Window Cleaning News From The Week

Cleaning companies, window washers and landscapers are among businesses that benefit from Masters home rentals.

Businesses profit from spruce-ups: Local businesses and homeowners are turning to the professionals in high numbers to ensure their homes and yards are in tip-top shape for Augusta's visitors during Masters Week. Melissa Testino owns Clean as a Whistle, and she said increased home rentals have helped her double her clientele this year. Khel Anderson, the owner of A-Kustom Cleaning, estimated that each of his employees is putting in 20-25 extra hours a week to cover a 30 percent increase in work compared with 2010. "I'd say I've gotten the most business I've gotten this year out of the six years I've been in business," Anderson said. The owner of We Wash Windows, Quincy Fuller, said the extra hours are worth it, considering his business in the month leading up to the Masters Tournament generally makes up about 20 percent of his company's annual income.

Frank Rodriguez, of We Wash Windows, works at a home in Martinez. Many work overtime during the month before the Masters, but business owners say the extra hours are worth it.

Quincy Fuller, owner of We Wash Windows, says preparing for Masters provides 20 percent of the company's annual income.

Click2Clean - a window cleaning service provider in Perth, Scotland run by Gordon Fraser had a nice little marketing pitch with a countdown towards the release of his new website. Viewers were notified by how many days were to go when visiting his click2clean website. Gordon Fraser has also gone as far as to price every single house in Perth, Scotland & inputted their details into a database. This way, owners can see just how much it would be to get their windows cleaned. They also get to choose if it would be a one-off clean, monthly, quarterly etc.

Gordon also released a bottle of champagne in the city center to celebrate the companies new website. The SLS Baton Twirlers based in Perth helped Gordons Cleaning launch the unique online cleaning service in Perth High Street. The troupe is for boys and girls of all ages from the little as 2 years upwards. This is the first completely online cleaning service of its kind where you book and pay with just a couple of clicks. It is safe, needs no cash collection, no strangers at your door and you can have it as often as you want. Watch Gordons launch on YouTube here.

A drunken nightclubber set fire to cars owned by doormen in revenge for being thrown out of a nightspot – forcing staff to evacuate the premises. Fifty people had to be evacuated from the club and lives could have been put at risk if the blaze had spread to other buildings, a court heard. Sean Keaveney-Dunn, 28, of Caenby Road, Riddings, in Scunthorpe, has been jailed for almost two years after he admitted three offences of arson on July 12. Keaveney-Dunn, a window cleaner, was jailed for 22 months. The sentence included a consecutive month after he admitted breaching a one-year conditional discharge imposed by North Lincolnshire magistrates for damaging a shop door.

A window cleaner sent "loopy" on LSD clambered on to a rooftop and bombarded imaginary foes with roof tiles, a court heard. Paul Richards had his drink spiked with the liquid form of the hallucinogenic drug at a party, Bristol Crown Court heard yesterday. He then suffered a "bad trip" in which he thought he was being chased, climbed on to the roof and threw tiles into the street. Richards, 38, of Bellevue Road, Kingswood, pleaded guilty to affray and two counts of criminal damage. "In police interview Mr Richards said he had been at a 30th birthday party where he'd drunk eight pints of lager and beer and eight shots. He'd also smoked crack cocaine before the incident. "He thinks his drinks may also have been spiked when he left them unattended for a cigarette. "He said he'd been sent loopy by the crack cocaine that made him paranoid and fearful. He said he was walking home and thought people were chasing him, and that is why he climbed on the roof. He said he didn't recognise police when they arrived, so he threw tiles at them." George Threlfall, defending, said his client had built up his business after being loaned £5,000 from the Prince's Trust. He told the court: "He smoked crack cocaine but didn't want liquid LSD. He says the LSD was put into his drink and he was hallucinating."

Dirt, the Wellcome Collection's riveting new show, opens with a shocker: a window so filthy not an inch of glass is visible beneath the grime, a thick brown substance that twinkles repulsively in the gallery lights. It is gutter dirt, pavement dirt, the dirt of cities blown with dust and litter. It causes immediate recoil. And it covers the sill and frame, this unspeakable stuff, so that the whole thing becomes a solid block of dirt. You cannot see through the glass (if you can bear to look) its transparency stopped, its vision blocked. This window is effectively blind. It would be hard to overstate the physical effect of James Croak's 1991 sculpture, which is literally cast from street-sweeper's dirt. No matter how much art history it condenses – figurative yet abstract, with its resemblance to American minimalist sculpture; realist yet conceptual with its wink at Duchamp's Large Glass – it's the primitive impact that counts.

