Blogs

Professor James Hunter revisits a student historical dissertation to remind us that it wasn’t just Ireland that suffered from famine, after potato crops failed year after year in the late 1840s, but most of Europe suffered from the fungal spores of Phytophthora infestans . The poor people of the Scottish Highlands and Islands did not experience to the same scale as the Irish Holocaust, but many of the structural problems were the same. The...

I’d heard of V.S. Naipaul and even watched a BBC Imagine programme in which the author and Noble Prize Winner for literature was interviewed by Alan Yentob. I like to think of myself as a reader, but until I’d read A House for Mr Biswas I had read none of Naipaul’s books. A House for Mr Biswas is described as an ‘epic’ which is just another way of saying it’s quite long. With an Introduction, Epilogue and Afterword, written by Naipaul in 2011...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,821.84 ) Week - 20 Summertime and the Livin’ is Easy! Oh, your daddy's rich And your ma' is good lookin'... Full disclosure, only part of that lyric actually applies! Ma is good lookin’ but Daddy ain’t gettin’ rich this week. I keep looking for a floor but just keep finding another sub-basement level. I’m still hoping for a stairway to heaven or maybe a train bound for glory at...

Great to see that even with the easing of lockdown and the various sporting distractions going on, ABC Talers have still managed to find the time to post some brilliant work. Story of the Week is 'First Last Friday' by ice rivers. Like many of the best stories, it's deceptively simple. It's one of those pieces where nothing and everything happen at the same time. The ending might be heartbreaking, or it might be the start of something else...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000x9rg/out-of-blue Schrödinger’s cat, observational effect and superposition, the multiverse, and our place in the universe to the power of…Einstein’s God doesn’t throw dice. Enough quantum physics to fill half a teaspoon. This is the backdrop for a routine murder mystery, with unsolved serial killer cases and socialites Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) is called in to investigate as a possible...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,772.61 ) Week - 19 Summer Solstice! I don’t know why I take an interest in the Solstice. I’m not a practicing Druid or anything. Yet the movement of the planet in its steady, majestic procession around the sun evokes a feeling of reverence and awe within me. The Solstice coincides with my birth month and often causes me to ponder the very temporary nature of my existence as seen...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000x8l2/an-impossible-love A French film, with English subtitles. Set on the cusp of the swinging sixties, it begins as a coming-of-age drama. We are told in voice-over by Chantal (Estelle Lescure and the older Chantal played by Jehnny Beth) how her mother, beautiful, young Rachel (Virginie Efira) meets Philippe (Niels Schneider) at a local dance. He’s down from Paris to sub-rural hicksville and works as a...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,739.71 ) Week - 18 Last Week’s BIG Winner! Me... I hit a penny poker machine for 64 bucks with 4 aces! That’s after dropping a pair of twenty dollar bills into the beast. Net gain of 24 dollars and a demonstration of the long play patient approach to gambling, investing, and life in general. Vacation was good, played golf, saw the kids, had some adventures and good food, saw LIVE...