New! Improved! Whiter than White! BARF!

You're probably thinking "Hah! That's a made up photoshop jobbie", but you'd be wrong. This is a genuine product manufactured by the Paxan Corporation of Iran. Here's what they have to say about it:

پودر ماشين لباسشويي برف داراي قدرت لكه بري سريع وآسان براي زدودن انواع لكه هاي پروتئيني (مانند خون ،شير ،تخم مرغ ، و... )همراه ب قابليت پاك كنندگي ، سفيد كنندگي و درخشان كنندگي فوق العاده‌، محصولي منحصر بفرد جهت شست و شوي انواع البسه كتان،پلي استر ،پلي استر /كتان و البسه رنگي مقاوم در برابر رنگ پريدگي د ر دماي پايين مي باشد.اين پودر طوري طراحي شده است كه مانع از ايجاد رسوب بر روي قطعات فلزي ماشين مي‌ شود وبا كف كنترل شده ، مانع از سريز شدن كف از ماشين شده وشست شو براحتي انجام مي گيرد.

No More War!

What We Been Reading

Well, to be honest, not a lot by our usual standards. My time has been taken up in recent months by studies with the Open University. I am in the middle of a Humanities Degree and hoping to pick up a Diploma in Music along the way, and there's quite a lot of reading and online activity involved. This is an area in which I am self-taught so I am having to start from scratch and somehow incorporate my existing haphazard and imperfect musical knowledge into the 'proper' way of doing things.

Be that as it may, M'Lud, I have managed to fit in a couple more volumes of Chekhov's short stories and another Zane Grey novel 'The Last of the Plainsmen'*. I guess I'm about half-way through Chekhov's stories now and I'm starting to spot when he's being humorous. Believe it or not, but Chekhov's writings also have musical qualities. See: Bartlett, R., (1998), Sonata Form in Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk’, in Intersections and transpositions: Russian music, literature, and society, Wachtel, A.B. (ed.), Evanston, Illinois, USA, Northwestern University Press.

Just at the minute though I am in the middle of Terry Pratchett's latest outing 'Snuff'. Not so many laugh out loud moments in this one so far, and he seems to be using goblins as an allegory for the xenophobic fear of 'otherness'.  Erm, that'll be racial discrimination to you.

* You can download Zane Grey at Project Gutenburg

Well Done, Sherlock! #137: VInce Cable

We haven't awarded a Well Done, Sherlock! award for a while. Last week, however, there was an outstanding example of stating the bleedin' obvious from The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, The Right Honourable John Vincent 'Vince' Cable MP. Now then, our Vince has a Degree in Economics from Cambridge and prior to entering politics he worked as an economist for, amongst others, Shell and the Kenyan Government. No doubt it is these qualifications that have enabled him to deduce, as he expressed some sympathy with the protesters who have been occupying Pater Noster Square outside St Paul's Cathedral and who have now occupied the vacant UBS (a Swiss Bank) building nearby, in connection with the ongoing self-inflicted financial crisis faced by the globalised neo-liberalist economy, that:

"I think it does reflect a feeling that a small number of people have done extraordinarily well in the crisis, often undeservedly, and large numbers of other people who have played no part in causing the crisis have been hurt by it."

Well Done, Sherlock!

[Mr Cable also holds the rare distinction of being one of the few economists to have a cardigan named after him. The designers have rather unkindly inserted the word 'knit' into the description presumably as a kind of play on words or pun.]

Where's My Bacon Gone?

Sainsbury's back bacon - on special offer, three double packs (36 rashers) for a tenner. Sounds pretty good value! Not when you see what you've got after you've cooked it. Compare the rasher before grilling with the rasher after grilling. It's shrunk by almost a half! So the question is; what happened to the bacon that's gone missing? Is there a Mystery Bacon Dimension into which it has transmogrified itself via the application of heat (or some other more inexplicably devious mechanism)? And is there a race of alien bacon monsters in there absorbing our bacon? I think we should be told.

