If you find the text too small to read on this website, press the CTRL button and,
without taking your finger off, press the + button, which will enlarge the text.
Keep doing it until you have a comfortable reading size.
(Use the - button to reduce the size)

Today's quote:

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Dogecoin is dodgy

 

Some say cryptocurrency is the future of money, and the technology it's built on is destined to revolutionise the internet and the society. Others see it as one big fraud. Whatever the truth, it's impossible to escape the hype which creates the value because there is no real underlying value.

I believe cryptocurrencies are just one big Ponzi scheme. They have no underlying intrinsic value other than what people believe they are worth. And the main reason that people invest in cryptocurrency is because they believe that there's a greater fool out there than them.

"Despite claims of 'decentralization', the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures" who pump and dump. Before you get dumped, watch this ABC Four Corner's clip.


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Seven Years in Tibet

 

Aall our dreams begin in youth. As a child I found the achievements of the heroes of our day far more inspiring than book-learning. The men who went out to explore new lands or with toil and self-sacrifice fitted themselves to become champions in the field of sport, the conquerors of the great peaks - to imitate such men was the goal of my ambition."

So wrote Heinrich Harrer in the preface to his famous book "Seven Years in Tibet", and he continued, "Since then many years have passed, but I have never been able to cut loose from Asia. How all this came about, and what it led to, I shall try to describe in this book, and as I have no experience as an author I shall content myself with the unadorned facts."

The unadorned facts are what the above 1956 documentary by Hans Nieter uses to describe Hans Harrer's incredible struggle to reach Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city, in January 1946. The documentary never became a Hollywood blockbuster like the 1997 movie with Brad Pitt, and neither did Heinrich Harrer's 1985 sequel "Return to Tibet" become a bestseller like "Seven Years in Tibet". If you're interested, you can read it here.

To read this and hundeds of thousands of other books online,
JOIN UP with www.archive.org - it's FREE! - then LOG IN and BORROW

 


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Monday, May 30, 2022

Schopenhauer on reading and books

Read Schopenhauer's essay "On Reading and Books" here

 

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents. To desire that a man should retain everything he has ever read, is the same as wishing him to retain in his stomach all that he has ever eaten."

And here's another piece of advice: "Any kind of important book should immediately be read twice, partly because one grasps the matter in its entirety the second time, and only really understands the beginning when the end is known; and partly because in reading it the second time one’s temper and mood are different, so that one gets another impression; it may be that one sees the matter in another light."

Though it was written a hundred and fifty years ago, the essay "On Reading and Books" still has much to tell us and, for nineteenth century German philosophy, it is significantly funnier than you might expect.


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Sunday, May 29, 2022

My Life in Greece

 

Just months before I left Greece - and before I even knew I would so abruptly and so stupidly resign from a job that others might kill for - I booked myself on a bus tour of all the ancient sites. It was in the middle of winter which even in Greece can be pretty harsh, and we spent more time inside Greek tavernas than in ancient Greek temples. "Opa!" indeed!

Two Australian girls, deaf-and-dumb teachers from Melbourne, who had just arrived in Athens on a whirlwind tour of Greece, sat across the aisle from me. They had no need to talk behind my back because they always "spoke" in Auslan. Whatever they were saying about me must've been nice enough because we joined up for the duration of the bus trip and they even spent another week staying at my apartment in Piraeus.

If you have an hour or two to spare and are missing Greece as much as I do, then "My Life in Ruins" is a welcome ray of sunshine on a cold winter's morning in Australia. It's been many years since I last spoke Greek, and I'm already beginning to fall back on my phonetic device to remind me of the Greek word for "thank you", and so I simply say "F. Harry Stow" to Greece, to my wonderful friends in Greece, and to the two deaf-and-dumb teachers in Melbourne for the wonderful memories.


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Living at the End of Time

The small cabin deep in the woods with a river running 'round it. We named it "Melbourne" so that if the phone in the house rings and someone asks for me, Padma can truthfully tell them, "Sorry, but Peter has gone away to Melbourne."

 

On July 4, 1845, the year he turned twenty-eight, Henry D. Thoreau moved into his house at Walden Pond. He borrowed a wagon from a friend, loaded it with his few earthly belongings, and hauled everything out through the woods to the door of his newly constructed dwelling.

