SLOW BOAT FROM CHINA

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Susan Loesser : ...""I'd like to get you on a slow boat to China" was a well-known phrase among poker players, referring to a person who lost steadily and handsomely. My father turned it into a romantic song, placing the title in the mainstream of catch-phrases in 1947. visit site

mish : ..."If nobody is buying your trucks, you don't need to rent a vessel to carry that shiny new 18-wheeler to its new owner. Hence the Baltic Dry Index, which tracks the cost of shipping goods and commodities, fell below 1,000 this week for the first time in six years.

Put another way, it is now almost 90 percent cheaper to ship goods over the oceans than it was at the beginning of the year. And because the huge vessels known as capesize ships can't currently charge much more than their daily operating cost of about $6,000 per day, their captains have slowed down to economize on fuel and save money, to about 8.68 knots from 10.33 knots in July, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

It isn't just the oceans that are emptying. Air freight traffic dropped 7.7 percent in September, according to the latest figures from the International Air Transport Association. That's the steepest decline since the trade group began compiling the data in January 2003." mish

cappinpetey : oh...an iss..."

ambrose : ..."In Eastern Europe, the brief respite following Hungary's $25bn rescue package from the IMF was already giving way to fresh angst. Romania was forced to deny persistent rumours that it was seeking an emergency loan from the fund.

The country's prime minister, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, may have inadvertently fuelled fears when he told local TV that the global economy was sinking like the Titanic. "On the lower levels, people are in water up to their necks, while on the upper floors the music still plays on, just as it did in the film. And those people listening to the people listening to the music, not knowing that the Titanic has hit an iceberg, that's us here in Romania. That's just what we're like," he said.

dexansamclem : ..."The idea, of course, was that traveling by boat to China was about as long and slow a trip as one could imagine. Loesser moved the phrase from the poker table to a more romantic setting. The song was very popular in its time (and has been revived and sung from time to time over the years by such notables as Kay Kyser, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Buffett, and Frank Sinatra, among others). The phrase then moved into general parlance to mean anything that takes a lonnnnnnng time." visit site

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