Love and Death in Caracas

How can you not love a report of violence that contains captions such as this one?

«One day, aged 19, Silva mugged a bus passenger for her jewellery. He fled on foot and caught another bus, conscious of a police patrol ahead. Seated behind him was a pretty girl. "I wanted to say something cute to her but the only thing I could think of was: 'Will you hide my revolver?'" he recalls. The girl smiled and hid it in her purse. Love was born.»

Rest of the text in the Guardian.

If this blog was still in Norwegian, I would probably have headlined it thus: «Kanakas i Caracas»

Muammar Gaddafi speaks Swedish!

Who says irony is dead? Even with Libya on the verge of civil war, there is another way of keeping the pressure on Muammar Gaddafi: use of humour. Such as this Swedish speech, where the video poster has translated one of Gaddafi's speeches (culled from al-Jazeera) into Swedish:

«Massera min kjol!»

Afraid this will only appeal to anyone familiar with the Scandinavian languages, but easily one of the funniest YouTube clips of 2011 so far. Enjöy!

Thanks to Morten Traavik for the tip-off!

Goats Do Roam!

Loved the sheep'n'goat metaphor at the end of this little piece on the state of the world economy from FT Alphaville, one of the few blogs about financial matters that I read on a regular basis. Probably it mainly is because of the subtle humour that is intercepted here and which is sadly lacking in most writing on financial matters.

Anyway, here's the excerpt I was talking about:
«We await the end of QE2 in June. This will really sort the sheep from the goats. Then we will see whether this patient can keep up its frenetic Irish jig in the absence of extreme stimulants. I am in the camp (tent) that believes that QE1 and QE2 have driven equity prices which have, in turn, fuelled the economic recovery. Looking around, it is not a very crowded tent and being a city boy I’m not quite sure whether those droppings belong to sheep or goats.»

Q: Are We Men? A: No We Are Lemmings!

I could as easily have named this post something-to-do-with-oil, as it's the ever-rising oil-prices that is the subject here. But ah, always nice to indulge oneself and dive into popcultural ephemera and evoke the spirit (or should that be ghost?) of Akron, Ohio-new wavers Devo.

But I digress... as I said, it's all about the oil. Isn't it always thus?

It's reading stuff like this from the WSJ that sometimes even makes a pro-capitalist such as yours only doubt the existence of this thing called Western civilisation. Or make that «civilisation». And its discontents.

The panic created by the ongoing events in Libya (a far more limited producer of oil than the impression created by the ever-present hysterical mass media), apparently has seen oil prices reach their highest level in two years. Strange really, considering that there are sufficient back supplies to last another month (as the WSJ piece points out) and any losses in Libyan oil production so far in 2011 have been offset by similar rises from the world's primary oil producers – the Saudis.

So why the panic? Are We Not Men? Sadly it doesn't seem that way. So much for the idea that people in the West think independently. It all looks rather more like a flock of lemmings heading towards the nearest cliff together. And not exactly in a communal spirit, which would have been the least to expect given the circumstances.