Book Review - Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip by Jim Rogers

Jim Roger's Excellent "Guide to the World"
I have learned more about the world from Adventure Capitalist than from any other book I've ever read. In case you're not familiar with the author, Jim Rogers, he's an Alabama boy who moved to New York to become one of the most legendary investors in Wall Street history. He co-founded the Quantum Fund, one of the best-performing hedge funds of all time, in 1973 with partner George Soros and "retired" in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight. The Quantum Fund gained over 4,000% during its first ten years. In addition, Jim Rogers and George Soros are legendary for making a billion dollars for the fund during a single day of currency trading. Jim is particularly famous for investing in stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and everything and anything else--long and short--all over the world. If a truck of coffee beans turns over in Columbia, Jim can tell you how it will affect pork belly futures the next day.

Jim chronicled his first trip around the world, on a motorcycle no less, in Investment Biker. Adventure Capitalist is his report of a three-year trip around the world at the turn of the millennium (1999, 2000, and 2001) through 116 countries. No motorcycle this time though. With his beautiful fiancee Paige accompanying him (they married during the trip), they traveled in a custom-built, four-wheel-drive, convertible, Sunburst Yellow Mercedes.

The book is non-stop adventure supplemented with Jim's excellent political and economic commentary. Here are some quotes that I highlighted in the book:

"Ulan Bator, the capitol of Mongolia, is perhaps the most technologically up-to-date city in the world, totally digital. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a free and independent Mongolia benefited from numerous sources of foreign aid, and with no infrastructure to upgrade, it leapfrogged about three generations of technology. The whole city is wired with fiber-optic cable, enabling you to jack into the Web from almost any phone in town... Everybody in Mongolia has a digital cell phone. The nation's nomads, crossing the country on horseback, carry them. There is a cell phone in most yurts."

"The liberator of the Ivory Coast and its first president was Felix Houphouet-Boigny... He was going to make the country's cathedral larger than Saint Peter's until the pope intervened. In the end, at the pontiff's urging, he made it two centimeters smaller."

"Tanzania, in my opinion, when it comes to tourism, is the single best country in Africa... it has not yet been overrun by foreign visitors... It has beautiful beaches on the Indian Ocean. It has the exotic, ancient island of Zanzibar... It has game parks that are unique in the world, teeming with animals... Tanzania is one of the safest countries in Africa. And it is cheap... There were animals everywhere. And no people."

"In India, self-described as a great incubator of information technology, we could not even use mobile phones universally. We had to buy a different phone for almost every city. A mobile phone in China works everywhere in the country. The Indians are extraordinarily resentful and jealous of the Chinese... China has grown far more than India in the last twenty years, and China has infrastructure--highways, telephones, mobile phones. India has virtually none of these."

"You will not find another city in the world that is as rich and as safe as Singapore."

"My chief impression of Paraguay today is that it should not exist. The place should be dismantled and sold for parts."

"In Buenos Aires I went to the bank, changed all my pesos into dollars, and got them out of the country. The banker handling the transaction scoffed at me, as did several politicians... in three months the collapse of the Argentine economy led the news all over the world."

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Music Review - Ultra Dance 5

Decent At Best
Ultra.Dance 05 is a below-par two-disc album. At best, it's worthy of listening to in the car or at work. I specifically rate is as "decent" since these compilation albums are never "great" and it does have a tiny few fairly good songs. Also, the majority of tracks on this album certainly do not qualify as "club dance" either. They're much too popish for that in most instances, or techno-trance in others. The first two tracks on disc one, "Love Me Right (Oh Sheila)" and "Take Me To The Clouds Above", are perfect examples of the former.

"Trick Me" is a track that I absolutely cannot stand. The same goes for "Stand Back", a hideously bad cover of Stevie Nicks' hit song. The artists on this album each have their place in music, but none of them, with the exception of Sarah McLachlan, deserve to even stand in the same room with Stevie Nicks. None of them should even be attempting to redo her songs, especially the girl on this particular track who doesn't seem to have any particularly noteworthy singing talent to begin with. By contrast, "California Dreamin'" by Royal Gigolos selectively samples the 70's classic by the same name instead of trying to redo it, and the result works well.

"Seven Nation Army" by Punk Division has received pretty good radio play in the genre. Most readers will probably already be familiar with it though you may have to hear it to recognize it.

"Never Be Alone" by Lucas Prata is about as popish as you can get (with a little techno thrown in), but it works and is a really great song. Ditto for "Love Comes Again".

"Fallen" by Sarah McLachlan is the first single from her Afterglow album and the only 5-star song on this compilation. If you don't have this single or the Afterglow album, buying this compilation is almost worth it for this single song with the few other half-decent tunes as bonus material.

"Fallen" flows well into by the trance tune "Satellite" by OceanLab which is easy to get lost in and reminiscent of tunes by Ian Van Dahl or Lasgo.

Seal reaffirms his flash-in-the-pan status with the quite forgettable (if it was so obnoxious) "Waiting For You" which starts out disc two.

The majority of the other tracks are mediocre at best, but are not a total loss.

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