Gender gap

Yesterday the company I work for, Verkis, was the first company in Iceland to receive the PwC gold medal for salary equality. The process involved an audit of the salary system to seek out any difference in remuneration for work conducted between the sexes. The outcome was that less than 2% difference exists and this percentage is so low that it implies that there is no significant variance between what John and Jane are paid, provided their work related backgrounds are similar.

Now this is great news for Verkis and all of us who work there both men and women. Verkis is an engineering consultancy that employs approximately 310 engineers and technical staff and I can testify that everyone is taken on their own merits irrespective of their sex, pay-wise or otherwise. What is sad that although Iceland is pretty advanced when it comes to gender equality very many companies here would not be able to say the same, a fact testified by the fact that we are the first company to receive this level of the salary equality prize. The latest figure for the country as a whole that I could find was from 2007 when women on average made 15,9% less an hour than men while non-explainable differences in salaries are 7%. Apparently the worst gender wage discrimination occurs in the public sector which to me is truly amazing as it is effectively controlled by political puppet masters, the same people that pretend to champion equality.

I do not understand the need to pay women less than men for the same work. There is no way it can be worded or set up that would change this firm fast opinion.

The world economic forum reports on many interesting things, the gender gap included. In its latest report on exactly this Iceland ranks as no. 1 with a mark of 0,853 where 0 is total inequality and 1 is perfect equality. We have been no. 1 for three years in a row now, before we were no. 4. This ranking is not only in the overall category, we also rank no. 1 in all of the subcategories: economic participation, educational attainment, health& survival and political empowerment. Considering that although we are no. 1, we still have over 15% difference in wages and 7% in salaries, I shudder to think what it takes to get a zero mark.

If you are interested in where your own country stands in comparison to the rest of the world, here is a link to the report as a whole where you can select different countries to view if you scroll to the bottom of the section on the left:

http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-2011/

If you are a bit like me and want to know who is the dunce I will save you going through the list of 135 countries – Yemen ranks at the bottom. This came as no surprise to me. I knew I guy who worked there for some months as a welder, joining together pipes in an oil supply line through the desert. As the country is war torn he was told to be careful of landmines. If he saw a procession of a woman, children, a goat and at the end a man, this was a sure fire sign of a land mine zone. The wife i.e. the woman was of least consequence, then the children, the goat and the most important the head of the family – the man.

When me and my family go out for a walk we walk side by side and our dogs run around our legs, sometimes heading the convoy and sometimes trailing it. But then again we have no landmines so we have never had to line up in order of importance. Not that I think our lineup would change much.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Paris quiz time

The other night I was at a 'mystery bookswap' at a great local indie bookstore - lots of fun! For a finale to the evening the owners conducted a 'pub quiz' on the swapped books series and characters. This inspired me to come up with a quiz for Murder in the Lanterne Rouge which pubs today!

1) Which building is the oldest in Paris?

a- the Nicholas Flamel house on rue Montmorency
b- the timbered building on rue Volta
c- both of the above
If you answer c you're right - historians continually argue over which building is the oldest - it's a toss up but records in the archives list both as the oldest remaining building in Paris



2) Square du Temple gets it's name from
a- a flower seller in the district named Temple
b- the Knights Templar
c- the Jewish synogogue nearby
If you answer b you're right - the square du Temple - now a park - is on the site of the 14th century Knights Templar former fortress

3) Where is the boulevard du Crime?
a- by the Seine
b - near the police Prefecture
c- none of the above
If you answer C you're right - at the turn of the century the boulevard du Temple was referred to for awhile as the blvd du crime because of the many theatres playing crime dramas on the stage

4) Aimée Leduc keeps all of these items in her purse except for:
a- Chanel Red lipsitck
b- computer encryption manual
c - red hightops for escape work
d - dog biscuit for her bichon frise Miles Davis
e - handkerchief
If you answered e you're right she wouldn't be caught dead with a handkerchief

5) Aimée Leduc has never driven
a - a moped through the Metro to escape
b - a bicycle
c- René's classic Citroën
d - a Segway in Montmartre

If you answer d you're right - she'd never be caught dead on a Segway. either.

This book takes Aimée back to the Marais, investigating in the oldest and smallest Chinatown in Paris set among 14th and 17th century buildings. I'll write more about the quartier next week meanwhile I'm getting ready for the road and hope to see you at a book event -
http://www. carablack.com/events.html

Cara - book launch Tuesday

Wine

I hope the rest of you found that as funny as I did.

Now, let's get serious.

