Where to Retire
There are books and magazines devoted to where to retire. I ghost wrote one on Belize. Though it is beautiful, warm, democratic and English-speaking, I found it a bit boring. There is no buzz.
The list below picks the best countries to retire using things like health care and income. It depends on your income. Norway is number one, but a Canadian or a Brit would go broke in a hurry in that expensive country. Ditto for Switzerland. Iceland? Please. Italy is not even on the list, and it would be my pick. Down at the bottom the list is France, which would appeal to me. Malta? So small you’ve seen it all in a week.
The Hula Hoop of the Covid Era
I once bought a rowing machine from a guy who never used it. He died young, of a heart attack. I used it, maybe twice, and I don’t know where it is.
Same story for Peloton I guess. It was all the rage when people were bored at home. Maybe they watched TV instead, though the bike has a screen.
The stock has tanked. There it is, the peak about $162.72, the day before Christmas, 2020, when Santa was trying to figure out how to stuff one on these things down the chimney. Peloton gear costs a lot of money; buying the stock was even pricier.
Happy Anniversary to Vlad the Murderer
Russia still occupies 17% of Ukraine, but a lot less than it did a year ago.
Do Sanctions Work?
The CBC carried a report this week that showed shops full in Moscow, selling running shoes from Turkey and Belarus, things from China and saying even Apple computers and phones are easy to come by. Many countries get around sanctions by being inventive. They do hurt in the long run, but not enough to change the behaviour of Russia, Iran or pre-apartheid South Africa.
Envy, A Deadly Sin
Envy is a futile emotion.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote a book called “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” This sometimes happens when a neighbour wins the lottery:
“The data shows that your neighbor winning the lottery can have an impact on your own life. If your neighbor wins the lottery, for example, you are more likely to buy an expensive car, such as a BMW. Why? Almost certainly, economists maintain, the cause is jealousy after your richer neighbor purchased his own expensive car. Chalk it up to human nature. If Mr. Johnson sees Mr. Jones driving a brand-new BMW, Mr. Johnson wants one, too.
Unfortunately, Mr. Johnson often can’t afford this BMW, which is why economists found that neighbors of lottery winners are significantly more likely to go bankrupt ( than the general population)”
Boris Becker’s Advice to Prince Harry.
The tennis star is out of a British prison after eight months and six days and back in Munich. Deported from Britain. He is the subject of Lunch with the FT.
He has advice for Prince Harry:
“Don’t forget where you come from, because you may have to go back there. And marriages don’t always last forever, last time I checked.”
When Patents Stop Performing
Pfizer’s patent on Viagra ran out in December of 2017. It sales fell off a cliff.
The reason Viagra popped into my mind was a cartoon drawn by my friend Vittorio Canta. This is the second week running with a snake joke.
Was T-Rex as Smart as a Modern Day Baboon?
Probably not. But there is a theory that the giant dinosaur was super smart.
More than just a pretty face?
A scientist measured the size and number of neurons in a T-Rex brain and came to the conclusion they were as clever as modern day primate.
“Dr. Herculano-Houzel found that theropod dinosaurs – animals like Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus – had similar numbers of telencephalic neurons to modern baboons,” said the article in something called Max’s Blogo-Saurus. It is amazing what pops up on the Internet.
You can imagine how scary a smart giant dinosaur would be. However, the blogger came to this conclusion: “Did Tyrannosaurus have the IQ of a baboon? Probably not. Could it utilize tools the same way Homo Sapiens does? Absolutely not.”
Cats-2
Last week there was a story about how cats were domesticated separately, in Mespoatantia and in Egypt. A reader who was just in Kenya sent this photo. Locals in Kenya say their cats are descended from those who came down from Egypt.
Their distinctive feature is said to be their triangular ears. These cats are waiting on a narrow street on the Kenyan island of Lamu. The white cat on the left certainly has a majestic ancient Egyptian look, straight from a Pharaoh’s tomb.
Essay of the Week
Embarrassed to say I have never read anything by Roald Dahl, but I have read a lot about Dahl. Of course I knew he was one of the great writers of children’s stories in the English Language.
His 19 children's books have been translated into at least 17 languages and sold more than 8 million copies. “He also wrote film and television scripts, and nine books of short stories that earned a devoted following,” said the Washington Post in his obituary in 1990. “In 1989, the paperback editions of his works sold more than 2.3 million copies in Britain alone.”
Dahl, who died at 74 thirty-three years ago, is now back in the news because his British publishers--Puffin, the children’s imprint of Penguin Random House --re-wrote his children’s books to take out words that offend modern sensibilities.
Before we get to that, a bit about Roald Dahl, who was more than just a wildly successful writer. You’ll note that his name does not have an Anglo-Saxon or Celtic ring to it: Dahl is a Norwegian family name; Roald is the equivalent of Ronald. His parents were rich Norwegians who moved to England during the First World War where Roald was born, 1916.
Dahl was a war hero, a fighter pilot who squeezed his six foot six frame into a Hurricane fighter aircraft.
In 1941 Pilot Officer Dahl flew a Hurricane from Egypt to Eleusis in Greece and scored his first kill the next day.
