The Team

This is a Research Triangle based investment team that shall go unnamed. I'm sure my old firm used to look clonish some of the time, but this is ridiculous. Did somebody decree blue-shirt day only to have a few white-shirt rebels turn up? I'm sure these guys have some fascinating yarns to tell, like: "... and I had an onion on my belt, which was the fashion at the time."

Home alone

Got home from Larchmont, checked the mail. From Citigroup (Citi?), I received cards for me and Mary with a new number. From another branch of Citi, I received a come on to use our newly enhanced cash advance power to borrow money at the old card number. Whoops. There will probably be fees to transfer the balance.

Then I went to the grocery store, where I noticed a sign over the ice machine claiming "crushed ice is food." I can just see it, a family at table and one of the kids says "mom, can I have another serving of the crushed ice, please." It must have been reclassified under Reagan, along with ketchup.

Naughtilie

When I was about to pull the burgers off the grill I dashed upstairs to push Mary Lee towards wrapping up her often lengthy process of putting down Natalie, who is, after all, her first grandchild. What I found, instead -- much to my dismay, was Natalie alone in bed with a Harry Potter novel, perhaps the third. She and I agreed she would read fifteen minutes more and then turn off the lights.

I forgot to check, and when I went back upstairs at 9:30, there she was, light on, many pages deeper into the novel. "I got carried away" she said, sheepishly, all too conscious of her guilt. We kicked the cat off the bed and turned off the light.

Since Mary doesn't read this blog, she'll never know.

Bonnie Briar indeed

Riding bike through Bonnie Briar golf course in Mamaroneck around 3 pm on a warm day, I noted an umbrella and table coming up on my left. Young ladies, who upon closer inspection proved to be model pretty, sat in there. And what were they distributing, these bonnie lasses? Lemonade? I don't think so.

Dewar's. In the middle of the summer, models pouring free shots of scotch for a bunch of bozos in black pants (I actually saw that too) and Mercedeses.

At once preposterous and repulsive

Sitting in a Starbucks in Larchmont, NY, a densely-packed inner suburb of New York, I am looking at the most obscene vehicle I have ever seen. It's a luxury king cab of a Freightliner rig with a pickup truck rear. It makes a stretch Hummer limo look demure. The owner -- undoubtedly an investment banker with an sick sense of humor -- should be shot on sight

Getting a life

Just reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about how business people -- and consultants in particular -- have to continually be figuring out to dress to feel appropriate and fit in. In one example, a woman talked of getting directions from a style maven client to spruce up because she wasn't fashionable enough. Which is absurd. The correct answer for both of them is get a fucking life. Later in the article others kvetched about how one needed to be careful to pick consultants who fit in.

It never ceases to astonish, the things people get paid lots of money to do.

Larchmont - Mamaroneck - Scarsdale - New Rochelle

Today I hauled my tired old mountain bike around the charms of upper-lower Westchester. Scarsdale was the goal, as I had never really checked it out, though I vaguely recall having disdain for it in college.

For naught. It was swanky as all get out. There was one building where there was a newsstand on one side, furs on the other, but they were both in the same font and color, which looked kinda funny. Ornate old buildings in the town center.

On the way home swung through New Rochelle, where parts are just flat out ghetto. In front of one bakery as I passed, a slim and attractive young black woman was screaming at an Hispanic woman who walked past, who had apparently rolled her eyes at her. "You better not come on back here or I'm gonna fuck you up good, in front of your man." She nattered on as I left. I liked to had told her to carry her lazy self on and get a j-o-b.

Princeton Junction - Newark 10:50 AM

These daytime trains are a frickin zoo. Bizmen on phone doing deals, Borat with the moustache over there talking at length in some language, and then 4 shiny and tan Princeton teenage girls with demonstrated cleavage bound in squealing, reenacting pop videos ensemble in voice and dance while playing tunes aloud on their... cellphones. New to me.

Memories of yore

In the doldrums of August, with seemingly no one at their desk to take my call or read my carefully crafted email, I resorted to one of the many amusements of the so-called "Internet": GoogleMaps.

So I checked out the satellite images of Emerald Isle, my old beach haunt, and confirmed that, indeed, they done built a bunch since I was last there.

