This Is Why Warren Buffett Really Eats So Much Fast Food - "Warren Buffett eats in a way few would consider healthy. "I am one quarter Coca-Cola," he joked at the Berkshire Annual General Meeting in 2016. Out of the 2,700 calories he consumes per day, 700 come from the fizzy drink... All this despite a high-sugar, high-sodium diet that includes ice cream, potato chips, peanut brittle, and copious amounts of fast food. The billionaire's company, Berkshire Hathaway, is Coca Cola's largest shareholder. He's also invested in See's Candies, McDonald's, and Dairy Queen... Warren Buffett's close friend, billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, says Buffett mostly subsists on a diet of hamburgers, ice cream, and Coke. Celebrating 25 years of their friendship in 2016, Gates wrote in his blog, Gates Notes, "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old." ... He downs three cans of Coke before leaving for work. For breakfast, he may have a bowl of ice cream, or Utz potato chips. Buffett's logic? "I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among 6-year-olds, so I decided to eat like a 6-year-old. It's the safest course I can take"... Once a month, Buffett takes his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to the fast food restaurant and soft-serve ice cream chain Dairy Queen... "Warren tells this story that, when he was young, he took a young lady to Dairy Queen. She had a great experience, and he said that if he ever had the opportunity, he would buy the business. So he did"... he has a McDonald's card that allows him to eat for free at any of the fast food chain's Omaha restaurants. There's no expiration date on the gold card — not that it matters. Buffett's company has enough money to buy McDonald's outright (via Business Insider). But the very modest billionaire told CNBC that the card is the reason "why the Buffett family has Christmas dinner at McDonald's."... The market's highs and lows even affect what he eats. In the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, Buffett explained how he decides which of three breakfast options to order at McDonald's. "When I'm not feeling quite so prosperous, I might go with the $2.61, which is two sausage patties, and then I put them together and pour myself a Coke," he revealed (via CNBC) . He continued, saying, "$3.17 is a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit, but the market's down this morning, so I'll pass up the $3.17 and go with the $2.95... Cauliflower makes Warren Buffett sick and rhubarb makes him retch. He doesn't like sweet potatoes, but he will reluctantly nosh on some carrots. Buffett is vocal about his disdain for vegetables... "I don't see smiles on the faces of people at Whole Foods"... No matter which part of the world he travels to, Warren Buffett sticks with the meals he knows, usually a hamburger or a hotdog. In Buffett's biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, he is quoted as saying, "I like eating the same thing over and over and over again. I could eat a ham sandwich every day for fifty days in a row for breakfast.""
Weird this isn't that known, given the media obsession over Trump's diet
Warren Buffett says he eats McDonald's three times a week because he 'isn't bothered by death' - "Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has admitted eating McDonald's chicken nuggets for lunch at least three times a week - because he is 'not bothered by the thought of my death'... He is partial to both the regular and cherry coke varieties, which give him the necessary energy boosts as he doesn't drink coffee... Despite his high-sugar, high-salt diet, Mr Buffett has never touched alcohol. This is reminiscent of the U.S President, Donald Trump, who despite his junk food habit and disinclination to exercise, doesn't smoke and is a noted teetotaler... Mr Buffett also handed a big endorsement to Britain ahead of Brexit by dismissing fears about its impact on the economy."
Too Much Tech Could Be Causing Nearsightedness…But Not in the Way You Might Think - "Myopia, the blurry vision we know as nearsightedness, is reaching epidemic proportions—it could overtake a third of the world’s population by decade’s end. But is the condition caused by the rise of computers and mobile devices that strain the world’s eyes? It turns out that tech can cause nearsightedness...but not in the way you might think. Scientists are increasingly linking myopia with time spent indoors, reports Ellie Dolgin for Nature. She notes that scientists have long been on the hunt for the cause of myopia, which has been linked to higher education levels, genetics and book work over the years. But though researchers have been unable to find a link between specific computing or reading behaviors and myopia, says Dolpin, they did find a connection between eyesight and the amount of time spent indoors"
Dvořák's "American" Quintet - "Composers and publishers don’t always see eye to eye. Simrock, the German publisher of Dvorak’s music, irritated the patriotic Czech composer by issuing his scores with his first name printed in its Germanic form “Anton” rather than its Czech form “Antonin.” They finally came up with a compromise: Simrock ABBREVIATED Dvorak’s first name, printing it as “A-N-T-period” on the music’s title page: Germans could read that as “Anton” and Czechs as “Antonin.” Everyone was happy."
