This Parenting Service Announcement is brought to you by me having no time to bring anything else to you.
This is from the excellent @TwopTwips twitter account, via The Poke.
This also goes for getting a dog. I speak from bitter, bitter experience.
Author: 6000
Europe’s stereotypical billionaires
Here’s a map of Europe, labelled with the richest person in each country (via i100). And, given the integrated global economy, it’s actually a whole lot more stereotypical than you might imagine. In many cases, the first product you’d associate with each country turns out to be the one which makes its boss the most spondoolas:
Click to make it biggerer
Examples include: Austria: Red Bull, Italy: Nutella, Denmark: Lego, France: L’Oréal (because you’re worth $37,000,000,000).
The only surprise in that regard might be that the richest guy in Finland, Antti Herlin, is in lifts and escalators rather than mobile phones.
Incidentally, South Africa also bucks the stereotypical trend, as Johann Rupert ($7.6bn) makes his money through selling luxury goods, rather than through iffy race relations, dreadful, rampant corruption or crime.
Please (because it’s apparently Iceland week on 6000 miles…) also enjoy Iceland’s richest man (who is not as rich as he used to be), Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, known to his friends as Bjöggi. He made his money by moving to Russia and selling beer to the Russians (sidenote: genius) before investing in investment banks and breaking Iceland’s financial system (sidenote: oops).
Things your kids need to grow out of
We’re lucky parents.
[Through a combination of hard work, dedication, sacrifice, communication, compromise and understanding] We have two generally very well-behaved children.
That said, I still recognise several of these things the children do that are unacceptable for adults to do. For the record, I feel that some of them are unacceptable for children to do, but that’s not what this video is about, so let’s not get in the way of the humour.
There’s my daughter at 0:49.
Oh, and yes, that’s my son at 1:49 (albeit with fewer beard). Complete with his exact reaction at 1:55.
That’s uncanny. Either all kids do this sort of thing or someone’s been spying on us.
A tale of two… Uniteds
Last night’s Carling Cup action brought shocks galore – if by ‘galore’ you count four Premiership teams falling to lower league opposition.
The big one for most people was the hilarious 4-0 drubbing of Manchester United by League 1’s MK Dons. As was noted by one astute individual – Louis van Gaal looked like he was about to cry:
And while it was funny, it was also sad that Shrewsbury’s win at Leicester was overlooked, and that West Ham’s home defeat to the mighty Red And White Wizzzzards of Sheffield United didn’t make more headlines. Yet another Premiership scalp after our amazing cup run last season,and, given that this was the first meeting of the teams since the infamous Tevezgate scandal, an especially nice one to take.
The Blades had to work hard for their win on penalties, but to take a young team down south to a Premiership ground, hold them for 120 minutes and then pop in five out of five penalties is no mean feat. No wonder Nigel was happy.
No real point to this blog post save to record this for posterity. And that has now been done.
Dry The River
If, when he left this comment, Jon Liddle was attempting to generate some sort of interest in his son’s band’s new album, well then, he’s succeeded. I’ve had a quick wander through their back catalogue and – while there’s a bit of gospel, a lot of beard, some violin and more than the occasional hint of banjo – it’s well worth a listen. This ain’t no Mumford and Sons/Lumineers mashup. Thankfully.
Recording in Iceland was about shutting ourselves off from our daily lives and our heavy touring schedule to rediscover what Dry the River means to us. We suspected it would be some kind of otherworldly experience, and it was: beautiful and alien, lonely and taxing but ultimately rewarding.
So yes, the tenuous link was Iceland: its wild beauty and solitude. And they did a documentary on just how that worked out for them:
MOAR SCENERY!!!!
Apparently:
The end product, Alarms in the Heart, is so heavily engrained with that process, that strange location and the experience of being there, that you have to take the two together.
I’ll be giving the album a full listen and I’ll let you know how that goes, but in the meantime, here’s Gethsemane: which features on the documentary from about 8 minutes in and just. fits. perfectly.
My son doesn’t have a band, but when he does, I’ll probably advise him to head to Marion Island (SA’s equivalent of Iceland, I guess) to record that difficult second album. “Fewer beards,” I’ll also tell him.
Safety first.
UPDATE: More information about Dry The River? Here.