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

He did not own much. As he tells us in "Walden", he had at the cabin a table, a bed, three chairs, a three-inch looking-glass, and a tent, which he kept rolled in the loft. He also had three plates, a cup, a spoon, two knives and forks, a japanned lamp, a flute, a kettle, a skillet, a dipper, and a wash-bowl. He brought with him a few cherished books, including his copy of "The Iliad", and some lighter reading.

No-one who wants to spend some time in the woods does so without at least a nod to Henry Thoreau who wanted "to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms." Unlike Henry Thoreau, who lived in his cabin for a little over two years and made do with only a few books, I lined the walls of my small cabin in the woods with shelves, filled them up with books, and stayed there during the warm summer months for just a night or two at a time, never too far away that I couldn't walk home for dinner.

Being without insulation and without any source of heat, the summer idyll of spending nights in my little cabin, my retreat from the twenty-first century, has come to an end. I had become a little addicted to the place. A good addiction in which the modern world fades away. There's something fascinating about simplicity: inside the hut the light of the kerosene lamps cast a warm glow over the wood-panelled walls, and in the peace of the summer evenings I began to appreciate the beauty of shadowed corners, of silence and the natural world. You begin to imagine you could give away all your money and live happily on nothing.

On certain evenings a deep, almost primeval silence would descend. With no artifical light nearby, with just the golden glow of the kerosene lamps, the moon and stars seemed brighter, the sky blacker. The night would be warm; a slight breeze rustled the tree tops, and occasionally all manners of scratchings and scurryings could be heard around the hut.

In the morning, with the sun slanting through the windows, with bird song everywhere, and the cottage filled with air and light and the fresh smell of a new morning, I'd get up early, pour a coffee from the thermos I had carried from the house the night before, and sit in a sunny spot along the east wall, thinking and daydreaming, simply staring at things, drinking coffee and landscape in alternating sips. I have no religion but I came to love those mornings at my cottage, and those quiet moments were the finest hours of the day that came closest to sacredness.

Summer has gone and I'm back in the comfort of my own home with heating, electricity, running water, telephone, television, the internet, and I'm reading "Living at the End of Time" by John Hanson Mitchell.

Henry Thoreau took to the woods because he wished to live deliberately. John Hanson Mitchell took to the woods because "... the woods were the only place I could afford to live". There he discovered firsthand, as Henry Thoreau had taught, that the essence of civilisation is not the multiplication of wants but the elimination of need.

In our time it never hurts to rediscover such simple truths for ourselves.


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Saturday, May 28, 2022

Dumb and Dumber

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand-children's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

So wrote Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark" in 1995, twenty-seven years ago. How prescient was that!

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

And he continued: "The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one video cassette rental in America is the movie 'Dumb and Dumber'

 

 

To which I can add only four words: Not only in America!


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Friday, May 27, 2022

The trick is to know which book to read

 

Carl Sagan is perhaps best known for his book "Cosmos" which contains the memorable quote, "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

Page 281 of the same book contains another equally memorable quote:

"If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime ... The trick is to know which books to read."

 

 

I have yet to learn that trick, as I randomly buy more and more books. Recent additions to my library include Michael Harris' "The End of Absence", Tim Marshall's "Prisoners of Geography", "Solitude" (another Michael Harris book), and, on a lighter note, "Whatever happened to Margo?", a humorous account by Margaret Durrell - one of the famous Durrells of Corfu - of her experiences as a Bournemouth landlady in the late 1940s. Maybe the trick is to know when to stop buying books!


Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. You may wish to listen to the audiobook "Cosmos" here and here.

P.P.S. I could listen to the man all day long - click here.

 

People die only when we forget them

One of the last few postcards I received from my friend Hans Moehrke

 

On this day in 2015, my friend Hans Moehrke passed away at his home in Cape Town. He and I had met when he stayed at the SAVOY HOTEL in Piraeus where I was a permanent resident during my "Greek days". We breasted the bar on many nights and, over many drinks, bemoaned the state of the world and our place in it, in three languages: Afrikaans, English and German. We were both in commodity trading: I mainly in grains, in lots of 20,000, 30,000, even 50,000 tonnes at a time, whereas Hans was more into pork bellies for which there wasn't much demand from my Saudi masters.

