Lily Allen

Asia

Jellied Salad

JELLIED SALMON SALAD

1 tablespoon gelatin
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup celery, chopped
3/4 cup boiled dressing
1 cup canned salmon, broken in small flakes
1/4 cup chopped stuffed olives
Salt and paprika to taste
Soak gelatin in the cold water; dissolve over hot water and add to the dressing. Fold in the salmon, celery and olives and add seasonings to taste. Mould as desired and chill. Unmold on shredded lettuce.


JELLIED CHICKEN SALAD

Make same as the Jellied Salmon salad, using 1 cup cubed breast of chicken instead of the salmon. Add 2 tablespoons chopped pimento. Unmould on crisp lettuce and garnish with stuffed olives or radish roses.

Dressing

STANDARD BOILED DRESSING

2 tablespoons Five Roses Flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons mustard
1 teaspoon salt
2 or 3 egg yolks
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1/4 cup rich milk or cream
1/2 cup mild vinegar
2 tablespoons butter

Mix together the flour, sugar, mustard, salt and egg-yolks. Add the evaporated milk; mix well and turn into a double boiler. Cook over boiling water, while stirring constantly, until mixture is heated, then add cream and vinegar alternatively, a few drops at a time. Stir and beat the mixture while it cooks, until it is thick and smooth. Remove from the fire, stir in the butter. When butter is melted, strain and store in a scalded glass jar. Dilute with cream as required.

Historical

From the U.K.

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/index.htm

KABUL

Auto Industry!?

http://www.wowow.co.jp/music/radiohead/special/

This site allows the viewer to put together a personalized version of a Radiohead song (in concert in Japan). There are twelve camera shots to choose from and it is actually a little difficult to do.

Thanks to Le Nouvel Obs; Enjoy.

Using Pythagoras

NASAtoy

http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/ClimateTimeMachine/climateTimeMachine.cfm

Anna_W

From my glorious spot on the sidelines of things aka blog journalist, I sometimes have illuminations as to how the world should re-order itself. Been reading about the hard times endured by Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, whose publication is no doubt suffering financially as much of the luxury economy seems to be. The case is poignant for me - she is my own age, 59, almost to the day - but has made very different decisions in her life: she has little formal education having dropped out of school at 16, but has attained career success and prominence in the field of fashion. No existential angst for Anna- W; she just went out and DID it.

What positive difference could more education be making to Anna's life right now, I wonder. What would an infusion from MY life experience be. For although I never knew it, Anna had quite an influence on mine. It was her idea to photograph a Vogue model in a $10,000 sweater and a pair of faded jeans. Need I say more?

Anna needs a new challenge, and I've got the perfect Creative Director job for her. At General Motors. A summer stint at the Harvard Business school to learn to talk the talk of Management by Objectives, a foulard de soie of business calculus and an intensive case-work seminar involving humiliation training - always handy in business - and she's ready to go. I'm not being facetious. The very no-nonsense personnal qualities and aesthetic flare that have made her a success in fashion are precisely those presently needed to operate a turn in the auto industry. I'm throwing in a boy-toy assistant from Greenpeace for good measure. 'r welcome!

As for the auto industry itself: my sincerest apologies. These people have been the backbone of American industry for a century and the rude circus their executives have been subjected to by the political class has no excuse. The industry has drawing rights to governmental support in difficult times. Taxes in when times are good, taxes out when they are not. That is the moral dimension of the question. America needs to get around, forget elimination by competition.

I was happy to see the German Environment Minister showcasing electrical cars in Berlin. Wrong minister but right idea: he's polite, photographs well, doesn't sweat. Why is all this so difficult? We are all faced with an enormous opportunity to be creative. Let's enjoy it!

