Lost in Spac
Until this week, only financial insiders knew what a Spac was. It is an acronym for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. What happens is a company raises money on the market without having a business. Investors trust that people running the Spac will find a profitable idea or business to back with the Spac’s cash.
This week a Spac called Digital World Acquisition Corp. invested in a Donald Trump company called the Trump Media and Technology Group. It was actually a merger.
Digital World’s stock jumped 160% on the New York Stock Exchange. What does it mean? Trump could do an end run around his ban on Facebook and Twitter and have his own outlet. Watch for the likes of AOC, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to now question why Spacs are allowed to exist.
Where in the world is Boise?
Here:
And why do we ask?
Because Boise has passed Toronto as the second priciest real estate market in North America, though it’s still behind Vancouver.
During Covid, and before, people moved to Boise, population 230,000, because it’s close to the beauty of the mountains with high speed Internet to connect to the world.
And why is Vancouver so Expensive?
Zoning is one big reason, as it is in most cities in the rich world. All of the yellow is single family housing, duplexes or low rises. Also loose barriers to money laundering in real estate.
Where the millionaires are
A million isn’t what it used to be, but it isn’t poverty.
New York is scored as 100, the other cities are ranked against it. As you can see the millionaires per 100,000 population are marked with a person icon.
Zurich and Geneva have more than 20,000 millionaires per 100,000. By my math, sometimes dicey, that is one in four for Zurich. The overpriced Swiss Franc translates into a million US$ in a hurry. Also they don’t let many poor people into Switzerland.
Darwin on speed
Apologies to those who have already read The Economist this past week, but elephants in Mozambique have shed their tusks to foil the rotten poachers who kill them for the ivory.
A Princeton biologist, Shane Campbell-Staton, says that before the civil war in Mozambique (1977 to 1992) 18% of female elephants had no tusks; after the war half the females had lost their tusks. With no war, where lawless poachers roamed at will, a third of a females elephants have tusks.
You will notice that The Economist picked the same photo as I did from my Shutterstock subscription. I didn’t notice it at first. Honest.
For the genetic complexities of the elephants tusks here’s The Economist article.
NOTE: Many people who subscribed last year have renewed. Thank you. To those who haven’t, push the subscribe button. The `Free subscription’ notice might be a little misleading. Please feel free to share the newsletter with others. The object is to grow the readership.Essay of the week
Essay of the Week
This is first chapter of one of the two novels I wrote and which were published by Mosaic Press. They were not a success. Poorly edited, there were many typos. A lot of work, and enjoyable to write, but since I wrote them I have stuck to writing books for other people. This is Chapter 1 of The Obit Man. A friend of mine once said: “If you want to know the truth, read fiction.” There is a lot of truth in this book, but it is mainly a work of fiction.
1
LONDON, LATE FEBRUARY, 1986
We live in a great age for death.
That thought came to Jack as he was bumped on both sides, one a rather harsh poke in the soft part of his back – was it the kidney? He turned and saw it came from a wooden umbrella handle.
“Sorry,” he said with a pained smile, even though he had nothing to be sorry about.
He stared out at the people in the subway car and thought each one of them is going to die, some soon, somelater. A few, maybe none of them, might be worthy of his notice upon their death. The woman with the sharp umbrella handle was pretty enough, but what had she done with her life so far?
An older woman at the end of the car moved and he thought he caught a spark in her eye as her head turned. She was sixty, maybe older, slender, erect and about five foot eight. She had a handsome face, a shock of white hair with some black still left on the sides, and was well dressed. When the subway car moved she grabbed for a hand strap and when she turned he saw a trace of pearls round her neck.
Would her life be interesting in death?
Maybe she drove an ambulance or a staff car during the war; she might have worked close to airfields when they were being bombed or carried intelligence officers from the Admiralty on their secret trips, headlights taped over, just little slits of light to bounce off the cat’s eyes as they sped almost blind down dark country roads.
He started to write her obit in his head.
Maude Worthing, who has died at the age of 89, was awarded an OBE for extraordinary bravery while serving with the Motorised Transport Corps. She drove three badly burned pilots and two injured airmen to a hospital during a Luftwaffe raid on North Weald in August of 1940.
She looked as if she might have been in the MTC. Not that he’d been there, but he’d just done something on a man who flew out of North Weald, and his widow had told him about the incident with one of the young things from the MTC. It was a rather fashionable thing to do, drive ambulances and trucks and things. Even Princess Elizabeth was part of the motorized corps, though she was too young to have done anything during the Battle ofBritain.
During the war women had to do men’s jobs so the men could fight. While working-class girls went to the factories, as they had done in the First War, the women of the middle and upper classes drove cars, lorries and ambulances. Maude Worthing did two out of three, starting her life in the MTC, driving a heavy lorry, and then shifting to life as a chauffeur for MI6.
She was driving an intelligence officer to North Weald when the raid began.
Just then the train stopped, the doors opened and the imaginary wartime driver pushed her way through to get off at Knightsbridge. The way she moved showed her a confident upper middle-class woman. Jack was tempted to follow her and ask a few questions, but it was a stupid idea and this wasn’t his stop.
Maude Lacey married Group Captain Henry Worthing, DFC, in April of 1941. He had been one of the men she saved at North Weald. They had three children.
A little Jane Austen in the ending department, but still a good story. He didn’t have time to make up the part about the air raid and how she had trained as a nurse before the war. All of a sudden the car seemed more crowded. People stuffed on at Hyde Park Corner, something that almost never happened. An elbow stabbed him from the side and another umbrella handle caught him again, this time in the hipbone. It hurt. There wasn’t much padding on his bones. A few years of living on his own had left him thinner, and he didn’t weigh more than 165 pounds even though he was almost six feet tall.
