The Smiths had no children and decided to use a proxy father to start their family.
On the day the proxy father was to arrive, Mr. Smith kissed his wife and said, 'I'm off. The man should be here soon.'
Half an hour later, just by chance, a door-to-door baby photographer rang the doorbell, hoping to make a sale. 'Good morning, madam. You don't know me but I've come to....'
'Oh, no need to explain. I've been expecting you,' Mrs. Smith cut in.
'Really ?' the photographer asked. 'Well, good! I've made a specialty of babies.'
'That's what my husband and I had hoped. Please come in and have a seat. Just where do we start?' asked Mrs. Smith, blushing.
'Leave everything to me. I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch and perhaps a couple on the bed. Sometimes the living room floor is fun too; you can really spread out.'
'Bathtub, living room floor? No wonder it didn't work for Harry and me.'
'Well, madam, none of us can guarantee a good one every time. But if we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven angles, I'm sure you'll be pleased with the results.'
'I hope we can get this over with quickly,' gasped Mrs. Smith.
'Madam, in my line of work, a man must take his time. I'd love to be in and out in five minutes, but you'd be disappointed with that, I'm sure.'
'Don't I know!' Mrs. Smith exclaimed. The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of his baby pictures. 'This was done on the top of a bus in downtown London.'
'Oh my god!!', Mrs. Smith exclaimed, tugging at her handkerchief.
'And these twins turned out exceptionally well when you consider their mother was so difficult to work with.' The photographer handed Mrs. Smith the picture.
'She was difficult ?' asked Mrs. Smith.
'Yes, I'm afraid so. I finally had to take her to Hyde Park to get the job done right. People were crowding around four and five deep, pushing to get a good look.'
'Four and five deep?' asked Mrs. Smith, eyes widened in amazement.
'Yes,' the photographer said.
'And for more than three hours too. The mother was constantly squealing and yelling. I could hardly concentrate. Then darkness approached and I began to rush my shots.'
Finally, when the squirrels began nibbling on my equipment, 'I just packed it all in.' Mrs. Smith leaned forward.
'You mean they actually chewed on your, eh......equipment ?'
'That's right. Well madam, if you're ready, I'll set up my tripod so that we can get to work.'
'Tripod??', Mrs. Smith looked extremely worried now.
'Oh yes, I have to use a tripod to rest my Canon on. It's much too big for me to hold while I'm getting ready for action.
Madam ? Madam?..... Good Lord, she's fainted!'
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Does London Have the Best Indian Food ?
Better quality meat, fish and vegetables could very well put London ahead of any Indian city when it comes to high end Indian food. World renowned London-based Michelin star Indian chef, Atul Kochhar and the owner of the Benares Restaurant, a high-end Indian restaurant in the exclusive Mayfair area of central London said India needed to reform and reorganise its farming industry, so consumers and caterers had reliable access to fresh produce.
Watch out - be warned! Chefs in India could lose their cutting edge in preparing top quality Indian food to chefs in London.
Atul Kochhar is one of the few Michelin star Indian chefs. He warns that if India's farming industry is not reorganised - London will become the center of Indian cuisine in terms of quality.
It's not because of lack of good skill, or lack of good spices. It's purely because of lack of excellent ingredients. India doesn't have excellent ingredients in terms of fish, meat or vegetables, he says. Back in 2001 Kochhar became the first Indian chef to be awarded the highly coveted Michelin star. Kochhar is looking to return to India and open up restaurants. His biggest worry however is getting a regular supply fresh food.
The lamb farming has to be niche. The vegetable farming has to be amazingly good. All those things are there, but there is no organized effort in India he says
It wont be surprising that more Indian chefs will be awarded Michelin stars in the near future as the reputation of the Indian chefs in the city are growing.
There are more people conducting business with Indians. They are trying to understand the culture and cuisine better now and hence the recognition.
Kochhar says the corner curry house which churns unique English scorchers such as 'chicken tikka masala', or 'balti chicken' - are on the decline. It in fact, was never an authentic cuisine. I call that British Indian food - because that's how brutish people liked it. That's why they were cooking it and thats why it went on for so long. The curry house will always be part of the British landscape
Incredibly there are 1000 plus new restaurants that open every year in Britain, more than any other kind of business, unfortunately around 850 to 900 close within a year. It’s a dream that every couple has entertained. Why? Because secretly they all think that it’s so simple and that they could do it.
They think that as they know the mindset and what people like to eat, what they only wanted is the money and the opportunity.
Friday, October 3, 2008
'Shank town' brings in the cleaners to drive crime off the streets
A neighbourhood nicknamed "shank town" after a spate of stabbings is to adopt New York's approach to fighting crime.
Enfield council is using the "broken windows" theory in Edmonton in the hope it will halt killings, robberies and anti-social behaviour.
Scores of street cleaners, jet washers and environmental crime officers are carrying out a deep clean and fining litterers this week as part of the drive to make the area safer.
The thinking behind their strategy is that a problem ignored, even one as apparently minor as a broken window, sends out a signal that disorder is tolerated - encouraging more serious crime and vandalism.
