February 28th;
Saturday. Fascinating & inspiring long lunch with Marion. We go into surprising depth on Liberty's, Walthamstow boy William Morris, trading 20th-century engravings, and early socialism. Possibilities abound. Separately, Vogue interviews cucumber-cool girl who helped hide Snowden in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport: she's now trapped in Berlin by narky surveillance trolls.
February 27th;
Friday. Computers reading faces. Useful?
Creepy?
February 26th;
Thursday. Remember how anyone who said that 1970s
British trade unions & Labour Party officials were in the pay of Moscow was laughed at?
February 25th;
Wednesday. How the spluttering botanist on the telly Bellamy fell from favour: can you guess? Some of what more innocent times called 'overproduced' music:
Sorceress - Treat The Feel (nice cover art) /
Gentlemen Thieves - Down /
Wilfred Giroux - U Make Me /
ZHU - Cocaine Model /
Thief - Closer. & a gorgeous little animation of Earth's very own pet asteroid ("second moon") and its funny 'horseshoe' orbit.
February 24th;
Tuesday. Still snuffling, bastard bacillus. Doubtless dutiful damsel moans '50 Shades of Grey' is a bone-idle girl's dream of sloth. "Inexplicable"? Only to you, dear.
February 23rd;
Monday. Detailed article points out that ISIS/Daesh isn't 'un-Islamic' at all but, as anyone who's ever read the Qur'an already spotted, very Islamic indeed. In separate news, seems it's not just Eastern Europe where greedy gangsters make money scrubbing dyes out of heating fuel.
February 22nd;
Sunday. Never a bad moment for
some Yeats:
- Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
February 21st;
Saturday. Tantalising glimpses of warm spring weather. Heavy head cold stubbornly continues.
Best account yet I've seen of the beguiling Monty Hall Problem.
February 20th;
Friday. New Greek government outwitted, as interim deal extends the euro-monopoly-money crisis into summer. Our 2-currency solution addresses the real problem.
February 19th;
Thursday. Keeping things weaponised from yesterday, a fascinating thread on Reddit imagining Ancient Rome versus today's US Army. The apparent majority of Britons who would like to be professional writers, take note.
February 18th;
Wednesday. Visually striking, even lush, video to a Prodigy tune: albeit banging on at the same old class-hate thing. Perhaps a good moment to mention that Britain might be safer with more guns?
February 17th;
Tuesday. All right, time to explain how the #Greekdebt problem can be solved. As currently set up, this is a stalemate, since ejecting the Hellenes from the euro will cost their creditors, but them being forgiven with easier repayment terms is also not going to work since the other countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal) hurting from the stupid euro experiment will demand the same easy terms. So this cannot happen either. As some of us were pointing out decades ago, the #eurozone needs an exit process and was always a dumb idea anyway, exit process or no. Right now, if Athens relaunches the drachma, the main point of doing this - to enable it to have a soft currency that helps the country export - will make its euro-denominated debt nigh impossible to repay. So in fact what #Greece should do is launch a deliberately soft domestic currency that has demurrage (depreciating scrip is the jargon term) which can be used to reflate domestic demand without sucking in imports. At the same time it should keep a 2nd currency (either the #euro or a new #drachma) very hard. This hard 2nd currency will be good for repaying debt and purchasing high-tech investment goods, while the unconvertible depreciating scrip revives internal trade. That's the rarely-trodden path which has to be taken. Anyone who wants more details, citizens, can buy me lunch. Ask really nicely you even get a presentation.
Here's a neat technical overview of 40 years of commodity prices from zero hedge's 'Tyler Durden'. Incidentally "he" is one of the 20+ star contributors to our book on the economic crisis. Meanwhile, the Crimea seems to be suffering from its blockade, despite extra cash from Moscow.
February 16th;
Monday. Back into Budapest. My 2 new herbs seem in good spirits after their first weekend of dim winter daylight. Latest Lady Waks radio show,
number 318, quite good (a couple of quick breaks at 18 and 19 minutes). Backless dress pushing the backless envelope a bit. Engineers are more likely to become terrorists, but we knew that already didn't we? And here's a loving wife to reckon with. "He's just like me ... I love his butt."
February 15th;
Sunday. Yesterday, Robin was host to Zeno, Akos, & Laszlo and we all lunched together. Laszlo underlines his spiritual view of humankind, and how he and his Szekely wife are bringing up 3 children without television or internet. Found a book of Robin's lying around yesterday, 'Tristes Tropiques' (Sad Tropics) by Levi-Strauss translated into English. Today started reading it as dusk slowly darkened sitting room - some lovely evocative writing which I wasn't expecting. Earlier today at lunch Zsuzsi & Letty slightly shocked I don't tolerate women packing heat.
February 14th;
Valentine's Day. 2 Hungarian blokes glumly compare notes on irritating sexy chick: pop video trope. Middle-class version
/ Proletarian version. Also black with white filmings, please to notice energy-drink motif at both musics.
February 13th;
Friday. Robin narrates his week in Greece as we speed down the motorway after dark munching biscuits and tangerines.
February 12th;
Thursday. A man can be too handsome or rich, eh? So that's the problem. If wit affects number of partners among the fairer sex, wealth & nutrition affects taste in what those partners look like.
February 11th;
Wednesday. My students are melting away like people-shaped ice chunks bobbing about in warm cocktails. Partly because the whole country goes skiing round about now. Now you can have convincing pseudo-sunlight at home, might improve Denmark a bit.
February 10th;
Tuesday. I miss the long-format writing of American magazines sometimes, but it can also be annoying. Take this (relatively) brief update about the death of the loner who inspired the film 'Into The Wild' here. Not a word (or even sign of awareness) of the hermit in the wilderness as symbolic hero of American fantasy. Meanwhile, consider these pompous plodding bits of verse.
February 9th;
Monday. Visit Lajos in his tiny orange-curtained kitchen.
February 8th;
Sunday. Read a book borrowed from Lorinc, called 'A Girl Called Madonna' by Peter Robinson. It's a clever idea I should have had the idea of publishing. Sold as a small hardback reading text for children with each picture facing a page with only 2 or 3 sentences, it is in fact a naughty tease aimed at adults. Madge sings a song about being kissed for the first time (although she has already kissed lots of people!), drinks a special magic potion to become more English, and makes some "rubbish films". From a website and publisher called 'popjustice'.
February 7th;
Saturday. All the usual: Russian media mentioning the Saudi/Al-Qaeda connection; Oxfam's wealth-inequality stats need some nuancing (who would have thought such a thing?!); Argentina seems to have a scandal that deserves to win an award - recently dead prosecuting magistrate was preparing a case against the president; the 1930s Depression was actually caused by too much government intervention, not too little.
February 6th;
Friday. Life is truly strange, citizens. Beneath our feet: a guide to physical internet infrastructure in New York, and some dead-letterbox memory sticks scattered across the same town.
February 5th;
Thursday. Steven K pops over for a coffee. Here's an interesting
interview about Teilhard de Chardin and his noosphere idea.
February 4th;
Wednesday. The mystery deepens.
February 3rd;
Tuesday. Drab weather continues. Space-diplomat
eye shadow.
February 2nd;
Monday. Seems films are getting increasingly
orange and
blue.
February 1st;
Sunday. From Vladislav: big band goes hepcat. From nowhere in particular: 'On Blue Mountain' by Foxygen.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
