Guilt

Okay I'm feeling slightly guilty.

One of my business partners has a real thing for fast cars; I'm not all that fussed about them.

The whole world is apparently on the edge of some kind of financial precipice. Jim Rogers says let the bankrupt guys just fold – stop bailing them out. And I totally agree. But what I mean is that people are really saying things are really bad...

So... Yesterday my other business partner took me to Western Australia's best restaurant (Galileo's) and we went there at a hundred miles an hour in his 458 Italia (Ferrari, obviously).

Three bottles later of some Sicilian wine called I think Santa Cecilia, um, we took off back to his place and opened the very last bottle in existence of some kind of 'nuther red from Mount Barker.

Er, these wines were all absolutely spectacular.

I don't know much about the car ride home because the way the driving/passenger position is in the Ferrari (you sort of lie on your back with your head being the only upright thing... well kind of upright, anyway) the blood going to the back of my head and the swirl and swoosh of stuff flying by in my peripheral vision on either side meant I can't really tell you what the hell was going on – I never saw it, and don't remember much of it anyway either, really.

I'm doing a $260,000,000 Stage One project financing for a UCG and ammonium nitrate plant on a huge deep seam (non-fracing) coal resource in Queensland and I basically have a whole bunch of money from some Chinese guys whom I've never personally even met and including, I think so anyway, actually the Chinese government.

Okay things are bad apparently. Everywhere. I swear to god I have brand name banks tell me this every day these days and I don't know what to say back to them. I've never before personally been in charge of $260,000,000. Well not as far as I know or can ever remember. So I don't know what 'bad' actually might mean... Not by comparative experience or compared to the way banks must know why they are saying things are bad everywhere.

Well but they're not bad here, though.

I don't have political friends and my parents would be over 105 if they were still alive so I don't have family connections either, other than my wife's. Nobody knows me. Meaning, I am not a public figure. And maybe I never will be too. But things are certainly not bad here for me right now.

Calvin J. Bear

Hot Firecracker Ice And Silk

In Switzerland there are a few – not many, but a few – precision industrial weaving machines with the capability of creating beautiful silk fabrics with up to about fifteen different colours in the design of the fabric.

So we're talking not about printing onto the fabric various colours, but rather, weaving crystal-clear and precise patterns with different coloured silken threads. This sort of finished silk product is extremely expensive. Depending on the visual designs, some of these new silks are quite sensational.

Yet on the whole I don't like too many of these new-fangled things – well I'm talking about expensive things anyway with an old tradition to them. Sometimes more is not better. I really don't, for example, like the modern complicated styles of cutting diamonds. Yes yes I get the basic idea of so-called perfect symmetry 'hearts and arrows.' What's the other one – 'hearts on fire' or something. And there are others too. All departing through extra complication from the fully-developed American Standard 60/60 Marcel Tolkowsky cut. There's a reason for tradition and they're the ones who don't get it.

Then there is the 'Grand Complication' wristwatch thing too.

To me some of this stuff is a bit like George W.-speak: it's 'complexified' rather than really that advanced and complicated afterall.

This image is digitally rendered -
real life diamonds are much more exciting

And the same is true in the modern world of pop fashion sex idioms too: it's how much further, how much more absurd, how much more exaggerated. There is also the whole power overlay thing which to me seems all too equivalent to the current male world of politics and banking – 'waddya mean we have no clothes?! We're in charge, aren't we. You should be happy. Why aren't you happy. Do it my way. Every other way would be bad for you... And by the way, can we have another bailout?' ...The contradictions are too too numerous.

'Inability to resolve the stone's dispersive fire.' This is the key phrase to why overly-complicated cuts are wrong for diamonds. 'Inability to resolve' also includes 'imperfect or incomplete ability to resolve' – which is the result of too many facets and too many small edges, even when the stone itself is large.

D &G classic

A plain black silk cocktail dress when fitted properly is the peak of adult female elegance. A top-cut Tolkowsky brilliant is the paramount when it comes to jewelry. If you want some colour try a Russian Posad silk shawl as an accessory.

