An Englishman's home

For too long the Englishman's home has been his financial instrument, and speculation has taken his mind off productive work. He has learnt to spend his time watching the changing size of his pile. His view of the Euro matches this mentality. He considers it his birthright to be able to leverage the strength of the pound to buy cheap property abroad and is sorely miffed when as an expat he can no longer live like a king on a sterling pension. But money is like the oil in a car's motor. If it isn't continuously pumped through the system the engine seizes up. The view of money as treasury which needs to be piled up is primitive and is equivalent to letting all the oil accumulate in the sump where it can do no good. For this reason alone, the euro, which has increased the ease with which money circulates over a large area of the world, has proved its worth, and for the Brits to stay out of the eurozone is to deny its potential for lubricating and feeding the real economies of both Europe and the UK.

Thomas Jefferson said "If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered".

Seems the same fate is befalling the mother country.

I dreamed a dream

Last night I dreamt we captured Osama bin Laden. Me and four other lads. It was me that spotted the clue. There was a row of large Victorian houses facing the common, all of them abandoned because of repossessions, but only number 30 was actually boarded up. The line of footsteps in the frost leading up to the door gave it away. His office was actually at number 10, and he would have had to slink across a road every day covered by his faithful lookouts and stenographers because there was an intersection in between.

Leading our captive by a rope across the common I was surprised to bump into Oliver, an old school friend whose surname escapes me, engaged in sloshing out a pig-sty cum water-buffalo-pen.

On reaching HQ I was not sure who I was supposed to hand our prisoner over to. The assembly hall was full of soldiers seated on the floor listening to a lecture, but their brown uniforms were no guide as to which side they were on. But I was soon reassured by the voice of the lecturer, who spoke English, and was warning the troops against dangerous heresies such as Gnosticism or Arianism. Looking for a room to hold the prisoner I was dismayed to discover that every door I opened revealed Shakespearean actors getting costumed. I ended up getting the prisoner a part in the Tempest. Later, wandering down the corridor alone, I saw a young lady in battle fatigues and a white muslim headscarf trying to contact her leader on her cellphone. "Obama! Obama! Obama!" she shouted with growing alarm, as it gradually dawned on her that he must have been renditioned. Her shouting woke me up.

Ditty for the missing Kitty

The weather has turned kind of funny,
It's suddenly raining subpoenas,
Since Bernie Madoff with our money,
And Dreier took us to the cleaners.

Well, their names were a bit of a giveaway...

Popinjay Art (3)

My favourite Catalan expression, used when talking about something so overpriced that no-one can afford it, or so pretentious that no-one can understand it, is "una gran tocada dels collons", which freely translated means "a great tickling of the balls". The present downturn in contemporary art prices exposes how some fancy people's balls have been tickled. To borrow the words of Meredith Whitney who (according to Michael Lewis, here) caused the market in financial stocks to crash. "If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale."
It may be premature for artists with something to sell apart from their signatures to cheer, but you are allowed to grin.

Popinjay Art (2)

If you think Damien Hirst is bad, I invite you to Clairac's International Art Salon coming up this month in Clairac (Lot et Garonne, France). Contemporary Art is sick enough when it is original, but in the hands of French provincial pastiche merchants it truly heralds the end of civilisation. The nude in the poster for the exhibit looks as if she has been hit by a TGV before being smeared onto the canvas with kitchen implements and preserved with some kind of industrial plasticiser. Her severed right arm has been saved for an arresting sculpture to be unveiled over the vin d'honneur after the speeches.

Fuel shortage hits swifts

Has anyone seen our swifts? They disappeared from our village in mid-May halfway through the breeding season and haven't been seen since. On the insect front, we have also only had seven flies, one potter wasp and a single humming bird hawk moth (macroglossum stellatarum) in the house all summer. The two facts may be related. Presumably swifts, which spend all their lives on the wing except when nesting, and (I have read somewhere) fly five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon in a lifetime, need a certain amount of fuel, measured, let us say, in grams of insects per kilometre. So when the density of airborne insect protein falls below the required threshold, what gives?

