The UK ... Episode 1

Alrighty Then…

I’ve suffered through the first and extremely chaotic week back at work so I’ll take the time reminisce about my trip. It’s mainly for my benefit but I’ll throw Terry a bone too.

First things first, British Airways was a different flying experience and in a good way. It’s still an airplane, you’re still stuck in it for an ungodly amount of time but you are considered a human being. They serve you free drinks and meals (all included in the ticket price) and will gladly try to accommodate any request you have. The entertainment system is updated to the individual touch screens that allow you watch whatever selection you wish, unlike some other airlines (cough… !$#@!&* AMERICAN…cough). To top it off, the seat is actually comfortable.
Even more shocking than a somewhat pleasant flying experience was the immigration and customs process. I was not, I repeat not, treated like a criminal. I showed them my passport, told them I was a tourist, said I had nothing to declare and then simply walked out into the arrival area.

Ok, so that’s it for the mundane travelling portion. I arrived in London at 10:00 AM local time. I grabbed a train, transferred to The Tube and checked into the Radisson Kenilworth Hotel. I spent the next four days exploring the city, museums and the nightlife. I spent over four hours in the British National Museum. The one where they house all of the Egyptian artifacts including the Rosetta Stone. I also made a point of visiting the RAF museum which was incredible, and incredibly haunting.

The nightlife was wild.

I’m not going to incriminate myself online but I had a great time. I met tons of people and found that in London there’s somebody willing to drink to excess no matter what night of the week it is (This worked greatly to my benefit). Oddly enough, there were more people from around the world than there were from the UK. I met American servicemen from Germany, Aussies, Chileans, French, Fellow Canadians and actual Germans.

I have to comment on the way they dress in London. I’ll give you a hint; they don’t dress like me (like a country bumpkin that is). Everyone, men and women, seem to make it a point to dress somewhat more…upscale. I walked down Oxford Street (sort of like Robson Street in Vancouver) and the sheer amount of people shopping for ridiculously priced clothing was overwhelming. Suffice to say I became hopelessly irritated by the crowd within two minutes, despite while to breathe deep and not snap the necks of the idiots standing still in the middle of the %@!%! sidewalk. Crowd and irritation aside, it was obvious they take their clothes seriously in London.

Well, that’s all for now folks. Tune in next time to hear about my Adventures in Scotland.

April Rant

EDIT: For anyone who is interested, this article is an excellent discussion of inflation.

It has been quite a while since my last post. In part, this is because I'm lazy, but it is also because I don't like writing for the sake of writing; I prefer to have an idea first.

I'm still light on ideas these days, but I'll give this a shot:

The market is still incredibly overbought (14,000 on the TSX has been like kryptonite). Earnings multiples are huge, and there is no sign of any continuance of QE in the USA beyond QE2's completion in June. We stand a good chance of the ol' "sell in May and go away" quite soon, though I don't see Mr. Bernanke being able to pull any more rabbits out of his hat in August to have the sellers come back (though, in honesty, I didn't anticipate QE2 either).

Aside from that, silver has performed spectacularly (those who bought even just 2 months ago are up 30+%), though caution is becoming necessary. There is no good reason to go way overweight on precious metals. Discipline is simultaneously the easiest thing to understand in investing and the hardest to apply. Emotional decisions tend to cost money. Try to form a set of baseline rules and stick to them. I've always been a fan of the rule of thumb that precious metals should form, at most, 10% of one's portfolio. The only way I can add to my position, in absolute terms, is to inject capital into my entire portfolio.

Oil has also done well, but not for the reasons our overlords state. The fact is, the US has tripled its monetary base since 2008, and as such, prices of commodities denominated in that currency will eventually have to triple. It's a shitty situation, really, because true inflation is running well above 7% (annually) right now, so anyone who has made typical gains in equities has essentially been pacing inflation, at best. Of course, this means that anyone who has been saving money in GICs or a savings account is quickly losing purchasing power (indexed government pensioners aside, I'd hate to be years into my retirement right now).

From March of 2010 to March of 2011, gasoline has risen in price 19%, and fresh produce is up 19% as well. Coffee is up 10%, sugar is up 8%. Electricity is up 4%. There are lots more.