Silk gets hot when you put a little fire to it. What Prometheus really knew was to do with the fire in the ice. Let me tell you, when you get a really well-cut diamond, you turn it in the light and you can almost hear the snap crackle and pop of the dispersion: it's sharp, and hot, and snappy, not flashy. A good diamond is a firecracker, not merely a sparkler.

Hedonics Of Diamonds

People today really misunderstand the point of owning diamonds: even some big commercial organisations that are in the business of selling them – other than paying the standard lipservice that dates from another era - fail to give any kind of indication that they either really care about what they are doing, or care for the nature of the product itself. Like so many other things these days, the modern-day inheritors of other people's original achievements behave to a large extent as though they seem to actually begrudge the role they were handed along with the wealth which of course they readily took.

“Diamonds are a girl's best friend.” Well not if you go by the five investment banks that recently completely stuffed up the proposed float of Laurence Graff's diamond house. Apparently they – diamonds - are not anyone's friend at all. Not only did the banks fail to execute the supposedly planned book build, but they let slip to the market and to competitors in the process the very limited number of key clients that Graff had – no more than twenty in all. Many questions can be asked about what those investment banks were doing in conducting such a strategy that claimed a float target of a billion dollars – unnecessarily large if you couldn't be sure to make at least close to it – and wildly irresponsible to the client if in the normal exposure that occurs in a public float, sensitive and otherwise also confidential commercial information is scattered around in the breeze gratuitously when that event then becomes a failure.

And to another 'large extent' this sad tale is really testiment to the nothingness that the big brand-name investment banks have themselves become. Once proud and to-be-reckoned-with names like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, even H.S.B.C., cannot but expect to be castigated because of such a market failure (again!) of something they have tried to take to the professional financial investor. You can't make such an insane hash of something as prestigeous as a major diamondaire's public flotation and hope to maintain credibility.

And so now we're going to have to put up once again with the same old 'spin-city' peppering in the media about how diamonds are not good 'investments' and how synthetic diamonds have altered the profitability of the traditional market, and how diamonds have fallen out of favour with today's super wealthy (probably Chinese) elite. And how at the low end the ordinary consumer cannot afford them... And how the Greeks ought to pay their taxes and how austerity must prevail... Meanwhile of course, Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF pays no tax at all. Pure self-interest driven spin drivel; the whole lot of it. Welcome to today's world, though.

'Girl' is a general term; Elizabeth Taylor is a specific name.

See, the thing is – 'certain specific diamonds are certain specific girls' best friends...'

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Hey Jesus... The Beef And Potatoes?

I just binned a fairly negative post I was going to stick up here about some nonsense the tendentious Australian media is writing about at the moment. In a nutshell though, the media is writing nonsense that is not even slightly factual: they are making false claims about something that is non-value added and straight out of the ground belonging to the Crown and that is leased to entrepreneurs, whilst forgetting about the decades of value-added profits that other people around the world have been generating and have tucked away into Swiss banks already.

But if I posted all that nasty stuff you wouldn't get to see or appreciate the wholesomeness of what truly wealthy people get up to... So... I binned it. And instead,

Yesterday, my wife took over a chicken mozambique (kind of mild curry thing) to a brilliant and very very wealthy deep coal gas engineer who lives in a mansion in the premier local suburb.

I had to warn her to tell him though, before he ate it, that there is a difference between fresh hand-ground spices and proper traditional cooking, and the commercial cooking he might have been used to from going out to commercial restaurants.

Now I watch Dr. Phil as much as any of the other several million+ of his viewers, but let me tell you, illicit drugs are dangerous but I don't think it really is true that illicit drugs are as powerful as a properly-made Tamil curry or a Mozambique chicken 'casserole.'

Well, okay though, this is how you get to eat these things with me at my place:

...firstly, it's late afternoon or evening. There are uniformed people who massage you for as long as three hours or so in the massage rooms, using myrrh and benzoin and almond oil. You wear comfortable slippers and something loose and you are taken into the dining area, which is in candle-light and the orange glow of the warming brazier. Suddenly 'Diving Faces' by Liquid Child hits up deeply on the Bose. People wear emeralds around the table.

