an indispensable component of most larger paint jobs. Making Graco’s results perhaps the best data available, when forecasting demand for architectural coatings. And

Lawsuits topped the news last week with independent hardware cooperative Ace Hardware getting served with a summons alleging a hub-and-spoke price fixing conspiracy and Behr settling their copyright infringement case with ABKCO Music for their unlicensed use of the Rolling Stones song Paint it Black, in a marketing campaign. The case against Behr lasted as long as I presumed when I covered the filing in January of this year, when I called Behr incompetent for allowing an in

The Sherwin-Williams manufacturing facility in Rochester, Pennsylvania continues to make paint illegally, doing grave harm to the people and planet there. With little regard for the impacts of their actions beyond growing their own earnings, which Sherwin announced were up in the first quarter of this year. A callousness even I did not believe Sherwin-Williams could possess. Because the effects of Sherwin’s illegalities there are evident prima facie, Monty that means it