More details at :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23562860-details/%27Shank+town%27+brings+in+the+cleaners+to+drive+crime+off+the+streets/article.do
Enfield council is using the "broken windows" theory in Edmonton in the hope it will halt killings, robberies and anti-social behaviour.
Scores of street cleaners, jet washers and environmental crime officers are carrying out a deep clean and fining litterers this week as part of the drive to make the area safer.
The thinking behind their strategy is that a problem ignored, even one as apparently minor as a broken window, sends out a signal that disorder is tolerated - encouraging more serious crime and vandalism.
More details at :
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23562860-details/%27Shank+town%27+brings+in+the+cleaners+to+drive+crime+off+the+streets/article.do
Friday, September 19, 2008
More regulation will create more panic
The capitalist fat cat has long held a treasured place in popular demonology. Russians used to deride casino capitalism before showing us how to do it really well - by playing with the house's money. British trade union leaders castigated the City of London even as it created jobs at many times the pace at which their own mulish Luddism destroyed them.
Even for Americans - perhaps especially for Americans - Wall Street has been the target of popular revulsion and caricature almost since the first banks opened in Lower Manhattan. From William Jennings Bryan's philippics against the “idle holders of idle capital” in 1896 to Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko almost a century later, the susceptibility of the American public consciousness to the perceived cupidity and selfishness of Wall Street is every bit as acute as that of any European.
When crises unfold and the idlers and greed merchants get their comeuppance, the instant reaction is a mix of anger and Schadenfreude. The public experiences a sort of Kübler-Ross style progression through the various stages of socialist grievance.
The inner Marxist rather enjoys the spectacle of rich bankers becoming victims of their own unsustainable excess, proof of the inevitable internal contradictions of the market process. Picture editors never tire of those photographs of some trader holding his head in his hands as the numbers on the screen behind him bleed red.
Then the inner Stalinist takes over and rages at the injustice of it all. How dare these Masters of the Universe with their Porsches and their incomprehensible gobbledygook bring us to our knees? Annihilate the options traders!
Finally, we get to the inner Leninist, surveying the economic wreckage and calmly insisting that Something Must be Done.
That is roughly where we are now in the Great Panic of 2008.
There is a compelling narrative that spans the transatlantic political space - all the way from Barack Obama through John McCain to the Labour Left and, for all I know, the British Conservatives too.
We got into this mess, it says, because we unleashed the forces of free-market capitalism. This is what you get when you let the animal spirits loose. We bought too willingly into all that 1980s ideology of deregulation and the primacy of markets. Government bowed out of the business of supervising and constraining the financial system. We need to realise the destructive folly of free markets and put the Government back in control. It's a convenient and compelling narrative but is deeply flawed both in its historical account and its prescription.
First, the mess we're in cannot simply be ascribed to an insufficiency of government intervention. It's true that some better regulation would have helped but in important respects there has been way too much government intervention.
Take the US mortgage market at the heart of the present crisis. One of the largest sources of the problem is the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant US mortgage companies, government-sponsored enterprises that hold or guarantee almost half of America's $11 trillion mortgage market. They facilitated much of the explosion of the mortgage-backed securities market in the US and they did so because investors always believed that these oddly public-private hybrids carried an implicit government guarantee. (They were right.)
Critics gave warning repeatedly that if they were not scaled back they would threaten the stability of the whole financial system. (They were right again.)
The idea that these two collapsing behemoths somehow represent a failure of the market is about as plausible as saying that the collapsing boxer falling to his knees somehow represents a failure of the canvas.
Nor is it the case, as capitalism's critics maintain, that the regulatory structure has been dismantled. On the contrary, the US system of financial regulation has been built up over the years into a staggering skyscraper of rules and institutions that induce a sort of governing paralysis.
The regulatory framework is not too small. It is a mess, multiplicated in many areas among different state and federal agencies, and completely lacking in others. It is developed on a base that was created in the 1930s to deal with a wholly different financial environment. Most of those still extant rules that deal, for example with commercial banks, are redundant, while others that should be in place to deal, for example, with investment banks, are not there.
Or take the UK model - please, take the UK model. Tripartite regulation between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority was a work of genius - until someone rediscovered the old truth that when you have three people in charge of something no one is really in charge. Again this is not lack of regulation. It is the wrong sort of regulation, misdirected, incoherent and in some respects, excessive.
Or consider another example in which tight regulation is actually hampering economic recovery. Under international financial rules, banks are required to maintain a core capital base as a proportion of their total balance sheet. But in a financial catastrophe, as capital dwindles and assets become riskier, those rules require banks to cut their lending and investments, driving deeper into the vicious circle
The need is not for more regulation but for more relevant regulation, a more intelligent and targeted role for government that acknowledges the essential wisdom of markets but acts to protect the weakest from their excesses.
That might certainly mean a more active role for supervisors in examining bank balance sheets. But it is more likely to require not aggressive government intervention, but simply the insistence on better provision of information to avoid the chaos created in the past year because investors didn't have a clue about the quality of many of the assets that they held. And in some respects it might even require less public involvement in, or restraint of, the economy: for example, the dismantling of the US mortgage giants and perhaps less onerous restrictions on bank lending when the economy is contracting.
