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Money matters:
Graham Macdonald MBMG International Ltd.
The Writing is on the Wall (St) part 2
To our minds the idea that Wall Street takes an idea like
long/short investing and packages it neatly (in the sense that a square peg in a
round hole is neat), markets it, devalues it and then moves on and abandons it
in favour of the next hot idea is the perfect example of why people are cynical
about the financial industry. It is a little bit like turning on the radio to
hear some really awful cover version of a song that’s always been important to
you played by a talentless young band who just don’t understand what the
original was all about but sense an opportunity to make money from it.
Whilst we are all in favour of innovation, we also go by the old maxim, “If it
ain’t broke don’t fix it”. With this in mind, we have had quite a few people
asking us about Alfred Winslow Jones, the founder of the hedge fund. We remain
indebted to Michael C Litt’s excellent work on Puttnam, Jones and Moldodovsky
for much of what we, at MBMG, know about Jones.
The least reported fact about Jones is that he was actually an Australian
national. More widely recorded is that he was a graduate of Harvard’s 1923 class
and his early career as a purser on tramp steamers was followed by a period in
the U.S. diplomatic service in Depression-era Germany during the emergence of
Nazism. He then moved into journalism. Originally covering the Spanish Civil
War, Jones went on to study sociology at Columbia University and then to publish
Life, Liberty and Property: A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of
Conflicting Rights. During World War II, Jones worked as a staff writer for
Fortune and Time magazines. In 1948, Fortune published an article
he had been working on for quite some time, “Fashions in Forecasting”. This
referred to the pioneering work of investment analysts who had evolved from the
pure Dow theory “chartists” of the earlier part of the century to the
consideration of increasingly complex sets of data in order to better gauge
stock market machinations and investor behaviour.
Disparagingly called “technicians” these pioneers were considered pariahs by the
disciples of the Graham and Dodd value approach, who exhibited that all too
human trait of mocking what they couldn’t understand. In his article, Jones
wrote that A. Wilfred May, the titular figurehead of the value approach at that
time, was “directing a steady, fine spray of ridicule at the technicians …
lumping them in with spiritualists, Ouija-board operators, astrologers, sunspot
followers and cycle theorists.”
The most significant part of the article is Jones’ analysis of the work of
fellow Harvard graduate, Nicholas Molodovsky of White, Weld & Co. Molodovsky was
focusing solely on the technical approach, applying this by creating two lists
of stocks, pairing shares of companies in the same or similar industries, and
assessing their relative merits - one of each pair being consigned into a “value
index” and the other into a “vision index” measuring investor confidence through
the divergence in performance between the value and vision indices. 60 years ago
Jones wrote, “The more volatile vision stocks normally diverge in price more
widely from their ‘values.’”
Five years later Molodovsky himself published his seminal “A Theory of
Price-Earnings Ratios,” and today an economics prize is awarded annually in his
name, but his greatest legacy may well have been capturing Jones’ interest in
such concepts as risk-weighting individual stocks, recognising their magnitude
of divergence from their intrinsic value, and finding insights that deal in
probabilities.
When Jones founded A.W. Jones & Co. in 1949 with $100,000 of initial capital,
his strategy was based around the elimination of a good deal of market exposure
by holding both long and short securities positions, with returns mainly
generated by stock selection. For almost two decades, Jones operated extremely
successfully, albeit without capturing too much attention until in 1966 Carol
Loomis wrote a Fortune article, “The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With.” He wrote,
“There are reasons to believe that the best professional manager of investors’
money these days is a quiet-spoken, seldom photographed man named Alfred Winslow
Jones.” The idea that short selling and options could be used to protect stock
portfolios was well-known at this stage.
Alfred Jones’ successful experiments with long/short funds (buying the stocks
most likely to increase in value but short selling those most liable to correct)
was about to create the worldwide phenomenon of hedge funds.