And my eye trailed south from Emerald Isle to Bear Island, or Hammock's Beach State Park, as pristine and untouched as ever it was. And my eye focused more specifically on the southwest tip of the island, where, in 1988, I wandered naked amongst the dunes with a number of my college cronies, until most of them headed back up the beach to where our stuff was, and I was left lolling in a shallow pool of water -- far out of eyeshot from anyone and with a long views of anyone who might approach -- with a young woman with whom I was, at the time, romantically involved, whom we may call, shall we saw, Jennifer. And we lolled there in that water and talked, and I thought... and I thought.... and I thought too damned much, and did not pull the trigger, and there it went. My one and almost certainly final chance to have fantasy island sex on the beach, vanished in the ether, only to be immortalized in blog.

Melanchorolina

I'm feeling a bit grave after learning of an uncle's impending demise from multiple myeloma. This after hearing of a peer's recent demise from some other equally nasty cancer.

I suppose I might really take this as a message that I should chill the fuck out, stop being so serious about everything. Indeed I might.

Had been thinking about reading Samuel Pepys, the original graphomaniac diarist fool from back in the 17th century day, as a model for the daily blogathon. Then I took a look at volume 1 of a neighbor's 6 tome set, and I saw that Pepys wasn't very reflective at all, though he was observant, they say. Just flat out boring, is all. Which is not what the Grouse means to be, nossir.

Not that I have anything particularly scintillating going on here at "Tales from the Desk," rack my head as I might.

I will say that I was a little shocked to see Stephen Colbert bring on some poor guy who had been behind bars for 26 years but was exonerated by DNA. Colbert takes a very generous step like letting the guy have some large airtime and then stays in his psychotic pseudo conservative character and hardly lets the guy talk. He's gotta make up his mind which side he's on. As if we didn't know. He's on the side of Stephen Colbert.

Old Nick

Every once in a while I remember just how much there is on YouTube.

Here, for example is the greatest Rock and Roll scene in the history of film: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds doing "From Her to Eternity" in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire.



Cave has done a fine job to keep his career going all these years, but the sad thing is that he keeps leaning on the same look, has never had the courage to reinvent his persona/hairstyle. He has, in some sense, become like Johnny Haliday, a eurorock impostor.

Nonetheless, he does some good work. Here's a video of Cave in a duet with PJ Harvey. Really an amazingly subversive video, insofar as they demonstrate sexual desire by.... actually touching each other, as compared to hiphop rumpshaking or the Nashville Levi's airbrushing with Breck school of wholesome sexuality. Never mind that he's not even cute.

Today's headline "Sentinel sells some assets to Citadel"

I may yet have a thoughtful post, but this headline just caught my eye. Two hedge funds with the same branding consultant do biz. It's like the sports page that days "Tigers devour Lions" or a tale from the playground like "Sophia bit Lucia" or (OK) "Madeline was picking on Natalie." But Sentinel/Citadel, that's extremely ripe.

Down at the bread line, or, fun with whitey

I was told that NJ Dept of Workplace Development mandates attendance at a "Reemployment Orientation" to get your benefit paid, so I went down there to Trenton yesterday. Unfortunately, I got tangled up in directions and was seven minutes late. So the lady at the "Triage desk" tells me that they lock the door right at 9 and I need to come back tomorrow. So I say, "Will they really require a Social Security card? I haven't had one in 20 years." And she says, yeah, they will, but go over to SSA a few blocks down and order one and the printout for ordering one will suffice. So I go and do that and it goes smoothly and easily.

So today I come back just like she said and I was there plenty early, and nobody asks to see Social Security Card at all. Then a 9:06 somebody comes in the room and at 9:10 somebody else. The door is literally but not figuratively locked, and she didn't turn them away.

They just have fun tweaking the white-collar types. It's cheaper than cable, you gotta figure. There's more, but I gotta run.

Idea for a party

Invite 20-30 people. Solicit suggestions for tunes. Order songs from your favorite vendor and arrange. Print set list with recommender's name and post to web too.

Quick and dirty way to get exposure to stuff.

Make sure you have multiple rooms at party so that people can recoil to music-free zones as necessary.

