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To: Moominoid who wrote (18415)	4/25/2002 11:32:30 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi David, <<Latest activity (been busy)>> Dateline 9:00am, Wednesday April 24th, 2002. TurboCat. Telephone calls change events faster than plans do, and reality changes plans even faster than telephones do. Whatever my travel plans were, they are no longer. I am sitting in a strange and enormous catamaran-type of contraption powered by two turbofan engines, gliding through water with a complement of 250-300 passengers. The TurboCat will whisk me from China Hong Kong City Harbour (name of a building) in Freedom Mountain Kowloon to the Shenzhen Airport in Center of World Production Guangdong Province, across the dividing line of 'one country two systems' within the hour. I shall then wait for another machine with wings on top of jet engines to take me to Yichang, site of the Three Gorges Dam. I will collect some money from a fertilizer company for one of many but second to last partial payment on a power plant, and I shall mesmerize the chairman again with tales of gas fields in the British West Indies, this time with an audio visual multimedia dog & pony show. Yes Pezz, we are coming to the end of one scheme and the beginning of the next. I will go from Yichang to Shanghai on Thursday, and my wife will join me on Friday, in time for a get-together with metal trading English-Chinese nephew on Saturday (yes, I will answer the question asked of me by a PM on the subject of China and metals), and finally a friend's wedding on Sunday. My metal trading nephew is a fortunate 35-year old who had quit Enron Metal last October, shortly before the company's collapse. He, in cooperation with his Chinese Japanese Peruvian partner, took many of their Chinese customers (Enron did not choose to pickup on their contractually optional transition/non-compete as it was busy with trying to survive) and signed commission-share agreements with competing metal trading brokers. Enron continued to pay hefty salary to the two youngsters just so that it could claim it still had a China office, an empty shell in Shanghai with a commission sharing agreement with two ex-employees. Enron Metal has now changed hands, and the buyer bought back the Chinese customers along with an English Chinese Jew and a Chinese Japanese Peruvian. This has been an excellent adventure for two kids over the past 6 months. Net gain, low-7 digits in fiat USD, with additional mid-6 digit guarantee per year over the next 36 months. Is this legal or is life just great?! I just raised my gaze from the palmtop to my surroundings in the SuperClass cabin (USD 45 vs USD 25 in Proletariat Class downstairs) on the TurboCat, and I am surrounded by a group comprised of various flavors of Chinese, English, Russian, American, Pakistani, Indian and bearded and capped Jewish business types. No one started killing anyone else yet. One quarter of the passengers in this 48-seat airplane-styled cabin is busy with computers, 25% are flipping newspapers, a dozen are chatting away on cellular phones, and the rest have either dozed off, or are tucking into their scrambled eggs and twisted bacon. The scene in this section of the galaxy reminds me of that oddly populated oddity bar in the first Star Wars movie from a time long long ago. I do not see any laser swords. I do not know what the 250 passengers downstairs are doing, but they have access to television, newspaper, cards, and each other. Many things can be said of globalization, but boring is not one of them. I now press a few buttons to 'forward' my HK mobile calls to my China mobile number, and activate the dual-numbered SIM card to China by inputting 0002#. Chugs, Jay