Swifts live up to their name and are born racers - until they crash. Once they fall to Earth they have trouble taking off again because their wings are too long. They can't feed and they lose morale fast. Anyone who has tried to restart a crashed swift or make it feed from the hand knows the problem.

Apart from their role in keeping down the mosquito population, swifts fulfil an essential function in livening up peaceful village evenings with their noisy rodeos. So are the treetops, hedgerows and ditches littered with swifts who just fell from the sky because of a shortage of insect protein? And are rustic eaves now full of the corpses of the chicks whose mothers never came back to feed them?

Bad language

I read this a while back on bbcnews

A group of French speakers in Japan are suing the governor of Tokyo after he described French as a failed language.

The 21 teachers and researchers are demanding compensation and an apology for the "insulting remarks" from Governor Shintaro Ishihara.

Mr Ishihara is accused of saying he was not surprised French did not qualify as an international language, as it was "a language which cannot count numbers".

The veteran politician is well-known for his outspoken comments.

He has previously drawn criticism for saying the Nanjing Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops in the 1930s, never happened.

Mr Ishihara is referring to the fact that French, not having simple words for seventy, eighty and ninety, has to resort to periphrasis to count between 69 and 100. Some numbers are quite challenging to give out over the telephone: 84 24 20 14 94 comes out as quatre vingt quatre vingt quatre vingt quatorze quatre vingt quatorze, which read fast comes out as 84 84 94 94.

French also has over the centuries suffered a process of phonetic attrition unparalleled in other European languages, so that an instruction to put a thermometer in the baby's armpit (dans l'aisselle) could be quite legitimately be misconstrued as meaning to put it in his stools (dans les selles). Only Tibetan to my knowledge has so many silent letters.

So Mr Ishihara's remarks appear justified - so long as he is not trying to imply that Japanese counts better than French and should therefore be an international language. Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start - in Julie Andrews's immortal words). "One day" in Japanese is ichinichi, and "one person" is hitori. Where is the word for one? We all know the word for "person" is hito. But counting upwards, we find that "two persons" is futari. Where did hito go?

"Two days" is futsuka and so fut means "two"? But "two portions" is nininmae (which is written as futari followed by the character mae). So where did fut go?

Or maybe ri means person? But "Three persons" are sannin, so where did ri go?

Confused? Counting in Japanese is a killer, and we only got as far as three.

In the seventh century Japanese was a primitive unwritten language possibly with Korean ancestry and phonetically not unlike Polynesian in its simplicity. It then had the misfortune to import the entire Chinese "alphabet" in order to write itself. But Chinese writing is not phonetic, and along with the characters of Chinese, came the words they represented. This huge influx of words already contained a mass of homonyms even when correctly pronounced with the right tonal distinctions; when adopted into the limited sound palette of Japanese the mass became an unnavigable ocean. Sixteen Chinese syllables: zang, sang, cang, cao, zao, suo, xiang, qiang, sao, zheng, song, zong, cong, zhuang, chuang, zeng and ceng, each with a possible four tones which helped you guess the meanings were reduced in Japanese to one sound: sô.

Right up until the twentieth century the Japanese muddled bravely along with the weight of this huge foreign vocabulary distorting their grammar and overloading their phonology, so they had to trace characters in the air to make themselves understood. And then came the American occupation. For the second time in Japanese history an entire (for them) unpronounceable vocabulary was imported wholesale, along with meanings which they could only grasp after their own fashion.

Without going so far as to say Japanese is a failed language, it might be instructive to make comparisons based on the amount of money and school time spent in each country on simply mastering reading and writing. Wouldn't some kids do better kicking ball?

Languages are the greatest shared creations of humanity. But languages, like bridges, evolve towards failure. Each bridge that doesn't collapse serves as an incitement to streamline the design and cut costs until...