Men at work

In a Starbucks on Market St in Philly today I chanced to overhear a young insurance salesman working a prospect while his slack-jawed understudy looked on. "So lets just say we've got your mortgage and your other fixed expenses covered, how much income do you think you would need?" Like the guy's going to be able to estimate that. For retirement income replacement there are pretty much standard formulas based on a % of your income, there's no reason Life insurance shouldn't also be formula driven. He shouldn't be asking the guy that question, he should be giving him guidance. But he was probably trained to do this to milk prospects for bigger policies and premiums. I wish I coulda figured out who he sold for.

Later, in the wilds of backroads NJ, out for a ride of record length (for the kid at least), was only surprised see that Lindbergh Road (goes by the estate from which the baby was nabbed back in the day), a narrow winding two-lane road between nowhere and nowhere through woods over a "mountain," had a significant rise in traffic at rush hour. I've said it before, but this proves it: any through road in NJ will become somebody's shortcut at rush hour.

What's more, traffic picked up at 4;45. It was the ultimate getaway crowd.

Protecting the Innocent

I was enjoying a lunchtime read of an Institutional Investor piece on Orin Kramer and his attempts to beat some sense into the New Jersey Pension Authority or whatever it's called, which has long managed its own money in-house (i.e. nothing in funds of any sort). Given Kramer's reformer's zeal and serious pedigree, I reckoned it might be a place for someone like myself to earn bread fixing processes and whatnot.

Then I kept reading. There's a lot of pushback against Kramer from unions, fear he's gonna put too much money in hedge funds etc. In fact, the unions resist putting money in funds since they see it as outsourcing and, get this, the investment staff of 65 is unionized! That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. Securities analysis and trading are not functions subject to collective bargaining. You should be able to fire these people at any time, and their comp should be based on individual performance. Otherwise why would they bother pushing themselves to do well?

This is a sure recipe for disaster for New Jersey and its pensioners, but nothing surprising from out most opaque neighbor to the south, Trenton. Would that it were Kramer vs. Kramer.

Too much mumbling

De Niro's The Good Shepherd suffers from many things. It is too long, too bleak. Sure, one of its themes is noncommunication, but that could have been enunciated more clearly. All the "Ang" part of Brangelina gets to do is sulk, after some initial moldering. And, finally, it is unjust towards the fine men of Skull and Bones, who have done so much for all of us. I guess.

Memories

My laptop won't take power from the cord, even the one Dell impressively overnighted to me after I ordered it last night at 10:30. Trying to jiggle and finesse the thing. It brings to mind the tortures of trying to get Natalie and then Graham to breast feed in those first days out of the belly. Excruciating.

Rumbling

Was watching Vulture investor Wilbur Ross talk about the subprime mess with a reporter from Marketwatch when I heard something that sounded suspiciously like a fart. I rewound the wmv file, but there was nothing there. It was, apparently, me, getting a rumbling in my tummy. Onwards to lunch!

Day of Challenges

Nasty drive home today for Concord, MA. First was vexed by Massachusetts and its typical shit. Trying to take 126 to the Masspike, got confused by multiple sets of poor and misleading directions. And the de minimus signage favored in puritano-aesthetic North was no help. What would have helped, admittedly, was a good map. But I was too cheap and lazy for that.

The Masspike and gentle Connecticut were kind to me, admittedly, flowing by smoothly. Even the occasionally skittish Saw Mill and Tappan Zee rained favor on me.

But my New Jersey and the inaptly named Garden State, they made my day.... nasty. And diverting onto 78 was vexing in its own way. All in all, bad.

And then, at home, I discover that my power brick would appear to have died. So I have to commandeer Mary's computer till Dell can get me another one. Stay tuned..

John Thornton for President

Although his arrogance sometimes make him seem arrogant, I'm casting my ballot for John Thornton in 2012. Everything that comes out of the guy's mouth is smart and interesting. If China is the future, Thornton is our best shot at staying dialed in.

Man with plan

As I pulled out of the driveway this morning (to park the car on the other side of the street and free up the other car, down at the end of the drive), I had an idea. A rarity, though now I've had two in three days.

What's our drought status? (I thought). How far below normal are we for this time of year? I know where to dig that up in the Times, on the web. But I don't care enough to put that much effort into it.

