Wot I done on my holidays

Hello again gentle readers both great and small!
I have returned from my holidays, well you will have probably got that already as I have done a couple of post. So there you have it! I am back in god's sod and like all good A+ students I have the "Wot I done on me holly dayz" 500 word essay ready and I am prepared for the start of the new autumn/fall term/semester. Which means I am basically on the wind down to Xmas.

Last year our outward journey to the land of Homer and Euclid was a complete FUTILE invested disaster. So collective breaths were held, fingers, toes and all bendable appendages were crossed and it WORKED for this year was a breeze! A quick hop from Belfast to Birmingham (UK) then a very pleasant evening with my middle sister and then a 5am flight to Skiathos in the Sporades island chain in Aegean.

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Now I don't want you all going and booking holidays there next year so .... it is really a horrible place, ghastly truly horrible you cannot adequately describe the levels of awfulness that are reached ... OK have you turned off.. good :-)

So for anyone who has kept going, Alonissos is a what we in "Norn Iron" call "Toetee" , or in the more common parlance, "very small" island.There are no big discos, no noisy bars and most of all no northern european arseholes demanding Pukka Pies and cheap cider .. absolute bliss!

I am a simple man and have simple tastes and requirements for my vacations. I want to be able to paint, eat , drink and sleep but not necessarily in that order. Alonissos delivers all that and more.
I stayed in the Paradise Hotel which hangs on the edge of a cliff about 10 minutes stroll from the harbour in Patitiri town. Bessie and Kostas the owners run one of the most wonderful hotels in the world. I, through work, travel all around Europe with occasional trips to the US and Asia and I would gladly mark the Paradise higher than many of the 4* hotels that I have stayed in. They only have 2* at the minute but on the McDonagh Scale they score 10 out of 10 .. yes I do think they are THAT good!

I did some painting every day, it is the only part of the year where I can spend several hours painting and not let the 1001 other things slide. You may notice that I don't paint on paper, this is in fact not as it has been spread around because I am so "tight" that I won't spend money and buy paper. This is NOT TRUE.

There is a long story that explains my stone decorating issues. A story that involves dolphins, gypsies, sunburn, boredom and leaving a little bit of yourself behind when you leave. Perhaps I will fill you in on it one of these days.

Briefly this is a daily routine - I get up and have a long brekkie and a bit of a chat with the other guests. Then go for a wander before it gets to hot. This walk is usually down to one of the beaches on a hunt for material for that day's painting. I have to pass some tavernas (lucky that) which at that time of day are full of Greek gentlemen fiddling with their Komboloi (Worry beads) drinking Greek coffee and watching the world go by. Sometimes I join them on the way to the beach, sometimes on the way back. So it is nearly dinnertime or there abouts when I get back to the hotel. The sun is high in the sky and the temperature is in the high 90's. As I get sun-burnt under a naked 40W bulb I head for the shade somewhere near the bar and get out my paints and ... paint until it is safe to venture out into the sun on late afternoon.

One of the benefits of painting in public is that it is a great ice breaker. People come over to see what I am doing and you get talking and soon you are firm friends. [ Hi Bert,Ria, Roger,Anne and all the other others I met under the trees :-) ].

You may be wondering what happens to the stones (I do 2 or 3 a day) No I don't take them home, I give them away to folk that say they like them ... LOL ... I will never make a fortune but I have met some amazing people and have made some great friends so it is good karma if nothing else.

The food is uniformly excellent in all the Taverna's I have frequented. It has to be said that Roger and Anne [who have been coming to the island for many years cos it is a fantastic place to walk] were of great assistance here as they know everyone and can point you to the best kitchen for lamb/goat/fish or the amazing "Alonissos Cheese Pie".

I do have to add at this juncture that "We don't like Skopelos" a phrase often repeated when Cheese Pies are mentioned. Skopelos is the island next door [and was the location for the MamaMia film of last year] and they are alleged to have "stolen" the recipe and shape for Alonissos cheese pie and made it their own! Should you ever be in the Sporades please do sample the cheese pie on any of the islands ... BUT do not expect to be able to move afterwards if you buy one just for yourself - they are ENORMOUS!

I could go on and on and on boring the pants of you about how drop dead gorgeous the Hora up on the hill is, how wonderfully clear the sea is, how even though the rough guide and lonely planet say Patitiri is not pretty that I beg to differ ... I think it is. Give me the Patitiri harbour any day of the week but then I am probably biased. I can get a coffee, retsina , ouzo or a bite to eat with the minimum of exertion or fuss I even got the share of a coffee and a shot of Tsiporo from a fisherman at 5am when I wandered by looking for somewhere to sit and watch the sunrise.... but i won't drag this on any further.

Oh I have to mention Kostas' and Bessie's daughter Nicholetta and her friends who quite happily played tabli (Backgammon) with an aging Irish hippy without any of that reticence that teenagers feel around adults. Thanks for letting me at least 1 game :-) !

