Categories
The Current Situation

Meme of the day

Thanks to Jordan Running for the find! Tap to view at full size.

 

Categories
Slice of Life

Morten’s better ice-breaker: “The Museum Question”

Morten Rand-Hendriksen, whom I met during my time as a Microsoftie, has a brilliant “ice-breaker” question that’s perfect for those group intro sessions, where everyone’s trying to get a feel for all the other people in the room.

The question:

A museum calls you and says they want to feature you in their permanent exhibit. But there’s a small catch: They only have room for one artifact, and you only get to choose once. What do you send them?

The answer for me would seem obvious — an accordion — but the question then becomes: Which one? The answer to that question is “The first one”, pictured at the top of this post. It’s the one I took out onto the streets of Toronto on May 1, 1999 and started this whole thing rolling.

What would your artifact be?

(Be sure to read Morten’s article on the topic!)

Categories
America The Current Situation

A reminder

Categories
Florida of the Day

Floridian Pie

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Categories
Music Stranger than Fiction

Dammit kid, you’re makin’ me feel old

During my time at Crazy Go Nuts University, I was in a band that covered a couple of Pixies numbers (Tame, U-Mass, and we also covered their cover of The Beatles’ Wild Honey Pie), and have attended 4 concerts where the Pixies were either part of the line-up or the headlining act. I suppose this kind of “oof” was bound to happen sooner or later.

Wave of Mutilation came from the Pixies’ 1989 album, Doolittle:

Categories
The Current Situation

Some facts to remember about the current situation in Afghanistan

Also worth checking out is this article from The Hindu: Mullah Baradar released by Pakistan at the behest of US: Khalilzad (Feburary 9, 2019)

And then, after Baradar’s release, do you remember the hush-hush plans to meet with the Taliban at Camp David back in 2019? See these articles:

And as for the withdrawal, remember that Trump had set a withdrawal date of much earlier this year — May 1:

Categories
Stranger than Fiction

August 15th: A loaded day

 

In India, today is a national holiday in India that marks its independence from the United Kingdom. On August 15, 1947 — 74 years ago — the provisions of the Indian Independence Act came into effect, officially ending 300 years of British occupation.

On that same day, August 15, 1947, the Partition of India took place, dividing the former British India into two independent dominions of India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with its Muslim majority. Drawing new borders where none previously existed is a messy business, and this was no exception, as 15 million people were displaced, 1 million were killed, and communities that lived side by side for 1,000 years started killing each other in humankind’s oldest sport: “What team do you play for?”

Two years prior to India’s independence and partition — August 15, 1945 — was the day when Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule, which had been going on since 1910.

Today, in South Korea, it’s 광복절 (Gwangbokjeol), which literally translates as “The day the light returned”. It’s also a big day in North Korea, where it’s taken on the unsurprisingly dour name 조국해방의 날 (Chogukhaebangŭi nal), which means “Liberation of the Fatherland Day”.

50 years ago today, on August 15, 1971, then-president Richard Nixon announced a new economic policy, whose measures collectively became known as the Nixon Shock.

In a televised announcement that meant interrupting the popular TV show Bonanza, he effectively announced that the connection between the U.S. dollar and gold was to be broken. The way in which he made the announcement might seem kind of odd to the modern-day viewer; by today’s standards, his announcement looks like a dry reading recorded in a YouTuber conspiracy theorist’s basement and not the bombshell that it actually was:

The money line (pun intended) in his announcement was that the U.S. would — and I quote:

“…suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold.”

50 years is still not forever, so technically the “temporarily” qualifier still applies. Temporary or not, the effects of the disconnection between the dollar and gold — the creation of what cryptocurrency people like to refer to as fiat currency (currency that governments issue by fiat, and are not backed by a commodity, such as gold) — have had massive effects on the way the world works today.

I have only a vague notion of Bretton Woods, and international monetary policy, and most of what I know about modern monetary theory comes from the “sink metaphor”. To better my understanding, I’ve put some books on my reading list including this one:

If you’ve been watching the Food Network for some time, the name of the author, Jeffrey Garten, may seem familiar. The author photo may clinch it for you:

That’s right, he’s the Barefoot Contessa’s husband! When he’s not making cameo appearances on her show, he’s kept himself doing money-related things such as being Dean of the Yale School of Management, Undersecretary of Commerce during the Clinton administration and doing other government work during the Carter, Ford, and Nixon administrations, and managing director at Lehman Brothers and Blackstone Group.