Michael Ampersant

Aug 13, 2021

How are you doing...?

Michael is posting this especially for Alex (Irene Hogan), the famous editor of GFF, who was wondering how we are doing...

This is "us" (Chang and Michael, plus Charlie, our saviour (in the middle), in November '20, in the garden of our new home in Alcobaça (click on any picture for a slide-show)).

The last couple of years, when Michael was looking at his posts on these pages, he felt that people were being misled to think that we were living in paradise.

The view from our home on the Cote d'Azur ("Nichts ist schwerer zu ertragen als eine lange Reihe von schönen Tagen" (Goethe))

This was far from the truth, unfortunately, since we were in financial trouble and had to sell the place and leave France. But the housing market was down, we could not sell, and in our suppressed state of mind we suffered under this ruthlessly glorious sun rising each morning over the glorious Mediterranean.

A passing cloud comes to the rescue, for once.

But then Covid struk, the markets turned, and we sold the house and moved to Portugal, where we found---for a song---an underrated hilltop villa in Alcobaça, 100 km north of Lisbon, near the coast.

It's the structure with the red roof, not far from...

...the Praia do Norte, the beach with the highest surfable waves in the world.

But then, the internet hit in too many ways and our relocation became much more complicated than expected. Here's one trivial example, concerning our print-copy subscription to The Economist. It's a "chat" with their "advisor":

The Economist (TE): Hi, Ampersant, you are now in a queue and we'll have an advisor with you shortly.
Michael (M): I am not receiving my print edition since 2 or 3 weeks
TE: Your current position is 1, thank you for holding.
TE: Your current position is 1, thank you for holding.
TE: Your current position is 1, thank you for holding.
TE: Bill has been allocated to the chat.
Bill: Please bear with me for a minute, while I check the information for you.
Bill: Thank you for your patience, Ampersant.
Bill: I've extended your subscription by a further 2 issues to compensate for the missing copies.
Bill: Is there anything else I can help you with?
M: You have no explanation? Did you send the copies?
Bill: Actually there is a issue in delivery, I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
Bill: Hereafter you'll not face the same issue.
M: Could you just be a bit more precise..."issue in delivery"...is that the language I can expect from THE ECONOMIST?
Bill: I'm extremely sorry to inform you that there is an delay with the postal department is I meant.
M: Shall I cancel my subscription, then?
Bill: But now I have forwarded to concerned department, hereafter you will not face delivery delay.
M: I'm not happy about this "chat", I can tell you...
Bill: I'm sorry that you've decided to cancel.
M: I have not decided to cancel...I asked: "Shall I cancel"...
Bill: I'm extremely sorry for that, Ampersant.
M: You are sorry for what?
(Here the chat ended; the "advisor" disappeared from the line).

Are you still there? This is how people have to spend their days these days when they move countries.

Plus, our underrated villa revealed some underrated problems which required all our attention. Plus, Michael developed a problem with his knee.

Not so underrated after all---street view of the house in Nov. '20.

Charlie working on the gate of the driveway

Not all problems are solved yet; we are still somewhat in limbo (etymologically the first sphere of hell, "limbo", if we recall correctly from memory).

And Michael is not---he's excepting Chang from this, because Chang is everything---we are really not self-help people that believe in self-help slogans.

Anyhow, there we are.

A recent morning lensed from the bedroom; note the pergola.

The new front deck

Entrance; note the ridiculous double doormat

Street view of the house in August 2021

Aug 6, 2021

Michael goes crypto...

...well, not quite, but he does what he rarely does, he reproduces an entire piece from the NYT (last time he did that it was with a column from Ross Douthat about Obama's victory in the 2012 elections). Enjoy:

Going for Broke in Cryptoland -- By David Segal

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.

Alle reden vom Wetter (2)

Wasn't it prescient, our last post? Here, the climate change in Verviers, Belgium, on July 16, 2021, where the flooding water stacked cars on a roundabout:

Jul 8, 2021

"ALLE REDEN VOM WETTER, WIR NICHT"...

...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.)

Jul 4, 2021

The new front deck next to the entrance of our house in Alcobaça, PT

On the horizon: the norther tip of the Serras de Aire e Candeeiros

Jun 28, 2021

Buy Tesla (TSLA)

Jun 27, 2021

This morning

Jun 25, 2021

The mysterious border between syntax and semantics

Jun 24, 2021

Alcobaça this morning, on Michael's morning walk

(Pictures by Chang Man Yoon)

Jun 18, 2021

The giant wave

This surf figures in the Guinness Book of records, but it is rare (happening twice per year perhaps) and very local (just at the tip of the Sitio rock, in front of the Forte de São):

"More or less (?)", you ask? Yes, because we are located in Alcobaça, the town next to Nazaré (lower right of the map)...

...and the Praia do Norte (northern beach), where the surf happens and the Forte is located, is ca. 10km away:

An interesting feature, which explains part of the popularity of the region, has to do with the two beaches. The northern beach is wild at all times, and untameable under the unrelenting drift of northerly winds---providing a perfect backdrop for hippies of all generations. In contrast, the southern beach is protected by the cliff---gladly accommodating families with small children and strong preference for sunburns.

Jun 13, 2021

The week in pictures

The entrance with two newly acquired geranium pots

Fleas on the newly acquired bougainvilliids

Sheep on Michael's morning walk

The living room on Sunday morning

The living room again

Rambo, Charlie's dog

Jun 4, 2021

Acres of artificial grass...

...not acres, in fact, but the grass-floor of the pergola is indeed artificial. The swing--which we called Hollywood-swing in previous editions (our friend Sacha informs us that said expression is only used in Germany and unintelligible to normal people)--so, said swing is from Belliani, a Portuguese outfit. The two deck chairs are from LaRedoute:

We ordered four canvas chairs (director's chairs in German), so stay tuned.

On closer inspection, the natural grass looks artificial as well, but that's just an artefact induced by Chang's lawn-mowing plus the dry high winds of the last couple of days. The swing swings with the wind, very nice.