The Accidental Reservist

About the rice shortage...nevermind:

On May 19, Japan's Deputy Agriculture Minister, Toshiro Shirasu, said that Tokyo would release some of its massive stockpile of rice to the Philippines, selling 50,000 tons "as soon as possible" and releasing another 200,000 tons as food aid. ....

To understand Japan's role in deflating the rice market, it helps to visit the warehouses rimming Tokyo Bay. It's here in temperature-controlled buildings that Japan keeps millions of 30-kilogram vinyl bags of rice that it imports every year. Tokyo doesn't need rice from the outside world: The country's heavily subsidized farmers produce more than enough to feed the country's 127 million people. Yet every year since 1995, Tokyo has bought hundreds of thousands of metric tons of rice from the U.S., Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Australia.

....Why does Japan buy rice it doesn't need or want? In order to follow World Trade Organization rules, which date to 1995 and are aimed at opening the country's rice market. The U.S. fought for years to end Japanese rice protectionism, and getting Tokyo to agree to import rice from the U.S. and elsewhere was long a goal of American trade policy.

But while the Japanese have been buying rice from farms in China and California for more than a decade, almost no imports ever end up on dinner plates in Japan. Instead the imported rice is sent as food aid to North Korea, added to beer and rice cakes, or mixed with other grains to feed pigs and chickens. Or it just sits in storage for years. As of last October, Japan's warehouses were bulging with 2.6 million tons of surplus rice, including 1.5 million tons of imported rice, 900,000 tons of it American medium-grain rice.

It's one of the cruel ironies of global trade that poor countries have been paying through the nose for rice while Japan has been sitting on reserves ....

This time, the WTO rules—formally known as Minimum Market Access—acted as a safety valve for the market. Japan's 1.5 million tons of imported rice reserves amount to roughly 5% of the 28 million tons that are traded globally ever year, which explains why Tokyo's announcement had a sizable and immediate impact.

MacDon't Tread on Me

Typically American; don't like the deal? Sue:

McDonald's, a symbol for the spread of U.S. culture around the world, has found common cause with French cinemas and brasseries.

The fast-food chain is suing its landlord to avoid being priced off the Champs-Élysées after the rent for its outlet on "the world's most beautiful avenue" doubled in five years.

...."We don't want to leave the Champs-Élysées," said Sébastien Perochain, spokesman for the French unit of the company based in Oak Brook, Illinois. "It's a very prestigious location. But the rise in rent has been spectacular."

....The Champs-Élysées is the world's third-most expensive commercial property location, after Fifth Avenue in New York and Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, according to the real estate brokerage agent, Cushman & Wakefield.

Average annual rent on the Champs-Élysées is €7,364 per square meter, or $1,075 per square foot, compared with €11,983 on Fifth Avenue and €9,688 on Causeway Bay, Cushman & Wakefield said in a report in November.

....Now even some global brands are deciding that the address is not worth the cost. Planet Hollywood, the restaurant chain backed by the actors Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone, closed its doors a block from McDonald's at the end of February.

"Demand is still on the rise, so the surge in rents is far from over," said Thierry Bonniol, who oversees commercial property at the Paris real estate broker Atisreal. "The Champs-Élysées is very coveted given the sheer number of tourists that visit it."

Perochain declined to disclose what McDonald's pays for rent, the name of its landlord or any details on the lawsuit. The restaurant sits on the former site of the 1872 Rothschild mansion. It became home to what the French call "MacDo" in 1988.

Shy Away, Shy Away All

Allergic to other people?

Also nicknamed the "cuddle chemical", or the "love hormone", oxytocin has been shown by a wide range of work to play a role in social relations and maternal bonding, and is also released in sex.

Now it has been shown to turn people into trusting pushovers and brain scans reveal the reason why: inhaling the hormone lowers activity in the amygdala - a region linked with fear and danger - according to a study in the journal Neuron by Dr Thomas Baumgartner, Prof Markus Heinrichs and Prof Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich.

The same brain circuits identified in the study could play a role in social disorders.

Tests are now under way to follow up the findings to see if the hormone, introduced as a nasal spray, could overcome feelings of awkwardness, warniness and anxiety felt by many in social situations, from parties to meetings.