And then I thought: what about an environmental / climate change dashboard, like the CEOs love so muchso they can swivel in their desk chairs and know at a glance how their company is doing? What if I could plug in a zip code* and see a tricolor summary of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like precipitation, mean temperature, smog, CO2, rate of farmland consumption, whatever else. And also be able to drill down on the data and change date parameters to map historical change. This would rock. The trick (as always) would be to get good and reliable data and then get traffic to the site. But it would be a terrific consciousness raising tool.

Has anyone seen such a thing?

*Another good front end model would be like Smart Money's Map of the Market (which must be the only thing propping that old rag up).

Falling down

All this hand-wringing about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the implications for bridges throughout the Interstate system reminds me of the hullabaloo following the August 2003 power outage, when a few trees near Lake Erie plunged everybody into darkness. For a few weeks after that, we all became experts on grids, substations, yatta yatta yatta, and politicians promised focused and decisive action.

So what became of that? It could well be that it receded from the headlines and substantial progress has been made. It's much more likely that $42 million and some earnest crackerjack civil engineers have been thrown at it, and they're doing their utmost but lack the high level visibility and sponsorship needed to fund, drive, and coordinate major interagency initiatives. I'm sure it's underfunded.

The fact of the matter is that the US has pretty mindblowing infrastructure. How much should be spent on maintaining it, and how to allocate it are basic questions. But they are not sexy ones. Building a new bridge or highway is sexy and enhances electability for local and state politicians. Fixing an old one is not. I cannot tell you if this is a partisan issue, but I tend to doubt that it is. Maintenance is the type of thing only a lame duck administration could like.

90 Degrees

Sitting in a bar in DC listening to Bananarama and watching X-game idiocy. Some old black guy I thought was homeless with matted hair turns out to be a neighborhood intellectual, of sorts. Something like my dad.

It's 90 in DC, 90 in Chapel Hill, 90 in Princeton, 90 in Manhattan. 95 in Boston. You can't win. At least I took off my tie.

Between me and home lies a frigid Amtrak trip.

Washington appears to have some character. Saw an African diplomat in kente cloth wandering amongst the 6 story glass boxes and sorority girls.

A clean well lighted hotel room

Oh, the classic conundrum of arriving in a hotel room in a distant city with nothing in particular to do. What to do? First must eat, but then. TV? Web? Sleep? The possibilities are endless, but not the time.

And so, Washington DC. Our nation's fair capital, hot, humid, urban and quasi-urbane but with much bad furniture and often only reasonable hair. A town where people would seem to do the things they think people are supposed to do in cities, like the black T shirt punks out my window down by Dupont Circle sitting in the dirt strumming a guitar. That's city living. Maybe kids do this in New York too, and I don't see em. Some do it in Princeton, and they're silly.

We'll see.

Update from the pool

This is turning into a huge landmark summer for Natalie. First she fully mastered the bicycle, at one point in time going a full 11 times round the large loop of the driveway at Canandaigua.

Also in the Finger Lakes, she made tremendous strides in the cool, cool, clear water, swimming out to the raft unescorted by the time we left.

Then, as we have recently reported, she plowed through the first Harry Potter book mercilessly. No prisoners.

And so, after a couple of weeks swimming at the Dillon Gym summer camp, I decided to take her out to the Community Park Pool for a swim to let her strut her stuff. Very impressive, it must be owned. She can swim long distances without help. She can touch the bottom with her hand. She's learning freestyle and breast stroke. She'll dive off of my knees. Mostly, she's perfectly comfortable and acclimated in the warm, chlorinated water, and wants to keep swimming.

Crazy hats off to those buff and bored young counsellors at the camp.

My readers

For a blogger, there's little that's more flattering than sustained visits by readers. And freely available modern technology lets us monitor who's coming and going. So when I have a reader sit down and read for an hour or so and dig through my archives, there's nothing more flattering. But when it turns out the reader works in a lawyer's office, and returns to a methodical pouring through my complete works after breaking for lunch, it makes me wonder. Is this a casual reader, or has someone taken a professional interest in my musings. God forbid I should have made some actionable booboo in there.

Or, as this reader hails from the State of North Carolina and probably overlapped with me in Chapel Hill in the late eighties or nineties, perhaps it's just an old friend.

In any case, the Grouse welcomes comments from avid readers.

