3-4-3 three books for free.3-4-3

Do Chickens like Rock and Roll?

Happy Hens?

This might appear to be an odd question but bear with me. Everybody knows (oh really?) that happy hens lay tastier eggs so the logic is that free-range eggs are best. Is this necessarily so? Allowed to roam at will what about the odd passing predator. No we’re not talking CIA drones here, we’re talking about the odd fox, cat or marauding marsupial (I write this in Australia and I’m told marauding marsupials can be a problem). Do hens worry about their personal safety and if so does this impact on the tastieness of their eggs? I think we should be told.

In one section of the upcoming book I postulated that a chicken farmer wishing to keep his free-range hens happy might well organise a nightly security patrol to ease their anxiety and perhaps even have a weekly dance where they could meet like-minded companions and maybe the odd rooster. I’m told that some roosters can be very odd but I can’t say that I speak from any personal experience. All I can say is I know they’re supposed to crow at dawn but once they’ve started the buggers are liable to make a racket at any time of the day.

Be that as it may, what sort of music might hens like to hear at a weekly dance? I can’t really visualise hens waltzing together so it must be something more lively.

Rock and Roll?

Well why not? I’m sure that Chick Berry is a favourite performer and doubtless Little Red Rooster a favourite tune. Can anybody think of any other songs/performers that they might like?

Meanwhile…

When is an apology not really an apology? Apparently when Bibi (Netanyahu) apologised to Recep (Erdogan). Read a view on it here. I would have added a link to a Turkish point of view but apparently they don’t have one. We’ll see what transpires but it appears that Obama finally has realised what a mess his Middle East policy is. The public message to Abbas was ‘sit down round a table and negotiate’. No mention in public of the ‘or else’ but I’m willing to bet there was one. The public message to Bibi was ‘I understand Israel has to defend itself so go for  it when you think you have to’. The private message probably was ‘call me before you do it so we can all join in the fun’. At that point Bibi made the phone call to Recep and basically repeated what he’d said at the time of the flotilla incident. I have no idea how the conversation between Obama and Erdogan went but I imagine it started with ‘worried about the situation in Syria are you? You can forget any help from NATO if you decide to have a go yourself but would you like America to actually do something concrete? Oh yes, stop making nasty comments about Israel otherwise we might look the other way if they get really upset’.

Cyprus staggers on. I think I’d be inclined to keep my money in a shoe-box under the bed (if I had any). The rates on savings accounts throughout the EU are risible and now apparently if a bank gets into trouble the first reaction is to grab a slice of depositors money, doubtless to secure the bank CEO’s ‘golden goodbye’ . What we’d all like to see is one of the bastards publicly fired AND a very large slice of their severance pay and/or pension grabbed back as a one time levy. See how they like being given shares in a bank that they’d screwed into the ground. Never mind, Cyprus always has off-shore gas fields to fall back on. Oh, I forgot, they haven’t. I think they’ve just been mortgaged to Russia in return for Russia doing absolutely nothing to help the Cypriot-in -the -street out. Never mind, they’ll find somewhere else to launder their Roubles into Euros. According to one Cypriot banker some ‘Northern Friends’ are already lining up. Doubtless some genius has already come up with the idea of taking the Roubles, engineering a banking crisis and grabbing a large, say forty percent, slice of Russian deposits and using the proceeds to pay Russia for the gas that the EU imports. Don’t laugh and remember you read it here first.

I suppose it must have seemed quite a good wheeze to La Merkel at the time. Grab a slice of the money laundered by various Russian interests that were deposited in Cyprus and use it to underwrite the EU’s bailout of Cypriot banks. Unfortunately this broke all the rules safeguarding individual deposits and in any case the Cypriots weren’t having any of it. People have long memories. Nearly sixty eight years after the end of the Second World War and everybody still hates the Germans. One Cypriot bank has been shut, nobody dares mention the ‘F’ (failed) word and the central bank may, or may not, open sometime soon. In the meantime depositors in Cyprus can only make limited cash withdrawals and can’t transfer money out of Cyprus. So  much for an economic union comprising of free-movement of people, goods and services. What’s the betting that people in other ‘dodgy’ EU countries in the eurozone pull their money, assuming they still have any, out of banks asap? I’m trying to think of a list of non-dodgy countries in the eurozone. Germany springs to mind. France, Spain, Ireland and Portugal don’t. If you don’t mention Italy I won’t either. What fun. People might just realise that the best thing they can do right now is pay off any debts rather than have money in the bank.

They won’t of course and we all know that it’ll end in money being printed and tears of temporary happiness. As long as the EU keeps telling everybody that everything will be OK then it will be, until one fine morning when suddenly and totally unexpectedly it isn’t. Goebbels said something about if you told a big enough lie long enough people would eventually believe it. Damn, I promised myself I wouldn’t mention the war (again). Still, we beat them in eighteen, forty -five and sixty- six. I wonder if ‘Dave’ smokes cigars and drinks brandy (yet)?

 

 

 

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *