Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.
Just about everybody knows how much I despise the brokerage industry - the sorts of people who say that current valuations are 'low by historical standards' - but neglect to mention that by 'historical standards' they mean 'including the period since 1995'.
Well, two (or more) can play at that game...
I therefore declare that I am the tallest, most attractive, smartest and most successful man in Paris - simply by defining 'man' as 'people listed in the Paris telephone directory under Transom'.
I am not sure, but I might also be the smartest, tallest, etc man in history (with 'man' keeping the same definition as above).
I have also noticed the penchant for the 'intellectual' type of Frog (and some Ities and Ancient Bubbles) to go by only one name - the Bubbles usually slapped 'of X' at the end (e.g., Heron of Alexandria, Solon of Samos and so on).
You know what I mean - these folks who drop their first name and just go by 'Voltaire' or 'Moliere' or 'Colette' or what-have-you. (and actually Voltaire's pseudonym was entirely fabricated, since his real name was Francois Marie Arouet).
Since there is almost certainly not another Transom in France (otherwise the French government would certainly have formally surrendered by now), I reckon I could safely designate anything I write in French as 'Transom' and get away with it. Or maybe I will just do what Arouet did and declare myself a pseudonym... maybe 'Superion'.
OK... enough tripe for the moment. jimhaz1 pointed out to me that the 'hundredth monkey syndrome' was apparently a crock - the 'learning at a distance' bit of it was invented by a writer who liked the idea and sticky-taped it to the end of a piece of valid sociological research which canvassed the learning-to-wash-sweet-potatoes in a populaiton of monkeys. Bugger...
And (as you might have discerned from above, France Telecom has finally fixed the residual problems with my telephone, and - wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles - the 'FreeBox' also arrived today... meaning that as soon as I get the thing innstalled, RantWorld will explode back onto the horizon. the instriuctions are in French, and that's half the reason that I am at an internet cafe as I type this... I have to try and find proper non-Gibberish instructions. (I'm kidding - I want to do all my downloading of little freeware things from here, and put them onto my USB key).
100 channels of cable TV - some of it in English! (In fact, for the first three months I get all the channels - some 240 of them... how can there possibly have ever been enough telly produced to fill 240 channels???)
And one final thing... I found a 2006 diary in a bookshop the other day, with a picture of a cat on the front - the cat is, I kid you not, the spi't 'n' image of the recently-departed Chubba. Inside the diary, each month also has two cat photos. The photo on the front is also the photo that relates to the second half of March, 2006.
(Note - I try to remember to use spi't 'n' image instead of 'spitting image' because what we now think of as 'spitting image' is actually a contraction of 'spirit and image' that began in the Southern slave populations in the US prior to the War of Northern Aggression.)