A Never-Ending Story

Having got the Completion Certificate from t'Council, the next step was to nip along to the Land Registry to get the penthouse suite registered, something we thought would be straightforward enough. So El Presidente duly toddled along to the local office; only to find that the chappie responsible was 'out' so she'd have to go the central office. After much waiting about, a very helpful lady at the central office looked the property up in their records and discovered, much to our bafflement, that only the land is registered and none of the existing buildings, let alone the penthouse, have ever been. So El Prez was advised that she would have to get loads more paperwork from t'Council to show that building permission had been appropriately given and that a Completion Certificate for the existing building had been issued. This meant a return to t'Council offices where the officials, who were at first reluctant, agreed to dig out their old files (from 1983). El Prez went back this morning and duly collected copies of the papers. (There was a brief hiatus while El Prez took the old plans down the road to get them copied because t'Council doesn't have a photocopier big enough. A worrying equipment deficit as they must need to copy plans on a fairly frequent basis, seeing as they are The Planning Department).

El Presidente then whizzed back to the Land Registry with her mountain of documents but, alas! The Land Registry also require a copy of the plans for the kitchen as they were before amendment. That is, the plans for the kitchen that didn't get built because we changed the layout. They've got the plans for the kitchen that did get built. Everyone is at a loss as to why they should need plans for something that isn't there and never was. But there you go, this is Cyprus. So we have been confounded in getting the building registered. The nice man at t'Council has agreed to dig out the plans for the mystery kitchen and give a copy of them to Niky's cousin, but registration will in any case have to wait now till our next visit. This is annoying but only a practical problem if El Prez should happen to die beforehand, in which case there will be untold difficulties in getting the unregistered property transferred to her beneficiaries. Mind you, you would think that if you've got the title deeds to the land then it can be assumed you own the buildings on it, but I'm not counting on that; this is Cyprus.

Oh, and when we do eventually get the registration done there will be a fee of 85 Euros.

Oligarchs

The epithet 'oligarch' is from the Greek, innit. Is mean 'ruled by the few', which is what is about to happen to Greece, which is ironic, I suppose. Ironic is from the Greek as well, also, but is another story doings with Aristotle, innit? But that's another story.

Any road up, they've finally agreed on a new Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, to take over from Pandreou and bring into effect the various measures demanded by the Eurozone and the IMF in return for the billions and billions from the bailout fund. Papademos, however, is not an elected politician but he is an economist who has been employed by the Federal Reserve in Boston (amongst others) and was the Governor of the Bank of Greece at the time that Greece joined the Euro. You may recall that doubts have been expressed about the accuracy of the economic statements provided by Greece at that time; let's hope Mr Papademos is in no way remiss in that respect. Then he moved to the European Central Bank as Vice-President until becoming economic advisor last year to none other than Mr Papandreou. All rather neat, really. The chap who was involved at the beginning of the Greek financial screw-up is now in charge of sorting it out. I think Mr Papademos can be counted amongst the oligarchs.

Other oligarchs are the chaps with the money who will now be able to buy up the State's assets really cheaply now that the State has to privatise everything in order to meet the bailout conditions - Greece has to raise 50 billion Euros by 2015. So the highways, the airports, banks, utilities, property, the post office, telecoms, etc etc are all up for sale and because of the pressure, Greece will have to accept whatever price it can get particularly now that Italy, Portugal and Spain are having to do likewise. (A buyers market, so if you fancy buying a Greek island, now's the time.)

Of course, in ten year's time when hopefully things are back on a more even keel, these assets will be worth several times what they are sold for. So just as happened in Russia twenty years ago when the state was privatised, there'll be a few oligarchs making all the money while the other 99% of the population pay their taxes to repay the bailout funds. And the double irony is that it was the tax avoidance/evasion on the part of the Greek oligarchs that helped get Greece into such a mess.

See also the FT.

Who Dat?

I've been hearing a different birdsong in amongst the usual sounds of sparrows, pigeons, finches and hooded crows and wondered for a few days what it was, The other day, however, we saw the interloper. A cockatiel, not indigenous to Cyprus but a native of Australia. Now, as Dame Edna advises us, there's a place for Australians and that's Australia, so what this fellow is doing here we don't know. It's a bit far to fly so we assume he's a pet who has escaped. If a lady cockatiel escapes and they get together there may be ructions in the local ecology. Here's a picture of the antipodean escapee, sitting on Uncle George's TV aerial.

And Now, The Good News!

Mad Marinos, the Psychotic Builder, has been shown the door, paid off, given his cards, had his chips, taken the long walk, and banished from our existence! Older readers may recall the anguish and misery this man has put us through over the last two or three years*.

