Fake Rich Culture

Do you notice all the modern era Michelin 3-Star restaurants? Have you seen how they try to bring in these food innovations like puree'd this or that, with strange colours dashed and splashed all over large white plates, and a touch of purple flower here and there. 

You can get the very rare exception such as the guy up in Scandinavia who gathers stuff from the Nordic woodlands and infuses his meals with all of these completely exotic woodland ingredients. But overall the stuff that one is asked to pay major money for is simply bizarre.

Looks good in pics but it's a fake place
that has no authentic culturalbackground

And then too, there are those tacky places like the huge aquarium-walled restaurant in Dubai. With the stupid wine list that basically is a complete rundown of every 'well-known' French wine name - and nothing of genuine note there. It's just a pop fantasy idea of epicurean dining.

Everything way too expensive, too mass market-focused, too 'brand name-centric...'

There are reasons - very good reasons - why certain dishes always appear in traditional upper class establishments. You can veer off the rails all you want just because you can market stuff to cultural illiterates who have acquired some kind of 'new money,' but it doesn't mean a thing in the long run. The long run is why there is such as tradition. And there is such a thing. Trust me, even if you don't see a lot of signs of it right here, here - is the place that people do drift around who have real class and real wealth. I know, I get the private emails.

Tradition and class is about family and legacy. It's about sons and daughters and what you are handing on to them from what yourself were given. But that's the trouble with 'new money,' it's got nothing much good to say of its ancestry. I can hardly tell you, myself how much I owe my ancestors - those who came before me, and not necessarily just those from my direct family but from the generations before me, and yes, oh dear, the infamous 'class system' of the old days. I have myself never ever heard a genuine aristocrat badmouth the so-called peasant classes - for god's sakes without them, the estates would rundown and die! And nor the so-called 'lower classes' either. But what happened - why is this not the prevailing conception of what aristocracy does or thinks like? Well, two World Wars happened is what happened, and all the decent aristocrats died out! Or most of the anyway.

Remember the montage or collage idea spoken about in the
last article? Genuine modern art does have authenticity...

Now you might not think there is any advantage in knowing about traditions but if I simply lay a few of them out, after awhile, a sort of gravitas will develop in your mind and in your spirit, and you will find the golden road to paradise after all...

All haute cuisine dinner in Paris starts with onion soup.

And onion soup is only ever done one way. That is, the traditional way.

Yes there are signature dishes at places like the Tour D'Argent and so on, but the straight-and-narrow, if you are out with your mistress, will be turbot for a main course. It had better be your mistress too, even if it is your wife... Such things make sense in Paris, if not anywhere else.

This is baked turbot, see... If you look up pics of haute cuisine turbot
on the internet, you will see everything but this!

And a great wine will be something genuinely good, and not just something with a name. And we will look at some of these next time.

I Take You To Art - The Highbrow...

Want to do some art...?

I'll take you there. You have to dress up for it. It's a big show. For luminaries only. 

There's food and drink for women:

Cranberry cocktail - you'll still
get very drunk on it 

Why 'art?' What is 'art' and why do we have it?

Well I'll tell you what it is and why we have it...

You don't know what these are - these are
'top hats.'

"We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony, we should learn to love each other so much to live outside of time... ...detached." Federico Fellini.

Now I want you to listen to this piece of 'art music,' and to realize that it is a modern art montage, isn't it? The words are all there, but they have been cut and spliced in - or, not so much cut exactly, but drifted in and out through volume control and by the deliberate vocal delivery of the singer herself.

So listen, and then you can read the actual lyrics below...

This is the fastest way I know Alley trees were grown again I cut across the city's backyards And every blade of grass would make me sneeze This is the fastest way I know Alley trees were grown again I cut across the city's backyards And every blade of grass would make me sneeze Oh I swear Surrounded? The sun will set for you The sun will set for you The sun will set for you The sun will set for you (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace (Will set for you) Caught a glimpse of her grace Caught a glimpse of her grace Caught a glimpse of her grace But just now we’re separated – wait up

The Angel Gabriel

"And they beheld a stranger in their midst; for he had the appearance of a strong man, dressed in white and with a powerful and confident demeanor, though not attired as one who is of the local custom."

The great Muslim scholars say this saying is one 'of the strongest hadiths,' - which means that its narration is sure, and with many unbroken chains of narration from the time of those who were present at the occurrence.

And the man came and went of his own accord, and no one had seen from whence or to where he goes, but that he goes and comes swiftly.

A messenger from God

From the clouds he comes, down through dark skies, deep in the night, to the predesignated place of meeting, there to give increase to the needy, and resolution to the afflicted.

You will have by now, heard about the 'air-droppable missile system,' developed by Russia and tested on the border between Syria and Turkey.

Of course, like all little stories in the press, you have to draw on a few strands of twine to tease out the fuller picture. And the fuller picture here is that what may be air-dropped at night, through cloudy skies, and reach its GPS location target spot of a few square feet, may be a lot smaller than a missile system.

