Friday, November 30, 2012

US Dollar Exchange Rate for the Euro and the Pound

How the financial exchange rate relates to "A Clockwork Orange" and the Rosetta Stone.  Perhaps that sounds lunatic to you but read on:

Tonight I was going to get some books from Amazon UK until I discovered the dollar exchange rate for the pound.  It's even worse than for the euro!  From this I conclude that the dollar isn't worth much of anything.

The euro trades for about $1.30 US.  The pound trades for about $1.60 US.  That means a $10 US book will cost $16 US at Amazon UK.

This couldn't have anything to do with the US being more deeply in debt than all the rest of the Cannibal Isles.  Nah, no way.

This is pretty disappointing as I love to read but the cost is prohibitive.  Shipping from Amazon UK is five pounds for the base shipping fee, regardless of whether it's one book or twenty, plus one pound per book.  For example, if you get two £10 books, that will cost £20 plus £5 for base shipping fee plus £2 for the individual fee per book for a total of £27.  Multiply that by the $1.60 US exchange rate and you have a grand total of $43.20 to get those books from Britain to my hands in Greece.  This has nothing to do with Greece as the same would be true if I were in Germany, ostensibly one of the richest countries in Europe.

The solution may well be a clockwork orange.

(Ed:  Um, what?)

Many people only saw "A Clockwork Orange" as a movie but there was much the movie couldn't show as a large part of the genius of Anthony Burgess' work was the language of idiom he invented for it.  'Horrorshow' is a word that was used frequently in the movie but the actual range of the lexicon was so comprehensive that one had to learn it to make any sense at all of the book.  It was, in my view, literary genius but there was no chance of making any translation of that for cinema.

(Ed:  So what?)

The solution of a clockwork orange may be to buy science-fiction books that have been re-printed in Greek.  It should certainly be possible to locate classic science-fiction as much of that was translated around the world.  Science-fiction could, in effect, work as a Rosetta Stone in assisting me or at least providing an incentive in learning Greek.

(Ed:  You're insane.)

Yah, I've heard that before!

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