It is now over a year since the building of the penthouse suite was 'finished' and under the terms of the contract we have been witholding 2% of the contracted price pending satisfaction on our part that everything is ship shape. Needless to say, it hasn't been and we've had to have all sorts of extra work done by other contractors as a result. So we've deducted those costs from the amount witheld. Marinos, however, had been expecting payment of the full amount.

As it happened, Looneytunes isn't actually in the country at the moment (he's in Bahrain) and so the matter was delegated to his son Dinos who has been 'running' the 'business' pro tem.  Any road up, we had the meeting yesterday with the architect and Dinos during which the final reckoning was made. Dinos was not happy when informed he'd only be getting less than a third of what he'd hoped for but, fortunately, although he is generally a bit useless**, surly and ill-mannered, Dinos is not a nutter so we had no screaming abdabs from him. However, he felt he had to phone his Dad to get his agreement and consequently the architect had to deal with the hysterical loony remotely. Lots of back and forth ensued, but eventually after El Presidente had made it clear that this was it - "Accept this settlement or forget it!" - and that no further negotiations would be entered into, Dinos relented, took the money, gave us a receipt and skedaddled. Somewhat optimistically, Dinos said to the architect as he left that he hoped he could work with him again.

El Presidente performed magnificently during the exchanges, which were in Greek, although I could get the gist of it. Not only did she stand up to Dinos but she also prompted the architect, who is a bit soft, to show a bit of backbone and not drift into compromise. Meanwhile, Uncle Hambis acted as observer and peaceful presence - he has known Marinos and Dinos for years and now accepts that Marinos is a 'difficult character' and no doubt regrets having recommended him to us. Now that Dinos has a few hundred from us, perhaps he'll pay Hambis the two months' rent his Dad owes him!
[*See post 30 April 2010 **See post 22 May 2010]

Sausage-Eaters at Three O'Clock!

The UK and the Commonwealth all agreed last week to end the rule of primogeniture through which the role of Monarch could be inherited only by males. David Cameron trumpeted this as a progressive breakthrough but it all seems a bit irrelevant these days. Be that as it may, some clever chaps at The Guardian have worked out that, had primogeniture not been in force following Queen Victoria's death, then Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany would have been King of the UK at the start of World War I. This might have given rise to a few diplomatic issue and no mistake.

Moreover, Elizabeth II would not have become Queen; instead it would have been Princess Marie Cecile of Prussia.  This means that, as the ban on Catholics is also to go, the heir to the throne would consequently be her son His Highness Duke Paul-Wladimir Nikolaus Louis-Ferdinand Peter Max Karl-Emich of Oldenburg, and Prince William would have to make way for Duke Kirill Friedrich-August Jaime Cristobal Hermann Antonius Vincenz Josef Maria of Oldenburg.

So Angela Merkel would be on our side!

First, The Bad News...

Major disappointment on the plumbing front.

The first floor apartment of Hajistilly Towers was built in 1985 and, at that time, galvanised steel pipes were used in Cyprus for all your plumbing needs - cheaper than copper, and plastic was only just taking over as the medium of choice. The snag with galvanised pipes is, of course, that they corrode and this is what we are now faced with. A tell-tale leak has appeared behind the sink in the auxiliary ablutions area which is causing the tiles to fall away. Only a very slow leak at present, but it's going to get worse. So we've had a friendly plumber round to give it the once-over and he advises that the whole lot will have to be replaced.

This will involve a complete refurbishment of the bathroom as well as the offending auxiliary facility because the pipes are embedded in the concrete behind the tiles, a major project costing thousands and thousands. Unfortunately, the current financial situation here in our overseas dominions is such that we are broke so for the time being it's a case of turning off the water and hoping for the best. Maybe Angela Merkel will lend us the money to get it fixed.

Give and Take Δήμος Λάρνακα Style

When we got planning permission from t'council to build the penthouse suite, they required us to pay a 200 Euro deposit against damage to the highway etc whilst building took place, the deposit to be refunded when the 'Building Completion Certificate' was issued. Older readers may recall the messing about that has been required to get the completion certificate, but is has at last been issued - although we have had to pay a 100 Euro administration fee to secure it. El Prez duly went to the refunds department to get back the 200 Euro deposit although this was delayed by a couple of days while we waited for the Mayor to authorise it. However, we are now advised that 67 Euros have been deducted from the deposit on account of us having had the use of the highway and related facilities meanwhile. So we've paid 167 Euros to get 200 Euros back. Well, at least we're 33 Euros in the black overall!

