Author: Joey deVilla

Imagine what would happen if $10 and $20 bills in the U.S. or Canada were suddenly made invalid. That’s pretty much what happened in India on November 8th.

Nearly 90% of the available paper money in India was rendered worthless a week ago when Prime Minister Narendra Modi made all 500- and 1000-rupee bills illegal in an attempt to reduce corruption, tax evasion, and counterfeiting and money laundering often associated with financing terror. Unfortunately, it means that nearly 90% of Indian cash in circulation can’t be used, creating a crisis for just about anyone in India trying to get through their day.

The Economist writes:

The government justified the move in part due to concerns over a proliferation of counterfeit notes (not unusually, it pointed the finger at neighbouring Pakistan), which it claims is fuelling the drug trade and funding terrorism. But its main impact will be on “black money”, cash from undeclared sources which sits outside the financial system. Perhaps 20% of India’s economy is informal. Some of that is poor farmers, who are largely exempt from tax anyway. But the rich are perceived to be sitting on a vast illicit loot. Though a large part of that sits in bank accounts in predictable foreign jurisdictions, a chunk of it is held in high-value Indian notes. Purchases of gold or high-end real estate have long been made at least in part with bundles (or suitcases) of illicit cash.

These most often-used rupee notes — in U.S. terms, they’re analogous to the $10 and $20 bills — were made immediately invalid on November 8th and people have until December 30th to get these old bills replaced with new 500- and 2,000-rupee ones. The result has been long-even-by-Asian-standards lines at banks and ATMs, and confusion among that part of the population that lives in poverty, doesn’t have a bank account, and doesn’t know what to do with what little suddenly worthless money they have.

In case you were curious, here’s a “Cost of living in India” page showing the prices of everyday things.

For more, see:

• Forbes: India Demonetizes Banknotes To Combat Tax Cheating, The Poor Suffer As A Result
• The Economist: Why India scrapped its two biggest bank notes
• BBC: Tourists struggling to find cash in India
• Quartz: One week of demonetisation in India: The good, the bad, and the ugly
• The Indian Express: Demonetisation: 11 deaths reported so far as India queues up outside banks
• Of course this event has its own Wikipedia page!

You could point your coworkers to any number of articles about how many meetings are a waste of time, or you can simply say it with these socks. You can order them online from Absolute Ties for $12, and they’ll make a great present for that special white-collar someone in your life.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Be excellent to each other, folks.

Yes, I know there are fingerprints all over my iPad case.

Sooner or later, we all encounter that person: the one who breaks into our personal space on a plane, often quite unintentionally. This happened to me last night on my flight home when the guy pictured above drifted off to sleep. He was in the middle seat of our row; I took the window seat because I got a spot in Southwest’s “A” group and because I have retained my sense of adventure about travel.

He certainly wasn’t drunk, but he was incredibly relaxed and floppy. He leaned on me for a moment, then leaned on the passenger in the aisle seat, and finally slumped forward against the seat in the row ahead of us. His preternatural flaccidity was a wonder to behold. If the plane crashes, I thought, he’s almost guaranteed survival.

I was all right with that state of affairs until we hit some turbulence. He bounced around like a stalk of microwaved asparagus and finally landed face first in my lap. That’s when I tapped on his shoulder and woke him up.

As he groggily pulled himself upright, I smiled at him and said “In my culture, we’re married now.”

(It’s a catchphrase my Dad used to use in awkward situations and I’d decided to borrow it.)

He gave me a weak, worried smile, and sat bolt upright for the rest of the flight.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Water fountain at First Coast High School in Jacksonville.
Click the photo to see the news story.

You’d think that a member of the vaunted Master Race would put the “whites only” sign on the higher-up water fountain.

It’s almost as sad as these pathetic attempts at swastika graffiti from a couple of years back:

November 11th is the anniversary of the end of World War I, also known as the Great War — and is referred to as Veterans Day here in the U.S.. In Canada and many other Commonwealth countries, this day is referred to as Remembrance Day.

Lt. Col. John Alexander McCrae, author of In Flanders Fields..

The symbol of Remembrance Day is the poppy, which grew in abundance in some of Europe’s bloodiest battlefields during World War I, and became the central image of In Flanders Fields, a poem written by Canadian soldier Lt. Col. John Alexander McCrae, a field surgeon assigned to the First Field Artillery Brigade after a particularly bloody battle in Ypres that started on April 22, 1915 and that lasted 17 days. After performing a funeral for his Alexis Helmer (no chaplain was available), McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance, from which wild poppies could be seen growing in a nearby cemetery, and wrote the following into his notebook:

Here’s the text of the poem:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

There’s only one person in my family that I’m aware of who’s performed military service, but I think his contribution is significant enough:

Note the family resemblance.

Pictured above is General Renato S. de Villa (retired), the 19th person to hold the title of the Phillipines’ Secretary of Defense. His military started in 1953, when he joined the Philippine Military Academy. Since then, he served as Chief of Philippine Constabulary, Director-General of the Integrated National Police, and Vice-Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. President Corazon Aquino — yup, the Philippines had a woman president before the U.S. did — made him Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, and in 1989, he defended her against coup plots in Manila by Gregorio Honasan‘s Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) and the siege of an army camp by Rizal Alih in Zamboanga City.

Here’s Uncle Rene’s page on the Philippines’ Department of National Defense site, and here’s his Wikipedia entry.

If you ever visit the Philippines, be sure to visit the Manila American Cemetery, the cemetery with the largest number of U.S. soldiers who died in World War II in the Pacific. It’s both a beautiful place and a great way to pay tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.