Ravel plays "guess who" in Paris - "On today's date in 1911, the Independent Music Society of Paris sponsored "An Anonymous Concert" at which the audience was invited to guess the composers of a number of pieces presented without attribution. In the audience was the French composer Maurice Ravel, who had agreed to let a suite of his new piano pieces be performed as part of the experiment. Some professional music critics were also in attendance, although they prudently refused to reveal their guesses, fearing their professional reputations might suffer as a result. "The title Valses nobles et sentimentales is a sufficient indication that my intention was to compose a chain of waltzes following the example of Schubert," Ravel wrote. "They were performed for the first time, amidst protests and booing, at this concert." Even more droll, recalled Ravel, were the reactions of some his most ardent admirers, who attended the concert with him, but didn't know any of his own music would be played. They jeered at his waltzes, calling them "ridiculous pages," and ventured the guess the composer must be either Erik Satie or Zoltan Kodaly. Ravel accepted their comments in stoic silence."
Bernard Herrmann gets a pink slip from Hitch - "When Alfred Hitchcock's 53rd feature film, a cold war spy thriller entitled "Torn Curtain," opened in New York Theaters on today's date in 1966, audiences did NOT hear this music over the title credits. It was the swinging 60s, and Hitchcock had asked his long-time collaborator, composer Bernard Hermann, for a pop score that would be "with it." For the main title, Hitch wanted a pop song that might be successful as a hit radio single. What Hitch did NOT want was, as he put it, "more Richard Strauss." Hermann assured Hitch he knew exactly what was required—and then ignored him completely. Herrmann thought "Torn Curtain" was a dangerously weak film, and one that needed a strong orchestral score to make it effective. Herrmann's huge symphonic score featured an eerie choir of massed flutes and ominous, oppressive brass. When Hitch heard a Hollywood studio orchestra rehearsing Herrmann's main title music, he fired the composer on the spot and called in someone else to score the film. Herrmann was crushed. He had thought his score would rescue a weak film, and that Hitch should have been grateful. "You call in the doctor to make you healthy," he later quipped—"Not to make you rich!" Hermann may well have right. "Torn Curtain" is regarded as one of Hitchcock's lamest efforts, while Herrmann's rejected score has gone on to be recorded and admired on its own."
Ennio Morricone - "He also offered a bit of wise advice when asked about scores that were NOT successes: “A long time ago I really loved a film that I was working on and I became too involved. That was kind of unbalanced. It made me realize that you can’t love things too much if you want them to work.”"
Liszt gets political - "Liszt delivered an equally impassioned speech calling for Hungarian cultural and political independence. The patriotic audience went berserk with joy and began a torchlight procession of some 5000 people through the city, with Liszt at the front. It’s one of those nice, ironic touches of history, however, that Liszt, the standard bearer for Hungarian national music, didn’t really speak Hungarian very well, and, for the record, delivered HIS patriotic address in French."
The morning after for Sergei Rachmaninoff - "“If there were conservatory in Hell, and if one of its students were instructed to write a symphony based on the seven plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff's, he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and delighted the inmates of Hell.” Ouch! What must have really hurt was that the review was written by a fellow composer, Cesare Cui, and the premiere was conducted–poorly, it seems–by another composer colleague, Alexander Glazunov. The whole affair was so painful that Rachmaninoff needed therapy before he could compose again, and when he left Russia for good in 1917, he left the symphony’s manuscript behind, and in the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution it was lost. The original orchestral parts for the 1897 premiere, survived, however, and they were rediscovered in 1945, two years after Rachmaninoff’s death, and a belated, and this time successful, SECOND performance took place that same year."
