What The Schiff? I Noted The Same Thing; The Black Friday Effect -- November 23, 2018

The Red Queen may be dead but Black Friday most certainly is not.

This is truly amazing. I noted the same thing. I have had to re-start my computer several times this morning to get a new internet connection. Things are so slow. I thought it was "my" problem or someone was hacking my system.

Nope, Scott Adams noted the same thing:

I can't wait for the Drudge headline announcing record Amazon sales. And the market thinks tech is dead. The smart money thinks the US is headed for a recession. Wow.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or what you think you might have read here.

Starbucks this morning: seating for 30; generally standing room only. Today, I am the only customer sitting in Starbucks and that has been that way for the past 85 minutes. There is one person at the counter, and one person has just come in to pick up a mobile order. Dead, dead, dead. Truly amazing. Hopefully next year President Trump simply declares -- by executive order -- that Thanksgiving will be a five-day affair, Thursday - Monday. As if any work gets done Monday after Thanksgiving. Think of all the money the USPS would save by shutting down for five days. Would anyone notice?

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For The Granddaughters

I don't particularly enjoy this book but, wow, all the new words! French words.

The Great Journey, David McCullough, c. 2011.

A portrait of the Americans traveling to Paris in the 1800s, starting with the 1830s and ending with Henry James in 1875, or thereabouts. The inside map is of Paris, 1870. Twelve arrondissements. Since then, twenty and they have been re-numbered. Today, the twenty arrondissements are arranged in a "golden ratio" spiral. The first four arrondissements are on the right / north / east side of the Seine. Then five, six, and seven on the left side, the Latin quarter, before crossing back over the Seine to number 8. And then the spiral continues out to 20.

Cumulative, life-time, I've probably spent a year in Paris. And like Owen Wilson's character in Midnight in Paris I haven't been there enough.

But I digress. So many "words" that one does not often see these days.

Disclaimer: there will be misspellings. There are variants of spellings. I will correct them later.

My favorite: flâneur, although the French write, flâner -- page 31.

Postillion: most, most interesting -- if the the horses are two abreast, the postillion sits astride the "left" horse. Interesting. Same side as the driver of automobiles in most regions of the world (exception: the Brits).

The huge stagecoaches that carried passengers from Le Havre to Paris, in the 1830s -- "room for 15 passengers in three "apartments": three in the front of the coupe, six in the intérieur, and six more in the rotunde in the rear. Each of these sections was separate from the others, thereby dividing the rich, the middling, and the poor." Don't you just love coupe. For the rich. Coupe de Ville.

The driver of this stagecoach? The conducteur.

By the 1830s, trousers had replaced britches. On this page McCullough spells the word, flâneur.