Cabs

I'm watching 'Sunrise', the morning show on channel7 and there's a story about cab drivers in Melbourne blockading the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets to protest about the increasing levels of violence they're experiencing. In a couple of hours they're going to march up to Parliament House.

How are they going to find it?

DPRK

There's a great story in the Murdoch press today about how the North Koreans have built an one-mile-long runway, embedded into a mountain so that only the end opens out. In effect, the planes just fly out of the mountain. The Times, hilariously, characterises this as very 'thunderbirds'.

I once played the piano for an audience of appreciative North Korea children, at the Children's Palace in Pyongyang.

Station to Station

In Slate today, there's an excellent article about how banks' capital raisings dilute the stakes of existing shareholders, and to anyone who knows a bit about bank capital and corporate finance none of this is a surprise.

I clicked on it because I like the guy who writes finance for Slate, Dan Gross, and I'm interested in bank capital and I was hoping for some new insight, which is what we often get from Mr Gross. But the first thing I noticed was the title, "The Age of Grand Dilution". So what, I can hear you asking. Settle down, this isn't going to be fun.

It's clearly a reference to "Word on a Wing", a song on Station to Station, which has as a first line, "In this age of grand illusion, you walked into my life out of my dreams". Or maybe it's delusion.

There are very few people in the world, I bet, who are intensely interested in bank capital raisings AND who know all the words to David Bowie's great 70s albums. (Especially this one.. my all-time favorite record). It's not all that often that I get to feel special so I relish it. Thank you Mr Gross!

Question

You know if someone says to "Can I ask you a question?", the only possible response is to say, flatly, "you already did". You'll find this useful.

Ripe

If you don't wash for 4 or 5 days you pretty quickly end up smelling like a homeless person. In some ways this isn't surprising. How do I know this? I had some surgery on Monday and as a result have been trapped in my apartment ever since, and until the tape comes off (69.5 hours from now, Tuesday morning) I can't bathe. It's nasty. I can move about, with some difficultly, and if I'm standing up (as I am now) I can stay standing for quite a while, mostly because I know that if I were to sit or lie down, that would mean that I would, inevitably, have to stand up again at some point, and the business of getting from lying down to standing up takes quite a bit of doing. I need to mentally prepare, I need to think through exactly how I'm going to do it, I need to summon up all my feeble reserves of courage...and then I can stand up, usually with a bit of colorful language involved.

The is some bruising visible above the bandage and we have today moved into autumn colors, a quite striking yellow-y brown.

Awesome

I read recently a saying "the adjective is the enemy of the noun", and of course this at first seems counterintuitive. Adjectives help nouns, surely? They describe things, they add color. What can be wrong with that?

There was a lovely example of this in today's Crikey. The editor of an Australian regional newspaper sent an email to all staff asking them not to use Anzac Day as an excuse to write mushy rubbish. He said, "Anyone who includes two or more adjectives in a sentence will be shot (metaphorically)...".

I remember years ago, watching a travel show with my then wife, and one of the presenters was a childhood friend of hers so we were hoping he'd do well. He was having problems finding enough words to describe how great everything was on some trek, and we knew he was in trouble when there was a shot of him looking out of the window of a bus, at a mountain range, and all he could some up with was 'these mountains are... awesome'. In a similar vein, there's a lovely video of the Pope finishing a speech on his recent trip to the US, and President saying to the Pope, "awesome speech".

Eggs

People who say 'eggzit' for 'exit' shouldn't be allowed to vote. Same for lug-zhury instead of luxury.