North v. South: the rumble continues

The collective accrued wealth of the Northeast is staggering. The great campuses of the Ivy League make the physical plants of Southern universities look like frat houses within Second Life (though Columbia's Lee Bollinger surely salivates at the real estate available too them). Sidewalks abound, connecting a huge stock of cool old houses, and fleets of artisans trained to maintain them. Yes, for decade upon century, people have been raking in fat ducats up here and plowing them into the physical plant, making for many a beautiful place.

But so many people are hip to it, meaning traffic, scarce parking, long nasty commutes. Density is good, making it easy to run into people and exchange ideas. And if density is the future, the Northeast holds the future firmly in its grasp. Would that it were less of a pain in the ass to get there.

Natalie loves Harry

I knew it had to be, eventually. Natalie has fallen for another boy, and not just any other boy, but a sorcerer-type. To wit, Harry Potter. In a day long not feared, Natalie has taken up the magician of choice these days with a vengeance, blasting through tens if not hundreds of pages in a sitting.

After having brought her back from her camp, with its many "crazy hats" and "crazy field trips," she settled in with Potter after a brief paw through of the just-arrived Highlights magazine. Just now I peaked in on her. I've been blasting the AC in her room and then pumping it round the corner to the un-airconditioned "Granny's room," so it's quite chilly in there, and she's got the sheet over her legs and is deeply engrossed, where surely she'll stay till dinner.

And she still wilingly holds my hand crossing the street and enjoys milk. Which you've gotta love.

Playing soccer

Played six on six for like two hours in brutal humidity this evening. Sweated like a pig. Non-trivial pain walking around and then especially coming up the stairs. Watching movie my hamstring began to cramp, I've barely avoided a full clenching.

Clearly, I need to play more to get back in shape.

Home-Lewisville-Lawrenceville-Terhune-Pretty Brook-Home

All told 16-17 hot and humid miles. I was surprised to see beads of sweat falling beneath me, appearing to be rather yellowish-brown. I had such a pure notion of my sweat, which is now ruined.

Dutch treat

Summer driving around in Mary's car pulled up an old tape of Betty Serveert's 1992 Palomine. This is a good record. These nederlanders did better than most of their contemporaries (cf. Oasis and the Catherine Wheel) to recycle Skynyrd grooves, and the drummer has a full-on jazzy groove. The lead singer sings with real passion, investing much in her sophomoric lyrics. Incredibly, this band still exists.

Somehow my focus on Betty Serveert has been broken by discovering what Dexter Romweber is up to. I'm delighted to see that he's neither dead nor held within some psych ward. Sounds like he's sober now.

Larchmont -- Stamford -- Princeton

After driving in the studentless calm of Chapel Hill, hitting the road in fair Larchmont was eye-opening. No back up, mind you, just lots of cars and trucks everywhere, making a routine task like proceeding a quarter mile along the Boston Post Road fraught with much cogitation and concentration: which lane should I be in to avoid being slowed down by that truck? What is that moron doing?

Everywhere, the would-be heroes of 9/11 lollygag and obstruct. In Mamaroneck, two fat cops sit with their motorbikes jutting out into the street palavering with some other fat guy at a busy intersection. Road workers (this being the peak season for road repair) dicked around with their SLOW sign. Some construction workers double parked at the deli while picking up Snapple and bacon egg and cheeses. You see this shit all the time. Dudes revel in their ability to slow traffic.

The ride back to Princeton came off painlessly, save for the lack of a Starbucks at the Vince. It ain't right.

Hillsborough - RDU - EWR - Larchmont

After catfish and encouraging discussions of possible future sports endeavors for the Grouse, it was back to the airwaves and back up to Yankee territory for a morning tete-a-tete with an altogether different kind of beast. Often, airplanes offer up interesting anecdotes for the blogger, but today there was very little of note, just some rather plain young lady taking pictures of New Jersey in flight with the camera in her cellphone. She's probably already posted those to her own blog, and I'm sure it rocks.

In general, these are rather heady times for the kid. Many voices call me homewards, while quite a few sing another tune. Should I hack at a few more dragons before repairing to the castle? Time will tell, and not much of it.

Bring it home!