E-BMW

www.spiegel.de/video/video-41371.html

Tune

2030

D_Lies

Black

About Lenses

It is the play of the ray of the light through the center of the lens that determines the point of image creation .http://www.univ-lemans.fr/enseignements/physique/02/optigeo/lentille.html

Rational Periodic

Chinese Bailout

from Le Monde, Nov. 19, 2008
Jean-François Huchet

AN OVERVIEW OF THE CHINESE BAILOUT

The annoucement of a vast plan to stimulate the Chinese economy, more important than that awaited by most analysts, is a sure sign of worry on the part of the government in Peking with respect to a rapid deterioration in economic indicators. It is yet too soon to give a detailed analysis of the impact of this plan. Yet its size - almost 546 billion dollars (431,3 billion euros and thus almost 16% of Gross Domestic Product) - does show that the optimistic view of a China getting through without too many challenges the world economic crisis without government intervention was becoming impossible to sustain. What are the elements that could have led the Chinese authorities to intervene so massively?

First of all, the importance of domestic repercussions to a drop in exports. A drop in the orders from foreign buyers has cascading consequences for the myriad of small to medium enterprises that act as sub-contractors and furnish semi-finished products to firms (Chinese as well as foreign) that operate and export from Chinese territory. Statistics don't fully show these effects.

As well, these sub-contracting Chinese SMEs find themselves operating on a trades basis in geographically delimited industrial parcs. The economic and social consequences of a drop in exports becomes amplified in certain geographic zones of the delta of the Pearl River near Hong Kong or in the provinces surrounding Shanghaï.

And, these contracting Chinese SMEs work on high volumes of large orders to off-set very low profit margins per produced unit, this because of the fierce competition these firms constitute for each other and in view of the little value-added for the foreign firms that sell the finished product in the United States or Europe.

A loss of orders from foreign clients thus might have catastrophic effects for the least organized sub-contractors. In a context where it is always difficult for SMEs to obtain loans from large public banks, which prefer making loans to state-owned enterprises, these sub-contractors have no liquidity with which to pay for raw materials and salaries.

Secondly, a natural re-orientation of Chinese growth toward Chinese consumption, an objective announced by the government as early as 2003, seems to have had difficulty being achieved in a significant manner over a few short months. Chinese households build up precautionary savings to meet education costs, but also in response to insufficient or absent social policies with respect to retirement and health. On top of these structural considerations, one would have to count in equally two circumstantial phenomena which would certainly have a negative impact in the coming months on the consumption patterns of households.

Even while it is still difficult for us to measure, in particular because of the opacity concerning the identity of holders of share acounts in China, the abrupt collapse since last spring of the Stock Exchanges of Shanghaï (- 65%) and Hong Kong ( - 50%) should affect the anticipated revenues of the middle classes. Furthermore, the psychological impact of the international crisis, which had largely by-passed urban Chinese households during the Asian crisis of 1998, seemed this time to touch them more directly. These factors were starting to have a negative impact on real estate, which is one of the principal pillars of Chinese growth since the middle of the 1990s.

It is thus not a coincidence if beyond the traditional infrastructure expenses for which there is no doubt still a lot to be done in China, the bailout plan seems to give a lion's share to social expenses and help to real estate for those of intermediate income. The size of the announced stimulus package as well seems designed to counter the negative psychological effects of the international crisis on the Chinese consumer. The stimulus package also allows China to deflect the criticisms which would have certainly arisen on the deficit in internal consumption and the excess in savings, which contribute to imbalances at the world level.

This stimulus plan nonetheless raises a few questions. First of all the manner of its financing. With a public debt close to 16% of GDP and a fiscal surplus which should rise to 2% this year, Chines authorities have more room to manoeuvre than they did in 1998. Yet many anaslysts question the true margin enjoyed with respect to taxation. Things could be tighter than official statistics show.

At a time when tax revenues should go down steeply, the quick growth of certain structural expenses, which are beyond control in view of their social character, will continue thus putting in place a welfare state, a central element in the pursuit of endogenous growth. Yet this analysis also points to the existence of a non taken-into-account debt concerning retirement expenses and defaulting loans in public banks, which risk growing rapidly in the present context.

It would thus not seem surprising to see the State require from public entities, such as state-owned enterprises or state banks which have seen their profits go up considerably in the last few years, to contribute for a part of this effort, thus avoiding a too large budgetary deficit. Indeed, the annoucement defines an effort over two years, without mention of whether this is new money (which would be a massive sum) or whether it encompasses what the State had already decided to invest.

