Where next ?

My son will, in August, be travelling back to the land of his birth for the second time without me. I expect the riots will have blown over by then but perhaps not. Maybe this "uprising" will be something unprecedented ?

Although in my last post I said I wasn't going to comment further, the fact that Brazil has been in the headlines this past week or so, and hearing the typically ignorant commentators in the UK, has provoked me to say a couple more things.

And lo, it came to pass

I have resisted posting any "I told you so's" about the Brazilian economy. I will continue to resist .. apart from this one. Today I read: "But stagnant growth is now hitting Brazilians in their pockets. After successive wage rises, this year’s pay deals barely outpace inflation. Already indebted, households are reining in their spending. Consumer confidence is falling and more people say rising prices are their biggest economic worry."

Two and a quarter years ago, in my first blog post, I wrote: "On a related note, all the excited chatter about Brazil's swelling middle class must be taken with a big pinch of salt. There's no way that the average salary allows for the kind of disposable income which economists and sociologists generally assume when they talk about the middle classes in developed countries. In fact a good chunk of the Brazilian middle class has been hit hardest by Lula's Robin Hood politics, seeing their wages stagnate while the cost of living rockets."

Business or pleasure ?

To speak, perchance to dream ..

Invariably, "live chat" with a customer service person or thing on a website results in anything but liveliness. Deathly boredom or utter frustration is more like it. But not today. The following "conversation" has just taken place with a chap at a new company called Nutmeg, which is taking the low-cost, self-service model of a Zopa to the fat-cat, fusty old fund management industry:

Love-haytch relationships

In my day, when I were a nipper, where I come from, etc. etc. the number of people who pronounced the letter H as "haytch" was small. All right-speaking folk knew it was "aytch". So who'd've thunk the day would come when I too became a haytcher ?!

The reason is simply that "aytch" is not quickly enough and easily enough understood over the phone, where we spend so much of our semi-automaton lives these days, repeating ad nauseam our personal letters and numbers. Aytch can sound too close to "eight".

I related this life detail to the woman from M&S Bank this morning, as I robotically spelled out my postcode for her, complete with a penultimate "haytch" and she said: "Ooh, I do that too, never used to, think it's for the same reason as you." The ghost of a journalist in me said, Aha, me-plus-one-other-person-changing-our-verbal-habits-equals-an-important-new-social-trend.

My beef with "meat" !

Alt. titles: So hungry I could eat a horse .. Don't ask, don't tell.
Growing up in Britain as a sort-of-kosher Jewish person I would often ask hot dog sellers: what kind of sausage is it ? Ditto with pies or stews or any other form of non-distinct carnivorous fayre. And invariably they would reply: "It's meat", as if I was a moron. Unfailingly, this "meat' turned out to be pork and thus off my menu. It was a revelation, arriving years later in New York, to find that their sausage "meat" usually turned out to be not just beef but also kosher.

Fry me to the moon

Just watched a charming Wikipedia promo video, showing some of the multinational good eggs who volunteer their efforts to keep it running. As one of the small contributors to Wiki's latest appeal, I salute their work.

But I also couldn't help noticing the stark contrast between the voice of the New Jersey woman and the voices of the other women from places like Poland, India, Italy, Russia, Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Iraq. All except Miss New Jersey had pleasant voices. The US young female, however, suffered from what's known as "vocal fry", although I keep calling it "vocal croak". It's a way for mostly young, deluded females to sound what they imagine to be sophisticated, worldly and / or businesslike. The result is aural torture.