Nobody is talking about this, for there's a touching touch of political incorrectness. Ahem...did you observe that the waiting list of successors to the scandal-plagued British prime minister Boris Johnson is rife with very foreign names (?):
Rishi Sunak
Priti Patel
Sajid Javid
Kwasi Kwarteng
Nadhim Zahawi
Some hype coins mint instant millionaires. Others go bust. Why not take a chance?
They have names that make them sound delicious, like Cookie Coin. Or headed for outer space, like Pluto Coin. Or space-bound and delicious, like AstroCake, which was described this way: “Created 5 minutes ago. SAFE.”
Hype coins, as they’re known, sit squarely on the flashy, speculative end of the cryptocurrency business. Every day, dozens of them are created around the world by developers promising fortunes to would-be investors. It usually ends poorly. The vast majority of these tokens are worthless within a couple of weeks. The developers, on the other hand, can make tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes a lot more.
Despite this track record, hype coins have become the investment of choice for millions of people, most of them men in their 30s, or younger, and convinced that the economy writ large is rigged against them. Some are the same traders who have been leaping into stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment. To them, crypto is both a source of hope (in imminent riches) and fellowship (many coins have chats on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, that can sound like faith-based support groups).
It’s hard to think of another financial craze in which so many people poured so much into entities with so little intrinsic value. Few hype coins have any utility as currency. Good luck buying lunch with one. Many are minted in numbers rarely seen outside astronomy books — trillions, quadrillions — which dooms them to vanishingly tiny prices.
From the outside, the hype coin party is a mystery. To understand it, you have to join it.
Which is surprisingly easy. You may have heard that Bitcoin, the granddaddy of crypto, is “mined” by power-gobbling supercomputers, a process that verges on the utterly incomprehensible. Making a hype coin, by contrast, is more like ordering a pizza online. The entire process is automated and speedy. The fixings — in this case, what to call it, how many coins to make and so on — are up to you.
So one day in May, I created my own cryptocurrency. I did it on a Zoom call with an excitable 36-year-old in Taiwan, Dan Arreola, who had posted a tutorial on YouTube about how to make, and promote, a “scam coin.” It has more than 240,000 views.
...was the title of a famous poster by the German Bundesbahn in the winter of 1967, pointing out that their trains would work even when the Autobahn got frozen over:
It got soon parodied by an infamous poster by the SDS ("Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund") a principal agent of the 1968 movement:
And now us, 53 years later: the famous Chang Man Yoon...
...and his infamous partner Michael Ampersant...
...lounging in their swing in the middle of an overheated summer worldwide while enjoying a fresh Atlantic breeze of 22°C in their garden in Alcobaça, Portugal.
(A bit smug, this post, but anyhow.)
(1) Twitter didn't even exist when Monica Lewinsky was comforting Bill Clinton
in the off-room of the Oval Office;
(2) That was 25 years ago;
(3) And now what? How to stay afloat 25 years later?
(4) Study physics and outdo Einstein?
(5) Or...
(6) Well, while you are studying physics, we study expressions such as:
(7) "Yesterday"...
(8) "All my troubles seemed so far away" (Beatles)
(9)
"On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my head..."
(Eagles)
(10) Not quite, instead:
(11) "i [sic] hadn't driven on a highway i [sic] hadn't driven on in years"...
(12) ...and then, of course: "My dark decade"...
(12a) ("dark" (?) -- don't they have electricity in the Oval Office?):
(13) Note the subtle tiptoeing around her own gender ("(she/her)"), as if she would be in doubt herself;
(14) We are so politically-incorrect here, it's intentional
terrible intentional
terrible...
(15) But we do this because 50% or more of all Twitter posts are like this: undiluted self-promotion of has-beens and non-entities.
(16) We know, we know, we are one of them.
Pictorial warning: this is not an exciting picture, but...
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| The Baça, just south of the confluence, as it arrives at the Rua 16 de Outobro |
If you're old enough, you'll remember the eternal French words "Je t'aime...Moi non plus", spoken by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, in what...let's look this up...in 1969 (meaning you possibly won't (remember)).
But we got struck by this not so jugendfreie poster on the internet...
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| We added the fig-leaves after having read a beautiful essay in The New Yorker about Nabokov's Lolita |
...and feel encouraged to engage in another act of self-promotion by invoking our novel "Green Eyes", which--regular readers of this blog may have come to regret--is always about everything, and so it's also about this song...
We're in Chapter 17 of the GREEN EYES, and the whole thing is NOT jugendfrei at all, so you'll read this at your own risk. John, the narrator, and Alex, the lead character, have met once before, and now they meet again--in Johns bed:
We’re back in the bedroom. We finally embrace, kiss. This is it, this is the
moment. Should Alex expect me to sink to my knees now, unbutton his fly, like
in the porn flicks? Or unzip his zipper, most porn flicks are so cheap, they
don’t have money for the more expensive, button-holed Levis—-unzip his cheaper
jeans and start caressing his briefs with my lips, drawing the attention to
his budding tumescence under the cotton?
