Seth's Blog - The Roush Effect

Gerald Roush, who recently died at the age of 68, was a long time Ferrari enthusiast. Nothing too interesting in that you might think, but as my big brother Seth Godin explains, this obsession led to a very nice little earner indeed, simply by compiling lists of information on Ferraris around the world and selling this info on a subscription basis to a few hundred people.

This is it, I feel. Find a tribe which has a passion for something, and provide everything that that group of individuals want to know about their passion (and sod the rest) and charge them a little bit of money for it...

....of course, it helps if you yourself have a passion for the same thing, and Roush's obssession started in his teens when these things tend to take root. But for those of us in our 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, I don't for a minute believe all is lost. It's just a question of hitting on something that works; even in a small country like Estonia, we have the internet.

Or maybe you prefer giving a huge amount of your life that you'll never retrieve to employers who don't care if you live or die, performing a task that anyone else could do just as well, donating twenty something per cent of your hard earned money to incompetent Governments to piss up the wall (it's salutary to reflect that the Islamic faith demands as zakat, one of its five pillars, that an adherent  gives just 2.5 per cent of their income to the poor, not ten times that, and this for an unequivocally worthy cause) and having nothing to show for it at the end.

Anyway, it's a good post.

Shackleton's Disillusionment

A (very) short story..

After all the privations the team had suffered over the past months, Ernest was at a loss as to why they had disappeared. Only yesterday they'd held a vote of confidence in his leadership in letting him overrule them in his choice of campsite for the evening– not the shelter from the cruelty of the Southern ocean that was offered by the lee of a small bluff, the Bosun's choice, nor the cook's choice, a spot right on the beach, convenient for the quick despatching and preparing of the fish that they would surely be able to land, but the unpromising crush of rocks, held together by robust gorse, where they had finally struck on

So now where were they? Barely a trace of them, aside from a couple of empty pemmican tins and ski equipment, surplus to requirements during the summer months in South Georgia, and yet Ernest discounted the idea of a mutiny out of hand.

His curiosity therefore could hardly fail to be drawn by a small square of yellow light which appeared at just the spot where the horizon melded into the grey lowlands, which a short walk revealed as coming from a house – no, a hotel, the word emblazoned in no less than three languages, the proprietors no doubt ready to take any and every business which might drift in from the sea.

The vantage point offered by a steep, glaciated, geological feature which he'd forgotten the name of enabled the now deeply puzzled Ernest to look straight through the open window, from which he'd already caught bursts of aggressive, forced laughter, only to see the rest of the crew, very drunk, and clearly happy to have found environs which wouldn't have been out of place in yorkshire or guernsey, even more so that they were free of their leader's jurisdiction at last.

For the first time in his life Ernest felt truly left out.

Shackleton's Disillusionment

A (very) short story..

After all the privations the team had suffered over the past months, Ernest was at a loss as to why they had disappeared. Only yesterday they'd held a vote of confidence in his leadership in letting him overrule them in his choice of campsite for the evening– not the shelter from the cruelty of the Southern ocean that was offered by the lee of a small bluff, the Bosun's choice, nor the cook's choice, a spot right on the beach, convenient for the quick despatching and preparing of the fish that they would surely be able to land, but the unpromising crush of rocks, held together by robust gorse, where they had finally struck on

So now where were they? Barely a trace of them, aside from a couple of empty pemmican tins and ski equipment, surplus to requirements during the summer months in South Georgia, and yet Ernest discounted the idea of a mutiny out of hand.

His curiosity therefore could hardly fail to be drawn by a small square of yellow light which appeared at just the spot where the horizon melded into the grey lowlands, which a short walk revealed as coming from a house – no, a hotel, the word emblazoned in no less than three languages, the proprietors no doubt ready to take any and every business which might drift in from the sea.

The vantage point offered by a steep, glaciated, geological feature which he'd forgotten the name of enabled the now deeply puzzled Ernest to look straight through the open window, from which he'd already caught bursts of aggressive, forced laughter, only to see the rest of the crew, very drunk, and clearly happy to have found environs which wouldn't have been out of place in yorkshire or guernsey, even more so that they were free of their leader's jurisdiction at last.

For the first time in his life Ernest felt truly left out.

Thought For The Day No. 31 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

"Never does a man portray his character more vividly than his proclaiming the character of another."

Winston Churchill

Where The Worst Is Better Than Most People's Best..

I normally disparage list programs, as in those 'top 100 films/TV ads/comedians' etc that seemed to be the staple of Channel 4's output when I left the UK 5 years ago anyway, but I'm as susceptible to the Beatles as the best of us, so can't keep away from this...all of the Beatles' output (more or less, doesn't include those bootleg things they did in Hamburg, or the Decca demos, and quite rightly so).

