A quick dash into town

 

 

There's really nothing better on a hot day like today than sitting by the river to keep cool, but we promised to see our friends in town and so we went (of course, if I had stayed home I wouldn't have missed BHP opening at $48.49 and may've offloaded some; they closed the day down at $47.70 but still up 48 cents from yesterday).

 

 

As if to make up for what I missed out on BHP, I picked up this little gem at Vinnies: "Half the Perfect World". I'd been looking at it on ebay for a while but always baulked at paying forty dollars plus postage, and there it was for two dollars at my favourite op-shop. And if that wasn't already enough, I found Leonard Cohen's "Book of Longing". Only those who follow this blog will see the connection between Hydra Island, Leonard Cohen, George Johnston ("My Brother Jack"), and my time in Greece.

For good measure, I also picked up a Simon Winchester book I hadn't read yet, "A Crack in the Edge of the World", and what promises to be a good romp, "Changing Gears - A Pedal-Powered Detour from the Rat Race". I couldn't wait to get home to start reading, but first we had lunch at the club with our friends. The view was excellent, the company equally so, and the food — well, what one would expect from a club.

 

 

We are home again with the blinds drawn to keep the heat out. Even the computer is displaying a heat warning! And it's only Wednesday, with rising temperatures forecast for the rest of the week and the weekend.

 

 

It's not something you'd often see in Germany, is it, Ralf Goette? 😂

 

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I'm obsessed not only with apostrophes!

 

Those shirts and shorts are straight out of K-Mart, with their fold-marks still showing
(I have an eye for these things because I often rushed into David Jones' before work on a Monday morning after having misspent yet another weekend without doing my laundry)

 

It's just after six in the morning and I was going to step outside onto the verandah to take a photo of the mighty Clyde River which is quietly flowing like the Don - are you a fan of Mikhail Sholokhov? - before the daily onrush of the tourists because the holiday season isn't over yet, but I can't take a photo because the river is all fogged in, which is a sign of a hot day to come.

Instead, I am showing you a photo of Mark & Steph, Taj, Harlo, Hendrix, Sabre and Baby Bodhi (this looks like a spelling bee; what happened to good ol' English names?) According to their website, they are the family behind the Se7en Cafe (I am typing this without the acute accent to be true to their website) which the former "Drain Surgeon" Frank and I have been supporting by having our weekly "Kaffeeklatsch" on their premises.

But not today! It'll be too hot today to sit in their crowded and noisy café (back to my acute accent), and I've just rung the "Drain Surgeon" to suggest that we meet in the air-conditioned comfort of the Batemans Bay Soldiers Club (they must have removed the apostrophe altogether after I had told them that it was misplaced in their "Batemans Bay Soldier's Club" car signage). They sell some beautiful cheese cake, too!

Having just looked at the overnight London and New York prices of BHP, I may be able to afford more than just one piece of cake because London finished at £24 and New York, which is still trading, stands at US$32.42. At their respective conversion rates, that would suggest an Australian opening price of $48.15, up by another 93 cents from yesterday's close.

As you may have gathered, I'm obsessed not only with apostrophes!

 

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The Tasmanian Devil

 

 

Anybody who spent time in New Guinea would have read the Pacific Islands Monthly and heard of Errol Flynn, writer, adventurer, con-man, screen star, Don Juan, frustrated in marriage and career, butt of sexual jokes and sly smirks ("in like Flynn"), bouts with disease, drink, and drugs, and then suddenly death in 1959 at the age of fifty.

He lived a fast life but left behind some revealing introspections:

"I am going to front the essentials of life to see if I can learn what it has to teach and above all not to discover when I come to die, that I have not lived.

We fritter our lives away in detail, but I am not going to do this. I am going to live deeply, to acknowledge not one of the so-called social forces which hold our lives in thrall & reduce us to economic dependency. The best part of life is spent earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

I am going ... to drive life into a corner & reduce it to its lowest terms and if I find it mean than I'll know its meanness, and if I find it sublime I shall know it by experience --- and not make wistful conjectures about it conjured up by illustrated magazines."

Errol Flynn most certainly "fronted up" to life, spent money as fast as he earned it (and then some), and learned about life from first-hand experience.

 

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A new world order?

 

Despite having hundreds more irregular verbs than the English,
this map must have been drawn up by a Spaniard or Portuguese.
I would never have spelt the irregular verb 'split' as 'splited'.
I'll be a pedant until Trump's bitter end. 😂

 

The story goes that after Oliver Cromwell had taken the Irish town of Drogheda, he had all its citizens brought to the town square and instructed his lieutenants, "Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men!" One of his aids said, "Excuse me, General, but shouldn't that be the other way around?" A voice from the crowd called out, "Mr Cromwell knows what he's doing!"

Threatening to withdraw from NATO; renaming the Gulf of Mexico, imposing huge tariffs on his own citizens, kidnapping a South American dictator; telling Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba "You're next!", wanting to annex Greenland — does Mr Trump know what he's doing? "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake!" I can hear Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un mutter as they rub their hands with glee.

 

Reactions to Trump's kidnapping of Maduro have been mixed

 

It seems Mr Trump is drawing up his own "Treaty of Tordesillas" which in 1494 divided the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese by drawing a longitudinal line west of Cape Verde, with everything east of it going to Portugal and everything west to Spain (which is why today Brazil speaks Portuguese while the rest of South America speaks Spanish — stay with me, Sunshine, you're getting a free lesson in history here!)

Mr Trump's "Treaty of Tordesillas" suggests that anything near the United States is free for him to take and to let the rest of the world look after itself. This doesn't look good for Taiwan and Ukraine because if he can invade Venezuela, he can hardly argue if Xi Jinping takes over what has always been a part of China nor censor Putin for invading what has for much of its history been part of the Russian Empire. A new world order?

 

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"What's your current position?"

 

"That's my current position!"
Inside "BONNIEDOON" during today's heatwave.
It's hot but peaceful with just a few kangaroos outside
munching on what's left of the green grass

 

That's what an old friend from my New Guinea days asked me just now. Like me, he had piled into thousands of "penny dreadful" shares, only to see them become worthless paper when the mining boom came to an end in the early 1970s.

 

The address says it all: PO Box 187, Rabaul, New Guinea

PO Box 12, Kieta, Bougainville, New Guinea

 

What we lost then seems, from today's perspective, like pocket-money but was then more than a whole year's salary earned from working ten hours a day six days a week. It taught him never to buy shares again while it taught me not to treat the sharemarket like a casino but to treat investing in shares like watching paint dry or watching grass grow.

Yes, I still made far too many mistakes because the sharemarket is like life itself — nothing is certain — but despite constant ups and downs my share portfolio steadily grew while at the same time earning me a steady stream of dividends topped up by refundable franking credits.

Of course, I didn't tell him that because, even though he's a nice chap, envy is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Instead, I just emailed him the above photo with the description, "That's my current position!"

 

 

Just between you and me, BHP ended the day at $47.22, up 74 cents.

 

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