So called social phobia is the third most common psychiatric disorder after depression and alcoholism, affecting around one in 10 adults.

Trials of the nasal spray are under way on 120 patients to help treat the pathological shyness by one of the team, Prof Heinrichs.

On the Other Hand

The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board can be embarrassed after all:

Three months after declaring the defunct Ballard Denny's building a landmark -- which, for some, put into question the very meaning of the word -- Seattle's Landmarks Preservation Board unanimously said the owner may tear it down.

....The landmark designation for the Denny's, which Benaroya shut down last year, sparked passions because it touched on property rights, historic preservation, growth and the continued evolution of once-quaint Seattle neighborhoods. Hundreds of Ballard residents banded together to try to save it.

Their efforts worked at first, but Wednesday the board was required to consider its decision's economic impact on Benaroya -- a factor that by law it could not take into account three months ago.

....John McCullough, Benaroya's attorney, said the company looked at a dozen redevelopment alternatives that would have preserved the building, but no plan was feasible.

Even the rosiest option -- turning the Denny's into a high-end restaurant and building condos on the rest of the site -- posted a near 25 percent loss for Benaroya, he said. That's because the number of units built would have to have been reduced from the original redevelopment plan.

Board member Alyce Conti, a real-estate finance expert, agreed with McCullough's assessment.

"No lender is going to lend on this project, especially in today's environment," she said. "It's impossible."

Stir Fry

Ala Prigionese:

At the candlelit tables inside a deconsecrated chapel of what was originally a 14th-15th century castle, the meal itself is eaten with plastic cutlery.

But even though this is the Fortezza Medicea top-security prison, the white wine - Fattoria Sorbaiano - keeps flowing.

"The standard of the food is fantastic - the atmosphere, the people, and the place is incredible," said diner Sharon Kennedy, a resident of Volterra but originally from Scotland, who came to sample a special dinner at the prison.

The inmates at the jail in the picturesque Tuscan town - surrounded by rolling green hills and brown-tiled villas - have swapped their slacks for shirts and bow ties for a night. They are cooking up a sumptuous meal for curious diners who want to sample a taste of prison life.

Part of a project raising money for charity, the aim is also to teach cooking and waiting skills that could help the prisoners find work when they are released.

The scheme, for several nights a year turning the prison into a restaurant, began in 2006.

...."It is not just a distraction, it is more than that," said 39-year old inmate Arena Aniello. Originally from Naples, he has been in jail since 1993 for homicide: tonight, he is a waiter.

"(Prison life) is like a photocopy machine - you leave your cell, you go to work, you work out - the day is always the same, it becomes a habit. So this is a great thing."

Billions and Billions

In Zimbabwe everyone's a millionaire:

...inflation has burst through the 1 million per cent barrier. ....

As stores opened for business Wednesday, a small pack of regular locally produced coffee beans cost just short of 1 billion Zimbabwe dollars. A decade ago a billion local dollars would have bought 60 new cars.

A loaf of bread cost 200 million Zimbabwe dollars - enough for 12 new cars a decade ago. Fresh price rises were expected after the state Grain Marketing Board announced up to 25 fold increases in its prices to commercial millers for wheat and the corn meal staple.

Loser

The man who disposed of one of America's greatest fortunes is dead:

Huntington Hartford, who died on May 19 aged 97, was born into one of the wealthiest families in America and inherited a $90 million fortune at the age of 12, but blew it on a series of quixotic artistic and commercial ventures and expensive wives.

Born in New York on April 18 1911, he was named George Huntington Hartford after his grandfather, a Maine tea merchant who had founded the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in 1859. ....

...Hartford entered the family business, but found it difficult to concentrate on stock lists of pound cake and was fired six months later after playing truant to watch the Harvard-Yale football match.

In 1940 he put up $100,000 towards the founding of a new New York newspaper, PM, for which, fancying himself a writer, he became a reporter. But he soon gained a reputation for missing deadlines....

After the war Hartford moved to Los Angeles....