The government conveniently strips out anything that jumps in value (so, you know, food and gas) to come up with something called "core inflation", which lets them convince Joe Public that everything is OK. The fact is, people need to buy gasoline and food more than anything else. It's safe to say that wages haven't increased 18% year over year. The continuing practice of manipulating the way inflation is measured to justify an unnecessary low-interest rate policy is only going to delay the inevitable and make things worse.

Going forward, I still think silver has some considerable upside, though we can very easily get into bubble territory if the public starts buying in a major way. At a 30:1 ratio with the gold price, we are still far below the, albeit long-term, historical average.

There are still some good plays out there in oil, as well, though as I said, these positions will essentially follow inflation in the near term.

Achieving returns that surpass true inflation is going to be a considerable task going forward.

For the future, I'm starting to consider a shift toward defensive stocks, in anticipation of a summer decline.

April has been a busy month for us. We've have travelled to Edmonton twice, Vancouver, and I'm off to Cranbrook this weekend. I'll be off to Vancouver again in May for work, and once summer is in full swing (if that ever happens) we'll be gallivanting all over Western Canada, as per usual.

One thing that won't be taking up any of my time in May, though, is voting.

Call me what you will, but my argument for abstaining is the following.

1) I want no shred of responsibility for any one of these idiots getting into power.
2) There is no candidate that represents my values (and I don't want to run...yet).

The first candidate to come out and say "I will lay off public sector employees until the budget is balanced" would have my vote. This won't happen.

The first candidate to say "Government spending will be less than tax receipts for the next 25 years so we can pay down the national debt" would have my vote. This won't happen either.

The first candidate to say "All MP's will be paid a salary equivalent to the average Canadian's annual earnings (less than $46,000 a year) so that their decisions are in line with the plight of the average Canadian." would have my vote. Again, this won't happen; how can we trust important economic decisions to politicians who pull in a salary that puts them in a completely different class of people?

It doesn't matter who wins next week, the result will be the same. Continuing necessity goods inflation and debt-financed asset deflation (on the way).

The one thing that would get me to the polls, other than a smart candidate, would be a box on the ballot that said "None of the above".

In addition, if the majority of the public voted this option, then all the candidates would be thrown out and new ones would be nominated, and another election held, until somebody won.

Seems pretty simple to me.

This ended up being a lot longer than I thought.

Peace out, bitches.

Wandering the Globe yet Not Quite by Myself

Well hello all fans/obliging family members who read the Sentient Deli. I’m Anton, yet another friend of Terry’s with his own slanted view of the world. Terry has asked me to blog (still surprised that’s considered a verb) all of my travels so that he can live vicariously through me. I work at a gold mine in the Dominican Republic and every six weeks I go gallivanting around the planet to wherever my impulses take me.

The most recent urge took me to the United Kingdom but I’m not going to get into it right now as I don’t have the time required to discuss all of which I’d like to. Instead, I’m going to comment on the best invention for us wandering types ever to be created.

Smartphones.

That’s correct; the best things ever created for travelers are smartphones. Let me illustrate this with a bit of my experience.

I woke up in my hotel on my first day in London and set out. I had just updated my friends and family as to my location and activities through both Facebook and a quick phone call. I then found the directions to the British National Museum using Google maps and while walking there, started researching areas to get lunch (as in good pubs). While eating lunch, I also found and booked hotels for the second half of my journey in Scotland in addition to scoping out the best area in London to party on a Monday night.

All of that information took mere minutes to find. I did not have to line up at a tourist information center, I did not have to harass random locals with annoying tourist questions and best of all I did it all on the fly. The prepaid SIM card cost a total of 15 Canadian dollars for which I received 500mb of access, 3000 or so text messages and 10 dollars in phone credits.

Throughout my trip: I was never lost, I was never bored and I was always connected.

Bloody Brilliant.

I recommend you never leave home without one.

Well, that`s all for now. I will of course follow up with details of the actual trip lest I provoke Terry.

On the Road... Again

Hey hey, there's an Android app for Blogger. I have submitted an image of yesterday's dinner for inspection.

Working in Calgary is really lame right now. Unseasonably cold weather and problems with the project make it seem like I will be here forever.

I am starting to think most people's interest in some sports is rooted in not having anything else to do. With hockey on at virtually every restaurant I've been to in the past eight weeks I am actually slightly interested in the playoffs... yikes.

On the other hand, I genuinely enjoy watching curling every now and then so I am probably just not wired right for hockey and the like.

Anyone have any tips for things to do after dinner in Calgary on weeknights? I've already exhausted walking through the nearby malls and the current movies that interest me at the theatre.

Choir

So this will be a bit of a departure from my normal posts about travel and random bits of the internet, but I think it will, at least, be interesting.

Most people may not know this, but I am a big fan of choral music.  I sing in a large chorus and direct a rather small (but fun) one.  Recently I have become somewhat obsessed with choral music on YouTube.  In specific, The King's Singers and Eric Whitacre.  So I've decided to devote this post to talking about some of my favourites that I've found.

The King's Singers
The King's Singers are a British group formed in the late 1960s by a group of choral scholars from King's College in Cambridge.  Since then, there have been a few changes in membership but they have always remained supremely British in styling.  Their tone is generally pure with only a hint of vibrato as a colour rather than a staple.  They also make fantastic use of a very uniquely British tongue-in-cheek sense of humour.

Their repertoire is impressively wide and varied.  The core of this repertoire has always been madrigals, mostly French and English.  The French madrigal Il Est Bel et Bon by Pierre Passereau best shows off the incredible skill and flexibility that this group possesses.  For those not familiar with choral works, singing that quickly and accurately is extremely difficult.  Contrasting the traditional madrigals, the King's Singers are also big fans of modern and pop music.  This ranges from their love of the Beatles (such as Blackbird) to more "untraditional" choir repertoire such as Duke Ellington's Creole Love Call which has no actual words but simply sounds mimicking a jazz ensemble.

However, my two favourite pieces (as far as I've discovered) are Masterpiece and Spem In Alium.  These two pieces could not be any more unique from each other but both manage to highlight the King's Singers' immense talent.

Masterpiece is a rather recent piece by Paul Drayton in which each section is devoted to a composer or period of music throughout the history of western classical music.  Each composer's distinctive style is cleverly, accurately, and humourously imitated producing a very interesting look at the last 400 years of music history.

Spem in Alium is a motet composed by the English composer Thomas Tallis in the 1570s.  The unique part of it is that it was written for a total of 40 voices in 8 choirs of 5.  To accomplish this, the King's Singers' "perform" the piece in a recording studio and use a technique called multitracking to layer their own voices on top of each other producing a uniquely thick and warm texture.

The King's Singers have also recently published two full concerts to YouTube.  This includes 2006's From Byrd to The Beatles and their 2008 Live at the BBC Proms celebrating their 40th anniversary.  The first is especially interesting to me as it includes some behind-the-scenes information on Spem In Alium.

Eric Whitacre
Eric Whitacre is an American choral composer who focuses on very dense pan-diatonic chords which produce a unique sound and style.  However, the more interesting thing about Whitacre is his new concept of the virtual choir.  He will publish a video of himself conducting one of his pieces and requests people from around the world to submit a video recording of them singing one or more parts.  Not only is this notable for the fact that he essentially gives away the music for this purpose, it produces choirs which are uniquely diverse and massive.

The first virtual choir was put together in 2010 and featured Whitacre's Lux Aurumque.  Over 200 videos were submitted by 185 people in 12 countries.  It was an immense success with over 2.5 million views to date.  In the light of that success, another virtual choir was put together this year using Sleep.  The response was impressive.  Over 2000 voices from 58 countries submitted themselves.  This included several full choirs who recorded the piece together.  The result is beyond impressive.  Having 2000 choristers sing together in a single physical location would be nearly impossible, but through the magic of the internet, we can hear what that might sound like.

Soon...

I just finished a barrage of road trips totalling over 4,000km in the last 10 days. Thus, I am going to be skipping out this week again on posting.

Perhaps one of the others can grace us with a slice of wit this week.