I'm more than a little bit troubled by the difficulty I chronically have in obtaining certain regional delicacies back home in my native Chapel Hill. One would think we really weren't in North Carolina at all.
* The burger "with everything": i.e. chili, slaw, onions, and mustard. Don't nobody sell it.
* Coconut cake: perhaps I should be looking harder. I know where to get it in Manhattan, why not here? Neither Dips nor Crook's has it on the menu.
* Cheerwine. This is the most important thing. Regional sodas should be thriving in the pomo 2.0 economy. They are, after all, distinctively delicious, and none more so than the flagship of the Carolina Beverage company. The Cheerwine.com Distributor Locator clearly indicates that Long Beverage (919-481-2738) of Raleigh dispenses the elixir. Given Cheerwine's long historical association with intellectual and academic achievement, might not the absence of this beverage from the so-called Southern Part of Heaven explain the inability of UNC-CH to vault upward towards Berkeley and Michigan into the very upperest tier of public universities?

The Streets of the Triangle

Praise the lord that it hasn't been too hot. Exceptionally mild days, which we've told Mary are typical, have been the backdrop for our tour of the older neigborhoods of Chapel Hill which -- owing to the limited stock of such locales -- was exhaustive without being exhausting.

But it's nonetheless taken a lot out of us. The though of moving home for me, to a frickin foreign land for her, is non-trivial.

What is striking, I must say, is the relative wildness of the south, the roughness of the landscaping, the scrappiness of the yards of even high-end homes. And I'm not Mr. yard Perfect either. The greens seem deeper and richer in the Northeast.

I remember reading a review of a book about houses in France from 1760 to 1820 where the Parisians, when travelling to their country estates, would pull closed the curtains on the side of their carriages when passing through unreformed country because the chaos of it offended their dainty eyes. I'm having a little bit of that, which is just shameful and pathetic.

Sucking ze blood

Today was a slow day. I was scheduled to go to my former employer and give blood in honor of a deceased coformerworker, so I went there. I also scheduled lunch with another coformerworker. Luckily, it was the day of a quarterly meeting so, by tradition, there was free pizza. The fatal free pizza.

There, in my ex-office, were blood-sucking people I had never met with forms to read and disclaimers to sign, which I took care of quickly. My blood, it seems, was good.

But into the line for blood extraction came a woman who needed to get back to her desk in an hour, so I gave up my place in line and went to have pizza with my former colleague, whom we shall call "Bob". Well "Bob" and I palavered and pizzad, and then it was time to return to the line, through which I sailed to my date with the needle.

So they stuck it in my arm, they did, those 501(c)(3) vampires, and that went by quickly. Naturally, I was apprehensive about what it would be like afterwards, when one hears rumors of light-headedness and fainting. But that's just for girls, I thought. No no. Turns out one shouldn't really eat before having blood drawn. Blood goes to stomach or somesuch. So when I was done, I sat up, felt light-headed and hot, and the nice vampirette said "why don't you lie back down?" And put cold compresses on my forehead. And brought me juice, then Coke. All and all it was twenty minutes of receiving fine service in a potentially embarassing situation.

Thank God noone will ever learn of it.

Home work

Ahh, the joys of having the family around the house throughout the business day. One woman here in the neighborhood likened having her husband in the house job searching to having a "teenage girl." Her actual words. And I don't think she meant his figure was both comely and shapely.

But frankly, I'm not the problem. Right now Graham is downstairs screaming his head off because Mary refused to take him to pick up Natalie from camp if he wouldn't sit on the potty and try to poop. Which would really be a good idea, in fact. But no, he'd rather poop in his underwear.

After a few minutes of quiet, Mary and Natalie return home, and the demonstrative screaming begins again. Mary is duly impressed by his perseverance.

Card-carrying members

Some nice young lady was prowling the block yesterday evening, looking to sign people up for the ACLU. Mary gave ten bucks so she could say she was a "card-carrying member." I chided her for not giving 20.

This morning, a nice young man called to thank us for our generous contribution. OK. I'm sure they were both volunteers or interns, so the ACLU wasn't wasting much money, but is that the best the ACLU can do with its volunteer time? A thank you call for a ten dollar contribution?

