Just call me Dude!
Gotta thank Alex Beam of the Boston Globe for this one: In his latest column, entitled “Dont call me Dude”, he refers to an organization which calls itself the Church of the Latter Day Dude whose mantra is “Just Take It Easy, Man”.
This is one really cool religion, let me tell you!
View with a room…
My wife and I stayed at Penha Longa for four days over Christmas, and yes, this is a superlative establishment with beautiful architecture and landscaping and all the amenities you expect from a 5-star hotel bearing the famous Ritz-Carlton brand.
But in fact it is people you remember when you go away, like Candela, a charming young girl whose name means “flame” in English and who wouldn’t just point out the way to the spa but insisted on walking there with us.
Or the restaurant manager whom we asked if we could purchase a glass of the utterly delicious tea jelly with rosemary and who instead presented us with one as a “special gift for special guests” (I bet he says that to everybody – and I bet everybody feels it’s true…).
…and then there were three
The thing I loved about Bluetooth is that it worked. I mean: really worked. On any device, under any operating system, anywhere in the world.
Not anymore.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group which owns and maintains the system has given up on full interoperability. Version 4, which was announced last year, is not compatible with those millions of gadgets, computers, laptops and smartphones people use today, or at least not fully compatible. Instead, there are now three different flavors of Bluetooth: “Classic”, “Smart” and “Smart Ready”.
Sound confusing? That’s because it is.
Bluetooth, we elderly nerds remember, was developed back in the 90ies in Scandinavia by phone makers Ericsson and Nokia as an answer to the infrared solutions for getting rid of cables favored by the PC industry (HP, IBM, etc.). The name, by the way, harks back to king Harald Blåtand (literally: “blue tooth”) who conquered and Christianized Denmark.
Quote of the day:
“Pollster George Gallup has dubbed America “a nation of biblical illiterates.” Only half of Americans can name even one of the four Gospels. The majority cannot name the first book of the Bible. Less than a third know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Fewer still can identify the Trinity or explain what Easter commemorates. The most widely quoted Bible verse in the United States – “The Lord helps those who help themselves” – is not in the Bible.”
By Alexander Green, Investment Director of The Oxford Club, published on SpirtualWealth.com
It sure is starting to look like a shoo-in for Barack Obama. So what if more than half of Americans don’t like they way he does his job and if his ratings keep reminding you of Jimmy Carter.
But in fact, Obama doesn’t need anybody’s job approval in order to soldier on for four more years. All he has to do is watch the Republicans loose.
I went to see the sneak preview of “Anonymous”, the new movie by Roland Emmerich, whom the critics have always dismissed as a rather lowbrow producer of admittedly spectacular disaster movies. As a rule, he is strong on visual effects and weak on storyline, but hey: who cares as long as the good guys win and the aliens are vanquished in the end.
Presumably, Emmerich wanted to prove his critics wrong by making a movie about Shakespeare. Unfortunately, all he succeeded in doing was to prove how right they are.
“Anonymous” is an insipid, at times even boring hodgepodge of faux literary history, royal incest, oedipal conflict, and behind-the-scenes power struggles by men in wigs and petticoat breeches.
As a spectator, the only things that kept me awake were the occasional swordfights and the short dramatic climax, during which the Earl of Essex and his men are trapped in a courtyard with soldiers firing down on them like shooting fish in a barrel.
Unhappily, even this isn’t original. In fact the entire scene is lifted straight from Eliza Kazan’s 1952 production of John Steinbeck’s “Viva Zapata!”.
If you ask me, “Anonymous” is a true movie disaster. But then again, I guess that’s what you can expect from a director of disaster movies.
It never ceases to amaze me how a nation with such an utterly archaic, technically obsolete banking system like America’s can assume such an inflated sense of its own importance in world affairs.
I was reminded of this once more while empathizing with those poor Wall Street executives who face drastic cutbacks on the annual compensation. “Banker’s bonuses likely to fall 20 to 30%”, the headline reads in today’s International Herald Tribune, which goes on to describe the desolation and panic of those second-tier traders and brokers for whom the year-end bonus usually represents the bulk of their take-home pay.
The sentence that really struck me, though, was this one: “”Employees are typically informed of their bonuses in January or February, with checks going out shortly afterward.”
Huh?
I am still trying to remember the last time I saw a check, much less wrote or received one. Checks are almost as archaic as wampum. Dog’s teeth or cowrie shells, anyone?
Since I know that some of you are concerned about the condition of my health, I guess a short update is called for. So here we go:
I have been a long-distance runner for many years, and while I may not be very fast (my best Marathon time was 4:14) running is very much a central part of my life. I routinely wear a heart monitor to check my progress, and in June the device started to show absurdly high hearth rates of 200 or more beats per minute. Of course, a 61 year-old heart simply can’t beat that fast, especially not for over half an hour and more, so there had to be some other explanation.
In fact it turned out that I suffer from auricular or atrial fibrillation, which doctors often jokingly refer to as “sick sinus syndrome”. This happens when the heart gets confused by signals originating in the major blood vessels leading to the two upper chambers (atria) of the heart. As I now know, about 2 to 3 million people in Germany alone suffer from this condition, which causes shortness of breath and a feeling of restriction (“belt around your chest”), both of which you don’t really want if you are running 42 kilometers (26 miles).
Catching up with the rest of the world
And you thought America’s crumbling infrastructure resembles that of a third-world nation? Wrong; it’s worse.
Two days ago, the Metropolitain Transportation Authority announced that commuters on the New York subway system can now use their mobile phones to talk or text. Well, actually it only works in four downtown stations. And only AT&T and T-Mobile customers will be able to connect. But hey, it’s a start, ain’t it?
As anyone who has been to New Dehli, Singapore, Shanghai or Rio de Janeiro knows, you have been able to use your cell phone underground on most lines for years. So in reality, New York, at least, is still struggling to catch up with the Third World.
I don’t know about you, but I find this rather worrying. But on the other hand, the U.S. does have more weapons and soldiers than anyone else, so I guess that kind of evens things out…
All, all, of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
‘Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.
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