Jones had outperformed any other equity investment funds, while taking lower
risks. This is precisely what S&P have recognised that MitonOptimal, in the form
of Martin Gray, Sam Liddle and Scott Campbell, has done over the last ten years.
It’s also what the Ivy League endowments have done. As we’ve highlighted
recently, Harvard University enjoys the largest of the university endowment
funds. The management of these has an extremely long history. It was already
well established when the estate of John McLean was left in equal parts to
Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital after his death in 1823.
Over the subsequent seven years, while McLean’s widow was still living, the
estate had not grown as expected under the care of designated trustees, leading
both the university and hospital to sue the trustees for neglecting their
duties, and resulting in Justice Puttnam pronouncing what has come to be known
as ‘The prudent man’ rule which still pervades to this day.
The modern history of the Harvard endowment can probably be traced to 1988, when
a team at Harvard Management Company (HMC) led by Jack Meyer started to pursue a
non-conventional, or non-benchmarked approach to wealth management. During
Meyer’s watch the endowment increased in value by over $8 billion more than
would have been the case if HMC had simply achieved the university endowment
benchmark during the period.
To be continued…
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The above data and research was compiled from sources
believed to be reliable. However, neither MBMG International Ltd nor its
officers can accept any liability for any errors or omissions in the above
article nor bear any responsibility for any losses achieved as a result of any
actions taken or not taken as a consequence of reading the above article. For
more information please contact Graham Macdonald on
[email protected]@mbmg-international.com.com
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Snap Shots: by Harry Flashman
Do you need
a flash at all?
 Camera
flashes come in all shapes and sizes. These range from piddly little
things in the camera body, which will light up the end of your nose and
not much else, through to pop-up flashes that will get to the other side
of a (small) room, through to the big hammer-head flashes which bolt on
to the camera and can light up the other side of the moon. But do you
really need all this ‘firepower’?
Take a look at the photo with this week’s column. The Halloween lantern
was photographed at night, and if a flash had been used, the whole
atmosphere of this photograph would have been lost. With flash you would
have had a washed out pumpkin, and nothing inside. Without the flash,
the solitary candle burning inside was the source of light, and the
photo really shows up the carving and the fact that it is a Halloween
pumpkin. A small amount of light was reflected from the photographer
back into the exterior front of the pumpkin, and there you have it – a
‘surreal’ shot of a Halloween pumpkin.
Now the orange color (which you can see on the net version of Pattaya
Mail, but unfortunately not in the grey and white hard copy) is
something that came with the candle light. What has to be remembered, is
that light comes in many different colors. There is in fact a light
scale, measured in degrees Kelvin, that shows why the late afternoon
shots are ‘warm’ and the other shots are ‘cold’. It also explains why a
household light bulb looks orange when photographed on ordinary film,
and why objects lit by neon tubes look green. This color shift can also
be seen with digital cameras if you do not reset the white balance for
the prevailing light source.
Getting slightly technical, color temperature is a term that is borrowed
from physics. However, the photographic color temperature is not exactly
the same as the color temperature defined in physics, as photographic
color temperature is measured only on the relative intensity of blue to
red. However, we borrow the basic measurement scale from physics and we
measure the photographic color temperature in degrees Kelvin (K).
Here is a table to show the differences in light sources.
1000 K Candles; oil lamps
2000 K Low effect tungsten lamps
2500 K Household light bulbs
3000 K Studio lights, photo floods
4000 K Clear flashbulbs
5000 K Typical daylight; electronic flash
5500 K The sun at noon
6000 K Bright sunshine with clear sky
7000 K Slightly overcast sky
8000 K Hazy sky
9000 K Open shade on clear day
The next confusing aspect is that the photographic film and the human
eye do not see the colours with the same intensity. The usual print film
is ‘balanced’ to around 5,000 K, so light sources lower in color
temperature will look orange, even though it does not look orange to the
naked eye. There are other films available balanced to tungsten light,
so this time the light bulb will look white. You also do not have to
know the degrees Kelvin table by heart to get some different photographs
when you turn the flash off.
