Waiting for your dishwasher
Is your dishwasher or the computer chip for your car stuck in that mess down there?
If you want a new dishwasher, you're out of luck. It might be stuck in a container aboard a ship waiting for space to unload in Los Angeles or Vancouver. It could be in Halifax, Rotterdam or still at the factory waiting for a part hiding out on another container stranded heaven knows where.
The `Shortage Economy' is what The Economist calls it.
A friend of mine has been without a dishwasher for months. A First World problem, but annoying if you’re used to having one. It would take six months for a new dishwasher to arrive. No guarantee of that either. There are none in the stores. My friend’s busted machine is a fancy one so the local repairman can’t get parts from Miele. Now the company is sending a repairman from 100 kilometres away; $260 just for the visit.
Which got me to thinking:
Who invented the dishwasher?
Seems the first one was invented in 1850. It was in a a box and worked with a crank.
But the first patent for a dishwasher was issued in 1858 to a woman named Josephine Cochrane of Illinois who was tired of the servants chipping her china. “If no one else is going to invent a dishwasher, I’ll invent it myself,” she is quoted as saying.
It didn’t run on electricity but water pressure. Easy to see in the pic above. Joeephine Cochrane got a more advanced patent in 1886 and built her company, and showed her machine at the Chicage World’s Fair in 1893. She died in 1913. Her company was sold to Hobart in 1926, which later became KitchenAid. Dishwashers only became popular in the 1950s as kitchens started to modernize.
Josephine Cochrane is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Property bubbles around the world
If there is one thing that could throw the rich world into a tailspin it is a real estate crash. All the money poured into people’s pockets by governments are one of the reason there is so much demand for `stuff’ which is clogging all the container ships and ports. Inflation would equal higher mortgage payments and a burst bubble.
UBS, the Swiss bank, issued a report this month on the bubble index. Here’s a snippet:
“Frankfurt, Toronto, and Hong Kong top this year’s UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index, with the three cities warranting the most pronounced bubble risk assessments in housing markets among those analyzed. Risk is also elevated in Munich and Zurich; Vancouver and Stockholm both reentered the bubble risk zone. Amsterdam and Paris round out the cities with bubble risk. All US cities evaluated— Miami (replacing Chicago in the index this year), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York—are in overvalued territory.
Fascinating report. To read the full thing click on the link below.
UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index
Some James Bond watches
Ian Fleming, the roué who wrote the books, wore a Rolex Explorer.
He had James Bond wearing one in his second novel, Live and Let Die (1954).
In the first Bond movie, Dr. No, Bond (Sean Connery) wears a Rolex Submariner.
In Thunderball Bond, still Connery, sticks with the Rolex but also wears this Breitling.
It was a different Rolex when George Lazenby took the role of James Bond in 1969.
The Daytona is by far the priciest, according to a friend of mine who collects watches. It’s probably worth $35,000 today. That’s enough about watches.
Much of this material was pinched from Watch Time. magazine.
Most cringe-making event of the week
Anderson Cooper’s fawning interview with William Shatner on his trip into space. Shatner uttered the most maudlin drivel about the earth being in danger. Space tourism is now boring and a brief blip into near space doesn't make you an eco-philosopher.
Full on Autumn
There really are eagles on Eagle Island. Amazing that my friend Dominique Parizeau took that picture from her kayak with an iPhone.
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Essay of the Week
This is an obit I wrote in 2007 about a man I knew in the Montreal bar scene. He was an entertaining alcoholic. He was also a person with a sad but interesting life. I remember sitting in the Bistro on Mountain Street in 1966 or 67 with my girlfriend and Graham was sitting with his mother, who was running her hands through his hair. “That’s what I do to you,” said the beautiful girl beside me.
Graham McKeen was a magnificent failure. He was a drunk, a charming conversationalist, a mooch, an effortless piano player and a man who was friends with many of the great poets and writers of his time, from Jack Kerouac to Leonard Cohen.
He was a beatnik in the era of the hipsters who came between the end of the Second World War and the start of the hippie era. It was the beatniks who invented free love and the hedonistic life, a culture well chronicled in William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch, Mr. Kerouac's On the Road, and Allan Ginsberg's poem Howl.
Graham McKeen knew all the high priests of the beat generation. He spent months on end drinking with them in Greenwich Village in New York. He experimented with drugs, but at heart, he was a drinker. He commuted from New York to Provincetown, Mass., at the end of Cape Cod, which was another beatnik mecca. He travelled in the style of the characters from On the Road.
It helped that Mr. McKeen was a handsome, smooth-talking and likeable rogue. He kept his looks for at least the first 40 years of his life, after which the drink finally started to take its toll. He could always count on getting a lift from women who were attracted to him or from men who enjoyed his company.
His five or six years living in the United States gave him dining-out material for the rest of his life, but Graham McKeen spent much of his time living in the bars of downtown Montreal. After his early 20s, he never really worked much.
