Weekend reading: Edinburgh edition

A silly season weekend musing followed by links to some of the week’s great posts.

I am in Edinburgh for the fag end grand finale of the Fringe Festival this weekend, so no links from this morning’s papers I’m afraid. Even my beloved FT will have to wait until I’ve boarded the train at Kings Cross.

Really looking forward to the trip; we’re in the quiet carriage outward and in first class for the trip back, and just £70 for the lot. The train takes five hours, but it deposits you right in the center of Edinburgh, instead of putting you an hour out in the sticks like the budget airlines. And no need to trundle to Luton beforehand, either.

The chap who booked the tickets will be missing his fortnightly plane journey, though. While he’s far from environmentally ignorant, he doesn’t let Al Gore get in the way of his flying. I’d estimate his annual greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to those of the Solomon Islands.

Besides doing his bit for global warming, this chum is also a total maven at booking cheap transport and hotel rooms. I once asked him whether he’d like to write an article now and then for Monevator about these bargains, but alas I’ve known him for two decades and his Machiavellian Alert system skipped straight from amber to red and started wailing.

Perhaps you should be glad of it, because while you’d now be flying to places for a lot less money, you’d also be landing many dozens of miles from anywhere that you actually wanted to go.

I once went on a trip he organized where we landed in a completely different country to the one we were visiting – Norway, I think.

Thanks goodness a train is on tracks, otherwise I’d expect to disembark in Belfast.

From the blogs

• Does double-dip pass the duck test? – Investing Caffeine
• The trouble with retirement calculators – Oblivious Investor
• 22 signs your college degree may not be worth the money – Len Penzo
• Sexism and the City – The Psy-Fi blog
• Self-reliance, DIY, and A-Levels – Simple in Suffolk
• How to run a home-based business – Christian Personal Finance
• K.I.S.S. – Coffeehouse blog
• Investing in your life pays off – Get Rich Slowly
• The power of progress – Canadian Finance Blog
• You can buy an island for $500,000 – The Digerati Life

From the big sites

• UK growing at fastest rate in nine years… – The Telegraph
• …so here’s three shares that could  benefit – The Fool UK
• Government bonds: A bull market in pessimism – The Economist
• Ben Bernanke clears the air – The Economist
• Regulating finance: Killing them softly – The Economist
• The six-figure fish tank catches on [don’t look at me!] – New York Times
• Small investors continue to flee stock market – New York Times
• Buying opportunity of a lifetime – Motley Fool US
• Facebook value soars on pre-IPO jostling – The FT

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