Golden Quotebook: Zimbabwean Inflation

Oh, this one is really too good not to quote it. Writing about the hyperinflation that struck Zimbabwe in recent years, Ms Olivia Archdeacon tells the following anecdote in her article ‘China buys its first African colony for a meagre $40 million’ (CapX, January 2016):

‘After years of hyperinflation (peaking at 79.6 sextillion per cent) the Zimbabwean dollar had become virtually worthless. 250 trillion Zimbabwe dollars was worth just 1$. To illustrate: one local woman took her wheelbarrow to the bank (…) in order to carry the amount of bills she would need to purchase anything. On her way back to her car she was robbed. Two young men seized the wheelbarrow, emptied the cash at her feet, and ran off with the wheelbarrow.’

Hilarious, if it weren’t so very sad at the same time…

Golden Quotebook: Ambrose Bierce on reliquaries

Well, as it is Sunday and time for some light relief from a short hilarious quote, I offer you today the incomparable wit of Ambrose Bierce's 'Devil's Dictionary' on the subject of reliquaries.

RELIQUARY, n.  A receptacle for such sacred objects as pieces of the true cross, short-ribs of the saints, the ears of Balaam's ass, the lung of the cock that called Peter to repentance and so forth. Reliquaries are commonly of metal, and provided with a lock to prevent the contents from coming out and performing miracles at unseasonable times. A feather from the wing of the Angel of the Annunciation once escaped during a sermon in Saint Peter's and so tickled the noses of the congregation that they woke and sneezed with great vehemence three times each. It is related in the "Gesta Sanctorum" that a sacristan in the Canterbury cathedral surprised the head of Saint Dennis in the library. Reprimanded by its stern custodian, it explained that it was seeking a body of doctrine. This unseemly levity so raged the diocesan that the offender was publicly anathematized, thrown into the Stour and replaced by another head of Saint Dennis, brought from Rome.

Golden Quotebook: Charles Colson on the Family Jewels

The tangle, the defiance, the challenge and the reckless gamble by all involved in the coming Greek referendum, immediately brought to my mind a somewhat rough, but certainly utterly honest observation by Charles “Chuck” Wendell Colson.

Mr Colson used to be a special assistant to President Richard Nixon back in the 70s, and in that capacity performed a number of rather disreputable tasks, among other things (the more amusing ones you can read up on here) the organisation of the Watergate burglary that ultimately brought the Nixon administration down. For this and many other transgressions he served a prison term, after which – to his credit – he saw the Light, found the Lord and did his best to make up for his many sins as a preacher and a conscientious Christian.

Chuck Colson was, if anything, a ruthless Realpolitker (it was said by one who did not even dislike him all that much, that he was ‘The Evil Genius of an Evil Administration’, who wouldn’t think twice about walking over his own grandmother if this were necessary to win a re-election…), and he believed that the way to political popularity often involved a certain dose of pressure. Or, as he himself put it in far more flowery terms than my own:

Once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow…!

This, dear reader, is of course what today the Brussels Nomenklatura firmly believes about the Greek populace. Let them sweat! Let them starve! Let them panic and make them bleed! Never give in an inch, and then they will learn to love us!

They may well be right, for bullying often works wonders. But anybody who – like myself - has ever read a history book about the roughly 2,500 years of Greek history, say from the Battle of Thermopylae through the Ottoman Empire to the Greek War of Independence and the German Occupation, surely will share my doubts… Yes, the Greeks may be a little bad and a little mad, but you cannot beat them when it comes to pride and dignity.

Next Sunday will tell…

Golden Quotebook: Bill Bryson on Chopsticks

Great statement by an unknown artist of genius!

A while ago, in an indignant article about the horrid Chinese habit of frying life dogs, I also gave you a gentle piece of my mind, dear reader, concerning Chopsticks.

Recently I ran in to another author of good taste and good sense, who also had a most amusing word to say about that most anachronistic invention. It comes from chapter 10 of Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a small island', and goes like this:

• I can't say why exactly, but Chinese restaurants make me oddly uneasy, particularly when I'm dining alone. I always feel that the waitress is saying: 'One beef Satay and fried rice for the imperialist dog at table five'. And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? I spent a perplexed hour stabbing rice, dribbling sauce across the tablecloth and lifting finely poised pieces of meat to my mouth only to discover that they had mysteriously vanished and weren't to be found anywhere. By the time I finished, the table looked as if it had been the centre of a violent argument.

Golden Quotebook: Melville on Paupers and Plutocrats

The nauseating spectacle of the European rich getting away with corruption and fraud, while the crisis they caused is visited upon the most vulnerable, inspired me to quote the following terse lines from America's foremost author:

Now Jonah's captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, Sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport, whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

[Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 9]