We stayed in touch after my return to Australia in 1985, sometimes through an occasional phone call but more often through letters and postcards. "I was delighted to speak to you on the phone today. Although some ten years or more must have passed since we last spoke with one another, hearing your voice was just as if we had been together only yesterday", he wrote, and repeatedly invited me to visit him and his family in Cape Town. (His daughter Astrid and her husband and their son later emigrated to Adelaide, and I like to think that my supporting letter to the Department of Immigration was of some help.)

Knowing I was again single by choice - just not my choice - he tried to matchmake me by sending me several of these enticing postcards:

 

 

On the back he wrote, "I will gladly assist you in trying to source the right partner for you. However my hands are tied until I receive detailed specifications from you. South Africa has many fair maidens to offer, although they may not always be fair in colour as revealed on these postcards. To acquire any one of the wholesome women for the purpose of marriage, you have to negotiate with the parents of the bride to agree on the level of the 'Labola' payment. The price is determined by the status of the family - chief, headman or commoner - whether the bride is a vergin [sic] or not, whether she has illegitimate children, etc. In practice this means you will have to pay plus/minus 200 cows or 40,000 rand for a daughter of a chief, if she is still a vergin [sic]. If on the other hand, if she has had premarital experience, one should be able to negotiate a 25% discount. Should the above proposition arouse your interest and since I am reasonably familiar with local customs, I could of course assist you with negotiations and any physical examination that may be required (here, too, I am qualified) to make sure that you receive value for money."

 

 

After he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and his hand-writing had become almost illegible, we phoned each other instead. Then, after I had heard nothing from him for a while, I don't know what made me do it but I googled "Hans Moehrke Cape Town" and found this:

 

www.remembered.co.za
Hans Horst Moehrke was born on 30 July 1934
and passed away on 27 May 2015 in Cape Town.
Posted by Remembered Admin, 10 Jun 2015

 

That was seven years ago, and I still miss his postcards and letters and occasional phone calls, his great sense of humour, and even more our long talks breasting the bar of the SAVOY HOTEL. Rest in Peace, Hans!

People die only when we forget them. I shan't forget you, Hans!


Googlemap Riverbend

 

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Prisoners of Geography

To read a preview, click here

 

Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers and ask God: "Wy didn't you put some mountains in Ukraine?" If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. And if Russia wants to be a world power, it must have a navy. And if its ports freeze for six months each year then it must have access to a warm water port - hence, the annexation of Crimea was the only option for Putin.

All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to understand world events you need to understand people, ideas and movements ... but if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture. To get the full picture, get yourself a copy of Tim Marshall's "Prisoners of Geography - Ten Maps That Explain Everything About The World". I just did!

 


Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. I've just discovered Tim Marshall's sequel "The Power of Geography". Listened to a sample of the audiobook and am tempted to order it and the hardcover book.

 

Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Not me! Not yet!

 

My visit to the oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr Anthony Oliver today added a new word to my vocabulary: hyperbaric, as in hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Because the tooth that needs to be extracted is in the pathway of my cancer radiation some four years ago, the risk is that the hole left by the extracted tooth may not heel again, leaving an exposed jaw.

As the surgeon pointed out, "The risk may be only 15% but if you are in that 15%, your risk is 100%!" To lower the risk, he suggested hyperbaric oxygen treatment to increase oxygen levels in my blood stream to help heal damaged tissue that has a poor blood supply from previous injury, such as radiotherapy. It's the same sort of treatment that is given to divers who are suffering decompression illness known as 'The Bends'.

Treatment time is two hours a day, Monday to Friday, for four to six weeks, all of which takes place at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital. If you want to know more, read the Patient Information Booklet.

"Don't call me; I call you!" he said, and so I'll wait to hear if and when I will hit the bright lights of Sydney again. Life is just a bowl of cherries!


Googlemap Riverbend

 

The Confidence Game

 

An old friend from my Bougainville days who's as gullible as he's greedy, sent me the link financialnewszone.com and wrote, "Hi Peter, I just came across this crypto-currency trading scheme and I am tempted to invest a bit of money in it, are you into crypto at all? What do you think of this plan, they make it sound like you couldn’t go wrong with it, what do you think? I thought of just putting in a few thousand dollars and see how it goes and would value your opinion!"

What, my old employers from fifty years ago, the ANZ Bank, offering a crypto-currendy trading scheme? Never! One quick check with whois.domaintools.com revealed it for what it was: a scam emanating from Bucuresti (Bucharest in Romania to you), and forty-seven days old!