Brazil. Not a place that immediately springs to mind when you think of fine wines, is it?

The country was largely colonized by folks from European countries where wine is the tipple of choice and where a meal isn’t considered complete without it, and yet Brazilians, on the average, drink less than 3 liters of the stuff, per capita, per year.

Most drink cachaça, much of it in the form of caipirinhas.

Don’t know what cachaça is?

Click here to find out: http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/03/cachaca-brazilian-tipple.html

We also drink lots of beer, most of which is really good. But the making of good wine, until recently, has eluded us – and many would say it eludes us still.

Why?

Well, remember those three rules for earning money in real estate?

Location, location, location?

The same applies to fine wines.

In the northern hemisphere, the grapes used to make Burgundies are grown at latitudes in the neighborhood of 47 degrees.

The ones used to make Barolos and Valpolicellas in latitudes of slightly less than 45.

Portugal’s Douro Valley clocks-in at 41.

The Napa Valley, in California, does well at about 39.

Spain’s Rioja region is at 37.

Algeria’s highlands are at 35.

But if you get any further south than that, the quality falls-off fast.

And the southern hemisphere?

Well, our friends from South Africa (my hat is off to you, Stanley and Michael) grow truly superior wine grapes in the area around the Cape of Good Hope. And so do the Argentineans, in the area around Mendoza, and the Chileans in the Maipo Valley, all of which are located at about the same latitude: 34 degrees.

Brazil’s wine-growing country, what little of it there is, lies as far away from the equator as you can get without crossing the southernmost border. It’s an area in which growing conditions are less than ideal and where wine neither travels nor stores well, but it’s the best we’ve got.

Back in the early days, the colonists really missed their wine.

The rich ones had it shipped to them from the mother country.

And many farmers tried to grow it, but they quickly discovered that a terroir suitable for crops like coffee and sugar cane is the last place you want to start planting wine grapes. The climate in such places tends to be humid, and those were the days before disease-resistant vine clones had been developed, so the first vines the colonists planted ( in São Paulo back in 1532 ) died in short order.

Mostly from funghi like the one shown above.

They did manage to find some places in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (map above) where drinkable (although not very high-quality) reds could be produced and slightly higher-quality whites, but getting them to the markets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro proved well-nigh impossible. Back then, the roads were very poor. And they stayed that way for a long time – all the way up until the twentieth century. But I’m happy to say that, like just about everything else in Brazil these days, the winds of change are blowing through the country.

The new reality has been heavily influenced by the arrival of, and investments by, a number of international wine companies. They brought winemaking technology and vineyard-management techniques to the industry and invested heavily in the planting of the European grape varieties, Chardonnay and Semillon (for the whites) and Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot (for the reds).

These days, the area around Bento Gonçalves, the heart of Brazil’s wine growing region, has more than 90, 000 acres planted in vines.

But we still have a long way to go. Last year, Brazil exported only 3.3 million dollars worth of wine.  

And, to give you an idea of how little that is, compare it to the 1.6 billion dollars worth exported by Chile.

Still, we’re getting there.

Click here to take a virtual tour of the facilities of Vinícola Aurora, Brazil’s largest winery:

I daresay the sophistication of the operation will surprise you.

Leighton – Monday

Bum's Rush

Those of you who don't live in North America are fortunate not to be sharing a continent with Rush Limbaugh.

If you're among the lucky few who haven't heard of Limbaugh, he's a vile, porcine rabble-rouser who is, unfortunately, the most brilliant practitioner of that most doleful form of public discourse, politically conservative talk radio.  I believe that we do ourselves no favors by underestimating our enemies, so I will acknowledge right here, up front, that Limbaugh is the best of a really appalling bunch.  He knows his audience and their prejudices intimately, his frame of reference is enormous, and he possesses a kind of brutish, blunt-object eloquence that's uniquely persuasive to those who believe that "progress" is a balls-out retreat to a less inclusive, less dark-skinned, less female world.

He's also a drug abuser who deputized members of his household staff to fill prescriptions for literally thousands of tablets of junkie popcorn -- Hydrocodone and Oxcodone, to name two.  Most people who did this would go to jail, but in Limbaugh's America, of course, some swine are more equal than others, so when the investigation became public, he avoided prosecution by submitting to a backbreaking 30 days in an outpatient program.  Three years later he was arrested and booked (although not handcuffed) for "doctor shopping."  Once again, justice was swift and severe: he was held for one grueling hour, and then arranged to have all charges dropped in exchange for paying $30,000 to offset the cost of the investigation.  To Rush Limbaugh, $30,000 is beer-can change.

