face-down? It still
works fine. I really hope I can forget that horrific moment. She was wonderfully sweet about it.
September 18th;
Reviews section open,
discreetly tucked further down the column to the right.
September 17th;
I take Rob's
old mobile
he is kindly letting me use to a showroom
where the girls with long fingernails show me how to switch it on. As they gather round
its little screen and put in the code number, Rob's greeting comes up in firm, friendly
capital letters. FUCK OFF. The girls giggle with approval.
September 16th;
Here again is the young male I would like to talk to with his mobile phone round his neck,
pictured about ten minutes before he
reallocated my briefcase in August.
All I need is his address. Since
the Internet isn't about physical distance or proximity but about networks of friends and
acquaintances, it would help me if you forwarded this page to anyone you know. Thanks again!
September 15th;
Yesterday Rob and Ryan took me to see the
Nicole Kidman and
Ben Chaplin film,
'Birthday Girl'
about an English bank clerk who orders a mail-order/webpage-click Russian bride. She never stops smoking
of course, and turns out to be serious trouble.
Anyone remember
an early 90s BBC version of the same creepy story, where 2 Scots soldiers get out of their depth with a pair of
Hungarian girls? The West is starting to get the measure of East Europeans, I would say.
September 14th;
Rob took me to the supermarket and rustled up a wonderful dinner, totally turning my mood around.
The Economist is gloomy about
the
dwindling of the Scots Gaelic language, but I was at least amused to find that
this page where I choose ten records of
exotic music is still alive.
September 13th;
Apparently this week's
Big Brother
'reality show' on Hungarian television had a
17-minute sex scene. Gosh. Oh and some quite Flash-heavy but fun Lithuanian web designers,
in Lithuanian,
or, if you insist,
in English.
September 12th;
So, have now finished
Woodruff's
'Money Unmade'
- his account of two resurgences of barter among Russian firms in the 1990s. He tracks how discounted 'wechsels'
[a Russianised German word for scrip, or paper IOUs] kept on circulating between Russian factories
even in 1998 [so surely now in 2002 still] because they had trouble selling their products and thus
paying their bills. Why? Non-market interdependencies were built into the economy by Soviet
development {every planned town having a giant factory built right next to the power plant, neither of
which can be allowed to go bankrupt}. As I already grumbled,
Woodruff overdepends a bit on 2 Hungarians,
Polanyi [Karl, not Michael] and
Kornai,
for theoretical buttressing, leading to a rather simplified view that state-sanctioned money is always
progress.
From his account seems that Russian managers [and the US academics writing about
them] all view wechsels as a way to avoid paying 'real' money [rubles? dollars?] and not as an
opportunity to make something newer and better. If Woodruff could move a little beyond the view
of the 2 German-speakers,
Menger
and Simmel,
that barter is always worse than money, then a way forward for Russia might
be clearer.
(1) Date the scrip,
making it lose value over time. {So that it moves fast, retires predictably,
and hoarding and late payment are taxed.}
(2) Base it on a natural resource
{such as deliveries of fixed volumes and grades of gas.}, not on rubles.
(3) Match up the time-decay and the
excess issue so that the issuer makes reasonable, not excessive, seigniorage,
or profit, on creating and maintaining the cash instrument. Using time instead
of closed giro networks to limit hoarding and money-replacement is crucial.
Whether or not Moscow can stomach it,
Gazprom is probably the best-placed
wechsel-central-banker-to-be.
Oh, and
(4) replace
Gresham's Law
{Bad money drives out good} with a more general and useful law
{Quick money drives out slow}. Money can be quick because it is bad,
but not necessarily - such as if you designed it that way. In Russia's case,
I can't think of anything it needs right now more than quick money redeemable
in something practical, like natural gas.
September 11th;
Here is a funny clock - metronome meets LED.
I wonder if it cuts curious children's fingers off? They probably thought of that.
Meanwhile, here is some more about Captain Euro. I e-mailed the fearless crusader
for European Unity asking how I could license his comic strip,
and he e-mailed back asking for my phone number so we could talk, you
know ...not by e-mail. Looks like the Captain is owned by a branding agency
who created him for the European Parliament so as "to present a friendly and non-political image of Europe to the world". That gives away quite a lot about European politics, doesn't it? Pretty sad.
September 10th;
I would like to belatedly say hello to the surfer who reached this page looking for
fucking+urdu+story+sites, as well as the
visitor who was more primly seeking only
ukrainian+sunbathers.
A cordial welcome to you both.
Bursting with ideas? Then drop in on
this list of sites, hosted by the
half-bakery.
September 9th;
David's book about the News on Sunday (appropriately called
'Disaster!'),
a British newspaper
that died within months of launch in 1987, is unwittingly very revealing about what really
went wrong. The authors worked on the paper, and sneer at articles published
by other
ex-News-on-Sunday
staffers justifying how it wasn't their fault, though
their book is different, of course.
I read the NoS when it came out, and the book felt a lot like it. Both snide
and rambling, Chippindale and Horrie never get to the point. They can't quite admit
that the hacks who produce
The Sun
are superb writers with real craft (let alone work out why), and they never
really examine their own attitude. They blame mismanagement, funding, feuds -
anything rather than admit that the NoS was badly written. People didn't buy it for
the same reason they didn't buy
Chippindale and
Horrie's
book: readers could taste the
bitterness on every page.
September 8th;
Reading the book David lent me about how Britain's stillborn 1987 newspaper
The News on Sunday asked Nick Horsley of
Northern Foods
and Owen Oyston, now a director of
Blackpool Football Club
(nice to see businesspeople with hometown loyalties),
for injections of money. Apparently both men were interested in helping halt the
decline of the North of England, and this partly motivated them to support the short-lived
Manchester-based weekly.
Did anyone ever advise Nick Horsley or Owen Oyston to read any of
Jane
Jacobs' books?
Come to think of it, did anyone ever suggest
David Woodruff of MIT (I'm still ploughing through Ryan's copy of
'Money Unmade') check her work on regional economic autonomy?
With cases of missing advice like these, how can
technical traders
possibly believe that all the
information is already in the market? Baffling.
September 7th;
so a whole day on that
William-and-Susanna-brave-the-South-Seas
translation, now back on the ocean blue,
and unless I am drunk, I just translated two seafights both settled by gale-force weather
in the space of one chapter.
Shiver me timbers, hearties.
It has dawned on me that
the two-month gaps mean I am translating as the book is being
written. A bit slow of
me not to work that out sooner, I suppose - though there are other things on my mind.
Being written in Hungarian by a Hungarian, I'd guess, who's been
away from home so long his/her spelling's gone a bit peculiar. Or it might be a dialect
I've never seen, of course.
September 6th;
Ryan helped me lug Istvan's computer back over to Gogol Street two mornings ago,
so one more thing is restored to harmony.
Trust
sargasso
to continue to find new things - this time it's
Crash Bonsai. And
fabulousness some
time ago mentioned these gorgeously swirly {scroll down}
text diagrams.
Books as digital carpets. Talking of
carpets
.... here is a
discussion thread {as it were}
about a Kurdish/Persian/Turkish {delete where applicable} carpet/rug involving
Bob.
I'm intrigued.
September 5th
;
Ah, goody. so the answer to all my problems 
