Bill Murray's Blog, page 59
June 3, 2018
2018 Global Flight Price Ranking
For all types of traveler, the 2018 Global Flight Price Ranking: What’s the world’s cheapest airline? from travel planner rome2rio.com. Find out how the airlines most convenient to you stack up, domestically, internationally and the overall top 50, here, in a screenshot from rome2rio.com.
June 2, 2018
Quotes: White People Dancing
“There were as many ways of dancing the high-life as there were people on the floor. But, broadly speaking, three main patterns could be discerned. There were four or five Europeans whose dancing reminded one of the early motion pictures. They moved like triangles in an alien dance that was ordained for circles. There were others who made very little real movement. … The last group were the ecstatic ones. They danced apart, spinning, swaying or doing intricate syncopations with their feet and waist.”
– Chinua Achebe in No Longer at Ease, originally published in 1960
June 1, 2018
Weekend Reading
Relax and enjoy some absorbing writing online this week. A sampling:
– Facebook, Snapchat and the Dawn of the Post-Truth Era by Antonio García Martínez in Wired.
– Sacrificing at the Altar of the Euro by Thomas Fazi in Jacobin Mag. More in the burgeoning genre of hand-wringing about the inflexibility of the Euro. Case study this time, Italy.
– My Mother’s Brilliant Career in Soviet Culture by Anastasia Edel in the NYRB. From the mini-genre of books about Soviet life. Books like Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald J. Raleigh and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich (Author), Bela Shayevich (Translator).
– Warsaw to Trump: Let’s make a military deal (without NATO) by David M. Herszenhorn in Politico. From the Polish perspective, this might be canny thinking.
– Can’t we all just get along? A road trip with my Trump-loving cousin by Bryan Mealer in The Guardian. Mealer is the author of a 2011 book on a rather different topic: All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo.
– How we entered the age of the strongman by John Gray in New Statesman.
Gray is a sort of public intellectual iconoclast from Britain. This is a lengthy book review in which Gray writes early of “corporate predation and ravaging of communities …under the regime over which liberals of one kind or another presided,” then later that “The most serious threat to the West comes from its own intellectual inertia.” Corporate predation must not be that ravaging to Gray. He worries, as does everybody else today about “the redundancy of human labour,” and decides that “The western model … has morphed out of shape.” And this:
“In a plausible scenario, the decisive conflicts in coming years will not be between liberal and authoritarian states but among oligarchies within each of them. Will Trump continue to be swayed by the billionaire Mercer family, or will other American oligarchs become more influential? Will the spoils system Putin has established in Russia be destabilised in an intensifying succession struggle? Could the anti-corruption drive through which Xi is cementing his position in China provoke a backlash from oligarchs it threatens? Whatever the answers to these questions, there is little reason to expect any move to more liberal values. Societies that are progressively discarding the freedoms by which liberalism was once defined are ill-equipped in the contest with advancing authoritarianism.”
It’s a lengthy article. Food for thought.
Enjoy your weekend. See you Monday with Africa Vignette #5 from Malawi.
May 31, 2018
Two Nice Articles about Russia
In the run-up to Russia’s World Cup, The Guardian has two nice articles this week, one about “the mother of all rivers,” the Volga, featuring the river cities of Kazan, Samara and Volgograd, the other featuring “A little parcel of land smaller than Wales wedged up against the Baltic Sea,” the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania.
May 30, 2018
Guess These Ten City Skylines
A fourth installment. Here are the previous three: 1, 2, 3. See how many of these cities you can guess. Answers at the end. Some of these photos are a few years old. And yes, some are impossible.
IMPORTANT: You can click to enlarge them for a better look, but there will be a caption at the bottom that gives you the answer. Careful.
Answers:
1. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. Montreal, Canada
4. Perth, Australia
5. Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo
6. Saigon, Vietnam
7. Kigali, Rwanda
8. Minsk, Belarus
9. Durban, South Africa
10. Riga, Latvia
There are 1153 more photos in the Cities and Urban Life Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
May 28, 2018
May 27, 2018
Africa Vignette 4: It Takes a Long Time to Get to Zambia
Hippos in the Luangwa River, Zambia
Sure, the getting here was miserable. The long haul was more than thirteen thousand kilometers – leave shore over Charleston, South Carolina and don’t see land again until Cape Town. As if the continents were mountain peaks, you slid down the valley called the Atlantic on the flight map. That got us to Cape Town where it never dawned. The gray of winter just brightened up.