Encouraged by his new wife to make a name as a patron of the arts, Hartford set up an artists' foundation and, in 1954, converted an old cinema into a theatre where he staged his own adaptation of Jane Eyre with Jan Brooks as Jane and a hopelessly drunk Errol Flynn as Mr Rochester.

The script was panned by critics and Flynn dropped out but, undaunted, Hartford took the show to New York, where it played to empty houses for six weeks. Other ventures at this time included a "handwriting institute" (he even wrote a book on graphology) and an automated parking business in Manhattan which lost $1.8 million.

In 1959 Hartford sold $40 million of his shares in A&P to buy Hog Island, a two-mile strip of farmland 600 yards off Nassau, hoping to develop it into the St Tropez of the Bahamas. He renamed it Paradise Island and built the Ocean Club, a luxury resort with 35 acres of gardens modelled on those at Versailles and featuring a 12th-century French Augustinian monastery originally purchased and dismantled by William Randolph Hearst. ....

...the Ocean Club suffered because of Hartford's failure to obtain a gambling licence. Resorts International eventually bought him out for $1 million, leaving him with losses of around $30 million. In the early 1960s he built the Huntington Hartford Museum in Manhattan as a showcase for modern art, but he had decidedly unfashionable tastes, preferring "realistic" works (mainly, oddly enough, by Salvador Dalí) to "vulgar" cubism and abstract expressionism.

The gallery opened in 1964 to withering reviews both for its design ("a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops") and contents. The whole venture cost Hartford $7.4 million before he abandoned it.

.... "At least I tried to do something artistic with my money," Hartford would say. "What did Paul Getty ever do but make more?"

Dutch Treat

A baseball game, since at least WWII:

A former infielder with the New York Yankees, [Robert] Eenhoorn coaches the Dutch team that was the only one in Europe chosen to compete in the Beijing Olympics. He got his start playing ball at Neptunus, the club outside this port city [Rotterdam], before playing 37 games in the major leagues in the United States.

His father before him played ball, he said over coffee, recalling the years under German occupation during World War II, when Dutch kids turned to American baseball to stick it to the German occupiers. ....

As attested by the trickle of young Dutch ballplayers now entering the minor and even the major leagues in the United States, that wartime popularity never faded.

Asked what Dutch youngsters like about baseball, Eenhoorn said: "It's American; it's a summer sport, filling the gap left by soccer in spring and early summer. You know, we did research and found that kids like baseball, they like hitting the ball with the bat, they like the clothing. I don't think it's peaked."

Most Dutch baseball teams were in fact started by soccer clubs in search of a sport for the months when soccer is still. Johan Cruyff, the king of Dutch soccer, began his career as a catcher for Amsterdam Ajax's baseball team, before he ever kicked a soccer ball.

Where you find it

Gold is sometimes where it was found before:

Soaring gold prices, a recession and ingrained American optimism have combined to prompt thousands to head into the hills.

With the discovery of gold there in 1848, the California Gold Rush brought 300,000 people into the state, transforming what was then a backwater into the embodiment of the American Dream.

Fewer in number, "new 49ers" may have swapped picks and covered wagons for suction dredges and mobile homes but many are just as confident they will strike it rich.

....Land claims in the western states have soared and the Gold Prospectors Association of America says its membership has grown by nearly 40 per cent in a few years to 45,000.

.... Improved equipment has enabled prospectors to find gold – currently trading at $900 (£450) an ounce, that was missed before. Sometimes it is as simple as running over the debris left by earlier miners with a metal detector. Two years ago, one of the Scott River prospectors found a crack in the river bedrock which yielded , more than 23 ounces, worth as much as $40,000 at today's prices.

....The pan and sluice brigade are not the only ones eyeing up the old gold claims. Commercial mining companies are starting up in Nevada. In Idaho and Colorado. Another, more professional, gold rush is heading towards Mexico as mainly American and Canadian geologists and engineers are leaving their jobs in the big mining companies to get venture capital backing for gold mining in the Sierra Madre mountains.

As for the '49ers' notoriously rowdy off-duty behaviour, tradition is not completely dead, said Mr LaBox. "The drunken fights in the local saloon – that still happens. But there's less gunplay."

