Today BHP fell off the cliff

 

 

Last Friday, BHP powered from the previous day's close of $60.80 to an intraday high of $63.21 to close at $62.93. It followed it up with a jump to $65.18 on Monday and $65.59 on Wednesday (with an intraday high of $$65.98!)

Only yesterday, it was still flirting with a high of $65.66 before closing at $65.04, which seemed like nothing more than a temporary stall, but then came this morning's news that the costs of its Jansen potash project had blown out to at least US$6.9 billion, which is 42% above the original US$4.9 billion estimate, and it got SMASHED! In its biggest single-session loss since April 2025 it dropped from $65.04 to $61.40!

The market giveth, and the market taketh away! I am back to where I was last Thursday! My diary entry reads: SELL BHP WHEN BACK AT $66!

 

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This discovery sealed it for me

 

< Click on Watch on YouTube to watch the movie

 

Could you ever image "Casablanca" or "The Third Man" in anything but black-and-white? I love watching black-and-white movies, despite the fact that they often put actors' lives in danger during driving scenes, as they aren't able to tell if the traffic light is red or green.

No such danger in the medieval allegory "The Seventh Seal" which is set in fourteenth-century Sweden during the time of the Black Death, long before motor cars and traffic lights, and tells of the journey of Antonius, a medieval knight, who challenges Death to a game of chess, with his life as the prize. It is one of the greatest movies of all time which established Ingmar Bergman as a world-renowned director.

A regular movie-goer watching this movie may pick up on a few things: the terror, the suspense, the artful composition of the shots. A chess player, though - and that includes me - sees only one thing: that the chess board that decides Antonius’s fate is set up totally backwards.

Here is a correctly set up chess board ...

 

 

... .. and here is the (still) correctly set up board early in the movie:

 

 

But then things begin to go wrong. You see, when you set up the board, you're supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player's right side is light-coloured - the mnemonic "right is light" might help.

The next rule: when you array the pieces, the white queen always goes on the white square, and the black queen always on the black square.

So what do you see halfway through the movie? A black square nearest to each player's right side which changes the game completely!

 

 

It also positions the queen on the wrong side of each player's king at the start of the game (always provided the white-queen-on-white-square and black-queen-on-black-square rule is still correctly followed)

 

 

To think that Antonius may have lost his life due to an incorrectly set up chessboard ...

 

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What's Literature?

 

 

Okay, so the reader is no Leonard Teale whose resonant baritone voice was known to my generation from the long-running police drama "Homicide", but this video clip about literature is a huge intellectual effort. [Buy the transcript]

By the end of this video, you will know all the great works of literature, literary movements, as well as some of the most literary minds from around the world. The video has 3 major parts and 11 sections.

Part 1 gives the answer the most fundamental question. Why are humans the only species who tells stories? What functions do stories have in our evolution? It also highlight some important events in history that shaped the way we tell stories, and the literary movements of the last 4,000 years.

Part 2 deals with the origin of storytelling and how it is rooted in nature. The most fundamental event in a human life is death or the awareness of it. So this part discusses storytelling in four segments each on the topic of death, wars, sex and laughter. In other words, humans woke up to the realisation of death, so the first stories are stories of mortality and immortality. Then we humans moved to wars and wrote epics that lamented the demise of an empire or celebrated their triumphs. Since the victors got the spoils and we moved to tell stories of sex and mating, romance became an important topic of storytelling. In other words, how boys meet girls. With sex came laughter, so storytelling entertained us through comedy.

Part 3 moves away from nature-inflicted tales towards human-centred stories, as in when storytelling meets rationality and humanism. So instead of gods and nature, we humans became in charge of our own destiny. The age of reason also resulted in a counter-enlightenment movement of romanticism which took us back to nature. Then came realism, in which ordinary people became the heroes of stories, not some king or general. Then we moved to naturalism in which evolutionary biology became the window through which stories are told. This was followed by modernism in which we told stories through psychology. And finally magical realism which took us back to the early humans when gods and demons interfered with our stories.

Part 4 again moves away from humanism into what's termed as post-humanism. Here the whole idea of truth telling is questioned. If humanism tried to clarify and solidify things that humans are the only gods on earth, posthumanism, and postmodernism partly fuelled by quantum physics, muddied the water so we no longer know what's going on, despite our scientific and technological advancement, or in some cases because of that.

In this course, the real hero is literature or storytelling itself. Human mortality gave birth to storytelling. Conflicts gave it its fuel and energy. Sex added flavour. Laughter made it reflective. Then came reason to dominate storytelling, through physical reality, biological truths, psychological depth, and finally quantum magical thinking. And today literature seems a bit muddled as it has questioned truth-telling. You could say literature is suffering from old-age Alzheimer. So the question is can literature and storytelling survive robots?

 

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What if this hadn't been a typo?

 

 

The elderly manager of the ANZ Bank where I worked, Mr Tillett, did all his own typing, sometimes with devastating results. At one time he dyslexically started a letter to a customer with "Dear Madman" instead of "Dear Madam".

After I had come back from South Africa, I rejoined the bank in early 1969, only to leave again for New Guinea at the end of the same year. Mr Tillett gave me a short reference which he dated "1979" instead of "1970". I have often wondered how my life would've panned out had I stayed with the Bank for nine long years instead of nine short months.

It would've been so easy to stay for nine years because the work was undemanding and the surroundings pleasant. Then, after the first nine years, staying another nine years, and then another, would've become almost inevitable. After all, what else would I've been capable of doing, other than to turn up on time, execute some clearly defined functions, and repeat them the next day, and the next, ad infinitum?

 

Yours truly outside the ANZ Bank Kingston A.C.T. in 1969

 

Instead, I left my comfort zone to learn and grow and never allowed myself to get comfortable again. By the time I reached Mr Tillett's typographically erroneous date of 1979, I had already moved on through another dozen-plus jobs in a dozen-plus countries, and I kept on searching for new challenges and opportunities right until the end.

Who was better off? That other me who could've gone through life on auto-pilot, routinely receiving small but regular salary increases whether merited or not, routinely drinking with the boys on a Friday night, and routinely watching the footie on a Sunday, before routinely returning to work on the dreaded Monday morning, or the real me who lived on the edge, went from bust to boom and back again, and never quite knew where he was going to be and what he was going to be?

I think there's a time for everything and the time to take risks and test myself was when both my body and mind were still willing and able, and to switch on the auto-pilot only after my body had begun to long for some rest and in my mind I was already typing "Dear Madman ..."

 

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The Lost Art of Letter-writing

 

 

In an age that demands instant gratification, emails have replaced letters, and more is the pity. In letters we used to go into depths; now we skim the surface of things in order to finish and move on quickly.

If we want to include details, we attach a picture or even a video. We communicate by email and replies to questions are generally brief. Compared to letters, emails are little more than an exchange of notes.

For the most part, letter writing has fallen by the wayside, and with it grammar: no more capitalisation of words - you know, those capital letters that make all the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse - and no more punctuation either which turns everyone into a psycho - e.g. "I like cooking my family and my pets" - or may cost you $13 million, see here.

Letter writing is an art which takes time. You sit down with a blank sheet of paper and pour out your thoughts. There is a sense of gravitas to it, a deliberate act of communicating with someone else whom you can almost image to be talking to as you write. You choose not just your words deliberately, but also your writing-paper, even your writing tool. I still treasure my Montblanc fountain pen - remember fountain pens? there was a time when a man was judged by the fountain pen he kept - with which I carried on many years of correspondence with some of the most important persons in my life.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep their letters. I always thought there would be more but there are only emails - and who wants to keep an email?

 

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