Silent Moorish frogs read best sellers in colorful pants
I hope that you are enjoying a happy life full of wonder and prosperity. Here, Nazy and I awoke to an unexpectedly beautiful late spring Saturday. It began when Nazy noticed:
“The sun is shining, Dan! We should...”
“...go see some flowers. We could look at the window boxes on the balcony. The pansy..”
“I want to see vast fields of tulips, hectares of azaleas, orchards of cherry trees...”
“We can’t drive to The Netherlands for the afternoon, dear. What about Alpine wildflowers?”
“Good idea Dan. But I think we should go to the rhododendron garden at Seleger Moor,” Nazy recommended.
Official Note: Readers are advised to remember who recommended this venue.
“I don’t believe that the rhododendrons are blooming,” I thought.
Official Note (from Nazy): Readers should be aware that Dan’s ‘thought’ was left unspoken.
Undaunted by the plethora of official notes I remembered that: “We will get a chance to revel in the cheerful cacophony of frogs. Remember last time?”
“It was frog mating season.”
“That’s right. Lots of excitement in the pond.”
And, with that, we prepared to depart. I used the time that Nazy spent deciding what to wear to solve the Riemann hypothesis. After getting dressed, she changed her mind, so I used the additional time to manually examine the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and “unambiguously detect the Higgs Boson,” I thought.
[Nazy, reading an early draft of this epistle, complained. She noted that the Riemann hypothesis has been unsolved since the mid-1800s and that multiple supercomputers are required to analyze results from the LHC. “No one will believe that you had the mental dexterity to solve these problems while I was getting dressed.” I explained that that was not my purpose. “Quite simply, my dear, I am using written narrative to convey the amount of time that I had available for this purpose.”]
Eventually (really eventually), Nazy was ready. But.
“Now it is too late for us to go,” she said.
“It’s a short drive,” I replied. “I wonder why we’re running late,” I thought.
“It will take two hours to get there,” Nazy opined.
“It will take twenty minutes,” I replied.
“You are wrong. It will take longer,” Nazy retorted.
In the end I prevailed. We arrived at Seleger Moor in 22 minutes.
“See?” Nazy said. “I told you it would take more than twenty minutes.”
We saw ferns. No rhododendrons No frogs. No azaleas.
It was, Nazy complained, a color-free trip to a flower garden.
“Color-free, my dear?” I replied. “I beg to differ.”
“What?”
“Have you looked at the pants you’re wearing?”
“Well...”
“Those pants make my polka-dot dress trousers look dull.”
“Dan..”
“Visitors, who like us, came because they thought that the flowers would be in bloom, are taking your picture. They’ll go home happy because of your outfit. People will ...”
“That’s enough Dan.”
We drove back by way of a Wildlife refuge. (The sign said that we shouldn’t feed the deer.) Then we took the ferry back across Lake Zürich.
On a completely different note, Nazy and I also discussed the tricky economic situation: The Great Recession. In Europe. citizens, weary of the non-existent recovery. are dumping incumbents left, right and center. In France, the left will probably replace the right, in Spain, the right has replaced the left and in Greece, the (inept) center collapsed.
“There is,” I explained to Nazy, “a solution.”
“Yes?”
“A tax on stupidity. Consider, for example, Petra Ecclestone.”
“Isn’t Petra an archeological site in Jordan?”
“Petra is the daughter of a billionaire. She lives in a 57,000 square foot house that her Dad bought for her - for $85,000,000.00.
“57,000? How big..”
“Roughly the size of Manhattan Island. Petra described the recent renovation: “We kept the gym, the three hair salons, the bowling alley, the cinemas.... the opera house, the train station, airport, football stadium...”
“That’s preposterous.”
“Right. Aware of the dangers of conspicuous consumption, Petra said that she ‘clears out her clothes every few weeks and sends them to Croatia’. She also said: ’I don’t have to do anything for myself. If I drop a towel, someone else picks it up - so I dedicate my time to something I enjoy. Anyone would. It’s why people play the lottery.’ She is ...”
“Stupid.”
“Jawbreakingly stupid, my dear. If we could tax that colossal stupidity, the world would be a better place, the deficit would be eliminated and the overall planetary IQ would increase.”
Note: I’m not making this up. I read about Petra in the latest issue of the Sunday Times, a Rupert Murdoch ‘news’ product. (Rupert, who owns The Times, The Sun, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and others, was recently declared ‘unfit to run an international company’ by a special Parliamentary committee. I agree. He delivers the Sunday Times to Switzerland on Monday.]
And, finally, as regular readers know, Stumbling Through the Tulips, my best-selling book, is now available on Amazon.com.
“Best selling?” Nazy asked.
“In only one week, my book has moved up more than 100,000 places in the Amazon Best Sellers Rank.
“Wow. Maybe it will go viral.”
“Right. Just as soon as Mark Zuckerberg gives me a ‘Like” on his Facebook IPO page.”