There are Wally's and then again there are Wally's

Windguru forecast a northwester for Muizenberg but as it turned out the wind was about 60 degrees to the 'right' i.e. from the northeast, which is pretty unusual. This made conditions slightly choppy but with a big swell at the back and low tide this was neither here nor there. At Muizies you are hardly ever in the curl but you can race just a fraction ahead of the white water for long stretches if you pick the peak right. Waiting for sets I watched a magnificent rainbow over the Simonsberg, right above our house, with the full spectrum clearly visible, from ultraviolet to infrared. The air temp was 19 degrees - mid-winter, I ask you! As I was paddling back out after a ride, two surfers nearly collided, triggering an altercation. No longer the cool surfer dude, each thought the other guilty of hogging the wave and the one ended  up calling the other a Wally. This was meant as an insult. The word derives from Glasgow Scottish and refers to kids living in a 'wally close' and thus shielded from playing with the rougher kids on the project. And it's a derogatory term here, just as it became so in London.  But I thought of another Wally, the one with the stripey red and white shirt, bobble cap and glasses in "Where's Wally", the wonderful kids books by Martin Handford. If it had been me and I'd thought quickly enough (usually you don't) I might have said to the other guy, 'Hey thanks, Wally's a pretty cool guy.' Nerdy but cool. When our son was small we spent hours trying to locate this geeky little character in crowds on the beach, in fairgrounds and stacks of other places. Sometimes you'd spot him straight off, other times it would drive you mad that you couldn't find him among the loads of funny characters in the crowd. The QSL is from Northsound Radio in Aberdeen, east Scotland, heard on AM in Kent in 1996, using just 0.8kW. The engineer, Ken Hancock, sent a nice letter as well, mentioning that he enjoyed trading in listed stocks. Hope he didn't get burned in the crash!

No breeding in Ayn Rand

It's said "truth is stranger than fiction." If this means that stranger things happen in the real world than anyone can make up, then read The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand). With tributes to individualism and the human spirit I have no problem but do people really communicate like this and have such singularly little need of human company? The main characters are surely extremely talented souls but inter-communication is so perverse as to be utterly implausible. Many conversations are confrontational and often just plain obdurate. A keynote in the story is Dominique Francon's trial testimony where she insists that maverick architect, Howard Roark's temple be pulled down because it was 'casting pearls before swine' (swine being the human race, not capable of self-respect and exaltation). So she trashes all the other architects in the the courtroom. These are the leading architects of the day, all apparently living in the past and set up as straw men to be ridiculed. No matter that the book was published in 1936 and that some of the most iconic city pictures ever are of the New York skyline of the 1930s. Empire State and Chrysler were already up by 1931. When Rand arrived in Manhattan for the first time in 1925 she claimed to have wept 'tears of splendour' on seeing the silhouette. Is the human race really composed only of 'moles that object to mountain peaks'? I don't think so. The development of cities itself, all over the planet, is tribute to human ingenuity and creativity. Indeed, it's been a major catalyst for developing those traits. Leading characters, Roark, Francon, Gail Wynand (newspaper owner) and Ellsworth Toohey (humanist) are incapable of empathy. They pursue individualism at all costs. Wynand is particularly odious, as he destroys some people for no apparent reason at all. If society were truly composed of such dysfunctional characters it would, for one thing, find it very hard to propagate. Humans would simply die off for lack of breeding. No surprise then that Rand chose herself not to have children. Her view was that an individual's primary obligation is to achieve his own well-being. Shades of Adam Smith - society benefits from the individual's enlightened self-interest. No problem there. But Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments also talked of the happiness of others giving pleasure even though one derives nothing from it. That's balance. So The Fountainhead is a good read, full of archetypes but fiction that is stranger than truth. The QSL is from WNYW, New York, a popular station heard in Cape Town on short-wave way back in 1967.

