BRAVE NEW WORLD

Thanks to the estimable Fred Stanback for this awesome video:  The operating room of the near future . . . no cutting you open!  (Or, to be honest about the wellspring of my enthusiasm: no cutting me open.)  I’m telling you, kids, if we can just make it through the next couple of decades, investing in the future and learning better how to share our collective blessings, there are going to be enormous collective blessings to share.

Floss.

WheelTug picked up its eleventh airline yesterday — Icelandair.  I know the Arctic is not technically a continent — just frozen water — and that probably the folks at the Iceland Tourism Department would rather identify their country with Europe than with the Arctic anyway. But if the Arctic were the eighth continent, and the island of Iceland were on it instead of just sort of rising up out of the ocean near it, that would allow us to say “11 airlines on four continents.”

QUICK CORN

Just in time for summer, Cooking Like A GuyTM, part 63.  I haven’t posted a recipe in a long time because since we switched to WordPress I haven’t figured out how elegantly to insert the TRADEMARK symbol.  And still haven’t, but I trust you. [UPDATE: Thanks to Mark L., I now do! Cooking Like A Guy™.]

So here, to compensate at least a little, two new recipes.  Starting with corn.

Step one: buy corn.

Step two: microwave to taste.

Seriously, it’s that simple.  If it’s good corn, just three or four minutes, husks and tassles and all, and it should be amazing.  When it cools down a little, shuck, salt, pepper, eat.

INSTANT BAKLAVA

The simplest way to cook baklava is just to buy some.  But who ever thinks to do that?  Instead:

1.  Pour a little granola into a small bowl.  Or corn flakes, raisin bran — whatever.

2.  Dip a spoon into a jar of honey.  I know, honey is not that manly, but everyone should have a jar – it’s honey. How can you not?  Bears love honey, and bears are manly.  You could name a football team after bears.  So just dip the damn spoon into the damn jar and then . . .

3.  Putting the base of the spoon onto the floor of the bowl, push some of the granola on top, and then – still holding the now-honey-and-granola-laden spoon level with one hand, take a small knifeful or forkful of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light (or actual butter, but I’m trying to delight you, not kill you) and dab it on top of the granola, scraping it off the knife or fork with the edge of the spoon.

4.  Put the spoon in your mouth, close your lips, and, as you pull the spoon back out, leaving all the granola and ICBINBL in your mouth — but just some of the honey to swirl around and just make you crazy it’s so good, just as baklava does, but without having had to bake anything or clean anything (read on).

5.  Repeat until all the granola from the bowl and all the honey from the spoon are gone and you’ve licked the spoon and any honey that dripped onto the bowl, so everything is perfectly clean, as if you were a cat – though, being a guy, you have a dog.  By which I mean a dog – a large, sloppy Labrador retriever or somebody, not one of those dogs that really are so tiny and (let’s just come right out and say it) French, they’re barely dogs at all.

And that, my friends, is how a guy makes baklava.

So Buyer & Cellar reopens June 18.  As I’ve mentioned, I liked it so much when I saw the 99-seat version, I threw caution to the wind and invested.  But see it anyway.  Its star, Michael Urie, beat out five others — even including Bette Midler (“I’ll Eat You Last”) and Holland Taylor (“Ann”) — for the Drama Desk “Outstanding Solo Performance” Award.  Here’s the story.  “A fantasy so delightful,” says The New Yorker, “you’ll wish it were true.”

PRA-HA-FIT

Prague, in Czech, is “Praha,” which I know because I was a Slavic Languages and Literatures major in college (which meant reading War & Peace in English) and took Czech for a day.  It turned out that all Czech words are stressed on the first syllable — PRA-ha — except, the instructor went on to explain, those stressed also on the second syllable.  “What,” I asked, “are you just supposed to shout the whole word?”  No, she explained, “listen to the difference.”  After twenty minutes of not being able to discern the difference, I dropped Czech.

And today Borealis begins trading on the Prague Exchange.  Symbol:  BOREY.  Newsflash: there is a Prague exchange.  Indeed, it is 20 years old.  Here are current quotes.  I don’t see BOREY yet, and I’m not sure when we first will, but I’m bookmarking this dollar-corona currency converter to be ready.