Morton Gould rewrites history - "de Mille and Gould had met at the Russian Tea Room to discuss their ballet, a retelling of the true story of Lizzie Borden, acquitted for the gruesome ax murders of her father and step-mother. Both de Mille and Gould thought Borden must have been guilty as charged. “Well, what shall we do about that,” asked de Mille. “Hang her!” said Gould, adding that it any case it would be easier for him to write hanging music than acquittal music. So, with that large dollop of poetic license, de Mille and Gould came up with the scenario for a ballet that opens with Lizzie standing before the gallows."
Full text of "The Fall Of Constantinople 1453" - "The West remained unmoved when it came to deeds. Aeneas Sylvius might grieve sincerely; and there were a few historically minded romantics such as Oliver de la Marche, to whom the Emperor that fell at Constantinople had been the one authentic emperor, the true heir of Augustus and of Constantine, unlike the upstart in Germany. But there was nothing that they could do. The Papacy itself was largely to blame for this apathy. For more than two centuries the popes had denounced the Greeks as being wilful schismatics, and of recent years they had complained loudly that Byzantine adherence to the Union of the Churches was insincere. Western peoples to whom the Turks were a very distant threat might well wonder why they should be asked to give their money and their lives to rescue those recalcitrants. They were conscious, too, of the angry ghost of Virgil, who ranked in the West as an honorary Christian and a Messianic prophet. He had told of the horrors of the Greek sack of Troy. The sack of Constantinople Was its retribution. Literary-minded authors with a taste for Classical phraseology, such as Cardinal Isidore himself, were apt to call the Turks the Teucri. Were they not therefore the heirs of the Trojans, if not actual Trojans themselves ? A letter supposed to have been written by Mehmet II to Pope Nicholas was circulating in France a few decades later; and in it the Sultan was made to express his surprise that the Italians should show him enmity, since they were descended from the same Trojan stock as the Turks. Laonicus Chalcocondylas complained bitterly that at Rome it was generally believed that the Greeks were being punished for their atrocities at Troy; and Pope Pius II, whose name of Aeneas should have given him spedal authority, was at pains to point out that the Teucri and the Turcac were not identical."
Women fighters of the Jewish resistance - HistoryExtra - "‘When you say that the, the Jewish women found it easier to masquerade as Christian Poles than the men. Why was that? I mean, in the book, you talk about the fact that obviously they wouldn't be circumcised. And that's something that would always distinguish a Jewish man. Was that the only reason or were there other things that enabled women to conceal themselves more?’
‘Yeah, there were, there were other things. So first of all, in the 1930s, in Poland, education was mandatory for boys and girls. But often Jewish families sent their sons to private Jewish schools, and daughters were sent to Polish public school. And in these public schools, these girls who ended up becoming the operatives in Resistance that I write about. They, they were surrounded by Christian friends, they were more acculturated. They were aware of Christian traditions and habits, and even gesticulations. And most important, they, and they write about this constantly in their memoirs, they were taught to speak Polish, like a Pole, and not with as they often say, the creaky Yiddish accent...
I think that there's been a misconception that I too, subconsciously felt or participated in for many years, that that that of Jewish passivity. But now, what, I mean to me right now that the Holocaust is a story of constant resilience, constant resistance, constant defiance. Just most people were still killed, because they couldn't, you know, battle a massive army. But, but I think that's important’"
Robert Walpole: Who Was Britain's First Prime Minister? - HistoryExtra - "‘The key thing about him was he helped to ground a parliamentary monarchy and parliamentary state. I mean, if you look back at the 17th century, Britain was the failed state of Europe. It had had terrible Civil War, not just in England, which we tend to think about, but also obviously, in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, culminating in the creation of a republic. That then had fallen in 1660. There’d then be in fresh chaos at the end of the 1670s, the Popish plot, the exclusion crisis, culminating in 1688, with James the Second, James, the Seventh of Scotland being kicked out in the so called Glorious Revolution. There had then been chaos again in the mid 17 teens, the Jacobite rising of 1715 to 16. And at that point, Britain really seemed a bit of a political basket case. And, you know, at the very end of the 17 teens, you have a political split within the governing Whig Party, and you then have the financial chaos and crisis of the South Sea bubble. So somebody who could come along, stabilize the situation and give the country over 20 years of stability was really crucial. We tend to underrate that because we're not used to civil war. But actually, if you've got a background of civil war, there's somebody who can stabilize the situation is really important. Somebody like Charles de Gaulle in France, for example.’"
