Odd phrases, J S Bach, Moby Dick and Miss Pettigrew

Just a little catchup on the HitTail side of things....the following four phrases are the ones most used to get to my site this last week or so.  And what an odd collection they are!

brownlee finland
mother armwrestling
esther muir plastered
steve jobs graduation quotes

Gerry Brownlee is the man in question in the first phrase: he's a politician here in New Zealand, and recently made a bit of a gaffe in regard to some comments given in Parliament about the country of Finland. Supposedly the Finns got very up in arms about the comments.  Quite honestly, it seems unlikely.  Do most of them even know where New Zealand is?

Mothers and armwrestling seem to be a bit of an odd combination, although there are some You Tube videos showing mothers armwrestling with their teenage sons.    Last time armwrestling turned up on HitTail in relation to my site it was to do with a man armwrestling his wife.   Not sure how the mother got in on it. 

Esther Muir was an actress who had a role in the Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races.  Like most women who wind up in Groucho's arms in these movies, she suffers considerable embarrassment at the hands of his brothers.  

I don't need to explain the last phrase.  Do I?

Yesterday I came across a site called Grooveshark.  It's a place where you can stream endless amounts of music, or buy it, if you wish.  Since it's Easter Weekend, I had a thought that I'd make an effort to hear Bach's St Matthew Passion.  I know a little of it, but not the whole wide mountain range of it.  Anyway, it's all available on Grooveshark, in several versions.  Curiously, the tracks from these versions are mixed up to glory, so playing them in the order they appear means you're hearing a random version of the Passion. This isn't an entirely bad thing, and some tracks get repeated straight away with a different choir and orchestra, or turn up further down the list.  I've just left the whole caboodle running for the last couple of days, when I've been here, and gradually Bach's music is making more of an impression on my brain than it has before.  

On another front, I'm starting to struggle with Moby Dick, the novel by Herman Melville.  I was enjoying it at first, when he was still writing an actual story, but he gets bogged down in side-paths, which, though they may be interesting in themselves, just feel like they're holding up the real meat of the book.  Ishmael ceases to be a character in the story, almost, and becomes just a narrator of events in which he often has no part.  It's taken a long time for Captain Ahab to appear, and when he does you rather wish he hadn't.  Keeping him mysteriously below decks on a permanent basis might have worked better.  He insists on speaking in a pseudo-Shakespearean mode, as though he wasn't living in the same century as the other characters.  Not only that, Melville starts giving 'stage directions', and these have a Shakespearean feel to them too, which makes the whole thing stop being a story and begin to be almost a piece of postmodern literature (and I'm not saying that in a complementary way). 

I'll persevere a little longer, in the hope that something actually happens. 

Last night we watched a film called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.  It was superbly designed: the colour coordination between costumes and scenery in particular was just wonderful.  It was pretty well acted too, given that most of it was a load of old twaddle.  I'm not really sure what it was meant to be about: surely not the idea that a young person can have a change of heart and settle down to a straightforward marriage after having had three affairs on the go at once and being in general a total twat. The change of heart wasn't convincing, because it was supposed to take place during one set of 24 hours, and be initiated by a woman who didn't appear to have all that much nous to begin with. Nevertheless Amy Adams did her utter energetic best as the ditzy girl; Frances McDormand did her best to turn from being a lifeless frump to someone who could let her warmth hang out and make other people feel all cosy; Ciarán Hinds played a bloke who designed women's lingerie but decided to go back to designing men's sox (don't ask me why) - somehow he fell in love with the McDormand character without anything much having clicked between them.  The inimitable Shirley Henderson (known for her role as Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter series, though she's had some marvellous parts in other films) played Ciarán's ex-fiancée, and was positively statuesque in spite of her limited height. She stole the show with her stylish playing, I felt, but her character was underdeveloped, and in the end had nowhere to go and dropped out of the movie. 

The sort of movie where you always hoped things would actually get up and go. Nope, they didn't. 

Think again about Steve Jobs' quotes

Alan Jacobs alerted me to two blogs that commented on the famous Steve Jobs' graduation address, quotes from which have been doing the rounds since Jobs' death.  

Robin Hanson, on a blog called Overcoming Bias, wrote that Jobs' advice about not settling until you're doing what you really love isn't actually that practical in real world terms.  If that was the case, no one would get on and do the humdrum stuff, and unfortunately that still needs to be done, come what may. 

It's a bit like a lot of Seth Godin's blog posts: the idea that you can up and leave what you hate doing and go and find what you love doing.  The reality is that most of us have to do something that is 'normal' and do what we love in our spare time.