It feels good to know that we are doing our bit to ensure that The Powers That Be remain properly funded.

Archbishop Sees The Light

His Mentionableness the Archbishop of Canterbury has signed up to the idea of the Robin Hood Tax. Writing in the Financial Times* he endorses The Vatican's three points for making the world a better place, at least in terms of financial justice:

1. Routine banking business should be clearly separated from speculative transactions;
2. Recapitalise banks with public money. Banks should be obliged in return to help reinvigorate the real economy; and
3. A Financial Transaction Tax.

This declaration is, of course, not unrelated to the anti-corporate greed protest taking place outside St Paul's Cathedral and is no doubt aimed at getting the protestors to believe the Church is on their side, and to avoid confrontation. The last thing the Church wants is a forced eviction of the protestors (for whatever reason) so this might help persuade them to move on. Be that as it may, I am choosing to believe Mr Archbishop is sincere and that he is making a step towards separating service to 'God' (and charity towards us plebs) from obeisance to 'Mammon'.

What I would like to see next is the Anglican Church, the Vatican, the Greek Orthodox Church, and all the rest, divest themselves of their fabulous wealth and do their bit financially to make the world better place. A lot of the churches' wealth is tied up in property, works of art and golden idols etc. But it is estimated that the Greek Orthodox has sufficient assets to solve the Greek government's debts twice over (see The Guardian for more details. Typically, nobody has proper or reliable records and the church has not been publishing its accounts.)  And Heaven knows (or at least we hope it does) how much booty lies in the Vatican which might usefully be redistributed - the CIA reckon there are revenues of $355 million a year - so it would be nice to see t'Pope put his money where his mouth is.  The Church of England is quite poor relatively speaking, but they're not short of a bob or two when needed.

[*Sorry, but to read the FT article you will have to register, but you can do so for free.]

Verwünschter Grieche!

I expect Angela Merkel is spitting blood and biting the carpet this morning after the Greek Government agreed to Papandreou's proposal to hold a referendum on whether or not to accept the Eurozone's rescue package. It is usually the case that the Greeks are the architects of their own misfortunes, but this is taking it a little too far, nicht wahr? Having fiddled their way to bankruptcy they now seem determined to drag everyone else down with them. There'll certainly be some fireworks at the G20 meeting tomorrow when Papandreou turns up!

Papandreou has given himself two chances to completely screw everything up. First, there's to be a 'No Confidence' vote in Parliament. If he loses that there'll be a general election, the outcome of which is anybody's guess. If Papandreou wins, there'll be referendum on the rescue package and again, the outcome of that is anybody's guess. And maybe if someone else wins, they'll have a referendum too. So we're left with a double dose of uncertainty and the only people who make any money out of it are the currency speculators. Gott in Himmel!

It is so typically Greek to fail to think ahead and, when faced with the resulting mess, to spend so much time arguing, contradicting and being downright bloody minded instead of just getting on with sorting it out. And then having agreed a solution, to do something else. We've been employing a builder and an architect with similar qualities.

G20: Robin Hood Tax

Those awfully nice people over at 38 Degrees have a petition on the go to put pressure on our estimable Prime Minister David Cameron to support a Robin Hood Tax when he meets up with his chums at the G20 Conference at the end of the week in Cannes.

Here's a video featuring Bill Nighy which explains the idea behind the Robin Hood Tax.

So click on the 38 Degrees link and sign their petition, and click on the Robin Hood Tax link to send an email to Cameron. We've checked it with the Pope and so we all agree:

The Pope has come out as the latest supporter of a Financial Transaction Tax after a note released yesterday (24 October) by the Vatican called for a reform of the international financial system. The note, released by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, recommended the implementation of a tax on financial transactions “with costs proportioned to the complexity of operations, especially of those carried out on the ‘secondary’ market.” The Vatican also proposed that funds raised by the tax be used to help low income countries suffering the effects of the financial crisis, stating that "Such taxation would be very useful in promoting global development and sustainability according to the principles of social justice and solidarity. It could also contribute to the creation of a world reserve fund to support the economies of the countries hit by crisis as well as the recovery of their monetary and financial system."

 Of course, if you're feeling energetic you could go to Cannes as well and engage in some direct action.