Indulge me...

April 25, 2019, Somewhere in the Atlantic, off the west coast of Africa — Indulge me, not that you don’t already: I have two more posts to do to catch up (Namibia and Kruger). One will be difficult and therefore time-consuming; the other just time-consuming. So I’m stalling. First:

Live Cattle

Latest Price & Chart for Live Cattle

End of day Commodity Futures Price Quotes for Live Cattle

You know how sometimes when you open your desktop, some weird page pops up that you never beckoned? I get a page from the Reader’s Digest once a week; my computer doesn’t know that I once worked at the Digest, it just sends me that page. Also the front page of the Pittsburgh Gazette.

This morning the ‘Live Cattle’ page from the NASDAQ site popped up. Believe me, I hadn’t recently been checking the price of cattle or hog bellies or soy beans.

But it reminded me of a fascinating factoid I learned yesterday at a lecture called ‘Africa and the Globalized World.’ Poor African countries — which is most of them — cannot afford to erect telephone poles and string telephone wires across thousands of miles of jungles and savannas and deserts. But they can — sometimes with international financing — erect cell towers. Much easier. Sometimes they’re even camouflaged as trees.

What does this have to do with cattle? African cattle and dairy farmers — including nomadic tribes that move their herds from one grazing area to another — now have cell phones. Which they use to check the current price of cattle in order to decide if today’s the day to move the cattle to market! ‘Globalized World’ indeed!

II.

I always admire a well-written newspaper article, and this one qualifies. You know me and architecture. Though I was in Grand Central Station dozens of times as a kid (I lived 30 miles north), I was never in Penn Station. Reading this article, I’m sorry I never saw it in its glory days.