Milan, the style capital; housing sell-off; where to be for WW III and the Birdman of UBC
October 17, 2022 Volume 3 # 18
Milan: The Business capital of Italy
Milan is the fashion centre of Italy in a country that rivals France as the luxury capital of the world. From Armani to Versace, with the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Prada also in the list of top ten fashion houses, Milan is not only a fashion powerhouse, but the third richest city in the European Union.
The Richest cities in Europe
1 Paris €710-billion
2 Madrid €241-billion
3 Milan € 215-billion
4 Berlin €205-billion
5 Munich €203-billion
We arrived in Milan just at the end of Fashion Week, along with Paris, London, and New York, one of the world’s great luxury gatherings. There was trouble finding a hotel. You could still see the remnants of it, with models posing for photographers in the Galleria
Italian men make a fashion statement every day. They must be the best dressed men in the world. Simple, well-tailored suits, plain shirts, more often than not a tie and leather, or in this case suede shoes, not the ugly sensible things the tourists are wearing
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Speaking of hotels, the bathroom in the one we stayed in had simple touches I hadn’t seen before. I find European shower fittings a bit confusing. Which way is hot, and how do you know if it’s the rain shower or the hanging thingy that is going to surprise you with a blast of cold or hot? Look at these. Easy to understand in any language and elegant.
Maybe I am not well travelled enough, but I had never seen a lighted mirror inside a mirror. I want one.
Quite near the hotel was a narrow, ancient street with a restaurant that set out its tables along one wall. It was a busy street, with food delivery bicycles and the ocassional motorcycle zipping by.
Along with the passing pedestrians it made for great people watching. We got to know the waiter, Domenico, who came from Calabria, a place we know well. It wasn’t that busy one night and we chatted away, again one of the great unknowns when you travel, something a guidebook or travel app can never predict. A lovely man.
The Duomo, the cathedral in Milan, is the ultimate design statement.
The largest church in Italy, and that’s saying something, it was started in the late 14th century and they are still fiddling with it. The sculptures were done in different centuries. and some people have said it is too ornate. Oscar Wilde thought it an imposing and gigantic failure. Don’t think I agree.
Property Sell Offs to Come
UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2022 is the title of the report.
The reason for rising prices was cheap money; the reason for falling prices is expensive money to fight inflation. Here is a paragraph from the report:
“The main reason for the exorbitant increases in home prices thus lies elsewhere. Indeed, the property market has long been supported by one major buttress in particular: central banks. Ultra-low financing conditions and demand outpacing construction have led to increasingly optimistic price expectations among buyers. Even the most buoyant expectations have been exceeded in some cases in recent times.As a result, the imbalances have become increasingly severe.”
Click for full UBS Bubble Report
Two ways of Looking at the World’s Population
Where to Be if World War III Breaks Out.
Where you don’t want to be: Ukraine and all of Europe; Taiwan takes in all of Southeast Asia; and Pakistan and India go at each other. Isolated attacks in North America and even Australia. Forget On the Beach, the Nevil Shute doomsday book that had Australia has a haven
Tierra del Fuego is in the green— super safe— as is souther Africa. Almost all of Africa and Latin America are safe. This map and thinking would have been unheard of even at the start of this year. Let’s hope it’s still just a theoretical nightmare.
Cost to Rent a Container Takes a Huge Drop
During Covid prices for 40 ft containers shot up, hitting a high of $10,400 in September, 2020, to around $4,000 at the moment. Economics 101: demand is down.
Essay of the Week
This week the Daily Telegraph ran a piece on British eccentrics, and how they make great stories for obituaries. I agree. This is an obituary I wrote for the Globe and Mail, in 2005. Here is a man who meets the eccentric standard: The Birdman of UBC.
Jamie Smith spent his life studying the feeding habits of small birds, in particular song sparrows of Mandarte Island, 6 rocky hectares of bird heaven off the Victoria end of Vancouver Island. Though he knew what birds wanted to eat, he never fed them himself. He thought bird feeders, while well meaning, made birds dependent on artificial sources of food.
The Birdman of UBC was Mr. Smith’s nickname. He taught at the university from 1973 until this year. His special interest was in song sparrows, and the islet of Mandarte made a perfect place to study the small birds in isolation.
