Innocents abroad

BBC News:

Two Japanese sisters have been arrested for allegedly trying to evade paying a fortune in inheritance tax. Tax officials say the sisters hid almost 6bn yen ($58m) in cardboard boxes and paper bags at their home in the city of Osaka. They are accused of failing to declare most of the money they inherited from their wealthy father, who died almost four years ago.

I always feel sad when someone gets caught by the taxman, although I don't feel strongly about inheritance taxes. Those sisters didn't earn the money themselves, so their moral claim to it is relatively weak. However, the government's moral claim to it seems to me non-existent.

I'd feel more sympathy for the sisters if they'd shown more intelligence. I'm not sure what's the best way to hide a large inheritance, never having had to deal with the problem myself, but stashing banknotes around the house in cardboard boxes and paper bags seems somewhat lacking in sophistication. And they had four years to find some better solution.

Hell's bells, even burying the banknotes in the garden would probably have been an improvement. But it would have been better to get the money out of the country somehow.

Independence for Kosovo?

Today Kosovo declares its independence from Serbia. It has of course already been independent from Serbia in practice since 1999, but it remains to be seen whether it will remain independent in the long term, and what other effects this will have.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I believe in self-determination for all peoples, including the people of Kosovo, so I wish them luck.

On the other hand, it seems that various other countries will be spending money propping up Kosovo for many years into the future, and this is not good, for at least three reasons.

1. What have the Kosovans ever done to deserve this generosity? I wish them luck, but I don't feel that I owe them money.
2. Interference in the affairs of other countries may or not be justified in principle, but in practice it often seems to turn out unhappily.
3. As Kosovo becomes accustomed to being propped up by other countries, it may become permanently incapable of looking after itself.

The world could do with some kind of international law and some kind of international organization(s) to enforce it. It's neither satisfactory in principle nor successful in practice for powerful countries to send their armies all over the world trying to enforce whatever they happen to think is right at the time.

Various people have already pointed out that, if Kosovo's independence holds, this will encourage separatist movements in other countries. Indeed, I suppose it will, and I wish the best of luck to all such movements that have majority support within their regions.

I'm amused to see that, also today, residents of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the northernmost town in England, have voted in an unofficial poll to leave England and become part of Scotland.

Software obsolescence

Three months ago we got a new computer for our son Marc, and of course it came with Windows Vista, although Ana and I are still using Windows XP on our own computers.

From Marc's point of view, a computer is a games machine, and I was apprehensive about how many of his old games would work under Vista. I reassured myself that Vista seems not very different from XP; and at first I was pleased to find that some old games worked without trouble.

However, by now we realize that a number of his old games don't seem to work under Vista, although they work under XP.

This is a nuisance, and it's just an example of a wider problem with software: that it has a short lifespan. When I buy a book, I expect it to last for decades; it may well outlast me. But software can become unusable after only a few years, generally because of changes to the operating system.

Of course, if you maintain a museum full of computers running old operating systems, then you can go on running your old programs. But that's inconvenient and ultimately not very feasible. After a while, the old computers will break down and the old operating systems may not work with a new computer.

Some programs last longer than others. I'm still using Lotus Magellan, a file browser and search program, which hasn't been updated since 1990. It was an excellent program ahead of its time; it's somewhat less useful now because it's operating in a very different environment from what it was designed for. However, amazingly, it still works, and it's still useful for some purposes. I suppose this is because it was written for DOS, and so most of the changes to Windows in the last 18 years haven't affected it.

Hot wine

A traditional winter drink in many countries is hot wine, sweetened and with various spices or other additives.

Despite these widespread traditions, I've found that hot wine by itself makes a good winter drink without sweetening or spices. Just a minute in the microwave, and it's done. So far I've tried only hot red wine, but I've read that hot white wine works too. Hot sparkling wine doesn't seem like a good idea, but it may be worth trying out of curiosity...

If you want the wine to remain alcoholic, avoid boiling it.

Motorists versus cyclists

Today Ana told me about a current Spanish news story: a motorist ran over a teenage cyclist some time ago, killing him, and recently took the boy's family to court for the cost of repairing his expensive car. It seems that the accident was entirely the cyclist's fault, no argument about that; but nevertheless the case has generated so much unfavourable attention that the man has now withdrawn it.

