Happy Holidays -- December 24, 2016

From a reader, no source provided:

From twitter: I'm agnostic on this one. I guess it depends on where you are from.

My values and roots are in the midwest. Some of my most memorable memories are of the northeast. My coming-of-age years were spent in the west. We retired in the south. Although I hate to use that word, "retired." I am as busy as ever. Just not getting paid for it in dollars. Getting paid in love and kisses from the granddaughters.

Bullet train: LA Times has an update on the hunt for dollars to build the $64-billion bullet train. If not a subscriber, google works fine. How much interest in this story? There were three comments.

Saudi Aramco IPO: the initial IPO, it is said, could be significantly less than 55 of the company, probably sometime in 2018. Now it is being reported that the Saudi Arabia government plans to sell 49% of Aramco over the next 10 years. Via twitter.

Backstabbing. Trump talks Egypt into pulling its resolution condemning Israel building new settlements in Palestinian occupied territory. New Zealand, Malaysia, Senegal, and Venezuela introduce the resolution. Trump: with regard to the UN, "after I'm president, things will be different."

***********************

Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

	12/24/2016	12/24/2015	12/24/2014	12/24/2013	12/24/2012
Active Rigs	41	62	173	188	185

***********************************

The Literature Page

A few months ago I stumbled across The Edge of The World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe, Michaael Pye, c. 2015. It fits nicely with a couple of other books on the Icelandic sagas and the history of the Lewis chessmen, which I have also been reading. When I first began reading The Edge of The World I was thrown off a bit by the introduction. The story begins in Domburg, the Dutch beach. Despite all our time in Europe and all my reading, I don't recall Domburg. I was "confused." I did not know how I missed that. But it was what it was and I moved on.

Today, of all things, I'm reading an essay on a art, "A Starry Christmas" by E. A. Carmean in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. This particular essay was on a subject with which I had absolutely no interest, but I've said, I will read almost anything if it's good writing, so I slogged through to the end. And I was rewarded.

About halfway through the article,

The younger [Piet] Mondrian was influenced by the Post-Impressionist works of Georges Seurat and of fellow-countryman Vincent van Gogh, the latter receiving a posthumous exhibition in Amsterdam in 1905. Mondrian's subjects include landscape trees, as well as ocean dunes painted at Domburg on the North Dutch coast.

Mondrian's second wave of modernism came when he was living in Paris between 1912 and 1914....

World War I confined Mondrian to Holland, and he returned to the Domburg shoreline. There, taking a cue from the Pointillist color "dots" of Seurat's own coastal pictures, Mondrian used short horizontal, vertical and crossing bars to create seascapes of a pier and the ocean, and soon, a starry sky above. 

Had I not read The Edge of the World, I would have completely missed the Domburg connection in Carmean's essay.