wyndham do

wyndham do, originally uploaded by Knotty.

Lenny

Lenny, originally uploaded by Knotty.

clsa 7s slogan

clsa 7s slogan, originally uploaded by Knotty.

south stand

south stand, originally uploaded by Knotty.

And this is on a friday night, imagine what it will be like tomorrow afternoon!

hk 7s

hk 7s, originally uploaded by Knotty.

Bubbles in the Bathtub.. The Vader Sessions

"So?"

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, when asked to comment on a recent poll showing the majority of Americans do not believe the Iraq War was worth it.

newsweek

dice-k

dice-k, originally uploaded by Knotty.

Tokyo Dome, Major League Baseball opening game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland A's..

The audactiy of hopelessness?

First, Barack Obama weathered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair without serious damage to his nomination prospects.

Second, Obama’s lawyers successfully prevented re-votes in Florida and Michigan. That means it would be virtually impossible for Clinton to take a lead in either elected delegates or total primary votes.

Third, most superdelegates have accepted Nancy Pelosi’s judgment that the winner of the elected delegates should get the nomination and they’re drifting away.

In short, Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects continue to dim. The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.

Last week, Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election.

For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.

When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance?

The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic.

nytimes

Star Wars. Revisited.

Threadless Tuesday

Y1700 shipped.. bargain.

I know what I want for Christmas now..

POV1

Hungry

More Bohemian Rhap.

Is this the real price?
Is this just fantasy?
Financial landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
And look at your buys and see.
I'm now a poor boy
High-yielding casualty
Because I bought it high, watched it blow Rating high, value low Any way
the Fed goes Doesn't really matter to me, to me Mama - just killed my
fund Quoted CDO's instead Pulled the trigger, now it's dead Mama - I had
just begun These CDO's have blown it all away Mama - oooh I still wanna
buy I sometimes wish I'd never left Goldman at all.
I see a little silhouette of a Fed
Bernanke! Bernanke! Can you save the whole market?
Monolines and munis - very very frightening me!
Super senior, super senior
Super senior CDO - magnifico
I'm long of subprime, nobody loves me
He's long of subprime CDO fantasy
Spare the margin call you monstrous PB!
Easy come easy go, will you let me go?
Peloton! No - we will not let you go - let him go Peloton! We will not
let you go - let him go Peloton! We will not let you go - let me go Will
not let you go
- let me go (never) Never let you go - let me go Never let me go - ooo
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, - Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go
S&P had the devil put aside for me For me, for me, for me So you think
you can fund me and spit in my eye?
And then margin call me and leave me to die Oh PB - can't do this to me
PB Just gotta get out - just gotta get right outta here Ooh yeah, ooh
yeah No price really matters No liquidity Nothing really matters - no
price really matters to me..

via za wif

Happy Easter

thanks Andy :))

Easter Day this year is the earliest it has been since 1913 and will not fall as early for another 220 years.

Jerry's Automatic Tennis Ball Launcher

An Earlier Blight

The Great Potato Famine of 1845-6 changed Irish and American history, of course, but drastically changed Britain too.

Late blight has been traced to central Mexico, and the first recorded instances of the disease are in the USA, with the sudden and mysterious destruction of potato crops around Philadelphia and New York in early 1843. Within months, winds spread the the disease, and by 1845 it had destroyed potato crops from Illinois east to Nova Scotia, and from Virginia north to Ontario.

It crossed the Atlantic with a shipment of seed potatoes. The warm damp spring of 1845 enabled late blight to become an epidemic. By mid-October, the ruin of Europe's potato crops was complete.

The failure of the crop was a disaster for everyone in Europe that relied on potatoes. In Ireland, a population of more than eight million was threatened with starvation.

Intimations of Ireland's looming calamity reached the British government in August 1845. Although responsible for the social and economic iniquities which had made Ireland so susceptible, the government of the day deserves some credit for its efforts to avert mass starvation. There were political as well as logistical difficulties.

The Conservative prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, without seeking the approval of either cabinet or Parliament, authorized the banker Sir Thomas Baring to secretly buy £100,000 of American maize for shipment to Ireland. But before any official relief program could proceed there was a political obstacle to overcome: Britain's Corn Laws, which imposed exorbitant duties on imported grain to ensure that it could never be cheaper than homegrown produce.

To Peel it was obvious that the Corn Laws would have to go, but his electorate of large landowners was vehemently opposed to their abolition. Peel drew heavily on the news from Ireland as he urged Parliament to vote for abolition:

"Are you to sit in cabinet, and consider and calculate how much diarrhea, and bloody flux, and dysentery, a people can bear before it becomes necessary for you to provide them with food?"