Yet, one might wish to question the short term impact of increased public spending in promoting spending by households. One can only applaud the efforts of the Chinese government on the social front, but it will surely be many years for social protection and education systems to be sufficiently transformed for it to have a deep impact on savings behaviour or consumption.

These questions aside, the announcement of a bailout plan shows once more a remarkable capacity for macroecenomic leadership on the part of the Chinese government, which might well enable it to soft-land its economy with a growth rate close to 8% for the year 2009.

Trader News

Berlin Old and New

www.spiegel.de/video/video-39727.html

Stoïc

From: Gilles Prod'homme, "Preparing for happiness, The Way of the Stoïcs", Eyrolles 2008.

Another difficult notion for a contemporary thinker: the bloc-universe of the Stoïcs is not static. In effect, it evolves according to an eternal cosmic cycle: initially, the artist fire manifests the universe, which, like all that is alive, is subject to birth and death. In the view of the school of Stoïcism, the Universe appears only to disappear again in a sort of final fire. This is the universal conflagration. At the end of a cosmic night, impossible to evaluate in terms of human time, and in which God contemplates his own essence, a new reality becomes manifest. And everything begins anew since each one of us relives the same events: Socrates once more walks the streets of Athens, Plato again writes his dialogues. This is palingenesis. Let us note in passing that this cyclical form of creations and dissolutions shows deep similarities with the system of the Days of God or Manvantaras of hindu gnosticism. Nietzsche's notion of an eternal return also echoes, in certain aspects, the speculations of the pre-Socratics and first Stoïcs.

Happy H

Berlin Gallery

FROM: THE NEW YORKER

On the other hand, this week, the New York Federal Reserve began to convene meetings to try to create transparency and liquidity in the global market for credit default swaps. These are essentially unregulated insurance contracts sold privately to financial institutions to protect them against losses in stocks or bonds. No government agency regulates credit default swaps. There is no official information available about the size of the market or the distribution of liabilities within it.

Maybe most of these contracts are sound, or balanced out in ways that don’t create huge systemic liabilities--let’s hope so. Published estimates of the nominal value of all credit-default-swap contracts in the world today are in the range of $55 trillion to $60 trillion. So here is a global private market whose products, combined, have a nominal value roughly equal to the total size of the world economy’s output in a year, and apparently no one in any government knows the full market’s shape, distribution, or true vulnerabilities. Gulp.

Posted by Steve Coll
In
Think Tank

Report Card

Spiegel Finance

INTERVIEW WITH GERMAN FINANCE MINISTER PEER STEINBRÜCK

SPIEGEL: And is the United States completely to blame?

Steinbrück: The source and focus of the problems are clearly in the United States. There are many causes. After 9/11, a great deal of cheap money was tossed into the market. Apparently some of that money went to people with poor creditworthiness. This led to the growth of the real estate bubble. The banks embarked on a race over profit margins. Then speculation spun completely out of control…
………………………………………………………………………………

SPIEGEL: What, specifically, will you call for?

Steinbrück: A few agreements were already reached with the British and Americans within the G-7 in April. They include imposing new rules on the conduct of the rating agencies, tightening equity regulations and gaining a better handle on cross-border bank supervision. But as far I am concerned, it isn't enough for the industry to develop its own code of conduct. I also want to see the banks no longer allowed to sell all of their risks as they see fit. I think it as a dangerous systemic design flaw that not only loans, but also credit risk is 100-percent marketable. This can lead to uncontrollable wildfires, as we are now seeing...

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Chronicle

Martian Dust Storm

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1513658585/bctid1790913001

Houston

GUARDIAN's Favourite

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/style/fashionweek/runway.html#

THE END IS NEAR!

Atlas

Liberation

L. has been moopolizing the computer all day and watching that dance film abut Cuba which came out a few years ago. Spent the whole day back and forth on it. I think she finds it disturbing to know that people are having a hard time at this very moment but there is little anyone can do to help. Same old, same old, and C. Rice repeating that the U.S. is not about to make things easier on Cuba. How did Guantanamo prison end up on that island in the first place. Although if anyone ever seriously objected to the U.S. keeping prisonners, it is a gesture that the prison is not on home ground. ( And how did the planetary beacon of democracy end up calling itself a homeland, anyway?) For the joke: Guantanamo prison is hurricane proof, the safest spot on the island, at the moment.

I am seriously considering skipping the entire election campaign in the U.S. Hillary gave up the Florida votes that would have given her the victory, just politely let the vote go. Whatever possessed her to do that. I wasn't necessarily rooting for her like a religion, but there was remarkable perseverance and commitment in what she was doing. I'm feeling bummed out. Speaking of which. There is a reason why the public needn't know about the love lives of politicians and the Clintons illustrated it. In the sex department - and this is my personal opinion - that man is a dork. Baaaad sex. Awful. Take me to the movies, let me dream...

So while L. kept on the computer, I ended up watching artv, with the cat. In French, a black and white documentary on cinema and psychoanalysis in which major 20th century filmmakers appeared. Fritz Lang, with his monocle, who liked to make movies about innocent-looking people who ended up being criminals (which is the role of dreams, in a Freudian perspective). Indeed, the film itself pointed out how the whole of cinematic vocabulary, the cutting and story-telling is close to dreams, where one fades in from darkness.

Bergman liked to make films about horrible experiences: he said it made him joyful. Hitchcock used the French word 'cauchemar' to describe his work and Fellini joked he often caught glimpses of his work on tv and wondered who was making all these horrible films. Goddard really nailed it: he remarked that the cinema allowed the viewer to see what he ordinarily didn't, that this was the fascination of cinema.

So while I'm at it, I will also skip the entire Canadian election. To do math, or something creative and joyful. Ah liberation!

Muscle-activated

Climatic

I went to the hardware store today and bought a new thermometer. It felt unusually warm walking home, and my home thermometer, in the shady indoors, marked 30°. On a whim, I took my new t. outside to the garage roof. I expected to reach maybe 34°. I was astounded five minutes later to see a reading of 48° Celsius. That's 118° Fahrenheit.

I guess this is what the advocates of solar energy are talking about: there is a great deal of energy from the sun which, harnessed and somehow stored, could be doing useful work for us.
It is also the situation of seeing girls sun in bikinis, while others sky around them, in pictures of Innsbruck and the like. I intend to check again over the year to see what my garage readings are.

Following Gustav, and reading up on hurricanes, has given me a new respect for meteorological phenomena. A cyclone is a heat dissipating machine, that builds up in a positive feed-back loop once its activation conditions are met. It will keep going so long as there is excess heat.
It would be vain - and as a Canadian, I have to admit to the dream - to imagine we could build up heat in the summer to carry us through milder winters. It all dissipates as violent weather. We need to keep it cool in the summer, and make our winters warmer. And I mean outdoors. Needs work!

It's a round world.

www.spiegel.de/video/video-35360.html

America's hurricanes initially form over verdant Africa; they subsequently develop over the Atlantic where water temperatures exceed a critical limit.

Climate change does not create more hurricanes but makes the ones we get more intense. (Le Monde).

The Problem

Make my week-end!

How To Make A Tom Collins Classic Cocktail

Radiohead

Mofo the Maverick

Thank You, Perez.

Yacoubian

REVIEW: THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING,(the film).

Released in 2006, and presented at the Berlin Film festival, the Egyptian film 'The Yacoubian Building' is currently available for rental as a video. L. and I watched it on Sunday, and unlike those European 'snob' films I bring home which she claims are unwatchable, she actually sat through the whole 2:30 hours of it. I, on the other hand, trekked to the kitchen a few times.

Who is one supposed to root for in all this, and why? The female characters at the beginning are difficult to keep apart: everyone has identical jet black hair and heavy make-up. The males are all old and sex-mad and the one youngish hero gets totalled in a terrorist attack. Indeed the homosexual newspaper editor gets murdered, and the old alcoholic gets the girl. Strange and stranger.