...naturally there's plenty of room for debate, I've only got to the 160s as I type, and as expected about half of the White Album has already been represented plus that sub-Frank Zapper one they did with Brian Jones, but please, putting 'The Word' at 174!! You Blaspheme! Come to think of it 'I Wanna Be Your Man' doesn't belong in the 180s either...

Well, as I implied, we've all got an opinion on them...

POSTSCRIPT: on watching all of the countdown, this person has managed to omit anything that was a cover (which lets out 'twist and shout' and 'money' for example), omitted 'penny lane' and some other famous songs, and cannot count. So forget that then.

On This Day 346 Years Ago ...

..London Diarist...

19th August 1664

The news of the Emperour's [sic] victory over the Turkes [sic] is by some doubted, but by most confessed to be very small (though great) of what was talked, which was 80,000 men to be killed and taken of the Turke's side.

The battle to which Pepys is referring must be the Battle of Saint Gotthard which had taken place nearly three weeks earlier on 1 August, near the modern day Hungary-Austria border. The scrap was  between Leopold I, the Habsburg emperor of Austria, and the Ottoman empire, under whose control much of Hungary had come since the previous century. The Ottomans had taken Transylvania and Leopold essentially wanted to take it back, in the process recruiting various Protestant north German allies. Despite being outnumbered about 3 to 1 the Austrian forces under Montecuccoli were triumphant and, whilst not inflicting the damages which Pepys himself had doubted, took between 16-22,000 casualties. The Ottomans were inexperienced in fighting modern, disciplined ranks of musket-bearing soldiers and a failure to adapt to this was eventually their undoing in south-eastern Europe. A 20 year truce was signed and, whilst Hungary was not liberated from the Ottomans immediately, that process started from around 1683. So there you go.

The Glamorous world of Tallinn Real Estate

From the pages of a real estate website here - they want 105 000 EEK (6,711 Euros, 5,530 GBP, 8,624 USD,  3,121,197 Zimbabwe Dollars)  for this!

Check out the main room - I'm feeling a bit better about the continual mess in my place already. It almost smells through the internet page! As for size I think I'd be moving into the mailbox in the hallway to extend myself a bit. It would probably need as much again spending on it to get it straight.

Still, try and see the potential...hmm, I can't really.

Desert Island Reads

If I were to be stranded on a desert island, or some other island, assuming it didn't have WiFi, and I could only take five books with me (presumably having planned to be stranded), they would probably be the following. I have only chosen books which were actually on my shelf, if I've survived without them in Tallinn then it seems reasonable they'd only get used as fire building material on the island...


Viktor Frankl - Man's Search For Meaning
Actually I've read this multiple times so it may be taking up valuable space in my survival kit that could otherwise have been taken up by a beta emitter, fishing line or condoms (excellent water carriers apparently). In any case the ultimate read in my view, by a survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps, but also a psychiatrist who had developed his own school of thought in Vienna before the war and got the chance to test his theories in the field so to speak. Triumph of the human spirit and other such platitudes cannot do it justice, just read it.


Phantastes - George MacDonald
The original fantasy novel, but don't be put off. One of a kind really, Anodos' travails through fairy land always seem to offer something new each reading. I don't think they have ash or alder trees in the tropics, so I'd be safe.


Guide to Rational Living - Albert Ellis and Rober Harper
Not sure if this would be really required in my hermitage, but it's a sensible book in a vast field. Nothing about how, as an infant, you'd wanted to murder your father and replace him in your mother's bed, surrendering to a higher power, or the secret of unleashing the hidden art of war for the soul, but rather a common sense approach to how we think ourselves into all sorts of jams - and thus can think our way out of them again (presumably including being down about being marooned).


Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
A cultural history of Russia which makes quite a refreshing change from his excellent 'People's Tragedy' survey of the Revolution, in that it doesn't have death, duplicity and damnation on every page. So much so that I've never really read it cover to cover, but dipped into it to such an extent that I must have read the bulk of it. My fave two paintings culled from the illustrations page - Surikov's 'The Boyar's Wife Morozova', and Malevich's 'Red Cavalry'.


Battle in the Civil War - Paddy Griffith
A little military book with lots of sketches, details the various logistical, tactical and strategic considerations that faced the armies in the (American) civil war. Doesn't sound too promising, and yet it's superb. I picked it up years ago in, I think, Foyles' in London. I would presumably have plenty of time on my island fastness to reenact, using sand and pebbles, where McClellan went wrong at Antietam.