Jack pulled his cuff back, rubbing the red hair on the back of his hand as he looked at his watch and changed his mind about work and decided to get off early. He struggled through the silent sea of grim-faced office workers and got off at Green Park.
It wasn’t total whimsy. He remembered the current woman in his life. He knew her morning routine, and thought he’d see if she went to her usual spot, a rather smart coffee bar just past where Bond Street changes to New Bond Street. He was ahead on the story he was working on and all of a sudden sick of crowds. He’d take a cab to work in an hour, or maybe jump back on the tube when it was less crowded.
The streets on the other side of Piccadilly from the Ritz seemed almost empty, at least compared to the crush of commuters he’d just left. He crossed the road to look at what was being served today at that famous restaurant in Stratton Street. The one Michael Caine had a piece of. At the top of the menu was a watercolour of three rather louche men, one of them the famous actor, another a famous Irish drunk and the other an unknown. Jack thoughthe might have lunch there later in the week.
Around the corner there were three workmen doing no work outside a half-renovated building. They milled around a couple of funny looking yellow bins full of earth and construction junk. The workers were smoking, laughing and talk-ing in loud voices. Jack thought the little dumpsters were rather odd.
Clouds moved by fast, and light seemed to come and go. A rain shower half an hour earlier had left thestreets wet and shiny, the way film crews like them. The sun lit up the colours on the buildings, pulling reds out of signs, things that might seem to disappear with the clouds. And the morning light seemed to turn the grey road a sharp black. When the sun went in the air felt cold and fresh, though not cold enough to make him move any faster.
Huge pictures of landscapes hung in a gallery window. Jack stopped and looked at a few of them. A woman walked out of a discreet hotel and flagged a cab. Jack smiled and wondered what she had been up to. He took his time, having his first cigarette of the day, looking in the windows of a print dealer as he thought he should give up smoking. He promised himself he’d quit tomorrow.
He stopped at a newsstand outside Sotheby’s and bought another pack of Marlboros and an InternationalHerald Tribune. He never cared about baseball scores at home, but now, five and a half years away, they seemed an odd kind of link. The coffee shop was just a few steps down a small street.
There was a crowd by the cash, office workers and clerks from the shops picking up a morning fix. Only people who didn’t have to be at work by nine could take their time. There was space in the back where he could keep an eyeon the door and see if Claire walked in, which he guessed she did at the same time every morning. Then he worried, thinking maybe she isn’t that regular in her habits.
Jack ordered toast and a regular coffee and the waitress almost frowned. According to something he’d read in The Economist, the British didn’t drink as much tea as their self- image told them they did. Coffee was cutting into tea drinking, but his accent and the order for what passed for an American drink brought on a little xenophobic scowl.
It amazed him how the English could not do coffee shops. The delis and drug store counters he hung aroundas a kid had more to them than this. The English were good at pubs, but Jack was tired of pubs, except on weekends.
The places for coffee or tea were one extreme or the other. Most were grungy caffs, but this one had white table-cloths, a kind of halfway house for people who didn’t want to splurge at Brown’s Hotel down the street.
Just as his coffee arrived, Claire walked in. The sight of her still made his stomach hurt. Blonde hair, thick lips and an unusual face, beautiful to him, and a rather exquisite bottom, though some people might think it a bit oversized on such a flat-chested woman. Every movement, her hand, her head, her walk, seemed so feminine. Too bad they’d been fighting a bit for the past few weeks.
He waved and smiled, and she smiled back. He was glad of that since her reaction to a surprise was not always predictable. She motioned to the girl behind the counter to make her a tea to go. Strange for a Frenchwoman, she couldn’t stand coffee. The people here knew her since she worked in the office above the smart shop across the street, doing publicity for the jeweller. Claire’s boss thought it wonderful her boy- friend was a journalist, but he was too stunned to know Jack’s main interest was in dead people.
Claire sat down with some drama and put her face for- ward to be kissed. She didn’t often kiss back.
“Hello, my darling, what are you doing here?”
My darling, thought Jack. Why wasn’t this happening at night, or at least on a weekend afternoon? She clasped his hands with each of hers and leaned across the table. Seemed romantic, but then she might have been warming her hands. She hated the cold. He started to tell the truth, that he had been on the way to work, but she interrupted him. She knew why he was there.
“I have something special for you,” said with such emotion it was starting to scare him. Was she pregnant? She opened her large bag and pulled out a book.
“The Dirty Weekend Handbook,” she laughed, and she knew she had him. “Pick one and we’re off this weekend. My car is working again. I couldn’t stand the train.” She slipped the book across the table, or did he grab for it? “Pick some- thing today. And ring me later.”
She got up and kissed him a public kiss, on the lips. Brash French girl, thought Jack. A teasing wave and “Good- bye, my darling,” from the door and she carried her tea across the street. His eyes never left her skirt as it grabbed her roundness as she walked.
Jack wondered why he had wasted his time, twice so far today: once with the false economy of taking the tube in rush hour; the other taking an hour out of the day to wander around just to bump into this crazy girl. Now in the street outside the coffee shop, he smiled at his own weakness and her craziness and flagged a black cab. In the back seat he turned on the heater, a trick Claire had taught him, since he never knew cabs had heaters. Seemedalmost un-English.
He thumbed through the book. The Dirty Weekend Hand- book had different sections. One told women about the type of men they should go out with, rating lawyers, soldiers, journalists and other types. He laughed as he saw that last category came low on the scale. Unreliable, given to melodrama, heavy drinkers and often broke.
Naughty drawings hinted at the possible delights of a weekend away. But the best part was the actual names of places to go, a rating system of the hotels along with phone numbers and rates that looked as if they weren’t too out of date.
Such a practical girl, thought Jack.