Well, I might, at least in the sense that my bedroom looks almost as bad as
the motel rooms where those flicks are shot. A chest, two wooden bedside
tables, two wooden chairs. A timber-framed bed done in cherry imitation, a
mattress and dirty sheets, a discordant collection of things that speak of my
financial (and mental) condition.
Yet Alex isn’t waiting for the cotton kiss (besides, he doesn’t wear any
fly-enhanced leg-wear but is still clad in his hospital sweatpants). Instead,
he undresses unceremoniously. T-shirt, pants, briefs, shoes, socks are all
arranged into a neat pile on the second chair.
He climbs onto the bed, folds himself into some relaxed, unassuming position,
like a model in a drawing class, but without the attitude. The simplicity of
his movements I will never forget, they changed my life.
I follow his example and make an unusual effort at apparel-folding. Although
we had fairly rough sex the previous morning, there is not the least
suggestion of anything untoward between us in the past, for all practical
purposes we could be virgins. I lie next to him.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, caressing my face. I’m caressing back. This would
be the moment to say ‘I love you,’ although you never know what you get back,
like ‘moi non plus,’ statistically the most honest answer (moi non plus,
French, used by Serge Gainsbourg, the one and only basis for his fame, this
noun phrase, meaning “me neither”), or ‘I love you too,’ but uttered
unconvincingly, or ‘I love you too,’ uttered more convincingly, although you
know it’s bullshit.
(I hold back.)
(I cannot hold back.)
“I love you,” I say.
“No sweat,” Alex comes back—-bypassing world literature from Homer to Spielberg. Have you ever heard anybody saying ‘no sweat’ in this situation? There’s a teasing movement of his eyelashes, although his green eyes stay neutral as if it’s head or tail. “In human sexual behavior,” he says, “foreplay is a set of emotionally and physically intimate acts between two or more people meant to create desire for sexual activity and sexual arousal.” Ooh, he’s so sweet!(There's more educational content below, first the self-promotion:)
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| "Click" |
We simply had to put this up, an entire post from a member of Quora, our favorite Q-A internet site (which features the invaluable physics whizz Victor T. Toth). Here, however, we have Grizzly Coleman, who "leans" towards "atheism" (as opposed to the people that storm the Capitol):
I had a bunch of these.
There was a time where I’d challenge myself to keep scammers on the phone for the longest amount of time - my record was 49 minutes and one of the rules I set for myself is that I’m not allowed to be the one who ended the call.
I had a chalk board near the phone and put another “notch” on the board every time I got one to hang up, I still have the 100% success rate, although don't get many calls these days.
I’ve done the usual “dottering” old man thing with the Microsoft virus scamers for the most part, walking away from the phone for a couple of minutes at a time pretending I was on my hands and knees trying to plug in a hard to reach modem so they could connect, until saying something like “Always have trouble pluggin the iPad thingy into the modem”
But the funniest one was a woman using a scam that was going around Australia a few years ago. They’d offer budget holidays to several Australian locations.
They were usually for nine nights for two people, but you could reduce some of the nights for extra people for the same price.
The first part of the conversation was location - “I really want an Island location”
She suggested the usual Australian tourist spots in Queensland, I said I wanted to go to Torrens Island, and after she “Apparently” checked she said she could get me there. Torrens Island is a power station island in South Australia, also used as a quarantine location from time to time - I used to go fishing there as a kid
“Great” I said
She said “So nine nights for $X” (I really can’t remember the price offered,..)?
“No, I’d like one night for 18 people; I have a big family”
She kind of started to smell something was not right at this stage — there was an audible sigh on the phone, but had invested so much time she thought she better continue just in case.
“Yes, we can arrange accommodation for large families.”
“Okay, but what’s your policy if we need to bring back more people than we left with?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I have three daughters in the family who are pregnant, ready to drop any day now. If I go over with the family of 18, I could be needing to return with 21! What happens then, do we need to pay extra?”
I figured it was all over at this stage, just silence for a few seconds.
All this time I was walking around the house with the cordless phone; if I keep moving I tend not to break character and laugh so much. At this point of the call I was walking close to the toilet, so I walked in and flushed it.
“Hold on a sec, I just gotta put the phone down to wipe.”
I kept listening, and after a a couple of seconds I had another notch for my chalkboard.
My wife hates that chalkboard,..
So we went to Porto de Mos, the nearby town that dominates the Parque Natural das Serras de Aire e Candeeiros, where we shot our Christmas Card:
So, we found this:
It's a bit difficult to read, despite some photoshopping, but it says: "To the triumph of logic over the disruption of the truth." A bit optimistic perhaps, this congratulatory shoulder-pat, but now it's set in stone, and we'll hang it on our new walls as soon as we find a printer nearby.
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| The main building of the Quinta do Campo |
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| Partial view of the monastery. (The place we are interested in is to the right/south of this picture, up the hill for 600 m or so, make a left, and there you are.) |
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| A partial view of the service buildings of the Quinta |
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| The library (1), |
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| the library (2), |
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| the library (3), |
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| the drawing room. |
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| Apartment F. |
