The price of everything

Everyone has a number

As we wrote on 6^th February (‘Bless you !’), Jim Rickards has an intriguing thought experiment that touches on the same ‘cave brain’ behaviour as the new Covid-19 / coronavirus does. Imagine you were in a hotel ballroom with 500 other people..

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Get to the chopper !

“‘Get to da choppa !’

“Short for the whole phrase that Dutch (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) says in the movie Predator, which goes: “RUN! GO! GET TO DA CHOPPA !”

“This can mean any number or things, or mean nothing at all. Frequently it is used when something exciting is happening or will happen and they need to be going someplace. It's used when there is no need to mention where you're going, you all already know where you're going. So you just yell GET TO DA CHOPPA!!!! Friends get in their separate cars, about to leave school and meet up at the diner, but before leaving they roll down their windows and one yells "GET TO DA CHOPPA!!" before they all speed off.”

• Definition for ‘Get to da choppa !’ from Urban Dictionary.
  
  

“You know, if baseball umpires were on the front page of the sports section every week, you'd know something was desperately wrong with the game.”

• Jim Grant, on central bankers.
  
  

The director John McTiernan made two of the best action films of the 1980s. Die Hard surely needs little introduction – completists of the film can see its backstory in the series The Movies That Made Us on Netflix. The other is 1987’s Predator, with Arnie in one of his most memorable roles, as Major “Dutch” Schaefer, sent into the jungles of Latin America ostensibly to rescue some CIA folk, only to end up doing battle with a murderous monster from another planet.

Speaking of monsters from another world takes us neatly to Christine Lagarde, the lawyer who has been President of the European Central Bank since November..

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Try ignorance

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

• Attributed variously to Harvard University president Derek Bok, and to columnist ‘Ann Landers’ (Eppie Lederer).

“Sheriff Hank Keough: I.. I.. I never heard of a crocodile crossing an ocean.

 Hector Cyr: Well, they conceal information like that in books.”

• From the film Lake Placid, written by David E. Kelley.

Somebody wise noted recently that whereas, say, 20 years ago, investors needed a big funnel to help them assess market information and commentary, now those same investors need a big filter, in order to sort the wheat from the chaff. Thanks to the digital economy we are now drowning in information. But that is not, of course, the same thing as drowning in knowledge. To spot the difference, try watching any television news or simply opening a newspaper.

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Bless you !

“..the most famous origin-story involving ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’ is that the rhyme refers to the Great Plague, specifically the one of the seventeenth century that devastated London in 1665 and prompted the inhabitants of the infected Derbyshire village of Eyam to isolate themselves from the rest of the country, so as to minimise the spread of the disease. This interpretation of the rhyme sees the ‘ring-a-ring o’ roses’ representing the red marks or lesions – which, in this interpretation, show up like ‘rings’ on the skin – which are (again, supposedly) associated with the symptoms of bubonic plague. The posies in the pocket are the herbs and flowers people carried to ward off the disease (because until relatively recently people believed that disease was caused by smell). Similarly the ‘a-tishoo!’ is a symptom of plague, since victims supposedly sneezed when in the grip of the disease. Finally, of course, the falling down represents the death of the plague victim."


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