Generous Philanthropy Among Celebrities

A couple of days ago I was talking to a gentleman who had retired from the oil & gas industry, and he was showing me his net profit from his last year's tax return. It was just over $700,000 (USD) out of a handful of managed funds.

His last actual employment contract had been with the Reliance Group's India gas projects - in other words, he was working for Ambani, the world's I think maybe tenth or so richest person.

I was eating this 'beef and ale pie with peas and potato' thing and he stretched over and asked me about it. And then he said that it was unusual to see someone using a fountain pen these days. And yes, I had been jotting down a short note on deckle-edge'd paper (or is it deckled edge? Dunno) to someone a few minutes earlier.

And then after a while he proceeded to show me on his iPhone all the money in his funds. And so on - wife, daughter, all of that.

Anyway, let's put up the link to a short one-pager about the Autism project.

The Autism Drone Flying Project

(I never talked to him about that - the Autism project - or about anything else much, for that matter. ...I talked to him about how I thought the place was the best restaurant around here, and I talked to him about how fortunate he was that his daughter was attending one of the local primary schools).

And it was a really cheap pen I had been using too...

This is a cheap Chinese brand pen - even cheaper
than the Prera I was using. Same style though.

If I really wanted to hit someone hard over the head with words on paper, I would have been sitting there penning this kind of thing:

'Dear William, last night we set camp beside the explorer Giles and his camels...'

And you know, I have done that kind of thing. Well in fact, both of them - I have camped beside, if not 'the Explorer Giles and/or even his camels too,' then certainly similar oddities, and absolutely I have been quite the knave and deliberately penned such words, and with a flourish of the hand, under the noses of those I was seeking to play around with, you know, naively fishing to see if there were a few brain cells in the vicinity.

We are now approaching the latter part of the year - the time during which there will, or at least there should be, the 24 hours of Le Mans, and then, the Cox Plate horse race, forget the Melbourne Cup (that will be a joke again), and we are entering Ballet Season!

Ah, the ballet.

Really, we should give a thought to Alexandre Dumas, for he, afterall, was the person who introduced 'the Sugar Plum Fairy' to the Nutcracker libretto. It, well, she, was not in the E.T. A. Hoffman original story.

Art nouveau or art deco, I can't
tell - but, 'girl with lights...' anyway.
LOL
As you know, those who have been reading
the last Inkitt free book.

And the choreographer - the main one, because there were two who collaborated - Marius Petipa, took the adaptation of the Hoffman original tale, made by Dumas.

Hoffman was a German writer of strange, fantasy, and Gothic horror! He was also a jurist. Most experts consider him to be one of the true originators of science fiction and he is the person who actually wrote 'the Sandman.'

Oh to sit at a coffee house or tavern table and converse with the likes of Dumas and Hoffman.

And especially those two other poor driven fools, Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick!

Personally I'd keep those two well away in some darkened corner and just opine with Dumas -, leaving Hoffman to the serving people until one would have to rescue those.

Now don't think there are no crumbs falling out here.

There are, you just have to be awake enough and sharp enough to spot them or to follow up on what you're reading and seeing.

Goodness me! If we always just clearly detailed every single thing to go grab for the sake of its having some future value - well not only would that destroy the market, it would detract from the fun of it all.

Sometimes the value persists in the minds of women, for instance, and is hardly imagined by the male of the species.

What is this? Aaaeeerrh, I'm sure 
I cannot s-a-a-a-y.

I mean, hey, I guarantee you the rich guy ex-oil and gas industry never bought his young Vietnamese wife a $30,000 Birkin handbag (they are that price as you know). He was not that type of person.

Bit late now though, frankly, to be shoving around a Birkin under anybody's nose to impress anyone.Too old.

Every celeb already has one. You have that kind of money, you have that kind of 'stuff.'

And they all have that kind of stuff.

If you had the power to 'bag a celebrity' though, well that's a different story!

Stick a celebrity in a bag and zip it tight shut.

Hehehehehe.

Not sure if it is any kind of 'philanthropy' pinching celebs off the planet and stealing them away from ol' Ari Emanuel - but there are people that can do it for sure. So can you. Ah, well, I suppose yeah it is philanthropy in its finest definition. In my case it would generally (and more specifically) be philgynthropy.