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• Now you have an excuse to eat them. French fries should more accurately be called Belgian fries. They were given the wrong name by American soldiers in World War I who mistakenly thought they were in France when they came across the new tasty use for potatoes. Over the past many decades, Belgium has been a leading exporter of the kinds of potatoes that make the best fries. But restaurant and fast-food demand has fallen off a cliff coincident with coronavirus quarantining and there are storehouses full of spuds that are in danger of spoiling by the end of June. The message has gone out in Belgium, and it’s being picked up in other countries, that families should double their French fry intake from one meal per week to two.

• Speaking of Belgium, it has one of the worst COVID-19 mortality rates among countries in the world, according to the authoritative website on the progress of the disease being maintained by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths per capita is considered the best gauge of how brutally a country is being ravaged by the coronavirus. (Statistics on the infection rate can be wonky.) In Belgium, the number of deaths per 100,000 population is currently 74.6. The figures for some other developed nations, in descending order, are as follows: Spain, 56.3; Italy, 50.0; United Kingdom, 47.1; France, 39.2; Sweden, 31.2; United States, 23.6; Canada, 12.7; and Germany, 9.1.

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• Spoiler alert: Don’t read the following two bullet points unless you’re okay with learning the outcome. The Kentucky Derby race for three-year-old horses is always held on the first Saturday in May. Well, that’s not entirely correct. In 1945, in the final days of the war effort, it was delayed until June. Then in this year, 2020, it’s also been postponed, until September 5, for only the second time ever. In its time slot in early May, NBC Sports broadcast a virtual race between 13 former Triple Crown Winners.

• The ‘Run for the Roses’ at Churchill Downs is called the most exciting two minutes in sports. Did that still hold true this year, when there wasn’t really anything on the line and the finish was governed by a set of algorithms based on past performances? It’s your call. Perhaps you were watching on May 2nd. If not, you can catch a replay of the broadcast on YouTube. I’ve seen it and even as a CGI event, nothing’s quite as nail-biting as a ‘final stretch’ run, especially when it features win, place and show positions captured by Secretariat, Citation and Seattle Slew ‒ equine royalty.

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• Since the turn of this century in 2000, and excepting the latest six months of slower activity due to COVID-19 shutdowns, China has managed exceptional year-over-year gross domestic product growth (i.e., of +6% recently, but +10% or more earlier) due, in large part, to a string of major infrastructure spending programs. To make up for the nation’s Q1 2020 downturn in output, the government in Beijing is launching another wave of massive public investment. This time, though, the trillions of yuan will go into other areas of the economy. Instead of road, bridge, railway, train station, rapid transit and airport projects, the emphasis will be on securing China’s lead in such hot-prospect and high-tech sectors as telecommunications and biotechnology.

• In the past, when China embarked on an infrastructure building binge, the huge increase in demand for raw materials necessitated sourcing from multiple resource sites around the world, with extraction firms in Australia, Canada, South America and Africa all benefitting. Commodity prices soared and the owners of raw materials had a field day. A commonly quoted statistic is that nearly 50% of base metals, fossil fuels, steel and aluminum consumption worldwide has been in the People’s Republic. If there is to be an emphasis on different kinds of infrastructure works this time, though, the impacts for resource producers will be harder to assess, until the specs appear.

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