An upsetting story from Reuters yesterday. “Two years after she went missing, a 6-year-old girl has been found alive and in good health in a makeshift room underneath a staircase in a house in New York state…”
Now you might well ask why I find this upsetting? You need to read on:
Here's a stat that Unicef trots out almost every year: Every two minutes, a child under five dies of malaria.
I'm wistfully saddened at the news that P.J. O'Rourke died today — wistful because I always wanted to meet him but never got down to doing something about it.
His writing was the single reason I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine in my student days at Princeton in the 1980s — a path which introduced me to Gonzo journalism which in turn led me to discover Hunter S. Thompson.
I'm not going to go into his life story as there's enough of that documented elsewhere. I'm just going to briefly quote some of his work.
So here I am, after a fabulous dinner, trying to make coherent sense around the nature of the world (which, truth be told, is no different from most days). And the core idea today is what if things don't go the way you expect them to?
Hence the opening question which was raised by Hammond Innes through one of his characters in The White South (1949).
This from Elon Musk last week: "Why is the 'traditional' media such a relentless hatestream?"
He went on:
Most news outlets attempt to answer the question: “What are the worst things happening on Earth today?”
It’s a big planet! Obviously, some bad things are happening somewhere at any given time, but focusing relentlessly on those does not give an accurate picture of reality.
An acquaintance of mine has become the southern African partner for nice piece of European technology in the off-grid energy space. He asked me whether I would be willing to spread the word to potential customers, and I responded: "Sure. What's the entry-level price per unit?"
So here we are, on a Saturday afternoon, having a conference call with his German partner who proceeds to tell me about how brilliant his product is and its life expectancy is 20 years or more versus 5 years for the competition before I finally cut him short.
France’s president Emmanuel Macron and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin met in Moscow. They were pictured sitting at opposite ends of a long table which immediately reminded me of the adage that he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
Duck l'Orange is a favoured dish at Chez Pillay which is generally reserved for those rare occasions when Dr B and I have the house to ourselves. So, there's usually a pack or two of duck breasts in our freezer.
All I knew about Maersk until today is that most of the shipping containers on trucks travelling Africa’s longest dual carriage freeway from Durban to Johannesburg bear their logo. Then I saw the announcement of their financial results for 2021.
Yale Kamisar passed away 30 January 2022 aged 92. He was an American legal scholar and writer and Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Most of us have not heard of him, but his impact on the legal world was ground-breaking. He is known in legal circles as “Father of Miranda”.
If you’ve ever watched an American cop making an arrest on screen, you would probably have heard these words before:
