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The little fish like the mangroves, the big fish like the little fish -- and we like the big fish. - Mr. Ahmed Shengabay, Eritrean fisherman/farmer.
I loved this line; hence this post. In the photo, Mr. Shengabay is on the right. To his left
is Mr. Simon Tecleab, an Eritrean marine scientist, and they are planting a mangrove seed in the Eritrean Red Sea village of Hirgigo. The photo is from AFP.
I came across this in an AFP story in Yahoo! about how Eritrean villagers, working with an American scientist, Dr. Gordon Sato, are planting mangroves along the coast to improve fishing yields, provide feed for livestock, fuel for their kitchens, and combat desertification. The project is apparently very successful. You can read more about this remarkable story here, here and here.
It occurred to me that this is the sort of post that would be ideal as a Tumblelog at Tumblr. All I wanted to do here was to quote Mr. Shengabay.
In my last job, I was the boss of the Indian unit of an American outsourcing company. Our customers would visit from America, and it was my job to entertain them, and make sure that they were comfortable. Most of these guys liked Indian cuisine, but every once in a while, you would get a few who wanted more familiar, less spicy food. I would take them to a restaurant close to our office called Sunny's
I hate going to Sunny's.
Sunny's is not a bad restaurant. The food is good, if expensive, and the decor is not displeasing. What gets my goat is that Sunny's, like a lot of expensive restaurants in India, offers Evian water by default to its customers. Bottles of Evian are placed on your table, and should you want to drink Indian bottled water, at a tenth of the price, you have to make a special request. The waiter comes, takes the Evian away, and replaces it with the Indian water. I would have to do this each time I went there - at the risk of seeming cheap to my guests. But this was a scam that I was determined not to fall for.
HTF did water from the French Alps become the automatic choice in a restaurant in Bangalore?
Danone, the owner of the Evian brand is hard at work in India increasing sales - changing its local partner, trying to get into joint ventures with large Indian firms, identifying Indian companies for acquisition. They also have an active marketing programme that includes sponsoring parties for 'beautiful people', and working the newspapers with stories about the 'miracles of water therapy'. You absolutely must read this astonishing article in the Times of India.
Water is clearly big business.
I was reminded of this when I read this great post by Zahra at Grub Scout about how water is becoming the next wine. There are, already, 'water connoiseurs' writing books to educate people on 'the epicurean delights of water' . Companies have introduced water that costs as much as $37 for a 750 ml bottle!
While you are at Grub Scout, you can also read Zahra's earlier post about how several New York city restaurants are banning bottled water. Reason and commonsense may still win.
World food prices have doubled or tripled over the past few years, with most of the increases happening in the last few months. A particularly depressing article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times looks at why this has happened, and what could be done to correct it (very little apparently). One of the reasons for the rise in prices, he says, is that the Chinese are eating more meat as they get richer, which puts more pressure on global stocks of foodgrains.
Read it here.
Raymond Carbone trades in energy options on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). Traders such as Mr. Carbone buy and sell billions of dollars worth of various metals and energy products, including crude oil and electricity. And they do this using the Open Outcry system, where traders shout and use hand signals on a physical trading floor.
Most exchanges in the world have moved to electronic systems, but defendants of the Open Outcry system claim that physical contact allows traders to 'speculate as to a buyer/seller's motives or intentions'. Mr. Carbone says he 'can signal a trade faster than you can type it.'
In this article by Ben Schott in the New York Times, Mr Carbone demonstrates the hand signals he uses on the trading floor. Fascinating.
I love reading The New Yorker, for the excellent writing, yes, but also for the incredible detail to which they go when following a story. The country that gets blamed the most for shortening attention spans across the world, is also the home of magazines that think nothing of devoting 40% of their pages to a single story. You read that story, and the feeling is similar to what you get when you have really done well for yourself at a feast.
Want to read such an article about the environmental damage in China? I found this feature by Jacques Leslie at Mother Jones. I counted the words-8901. There is also a photoessay by James Whitlow Delano at the same site. All lovely stuff.Thanks to Treehugger, for leading me to this article.
My primary email account is now Gmail. I also have Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, which I opened years ago. These mostly receive emails from websites that I have registered with, and since those are rarely important, I don't normally check these accounts very often. However, every once in a while, a friend or acquaintance sends a mail to my Hotmail or Yahoo addresses, and several weeks pass before I read them.
I recently found an interesting article on Lifehacker which explained how you could consolidate multiple email addresses with Gmail. It worked for my Hotmail address, which accounts for most of my non-Gmail email. It didn't work with Yahoo!- I would have to upgrade to a 'Yahoo! Mail Plus' email account for $19.99 per year to pop or forward email to other accounts. So I guess I will wait till Microsoft takes over Yahoo!, and comes up with a hybrid Hotmail/Yahoo! mail service. I wonder what they would call that - Windows Live Hoomail?
Ever been in a position where you are holding forth on your favourite French, Spanish, or Russian author/artist/director, and you hesitate, because you are not sure how to pronounce their names?You could bluff your way through, and hope that no one in your audience is going to correct you, or, you could look up Forvo, a Web 2.0 service where you can listen to the pronunciation of the word.At the time of writing this, Forvo had 2510 pronounced words in 177 languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi. Users can add words, either anonymously or with their usernames. Adding new words is easy.
However, as with all sites that rely on user generated content, Forvo is not perfect; the two most popular words in English are both what Forvo calls 'bad words', and the only two entries for Hindi, 'Mahatma Gandhi' and 'Tilaklakshmikanth(?)', are clearly fake. Still, as with other such websites, the proportion of idiots posting misleading entries should decline with time, and Forvo could end up being a really useful site.
is Mr. Simon Tecleab, an Eritrean marine scientist, and they are planting a mangrove seed in the Eritrean Red Sea village of Hirgigo. The photo is from AFP.
