Thanks to Mrs L, the old folk and her old folk I am enjoying a year’s subscription to this august publication. There is a high volume of adverts (the average seems to be around 30% of page space per issue) but they are often classy adverts, and the news material and comment is fascinating and considerably more international than your average paper.
So, I now know everything. Which is nice.
I know, for example, that in America, expectations about transport are different to what they are here (among the class I belong to anyway), and that The Economist’s anonymous writers can be quite witty…
Speaking of the aftermath of the under-reported hurricane September that hit the South with a one-two, p.60 of Oct 4-10, 2008 reads [tricolon with bathetic climax?]
Most of the Gulf of Mexico’s crude oil production halted before Gustav, and after the hurricans hit the refineries were slow to recover. As of September 29th, according to the Department of Energy, more than half of production was still shut down. Two pipelines serve most of the south-east, and severe shortages resulted. [one…] People started to fill up whenever they could, sometimes queuing for hours. [two…] Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said that in Atlanta and Charlotte and Chattanooga the situation was “like a third-world country.” [three!] People contemplated public transport and telecommuting.
Oh, the hardship, the hardship.