The bill abolishing the Corn Laws was passed in May 1846 in the House of Commons, with two-thirds of Peel's party voting against it and the entire opposition voting in favor. A month later, Peel was out of office.

As it turned out, far from Britain being flooded with cheap wheat, within weeks of the abolition the price of grain had soared. Speculation was rife, draining the country's gold reserves and eventually threatening the stability of the Bank of England itself.

Then the summer of 1847 brought news that Ireland's potato crop, though small, was doing well. The grain harvests also promised to be exceptionally good. Prices tumbled just as the grain bought months before at inflated rates began arriving in the ports.

Twenty major grain trading companies were brought down in September 1847. An additional 99 trading and related firms collapsed in October as the crisis spread, bringing down 11 country banks and three of the biggest in Liverpool.

The banking crisis had such an impact on the British mindset that it is the benchmark against which commentators compare subsequent banking problems.

Not since the 1840s have we seen anything like this, they declared as the Bank of England stepped in last year to save the Northern Rock bank from a collapse caused by the subprime mortgage debacle - another American-born infection. At least our potatoes are safe.

iht

The moral of this interesting historical tale?

History repeats itself. Listen to the historians.

Threadless Tuesday

this one I am getting.. to wear near the reservoir with the dogs..

but you may prefer one of these..







and these are $9 each at the moment.. thats Y873.. looks like shipping to Japan for one is $7.40.. so Y1591 for a t-shirt.. sounds cheap to me.

Star Wars (Sweded): A Cardboard Hope

Words fail me.

703m above sea level, 70km from tokyo

703m above sea level, 70km from tokyo, originally uploaded by Knotty.

Traffic Jams

Bohemian Rhapsody

Japan Steel Nuclear Monopoly

Japan Steel Works Ltd. controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance. In Hokkaido stands the only plant in the world capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece which reduces the risk of a radiation leak. Utilities that won't need the equipment for years are making $100 million down payments now on components Japan Steel makes from 600-ton ingots. Each year the Tokyo-based company can turn out just four of the steel forgings that contain the radioactivity in a nuclear reactor. Even after it doubles capacity in the next two years, there won't be enough production to meet building plans.

"If there are 50 to 100 reactors or more to be built, there will be a real shortage and real delays in deliveries.'' said Ron Pitts, senior vice president for nuclear operations at the construction and engineering company Fluor Corp. in Irving, Texas.

Orders for nuclear generators are multiplying as electricity use surges worldwide and governments pressure companies to cut carbon emissions to fight global warming. As many as 237 reactors may be built globally by 2030, an average of more than 10 a year, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. That compares with 78, or fewer than four a year, started since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine.

Given Japan Steel's limited capacity, the math just doesn't work. Japan Steel caters to all nuclear reactor makers except in Russia, which makes its own heavy forgings.

It would take any competitor more than five years to catch up with Japan Steel's technology, said the company's chief executive officer, Masahisa Nagata. Rivals are working to break the Japan Steel stranglehold.

Areva, the world's biggest reactor builder, is considering modifying its newest design to be able to make the central reactor-vessel part from a 350-ton ingot instead of more than 500 tons as required today and another alternative is to turn back the technological clock and weld together two smaller forgings. That technique was used over the past 40 years in the U.S. and France and is still applied in China.

bloomberg

Well I never..

Moonwalking Bear

thanks Duffy

Drop and give me 27.. or 16.

"The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit. Based on national averages, a 40-year-old woman should be able to do 16 push-ups and a man the same age should be able to do 27. By the age of 60, those numbers drop to 17 for men and 6 for women."

27! Crikey.

nytimes

TSLF

"..if the maths are right.. Bernanke and co. have now committed $400 billion to TAF, repos, TSLF. That’s almost half the Fed’s balance sheet effectively placed in non-standard assets. Wow."

"The good news is this will help brokers and banks; the bad news is it will do nothing to help the Housing market, or stop the decline in House prices. Nor will it help resolve the inverted pyramid of derivatives that sits atop Housing. And, one has to believe it will only add to inflationary pressures."

Krugman and Ritholtz

International Year of the Potato

So.. with my brother and sister-in-law due at the end of this month with their third, with the Ponsonbys expecting their fifth (show-offs) and even our friends Bertie & Jo awaiting a baby boy this summer, Joli and I decided we better get serious about this kid thing too.. after all, it is the International Year of the Potato.. so with much deliberation (one name for it) in the rain on holiday in Bali this Christmas it appears we conceived.. currently at 13 weeks with a due date 13-15 September, we are, needless to say, thrilled.. all is good according to the doc and the spud was kicking about like mad on the scan yesterday..

