The stranger that is you

 

 

It's difficult to read Camus when you are married and your day is filled with trivialities. Today was different because today Padma went to join the 'Stitching Bitches' in the village hall where she learns the latest crochet knots, and I was left alone in the house.

I hadn't read Camus' "The Stranger" for what seemed like ages. I don't even know if I still have all his books in my somewhat messy library, and the only online copy was in Bahasa Indonesia. And so I did the next-best thing and relaxed on the verandah and listened to the audiobook.

 

 

I could've listened to it in French - click here - but this was my day off from domestic challenges, and the English translation was just fine.

 

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Falling asleep to Albert Camus’ philosophy

 

For more of the same, click here

 

When you get to a certain age, trying to stay awake during the day and trying to fall asleep at night become one and the same. Trying to fall asleep to Albert Camus' complete philosophy may make a difference. It works for me! Tomorrow I might surprise you with Camus' "The Stranger".

 

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What is Trump's next cunning plan?

 

 

I have no idea what Trump's next cunning plan is; I just hope he's not doing another Baldrick. After he had extended the Iran ceasefire overnight, all indications were that the stockmarket was going to nosedive. Yes, all the banks took a beating, but the big miners went up, and then down again, and then up again.

(Did you know that Australians now torch - at a minimum - over $31 billion a year on gambling across pokies, betting, lotteries and casinos, which is roughly the annual profits of ALL the four banks combined?)

The market simply doesn't know what to do — well, except for a certain clique in the US who are making billions with their insider trading. Very soon, though, there will come that Gorbachev-moment — remember December 25, 1991? — when the Iranian regime will finally collapse. I just hope it'll happen long before the whole world economy collapses.

I am holding on to my BHP shares, and just now bought a few more Liontown (LTR), after having sold my previous holding for a tidy profit only yesterday. Lithium is all the rage, and will be for a long time to come, now that electric cars are in higher demand than ever before.

Remember when Blackadder told Baldrick, "You wouldn't know a cunning plan if it danced naked on a harpsichord singing 'Cunning Plans are Here Again'"? Let us just hope that Trump doesn't solve the problem of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by only cutting off everyone's head.

 

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Laid up with Laytime Calculations

 

I know you're so gripped by this clip that you can't wait to watch Part 2

 

Istill remember being overwhelmed the first time I had to calculate the laytime of one of Mofarrij's six general cargo vessels - be it the "Mofarrij-A", "Mofarrij-B", "Mofarrij-C" "Mofarrij-D", "Mofarrij-F" or "Mofarrij-G" - or of any of the other charter vessels - click here.

 

The year was 1984. I had just purchased two APPLE ///s, each with floppy drives A: and B:, holding 5.25-inch disks with a capacity of 360 KB each. We thought them sheer magic! 😄

 

All those NORs, SOFs, WWDs, SHEX, and SHINC, and the small print in Charter Parties were more confusing than the simple dictum that for every debit there must be a credit. It's done with computers now but back then in my Greek salad days (with my apologies to Shakespeare's Cleopatra) in my office overlooking the busy port of Pireaus it was still done the old-fashioned way with paper, pen and hand-written time-sheets. I was often laid up for days with lengthy laytime calculations!

 

In my office in Piraeus

 

After a desperately placed classified in the ATHENS NEWS, I was lucky to find Bozenna, a former employee of Polfracht, a Polish shipbroking and chartering company in Gdynia (which is part of what my former fellow-countrymen used to call Danzig, but we won't go there now), and with a vastly over-qualified master’s degree in maritime transport economics.

"Nie ma problemu", said Bozenna and set to work, often craftily interpreting Charter Parties to swing the calculations in our favour. It proved to be a fortuitous encounter, just as it had been for Bozenna in 1979 when her Polish employers had sent her on a holiday replacement to their office in Piraeus. Two days after her arrival, another Pole, a marine insurance broker, invited her to dinner - and the rest is history.

 

Bozenna and Tadeusz (Ted) at the SAVOY Hotel

 

I know that history well because by the time I got to Greece in late 1982, Bozenna was already married to Tadeusz, the marine insurance broker, and both became my best friends during my time in Greece.

 

Ted in full flight

 

As it turned out, Bozenna was not only smarter than me in calculating laytime but also smarter than me by staying in Greece. Those years were the best years of my life, SHINC (Sundays and holidays included).

 

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Das Tal der Ahnungslosen

 

The grey area represents the reception of West Germany's ARD's television in East Germany. The areas in black had no reception and were jokingly called the "Valley of the Clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen), with ARD said to stand for "Außer Rügen und Dresden"

 

In the far east of Germany lie two infamous valleys. One is the far northeastern tip of the country, the other is around Dresden. During the Soviet occupation of East Germany, they were known as "Die Täler der Ahnungslosen", or the Valleys of the Clueless.

Not because the people there are unusually stupid, but because of the areas' topography which meant that West German television broadcasts couldn’t reach them. They were therefore cut off from the rest of the world, with only the East German state propaganda reaching them.

There are times when I feel I am living in the Valley of the Clueless, that valley being Australia. Here we all are, in an extreme energy crisis — although, if you listened to our clueless Labor government, you'd think that everything will be fine as long as we drive without our roof racks — and yet we maintain a full legislative ban on civilian nuclear power while sitting on nearly 28% of the planet’s known uranium reserves.

While China is building a nuclear empire, Australia is completely absent — zero operating capacity and zero prospective builds. While we are sitting on piddling fuel reserves, we are exporting gas. We also have oil but can't drill for it lest we upset our own homegrown bunch of Greta Thunbergs. And don't get me started on all those shut-down refineries.

While European investors still remember surprise bank holidays, limits on their ATM withdrawals, capital controls, double digit inflation and governments defaulting on their bonds, the stockmarket valuation of our country's biggest bank is greater than the world's biggest miner.

Our blissful ignorance is more ignorance than bliss.

 

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