So if you want to experience a "real Greek island" and promise not to ruin it, go to Alonissos, tell them Irish Steve sent you :-) on the other hand perhaps not...LOL...

So to Kostas, Bessie, Nicoletta, Kostantina, and all the locals that made it a holiday to treasure... a great big THANK YOU! You had better prepare for another Irish invasion next year :-)

LotusBeer Ireland II (now its personal) 26th Sept The Crown Bar Belfast 6pm onwards

*** UPDATE *** THIS HAS BEEN POSTPONED FOR NOW ***

Ladies gentlegeeks and GONADs all.

You are all cordially invited to an evening of quaffing and the sipping of whatever takes your fancy in The Crown Bar Belfast on Friday the 26th September starting around 6pm ish and ending when the beer runs out or the last bus leaves.

You don't have to but it would be good to know if you are coming so drop me an email and let me know so we can lay on extra chairs for the chair throwing. Oh and we may have a Keynote drinker this time :-)

So if you fancy a few beers to end the week in the company of some geeks from the North you are more than welcome to come and join in!

Best Taverna Joke 2008

In the last 2 weeks I have fraternizing with the nicest people on a totey (small) island in the Aegean called Alonissos (of which more later) much good food was eaten, drink drunk and jokes told. The best by a fairly wide margin was this one.. Ladies, Gentlemen geeks and GONADS let me introduce "The Baptising an Irishman" joke

An Irishman, is stumbling through the woods, totally drunk, when he comes upon a preacher baptising people in the river.
He proceeds to walk into the water and subsequently bumps into the preacher.
The preacher turns around and is almost overcome by the smell of alcohol, whereupon he asks the drunk,
'Are you ready to find Jesus?'
The drunk shouts, 'Yes, OI am.'
So the preacher grabs him and dunks him in the water.
He pulls him up and asks the drunk, 'Brother have you found Jesus?'
The drunk replies, 'No, OI haven't found Jesus.'
The preacher shocked at the answer, dunks him into the water again for a little longer.
He again pulls him out of the water and asks again, 'Have you found Jesus my brother?'
The drunk again answers, 'No,OI I haven't found Jesus.'
By this time the preacher is at his wits end and dunks the drunk in the water again ---
But this time holds him down for about 30 seconds and when he begins kicking his arms and legs he pulls him up.
The preacher again asks the drunk, 'For the love of God have you found Jesus?'

The drunk wipes his eyes and catches his breath and says to the preacher, 'Are you sure dis is where he fell in?'

the credit crunch (some scarey reading)

I am going to do a "What I did on my holiday" post in a wee while but this is way more interesting and much, much more scary , even more scary that me in my swimmers!

I asked a chum of mine, a geek that works in a bank, to explain to me what all this credit crunchiness was about and some background into what was going on and he sent me this there is loads of it so


*** START EXCERPT ***
The Credit Default Swap was invented a few years ago by a young Cambridge University mathematics graduate, Blythe Masters, hired by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank in New York . The then-fresh university graduate convinced her bosses at Morgan Chase to develop a revolutionary new risk product, the CDS as it soon became known.

A Credit Default Swap is a credit derivative or agreement between two counterparties, in which one makes periodic payments to the other and gets promise of a payoff if a third party defaults. The first party gets credit protection, a kind of insurance, and is called the "buyer." The second party gives credit protection and is called the "seller". The third party, the one that might go bankrupt or default, is known as the "reference entity." CDS's became staggeringly popular as credit risks exploded during the last seven years in the United States . Banks argued that with CDS they could spread risk around the globe.

Credit default swaps resemble an insurance policy, as they can be used by debt owners to hedge, or insure against a default on a debt. However, because there is no requirement to actually hold any asset or suffer a loss, credit default swaps can also be used for speculative purposes.

Warren Buffett once described derivatives bought speculatively as "financial weapons of mass destruction." In his Berkshire Hathaway annual report to shareholders he said "Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses -often huge in amount- in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)." A typical CDO is for five years term.

Like many exotic financial products which are extremely complex and profitable in times of easy credit, when markets reverse, as has been the case since August 2007, in addition to spreading risk, credit derivatives, in this case, also amplify risk considerably.

Now the other shoe is about to drop in the $62 trillion CDS market due to rising junk bond defaults by US corporations as the recession deepens. That market has long been a disaster in the making. An estimated $1,2 trillion could be at risk of the nominal $62 trillion in CDOs outstanding, making it far larger than the sub-prime market.

No regulation

A chain reaction of failures in the CDS market could trigger the next global financial crisis. The market is entirely unregulated, and there are no public records showing whether sellers have the assets to pay out if a bond defaults. This so-called counterparty risk is a ticking time bomb. The US Federal Reserve under the ultra-permissive chairman, Alan Greenspan and the US Government's financial regulators allowed the CDS market to develop entirely without any supervision. Greenspan repeatedly testified to sceptical Congressmen that banks are better risk regulators than government bureaucrats.

