The Snowball

I've been reading this long, sanctioned biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball, which purports to pass along the oracle's sage wisdom about life. So far, lots of great anecdotes about his genius and eccentricity and, indeed, his well-wrought sense of honor, but not so much sageness. Mostly, it convinces me that I'm right not to try to invest like Buffett because I'm not like him.  I was not the polymath son of a broker and was not obsessed with stocks and making money from a very young age.

The author, a former Morgan Stanley managing director, is a little obsessed with the glamor of the man, and gets completely bogged down in the gorey details of the collapse of Salomon Brothers under Johns Gutfreund and Meriwether.  I don't understand why she'd want to hover over territory Michael Lewis and other more talented writers have already beaten to death.  OK, Buffett did have a good role at the end, but still.  I skipped a bunch of that and felt good about having the backbone to do so.

Cousins in town, scenes from a clearly gendered weekend

Caroline and Natalie decided to make a "Hummingbird Cake," which had a bunch of fruit in it and lemon icing. They found the texture of the batter and the icing so appealing that they decided to do all of the mixing by hand. The kitchen was an utter wreck, with flour down in the silverware tray and batter down on the drawers at ankle height. But they enjoyed it and the cake was good, so it all turned out well.

Later, Carolina was on TV playing against Creighton in the second round of March Madness.  I've been trying to get Graham to watch games so that he'll have more to talk about with the more neurotypical boys, so it was definitely excellent to have his cousin Daniel there to explain things like 3-pointers to him while I hustled hither and thither grilling pork, cabbage (yes, grilling cabbage), scallions, and whatnot.

All good.

Big River Man

When I saw that Mary had picked out a documentary about some fat Slovenian guy swimming down the length of the Amazon, after having already conquered the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Danube, I was like, oh great.  But, in fact, I can and must recommend this movie, it's intense and infectious.  Crazy...

That was the first half.  By the end of the second half, it gets a little darker and seriouser.  Still, a pretty good movie.

It was good just to see the footage of Ljubljana.  I fine little burg.  Crazy to think it was nigh unto 20 years ago when I was there.

Baruchs

At the bar mitzvah of Josh and Anna's boy Sam, a great plethora of Baruchs, blessings. Really a beautiful service in many ways, with Sam truly rocking the Hebrew and a lovely woman leading the singing on guitar, until they got to the part about Israel and I was like, oh yeah, that.  Not that I'm Mr. PLO or something, it's just that the whole thing fairly reeks of geopolitical conflict in support of one specific scripture. It ain't about all that.

And then overeating at Solas on Glenwood, and, as penance, a 5-odd mile run with some walking and chatting with Woody and his kids and then NickNack and Isabel and, as a closer, the first swim in the lake of the season.  Yes it was chilly, but tolerable.  And then, rinse off in the outdoor shower, looking down at the lake. All good.

Good day with Natalie

Today I went in Natalie's room and hung out for a full hour without being kicked out. We talked about favorite books, and then I started going through the dad/daughter activities book she had gotten me at some point in time which had ended up in her room. We invented a killer secret handshake.

Later, we went to Flyleaf Books where she used some gift certificates she had been hoarding since her birthday 8 months ago and I bought a few books myself, mostly to assuage my guilt for buying from Amazon. Then we had coffee at Foster's next door, where I wondered at the many fine things on their menu that I hadn't known about.

All told, a good day.

Watson!

Going through a bag of crap I got at trade shows last year I came upon a cheap little notebook I got from IBM with something about Jeopardy and Watson on it.  So I gave it to Natalie. When she realized what it was about her face warmed up and she gave a little smile and said "cool."

Sometimes it's hard to get to the tweens, but when you can, it's nice to do so.

Rapprochement

Since the real Leon has returned, he has reverted to form, staying elusive and reclusive during the day, maybe hanging out with Natalie on her bed, but generally being a scaredy cat. Then at night, after the kids are in bed, he becomes attention seeking. Last night he came up on our bed and just begged to be petted, then lay down between me and Mary and purred.  So we're sure it's him.

Rascal, however, doesn't recognize him, and has been very territorial and dominant.  The first few days she would always position herself on a bed, chair, couch, table, something elevated, and look down at him. There has been a fair amount of hissing.  Apparently, with him having been gone for six odd weeks, he's like a new cat to her.

They have, however, been spotted sitting closer and closer to one another on the couch, and have today had a couple of little nose kisses, though afterwards Rascal swats at him a little, not quite ready to give in entirely.

Chicken and waffles

Chicken and waffles seem to be popping up on menus in lots of places around here. Yesterday I was in downtown Durham and this place that serves them had a line out the door.

I had never heard of chicken and waffles till I read James Cain's Mildred Pierce some years ago. When I read about chicken and waffles back then, I must confess that, as a confirmed low to middle brow eater, it sounded good. As I noted in my original musings, it's a good book, offering a lot of texture about what it meant to persevere through the Depression. When I read it, it was 2006, and nobody was thinking about the Depression.

Now we are, and presumably that's what got Mildred Pierce made into an HBO miniseries last year (I just found out about that when I googled it a few minutes back). And chicken and waffles must be to 2011 what meatloaf was to 1991, a return to lost roots.

Post-Renovation stress

So, after thinking for months that getting done with my renovation would remove my stress, I found instead that it made it worse in certain regards, as the removal of the immediate financial demands of the seemingly bottomless whole of remaking the home now leaves me standing naked -- to paraphrase Steve Jobs' eloquent Stanford graduation speech -- before the rest of my life. So I've been going to more AA meetings of late. Tonight I was at one describing my predicament and I kept confusing "rehab" with "renovation."  There was much belly laughter.

I was talking to my mom about my issues and she suggested I read some management books, so I picked up The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, mostly because it is one of those books whose title is so repulsive to arrogant intellectual snobs like myself that I knew that just picking it up would be a good act of humility. And, lo and behold, it's a good book. I've been reading it with breakfast instead of reading the paper, which I'm having trouble focusing on anyway.

I will give myself a smiley face sticker.

Suckerburg?

I've been a little stressed out recently, so when I was looking for someone on the dominant social network while laying on the couch with my son I started scrolling through people's faces (using a tablet from a certain computer company) --  and was somehow overcome with joy looking at all these people from various phases of my life, all of whom having selected a picture of themself which they think represents them best to the world -- an excellent smile, or a picture of them with kids.  And I was, truth be told, thankful to Mark Z. for having put together this pretty cool platform.

It's not that I'm not conscious that users of fbook are lambs to the slaughter of marketers.  I get that and find it a little discomforting too.  But at the end of the day, the platform has its uses, and it does a good job putting and keeping people in touch.

There was an article in the Times somewhere recently on the death of the cyberflaneur, the early promise of the web to promote random strolling and serendipity in the style of the heros of Walter Benjamin's and Charles Baudelaire's visions of the great avenues of Paris back in the day.  And it's true, one doesn't do much of that.  But if your network on the platform which must not be named is fat and random and inclusive enough (i.e. you're friends with people of opposite political parties), you can still get a reasonable degree of randomness out of it.

In any case, the overwhelming feeling I had looking at all those smiling faces was that I'd love to see so many of those people more often.

It gets better

So a couple of weeks ago I told of how our cat Leon had run away, and was now living in our basement. Well, this evening at work I got a call from Mary, who tells me that she is at the vet with.... the real Leon, which means that the cat in the basement is.... you guessed it, an Impostor!  The nerve of the cat. We had a definitive ID on Leon from the microchip he had implanted in his neck.

Truth be told, I had thought that the cat looked a little different from Leon and even meowed a little different, but I figured he had been off in the wild for 5-6 weeks and so he had changed a little, manned up, as it were.

And now Leon is back and is so much friendlier and more trusting than ever he was before, and all are overjoyed. Except for the poor sweet woman who had been feeding him for only the last 5 days, had been in fact plying him with eggplant parmesan, which she said he had taken a shine to (indeed, what's not to like with a nice eggplant parm).  She apparently was moved to tears when it became clear at the vet that Leon was lost from his former home.  We will have to have her by.

The fall of the ACC

The Wall Street Journal today ran a story about declining attendance at ACC basketball games.  Here's what the commish had to say:

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, said in a statement that the conference's "proud and storied" basketball history has "captivated fans over five decades." In recent seasons, he said, the league has experienced "transition in coaches and membership including eight coaching changes in the past three years." Swofford said the ACC's conference tournament has the highest average attendance of any in the country. He added that TV viewership "remains strong and we are on more platforms than ever before." With Pittsburgh and Syracuse scheduled to join the conference by 2014, he said, "the future couldn't be brighter."

With all due respect, what has the man been smoking.  The league has been bastardized beyond recognition for the sake of football revenue.  Miami and Boston College already make no sense -- and not just because the BC bus clipped and killed CHHS legend Harry Alston --, Syracuse and Pittsburgh even less so, with no disrespect to Boeheim for taking Dean Smith's place on the all time win list or for harboring pedophiles.  Florida State was fine, even Virginia Tech. They are from the same general region with similar institutional profiles. Even with the mass murderers and all. But leave the freaking Big East teams out of it. The reason people don't go to watch games anymore is that it's harder to sustain rivalries if you don't get the home and way thing. It's not organic anymore.

Vaporware

Met with some guys today in a rather dour office somewhere in Research Triangle Park.  I had met with one of them a year ago (along with a guy who passed away in the interim), and they told me about this great software they had.  All they needed was a client. Checked back in with them today, one year later, and the song remains the same. All we need is the one "pilot" client, then everybody will clamber to get on board.

A new low, a new chanteuse

What with having a first name that occurs most often as a last name, and a last name that occurs most often as a first name, I'm really quite used to name confusion. People call me by my last name all the time. Even my good friends often call me by my last name, though they do so advisedly and often rhyming with "your boy."

But yesterday, on Facebook, someone I went out with in college called me Troy. Admittedly it was a brief thing almost a quarter of a century ago, but by God it felt significant at the time. That was kind of a slap.

On the positive side, I caught wind of this young singer Sharon van Etten yesterday on Last Hotel or whatever the evening show on WUNC.  I like her, particularly when she harmonizes with this Charlotte Rampling looking person whose name I haven't yet figured out (3/2/2012 -- Turns out her name is Heather Broderick). They are each the kind of young ladies I would have courted when I was younger, and I would hope that, had I succeeded in wooing them, that they'd keep track of my fricking first name.

updates from the crib

When we started on our renovation a year and change ago, I thought that maybe I'd have one of those renovation-centric blogs with lots of before and after pictures and stories about travails of working with contractors. Somehow it slipped my mind. The renovation took a long time and there was definitely before and after (and there's some of that over on Facebook), but basically it was more a grind than a drama. I think I wrote some about liking our rental, and, in truth, the rental was just fine, if a little tight.

Now, we are back in our real house.  There have been some traumas since then, like when one of our cats (the always skittish Leon) meowed all night once we moved back in, then high-tailed it out of the house when our house-sitter was in here while we were up north. We found him after he was living in the wild for 5-6 weeks and was being fed by a couple of eccentric cat ladies about half a mile away, and he was nearly feral, hissing at us and whatnot when Mary brought him back in the house in a cage she had borrowed from the local shelter.