Try doing the following this weekend and let’s get some spectacular
low-light photographs. Firstly, inactivate the flash, but turn on the
automatic mode for your camera. In other words I am going to make this
very easy for you. No hard exposure calculations. If you have a tripod,
dust it off, but even if you haven’t, continue.
Go to your local markets at dusk and take some photographs of what goes
on there, using just the stall-holder’s naked bulb for illumination. Be
prepared to lean against a telephone pole to stop camera shake. But give
it a go.
Now try photographing some of the hotels at night. Most are quite
brightly lit and once again, you may end up very surprised at what you
get. Even try some portraits lit by candles only. Use your imagination,
and not the flash!
Modern Medicine:
by Dr. Iain Corness, Consultant
Thanks, Mum and Dad
We all have much to thank our parents for. Just letting us
grow up for starters. As an aside, if my young son continues much longer
with the two year old tantrums, he’s going to be lucky to reach his third
birthday, but no doubt his mother will shield him from paternal wrath.
However, heredity is one of the ‘clues’ to your health in the future, and
what you can do to enjoy a long, lively and healthy one. This is where
‘thanks Mum and Dad’ comes in. One problem of being an orphan is that it
leaves the person with no idea as to what ailments are going to befall them.
Dad might have legged it or ‘fled the scene’, but did he live to tell the
tale when he was 60?
With the increasing research into genetics, we are able to map out our
likely futures and can predict such ailments as diabetes, epilepsy and other
neurological problems like Huntington’s Chorea and Alzheimer’s Disease, some
cancers such as breast, ovarian, lower bowel, prostate, skin and testicular,
heart attacks, blood pressure problems, certain blood diseases like Sickle
Cell anemia and so the list goes on.
However, you do not need to have multi-million baht examinations done on
your DNA to see where you are headed, all you need to do is to start asking
the older family members about your inheritance. Not the money - your
genetic inheritance in the health stakes.
Have you ever wondered why the questionnaire for life insurance asks whether
any close member of your family has ever suffered from diabetes, epilepsy
and other ailments and then also asks you to write down how old your parents
or brothers and sisters were when they died, and what they died from? All
that they, the insurance companies, are doing is finding out the relative
likelihood (or ‘risk’) of your succumbing early to an easily identifiable
disease. This does not need a postgraduate Masters degree in rocket science.
It needs a cursory application of family history.
If either of your parents had diabetes, your elder brother has diabetes,
your younger brother has diabetes and your cousin has diabetes, what are the
odds on your getting (or already having) diabetes? Again this is not rocket
science. The answer is pretty damn high! And yet, I see families like this,
where the individual members are totally surprised and amazed when they fall
ill, go to hospital, and diabetes is diagnosed.
It does not really take very much time over a family lunch to begin to
enquire about one’s forebears. After five minutes it will be obvious if
there is some kind of common medical thread running through your family.
That thread may not necessarily be life threatening, but could be something
like arthritis for example.
Look at it this way - your future is being displayed by your family’s past.
This could be considered frightening, when your father, his brother and your
grandfather all died very early from heart attacks. Or, this could be
considered as life saving, if it pushes you towards looking at you own
cardiac health and overcoming an apparently disastrous medical history.
This is an advantage that you get provided you are not an orphan. You know
what to look for before it becomes a problem. Going back to the family with
diabetes, what should the younger members do? Well, if it were me, I would
be having my blood sugar checked at least once a year from the age of 20.
Any time I had reason to visit the doctor in between, I would also ask to
have the level checked. We are talking about a very inexpensive test that
could literally save you millions of baht in the future, as well as giving
you a better quality of life, and a longer one.
Ask around the dinner table today and plan to check your medical future
tomorrow. It’s called a ‘Check-up’!
