Every trip to the small grocery store near my home is an adventure. I don’t know who is in charge of their supply chain, but it is patchy and odd: some weeks there is a glut of strawberries, other weeks you can’t get a berry for love or money. The same inconsistency applies to most […]

No matter how efficiently one uses a computer, it is bound to wear out at some point. A colleague of mine has an old Windows XP desktop, and apparently it’s showing its age. I asked him, “How bad is it? Has it completely packed up?” He responded by quoting “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”: Ferris Bueller: […]

This has been a tense weekend in a number of ways; if the news is to be believed, the folks down at the U.S. Treasury Department have been burning the midnight oil, trying to ensure the biggest dominos of the American financial system – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – don’t fall over. If they […]

…President Bush couldn’t shock you with yet another gaffe, he goes and does it again. As yesterday’s newspaper said: George Bush surprised world leaders with a joke about his poor record on the environment as he left the G8 summit in Japan. The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to […]

For those who have been on holiday (and thus purposefully out of the loop) or living in a remote corner of the world untouched by the media, the owner and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has retired. Some of the publicity surrounding his retirement has been amusing: I enjoyed the spectacle of a BBC reporter […]

[AMAZONPRODUCT=1400063167] It’s very rare that a book about the 1920’s should make one think about the science fiction show, “Battlestar Galactica”; however, this volume certainly brought to mind Battlestar’s signature line – “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”   To which I would add, “…but I hope not.” The […]