'Air-droppable' air defense system

The noose is closing around the neck of the King of Saudi Arabia. Not only are the Russians on to him, but so are the Americans. There are sayings that abound in the intelligence operative circles: 'limited hangouts' (Lionel Nation loves that one), 'hunting dogs,' 'bird dogs,' 'the eagle flies on Monday,' and this one: 'if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?'

No, nobody hears, because nobody is listening.

That recent Panama limited hangout has nothing to do with revenue services closing down tax havens for individuals or rich people - it has to do, as all CIA matters have, with sovereign interests. Some people, say that it was to give the alert to those who funded and used Panamanian channels to carry out 9/11. And some say, it is to actually catch and block Saudi money being used for nefarious purposes around the world.

I cannot say. LOL. But what I do know is that if Donald Trump ever gets in you will see a lot of rats jumping ship. Except the ship ain't going down.

There is likely to be a lot of 'plank walking' though, if they don't all jump first.

I mean it's not all private money in those Panama accounts, is it. You see, it's easy for the US to find out who's moving money through any US-permit holding banks - HSBC, Wells Fargo, Chase, anyone. Not so easy if it is the State Bank of Saudi Arabia. And the cash was going through 'out of town,' let's say, in Panama for instance. Panama, as you know, doesn't have its own currency and uses the US Dollar. A very very dangerous state of affairs unless you have a grip on things over there.  

 Song and Music by Uppermost - 'Passion.'

The Fall-Back Position

Believe me, this is the calm before the storm.

Will they let the cat out of the bag or will they let le Donald steamroll forward, threatening everyone who has been preventing America from 'being great,' in a great big fog of disinformation regardless of how hard he presses.

This is not a clue, it is just an expensive Guinness;
unless you think being Irish is a clue about something
important to do with the President of the USA. In that case then
it is a clue. I wasn't really planning to give any clues.

He's not stupid though and he's well enough advised and informed. He'll have to make up his own mind about how to deal with what he learns once that file called 'if a tree falls in a forest' is opened on his Presidential desk.

I can't say too much about this, but there are secrets - you all already realize this. But I can say this: a friend of mine remarked on the subject of this recent Panama tax haven and money-laundering thing and I just had to suggest that organisations such as the CIA do not care about little people or small things, they play at the level of sovereign interests and I added that I did not consider anyone like China or Russia or even North Korea had any bearing on what happened with the release of information, regardless of what Fox News believed.

Sometimes it is those things we just plain don't see, or perhaps they are so close to our noses - even closer than well, my god, even closer than Israel - that it escapes our grasp unless we are really led to it. But I have always said that I won't fail to alert readers if I knew of something genuinely imminent. You have to understand something about the nuclear threat however - the cat is already out of the bag and the USA did not prevent that wrong country from acquiring nuclear devices which work. 

And so we are certainly in for interesting times.

A man's order - beef and Guinness pie

That friend also mentioned something about using those times when there is a slow down in cash flow or a temporary failure in liquidity to plan, for when you have money! An amazing insight, I said. And yes, I agreed. For instance, just look - I said - at our mutual super-wealthy friend Andrew, every day at lunchtime he just suddenly, out of the blue, without planning blurts out: 'hey let's go to lunch.' By which he means somewhere they serve Lamb Korma and Kingfisher beers.

Well - I said to my friend - you are so right; even now I'm planning for when I have a lot of extra money, and then lunchtime rolls around... ...I shall certainly be different in my approach. I'll shout out: 'hey let's go to lunch!' 

And my friend said, but what's the difference?

Well I'll have planned to do that. Of course! SMH... (Shake My Head).

Have you ever noticed that when a male orders lunch or dinner it's mostly never what a woman would order? And then have you ever noticed they steal stuff off your plate??!

Better Stop Doin' This

Oh gawd...

Talk about putting the pressure on myself.

If you've been reading this blog from the start a few years ago now, you'll know that the racehorse previews here have been on the money A LOT. 

It's hard to do this because, the real theory behind handicapping is something along the lines of 'a high percentage' of results, if you ran the same race over and over ten times, or a hundred times - a high percentage will have the same horses in the top places if you've calculated the weights and times correctly.

These are staggeringly good musicians and I
shouldn't make fun of them which I'm not and anyway -
anyway it was NYQUIST, wasn't it, not NYQUIL.
But there's a sick joke about: 'Nyquil, the reason why
Doves Cry...' (That's Prince's 'Wendy &Lisa' above)

The fact is though, there are a lot factors involved - and they are quite complex; for instance, some experts feel conditions such as the light level or even presence of birds (this is a fact, by the way, that is, a fact that experts take bird flocks into consideration...) have a bearing on the possible outcomes or on how the race is run.

Anyway let's put up for you the results of the just-run 2016 Kentucky Derby:

1st     Nyquist

2nd    Exaggerator

3rd     Gun Runner

So, let's all realize that despite any amount of 'successful' predictions on these pages, horse racing is still a risky business, and there is a lot of stakes' managing that goes into what it takes to be a long-term successful professional gambler.

Sydney horse racing expert,
typical dress code...