the organ of the rich

At last I got around to getting the old man's Scandalli accordion out. It was very dusty - for some reason he had insisted on throwing out its case, which he had fabricated from pieces of a downed B24 Liberator (as I recall) . When I cranked it up it was a bit wheezy - playing notes even when no keys (treble) or buttons (bass) were being pressed. He was going to show me how to pull it apart but we never got round to it. Nonetheless I figured out how most of it comes apart and gave it a preliminary clean which fixed the wheezing.

It weighs a bloody ton and so I might start to 'play' it a bit just for the exercise. It's a 120 bass for which you need to rewire your head in order to remember how the buttons go. Longitudonally they go up and down in fourths, while laterally they go tonic note, major, minor, seventh, diminished, augmented (I think). The thing is, it's quite loud so it's hard to play/practise without disturbing half the neighourhood - similar to bagpipes, I imagine.

Actually, when I say 'play' that is an rough approximation - I can still play piano but my abilities on the 'stomach Steinway', as father used to call it, are very limited. He had played it in a jazz band in the early 1950s and could still pump out Stardust, Elmer's Tune and similar songs when he was well into his sixties. Still, it'll be worth having a go occasionally.

(2) I was going to write something about the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us. Chip Goodyear only turned in a $10.5 billion profit for BHP Billiton last year so the board didn't pay him his maximum performance bonus - he got stock currently valued at $3.6 million with about the same again in options. These figures are just beyond the average worker's comprehension - they're certainly beyond mine. The article in the newspaper made much of the genuinely stringent performance hurdle/s that the board had evidently set. Still, I can't see that such disparities in income are sustainable. I read somewhere last week about the combined total of bonuses paid to the financial whizzes in the City of London last year. Juts staggering amounts. This is globalisation - the incomes at the top get driven up by competition for talent, and the incomes at the bottom get driven down by competition for lowering costs. Doesn't seem right.

(3) Sale of remianing bits of Telstra. As someone who bought into T2 (I did check with our then 'adviser') I have pretty much written off that money. It's in my daughter's name, we may as well sit on it until she has an income and needs a tax write off. I think I really don't understand this stuff. I'm supposed to be working - good night.