American justice may be blind, but she listens to the radio.

Limbaugh recently reached a new low, which is the moral equivalent of sinking a deep shaft at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  A female college student--whom I won't name because I think what Limbaugh did to her is the verbal equivalent of a sex crime--was denied the opportunity to testify before the panel of rickety, prune-mouthed old men appointed by the U.S. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, to look into government policies regarding women's health and reproductive care.  (This is the legislative version of the Victorian tradition in which the ladies "withdrew" after dinner to discuss brands of lavender-water and the latest tatting techniques while the men smoked cigars and settled the issues of the day.)

If she had been allowed to testify, the young woman would have said that she felt that birth control should be covered by government funding. Her sentiments led Limbaugh to label her a "slut" and a "prostitute" and to suggest that, if she wants the American taxpayer to fund protection for her more intimate moments, she should videotape them and make them available to us all.

This sewer talk could be dismissed as the addled rantings of a drug-deluded pill popper except that Limbaugh is widely regarded as one of the beacons of the Repuglican Party, a sort of wide-waisted Delphic oracle for the release of trial balloons.  In an election year in which some Repuglicans have scaled new heights of fundamentalist Christian rhetoric, this Elmer Gantry-like condemnation of female sexuality is more than a bit chilling.

Elmer Gantry, of course, was a hypocrite, advocating a morality he didn't practice.  It's worth noting in this regard that Limbaugh, pillar of rectitude that he is, was caught by U.S. customs on his return from a "vacation" in the Dominican Republic with a great many Viagra tablets in his luggage -- tablets prescribed for someone else. (Shades of Oxycodone!)  Limbaugh made a joke about it, saying, among other things, "I had a great time in the Dominican.  Wish I could tell you about it."

Please, Rush, don't.  I beg of you.  Don't.  And please don't show the videos.

P.S. Limbaugh "apologized" this morning, saying that when he called the young woman a "slut" and "a prostitute," it was not intended as "a personal attack."  Well, everything's all better now.

Tim - Sundays

Keep It Clean

This past week marked the beginning of Lent for the Eastern Orthodox faithful.  It runs for forty days and ends on the Friday before Palm Sunday.  This year Greek Easter is April 15^th, one week later than Easter will be celebrated by Protestants and Catholics in 2012.  As I explained in an article around this same time last year (Is Easter Early This Year), Eastern Orthodox calculations of the events surrounding Easter are based on the Gregorian rather than Julian calendar.

So what does the beginning of Lent mean?  For those of you looking for a liturgical or religious answer to that question, I can assure you this is not the place to find one. Yes, I know that for the Orthodox Lent begins not on an Ash Wednesday (as it does for others) but on “Clean Monday” (which actually begins the night before), that the reference to “clean” refers to leaving behind sinful attitudes and forbidden foods during Lent, and that the theme for Clean Monday is set out in an Old Testament reading from Isaiah 1:1-20, stating in part, “Wash yourselves and ye shall be clean.” 

But that’s not what this piece is about.  What the beginning of Lent means as far at this piece is concerned is one thing:  FOOD.

In Greek the name is Kathara (clean) Deftera (Monday) and is a public holiday.  It probably also is, or at least should be, a holiday for vegetarians around the world.  That’s because Clean Monday generally does not permit the consumption of any animal with red blood or of anything derived from those animals.  In other words, no meat, fish, milk, cheese, yogurt, eggs, etcetera.  Many also exclude olive oil.  You see, Lent is about fasting.  If it’s starting to sound like a pretty boring feast day, trust me, you’re wrong.

But just to keep the interest of those unrepentant red meat lovers out there, the Greeks also have a day for you to circle on your calendars.  It’s two Thursdays before Clean Monday.  In Greek that day is called, Tsiknopempti, “pempti” meaning Thursday.  Tsikno is hard to translate, though most settle on “burnt” and call it “Burnt Thursday,” or use the rest of Europe’s name for the day, “Fat Thursday.”  To me, though, tsikno conjures up the engulfing smoke and scents of endless grills sizzling with meats.

 

Personally, I think a more appropriate name would be “Lipitor Thursday.”

As for Clean Monday, to Greeks it’s a time that is about a lot more than prayer and food. It’s regarded as the first day of Spring, a time to celebrate outdoors and picnic.  Kite flying is a huge tradition, as is dancing and music, and thoughts of a new beginning ... please God.

But back to the food. No one is supposed to eat until noon, but once it’s here, kali orexi!