 Heart to Heart with Hillary
Dear Hillary,
Valentine’s Day has been and gone and I didn’t get one from anyone. Being as
handsome as I am, I was sure that the postman would be weighed down with cards
and suchlike, but he either missed my mailbox, or dropped my mail off in the
klong because it must have been too heavy. How was your Valentine’s Day,
Hillary? I hope it was better than mine. I feel that nobody loves me, and I
don’t know why!
George
Dear Gorgeous George,
What a blow to the ego February 14 must have been for you! Not left waiting at
the altar, but left waiting at the letterbox. What a fate, and people probably
saw you there as well. Oh my goodness! However, Hillary has the answer for you,
my handsome Petal. Next year send some cards to yourself and you can noisily
take them out after the postman has been, so everyone in the street knows you
got some. The only other way to go about filling the letterbox is to stop being
such a smug, self-opinionated bore, and people will start to like you, and some
may send you a real Valentine’s Day card. How was my day? Absolutely wonderful,
stack of cards and flowers, though it was somewhat strange - most of the cards
were addressed to “George”. Where exactly do you live? Close to my office?
Dear Hillary,
Can you recommend a good computer technician? Every time my computer breaks
down, the technician takes it away to fix it, and returns it several days later
and when I go to use it, something else has packed up. If he works on it at my
condo he is there for hours click-clacking away and not only does he not fix the
first problem, but leaves more than when he started. “You haven’t got enough
RAM,” seems to be the catchword with these people, but even after buying more,
the problems are still there. Any ideas, Hillary? My internet doesn’t work any
more, and he can’t fix that either!
Frazzled
Dear Frazzled,
You’re lucky it’s only a RAM problem. I’ve bought a veritable sheep station of
RAMs and now they’re telling me it is my operating system that is no good. I ask
you, what’s wrong with Windows 1946? It worked before, why not now? Honestly
Petal, I have no idea about this modern technology. Bring back faxes, I say. I
could understand those. I have to communicate with the editor with notes written
on the back of envelopes. His office is just below mine, so it’s easy to slip
one under the door (he works rather strange hours, and nobody ever sees him). I
think he might have one of those disfiguring diseases like a terminal hangnail
or horrendous halitosis or something. I do inhale deeply as I pass his door,
just in case he’s died in there after last week’s paper was put to be. See just
how thoughtful I am!
Dear Hillary,
I am sure you’ve heard it all before, but I think I am being ripped off. My
girlfriend (Thai) has recently started to ask me for more money than she
normally gets for housekeeping and the monthly wage I give her. It was just a
few hundred baht here and there to start with, but now she needs thousands at a
time. When I ask her why she needs the extra she gets sulky and when I really
push her for an answer the best I get is “for family - you farang no
understand.” Hillary, is there something here that I should understand, or what?
I am getting very tired of the continual cash hand-outs.
Andy
Dear ATM Andy,
It sounds like there is lots you don’t understand. “Family” is important to a
Thai and is one of the strongest bonds for the individual. Family keeps them
together, family gets them over problems of all types, financial and otherwise.
It is very similar to the Chinese borrowing system - but there is always
pay-back time. Your girlfriend may be returning money borrowed from before - in
that time in her life B.A. - before Andy. She may also be helping her
brother/mother/father/cousin (delete that which is not applicable) out of a jam.
And on the other hand, she may be gambling with it, another very common Thai
pastime. You really have to start communicating better with your girlfriend,
Petal, if you want to know where the money goes. If she is the money manager for
the household, sit down each week and discuss the family budget. If you do this
in a non-threatening way, then you will find out where the money goes. If it
ends up in sulkiness or accusations, then it is time to review the entire
relationship and handle the housekeeping yourself. I also worry about
relationships where the “girlfriend/wife” is paid a “wage” each month. For what,
Andy? For staying with you, putting up with you, or what? We call that having a
“mia chow” (rented wife), and a master and servant relationship will always
fail, in my experience. Thai women may look meek and mild, but they’re not. They
most certainly are not, and when pushed will bite back. That is something else
you have to understand, Andy.
