Now I don't do the Economy, because, believe me, Weasel Plc has enough problems without me worrying about anybody else's, particularly the land of moussaka and ouzo and places called Ammonia Square that live up to their name.
But on the sly, I have been watching the financial meltdown of Greece, and the reactions of uber euros, Germany and France, who until recently said there would be no bail out for a country that has public spendinged itself into shit creek without either a paddle or a life jacket, but an extra helping of shit. Until now.
Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, said that Greece would receive support in return for and aligned to progress on sweeping austerity cuts.(Telegraph)Well. Bugger me. No way Jose! I may be dim on fiscal fol de rols but this sounds like something that can only undermine the Euro, and cause people like me, who never wanted to be in the EU in the first place, to subsidise yet another failed economy. But if it was just me, you could laugh this off, but I am not an economist, so here's one now:
Gregg Gibbs, a strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland, said that “while a support package for Greece may remove the immediate risk of rapid contagion, it transfers more risk to the core, and will have permanently damaged the credibility of the euro as a better reserve currency than the dollar. It will infect the European Central Bank's monetary policy and generate stress between EU countries.” he said.(Telegraph)
9 comments:
Mmmm moussaka, welcome back old chap.
Welcome to the blog, Mark. I hope things are well with you. Totally btw, the first I heard of The Universality of Cheese, was from a chap I had a drink with in the bar of the Caledonian Sleeper last year. That was long before the, erm situation, but even then strangers on trains were discussing it.
Although widely known as ‘the cheese poet’ James McIntyre also played an important role in formulating the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of bacon and chips. Suspected of copying his festinating gait from Lord Uxbridge, McIntyre was well-known in the cafes of Toronto for his habit of bringing his own cutlery to whichever bacon outlet he had chosen as the beneficiary of his quotidian patronage, a theme later returned to in the Roman a Clef known as ‘As Good as it Gets’, although, as with many Hollywood tropes, something of the strong flavour of the original was lost. In particular, McIntyre was famous for rebuffing callers to his door with the phrase, ‘Sell cheese someplace else, we’re all stocked up here’, which was Lost in Translation thanks to Sofia Coppola.
But let the great man speak for himself.
Ode on the Mammoth Cheese
We have seen the Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze --
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial Show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees --Or as the leaves upon the trees --
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled Queen of Cheese.
May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great World's show at Paris.
Of the youth -- beware of these --
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek; then songs or glees
We could not sing o' Queen of Cheese.
We'rt thou suspended from balloon,
You'd cast a shade, even at noon;
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.
James McIntyre
I feel McIntryre's works to be a little sent Emmental.
Not everyone is satisfied with the strength of McIntyre's talent. Some prefer more exotic, non-dairy flavours. Currying is a popular alternative.
Currying is the application of condiments to a function, such as a wedding, funeral, or Bar-Mitzvah. Curries are created in a Madras Turmeric Laboratory, aka Matlab. Matlab also provides for real-time garbage collection of used ICEPACKs from curry house toilets. It is a direct descendent of the numerical carpentry environment of precision cabinet-making (W-ORKSHOP) fomented by Thomas Chippendale. Matlab is not unrelated to Supercollider, itself a homonymic epigone of a practice of James McCartney’s grandmother, remembered by her grandson only as a depleted engram ( the name of the practice, not his grandmother), involving the algorithmic deconstruction of superheated lentils and the hypothesised Higgs’s split-pea ‘maelstrom’ in stockpots (i.e. ‘soup-colliders’ in S-Lang). See also the array slicing of leeks and the SAXO flavour detector now in operation at CERN.
Refs:
http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~jeffm/Papers/curry.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATLAB
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2393
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCollider
'Saxa' - dearie me. Nearly caused an international incident there (Hi headless body of Agnew).
That aside, and I promise to stop now, it should be remembered that it was Konrad Heim, known for his brusque mannerisms as ‘Heim Hitler’, who first applied the Kesyer Meyer Olkin correction to Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity. Using an adapted Borg Warner torque converter housed in a Mulliner Park Ward body and based on an original idea of Vanden Plas, it was found that a transverse mounted Windhurst machine could generate sparks to the level of 12.36 Monroes. Tony Curtis, a known Monroe bagger, joked about ‘kissing Hitler’ but is not believed to have been referring to Konrad Heim.
Erm, thanks, Jim. You see, I am a Mulliner Park Ward body trapped in the exterior of a Morris Marina.
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