Beautiful Expensive Things

Karl Lagerfeld used a phrase once - 'beautiful, expensive friends.'

LOL

When you are extraordinarily rich, you have this problem, this new problem, see - one that only appears to those who are, truly rich with actual cash money.

I think I have mentioned here a long while ago, that when I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I used to wander around the city, with around eighty thousand dollars in my jacket pocketS! (Yes, it took several of them, but not much more than).

What would it even matter if you
wore this kind of thing around your neck?
Nobody knows and nobody cares.
It keeps you warm, though. It's nice.

It was the very early phases of the 'go go' era when everyone and his dog were 'entrepreneurs' on the way to making their first, second, third, whatever million.

In current affairs, there is this thing over here about the hundred billion dollar nuclear submarine contract. Well, back in the mid-Eighties, I made my first million dollars being involved in the very early digital linear signalling industry as a designer who could get around the 'capstan' wiring issues.

Frankly, I've lost all of that knowledge now, and I can't even speak Tamil anymore although I was literally raised by Tamils and spoke it as a young child! I hardly speak English properly anymore...

I know little to nothing these days!

My track-record of published academic research is not good, consisting of only one formal paper led by Dr. Tom Odgers (Edith Cowan University), on which I was noted as a research and analysis contributor.

Okay, yeah I did find around 13 million dollars of China money too for some land development at the campus then but hell, so what, really, in the wider scheme of things.

I mean, hey - what do I know, right?

Kid who made several million starting from age 23...

A couple of national newspapers in the business sections, one national business journal...

Today, it takes a PhD to fit a Shimano Di2 Groupset to a bicycle.

Above my level of expertise, that's for sure.

Electronic automatic gear-shifter.
Yep. What it is. For bicycles.

Yeah nah, I can't do much now.

When I used to wander around, ice cold in the facial expression, butter-would-not-melt-in-mouth-either - for all the people chasing bucks in the main financial street back then, not one single time did anyone ask me for any money, and nor did any women realize that the guys they were chasing at the nightclubs were the ones coming into my offices in the week asking for loans and investments.

Maybe it was that I was very ugly. Maybe, oh no, wait - it could have been that I was habitually a wearer of French double-breasted suits and that's a no no down here, clearly! No French stuff. Hell no. 

Funny thing, I will tell you this - I think it was something I was doing though, and totally on purpose. 

There's this guy who is the head of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. I know him well, and he knows me well. 

He used to ask me, when we were debating in the local Oxford Union society (a mini local outpost of -  and formally linked with - the real deal) 'Why do you go to sleep before it is your time to speak?'

LOL

These guys are 'Future Sound Of Egypt'
(aka Aly & Fila) playing in Prague though.
Actual Egyptian kids. Well, they're not kids anymore.

Well because it's known in the business of higher psychology as 'playful arousal...'

Innit?

Brudda?

It isn't me who would have been 'asleep.'

I might have looked asleep, could have even mildly snored too...

We never lost a debate, not a single one, ever ever. And there was one point where we advertised that we would take on 'all-comers.' And we did. Including with the eventual Federal Minister who took a couple of 'king hits' to the head, face, and jaw over the first 'submarine contracts' which he never sent the US's way.

So you're talking when we were pretty much still just kids and the others - most of them at that stage - were already adult members of the very high and mighty. And I can guarantee you there were no holds barred and no prisoners taken and there was a point where even a local television channel put up some 'rewards' to anyone who could take us... Never happened. Completely independent adjudicators - as is always the case for Oxford Union standards.

And it was around about then, towards the end of all that, that I realized, hey, better put a sock in this. You just ended up with enemies.

Anyway, the long and short of this is - and you know, Rose McGowan let it slip too, the same kind of thing: that she was a student of the histories and exploits of Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, and Genghis Khan!! When she was but eleven. Kind of tells you why she's winning the game now.

...An important 'lesson' in any war strategy is to never let your opponent know that you are coming. Hopefully too, it's good if you even get away with having them swanning about thinking that you are not there, when you are right there.

And it's at a certain point, that you are actually in their office, and they just simply won't believe it. So they don't do anything about it. 

'Beautiful expensive things' is one thing. Beautiful people are a whole other thing.

I want them both.

How about you?

[Music below is 'Future Sounds of Egypt' with Dan Stone and Ferry Tayle. Bigger than you know, and more important than you could possibly imagine... If you're just an 'ordinary' human being.]