Learn to Live to Learn: with Andrew Watson
The morning after the night before
“It would,” said one of us, “be a beautiful day to die.” I
replied instinctively, “You must be crazy. Everything’s
perfect!” With the wall to all intents and purposes obliterated,
we had driven from West to East Berlin with abandon, just as the
cold winter sun was breaking into the deepest blue darkness with
slithers of green. The first day of a new year and indeed, a new
dawn. Oh, brave new world!
Zigzagging euphorically between East and West all night, we had
belatedly resolved to spend our first day in this glorious new
reality in Rococo splendour at the appropriately named
“Sanssouci” at Potsdam, the former summer palace of Frederick
the Great, King of Prussia. The name, a French phrase (sans
souci) translates loosely as “without cares” and was
designed by the improbably and perhaps dangerously named Georg
Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, with relaxation in mind.
And so it was that we came upon this place, where all was frozen
silence. First light revealed a crisp covering of frost bathed
in blue and wisps of mist which nestled betwixt the temples and
follies like sleeping clouds around a manicured, monochrome
park. We felt like ghosts moving through a timeless landscape;
only the rhythmic soft crunch of feet upon icy blades puncturing
the silence and our breath, thick in the freezing air, reminded
us of our mortality in this ephemeral setting.
I don’t think we had eaten properly for days and sleep had been
voluntarily in equally short supply. Heaven knows what we looked
like, we five, feeling like the last islands of beauty in the
night, wandering hedonists, we felt neither fatigue nor hunger.
We dined on exhilaration, life’s great amphetamine. Sleep could
not gather us under its wing for our desire to embrace every
second of experience was overwhelming.
We took a stroll down to the banks of the silvery Havel River
and unpacked flasks of Brandy and of all things, easels, paints,
palette knives and canvases. And for the next three hours we sat
under the Glienicke Bridge in a condition of inner contentment
(if increasing external discomfort) and painted the pink growing
stronger in the sky, reflected in the metal blue water through
the steel trusses of the “Bridge of Spies”. The final exchange
of secret agents (plus the political prisoner Anatoly Sharansky)
between the US and the Soviet Union had happened here only four
years before. Harry Palmer, a.k.a. Michael Caine, had been here
too, in “Funeral in Berlin”. We were painting one of the great
symbols of the cold war on the day the war had ended.
And so to the road. Taking officially illegal advantage of the
new political landscape, we drove south through East Germany. In
our cadmium red Alfa, surrounded by a politburo of smoking
two-stroke Trabants, we stood out a mile, but nobody seemed to
mind that we were there. Indeed, quite the reverse, which seemed
incidentally, to be one of three gears these skips on wheels
possessed, the other two being “slow” and “stop”. The East
German “autobahns” were a misnomer, the antithesis of their
Western cousins. They were in many places, cobbled, which was
one explanation for the advertised speed limit of 80 kilometres
per hour. No need to enforce it; it wasn’t so much a matter of
law enforcement as mechanical unfeasibility. No matter how hard
we tried, we couldn’t actually break the speed limit. Where the
road wasn’t cobbled, it was potholed.
Surrounded by Trabants trundling along at 45 kph, entrapped by
Trabant fumes which closed on us like giant, cloaked Stasi bats,
it was as challenging a drive as I have ever driven. Twice, not
once, we were earnestly pursuing our little “fellow travelers”
(that’s what “Trabant” means) in the “least slow” lane, only for
them to break down like a paranoid neurotic with frightening
immediacy in front of us. I mean, they stopped, they ceased to
be, right there on the autobahn! It was crazy.
Approaching thirty six hours since our last slither of repose,
trying to concentrate on this madness was beginning to have a
seriously adverse effect; it was a struggle to stay awake and it
was becoming dangerous. I’m sorry to report, to confess for the
first time, that there was indeed a casualty. I struck an East
German goat, who had no doubt wandered innocently onto the
autobahn to munch on some of the verdant tufts of grass
sprouting up through the cobblestones. As we passed Magdeburg we
stopped for a cup of hot grit at a state run roadside café and
it had started to get dark again.
Four hours later, full ten hours after we set off from Berlin,
we finally passed out of Trabantland and back into the West,
where smooth Teutonic tarmac felt like fresh silk sheets. At a
time like this it’s good to be heading towards a place like
Heidelberg, an absolute pearl of a city on the banks of the
Neckar, where exhausted, more than slightly malodorous and
displaying a healthy disregard for German law, we left the Alfa
in the central square and checked in at Der Euopaische Hof
Hotel, by common consent the best in the city. The concierge was
incredulous, it’s true, and needed some convincing before he’d
let these unkempt individuals into his luxurious environs. But,
wouldn’t you just know it? A piece of Berlin Wall plucked from
the pocket and presented as a token of the reunification of
humanity did the trick and we were in, at a substantial
discount.
Never have the warm jets of a shower felt so soothing, or a
chilled glass of beer Stein, so rousing. Of course we went out
to the Old Town and returned fulfilled once more, just as
sunup’s birds began their songs. The morning after the night
before had become the night before the morning after. What a day
it had been. We were utterly spent. It seemed like the whole
world was at peace; we were at peace with ourselves, we were at
peace with our Gods. Fear was a thing of the past, concern could
be smitten with a smile and a better tomorrow, in which we had
all invested our youthful dreams, had finally arrived. Then I
understood. The world might as well have ended then. It would
indeed have been a beautiful day to die.
Next week: Does anything ever really change?
DOC ENGLISH Teaching your kids how to learn English:
High-Frequency Words
Hello and welcome back to the occasional
column for stressed parents teaching their kids English at home (you
brave souls).
This week we look at high-frequency words. High-frequency words are
words that appear most commonly in printed text. These are the words
that your child should ideally learn to read and recognise first when
learning English; however, it’s fine for them to learn other words too.
Learning to recognise high-frequency words by sight at an early age is
really important in order for your child to become truly fluent in
English. Some people argue that children should simply learn new words
as they encounter them and not be restricted to learning words on a
‘word list’, but I think using a high-frequency word list is useful as
it can help you structure your teaching and your child’s rate of
learning.
So what are the high frequency words? The Dolch list of high frequency
words comprises the 220 words (excluding nouns) that are found to be
commonly used in the English language. You can find the lists at School
Bell Dot Com: http://www. theschoolbell.com/Links/Dolch/Dolch.html. A
similar list is used by UK schools and can be found at this incredibly
long government web site address:
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/nls_framework/486193/919081.
This week I have included the words that a child with at least one
native English speaking parent should ideally be able to read, write,
listen and say by the age of 5 (or by the start of Year 1 in an
international school). Don’t worry if your child can’t read all these
words, they will catch up! If they are learning two languages at home
(such as English and Thai) then learning all these words may be twice as
hard for your child. Remember these are goals set by UK schools, for
native English speaking students. If your children can learn half of
these words by age 5, they are still doing extremely well!
Children in the UK are also obliged to learn at least some of the
following by age 5:
* days of the week
* months of the year
* numbers to twenty
* common colour words
* their name and address
* The name and address of their school
You should provide reading and exercise books and that make frequent use
of high frequency words. If your child is learning to read for the first
time, books that do not contain many instances of these words, use long
complicated words or lots of text should be avoided.
A good way to teach high-frequency words is to provide your child with a
new word to learn every day and there are a number of ways to present
the new word to your child.
* When watching TV (in English or with English subtitles) encourage your
child to shout out “Buzz!” every time you see or hear the target word
(such as ‘the’). Compete against your child to see who the best at
recognizing the word on TV. You could also play the game in the car, by
listening to a popular children’s song that contains many occurrences of
the target word.
