Bill Murray's Blog, page 126
July 21, 2014
July 15, 2014
Fabulous, Unalloyed Luck
Matthew Bennett and his travel tip sheet - today – led us nabbing two business class seats on KLM to Nairobi for a thousand dollars less – each - than our fare to Berlin two months ago. That’s incredible. I’ve read Matthew Bennett’s advice for years and it turns out that the first time you use it, it pays off.
By the time people find fares like these on FlyerTalk they usually can’t book them anymore.I never could. But in our case KLM matched the sale fare, we get our Delta miles and we get a side visit to Toronto besides.
Therefore, we hereby put a pending British Airways ticket for August back in the bank, and we’ll go dark on travel from now until November, with a big Africa thing happening then. Then next March it’s up to 800 miles south of the North Pole for an eclipse.
The view is good from here.
June 28, 2014
Panorama of Prague
The original is comprised of seven merged HDRs. It’s about 72 inches long and 2.3 gigs. Clicking on the photo will take you through to EarthPhotos.com where you’ll see a larger version. But not that large.
June 27, 2014
Not THAT Exclusive
The whole European royalty thing is great and all, sure, but you know what?
After about a hundred and fifty years of Prince Charles, he’s just not that exclusive anymore.
The whole European royalty thing is great and all, sure, ...
The whole European royalty thing is great and all, sure, but you know what?
After about a hundred and fifty years of Prince Charles, he’s just not that exclusive anymore.
Friday Bits
- This week’s EU hand wringing surrounds David Cameron’s decision to oppose Jean-Claude Juncker for the EC Presidency, and whether with decisions like that Cameron can be trusted not to inadvertently see the UK out of the EU with his proposed referendum in 2017.
Not to worry. If Scotland opts out of the UK on 18 September, 2014 David Cameron will have to resign by 19 September, 2014. Crisis over.
- This summer’s historic demise of the Sykes Picot adventure in map-making frames the inalienable fact that the Saudi kingdom will collapse, some say sooner than we think. How, as a nanogenarian potentate, how do you delay it?
- On the opaque-for-most and largely-avoided-by-the-American-press Thai military coup, Sean Thomas may be right when he observes, “bluntly speaking, democracy looks unappealing if you think poor people are going to vote themselves welfare that the state cannot afford — a big fear of the Thai Yellows.”
Don’t know your Yellow Shirts from your Reds? Here’s a primer.
- Literacy in pre-WWI Serbia ranged from 27% to as low as 12% in the southeast, and the rabble was roused beginning with the Rubicon moment 100 years ago tomorrow. I have high hopes for this site, which advertises that it will share a pertinent historical document every day, starting tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes.
- Three observations from The Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson:
The art of civilization: Combining the most delicate pleasures with the constant presence of danger.
The essential thing is to live one’s life with a brave hand on the tiller.
And this:
[M]y water holes have frozen over. I attack the lake with the ice ax, spending an hour and a half chopping out a handsome basin a yard wide and four feet deep. Water gushes up suddenly and I dip into it with pleasure. This feeling of having earned one’s water. My arm muscles ache. Once upon a time, in the fields and forests, living kept us in shape.
Tesson spent half a year in a cabin in Siberia. If hermitdom helps you write like he does, put me down for that.
- And finally, from @TheTweetOfGod: “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. In many cases this will mean showing up to the interview in a pirate suit.”
Happy Friday.
June 26, 2014
Onward to Graduation, Comrade
I spied this fellow on the floor of an art department building at the University of Warsaw. His resolute upward-and-onward gaze fits somewhere between really looking to the future and Soviet propaganda posters. Sort of like Poland.
June 12, 2014
Some Summer Books
The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga by Sylvain Tesson translated by Linda Coverdale, is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. Several months on Lake Baikal turned M. Tesson positively lyrical. Uplifting, full of original aphorisms, a pleasure to read.
I’ve found a couple of standouts so far in my trudge through the commemoration of the summer of doom. I liked Charles Emmerson’s survey of the world before upheaval, 1913. Most recently I’ve been enjoying July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin. As the title suggests, it’s a play-by-play of the diplomacy and mobilization for war on all sides after the 28 June, 1914 assassination of the Archduke. If you like your history detailed but not turgid you might give it a try.
Based on its press, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy promises the same, blow-by-blow, behind the scenes diplomacy. It’s due in the house tomorrow. I’ll let you know.
If analyses of the end of empires, turgid or not, aren’t your idea of light summer reading, here are four works of fiction I’ve enjoyed this year:
Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat. Nice, light, fast, easy. Whimsical.
Harvest by Jim Crace. NOT whimsical. Perfectly crafted and engaging. Sometimes you just stop, awed that anyone can put sentences together the way Crace does.
Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch. Lynch is an entirely absorbing, original young Irish writer. Red Sky, his debut, came out last November. His follow-up, the Black Snow is in my stack for later this summer.
Fatherland by Robert Harris. Another one of those “what if Hitler had won” books. Plays to my Berlin bias.
Happy summer reading.
June 9, 2014
Proximity to Power
This is Cecilienhof, once home to a German crown prince before being used as site of the Potsdam Summit in August 1945. Look, this is THE NEGOTIATING TABLE. These are THE SEATS in which the big three sat, Truman in the high-backed chair, center, Churchill in the similar one, left, and Stalin, right.
Stalin’s desk. It’s the very desk he sat behind in this very building. In the original, uninflated sense of the word, that’s pretty awesome.
•••••
Exception: Proximity to power is not always seductive. When Argentine President Cristina Kirchner came calling on Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa in Quito, her entourage bumped all of us from the club floor in the Sofitel Quito. That busted up our happy hours with, among others, the KLM Cargo pilots who ferried flowers to and from Amsterdam. We had had to take cocktails with the hoi polloi on the ground floor.
Not seductive.
I like to think the collective pox we and the pilots cast on the Argentine President contributed to her troubles today.