Unique to Clean Monday is lagana, a generally unleavened bread eaten only on that day which serves as the perfect compliment to the rest of the holiday table (and is far different from the “matzoh” familiar to many as another form of unleavened bread).  Here’s just an example of what you might find to nibble on while you dream of that Big Mac.

Taramosalata, made of cod or carp roe, is sometimes called “the common man's caviar.”  It’s one of the tastiest and most famous of all Greek dips.

A fava (split pea) puree.

Yigandes, giant kastoria beans (similar in look to lima beans) generally combined in a casserole with tomatoes, onions, herbs, and spices.

Salads of marouli (romaine lettuce), three beans (fassolia), or perhaps something more daring such as revitho (chickpea) salad with artichokes and sun-dried tomato.

Dolmades, the traditional grape leaves stuffed with rice and fresh herbs

Peppers stuffed with bulgar and herbs.

Calamari, squid prepared fried or in any number of other ways.

Octopus grilled as is, or dressed up with tomatoes, capers, and other special touches.

Cuttlefish in wine sauce with pearl onions.

Garides, giant shrimp grilled with oil and lemon

Stews of wild mushrooms, onions, and herbs.

loukoumathes

Halvas (semolina pudding), loukoumathes (puffs of fried dough in sweet syrup sprinkled with cinnamon and walnuts), pasteli (sesame-honey candies) … and on and on.

Then, of course, there’s the ouzo, wine, and beer.

Some fast, huh?  Gotta got run now.  Suddenly, I’m very hungry.

Jeff­—Saturday

Still Baffling

This week marked the 37th anniversary of the Moorgate tube disaster. At 8.46am On February 28th 1975 a southbound, Northern Line train from Drayton Park entered Moorgate station, the terminus on that branch of the line. Instead of braking and stopping at platform nine it appeared to accelerate. Witnesses on the platform said the driver, Leslie Newsom, 56, was staring straight ahead, no emotion on his face, as the train hurtled past. The train went past the platform, into the overrun tunnel, over a patch of sand and slammed into the tunnel end at an estimated 40mph. The front carriages concertina'd on impact. The rescue crews worked in oppressive heat in the mangled wreckage for days freeing the survivors and then the dead. More than 70 were injured and 43 died - the highest number of fatalities on the tube until the 7/7 terrorist bombings.

The cause of the crash was a mystery. Newsom was a non-drinker, in seemingly good health and a reliable and experienced driver. There were traces of alcohol in his system, but it took four days to recover his body and the contents of his stomach had fermented in the tunnel heat, which might have explained it. In his pocket was £300, which, apparently, he had withdrawn to buy his daughter car once his shift had finished. Not the behaviour of a man who was planning to end his life, and so many others, in such a dramatic fashion.

Yet the post-mortem revealed that Newsom hadn't even lifted his hands to protect himself when it smashed into the wall. Nor had he lifted his fingers from the 'dead man's handle'. This was put in train cabs in case a driver suffered some kind of heart attack or seizure at the controls. If he or she lifted his hands from the handle then the train would brake and stop. But Newsom's hand was still firmly on it. He had taken no steps to stop the train, which one might have expected him to do had there been a technical fault. Some people believe this is evidence it was his intention to crash the train. Others speculate that he suffered some kind of white-out or seizure in which he froze. On a discussion thread on a London Underground forum I read a convincing theory written by a current tube driver which said that Newsom's mind probably wandered. He switched off completely, and by the time his focus returned it was too late. There are other theories, similar to the ones that people claim lay behind many car crashes, where a driver thinks about something - for example, what it might be like to drive their car into the next lane into the face of oncoming traffic - and seconds later they are doing exactly that. Did Newsom imagine what it might be like to drive his train through the station into the tunnel end and it became a reality? Only a week before a train he was driving overshot the platform by a carriage length. Was he reliving that experience? Or was that, as some claim, a dry run for his suicide?

The fact is we will never know. The only person who might be able to tell us is dead. What we do know is that it can never happen again. As a direct result of the accident, tube trains entering dead-end tunnels like Moorgate stop automatically. All across the network, tube drivers do less and less driving. There has even been talk of phasing them out altogether and having fully automatic, driver-less trains, like the Docklands Light Railway. However, proponents of driverless train were given pause for thought this weekwhen  a child was saved from death by a quick-witted driver. He had noticed the boy had fallen between the train and the platform and stopped the train setting off and crushing him. If he hadn't been there the child would have died.