Imran can't quite reverse swing Pakistan's polls

Last month's Pakistani elections saw the first democratic transition of power..... and the winner waaaas...... Nawaz Sharif, who ruled once before, was deposed by the army and sent into exile. To the outside onlooker it seemed that the most high-profile candidate was Imran Kahn, one of Pakistan's great cricketers. Many would agree today that Pakistan produces cricketers of flair and talent and, if it wasn't for its dysfunctional politics, could probably be at the top of the world cricket. Imran was the cricket captain who schooled the wonderful bowlers Sarfraz Nawaz and Waqar Younis in the miracle of reverse swing. Up till then conventional swing was produced by shining the ball vigorously on one side to make it move in the opposite direction. In the right conditions you could shift it a lot through the air even at quite low speeds. I remember at junior school, we had one bowler who conjured up such prodigious inswingers that a leg slip standing next to the wicket-keeper could take the ball. Reverse swing occurs when the ball is quite beat up and moves in the same direction as the shine, such as it is. It also requires more speed, in excess of 80mph is good. Imran bought this talent to the Pakistani election. He took on the established parties and created a media storm. But his reverse swing in politics was probably too elitist to make serious inroads into the popular vote. Maybe, if he's prepared to continue the grind of constructing a political party he may yet prove a winning force in the next election, if the army doesn't intervene again. The QSL is from Radio Pakistan, Lahore heard with a local broadcast on AM one sunset at Partridge Point near Simon's Town, sitting in a car and using a short antenna up in a cleft above the sea.

Ben and the Assets

The Federal Reserve has come in for loads of criticism. Having once been regarded as the world's #1 central banker, Alan Greenspan's name is now mud in many circles. Ben Bernanke is also panned by those same detractors. But as each quarter passes you see method in the madness. While many fret that the huge rise in the Fed's balance sheet can only lead to disaster, the US personal balance sheet continues to improve. The latest data for 1st quarter 2013 shows another 8% rise in real personal net worth, following 8% and 9% in the previous two quarters. Many have lambasted the US for debt excesses especially during the 2000s. But what most fail to remember is that debt has its counterpart on the flipside of the balance sheet. And while the US consumer has reduced its debt burden, personal assets have surged. Total assets are now at $84 trillion while liabilities are at only $13 trillion, having fallen steadily for the past 5 years. Housing and equities make up a big slug of those assets and it's fair to say that these do not look particularly overvalued right now. On a cash flow basis, the combination of low interest rates and falling debt has pushed the consumer interest bill down to a record low of 8.3% of income, compared to 12.8% before the credit crunch. Being a liberal economist I argue that too many distortions and vested interests in the US economy lay behind the original explosion of debt and the 2009 credit crunch. However, once that had happened the Fed's focus on rebuilding asset values has slowly but surely medicated the recovery. We may see the outlook for US consumers continuing to improve for several years. Ben Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia. The QSL is from WTEL, Augusta, operating  in the US AM x-band and heard in Kent in 2001.

Marion Island: Water, water everywhere and many drops to drink

South Africa has declared the area around Marion and Prince Edward Islands in the south Atlantic a marine protected zone. These two global 'biodiversity hotspots', over 2000 km south-east of Simon's Town, are home to many of the planet's remaining albatrosses as well as seals and penguins. It is quite likely that the mythical albatross shot with a cross-bow by the story-teller in Coleridge's wonderful "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" had a home on the island. Probably the best-known stanza  is: "Water, water everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink". This is somewhat strange as the area around the islands averages 94 inches of rain a year, about 3 times London! The poem in turn was probably inspired by one of Cook's voyages into the Antarctic circle looking for what was then still a fabled southern continent, only to be discovered 22 years after it was written. The total area covered is 180000 sq km, about the size of Uruguay and slightly bigger than SA's Eastern Cape province. The islands themselves are a teeny 335 sq km. The protection zone is supposed to be enforced by the fisheries patrol vessel Sarah Baartman. Aside from the question of how this little ship could realistically patrol such a gigantic area, it is currently holed up here in Simon's Town harbour with paint flaking off its bright red hull waiting to be repaired, along with a number of other SA Fisheries boats. Marion Island is named for the French explorer Marion du Fresne. The QSL is a telex from the South African base on Marion, using just 1 kW and heard in Johannesburg in 1985.