May 2010

A Night of Vaudevillian Pleasure

30 May 2010

Before Vaudeville opened, one of the management team was doing a quick mental calculation of the number of people involved in making each evening’s performance happen. I seem to recall a tally in the vicinity of 60 or 70, covering everything from performers to kitchen staff and waiters. As I have so indulgently reported, my [...]

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Vaudeville’s June Menu

18 May 2010

It’s hard to believe that more than five months have whizzed by since the opening of Vaudeville. This equates to the service of nearly 25 000 meals, a rather startling realisation (more startling, perhaps, is how long it took me to get there as a guest. Read about my evening here). The total has been [...]

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The Power of Women in Business

14 May 2010

Women have had a raw deal for thousands of years. Denied education, the right to vote – or, even as recently as the 70s, requiring the counter-signature of their husbands in order to open a bank account – women were burnt at the stake under vague suspicion of witchcraft. In the modern world, they are [...]

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How to Win Any Election, Not

13 May 2010

Trawling the ocean of e-books can be an entertaining pastime. Today I came across a book (they call it a kit) that was clearly not in the libraries of either the Labour or Tory campaigns – How to Win Any Election. The author, “an accomplished political consultant” covers a wide selection of resources from fund [...]

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The World of Niche Diets

12 May 2010

I was highly stimulated after reading John Sculley’s book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple in the late 80s. Ask a question, get an answer, ask another question was the mantra of the world of knowledge navigation he foresaw. In a sense, the internet has made this a reality. However, I don’t think even he could have [...]

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Could this be a solution to the Greek crisis?

10 May 2010

Dinner table conversation last night turned to the UK elections. With my daughter and son present (aged 13 and 9) it then turned into a very general introduction to the concepts of hung Parliaments and budget deficits; in essence, the austerity that will need to be imposed upon the British fiscus made this a good [...]

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Fat Fingers and Black Swans

7 May 2010

It seems that wine isn’t the only field that casts a wider net in search of nomenclature. Yesterday’s cataclysmic sell-off on Wall Street saw major indexes dropping five percentage points in a matter of minutes. What triggered the panic- (or computer-driven) selling has not yet been conclusively established. One of the causes that’s been mooted [...]

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