We certainly don't need a system based on the wholly implausible proposition that, in the end, government knows better than people. We should resist at all costs the historically challenged claim that politicians, or the officials they appoint, can possibly know better than free, liquid, well-informed markets in which, every day, hundreds of millions of people put their own money on the line to choose their own future.
Article Courtesy : [Gerard Baker]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4782481.ece
Even for Americans - perhaps especially for Americans - Wall Street has been the target of popular revulsion and caricature almost since the first banks opened in Lower Manhattan. From William Jennings Bryan's philippics against the “idle holders of idle capital” in 1896 to Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko almost a century later, the susceptibility of the American public consciousness to the perceived cupidity and selfishness of Wall Street is every bit as acute as that of any European.
When crises unfold and the idlers and greed merchants get their comeuppance, the instant reaction is a mix of anger and Schadenfreude. The public experiences a sort of Kübler-Ross style progression through the various stages of socialist grievance.
The inner Marxist rather enjoys the spectacle of rich bankers becoming victims of their own unsustainable excess, proof of the inevitable internal contradictions of the market process. Picture editors never tire of those photographs of some trader holding his head in his hands as the numbers on the screen behind him bleed red.
Then the inner Stalinist takes over and rages at the injustice of it all. How dare these Masters of the Universe with their Porsches and their incomprehensible gobbledygook bring us to our knees? Annihilate the options traders!
Finally, we get to the inner Leninist, surveying the economic wreckage and calmly insisting that Something Must be Done.
That is roughly where we are now in the Great Panic of 2008.
There is a compelling narrative that spans the transatlantic political space - all the way from Barack Obama through John McCain to the Labour Left and, for all I know, the British Conservatives too.
We got into this mess, it says, because we unleashed the forces of free-market capitalism. This is what you get when you let the animal spirits loose. We bought too willingly into all that 1980s ideology of deregulation and the primacy of markets. Government bowed out of the business of supervising and constraining the financial system. We need to realise the destructive folly of free markets and put the Government back in control. It's a convenient and compelling narrative but is deeply flawed both in its historical account and its prescription.
First, the mess we're in cannot simply be ascribed to an insufficiency of government intervention. It's true that some better regulation would have helped but in important respects there has been way too much government intervention.
Take the US mortgage market at the heart of the present crisis. One of the largest sources of the problem is the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant US mortgage companies, government-sponsored enterprises that hold or guarantee almost half of America's $11 trillion mortgage market. They facilitated much of the explosion of the mortgage-backed securities market in the US and they did so because investors always believed that these oddly public-private hybrids carried an implicit government guarantee. (They were right.)
Critics gave warning repeatedly that if they were not scaled back they would threaten the stability of the whole financial system. (They were right again.)
The idea that these two collapsing behemoths somehow represent a failure of the market is about as plausible as saying that the collapsing boxer falling to his knees somehow represents a failure of the canvas.
Nor is it the case, as capitalism's critics maintain, that the regulatory structure has been dismantled. On the contrary, the US system of financial regulation has been built up over the years into a staggering skyscraper of rules and institutions that induce a sort of governing paralysis.
The regulatory framework is not too small. It is a mess, multiplicated in many areas among different state and federal agencies, and completely lacking in others. It is developed on a base that was created in the 1930s to deal with a wholly different financial environment. Most of those still extant rules that deal, for example with commercial banks, are redundant, while others that should be in place to deal, for example, with investment banks, are not there.
Or take the UK model - please, take the UK model. Tripartite regulation between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority was a work of genius - until someone rediscovered the old truth that when you have three people in charge of something no one is really in charge. Again this is not lack of regulation. It is the wrong sort of regulation, misdirected, incoherent and in some respects, excessive.
Or consider another example in which tight regulation is actually hampering economic recovery. Under international financial rules, banks are required to maintain a core capital base as a proportion of their total balance sheet. But in a financial catastrophe, as capital dwindles and assets become riskier, those rules require banks to cut their lending and investments, driving deeper into the vicious circle
The need is not for more regulation but for more relevant regulation, a more intelligent and targeted role for government that acknowledges the essential wisdom of markets but acts to protect the weakest from their excesses.
That might certainly mean a more active role for supervisors in examining bank balance sheets. But it is more likely to require not aggressive government intervention, but simply the insistence on better provision of information to avoid the chaos created in the past year because investors didn't have a clue about the quality of many of the assets that they held. And in some respects it might even require less public involvement in, or restraint of, the economy: for example, the dismantling of the US mortgage giants and perhaps less onerous restrictions on bank lending when the economy is contracting.
We certainly don't need a system based on the wholly implausible proposition that, in the end, government knows better than people. We should resist at all costs the historically challenged claim that politicians, or the officials they appoint, can possibly know better than free, liquid, well-informed markets in which, every day, hundreds of millions of people put their own money on the line to choose their own future.
Article Courtesy : [Gerard Baker]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4782481.ece
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