Ippoippo

… in other words. The theme from The Good Life.

That’s what keeps popping into my head at the moment with us starting to crop some of our home grown grub.

You can now see it here too…

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Talking of music getting stuck in my head.
Yuko seems to have got rather addicted to this bit of Japanese pop.

Yeah… cheese-tastic Japanese Electro-pop… yet strangely addictive. Also, the videos aren’t exactly unpleasant for us to chaps to look at, ahem!

… Japanese style!

Bloody hell, that’s pretty crazy.

There was a report in the FT today, with more ‘bad news’ being slowly leaked out by the IEA.

“Structural demand growth in developing countries and ongoing supply constraints continue to paint a tight market picture over the medium-term,” the IEA said in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report, released on Tuesday in Madrid.

“Poor supply-side performance since 2004, in the face of strong demand pressures from developing countries, has forced oil prices up sharply to curb demand,” the watchdog added.

Crude oil prices surged on Wednesday more than $2.50 to $142.73 a barrel, but still below Monday’s record high of $143.67 a barrel. The report also said that current oil prices were “justified by fundamentals.”

You can also read what The Energy Bulletin say about that report in the FT.

Japan is a market pioneer again: the first industrialised nation with no butter

Is this the first signs of Market failure?
As the article sub heading states…

An explosion in grain prices and a slide away from self-sufficiency is causing global crisis. And wealth is no guarantee of insulation

Another story, which also mentioned in passing

Yesterday, Japan was forced to secure emergency butter shipments as the rocketing price of feed and resulting drop in milk production has left the country’s supermarkets with sudden shortages of a basic foodstuff.