“On this, his first operational sortie, and with only seven hours experience on Hurricanes, Dahl came across six Junkers (German bombers). Attacking from astern he was greeted by a hail of fire from the rear gunners, but succeeded in getting on the tail of one, and after a short burst, saw pieces fly off its starboard engine; the crippled Junkers slowly tumble down, and three crew being seen the bail out,” wrote Chris Shore in his book, Air War for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete.
Dahl was also a spy, and later in the war worked for Sir William Stephenson, Intrepid, who ran a British intelligence operation in New York City. Dahl explained how that came about in a rare interview with Bill Stevenson—different spelling, no relation—in a 1973 CBC documentary, A Man Called Intrepid. Here is Dahl explaining how his espionage career started, actually spying on the Americans for Britain:
“I was in the RAF (as a) fighter pilot and I got wounded and couldn’t fly anymore so I was sent to Washington as an Air Attaché. A sort of lucky stroke came my way: I was dining at a friend’s house who happened to be quite close to the vice-president who was then Henry Wallace and he threw a sheath of papers at me; he was as naïve as Wallace was and he said, “You’re a flying chap, what do you think of that? Take it down to my study and read it.” I took one look at it and it was an immensely secret cabinet document, rather a horrid thing really. It was all the plans for civil aviation for America, post war after we had won the war. I thought, My goodness, I have got to do something about this. This would make them rock back at home; everyone was fighting like mad and here was somebody trying to steal a march on somebody else. I knew one fellow who was vaguely connected with Bill Stephenson and I grabbed the telephone in this man’s house and I said, “meet me at the corner of so and so”, just outside of the house at once. He knew something was up and he was there in two minutes and I sneaked out of the door and handed this thing to him in his car and I said to him, “You’ve got to be back in half an hour.” He flashed off and I hung around downstairs near the lavatory door because if the chap upstairs came down looking for me saying, “Have you finished reading it?” then I would be in the lavatory of course saying, “sorry, I’m caught short.” In half an hour I nipped out and this chap was back and I got my paper and it was all right. Well apparently that did cause a bit of a stir and it went up to New York to Bill and it caused a stir in London too. A little later on Bill said to somebody up there, “how did you get that?” and they said they got it from some chap down in Washington. He asked who and that’s actually how he heard my name first. Then I ran afoul, as one is bound to among the diplomatic people, and I got kicked out of the embassy mainly by an Air Chief Marshall. When Bill heard I was going to be kicked out and he always heard, he had ears everywhere you see, he sent word to me and said, “Go home, you’ll be contacted and you’ll come back immediately for me.” So I went home as a Squadron Leader and I was back in a week as a Wing Commander you see?
Roald Dahl cut quite a swath as a handsome war hero in Washington and New York and had quite a reputation as a ladies man, some say a serial womanizer. After the War he started to write. One of his short stories was turned down by The New Yorker. Dahl was a novelist, poet, short story master, playwright, scriptwriter and even the author of a funny cookbook that asked celebrities what they would like as their last meal. The Hangman’s Suppers, he called the chapter.
“When I was young they used to hang convicted murderers in Britain,” he started the chapter. Then he wrote to famous people asking what they would eat before death.
John le Carre wrote, in part: “…I would go for a nursery meal of the sort you can still get at the Connaught (a swish London hotel) roast lamb and roast potatoes, followed by bread and butter pudding. But I would wish it to be served by a very young and very pretty nanny.”
Dustin Hoffman wrote, in full: “May 1990 If I knew it was my last meal I don’t think I would have much of an appetite. But since we’re playing… let’s say mother’s milk. Might as well go out the way I came in.”
Roald Dahl was the farthest thing from woke. He would have despised the changes to words in his books. Writers across the world, including Salman Rushdie, attacked the re-write job. The examples are so ridiculous that they have had the opposite effect that the prim, prudish editors intended.
It will come as no surprise The Daily Telegraph went off the deep end, with examples of the Puffin edit and a series of cartoons mocking the edits.
“Take The Witches, for example, Dahl’s memorably unpleasant 1983 novel about a young boy growing up in a world ruled by a coven of secretive witches. A 2001 version of the text includes the following passage, about yanking women’s hair to check if they are witches. (In the story, witches are bald, and wear gloves to disguise their claws.),” wrote the Telegraph.
2001 Edition:
“Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.”
Replaced in the 2022 edition with:
“Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
The Telegraph continued:
Unsurprisingly given The Witches’ subject matter, many of the edits are to do with depictions of women. “Chambermaid” becomes “cleaner”. “Great flock of ladies” becomes “great group of ladies”. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind!” “The old hag” becomes “the old crow”
There are many more examples. A mention of Rudyard Kipling is replaced with Jane Austen. “Fat little brown mouse” becomes “little brown mouse”.
Though I have not read Raoul Dahl, I have read George Orwell. I downloaded 1984 on my Kindle a few months ago to re-read it and dip in and out of it. Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, does the same job as the woke editors at Puffin. He re-writes history for the records office at The Ministry of Truth. From 1984:
“This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.”
There is a happy ending to this story. Puffin has caved to the outrage caused by their `sensitivity’ edit of Dahl’s work. They will issue a `Classic Collection’ or books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches, without the changes.
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