The Suez Crisis: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra - "‘They sort of immediately issued this ultimatum on 30th of October for both Israel and Egypt to stop fighting and withdraw 10 miles from the canal... Now, this was a big problem... This is being written a long way ahead of time because in fact, what was happening at that point on the 30th of October was that the front between Israel and Egypt was actually around 125 miles east of the canal in Sinai. So what they were actually asking was for Egypt to withdraw 135 miles into its own territory, and for Israel, the aggressor to advance 115 miles into Egyptian territory. So immediately became apparent to everyone that this was actually a kind of conspiracy or plan that was going on... The operation was really very badly planned. Part of the reason for that is that the invasion, Operation Musketeer, as it was called, you know, this had been planned as an invasion. And then very quickly, when this conspiracy was made with Israel, it had to be kind of turned into something that would look like a peacekeeping operation. Now of course, those are two completely different things. So a lot of the prep was extremely bad. And the troops found themselves having to kind of, you know, participate in basically this pantomime. But also, it was so badly planned that sometimes the troops just didn't really know what was going on. Before Suez people used to speak about the three superpowers, and they would talk about the US, the USSR and Britain, because still, you had a British Empire. So Britain was spoken of as a superpower. After Suez that stops. People no longer, they speak of two superpowers’"
Jonathan Dimbleby On Barbarossa | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘It was assumed that the Soviet Union would collapse in weeks. And this was assumed around the world, incidentally, everyone thought the Soviet Union would collapse. And the Allies said, let's keep them going as long as we can, support them as much as possible because the longer they fight against the Germans, the weaker the German army will be in facing and threatening the United Kingdom. So the weather was bad, but it was predictably bad. The weather is always bad at that time of year, General Mud is always on the march. And, and the Red Army had to face the same conditions, but was equipped better to do it. Their weapons didn't freeze up to the same degree that the, the Army's weapons, you know, artillery wouldn't fire, tanks wouldn't start, they lit fires under the tanks to get them going. Meanwhile, they were running out of supplies and fuel. People were getting starved of food, they were getting starved of equipment. And the the, the attack was faltering. They were also losing large numbers of lives. You know, in that first six months of the war, the Germans lost almost as many lives through death, imprisonment, wounding as the Allies did in the whole of the war, the Western Allies did in the whole of the war. You know, these were huge losses, they were, they were dwarfed by the scale of losses that the Soviet lost. Nonetheless, this was attrition that they couldn't withstand’"
How Constitutions Changed The World | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'To ensure it continues to be successful, I think you'd need regular provisions for amendment. Otherwise, these documents become out of date. And in fact, Thomas Jefferson said that he thought that a constitution shouldn't be left untouched for more than, say, 17, 18 years. And I think that's one of the problems with the US Constitution now. The states’ constitutions in the United States are regularly amended, but the Founding Fathers, because they were, they were worried about possible instability, made it very hard to amend the Federal Constitution... The right to bear arms… was designed for a world where guns took about three minutes to load. They are not suitable to the kind of armaments that some Americans have at their disposal now, and this is an extreme example of one of the challenges of written constitution. So those who oppose them, including some in Britain, said that this was the problem, that they were too rigid...