I can see both points of view on this. On the one hand, as a motorist I don't see why I should pay any costs of an accident that was someone else's fault. On the other hand, as a sometime cyclist I feel it should be recognized that the car is the lethal ingredient in this situation. If the boy had crashed into another cyclist, I suppose the cost of the accident would be relatively low in both human and cash terms. It's the use of the motor car in general that causes the risk of death and the risk of expensive repairs, so arguably motorists as a class should bear such costs even if the specific motorist is not at fault.

Books 2007

I don't read as much these days as I used to, but in 2007 I read at least 42 books for the first time, and reread at least 47 books.

Books read for the first time included three autobiographies (Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Fry, C.S. Forester), fifteen novels by Elizabeth Peters, five by Terry Pratchett, two by Poul Anderson, two by Peter Tremayne, and further books by Rudyard Kipling, Michael Kurland, Alexander McCall Smith, Lindsey Davis, Thorne Smith, Christopher Anvil, Frank Muir, J.K. Rowling, L. Sprague de Camp, C.S. Forester, Margery Allingham, and Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner.

Reread books included eighteen by Terry Pratchett, three by Colin Kapp, three by Larry Niven, two by Douglas Adams, two by Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon, two by C.S. Forester, two by Elizabeth Peters, two by Clifford Simak, two by J.R.R. Tolkien, and further books by Jasper Fforde, S.M. Stirling, Michael Kurland, Randall Garrett, J.K. Rowling, Rick Cook, Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Jack Vance, and Keith Laumer.

Ballet Shoes?

My mother's response to the recent TV version of Ballet Shoes, the 1936 book by Noel Streatfeild:

They'd crammed the whole book into less than 90 minutes and so the opening events, although reasonably authentic, were whizzed through bewilderingly quickly. From then on it got silly. For some reason they hadn't seen fit to engage a double cast of the 3 heroines, so we saw them arriving one by one as orphan babies and the next minute they're strapping teenagers, attending for the first time the theatrical academy which, in the book, was when they were small children. A ballet class was briefly shown, with a load of girls in ridiculous net skirts jumping up and down in the most unballetic fashion. The youngest heroine, Posy, who goes on to be a famous ballerina (ergo the book's title) had obviously never had a ballet lesson in her life and in this drama school there wasn't a single boy to be seen. I lasted till a non-heroine was giving a professional audition, with her teacher saying proudly in the background that she was the most talented girl in the school, and there she was singing excruciatingly and staggering about en pointe like a lame heron. I switched off and went to bed. Incidentally the comedienne Victoria Wood played the girls' nanny, rather well, but they'd given her an enveloping grey wig and one reviewer, who'd seen a preview, commented that she looked like Worzel Gummidge.

Teddy Muhammad

As you probably know, an English teacher was recently arrested and imprisoned in the Sudan for allowing her schoolchildren to name a teddy bear Muhammad (it was the children's choice). Some Sudanese protesters called for her execution.

This sort of thing illustrates a simple fact that all travellers should bear in mind: some countries are relatively safe to live in and some are not. Considering the dismal history of the Sudan ever since independence, and how things are there now, why would any sane person decide to go and live there?

If you go and sit in a lion's cage, it may be horrific when you get eaten by the lion, but it shouldn't be surprising.

In this case the lady was allowed to escape without being eaten by the lion. She was lucky. Some reckless travellers have worse experiences.

Imagine

John Lennon's song Imagine seems to have lasting popularity, and I heard it lovingly performed by someone else on Spanish television just recently. It has a nice tune. But, considering the lyrics, its popularity has always puzzled me.

He imagined a world without religions, without countries, and without possessions, and invited us to admire it. This is a highly revolutionary manifesto that I'd expect virtually everyone in the world to disagree with in one respect or another; and yet large numbers of people seem attracted by it. Are they actually listening to the words, I wonder?

Myself, I'd welcome a world without religions, but it obviously isn't going to happen any time soon. A world without countries is vaguely attractive in principle, though perhaps unworkable in practice. A world without possessions doesn't strike me as attractive even in principle; I'm a libertarian, not a communist.

Amazon's best music of the decade

Amazon in the USA is offering its own choice of the best music of the decade so far: a top ten in each of 18 categories. This comes to fewer than 180 records, because some records are listed in more than one category.

I see that I own four of its chosen records:

• Charlie Haden's Nocturne (jazz): excellent
• Orchestra Baobab's Specialist in all styles (international): not bad, but I think their old albums are better
• Bebel Gilberto's Tanto tempo (international, Latin, and dance): overrated, but a few pleasant tracks
• Enya's A day without rain (new age): mediocre, but a few pleasant tracks