"In the last 50 years, Graham worked one month and one day. He worked on the docks for a day, and hurt his shoulder," recalled Peter Desbarats, a writer and journalist who, with a string of others, supported Mr. McKeen with $20 here, $10 there, on a regular basis. "Then, he worked in a bookstore for a month, and was on the wagon the whole time. He quit and went on a bender when he was paid."
Their meetings occurred in a kind of ritual, unspoken rotation. Mr. McKeen would bump into Mr. Desbarats midweek, then touch up boulevardier and journalist Nick Auf der Maur a few days later.
For some people, including Mr. Kerouac, the charm could wear thin if there were too many demands for money. Mr. McKeen had befriended the great beat writer and, in an effort to appeal to Mr. Kerouac's urge to get back to his French-Canadian roots, went to so far as to claim his middle name was Cournoyer.
"These innumerable friendships of mine are too much." Mr. Kerouac wrote to Mr. Ginsberg on June 20, 1969. "Charley Mills, [sic]and Grahame [sic]Cournoyer are calling me insistently from the village for money and I have had my phone number changed."
Mr. McKeen spent his early years in New Brunswick, mostly in Fredericton, where his father worked as deputy minister of public works. At the start of the war, his father joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and the family moved to Montreal, where the McKeens settled in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a neighbourhood that was almost totally English-speaking despite its French name. He went to Willingdon School and Westhill High School. In the summers and after school, he would hang around the YMCA near his house.
He dropped out of high school and found a job in the Arctic helping to build Distant Early Warning Line radar stations. He was in the merchant marine for a while before surfacing in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, where he managed to meet all the great writers -- at least all the great drinking writers. He spent a night boozing with Irish poet Brendan Behan and Norman Mailer. In fact, he knew Mr. Mailer well enough that later in life, when he was hoping to get a Canada Council grant, he got a letter of reference from the famous novelist.
Back in Montreal, Mr. McKeen became a fixture of downtown life. With some exceptions, his haunts were bounded by Metcalfe on the east, Guy on the west, René-Lévesque on the south and Sherbrooke on the north. He also played piano in bars on Stanley Street, which is how he became the subject of one of Mr. Desbarats's first freelance articles. At the time, Mr. McKeen was a sometime piano player at the Tour Eiffel, a bar on Stanley Street that was hipster central in the 1950s.
"He was a very complex character. Some people found him interesting, others couldn't stand him," Mr. Desbarats recalled. "I used to call him my most disreputable friend."
Mr. McKeen couldn't read music but was blessed with a natural ear. He picked up piano playing at the YMCA in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
On summer evenings in the mid-1960s he could be found at La Rose Rouge, an early discotheque, surrounded by adoring, young would-be beatniks. They were Kerouac fans and they had all devoured On the Road and the The Dha rma Bums. They might pretend to get Mr. Ginsberg's poetry, but what they loved best was to hear Mr. McKeen tell stories from Greenwich Village. "You want to be a writer, then just write, man," he would tell them.
One of his favourite haunts was the bistro on Mountain Street. There he would sit, sometimes with his girlfriend, other times with lunching ad men, and stay on into the afternoon with people who might be goofing off from work. He liked to shock them by revealing that he and his girlfriend had switched underwear. For a while, he was partial to wearing panty hose.
There were times when Mr. McKeen would scare himself and go on the wagon, but the dry patches didn't last long. "In his heart, he always wanted to be sober, but he couldn't manage it," said his brother Bud from Edmonton.
Some time in the 1970s, Mr. McKeen began living on welfare instead of getting money from his friends. It made life easier. He lived in a small apartment on Sherbrooke in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, not far from where he grew up. Around this time, he also started using the name Cournoyer more. He loved Montreal, and adapted to the city becoming more French.
Over the past couple of decades, he spent a lot of time in hospital.
"He always seemed to have fatal diseases of various kinds," said National Film Board director Martin Duckworth, a childhood friend who helped him out in his latter years. "He was in and out of many hospitals and knew the Montreal hospital system inside out. His charm helped keep him alive."
So did his piano playing. He played at every hospital he visited, and donated his own piano to the Montreal Chest Institute.
He also learned to use the Internet and had a long list of e-mail correspondents. His address book included all the people you'd expect -- Mr. Desbarats and Mr. Duckworth, but also Don Johnston, the former Liberal cabinet minister who was head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development until last year.
A typical McKeen message went something like this: "I am reminding all who participate that Charlie Parker, the coolest cat I ever knew, told me in 1952 that 'Man, the hippest thing is to be a square." The e-mail also talked of playing the piano for a Kerouac reading in 1957 in which "we ended the evening accompanying a group reading of Howl."
The book he started never did get finished. A lot of it is written, and Mr. Duckworth is hoping to get something published.
It was a miracle that Mr. McKeen outlived many of his drinking partners. Mr. Kerouac died of alcoholism in 1969, at 47; Mr. Auf der Maur died of throat cancer in 1998 at 55.
Graham McKeen was born in Newcastle, N.B., on July 24, 1932. He died of cancer of the esophagus in a Montreal hospital on Jan. 30, 2007. He was 74. He is survived by his sister Carol and by his brothers Bud and John. A daughter, Karen, whom he met only when she was an adult, died shortly after their meeting.