The study started 31 years ago. Mr. Smith and his students would get to the island from Sidney, a 7 kilometre trip in a Zodiac. Mandarte Island in summer is people free but still noisy with the sound of breeding gulls. Mr. Smith’s wife, Judy Myers says along with the squawking gulls there was the smell of their droppings. But Jamie Smith was there to learn about his favourite bird.
“First there was his love of the animal. Song sparrows are harbingers of spring across North America from southern Alaska to northern Mexico. Their scientific name, Melospiza melodia, recognizes their best trait, a lovely song that the males proudly sing from perched on top of bushes,” said Ms Myers, also a zoologist though her speciality is insects.
“To study a small bird requires finding nests, identifying all of the offspring of the population each year with coloured bands around their legs, and then tracking them over the following years.”
Here are some of things Jamie Smith found out about the songs sparrows of Mandarte. Breeding is almost always between birds that are born and die there. Few new birds join the colony. Song sparrow pairs have 0 to 9 offspring a year. Males with better voices have more success with females. Winter storms can almost wipe them out, but the birds recover.
Part way through the study there was an invasion from what is known in zoology as a parasite species, in this case the brown-headed cowbird. The cowbirds knock the song sparrow eggs out of the nest and then lay their own eggs, leaving the song sparrows to hatch and feed their offspring.
The story of the cowbirds and their affect on the song sparrows of Mandarte is one part of a new book by Mr. Smith and some colleagues, Conservation and Birds of Small Populations: the Song Sparrows of Mandarte Island, to be published soon by Oxford University Press.
Jamie Smith’s love of birds started young. He was born in Scotland and spent most of his early years on the Isle of Bute. A childhood friend, Andrew Fulton, remembered that even as a young boy he knew different birds and taught his friends how to identity bird songs.
He was brought up in his grandfather’s house on Bute, since his own parents worked for the British Colonial service in Nigeria. Jamie would visit them during the summer. His grandfather was head master of the local school, and encouraged his study of birds. Later he was sent to a boarding school near Edinburgh.
There he took up another pastime: golf. Mr. Smith was lonely at school and spent a lot of his spare time on the golf course. He was tall (6 foot two), strong and a natural athlete and that combined with constant practice made him a champion player, and he came second in the junior Scottish championships. He could certainly have made a living at golf, and shot in the 70’s later in life, though he was more devoted to his work and didn’t play that often.
When he was at Oxford studying Zoology, he and his fellow students would make field trips to Scotland to study birds and other wildlife.
“I always considered myself to be fit and strong, but on long days over Scottish mountains he was tireless and left me standing,” recalled Bernard Dod, who shared a house with Mr. Smith at Oxford.
After his doctorate, he moved to Vancouver and UBC. One year later, in 1974, he started his study on Mandarte Island. Over the years he did other research, in Canada and overseas.
One twenty year long study in the arctic looked at why the population of snowshoe hares spikes every 10 years or so. Mr. Smith’s interest was to see the effect the fluctuating population of snowshoe hares might have on boreal birds. He also travelled to the Galapagos and to Australia.
One of his most frustrating studies was the year spent looking at a colony of silvereye birds that nested on Heron Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Mr. Smith spent 6 months collecting data and tagging birds. But a short while later a cyclone—a Pacific hurricane—all but wiped out the entire bird colony.
The effect of storms and other natural disasters on bird population was also part of his long term study in British Columbia. Even in his private life Jamie Smith was a birdman. “Jamie used his binoculars like the rest of us wear glasses,” said his local paper, Island Tides.
“Jamie enjoyed walks along the cliffs of Saturna Island and usually had his notebook close at hand to record the birds he saw. The golden eagle and the peregrine were always exciting events,” said Ms Myers. “He would keep track of the seabirds and spent much time out in the water in kayaks.”
One special list he made was of birds spotted from his outhouse on Saturna.
In the winter he would lead students and others on field trips, including the Christmas Bird Count, an event held across North America. Some of his bird counts were done on cross country skis in the forest above Squamish. One of his former students, Len Thomas remembers “Jamie hooting owls of trees pointing out dickie birds that I would never have spotted alone.”
Jamie Smith took his students on field trips to Costa Rica, the Yukon and the interior of British Columbia. He received many awards from both the Canadian and American Ornithological societies. A field trip scholarship in his name is being established at UBC.
Jamie Neil Munro Smith was born on May 1, 1944, at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. He died of cancer on July 18 2005 in Vancouver. He is survived by his wife Judy and children Isla and Iain and the song sparrows of Mandarte Island.