Friday, November 03, 2006

 
I tried to have a little fun with Stuttaford's following post. If you didn't see "Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear" staring O.J. Simpson as "Nordberg" it won't make much sense. Even if you did, Andrew Stuttaford didn't read it(AOL lets you know this about mail sent to other members), and maybe you should consider the opinion of this prolific Corner blogger whose day job is in the "financial sector" before investing your own valuable time.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Georgia! [Andrew Stuttaford]

Swedish economist ( a sound one: they exist) and all-round good guy, Johan Norberg, is in Tbilisi, Georgia to chat about economic reform, but it's not all wonkery:

When Georgians do things, they apparently take it seriously. Yesterday at dinner we were entertained by dancers who attacked one another with swords. Quite aggressive and very impressive. And the Georgian prime minister Zurab Nogaideli gave a speech a la Castro - long, hopeful and filled with statistics and ambitions. But with a different sort of ambition, of course. He basically said that Georgia was going to become the most free trade-oriented country in the world and explained why corruption among the traffic policemen made him fire every single one of them. And even though Russia has stopped their exports, Georgia will grow by almost 10 percent this year. If I remember it correctly, the prime minister´s plan for privatisation went something like this:
Sell all government companies.
Sell all government assets.
And afterwards, the dancers attacked one another again.

Sounds like fun.

[My brilliant take-off sent the same day.]

"Jonah"* Nordberg, born in San Francisco, but since considered to be of "Scandalnavian" heritage, spoke yesterday in Georgia(Atlanta) from the perspective of a "surgeon of domestic political economy" asserting that the "personal is political." He recounted his "heroic struggle" to apply what he termed, "O.J.'s Razor" to the "Gridiron Knot" of no longer wanted "domestic entanglements." Expressing regrets over his role in "walking through the part of a lineman" as an undercover agent of "Police Squad" in Naked Gun 2 1/2, he further apologized for the subsequent scene in which he bounced down the steps of a baseball stadium while in a wheelchair, comparing it to the abuse heaped upon Tammy Duckworth.
He went on to describe his strategy of applying "a male fist in Aris Light gloves" with respect to intractable disputes and promised to " 'frame' the debate" to address the question of what soon-to-be-dead man would "walk the last mile in my Bruno Magli shoes." While declining to estimate his personal fortune, he said, "I wish I could get a nickel's rental for every time someone mangled what "I really said to Dan Rather, given the frequency of those misstatements": "What's the Hertz, Kenneth." He went on to complain about his abandonment by "fairway-weather-friends" such as the cast of Saturday Night Live who "threw me overboard"* when they declined to invite him back for their 25th Anniversary in 1999.
The speaker's plan for success went something like this:

1. Kill all your ex-wives.
2. Kill all your ex-wives' boyfriends.
3. Play on all the major golf courses.
4. Leave no divot unturned in search of "the real killer."

And closed his "cutting remarks" with an invitation to tomorrow's Halloween Bash in which his current girlfriend would wear the disguise of " 'Little Nicky", the Pez Dispenser."**

Best,
XX

[**The Nicole Simpson as Pez Dispenser joke, is an oldie, of course, and the other yuks are so obvious that most are probably not original either.]