Van Morrison seems blessed with a transformational power to bring a beautiful vision to even the most humdrum objects and events: There are Morrison albums I like better, but Beautiful Vision has never struck me as dull; on the contrary, its particular strangeness has always proved appealing – an exploration of Celtic heritage, distance, reminiscence, spirituality and the writings of Alice Bailey. Its most commercial track is Cleaning Windows, a wistful tale of a stint as a window cleaner, that marries the pleasures of physical work and sensory delights – bakery smells, Paris buns, and smoking Woodbines – to a time of expanding artistic and intellectual vision, of playing sax on the weekend, listening to Jimmie Rodgers on a lunch break, reading Kerouac and Christmas Humphreys, hearing Leadbelly and Blind Lemon on the street.

Cleaning Windows, like the rest of Beautiful Vision, seems to me an attempt to explain how a spiritual, emotional life does not exist in isolation, how the lemonade and Paris buns are as stirring as the Kerouac, and how the memory of both can be tethered to those "wrought iron gate rows". This has always been what I loved about Morrison: more than any other songwriter, he seems blessed with a transformational power, with the ability to bring a beautiful vision to even the most humdrum objects and events – the "clicking, clacking of the high-heeled shoe", the "crack in the windowpane", the "decent sherry" and the "drop of port", and "this letter-box behind this door here …"

The life-like bronze statues of sculptor J. Seward Johnson have not been universally accepted in the art world. The New York Times reported in 2002 that critics referred to them as "kitsch," "Hallmark" and "Norman Rockwell." Robert Hughes was particularly harsh in calling them "chocolate-box rubbish.'' Two of his statues installed in New Haven, Conn., in the 1980s, one of boys ogling a Playboy magazine centerfold, and another of a black youth walking down the street with a boom box on his shoulder, raised howls of protest from different corners. When the city of Lodi welcomes 10 of these statues to School Street for a three-month exhibit beginning April 13, the only controversy stirred is about their placement. What they see are pieces that are so lifelike that they stop people in their tracks. The whimsical sculptures include a little girl whirling a Hula-Hoop, a window washer, men sitting on benches reading newspapers, business men in suits with briefcases conferring on the street, a gardener planting flowers and a mother reading to a child sitting on her lap.

The newly installed Premier, Barry O'Farrell of NSW, Australia: Mr O'Farrell said while he expected it would take him two terms in government to fix the state, he was excited about the political opportunity presented by the scale of his win and was determined to use it to redraw the NSW electoral map. ''It's fantastic that in this country the grandson of a window cleaner from the western suburbs of Victoria can be Premier of the state of NSW. There is something about that. That's the genius of the country in which we live. A country that has always given opportunity to people.''

Roanoke Technical Rescue Team Tests Skills in Training: They don't get called out very often, but when they do, they usually find themselves in some tricky situations. The Roanoke Valley's Technical Rescue Team has to make sure they're up on their training, so they spent the morning Monday making sure they are ready to respond to all sorts of situations. They handle calls when someone gets trapped in a swollen stream or if someone is trapped in a cave or anywhere that requires special skills in order to pull off a tricky rescue. Captain Chad Riddleberger with Roanoke Fire/EMS sets that training up for the Region 6 Heavy Technical Rescue Team. "What if we had a window washer hanging off a ten story building? That's what we look at. We drive around and envision different things like that," he said. "We had some bridge workers out doing some work. Scaffolding collapsed on them." Made up of specialists from Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem, this team is the team you go to when a rescue gets tricky. "If it's swift water, technical rope or high angle, they have to be prepared for any type of situation," Roanoke Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Guzzo said.

Andy Robinson (a window cleaner) is being called "every day" by people wanting to discuss cases involving at-risk youngsters.Social services give out resident's number as their own: Vulnerable childrens personal details are being left on a Crawley man's answering machine – after social services staff mistakenly gave out his number as their own. His number has been wrongly passed on by West Sussex County Council's social services team on letters and e-mails. Mr Robinson, of Tollgate Hill, Broadfield, said he has made several attempts to get the mistake amended, but nothing has been done. "It is getting silly now, beyond a joke," he added. "I just want the situation resolved. "About six months to a year ago this all started and it is still going on now. "You would think they would want to get it fixed, I am getting people ringing me up about child-protection cases. "These people assume it is the right number and launch into telling me confidential information and I have to stop them, explain the situation and give them the correct number. "It is not safe, they should be protecting these children."

