Emma, Vin, and Katie in Colorado
A short, family video to my mother.
A short, family video to my mother.
Think that the airliner you’ve been on flew a bit to low when coming in for a landing? You don’t know what flying low is. Watch the first of these two Argentinian fighter jets fly low enough to get grass stains on its fuselage.
Karl Stefanovic, co-host of the Today show in the Australia tries to tell a joke to the quite attentive Dalai Lama. Maybe it will work in Stefanovic’s next incarnation.
For much of the past decade, El Bulli in Catalonia has been considered the best restaurant in the world. Restaurant Magazine ranked it Number One on its Top 50 list of the world’s best restaurants for a record five times — in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and #2 in 2010. Now, El Bulli’s owners, Ferran and Albert Adrià, have opened a cocktail bar in Barcelona, our favorite city. The seven-minute video above from The Guardian will give you an idea.
When Emma and I think about our eventual retirements, we think of Barcelona. That shouldn’t be surprising about her, a Spaniard (although our Catalan friends maintain that the autonomous community of Catalonia isn’t really part of Spain). My own experiences in Barcelona started late for me, beginning in the late 1990s: primarilyspeaking the NetMedia conferences held there, at Pompeu Fabra University, and at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Vilanova y la Geltrú 50 kilometers south, plus friends at La Vanguardia.
I remember waking one morning after arriving, and hearing the sounds of roaring motorcycles outside. I saw hundreds of leather- or denim-clad riders astride Harley-Davidsons passing by my hotel. Badly jet-lagged, I wondered if I was still in the States. Hundreds and hundreds of Harleys. But they were speaking French, Hungarian, Finnish, or Greek, etc. I’d arrived in Barcelona when it was hosting the continent’s annual Harley-Davidson riders’ conference. The next day, once I’d gotten used to the all that, I was walking across a crosswalk on a street near Pompeu Fabra when Jay Leno, at the wheel of a Smart Car, pulled up at the stoplight (turns out he was in Barcelona on vacation for Harley conference). That’s Barcelona−surreal, delicious, and always unexpected. Just like the Adriàs’ new cocktail bar.
The Economist today reports that polling by the Pew Research Center showed that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Lauden had lost popular support in Islamic countries years before a US Navy counter-terrorism team took his life. “This may reflect a genuine change in attitudes after al-Qaeda’s high-profile attacks in places such as Bali and Jordan, as well as its violence in Iraq. But it could also reflect Mr bin Laden’s lower profile in recent years.”
I’m thinking of raising capital for a new venture—Tea Party Land.
This amusement park located in Middle America will have little or no government, ban admission to immigrants, and comprise Hannity Town, Old Testament Ingrahamstan , Beck Fantasyland, Coultershire, and O’Reillytopia. All its streets will lead to Fox Castle where every hour on the hour Princess Palin appears from a balcony.
Tea Party Land will be the first family amusement park to feature rides engineered according to Creation Science and Supply-Side Economics: such as the Holy Rollercoaster down the mighty Limbaughorn, the Trickledown Waterslide (is your mortgage underwater?), and It’s A Cool Cool Cooling World.
What other rides, cuisines, and features should we include?
(Photograph, Tea Cup Ride on High Street, Solihull, courtesy of Ell Brown on Flickr.)
Charming mashup of Oliver Laurel & Stan Hardy’s 1937 Way Out West dance scene with Cachao’s Oye Como Va played by Santana.
The editor in 1958 was a Quaker who ‘didn’t get out much’ and who the pressmen hated because he’d frequently order last-minute changes to the front page (loads of work with melted lead type). So when he ordered this last-minute headline about Textron offering to purchase a local company that manufactured fasteners, they decided that their role wasn’t to question but to obey. The next day, Textron’s legal department ordered 50 copies. And my parents, the newspaper’s publishers, spent the next week explaining to Textron that no harm was meant.
OK, simply because this isn’t my business blog, I’ll take the liberty to embed the most politically-incorrect television advertisement I’ve ever seen. It’s from Dutch TV and produced by PMSvW-Young & Rubican for the Soesman Language Institute.