Ah nature

Up in Canandaigua, one day at the beat-up old tennis court I felt something on my arm and I looked down and it was a real spider. Not a grandaddy longlegs or something civilized, or a little corner scamperer, but a plump little brown booger with beady eyes and multiple legs and all. I shrieked like a schoolgirl and contorted violently, but I got away.

Later, walking in the woods of the Onanda reserve, I passed a seventy-year old guy out for a walk wearing a multicolored shorts matching a windbreaker he had on -- shirtless -- unzipped to his belly button (a look huge with the ladies). "Seen any bears yet? There's plenty of them around here." That got me to thinking, so I called Mary on my cellphone to confirm my memory of what you're supposed to do if you come across a bear in the woods. She remembers that stuff. Unfortunately, what with being in the woods in upstate New York and having a cheap shitty LG phone because I'm basically cheap, we had a poor connection and she basically thought I was calling because I had seen a bear. So when we got cut off she called back to see if I was OK.

When I got to one of the scenic overlooks in the park I saw that it was tagged with gang graffiti, probably the work of some of the country b-boys we had seen strutting around, yet another instance (like the bling wheels I saw on an Oldsmobile on a back road between Hillsborough and Roxboro, NC last year) of the confluence of hip-hop and cracker culture.

Surprisingly mild

It's a surprisingly mild and mellow day here in central NJ, perfectly tolerable as long as the absence of AC is offset by a no shirt policy. There's a soft breeze and birdie melodies complement home improvement percussion and the occasional growl of a Shelby Cobra driven by some cocky investment banker or his spawn. And normal cars too. Mostly women walk the sidewalks of my street, some with strollers, some with high school art projects.

I understand that the Durham Bulls will be hosting the Norfolk Tides next Tuesday night (7/24). The Grouse is intrigued by this development, and has directed his administrative team to make all necessary arrangements to assure his attendance.

Grahamisms

Getting ready for a party at Abby and Spenser's house, Natalie came downstairs in a sweet little floral white and blue blouse and matching skirt. When I remarked that she was dressed for the party, Graham flew into enthusiasm: "Hawaiian shirt! Hawaiian party shirt!" He called out a number of times, and then ran upstairs to retrieve said shirt. Fashion conscious at an early age, he is.

He has also taken to overgeneralizing "may," where he should use "can," as in "Mama, may you give me a muffin?"

Running late...

to pick up a pizza. Muscle car night in the Wegman's parking lot here in Canandaigua.

Sadly, day after tomorrow we must return to the lower NorthEast, where there's more action than is strictly speaking necessary.

Freak n geek

So I'm sitting in the Market Cafe area of the local Wegman's (a grocery, for you non-initiates), responding to email, minding my own business, when this sweaty bespectacled freckly guy in a baseball cap comes up to me uttering some pseudo-italianate nonsense about by laptop. "I'm a techy," he explains, "just checking out your set-up. Wow, that's an old laptop." I say "It does the job" or somesuch, and he moves on outside onto the deck with his sub, his soda, and his buddy.

A few minutes later I head out onto the deck to talk on the phone, and I hear Mr. Computer telling his pal: "I hacked into the Vatican, like, where the pope lives. I figure I'm not a believer so I gotta know what they're up to." And his pal gives the most Beavis and Butthead-like "Cool... heh heh heh" that I've ever heard.

Later, as I'm driving off, I see the guys moving slowly through the nasty summer heat in the parking lot on/with their bikes. Mr. Technical was pushing his, for some unclear reason. There was no big hill which would justify it. I don't think this is a good place to be a computer geek.

Bang your head, not

Yesterday morning I couldn't find my hat, my prized once red now rose Zinn Design/Build baseball cap, and then I remembered I had left it up by the tennis court. So I enlisted Graham to come with me, and I kicked a soccer ball and he brought with him the croquet mallet which has been his near constant companion here on the lake. And indeed, I found the hat where I suspected it would be, and then Graham had the bright idea to bang the soccer ball with the croquet mallet. Some bird was singing real nice, and we sat on the bench and listened. If we drank, it might have been a beer commercial moment.

Meanwhile, down at the house, Natalie excitedly got up from where she was sitting on the patio, whirled around and hit her head -- BOOOSH! Against a structural wooden column. Mary told me about this as Graham and I returned and as she, David S. , and Carol headed out to the grocery store.