Humans make mistakes - baffling ones, like Leslie Newsom - but they also have the ability to rectify them and react.

cheers

Dan - Friday

Herman Charles Bosman

LEOPARDS? - Oom Schalk Lourens said - Oh, yes, there are two varieties on this side of the Limpopo. The chief difference between them is that the one kind of leopard has got a few more spots on it than the other kind. But when you meet a leopard in the veld, unexpectedly, you seldom trouble to count his spots to find out what kind he belongs to. That is unnecessary. Because, whatever kind of leopard it is that you come across in this way, you only do one kind of running. And that is the fastest kind.

South Africa has a number of iconic writers – Nobel prize winners like Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, to say nothing of mystery writers.  But few South African writers have caught the spirit and feel of the Afrikaaner  life style of the first half of the twentieth century like Herman Charles Bosman.  He is widely regarded as our best writer of short stories, with an ironic twist which is simply delightful and illustrates the contradictions of that period.

Herman Charles Bosman

He was born in 1905 in Kuilsrivier in the Cape.  Afrikaans has a wonderful word: dorp.  Literally it means a small town or village, but it has become an untranslatable description for a town which requires a whole phrase in English: “a one horse town and that horse died yesterday”.  Kuilsrivier was a dorp.

He was always interested in writing, but studied teaching at the Johannesburg College of Education, and subsequently took a job at an Afrikaans medium school in the Groot Marico – an area of large, dry, bush farms on the way from Johannesburg to Botswana.  The characters he met there, his wonderful ironic turn of phrase, and his human insight led to a suite of superb stories exposing the foibles of the era.  His protagonist in these stories was often the inimitable Oom Schalk Lourens.  (Oom being the Afrikaans word for Uncle – a universal honorific for every male over the age of 30.  The women are Tanies.)

Oom Schalk Lourens

I remember the occasion that I came across a leopard unexpectedly,and to this day I couldn't tell you how many spots he had, even though I had all the time I needed for studying him. It happened about mid-day, when I was out on the far end of my farm, behind a koppie, looking for some strayed cattle. I thought the cattle might be there because it is shady under those withaak trees, and there is soft grass that is very pleasant to sit on. After I had looked for the cattle for about an hour in this manner, sitting up against a tree trunk, it occurred to me that I could look for them just as well, or perhaps even better, if I lay down flat. For even a child knows that cattle aren't so small that you have got to get on to stilts and things to see them properly.

He was a man with a checkered life.  In 1926 on a school break, he visited his family in Johannesburg and during a quarrel shot and killed his half-brother.  Initially death, his sentence was commuted to ten years hard labor and he was released after five.  A novel based on this time –Cold Stone Jug – is often regarded as his deepest work.  After that he carved out a literary career complete with Bohemian life style and multiple wives.

Abjaterskop

So I lay on my back, with my hat tilted over my face, and my legs crossed, and when I closed my eyes slightly the tip of my boot, sticking up into the air, looked just like the peak of Abjaterskop. Overhead a lonely aasvoël wheeled, circling slowly round and round without flapping his wings, and I knew that not even a calf could pass in any part of the sky between the tip of my toe and that aasvoël without my observing it immediately. What was more, I could go on lying there under the withaak and looking for the cattle like that all day, if necessary. As you know, I am not the sort of farmer to loaf about the house when there is a man's work to be done. The more I screwed up my eyes and gazed at the toe of my boot, the more it looked like Abjaterskop. By and by it seemed that it actually was Abjaterskop, and I could see the stones on top of it, and the bush trying to grow up its sides, and in my ears there was a far off humming sound, like bees in an orchard on a still day. As I have said, it was very pleasant.

After a party in 1951, he experienced severe chest pains and was taken to hospital.  Shortly after, he collapsed and died, not yet fifty years old.  His gravestone reads simply “Die Skryfer The Writer” indicating his achievement in the two European-based languages. 

Only three books were published in his lifetime, but since then many of his short stories originally published in obscure places have been rediscovered, collected and published.  All produce insight and a wry smile.

Then a strange thing happened. It was as though a huge cloud, shaped like an animal's head and with spots on it, had settled on top of Abjaterskop. It seemed so funny that I wanted to laugh. But I didn't. Instead, I opened my eyes a little more and felt glad to think that I was only dreaming. Because otherwise I would have to believe that the spotted cloud on Abjaterskop was actually a leopard, and that he was gazing at my boot. Again I wanted to laugh. But then, suddenly, I knew.

 

You can read the full Bosman story In the Withaak's Shade here. 

Michael – Thursday.