Remember that scene in Notting Hill where the fat guy is commiserating with Julia Roberts about how badly film actors are paid and asks her how much she got paid for her last movie and she says fifteen million dollars?  Course you do.

Anyway, I heard a similar bit of dialogue, for real, at the big annual Libertarian Alliance shindig at the National Liberal Club, last November.  Present were me (of course or I wouldn’t have heard it), LA and lots of other things Supremo Tim Evans, and Jan Carnogursky, the former Prime Minister of Slovakia, whom Tim used to work for, way back when Carnogursky was Prime Minister and when Communism was unravelling.

We were talking about education, and about how hard it is to get independent educational enterprises going, in the world today.  At which point Carnogursky said he was involved in starting up a University in Slovakia.  Oh, said Tim sympathetically, that must be very difficult to do.  How many students have you managed to get so far?  Tim (and I) had in mind perhaps twenty, thirty, fifty, ... a hundred maybe?  Some number like that.  The answer was, as I recall: three thousand.  Thoughtful silence from Tim and me.

It was this recent posting at Jackie D’s (Antoine Clarke worked for Carnogursky also) that reminded me of this conversation, which I should have passed on here at the time it happened.  Alas I haven’t been able to find out anything about what or where this university might be, but I definitely remember that it is doing well.