The social services team based in Crawley has a direct telephone number which only differs by one digit to Mr Robinson's home number, which has led to the mistake. He added: "I am a window cleaner and I use my home phone number for business. "I have thought many times about changing my number to stop the hassle but it would affect my business. "I have had the same number for the past 20 years, why should I change it? "They should want to fix it, but they don't. It is always me phoning them. They apologise and I was even promised an apology letter a few months ago, but I have never seen it. "One guy said to me that my number could have gone out to 40,000 people. I just want it stopped." A West Sussex County Council spokesman apologised for the error. He said: "We are very sorry indeed that this has happened and for the inconvenience. We have now written to Mr Robinson."

Stink Bug Invasion Predicted  “Year of the Stink Bug” - Some residents are anticipating the arrival of the dime-sized bug armed with its brown, protective shield by taking proactive measures ranging from cleaning window sills with extra-soapy water to sealing minute cracks that serve as an entry way.

Every 10 Seconds A Skyscraper Window Washer Falls To His Death: New York - A study released Monday by the Department of Labor found that every 10 seconds, on average, a window washer somewhere in the United States accidentally plummets to his or her death. "One would expect an occasional fatality in this occupation, but our research indicates that whether a rope snaps or a slip-and-trip situation occurs, more than 8,500 window washers are killed each day," said statistician Carl Eberling, adding that during a half-hour stroll through Manhattan, one is likely to see 15 to 25 workers hit the pavement, depending on the neighborhood. "Even with strict safety measures in place, the truth is, it just gets really windy up there." Eberling noted that at Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, it is not unusual for one window washer to be smashing into the ground while a second flails and screams in midair and a third, somewhere above, is beginning to lose balance.

The future is automated: The market for service robots, which includes the home robot category, is expected to more than double within the next four years from the roughly $10 billion it was a year ago, according to Dallas-based research firm MarketsandMarkets. More specific revenue projections are hard to make, however, because a full roboticization of the home could span a wide range of applications. IRobot, for one, has expanded to offer a line of Roomba-like robots, including the Scooba floor washer and the Verro swimming-pool cleaner, and domestic robots now account for more than half its revenue. Others are developing window washers, home health monitors and other robotic aids.

Mr Alain Robert, 48, who is also known as the French Spiderman.

He's no window washer: A French daredevil urban climber on Monday scaled the world's tallest building, the 828m Burj Khalifa in Dubai, fighting winds that delayed his ascent for hours. Mr Alain Robert, 48, who is also known as the French Spiderman, took about six hours to climb the more than 160-storey building, using a rope and harness as required by organisers. He started his climb at 6.10pm and a spotlight helped the gathered crowds keep track of his ascent after the sun had set. Mr Robert has climbed more than 80 buildings around the world including Chicago's Sears Tower and Taipei 101 in Taiwan. He has been arrested many times in various countries as he is rarely give permission for his dangerous climbs, although his scaling of the Burj Khalifa was done with the full cooperation of local authorities - the climb was meant to inspire over 2,000 students attending Dubai's three-day Education Without Borders conference which opened on Monday. See previous blog here with video & here.

Century City In Photos: Window washers work at the top of the Wells Fargo building Wednesday in Century City.

The building started shaking and things started falling off the walls. Imamura and his colleagues looked outside to see a nearby 30-story skyscraper swaying with the quake — something many Japanese buildings are designed to do. “We could actually see it moving back and forth,” Imamura said. “It was pretty amazing to see those buildings sway like that.” At about the 25th floor was a window-washer on a platform that “shook like crazy,” Imamura said. The man lay flat on the platform and hung on for dear life, he said. Things calmed down — the earthquake officially lasted six minutes, but hundreds of aftershocks were recorded — and Imamura and colleagues evacuated the building via the stairs, noticing cracks in the walls all the way to the ground floor.

Nice easy work if you can get it: It is, of course, a major worry in these dark economic times of ours, but I may have come across something which could be just the ticket. It entails working indirectly for the government (so no real job security, unlike in days gone by) but the opportunity to do not very much for the money seems to be ever present. The chance to travel extensively is the big attraction. One example of best practice in the art of wasting public money was contractors from Liverpool being sent 205 miles to Cardiff where they changed a single carpet tile in a probation office. Then there were the Manchester contractors who were given the job of washing the windows of a bail hostel in Powys, Wales. It involved a 240-mile round trip and the job took an hour. Local probation service managers were forbidden from using anyone else to do it.