The British have a rather, one could call it even hypocritical response to constitution since they offered to write them for their colonies. And they keep doing that right up to the 1960s. But you know, it's this idea, well, you people need a written constitution. But of course, we are above that. I'm, I'm being a little sarcastic'"
Liberals are so intent on changing the US Constitution, but keep crowing about how according to the Constitution the census doesn't need to ask about citizenship
If we've learnt something about nation building and democracy in the third world, it's that institutions take time to build, which is why the UK can do without a written constitution
Stanley Baldwin | Episode 2: Britain's Greatest Prime Minister Podcast Series - HistoryExtra - "My view is, appeasement was not necessarily a failure, because basically, you had to give Hitler enough rope to hang himself. In other words, you had to, people had been so traumatized and brutalized by the First World War, that they didn't want another war, there was a colossal peace movement in the 1930s. And the only way that Britain would go into the war united, is if you showed beyond the slightest possible doubt, that the Nazis were villains and couldn't be trusted. And in that sense, I actually think Baldwin’s strategy was successful. And he started rearming, he started building up the RAF during his time in office, it's not true that they did nothing. But he felt hamstrung by the opposition in the country, in fact the Labour Party was basically a pacifist party, there was a very strong disarmament movement. He just thought he could go as far as, as he could, and no further. But the benefit of all that was that when Britain did go to war in 1939, nobody said, well, the British should just, you know, hideous war mongers and they've been itching for this war. And actually, we should have given Hitler a chance and the Germans had legitimate grievances. Maybe, you know, you know, we didn't launch a sort of Iraq style preemptive campaign. If we had and even if we'd won, people would still be arguing about it now, they'd probably, there’d still be a lot of books, people saying that we should never have attacked the Germans in 1936, how cruel and wicked we were, Hitler was actually a splendid fellow who was just a bit misguided. Whereas as it was, we were able to go in completely united and, and sort of solid aristic [sp?]'"
Why am I not surprised that the Labour Party supported appeasement?
Choppy/laggy video on HDMI out - "A few months ago I had raised the display resolution being projected over the HDMI cable to 1920x1280 so the desktop would display completely on my TV, without being cropped. This had caused video to play jittery, so when I rolled back the resolution to 1280×720, video became smooth again."
"If your graphics card is integrated, it will cause severe lag unless, as you do, it carries extra GRAM. As it is, you need a discrete or dedicated card (or two, optimally) to output into a large, second screen."
Addendum: Same with the audio - lower fidelity helps
Petition after ice cream and custard dropped from school menu - "Primary children have started a petition after custard and ice cream was dropped from their school dinner menu on health grounds. Pupils at Aberdeenshire's Rhynie PS said they were taking the action to reinstate their favourite puddings, described as the "best in the world"."
Medieval Ethiopia's Diplomatic Missions | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - [On why they needed to send out embassies to get relics] "The Ethiopians didn't dismember their saints. So, you know, like, I think, especially in English, English sources, you do find sometimes descriptions of the rather vigorous dismemberment of the saint’s body, and then the head goes somewhere and the hands go somewhere else and the fingers and what have you. And that is not a practice that Ethiopian Christianity subscribes to. Now, what that leads to, of course, is a bit of a scarcity. Because if you're preserving a saint’s body whole, that means you only have one locality that can have that body or that relic"
Robert Harris On V2, Historical Fiction & WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "After a while, people around Hitler, the SS began to cotton on to the fact that the V2, although the most sophisticated piece of engineering in the world, revolutionary, it would fly, it could fly nearly 100 miles into space. It wasn't a weapon, it wasn't a very successful weapon, it was hugely expensive. The Germans spent almost as much developing V weapons as the or indeed, slightly more actually, than the Americans spent developing the atomic bomb. They wasted the money because a V2 only carried a one ton warhead, and a Lancaster bomber could carry six tons."
Ancient Babylon: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘When people think of the heyday of Babylon, they think of two particular moments in time that stand out. One would be in the 18th century BC, which is the, during the reign of the king Hammurabi and the king Hammurabi is a, best known for the monument that we call the law code of Hammurabi, which is from about 1760 BC, and many schoolchildren learn about that in school as the world's earliest law code. We now know that there were in fact, even earlier law, monuments of law before this and, and texts that write down laws before this, but somehow this has stayed in people's minds as the earliest law code, and he was a very influential and powerful King politically as well, but he's mostly associated with this law code. The other period in time is the time of the King Nebuchadnezzar. So we're moving much forward in time to a period between 604 and 562 BC, the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, which is the time when the city underwent a great deal of reconstruction and the building of major monuments, major architectural structures, and we have descriptions, ancient descriptions of what the city looked like at that time’"
