Aye Walt! I didn't take what you said as a challenge. I did admit the majority of my issue with the paneled pipe was strictly my personal taste and opinion. The execution itself was excellent.WCannoy wrote:Ok, so maybe I exaggerated a little... There's two sides to every story, and likewise, there's two (or more) opinions to every critique. Which brings up Yeti's question, should his opinion be ignored? Absolu... er, I mean, no.Ocelot55 wrote:
So that's Walt's version of the story. Here's mine:
Me: Hey, you want dis pipe?
Walt: Yeah, fo sho. Dat is da shizznit!
Me: Cool, I'll shoot it to ya.
Walt: What chew want fer it?
Me: Nothin, bro. It's all good.
Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, maybe even more so when it comes to pipes. This is not a US presidential election; everybody's vote counts, and Yeti's opinion is just as valid as anyone else's except mine... I mean, *including* mine. Geez, sorry. I'm having a hard time with dissenting opinions right now!
My raving about this pipe was in no way intended as a challenge to Yeti's views on the shape. Just another opinion. Happens to be, and again I'm being 100% honest here, that I have a really passionate attraction to this particular pipe and I wanted to make sure that I expressed that fact! Had Yeti not posted at all, my reaction to the pipe would have been the same.
When I started making pipes (oh god, here he goes again...), it was a matter of drilling holes in a block of briar at an arbitrary angle, and then starting to remove wood with no real plan of action until I started to realise a shape forming, then ran with it. There were folks who loved those shapes, and folks who hated them. Fortunately, of the few people who saw my early pipes, a large enough percentage had a positive opinion of the results most of the time, and I was able to sell the pipe and keep on trucking. As my exposure grew, it's entirely possible that only a smaller and smaller percentage of an ever expanding audience really liked the increasingly absud pipes I was making... But at the end of the day, that's more individual people who liked the pipes, although it might be said that *most* of the audience did not. I was still able to sell even the most far out creations, ones that most folks would think that no one would ever buy, and sell them pretty quickly.
This was a stark contrast to those who would have a vision of a pipe shape, struggle to excecute that shape perfectly to their eye, then struggle to sell it for lack of a broad enough audience.
I know I preach this alot, but surely there is a buyer for every pipe. For every *ugly* pipe you make, there is someone out there who will think it is perfect, and for every *perfect* pipe you make, there are those who will say "meh..."
Obviously Yeti and I, and everyone else, have different tastes to different degrees. What a bland, boring world this would be if it were not so...
In the same way, I just cannot make myself like the Castello 55. I just can't. That doesn't mean people who make them are making a bad pipe at all.
