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Saturday, 10 May 2008
What a banker
This image, on posters and T-shirts, is no longer as fashionable as it once was. It is nevertheless astonishing that a scheming, murderous tyrant - not even handsome in real life - adorned student walls and chests for so long. He even ousted Lord Palmerston from a London pub. And according to Charles Moore he has been displacing bankers:
Accountants, as we know, are even more boring than bankers. They look at your shoes when they talk to you, which, to be fair, is one up on actuaries who look at their own. Here's an idea - why not print T-shirts with pictures of incomplete ledger accounts and the challenging slogan: "Have you got the debit for my credit?" Thus accountants can mix business with pleasure and get down to some serious double entry. As for that troublesome, lonesome creature the dangling debit, this could adorn a pair of underpants, negating any reserve and creating much goodwill. Luca Pacioli, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Posted on 6:30 AM by Mary Jackson
Comments
10 May 2008
 Hugh Fitzgerald
"Pacioli" is preferred but in English both ways of spelling the name are permissible. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1934784491051175729 10 May 2008
Mary Jackson I like that clip. He makes no mention of his other activities. How do you spell Pacioli in Italian? Accountants spell it with one 'c' to save time and therefore money. Accountants - and Pacioli would approve - have their eye on the bottom line. 10 May 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
The orthographomachy -- “you wrote ‘Paccioli’ and “but I write ‘Pacioli’” -- takes us all the way back to posts nearly three years old, at JW, and an answer to a query by me that was promised by you but never kept: “…Hugh, on your recommendation, given that you're right about many things, I've read "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry". What a gem! Right up my street. It is now doing the rounds at my office - by strange coincidence, in Shepherd's Bush, near where Christie worked - and is putting all kinds of ideas into our heads. Many thanks.” Posted by: Interested “Glad to help B. S. Johnson's heirs and assigns possibly receive some posthumous royalties. He was quirky, like Russell Hoban, or Cees Nooteboom, or Andrey Platonov. Remember the title of that old song that Flannery O'Connor borrowed: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" ("You know -- you always get the other kind" with a slight rise in the singer's voice at the end)? Well, that's the way it is with writers nowadays. This office around which B. S. Johnson is now making his slow way. What kind of office? Estate agents, Strutt & Parker Country-Life stuff, selling houses and messuage to sheikhs who don't deserve more than a tent in the desert? Lawyers, the kind that hire Lavinia Greenlaw to be their Poet in Residence? What exactly? Youth wants to know. Posted by: Hugh I'll put your question in a suspense account, to be resolved at the year end. Suspense accounts must be cleared - they cannot be carried forward to future accounting periods. Posted by: Interested So? What kind of office, main or succursale, is it? Suppose I wanted to show up there, one day, unannounced. I’d need to know its local habitation and its name. 10 May 2008
Mary Jackson Who is this "Interested" party? Anyway, you know the answer, because she told you in "real life". On the web, however, the suspense account was never cleared. Readers have been kept dangling like a dangling debit. Reserves of goodwill are almost exhausted. 10 May 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
She did? And in "real life"? I forget what she said. Could you kindly remind me? 10 May 2008
Mary Jackson Check your email. Of course I'm not going to say that kind of thing on the web, anymore than you do. |