But it gets better.  So Mary closed :Leon in Natalie's bathroom, so he could get re-acclimated, and he spent a couple of nights in there and seemed to be getting better, recognizing us and meowing a little. Then, Thursday or Friday morning, Natalie goes into the bathroom and Leon had pried the grate off of the duct in the floor and, as she came in, he dives down and disappears into the duct. I kid you not.  So I'm having visions of dead cat smell in our HVAC system, but we had to call in a couple of heating and air guys and they opened up the duct where he was stuck and had to push him out.  So now he's in the basement for the weekend and Mary will try to trap him on Monday and get him to the vet or whatever as we try to figure out whether to try to bring him back into the house or maybe find a nice barn for him where he can chase mice.

You can't make this stuff up.

The weekend

Somehow, over the course of each weekend, I have lots of good ideas for things to write, but insufficient drive to get to my computer and write them. Perhaps it is best, as life is not really about writing it.

On Saturday, I took the kids to the Children's Store, but to get there where we had to pass through the Thrift Store (no good clothes, but some decent books were had), and the dry cleaner, and then walk past Three Cups, where we saw and talked to some folx, and then we hung at the Children's Store and I talked to Becky while Graham picked out a Ninjago spinner and Natalie snagged a plastic ring and a necklace and a lavender piggy bank. Awesome.

Thence back to Whole Foods, where Natalie was clamoring for some dried seaweed, and there was such a profusion of samples to be had that it was hard to imagine that there was any ambient economic malaise at all.  I had: chips, orange sections, salmon with guacamole, some sort of chicken, more chips, three kinds of yummy cookies (we bought one kind) and probably other stuff too.  Which was great, because I was very hungry.  And then we got the seaweed snacks and Natalie inhaled them.

The Bliss of Blogvivion

When I kicked off this blog way back in 2004, it was meant as a place for me to do some regular writing. Then I found out how to track traffic to my blog, and I started paying attention to that, and I tried to promote the blog some. More recently, I've had little time to blog, and I've had to make peace with the fact that my traffic has died back quite a bit from its previous, not all that elevated levels.

But it's actually quite nice.  Now I can get back to just writing to keep my fingers and brain limber, and don't worry too much about who comes by.  OK, I do still check, I just don't care that much. Admittedly, it may be my fingers and not my noggin that's getting juiced, but it's all good.

Now back to writing for money.

The Basketball Jones

Chapel Hill has always been a basketball town, but like so many other things in life (young readers will understand this in 20 years), it was so much bigger and purer when we were young. UNC basketball was the cultural heart of the town. The ACC had only 8 teams then, and all of them were good. On any given night, anyone really could lose to anyone. When the ACC tournament came around in March, some teachers (our favorites!) would bring little black and white televisions into the classrooms on the first day of the tournament – always a Friday -- and we would watch the games for the last couple of periods of school. And it wasn’t like the principal didn’t know.

The coach then was Dean Smith, who defined the spirit of the time and place. An unfailingly polite, flat-toned Kansan, Smith succeeded on the court, but was more important for what he did off of it. We natives like to think of Chapel Hill as a bastion of enlightenment, but it is in fact in the South, which means it was once segregated. The schools were desegregated only in 1966, and around this time Smith worked with civil rights leaders to desegregate local businesses and neighborhoods, and was since that time a beacon of good sense and manners for everyone.

Back on earth, as us 7^th graders rose from childhoods cocooned in elementary schools (I went to Seawell), our visions of the world expanded first to grasp that not only were there other elementary schools, there was a whole other junior high school (Phillips was a junior high, grades 7-9, back then). At the time, there was only Culbreth, so the cross-town rivalry fairly described our universe. And it was an unadulterated rivalry. It wasn't that one side of town was fancier than the other or anything, we just wanted to beat them, and they us, because they were there.

This was before club sports had become prominent, drawing attention and energy away from school sports. Basketball was king, and it was only natural that the Phillips-Culbreth basketball game was larger than life. As game days approached, excitement levels got out of hand. The gyms were always packed, and were steamy from overoccupancy, exertion, and sheer anticipation. Phillips was led by Ranzino Smith, who would go on to play at UNC, and who always brought the house down by dunking during games despite being only 5' 8" or so. But it was a team effort, and both Phillips and Culbreth typified the era of relatively early integration by featuring a balance of white and black players (including current Phillips Athletics Director John Beyle). Players from both schools look back fondly to this day about the discipline forged by the coaches, of fingertip push-ups and wind sprints without end, and strong team bonds.

