Mr. Rodriguez might not have known a month ago if what he had was any good; he had distractions, small calamities.
Apparently, a series of small calamities have been trailing him since he left the party island.
Reports of far-off, accidental, small-scale calamities come and go — lacking further spectacle, they hardly seem real in their numbing regularity.
"What I was talking about," Musk said, "was having a series of very large, by our standards, but very small by calamity standards, essentially having two tiny pulsing suns over the poles.
In the old days, Glass would sometimes come across Nancy in this or that remote corner of the world where they were both covering some small war or natural calamity, and they would have a drink together and laugh about Big Bill and his ways.
Vital parts of the world, where small things percolate into calamity, go dark.
She added: "Bahrain is facing a human rights calamity given its small size and small population… Scores of ageing and peaceful political leaders are behind bars.
His entertaining new book does not attempt a macro view of the financial crisis, but instead proposes to open a small window on the calamities by recounting the stories of some savvy renegades who cashed in on their conviction that the system was rotten.
So many calamities, big and small, are: the failure or inability to work out the day-to-day consequences, over a period, of our actions.
This "national embarrassment", as MPs on the Transport Select Committee described the first few days of Heathrow Terminal 5, was but one of many miserable experiences for travellers and the travel industry – as this calendar of calamities, large and small, reveals.
