Britan's Biden

According to Michael Kinsley, a "gaffe" is "when a politician [inadvertantly] tells the truth."

Not so much telling some objective truth, but revealing said politician's thoughts. In the United States, the preemminant practitioner of the gaffe is Senator Joseph Biden.

In Britan, now, he has a serious contender: Prince Phillip.

Savor his latest venting:

Prince Philip has branded tourism ‘national prostitution’ in his latest unfortunate gaffe.

He made the shocking comment to a professor during his State visit with the Queen to Slovenia last week.

Dr Maja Uran revealed that the 87-year-old Duke told her: ‘Tourism is just national prostitution.’

He went on: ‘We don’t need any more tourists. They ruin cities.’

His comments come despite royal aides regularly stressing the importance of tourists to Britain’s economy – with one million visiting Buckingham Palace and Windsor
Castle each year.

It follows other infamous faux pas by the Prince – including telling a British student in China he would get ‘slitty eyes’ and asking Aborigines in Australia: ‘Do you still throw spears at each other?’

Dr Uran, associate professor of tourism at the University of Primorska, was among
four groups of experts who met Philip last Tuesday at the Hotel Union in the
Slovenian capital of Ljubljana.

She told Philip she wanted to organise a network of people with local knowledge to help tourists. But she said: ‘He laughed and said, “Tourism is just national prostitution.”

‘I couldn’t quite believe he used that word and we all collapsed in embarrassment.’

All those sweaty tourists, clogging up the roads so that the Rolls is often stuck in traffic. And the well-to-do ones fill up often fill up one's favorite reasturant during The Season.

As bad as I disagree with the viewpoints of American elites, they have nothing on European elites.

FireFlew

I am a big fan of the Television show Firefly. I own the DVD box set and have watched it again and again. I have loaned it to friends and relations causing a few to buy their own sets.

Now the word comes out that the series will be released in Blu-ray. Well, here is the news item:

Firefly: The Complete Series drops on Blu-ray high-definition disc on Nov. 11 from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in a three-disc set that includes all 14 episodes, a new Firefly Reunion roundtable discussion and a new episode commentary from series creator Joss Whedon and select cast members; the set carries a suggested retail price of $89.98.

$89.98?!?!?!?

I'd love to see the roundtable discussion and hear the new commentary, but nearly $90 for a discs that I already own...

The Incomprehensability of Wealth

Peg' O My Heart has this observation on our New Gilded Age:

The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There's a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again.


A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you--orthodontist, store owner, professor--that means he's not rich. But if it's a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn't understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in--well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.

I write for a living. I write on-line help. Two sentences--guess I'm no billionaire.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Please don't ask me about global warming. This program should be required viewing in all schools.

Lottery

We've all heard the jape: "The lottery is a tax on doing poorly in high school math class;" or Annie Libowitz's line, "Your odds of winning the lottery are almost the same whether or not you buy a ticket."

Benedict Carey has a smart essay over at the New York Times about why people play the lottery. Here's the line that gave me the "Aha!" moment:

“The people who denigrate lottery players are like 10-year-olds who are disgusted by the idea of sex: they are numb to its pleasures, so they say it’s not rational,” said Lloyd Cohen, a professor of law at George Mason University and author of an economic analysis, “Lotteries, Liberty and Legislatures,” who is himself a gambler and a card counter.

Dr. Cohen argues that lottery tickets are not an investment but a disposable consumer purchase, which changes the equation radically. Like a throwaway lifestyle magazine, lottery tickets engage transforming fantasies: a wine cellar, a pool, a vision of tropical blues and white sand. The difference is that the ticket can deliver.

And as long as the fantasy is possible, even a negligible probability of winning becomes paradoxically reinforcing, Dr. Cohen said. “One is willing to pay hard cash that it be so real, so objective, that it is actually calculable — by someone, even if not oneself,” he said.

Exactly! A ticket in the $390 million lottery is not about an expectation of winning (not to a rational player), it's just a ticket to a daydream about what you would | could | should do if you won. It's a tenth the cost of a ticket to the movies and it plays behind my eyelids as I wait in the ferry line.