* Have a Word of the Day. Write down a new word every day on a bit of
paper and reveal it slowly from an envelope, to see if your child can
guess what the new word will be. Make a Word Wall with the pieces of
paper and get your child to stick each new word up on the wall to build
an impressive collection of new words.
* You could get your child to rearrange the word wall occasionally, so
that words are grouped into those with similar beginning sounds, vowel
sounds, endings, or words on a particular subject. Putting words into
groups makes words easier to learn. Your child’s school spelling list
should contain words that have similar meanings, contain similar sounds,
or relate to a topic that your child is learning in class.
* Your child can make their own dictionary if they wish using a blank
exercise book. You should also buy a dictionary for your child to look
up new words as they encounter them. Picture dictionaries are suitable
for younger children as the pictures help them understand the meaning of
new words. For older children, the Cambridge and Oxford dictionaries are
best. For adults, dictionaries that contain phonetic translations can
provide a way for them to pronounce new words, as well as read and
understand meanings. Phonetic Symbols may also help you pronounce Thai
Words. The list of phonetic symbols can be found at The Cambridge
Dictionary site: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/help/phonetics.htm.
* The Internet provides a number of activities for helping children
learn to read high frequency words. Some great games for learning high
frequency words can be found here:
http://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games-word-level.html.
* You can find cheap posters in most Thai book shops containing lists of
colours, days of the week, numbers, etc., in English which you can pin
up around your child’s bedroom.
* Finally, if your child keeps a simple diary or has a penpal, then this
will provide them with a daily opportunity to use their new vocabulary.
They should learn how to use new words within the context of a sentence.
I hope you have enjoyed this week’s instruction on how to teach your
child high frequency words in English. If you have any tips, suggestions
or queries regarding English education in Thailand, please mail me at:
[email protected]. Don’t worry if your written English is not
so great, I can assure you that my written Thai is a lot worse! Any Thai
teachers out there by any chance?
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Let’s go to the movies:
by Mark Gernpy
Now playing in Pattaya
Charlie Wilson’s War: US Drama – Directed by Mike Nichols.
Starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. This is
that rare Hollywood commodity these days: a smart, sophisticated
entertainment for grownups – complete with an often confusing point of
view and conflicting messages. Are we supposed to admire this man with
his endearing character failings and illegal activities? Are we to
applaud the fact that American foreign policy is arrived at in this
haphazard manner? It will make you shake your head in wonderment, and
you might end up either bemused or infuriated. It’s about how an
unlikely trio of influential and colorful characters conspired to
generate covert financial and weapons support for the Afghan Mujahideen
to defeat the Russians in the 1980s – and armed America’s future enemies
in the process. The film is snappy, amusing, and ruefully ironic, with a
startling performance by Hoffman. Rated R in the US for strong language,
nudity/sexual content. Generally favorable reviews.
Jumper: US Adventure/Sci-Fi – With Samuel L. Jackson. A genetic
anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers
his “jumping” ability when a child, along with the fact that this gift
has existed for centuries, and he now finds himself in the midst of a
war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and
those who have sworn to kill them. Generally negative reviews.
Kod (Handle Me With Care): Thai Romance/Drama – A three-armed man
from Lampang worries he might be considered a freak, decides to remove
one of his two left arms, but his girlfriend likes him the way he is.
(Really, I’m not making this up!)
Kung Fu Dunk: Hong Kong/Taiwan Sports/Comedy – With superstar Jay
Chou as an orphan turned Shaolin martial artist who somehow ends up
playing basketball using his Shaolin skills.
27 Dresses: US Comedy/Romance – Katherine Heigl is immensely
appealing in what is essentially a mildly pleasant chick-flick. If the
very idea of weddings makes you dewy-eyed, this is for you. Mixed or
average reviews.
Chocolate: Thai Action – A superior Thai action film that is a
huge hit in Thailand, with a new martial arts star, who is really
amazing. Within the conventions of a martial arts movie, it’s quite
inventive. If you’re going to see any Thai martial arts film this year,
make it this one – it’s got everything.
