Because yesterday was Wednesday

Europe on this date in history:

1666 Great Fire of London starts and burns for three days

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The middle of the week, yet again

Europeans on this date in history:

1895 - birth of Engelbert Zaschka, Helicopter Pioneer (d. 1955)

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Here comes the sun. Must be the new school term.

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It just about sums up the poverty of ambition in the UK that 24km of new (reinstated, actually) line is the biggest development in 100 years.

Airdrie and Bathgate line prepares for December opening | Rail-News.com

Network Rail completed track laying on the new 24km stretch of railway between Airdrie and Bathgate today (Friday 27 August), making it the longest domestic passenger railway with new stations to be built in Britain for a century. 

A 200-tonne mobile track laying machine ran through the site of the relocated Drumgelloch station over the course of  two hours, completing a modern, soon-to-be electrified rail link between West Lothian and North Lanarkshire. By December 2010, the line will carry four trains an hour in each direction, opening up travel options between Scotland's two biggest cities.

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The Africa we travel through is riddled with stereotypes. It starts with the children in hand-me-down rags shouting "Mzungu!" at us at every turn. The slender African women striding along the roads, tall bunches of firewood poised flawlessly on their heads. The African men on the doorsteps of their mud huts, sitting idle. It continues with the humpbacked cows, trailing dust and blocking the roads. The endless charities, orphanages and the philanthropist volunteers still burning with the ideological flame to do-good.

And stereotypes are positively overwhelming for travellers through Africa. That includes me, probably. The self-catering: locked up inside an air-conditioned Toyota Hilux with rooftop tents, wearing blouses with 47 pockets and impenetrable sun-glasses. The posh kids inside the towering overland busses, criss-crossing across the continent from Kenya to Cape Town like locusts. The "Adventure Tours": for the exceedingly affluent, being driven from luxurious lodge to luxurious lodge with pools, whiskeys and ice.

There were so many stereotypes, so much superficiality, I developed the creeping sensation I was missing out on the real Africa, the other Africa.

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Europeans on this date in history:

1870 - birth of Maria Montessori, Italian educator (d. 1952)

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So?

Although I call myself a capitalist (whatever that means) I would answer the above question with a clear: not really!

To understand that, it is necessary to have a quick refresher on what stock and bond markets do and what they don't do.

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Europeans on this date in history:

1949 - birth of Peter Maffay (originally Peter Alexander Makkay), German musician.

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Bring your Sunday wonders here

Europeans on this date in history:

1915 - birth of Ingrid Bergman, Swedish actress (d. 1982)

She'll always have Paris.

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Who knows what's what?

Europeans on this date in history:

1940 - birth of Roger Pingeon, French professional cyclist who won the Tour de France in 1967 and the Vuelta a España in 1969

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Every Friday needs one.

In the ET Salon today ARGeezer points us to Yves Smith's summary of a New York lunch conversation about grim times ahead. Here's what one of the lunchers had to say:

Fears of Regime Change in New York « naked capitalism

[this person]...has been reading up on the French Revolutions. took issue with the conventional idea that a revolution is impossible in America: “In France, the trigger was that people were hungry. We are close to that point than most think.”

I'd point out that though bread riots in Paris were the trigger, the French Revolution happened because the bourgeoisie was excluded from power by a fossilised system of royal and aristocratic privilege, in other words that revolutions are tectonic shifts, but never mind the history. What are the chances of a revolution in the developed "Western" world in the foreseeable future? The chances of more or less organized popular revolt? The chances of a favourable outcome in either case?

Europeans on this date in history:

1874 - birth of Carl Bosch, a German chemist and engineer and Nobel laureate in chemistry. He was a pioneer in the field of high-pressure industrial chemistry and founder of IG Farben, at one point the world's largest chemical company. (d. 1940)

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August afternoon, sun too hot...

Europeans on this date in history:

1845 - birth of Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, one of the Whitechapel murder victims of the notorious, unidentified Jack the Ripper. (d. 1888)

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