A Great Way to Start the Day!

Tuning half an ear to the British Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday morning at about eight am I was greeted by the  Huapango. I have met this creature before and it does put a bit of a shine on the day despite plague, famine, war and devastating floods. Just thought you might like to know.

Gustavo has a  passable rendition here.

(That's what I like to see:- clarity, brevity, fully referenced and a bit of a punch, it's what blogs were made for...Ed)

Is it a bit of a punch you're after?

A Shell of Myself

Shells, don't you just love 'em

Shell companies, now that is another matter. A blog  by Nick Shaxson on the ever popular Treasure Islands site gives the details but I prefer to let my imagination roam.
The companies - Unbeliezeable,  Delawho;  the officers are Umberto and Desiree, your name will never be mentioned!?
Umberto will do what you tell him to do... Also included in the starter pack was a resignation letter signed by Desiree
undated!
The reporters start to have fun with things they might be able to do. “Can we have Unbelizeable sue Delawho?”
However there are safeguards and due diligence will be done.

“The beneficial owner promises that the company will not be used for the purposes of distributing drugs, money washing, financing of terrorism, production and/or distribution of kiddy porn, and some other activity that you are promising not to run through Unbelizeable.”

Oh Yeah!
So Senor Zeta do you swear to be a good boy, a very good boy?
You may wholesale huge quantities of non prescription medications, be in the premature undertaking business, sex, rock and roll, not necessarily consensual, with the liddle people but you would never lie would you? Good I'm glad we have established that.
Now we can do bidness together and, if you wan, Desiree can have your babies!
Ocala!

Paranoia - Signs of the Times

I had the pleasure this week of noticing that one of the drugs I take had been increased in its dosage.
(Now you know herself prefers you speak of medication rather than drugs... Ed)
I am an old and foolish man with a bad memory but I am quite clear that neither the hospital nor the GP had suggested that the drugs medication should be increased in dosage, still less had they consulted me. Herself who was there at the last hospital consultation agrees and anyone who suggests that she is foolish, old or with failing memory - well peace be upon him as he is not long for this world.

Imagine my paranoia, my increasing paranoia, when I saw this sign in the car park of a local village hall.

No respect at all, it will be compulsory youth in Asia next.

Books glorious books

What a great idea! Virtual Library contained in public QR codes. Projekt Ingeborg.
From the ever popular ( in our house) and useful Collaborate (Previously known as Thriving Too)
(I did enjoy the little fishes, though (I could play with them for hours))
(Are we not becoming a mite parenthetical...Ed?)
(I am not in the same bracket as yourself!)

Lots of other ideas about books and libraries in this Books and libraries link.

Accounts Receivable

 Elif Batuman is a writer that I had picked up on in the London Review of Books.  I had seen she was giving a talk at the British Museum - Cervantes, Balzac and double–entry book–keeping, the title of the talk caught my imagination. She has  written The Possessed  which I have just read in paperback.  Ian Sansom gives a whiff of it in the Guardian review link. The book reads like a short ride through Russian Literature in a fast machine - see John Adams   for rest and relaxation.
Her wit limbo dances under the academic bar. On p57 in the paperback version she reports being accused  by a colleague at a seminar of not fully understanding Lyutov's ( a character in Bable's Red Cavalry)  "specifically Jewish alienation."

Her reply  -

Right ... As a six foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up  in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.

It may show irony in the soul but it is lost on her colleague who nods and replies -

So you see the problem.

There are nightmares about penguins as homestay hosts, ice-houses for connubial blisters, inspirations for conspiracies and attempts on Tolstoy's life. Do keep up there at the back.

Omposable

Not Staged, honest. I wouldn't go anywhere near digging the garden.

Omposable was 'e

You know I think herself is trying to tell me something.

Salad Daze

A Cabinet re-muffle, an Indian Summer and Salad Daze.
We are blissed out, lucky S o Bs.
I will pass over the occupants  of the deckchairs of state on the  good ship of the coalition and move on to the weather.
The Bees, even the S o Bees, have been making up for lost time.

We visited Hackney, not to indulge in Para-Julibumpic watching, but for a literary soiree!
Persons who are known to us and may even be re..(don't start on that bollix again, we will take the disclosure as being full frank and filigree transparent ...Ed) OK then we enjoyed the launch of Salad Days - see the link. Great stuff. Get a copy while it is good and hot!
After the event we wandered down the Lower Clapton Rd. The Blue lights still flashed and the sirens screamed but the old place is definitely on the way up! The party, stout and otherwise, foregathered in the Clapton Hart.
Before it was Chimes (or Crimes) we knew it as Dougies. I did not see this myself, being safely tucked up in bed, but in its Dougies incarnation a drive by shooting once upon a time produced return fire rather than the usual hitting of decks, allegedly. I seem to remember Lady BP going out for a night with the girls there but she claims I am old and foolish and my memory is failing!

Anyway,  we are making the most of it, the weather that is, not the failing memory.

Lest We Forget

Last year I referred (Somewhat disparagingly I thought... Ed) to graphs concerning the economy.
Ann Pettifor has returned to the subject and blogged her notes for a presentation to a conference entitled Just Banking.
Ha! Ha!

The arguments are well worth trawling through if you have any doubts at all that it is going to be a cold, cold winter.
The ground is also being prepared to blame us and those like us for the pickle we are in. The idea that it was a big boy called Gordie wot did it, and ran away, can only stretch so far in the collective Alzheimer syndrome that clouds The Mail, The Current Bum and the Torygraph! So now:-

Blaming the Victim
And, it is implied, those responsible for this spontaneous combustion are the victims.
‘Sub-prime borrowers’ are frequently named and blamed. Michigan hairdressers on $7 an hour with a mortgage sold fraudulently by the agents of banks at a very high rate of interest – are the innocents deemed culpable of bursting the vast global credit bubble.
Blame has been passed from criminal to victim: from the private banking system to government and to the public sector.

And for those who like to see pictures, graphs even...

Busy Bees

Lloyd's Bank in BSE has a sign which incorporates a bee hive.

This goes back to the name of the bank before it was absorbed into Lloyds
The bank may be absorbed into the Coop Bank as the TSB(ee).
Ho Ho.
Nice though for us romantics - cooperation, mutuality, bees (workers, queens, drones, fleets of drones no doubt; see where all that misty eyed nonsense has got you... Ed)