Tuesday newsletter

Dear rss free blog,

Today I am
in the port of St. Lucia, Castries,
along with passengers from 4 great ocean liners, including the QE2. There are
at least three reasons I can think of which make St. Lucia special.

It is one
of only two Caribbean islands with surviving
Amerindian tribes, who live in a lowlands mini-rain forest as subsistence
farmers. They speak English.

This
island beats out Quebec
on “je me souviens” front although it does not appear on the local license
plates. “Gens Sainte Lucie” speak an almost impenetrable patois which is
clearly French because of the intonations and because every now and again you
catch a phrase like “voila” or “ça va?” or “bien” or “oui”. The rest is
incomprehensible to old-time Paris residents
like us, and also to the two Quebec
men we made friends with on board. Many people have French names; the customs
house guards clacking their domino tiles could be in Marseilles as they keep count of the score. Most
of the population is Roman Catholic although the 7^th Day Adventists
are making inroads. Helping the RC’s keep their ranks, in the Cathedral the
stained glass and the creche show a Holy Family the same color as the Uganda
Martyrs: Afro-American.

But they
have been formally British since 1797 when the French garrison on Sainte Lucie
(as it was) surrendered to the Enniskillen Dragoons of George III. In 213 years
they did not give up French despite not getting help from the French Ministry
of Education and the forces of “la francophonie” to keep the faith. Our 2^nd
Paris landlady was teaching French in Quebec when she rented
us her apartment in the 1960s.

Most
astonishing is the 3^rd factoid about St. Lucia which undermines the
philo-Semitic tallies of our friend John Hulley, who is not Jewish. He says
(wrongly) that Jews have the highest number of Nobel Prizes per capita.

Actually, St. Lucia has
the highest number of Nobel winners per capita of any spot on earth. There are
60,000 people and two Nobelists, the poet Sir Derek Walcott, who described
himself ”Gens Sainte Lucie” in patois, (although most of what he wrote is in
English); and the late development economist Arthur Lewis, who developed the
theory that education was a key to economic progress. Both African-American St.
Lucians achieved world renown as well as the Nobels.

While on
the subject of development, note that money flows last week into emerging
markets funds were triple the prior week’s level, according to EMFL of
Cambridge Mass, which tracks fund flows. Tomorrow is the birthday of its Brad
Durham. As they say in St. Lucia, Bon Anniversaire. UBS today
issued a forecast for 2010 in which it says that “emerging markets are the only
play” for next year, according to Bloomberg.

Now it
turns out that anything you say on your mobile phone can be un-encrypted thanks
to a formula published today by some German mathematics boffins. Be discrete
please.

You can
find out about my favorite stock for 2010 by visiting www.thestockadvisors.com where
Steve Halpern summarizes the best ideas of 40 newsletter writers, among them
me.

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