No this is not some Chinese pig rival to The Empress of Blandings, or the dreadful Empress Lü, but a ship. More of that later, first let me tell you about a blow to my status as musical expert.
It is Thursday morning and just after opening the shop early enough to listen to IOT while having coffee and toast a customer came in.
The customer turned out to be a Latin American from Liverpool who could speak no English. He looked briefly around the shop and then spotted Kit's Roland Accordion and wanted to buy it for his teenage son.
Kit does not stock Roland, though I suppose he could order one, they are very expensive and not really suitable for some wretched teenager to learn on. I know that much.
It did my best to persuade the man that one of the accordions in stock and costing only a few hundred pounds might be a better choice but he was insisted he wanted the Roland. I was very tempted to offer it for sale at well over the top retail price, make myself a nice profit and have a replacement rushed to the shop before Kit got back. But Kit would have noticed. his accordion has some unique features. It was very difficult to explain why the accordion was not for sale as the man had almost no English. I now wish I had used my Spanish, but at the time simply did not have the confidence. (You see I never went to Public School.) In the end the man went away with the shop phone number and the prices of some expensive Roland accordions. Perhaps he will ring back, but he did not look like someone who could afford to spend 0ver a thousand pounds on a Christmas present. Perhaps he intends to use it for shipping cocaine.
If you are going to smuggle cocaine in accordions, use expensive accordions. Customs is more likely to look in the cheap ones.
After this I needed to relax so listened to the new China History Podcast.
This time Lazlo talks about early China/US relations. An extraordinary story and one that has shaped the modern world from the late 18th Century onwards.
I knew a little about the British China trade and that of the other Europeans, but next to nothing about the role the Americans played, and in the end they were the ones who were to win the game and become the dominant power. So the podcast filled in a very important part of the jigsaw.
The first US ship to trade with China was called The Empress of China, and you will never guess the main cargo she was carrying.
Clue: The pig connection is that it goes well with pork in soup.
Lazlo mentions four important commodities in the US/China trade and if you know a little world history you can probably guess two of them. But the other two really surprised me. I won't tell you what they are as I want to encourage you to listen to Lazlo's podcast.
But I will tell you opium is not one of them. There was a later US/China opium trade. So where did the newly independent US get its opium from?
Now I have to start filling in my visa form for Indonesia.
It is Thursday morning and just after opening the shop early enough to listen to IOT while having coffee and toast a customer came in.
The customer turned out to be a Latin American from Liverpool who could speak no English. He looked briefly around the shop and then spotted Kit's Roland Accordion and wanted to buy it for his teenage son.
Kit does not stock Roland, though I suppose he could order one, they are very expensive and not really suitable for some wretched teenager to learn on. I know that much.
It did my best to persuade the man that one of the accordions in stock and costing only a few hundred pounds might be a better choice but he was insisted he wanted the Roland. I was very tempted to offer it for sale at well over the top retail price, make myself a nice profit and have a replacement rushed to the shop before Kit got back. But Kit would have noticed. his accordion has some unique features. It was very difficult to explain why the accordion was not for sale as the man had almost no English. I now wish I had used my Spanish, but at the time simply did not have the confidence. (You see I never went to Public School.) In the end the man went away with the shop phone number and the prices of some expensive Roland accordions. Perhaps he will ring back, but he did not look like someone who could afford to spend 0ver a thousand pounds on a Christmas present. Perhaps he intends to use it for shipping cocaine.
If you are going to smuggle cocaine in accordions, use expensive accordions. Customs is more likely to look in the cheap ones.
After this I needed to relax so listened to the new China History Podcast.
This time Lazlo talks about early China/US relations. An extraordinary story and one that has shaped the modern world from the late 18th Century onwards.
I knew a little about the British China trade and that of the other Europeans, but next to nothing about the role the Americans played, and in the end they were the ones who were to win the game and become the dominant power. So the podcast filled in a very important part of the jigsaw.
The first US ship to trade with China was called The Empress of China, and you will never guess the main cargo she was carrying.
Clue: The pig connection is that it goes well with pork in soup.
Lazlo mentions four important commodities in the US/China trade and if you know a little world history you can probably guess two of them. But the other two really surprised me. I won't tell you what they are as I want to encourage you to listen to Lazlo's podcast.
But I will tell you opium is not one of them. There was a later US/China opium trade. So where did the newly independent US get its opium from?
Now I have to start filling in my visa form for Indonesia.
Oh, one more thing.
IOT this week was on the development of the microscope and there was a passing remark on a topic that really interests me, the visualisation of the invisible. Much of our view of the cosmos and the microverse is in some way 'coloured in' for us. It was also mentioned that Robert Hooke drew tiny circles, suggestive of atoms, in the crystalline structures illustrated in Leeuwenhoek's book.
The idea of perfection in the form of circle or sphere has shaped the way we see things since the Ancient Greeks, and probably before. In some ways I think it still does. I would bet that there are still a great many educated people who still think the Earth's orbit around the Sun is circular.
IOT this week was on the development of the microscope and there was a passing remark on a topic that really interests me, the visualisation of the invisible. Much of our view of the cosmos and the microverse is in some way 'coloured in' for us. It was also mentioned that Robert Hooke drew tiny circles, suggestive of atoms, in the crystalline structures illustrated in Leeuwenhoek's book.
The idea of perfection in the form of circle or sphere has shaped the way we see things since the Ancient Greeks, and probably before. In some ways I think it still does. I would bet that there are still a great many educated people who still think the Earth's orbit around the Sun is circular.