The Fed bailout of Bear Stearns on March 17 was motivated, in part, by a desire to keep the unknown risks of that bank's Credit Default Swaps from setting off a global chain reaction that might have brought the financial system down. The Fed's fear was that because they didn't adequately monitor counterparty risk in credit-default swaps, they had no idea what might happen. Thank Alan Greenspan for that.

Those counterparties include JPMorgan Chase, the largest seller and buyer of CDSs.

The Fed only has supervision to regulated bank CDS exposures, but not that of investment banks or hedge funds, both of which are significant CDS issuers. Hedge funds, for instance, are estimated to have written 31% in CDS protection.

The credit-default-swap market has been mainly untested until now. The default rate in January 2002, when the swap market was valued at $1.5 trillion, was 10.7 percent, according to Moody's Investors Service. But Fitch Ratings reported in July 2007 that 40 percent of CDS protection sold worldwide was on companies or securities that are rated below investment grade, up from 8 percent in 2002.

A surge in corporate defaults will now leave swap buyers trying to collect hundreds of billions of dollars from their counterparties. This will to complicate the financial crisis, triggering numerous disputes and lawsuits, as buyers battle sellers over the technical definition of default - - this requires proving which bond or loan holders weren't paid -- and the amount of payments due. Some fear that could in turn freeze up the financial system.

Experts inside the CDS market believe now that the crisis will likely start with hedge funds that will be unable to pay banks for contracts tied to at least $150 billion in defaults. Banks will try to pre-empt this default disaster by demanding hedge funds put up more collateral for potential losses. That will not work as many of the funds won't have the cash to meet the banks' demands for more collateral.

Sellers of protection aren't required by law to set aside reserves in the CDS market. While banks ask protection sellers to put up some money when making the trade, there are no industry standards. It would be the equivalent of a licensed insurance company selling insurance protection against hurricane damage with no reserves against potential claims.

Basle BIS worried

The Basle Bank for International Settlements, the supervisory organization of the world's major central banks is alarmed at the dangers. The Joint Forum of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, an international group of banking, insurance and securities regulators, wrote in April that the trillions of dollars in swaps traded by hedge funds pose a threat to financial markets around the world.

``It is difficult to develop a clear picture of which institutions are the ultimate holders of some of the credit risk transferred,'' the report said. ``It can be difficult even to quantify the amount of risk that has been transferred.''

Counterparty risk can become complicated in a hurry. In a typical CDS deal, a hedge fund will sell protection to a bank, which will then resell the same protection to another bank, and such dealing will continue, sometimes in a circle. That has created a huge concentration of risk. As one leading derivatives trader expressed the process, “The risk keeps spinning around and around in this daisy chain like a vortex. There are only six to 10 dealers who sit in the middle of all this. I don't think the regulators have the information that they need to work that out.''

Traders, and even the banks that serve as dealers, don't always know exactly what is covered by a credit-default-swap contract. There are numerous types of CDSs, some far more complex than others. More than half of all CDSs cover indexes of companies and debt securities, such as asset-backed securities, the Basel committee says. The rest include coverage of a single company's debt or collateralized debt obligations...

Banks usually send hedge funds, insurance companies and other institutional investors e-mails throughout the day with bid and offer prices, as there is no regulated exchange to prices the market or to insure against loss. To find the price of a swap on Ford Motor Co. debt, for example, even sophisticated investors might have to search through all of their daily e-mails.

Banks want secrecy

Banks have a vested interest in keeping the swaps market opaque, because as dealers, the banks have a high volume of transactions, giving them an edge over other buyers and sellers. Since customers don't necessarily know where the market is, you can charge them much wider profit margins.

Banks try to balance the protection they've sold with credit-default swaps they purchase from others, either on the same companies or indexes. They can also create synthetic CDOs, which are packages of credit-default swaps the banks sell to investors to get themselves protection.

The idea for the banks is to make a profit on each trade and avoid taking on the swap's risk. As one CDO dealer puts it, “Dealers are just like bookies. Bookies don't want to bet on games. Bookies just want to balance their books. That's why they're called bookies.”

Now as the economy contracts and bankruptcies spread across the United States and beyond, there's a high probability that many who bought swap protection will wind up in court trying to get their payouts. If things are collapsing left and right, people will use any trick they can.

Last year, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange set up a federally regulated, exchange-based market to trade CDSs. So far, it hasn't worked. It's been boycotted by banks, which prefer to continue their trading privately.

*** END OF EXTRACT ***

.... Hope you read all that ... or the next bit doesn't make much sense
Sorry for the language but what the f**K?

This is just stupidity stacked up with greed, iced with incompetence and decorated with dick heads in striped shirts. Whats worse it is it seems going to leave a $62 trillion dollar hole in someone's pocket and I have a feeling that some of it it going to from my fecking pension!

"Un-regulation works" does it indeed Mr Greenspan? My fat hairy arse it does! Who needs international terrorism when you have twonks that can come up with a wizzard wheeze like CDS and even bigger wankers that think it is a good idea to let it run?