Buckle up—the euro reversed its earlier losses against the dollar Monday, climbing to an intra-day high above $1.5500 as U.S. stocks began to wobble a bit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened higher, then began to shed those gains, though trading continues to fluctuate. The lower stocks reduced a modest rise in risk appetite in currency markets that had helped the dollar against its key rivals during the overnight session. Traders and analysts said the recent rise in the dollar, even as oil prices pushed higher, left many central banks to view the euro as a cheap buy. “With the run up that we had in oil, the euro is perhaps undervalued,” said Mark Frey, head foreign exchange trader at Custom House. Despite the dollar’s reversal against the euro, the greenback remains stronger against the yen. Recently, the euro was at $1.5492 from $1.5482 late Friday, while the dollar was at Y103.48 from Y103.02. The euro was at Y160.35 from Y159.47, according to EBS.
French avant-prog rock eco-warriors Magma’s Christian Vander sings about his love for Otis Redding in the made-up language of Kobaïan. I most definitely “caught the vapours” from these guys. I’ll never look at tv music performances in the same way again…
One afternoon when I was 11, my dad took me out of a maths lesson to watch late 80’s snooker giant Steve ‘The Nugget’ Davis, ‘cut the red ribbon’ at a new (pre Superdrug) chemist in my town called ‘Tip-Top’. Little did I know that this ball clacking ‘ginger magician’ was also a vinyl junkie iconoclast masquerading as a soup sniffing square.
At the zenith of his career, Davis arranged and personally funded UK tour dates in London for Magma just for his own amusement. He was astonished to find that other (fuck Japan, save the whales) Kobaïan/alien shagging weirdos turned up too:
“In the late Eighties, I thought it would be nice if they came over to London to do a gig, so I set up Interesting Promotions to promote it. Well, I paid the bill is what I really mean. I never realised that there were 14 of them in the band, which raised the overheads slightly. They did three nights at the Bloomsbury theatre; the last night was a sell-out. I’d done my nuts [spent too much money] too, so it was great. Then I went back to [whispers] playing snooker.”
Proof positive that there’s more to ‘Mr. Interesting’ than meets the cue ball.
Quote: My obsession, Lee Honeyball, Sunday March 7, 2004, The Observer