I personally had been and remained a very skinny kid, and never had a real hope of playing basketball for the school. I played soccer, and we were good and had our own real rivalry with Culbreth, but soccer was kind of a marginal sport then. We didn't command the attention that basketball did, particularly the attention of the girls. So we wanted to prove ourselves on court. On Friday nights my mom would drive me to the Phillips gym, which was often open for free play, and I would practice, whether anyone else was there or not. At lunch when the weather was good I would wolf down my food and then try to wedge myself into the games on the blacktop by the gym. I was fast and could jump but I couldn't shoot, but I wanted to be a player nonetheless, so I was probably a little out of control, pushing too hard, fouling people left and right. The more talented guys would often taunt me, "come on, soccer boy," but I shrugged it off as best I could. I remember one time Clarkston Hines - who went on to star in football at Duke and even played pro football – barked at me, almost certainly after I fouled him: "There's only room for one Clark on this court." And he didn't mean me. But I stayed out there because, for an early teen boy with something to prove, it was the only place that seemed to matter.

What I'm reading now

It's a little ironic, looking back at my last post, when I felt I had such a wealth of books and media in general.  I finished the Peter Hessler book, which was brilliant, and the one about Henry Aaron, and I'm glad I did that too. 

Then I just blew through Michael Lewis's Boomerang, although I skipped the first two chapters, on Iceland and Greece, cuz I had read them in Vanity Fair already.  On the one hand, Lewis is just brilliant, able to write about anything and usually add insight.  On the other hand, he does just continue to dial it in much of the time. He's reached that rare state of elevation where he can pretty much interview anybody, and he does. He is such a golden child of prose, I think it would be nice to see him really challenged by something.  What would happen if he had Joan Didion's luck, a husband who just up and has a heart attack and then her kid dies a year later? I don't wish this on Lewis, but I suppose I'd like to see him tested in some way just to see him grow, because I'm not seeing much growth book to book. Just continued virtuosity.

I started a Ruth Rendell novel, as I tend to do a couple of times a year. This one, just like the last one I read, features some deeply disturbed young working class kids in some dusty corner of London, soon to get involved in some sordid violence.  I gotta say, I'm not sure I'm gonna keep with it. I don't need to be cohabitating the skull of a psychopath, even where it's done well. When I think about it, I suppose I tend to prefer Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels, where the narrator more or less tracks alongside the detective, trying to restore order.  I guess that's pretty much where I am in life these days.

I'll take Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto upstairs.

End of year riches

At this time of year, these long days off, it's hard to know what to consume.  On the one hand, there are all these books I'm in the middle of, most prominently Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones and Ron Susskind's somewhat overrated Confidence Men, but also that biography of Henry Aaron that I need to polish off. Just finished John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye, which is well worth reading.

But then there's all the year end journalism, including the Economist year-end edition, always good, and the New York Times necrographies of those who died during the year, including Ira Glass's "These American Lives," much of which is touching.  And then, being here in Larchmont, there are all these Time magazines lying around, and many of the cover stories resonate.

And then there are movies to watch with the kids, including Elf, surprisingly good, with Will Farrell and James Caan and Ed Asner and Zoey Deschanel. 

And new CDs.  It's all just so much.

The Christmas Spirit

It is a shame in many ways that I am so apart from the giving part of Christmas.  I participate in gifts Mary and I give the kids, but I never do any shopping whatsoever, now that the family has gotten out of the habit of giving gifts between adults.  Which is kind of a shame.  It is, admittedly, a total pain in the ass to figure out what people want, and I have done considerable and pretty successful research trying to find new Christmas music for Mary, but other than that I've been totally out of the hunt. Ahh well. Maybe next year.