Nine more hours of airports, and these were the difficult ones, desynchronosis raging, hours 18 to 26 or so straight in a public place, no time to yourself. Now, finally, Lusaka. Here we are.
We hunt around the Lusaka airport and somehow find a woman who’s going the same place we are. She’s named Beatrice, from the copper belt up near Lubumbashi, Congo. Up there, there are tons of ex-pats in the mining trade, so it’s a place that needs a travel agent, which Beatrice is. Next we find Ryan, the pilot from Durban, and finally Kitty and Maeva who are also lost and that’s all of us, so we load up the Cessna and head for a town on the Zambian border with Malawi called Mfuwe.
As we walk across the tarmac, Maeva, Kitty and my wife Mirja discover that they’re all three Finns, which is incredible. Three out of six random people in a Cessna from Finland, a country of just five million.
There is a lot of anticipation in this little Cessna.
See photos from Zambia in the Zambia Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
Africa Vignettes is a weekly series most Mondays this summer on CS&W.
May 25, 2018
Weekend Reading
It’s a long weekend in the USA and here in Georgia, we’ll be spending some quality time outdoors. Wherever you spend the weekend, here are a few quality reads to load into your portable reader and take along:
This Is What A 21st-Century Police State Really Looks Like by Megha Rajagopalan in Buzzfeed, on Beijing today
If Crisis or War Comes, a pamphlet distributed to 4.8 million households in Sweden this week by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (English pdf)
The Ukraine Model – The last time a country agreed to give up its nukes, it didn’t turn out well by Mary Mycio in Slate
The New Passport-Poor by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on the NYRB blog. Passports “were invented not to let us roam freely, but to keep us in place—and in check.”
And two sort-of similar stories:
Why a San Francisco Burger King Blasts Classical Music Day and Night by Anne Ewbank at Atlas Obscura, and
The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations by Allan Richarz at Citilab.com
As for books, I can recommend two works of fiction which are also sort of similar, in that each follows a disparate cast of characters over time, and each has an environmental theme. They’re both really well-written: The History of Bees by the Norwegian Maja Lunde, and a book I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Overstory by Richard Powers.
See you next week.
May 24, 2018
Socotra
It’s not often the Yemeni island of Socotra is in the news, and today it’s not for any good reason. A cyclone has torn across the island with some 17 people feared dead.
If you’re not familiar with Socotra, take this opportunity to introduce yourself. Home to some 60,000 people, it is an entirely unique place, the way Madagascar is. Because of its isolated location about 200 miles off the coasts of Yemen and Somalia, it is home to flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth. The Independent newspaper ran this worthwhile two part series on Socotra recently. Check it out. There’s a video tour.
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How Is Bullying Working Out for You?
This morning’s cancellation of the US/DPRK summit comes as no surprise. It turns out that the president who threatens “fire and fury” can’t countenance similar rhetoric from his interlocutors.
It’s not just the threat of “fire and fury” that the North Koreans have been responding to. The other day the American vice-president went on a friendly news channel to say that “There was some talk about the Libya model … as the President made clear, this will only end like the Libya model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal.”
This was a straightforward threat to the life of the North Korean leader, thuggish and anti-diplomatic. But boy, he sure is a big ol’ tough vice-president, yessiree.
The vice-president was referring to an appearance by the new national security advisor John Bolton on the same friendly Fox News channel, in which Mr. Bolton provocatively laid out a maximalist negotiating position, demanding the unilateral disarmament of North Korea along the lines of the “Libyan model.”
Libya’s ruler Moammar Gadhafi was persuaded to transfer his nuclear equipment out of the country in 2003 and 2004. This came under the George W. Bush administration. Later the Obama administration, along with European allies, mounted military action against Libya in 2011 to prevent a threatened massacre of civilians. In that conflict, rebels hunted down Colonel Gadhafi and killed him. This was the “Libya model.”
Since everyone knows this, Mr. Bolton’s remarks were artless and, as we see this morning, if the U.S. is really seeking to pursue diplomacy, counterproductive.
The United States, along with the United Kingdom and France, was instrumental in the death of Colonel Gadhafi. The United States has meanwhile just unilaterally abrogated an internationally negotiated treaty with Iran.
In this light, consider how much weight a member of the North Korean leadership would give President Trump’s remarks on Tuesday that “I will guarantee his (Mr. Kim’s) safety, yes … He will be safe, he will be happy, his country will be rich, his country will be hard-working and prosperous.”
We now enter a period of blistering tit for tat rhetoric between the US and the DPRK.
That Nobel prize will have to wait.