We Blame Busch?

Takin' back the High Life may prove costly:

Cash-strapped drinkers are starting to trade down to economy beers, the chief executive of Miller Brewing Co. said Thursday.

The Milwaukee-based brewer saw some shift between higher-priced, premium beers and economy beers such as Miller High Life and Milwaukee's Best starting in January, Tom Long told reporters on a conference call.

"We think it's primarily driven by decline of disposable income and pocket money that American consumers are feeling right now," he said.

....Americans also are spending less in bars and restaurants, and Long said Miller is seeing declines in sales to those businesses.

....Sales of flagship brand Miller Lite was up 1.1 percent, as were sales of Miller High Life. That brand's performance, on the strength of its humorous ad campaign urging people to "Take Back The High Life" reversed a three-year decline.

Essentially in the Puget Sound Family

In New York City, the Seattle area bands play might pretty:

Just one year apart — Paul is 47; Chris, 46 — they had some sibling rivalry, but were careful not to get in each other's way, playing different instruments (Paul, trumpet; Chris, reeds) and rarely competing in the same sporting events.

"It has never been me versus him," insists Paul Harshman.

Not until this week, that is.

Today in New York, the Harshman brothers go head-to-head at the Essentially Ellington competition. Paul Harshman will be directing the Shorewood High School jazz band, from Shoreline; Chris will lead the South Whidbey High School unit, out of Langley, on Whidbey Island.

Along with three others from the Puget Sound area, their bands are among 15 in the U.S. and Canada to make the Essentially Ellington finals. No region has ever sent five bands to Ellington before.

The Seattle area's success in the Cadillac of jazz competitions is legendary. Since Ellington was opened to schools in the West in 1999, Northwest bands have accounted for nearly a quarter of the finalist slots, and won the competition four times in the last nine years.

...."I hate to sound conceited," says Paul Harshman, "but we've got some really good jazz teachers here who have pushed each other to greater heights. The bar is higher."

Our jazz-education history goes back more than 40 years, in a dizzying genealogy of crisscrossing relationships and influences. Though Seattle's Garfield and Roosevelt High schools usually get the attention, quality jazz education has spread like a brushfire to the suburbs. The Harshman brothers are a prime example — they are the heirs of a jazz-education legacy handed down by four great teachers: Waldo King, Hal Sherman, John Moawad and Dave Barduhn.

Waldo King grew up playing music in Centralia with ex-Count Basie saxophonist Bill Ramsay. In 1960, King started the Garfield jazz program — the first in Seattle schools — and later those at Franklin and Roosevelt, where he taught from 1969 until his retirement in 1983.

....Around the same time, Dave Barduhn, a former student of King's, exerted a huge influence on the Harshman brothers as well. One of the most respected high-school and college jazz-band arrangers in the country, Barduhn encountered the brothers as the director of the Cascades Drum and Bugle Corps, a tradition related to competitive marching bands with drummers and brass instruments exclusively.

....That flame was also passed along by another founding father of area jazz — Hal Sherman. His Kent-Meridian High School jazz band swept regional competitions for years, and he also started the Kent-Meridian Jazz Festival at the old Opera House. The popular fest brought international stars to Seattle Center, and Chris Harshman remembers being attending as a child.

Scott Brown, the band director at Roosevelt, says that festival had a profound impact.

"Hal really showed the possibilities for what could be done, putting [bands] in a professional venue, not just your typical school concert in the gym," says Brown, whose Roosevelt band is another of the five competing at Ellington.

Norm!

Beer is his life:

A car driver in Australia has been fined for strapping down his beer rather than his young child.

Police said they were "shocked and appalled" when they pulled over the car south of Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory.

They said the 30-can pack of beer was strapped down between two adults in the back, with the five-year-old child unrestrained on the floor.

....Constable Wayne Burnett said: "I haven't ever seen something like this before.

"This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child... The child was sitting in the lump in the centre, unrestrained."

When Constable Burnett handed over the fine he said the driver "just looked at me blankly".

"He didn't get it," Constable Burnett said.

"I asked him about the fact the child was unrestrained and the beer was, and he said he didn't know anything about it."