PS. Will be in HK for the Sevens.. anyone fancy a knees up?

The "R" Word

itulip

Threadless Tuesday

Pure Gold

"Regardless of the dollar price involved, one ounce of gold would purchase a good-quality man's suit at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and today."

-Peter A. Burshre

Abe

An older man wearing a stovepipe hat, a waistcoat and a phony beard sat down at a bar and ordered a drink. As the bartender set it down, he asked, "Going to a party?"

"Yeah, a costume party," the man answered, "I'm supposed to come dressed as my love life."

"But you look like Abe Lincoln." protested the barkeep.

"That's right. My last four scores were seven years ago."

Princes vs. Paupers?

I am glad to report that Ian's beloved Barnsley beat Chelsea 1-0 over the weekend in the F.A Cup quarter finals. I am sure his hangover will recede sometime this week. Barnsley last won the F.A. Cup in 1912.. Chelsea? Last year, along with the Carling Cup.

Some stats..

Wealth of owner: Barnsley - Patrick Cryne (software) £32m / Chelsea - Roman Abramovich (oil) £10.8b

Cost of squad: £350,000 / £212.42m

Number of foreigners: 16 / 24

Ticket prices (adult, seat in stand): £20-22 / £45-60

Last trophy won: FA Cup - 1912 / FA Cup and Carling Cup - 2007

For more comparison click here

Market questions

-Are we in a recession or not?
-Is the credit problem fixed yet?
-How much worse will housing get?
-Will earnings rebound in the second half of 2008?
-Will the US dollar ever stop falling?
-Are US deficits going to continue to skyrocket?
-How much more will consumers pull back on their spending?
-(Did I mention the housing picture is a disaster?)
-The war in Iraq is God-awful expensive, is there any relief in sight?
-Is Oil going to go to $150?
-Can the wobbly banks regain their footing?
-And how much more will inflation heat up?

bigpicture

And.. heard from the desk of a hedge fund.. "Who is this guy Margin who keeps calling me?"

Margin calls.. Ouch.

21 Accents

Deep Purple. Smoke on the Water. In Japan.

thanks Chris

Balancing Terror, Humour, Islam and Feminism

Shazia Mirza is one of a kind: Muslim, female and a standup comedian.

"Don't look so worried: I won't blow you up,'' she deadpans, leaning toward a front table. "Not tonight.''

She has had regular U.S. gigs. "Hello, my name's Shazia Mirza, at least that's what it says on my pilot's license,'' is a line she has used in the U.S. It was written weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

In London, Mirza quips that her burqa-wearing sisters conveniently share the same bus pass, and Muslim men "don't want to marry me because I speak."

bloomberg

Earth and Moon

as seen from Mars..

kottke

US elections..

"It's like a reality show...only real."

brothersjudd

Volcanic vacation

"Even with ash raining down on us and the wind blowing grit in our faces, the spectacle of the volcanic blasts was startling. Nakou had warned us not to jump backward or run away when there was a big eruption, rather to scan the soaring column of gas, ash, rocks and lava for any boulders that might drop from the sky.

Then came an almighty bang. We instinctively jumped backward, then fearfully looked up, only to catch an eyeful of ash. More explosions followed, and even Nakou began to look nervous. He called back to base on a satellite phone to explain the situation. "It's very active now,'' he said.

It is an experience not to be missed."

bloomberg

Anyone up for some lava laughs this summer? Beats a beach holiday, no?

UK House price growth

"If politicians hadn't been irresponsible enough to allow the economy to become overdependent on house price growth then we could happily allow prices to fall back and focus on the real economy. Instead we now face a situation where the wider economy might be weakened on a long-term basis in favour of the short-term goal of maintaining house values.

timesonline

"Pretend it never happened"

Why does this strike me as so fittingly symbolic of the entire Bush presidency?

timesonline

Buffett Wisdom

"You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight."

There's loads of gems just like this in this year's Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders.. have a read.. it's well worth it. I do hold shares and this isn't a solicitation to buy. Past year's letters can be found here.

We could use that wheelbarrow, though.

bigpicture

Need a new screen saver?

Screensaver

*NEWSFLASH* Tokyo Rampage

Riders of the Storm

Riders of the Storm, originally uploaded by /\ltus.

Another Altus photo from our second Niseko trip last weekend. Very stormy weekend. Luckily we managed to get two full days of backcountry in before the storm hit and shut the mountain on Sunday.

Breathe with the monkey

Bigger than that fat kid with the lightsabre