Word: sea
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...cuts, asset sales and cost-cutting measures have pruned the company down. Staff numbers have fallen from 6,000 in 2004 to some 4,500 today. The Legoland parks were sold in 2005 to Merlin Entertainments, part of the Blackstone private equity group, which owns Madame Tussauds and Sea Life. And critically, distribution, packaging and production has been outsourced to Eastern Europe and Mexico. As a result, the Lego Group turned a $374 million loss in 2004 into a $281 million profit...
...pages of the Tintin children's comic books are not where you would expect to find drug dealers cast in a favorable light. But in Cigars of the Pharaoh, our cowlicked protagonist owes his life to a passing sea captain, who rescues him and his faithful fox terrier Snowy from the Red Sea, into which they have been thrown overboard. That captain was based on the real-life French adventurer, hashish smuggler and sometime opium grower Henry de Monfreid - and the recent reissue of De Monfreid's beguiling 1933 memoir Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale is a cause for rejoicing...
...Like all the best drug yarns, Hashish has a whiff of incredibility without being any less enjoyable for it. The schema is plausible enough. Failure to sell 300 tons of trocas (or sea-snail shells), which De Monfreid had fished from the reefs of Eritrea, leaves him desperate for cash. One night, he overhears a midshipman talk about the lucrative market for hashish in Egypt, and De Monfreid resolves to head for Greece - where the "bringer of dreams" was cultivated and packaged for sale - then grease some palms and have 1,300 lbs. (600 kg) shipped to Djibouti, whence...
...Greece, for example, De Monfreid scowls at a throng of Russian peasants, whom he finds "as uncouth and primitive as the Somali Bedouins." And the book is further marred by the same sort of excessive nautical argot (starboard this, lateen that) that makes Moby Dick such a tough sea of words to oar through. But whenever De Monfreid reaches land and begins to describe the gallery of rogues and brutes and generally weird people he claims to meet on his journeys, the book can spellbind...
...bristling sarcasm to weighty understatement - is so dynamic that it ultimately doesn't matter whether he is using it in the service of fact or fiction. De Monfreid was at once a wild man and a philosophe, whose tender soliloquies on the joys of an unfettered life at sea, with nothing but the naked stars above, retain an immense power to seduce. While Hashish may be an acutely self-conscious literary artifact, it is also a singular self-portrait of a defiant spirit, who spurned "the slavery of some dreary job" and "the frivolous and treacherous world" of conventionality...