Go ahead, laugh.  Pra-ha-ha-ha-ha.  But Gregor Mendel, founder of the science of genetics, was Czech, as were Franz Kafka and Antonin Dvorak, and as is Milos Forman, whose “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975 won all five major Academy Awards — and what company, I ask you, is more cuckoo than Borealis?  Or, well, not cuckoo — I think it may have passed that stage.  Let’s just say unusual.

In any event, the more interesting near-term action could be in Paris, June 17-23, rather than Prague.  Borealis will be at the Paris Air Show, Hall 5, E-264.

THE CENTER HOLDS

So the Republicans stand for basically three things:  cutting taxes on the wealthy; austerity; and blocking everything the President tries to do — even if it was originally their idea.  They justify the first by dubbing the wealthy “the job creators.”  But as serial entrepreneur multi-billionaire Nick Hanauer shows so clearly in under six minutes, it is actually the middle class who are the job creators.  They justify austerity by citing a “massively influential” study by two Harvard professors that turns out to have been massively wrong.  And they justify the third — well, they don’t even try.  They’re just determined to see the President fail, whatever damage that may do the country.  For more on that, see Jonathan Alter’s The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, just out.  Will someone please bring back the Grand Old Party?  The party of Lincoln, who subsidized construction of the railroads (infrastructure!) and launched the first land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences . . . of Teddy Roosevelt, who busted the trusts and championed meat inspection and honest food and drug labeling . . . of Eisenhower, who gave us the Interstate Highway System (infrastructure!) and, lamenting a bloated military, warned of what he called the “military-industrial complex” . . . of Nixon (yikes!), who launched the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration . . . and so many moderate Republican members of the House and Senate.  Virtually all gone.

The center held this last time.  But our friends across the aisle, with their three goals (and their four “pillars of deceit” — government, the media, academia, and science), remain determined.

Hoping to make a lot of money myself one day, I’m still enjoying Tuesday’s airberlin announcement, wherein WheelTug picked up 110 more potential planes to retrofit.  Trading in Borealis stock barely budged.  But airberlin stock was up — choose the three-day chart here to best see it — even in the face of an unrelated sell recommendation (if I’m reading this translation right).  You could say that the difference is that airberlin has some credibility in the financial market, so when it announced what it believed to be good news, some people bought shares; whereas Borealis, after 14 years of bold projections and  no revenue, has earned a first class baggage allowance of skepticism.

And yet . . . the thing works.

Pick your magician: it’s one thing to make a jet vanish (it was a small jet, and, even if it really did vanish, how is that valuable?); quite another to drive one around for hours with no assist from the main engines, potentially saving a fortune (try that, David Copperfield).

If the system gets FAA Certification, what airline would not want this money-saving capability?

And because the system is not flight critical . . . and because so many airlines want it and so many experienced partners are working to make it happen . . . why is it crazy to think it may get certified?

The system is estimated to save more than $700,000 a year per plane.

Why is it nuts to think WheelTug (a subsidiary of Chorus Motors, which is a subsidiary of Borealis) could net $50,000 a year in profit from each leased system?

There are something north of 10,000 jets that could be retrofitted with WheelTug.  So multiply $50,000 times 10,000 planes and you get half a billion dollars a year.  In profit.  Assign that a multiple of 10 and you get a $5 billion value, which would make for a hundred-fold jump in the price of the stock.

Sure, there could be competitors; but as of yet, no airline I know of has signed with one.

And sure, I’m not taking into account that Borealis owns only most — not all — of Chorus Motors and that Chorus owns only most — not all — of WheelTug.

But then again I’m also not assigning any value to the possible value of the company’s various technologies for, say, automobiles.  Or its other potentially valuable assets.

So I frankly don’t get why the stock isn’t higher.

It remains highly speculative — and bizarre, with its headquarters in Gibraltar and all the rest.  But is there not by now a reasonable chance — a 50% chance or a 30% chance or a 20% chance — the vision will be realized?  If so, this is one heck of an under-priced lottery ticket.

But I’m in no rush.

What was that Sydney Greenstreet said at the end of “The Maltese Falcon” once he knew the real jewel-encrusted falcon had eluded him?  “Seventeen years I’ve wanted that item, and have been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest . . . well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only [he pauses to calculate] five and fifteen-seventeenths percent.”