Of course, I immediately alerted the powers that be inside the ANZ Bank that some scammers are masquerading under their good name, and the website - however convingly good it was done, even including a photo of Shayne Elliott, CEO of ANZ Bank - may soon be made to disappear again.

To my gullible friend I sent an online copy of "The Confidence Game". Fearing that he may not take the time to read it, I also added a link to Maria Konnikova's video presentation.

 

 

If you ever receive an offer that seems too good to be true, you will know it isn't true, don't you? At the very least, check the domain name with whois.domaintools.com, and if they ask you to click on a link, hover the pointy finger of your mouse over the link for a moment and look at the REAL link name displayed at the bottom of your screen.


Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. The fake site at financialnewszone.com has since been removed, and my gullible and no longer quite so greedy friend emailed, "Thanks Peter, you saved me, without you I'd have fallen for it, thanks again!"

 

The Durrells of Corfu

For a preview, click here

 

Not even a raging toothache could keep me away from my favourite op-shop when we visited Ulladulla again yesterday. Mind you, being a whole one hour early for my dental appointment and not wanting to spend it in the dentist's waiting room listening to all those drilling and gurgling noises may have had something to do with it.

The gods must have been wanting to make up to me for all the pain I was in, because there, squeezed in alongside a whole row of forgettable potboilers, I found this little gem of a book, "The Durrells of Corfu", still in mint condition. It is yet another biography of Corfu's eccentric expat family immortalised in Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals" and its ITV adaptation, "The Durrells".

How I wished I had already read it when I used to fly across to Corfu for a short weekend to stay in my Saudi boss's villa on Messonghi Beach to recover from an overload of work in my Piraeus office, but then I also regret not yet having read T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" when I lived in Saudi Arabia, or George Orwell's "Burmese Days" when I worked in Burma, or Anthony Burgess's "Malayan Trilogy" during those beautiful twelve months in Penang. Of course, I read them all now, and many more besides, but it felt a bit like finally reaching out for the instruction manual after having struggled for days with an IKEA flatpack.

As for my dentist's diagnosis, it was like a fairy tale, GRIMM! While he cut away the remainder of the broken-off tooth which had caused me so much pain, he felt unqualified to extract it fully as the tooth is right in the path of all that cancer radiation I had received all those four years ago, and there was a likelihood that it may lead to complications and even require a bone graft from my leg.

While I still had a leg to stand on, I made my way to the Mogo Day Surgery where the oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr Anthony Oliver practises for a couple of days a week. He was not due in until the next day for which I was able to secure a preliminary appointment at 1.50 p.m. Having all that time to wait, I looked him up on the internet, and was impressed - see here. Skilled hands when I need them indeed!


Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. I was lucky to get an appointment with Dr Oliver the very next day - click here.

 

Monday, May 23, 2022

The Sense of an Ending

 

I was going to write something about "The Sense of an Ending", one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors, but then I got waylaid by the description of one of his other books, "Levels of Life", and I thought that's just the sort of book I want to read now.

I went to ebay and found a copy priced at a modest twelve dollars but then, with my finger poised on the "BuyItNow" button, I thought, "Just a tick! I have several of Julian Barnes' books, why not this?" And so, at five o'clock in the morning, with the smoke from the neighbours' woodfires in my nostrils and before I had fed myself or the ducks and the possum, I trudged through the dewy grass across to my library to see if I did.

YES! I GOT IT! It's just that I hadn't read it yet! Some of my visitors look at my library and go, "Wow! What a library you have! Have you read them all?", and others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. A library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the size of your house allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. I call this collection of unread books my antilibrary.

Read it online, if you must, at www.archive.org

 

"Levels of Life" is part history, part fiction, and part memoir. It is a powerfully personal book on the subject of grief. It opens in the nineteenth century with balloonists, photographers, and Sarah Bernhardt, whose adventures lead seamlessly into an entirely personal account of the author's own great loss. "You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed..."

As will be yours after you've read this slim 118-page volume. I'm almost through to the last page, after which I may read it again, after which I'll return it to my library, the read-book-part of it, not my antilibrary.

As for "The Sense of an Ending", I'll tell you about it some other time, perhaps after I've had my porridge and fed the ducks and the possum.


Googlemap Riverbend