Glass Slipper - by Louboutin

You sit in Jarrah and leather dining chairs designed by my friend Karl Teuchert (I drag him out of heaven for this) of ARTRA and someone offers you champagne. And then the food is brought in and you are served. And you get to see some novelty, or some innovation, something new, always something new...

And let me tell you, you are not going to remember much else until you wake up the next day.

See the water, wine, bread...? We are the meat & potatoes.

And another thing – this is all real stuff I'm talking about here. Ordinary cardamom seeds out of the pods, if toasted a little and mixed with cloves tops and mace shroud (fresh), in some kind of delicious food will knock your socks clean off. Try it if you don't believe me. The staff don't need to be wearing Nombre Noir or SL's R de N, but that also helps and if you are conned by me into drinking the champagne out of straws (concentrates the gasses), you won't last thirty minutes. Wealth is what it is. And it isn't money per se.

Next post, I talk about Beef Bourguignone, one of the most complex dishes to do correctly, but one of the most rewarding when done correctly.

John E. N. Ward (himself).

Samsara - the eternal return

“Travelling forward to the past...” (A phrase from an old SAMSARA perfume advertisement.)

I must confess I was a little disconcerted when I saw Dame Stella Rimington on morning television today. She's been on and off the media over a few years now and she still seems to speak with a freshness and interest in her voice that either tells me she's been having a great retirement, or that she loves to share reminiscences about her old job as the one-time head of MI5.

And who wouldn't?! I knew this and that and I couldn't tell – and now I can. Sort of.

So we've had Germaine Greer tour through Oz just recently, and now Dame Stella. What's going on – that we should be 'graced' with these U.K. luminaries at the moment?

Dame Stella said her role at MI5 was as a protector. And she kinda said a few words about Islamic terrorists and begged off what she did about it in her time saying: hey, well, she had had her hands full with the IRA back then.

Not a spy

At least she acknowledged it wasn't exactly 'a war...' As in, 'a war on terrorism.'

I think these people are all a little naiive. Actually I am referring to the entire enclave that has had the public – especially the public of the United Kingdom by the throat since around Thatcher. In the evenings recently I've been watching Rebekah Brooks talk down both to a very senior judge as well as a quite brilliant QC. And I'm also sick of listening to Greer and hope she'll soon be consigned to a wheelchair and parked alongside that other piece of Oxford/Cambridge mischief Stephen Hawking.

Here's my question: did Dame Stella have no clue whatsoever that Rupert Murdoch was running quite the efficient little industry bugging thousands and thousands of people all over the United Kingdom all that time? Not even a tiny-teensy little clue...? Well hell boyh! MI5 screens and monitors the top cops and civil servants don't they? For gun analysts they sure as hell couldn't apparently work out the significance of the associations that were being maintained!

The top lady spy's story appears to be that one of the great capabilites of the master/lady spy from London Town is to be able to walk into a pub full of men, and strike up a conversation and extract a lot of detailed information about stuff from the unsuspecting target.

Uh-huh. Okay.

Actually I hope that Brooks doesn't get stepped on too much, go to jail and all that kind of thing. She's just doing a job for lots of dough. Same as I might, maybe, given similar circumstances, maybe. Who knows. Her boss is a crooked-minded individual who simply just doesn't realise that he is that – who's had the run of the whole place for a good long while. Enough already, Rupert!

Anyway, if they drag it all out, Rupert Murdoch will fall off the perch before Brooks is squeezed too hard. At least they've been apprehended at least. Though not by MI5, m'lud.

But notice how the media's use of Rimington has set the agenda again? Back to 'the terrorists!' And away from those right under her nose trampling over people's legal rights every day. Still. I wonder which media company publishes her books. Well, actually I don't wonder, do I.

Best Austerities,

Calvin J. Bear