CJ7: Hong Kong Comedy – Delightful! Stephen Chow finds a toy for
his young son which is actually a sort of Chinese E.T. It’s dubbed in
Thai, but you may find it with English subtitles. I thought the movie
marvelously odd and quirky. The kid is great, and Stephen Chow is
amusingly droll. A lot of fun for kids and adults.
Death Note: L: Change the World: Japan Thriller - What a pity
that this fascinating film is shown here in a Thai-dubbed version only!
(Despite that, I’ve now seen it three times.) The character “L” who is
the focus of this movie is an absolutely mesmerizing and unique
creation. This prequel to the previous two Death Note films shows this
youth in all his glory, as the world’s greatest detective, using his
superior intellect and deductive skills to solve the most baffling
crimes. No slouch intellectually, he is the world’s most infuriating
slouch physically. He is skinny and hollow-chested, despite continually
eating candy on a skewer. He single handedly keeps the eye-liner
industry in business. His reactions to people are exceeding strange,
especially with females and young children. His fate, as we know from
the second Death Note movie and the 108 volumes of the original story in
manga form, is to end the string of deaths due to the “Death Notebook”
by writing his own name in it, thereby signing his own death warrant.
It’s all very complicated and convoluted, a modern-day legend, and
simply terrific.
American Gangster: US Crime/Drama – Excellent performances by
Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in this story of an American
gangster negotiating contracts with Golden Triangle drug lords.
Generally favorable reviews.
Enchanted: US Animated/Comedy – Delightful re-imagining of your
basic Disney fairy tales. Generally favorable reviews.
Valentine: Thai Romance/Comedy – It’s your typical Thai low
comedy with several love stories. Fairly unremarkable, except that here
a “tom” lesbian and a transvestite switch bodies after a traffic
accident in Phuket, and get to like their new bodies.
Ghost-in-Law: Thai Comedy/Horror – The usual Thai combination of
horror with slapstick comedy, and the usual Thai stars.
Scheduled to open Thu. Feb. 28
Mist: US Horror – The Stephen King novella transferred to the
screen by Frank Darabont (screenplay and director), who did the same for
King’s The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. There seems to be a
wide divergence of opinion on this film, from those who love it to those
who hate it. Rated R in the US for violence, terror, and gore, and
language. Mixed or average reviews.
Backup and Restore your
Outlook emails easily
It is good practice to make a backup of your
important data regularly. And even otherwise, you would want to backup
your Outlook emails and contacts when you are sending that old PC for an
upgrade. This helps you get all those emails and contacts back to
Outlook easily and neatly, without much work.
Let’s take a quick look at how Outlook keeps your personal data. The new
versions of Microsoft Outlook use a format called “Microsoft Office
Outlook Personal Folder” file, or “PST” file. This file contains all
your Outlook folders including Inbox, Calendar and Contacts. This is the
file which you need to backup in order to back up all of your Outlook
information.
Here’s how you can backup your emails from Microsoft Outlook 2007:
1) First, you will have to locate the PST file. With Microsoft Outlook
2007 open, go to File and select Data File Management.
2) On the Data File tab, you should see a list of your Personal Folder
files that Outlook has created for you. Select one of them and click
“Open Folder”. This will open the Outlook folder where the PST files are
stored.
3) Select the PST or “Microsoft Office Outlook Personal Folder” files in
the folder, one of which should be “Outlook.pst”.
4) Copy the files to a backup location in another hard drive, or even
better, burn it on a CD.
Now, whenever you want to restore the backup files, you can do that by
simply copying the backup PST files back to the same folder. And to
locate that folder, follow the same first two steps above.
Safe and easy it is!
For more computer tips, log on to
www.mrtechsavvy.com
First two entries win an Apacer 2GB USB Flash Drive
each! So hurry,
send your answer to
[email protected].
Till then… Tata ;-)
Answer and WIN!
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