Seriously, the film is an Oscar-winner caliber overview of Islamist society which seems to have gone under the radar in popular film culture. The original 2002 novel was written by an older man (born 1957) and made in 2006 by a 30 year old but a combination of the two sensibilities gives a stunning portrait of character and mood. I would have guessed that the film was fairly low-budget but I read it was the highest budgeted film of Egyptian history...Perhaps because the honour roll of Egyptian actors is featured. They are all wonderful.

Here is an excerpt from the novel (Which I am translating from the French, which was translated from the Arabic):

Terrace society is no different than any other popular social group within Egypt: children run barefoot and themselves half-naked, the women spend their days preparing food, and get together to gossip in the sun, where they often fight and exchange the most injurious insults only to, suddenly, reconcile and go back to perfectly cordial relations, as if nothing had transpired. Then they exchange warm and sonorous kisses, even cry, so moved are they and so enamoured. As for the men, they do not attach much importance to feminine quarrels, which they take as proof of their insufficient brains to which the Prophet has alluded, prayer and blessings from God be with him. The men of the terrace spend their days in a rough and merciless battle to insure their subsistence and, at night, they come home aspiring to their three little pleasures: a nourishing and appetizing meal, a little bit of a good smoke, with hashich if available, which they smoke in a pipe, alone or in good company, on the terrace, summer nights. As for the third pleasure, it is that of sex which the inhabitants of the terrace honour in particular. p. 23 Actes Sud, 2006.

Cult British Commercial

http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/videos/index.php?id_video=3943

Sketches by Lyse

Kaïn

Fashion-Flash

Morning Game

http://www.coolmath-games.com/0-bloxorz/index.html

Fay

Best of M.

It's on Vimeo!

Nightfall from Valentin Schwind on Vimeo.

from: Le Nouvel Observateur

U.S. Population

Awesome!

Good Reviews

Beijing - China

Been cruising the Internet like a lost soul for information about Beijing and China in particular. It is so sad to not be there. I follow the medal count in the L.A. Times and Canada is a proud last with zero medals. They are all happy with M. Phelps, of course. He's 23, and had a ADHD diagnosis as a youth which led him to go into swimming.

Bei-jing means Northern Capital (Nan-jing would mean Southern Capital) although on the map, Nan isn't that much more southerly. Just a big country with a long history. Actually China is a region with many peoples, more so than Canada which is full of relatively recent immigrants. One doesn't really get a sense of the overpopulation because the esthetic bent is precisely to create enclaves of charm and rest. One tourist site mentionned that it is from the air than one sees it with little village lights everywhere.

Beijing itself is a city which has radically transformed itself in the last ten years to become a world metropolis, and the decision to grant them the games merely added to the process. There are some to decry the lost of traditional housing with internal courtyards and they are no doubt correct to mourn the passing of a certain sensibility. Paris as well went through a terrible rasing before taking its present form. Yet from here, China is a country with a relatively decent climate. More power to them!

Map - Beijing

http://www.chinahighlights.com/beijing/map.htm

Trash

Games

Go for it!

Paris for Prez

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

The Skinny

Diez consejos para contrarrestar nuestra preferencia por los dulces
1. Conozca lo que provoca el deseo
2. Estabilice el nivel de azúcar en la sangre
3. Aumente el consumo de carbohidratos más complejos
4. Reemplace el azúcar por fructosa
5. Abastezca la cocina con inteligencia
6. Haga ejercicio físico
7. Pruebe productos sin azúcar
8. Controle el tiempo
9. Busque distracciones
10. Controle las porciones

Source: MSN Latino

From France

Le Figaro reports today that sales for personal computers are totally booming in France, with an expected 10 million units sold this year. And half of these should be laptops, whose average price has gone down from 860 to 650 Euros. "Traditional sellers such as HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo and Apple are meeting costs in dollars: their production of PCs is mostly in China and Taiwan." explains the news-site. Add to that a strong Euro, and the market is ebullient.

There is also a charming quote from the president of Intel: "In spite of economic problems in the U.S., our business is so international that we detect no slowing in the sale of P.C.s."

Experts here seem to be arguing against buying cheap mini-laptops. I wonder why...

Gotta go, I still have another article to read about how well IBM is doing!

Fly One

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/aug/01/electric.kite

From Spain

Troublemaker

From Europe