Will Wilkinson wittily commented further, both on Jobs' statements, and on Hanson's.  Sometimes those who have succeeded in life forget that many others just have to get on with it; they don't have the choices that hugely talented people - or hugely successful people - have.   It's just the way life is. 

I'm keen to do the things I love, but regrettably I've never been in a position to go for broke and do only the things I love.  So be it.  Contentment with your lot isn't too bad a thing, in many ways.

Incidentally, Jacobs also quotes another writer on Jobs, and the less savoury aspects of Apple's influence on the computer world.

The price of gold

I noticed on the news the other night that gold is becoming increasingly valuable, and one online article reported that gold is now valued at "$1,619.30 an ounce at 1:48 p.m. on the Comex in New York. Earlier, the price fluctuated between gains and losses. The August contract reached a record $1,624.30 yesterday." (Yesterday in this case was the 26th July.) Phew!

This is good news for those with an IRA (Individual Retirement Account), especially if it's a gold IRA. It's not so good news for those who (a) don't have gold and (b) don't have a retirement plan.

I've written about IRAs on a previous occasion. It was a couple of months before I retired, when I was forced to admit that I didn't have much in the way of a retirement plan, having chopped and changed jobs over my working life, and often been in jobs where there wasn't any retirement plan. If it ain't there, you can't do much about it.

Ways of planning ahead such as the gold 401k approach are fine if you have money to invest, or have stayed in a job for a long period of time. For those of us who don't or haven't, then we just have to take what comes, and count the pennies a bit more carefully than we used to do. This takes some doing, actually, as the tendency, I've found, once you retire, is to keep functioning at the same level as before. Because we had a bit of money still in the bank when I finished up, and have had a bit more come in via things like Trade Me, we're okay. If those dried up, we'd really have to turn off the heat pump and stay in bed all day. (Well, in winter at least.)

I really missed out in my younger days, by not buying gold, either as bars or coins. So shortsighted of me. Seemingly, if I had purchased $25,000 of gold bullion coins in the early 70’s and held on to it during the oil crisis, inflation, devaluation of the U.S. dollar, Savings and Loan scandal, recession, tech and internet bubble, cooked books, 911, and a real estate bubble - after that lot I'd be lucky to holding onto anything - I could sell my gold today for $524,999.00.

And if I had purchased $25,000 of limited mintage investor gold coins over the same time line, I could sell that gold today for $1,377,257.00. Now that probably would have allowed me to keep the heat pump on over the winter at full bore...! Or move to somewhere where it's always warm.

This is always the issue: in order to make money from investments like a gold IRA transfer you have to have something to invest in the first place. If I had managed to put anything aside in the 70s, there would have been no chance of holding onto it during kids' schooling, clothing, eating food, going occasionally to the movies, paying various unexpected bills, replacing the wrecked car with a not-so wrecked one, let alone oil crises, devalutions, recessions, bursting bubbles and anything else you might care to name.

Some of us just have to keep holding in faith to our Father who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, as he reminds us in one of the Psalms. (I think it's more likely he actually owns the cattle on a billion hills, but that's pushing the poetic licence.) In the long run, he's the only one who'll get us through all the crises etc. If you think that's being a bit naive, then you'll just have to believe me that He's done it so far and there's no reason not to think that he won't in future.

Every three seconds? A little bit of hyperbole?

The world is awash with e-books and their ilk. It's reported that Steve Jobs (not him personally, but him as a kind of entity) is selling an iPad every three seconds. I find that just a little incredible as a stat, but I've been surprised by stats before. Let's see what that actually means in real terms.

There are 86400 seconds in a day. Divided by three, that says that Steve is selling 28,800 iPads a day. Really? In a week, he'll be selling 201,600. In a thirty-day month, he'd be selling, 864,000 of the things, if my calculations are right. That's ten times the number of seconds in a day. An interesting bit of number play.

I suppose that's possible. And I suppose it's possible that Jobs and co can churn out that many from their production line, wherever that is, and that teenagers in need of acne treatment and saga generation people in need of new dentures can both discover the joys and wonders of the iPad idol. (Sorry, did I say 'idol'? Surely not.)

Seth Godin, from whom I got the stat about the three seconds, is obviously a fan of the Kindle, and has written a post suggesting ways in which it might forge ahead of its competitor. And of course the Kobo has just arrived on the NZ market, from Whitcoulls, of all people. (Perhaps the most innovative thing they've got involved with in along time.) Check out their site or check out Whitcoulls ebooks selection. I can't say the prices impress me much; I think I thought they'd be rather cheaper than they are. SuperFreakonomics, for instance, is showing at NZ$29.95. You might as well buy the book.