Natalie's booboo seemed minimal, but then in 15 minutes she went and lay in her bed, claiming to be sleepy. Symptom 1. 15 minutes after that, she puked for the first time. David O., my family doctor on call, at that point in time said to get her to the emergency room, which I did, with 4 kids and one big bag of chips and a couple of frantic calls to the grocery store for support.

Anyhow, the doctor checked her out and gave her a CAT scan which was negative on both bleeding and cats, and we returned home after a three and a half hour round trip to the ER (which is really fast in my book).

But Natalie has been instructed to take it easy. Which is hard on vacation. And today it was hot as hell. Good for swimming. The doctor said she could swim, but "no splashing," and Natalie insists she can't swim without splashing a lot. So by the end of the day she's emotional toast, claiming her friends are excluding her by swimming and by everthing else they do. And at last she blows her top and kicks me as hard as she can which doesn't hurt me but would hurt kids, so I pick her up and bring her inside and give her a time out and yell at her loud, so she'll know I'm not kidding for once. And she's miserable, stubborn, kicking, crying, won't go out and play with friends. It's hard to be stubborn with a mild concussion on a hot day in July.

Thank you all

Somehow my minor absence from my scribal post has not negatively impacted my blog traffic. Thank you, gentle readers.

Meanwhile, up here in Canandaigua, New York, nothing keeps on happening. Mostly we observe spousal tensions, which is something. Even between all the lesbians who were shacked up in the place next door. Sister lesbians. Twin sister lesbians, even. With dogs, saying things like, "oh, sorry, this dog's not very well-trained." Which isn't a very good line in my book, but frankly it has nothing to do with her sexual orientation and everything to do with being in your 20s and childless, and all of a sudden having to deal with this incursion that other dimension sometimes known as the nuclear family, sometimes as New Jersey, or, in our specific case, the Griswolds. Protective of small children. Well-provisioned, dammit.

What's a group of chain smoking current and erstwhile lesbians from Beantown and Frisco to do? Tie them dawgs up. Put em on the screened in porch. They're not going to run over and freak out young Graham, I'll tell you that much.

Woe is me

My friends. It's been very hard to get internet access here in the wilds of upstate NY. I'm churning out text statically and posting it when I can. Keep coming back. Don't forsake the Grouse.

Violent Femmes

My multi-year retrospective tour of both Mary’s tapes and my own landed my on a Violent Femmes record I never owned myself. In the years since the Femmes got coopted into first frat boy anthem and then the classic rock format, it’s become easy to forget how new they sounded when they appeared, in ’84 or so, and how fresh they remain to ears disaccustomed to their sound. These guys were not even thinking about kidding, purists who somehow found the mike. Like Casey Casem meeting the Birthday Party.

Chicago Style

With granny available to care for the childs, Mary and I headed out to a rare date night dinner at the Inn at Bristol Lodge or somesuch, near Seneca Point. Any fears I had that it might be bland and corporate were put to rest by the stuffed baby bear that greeted us in the foyer. This was a rough-hewn wood, high-end flannel and shotgun kinda place.

On the menu, one of the appetizers was homemade potato chips with melted blue and gruyere cheeses. Guy food, designed to be consumed with beer. Mary was not sold. I pretended to be disgusted too.

The view was beautiful, and our food was OK. However, a fiftyish woman at a nearby table was not so lucky. The waitress brought her some blackened tornados or filets of beef, a $27 dish or somesuch. She was disgusted. “What is this? I’ve never seen beef look like this.” The waitress tried to explain: “But it’s Chicago-style, you sear the beef.” The poor victim would have none of it. She kept the plate in front of her for a while. She may have tried a bite and poked it a bit. But, in the end, the trauma was too overwhelming, and she and her date (who had ordered the fancily-worded fried chicken with cheese over pesto) asked for the bill in the middle of the entrée.

The Griswolds Ride Again

And so, after loading the car and the amorphous $50 Sampsonite black roof blob (suggested by Walter) with bags, toys, dairy-free food products, one night’s worth of seltzer, one large box fan and stuffed animals, with bikes what’s more on the back and the whole family with granny in the middle, we set off for Canandaigua (US 31 to US 206 to PA 33 to I 80 to I 580 to I 81 to US 17 to NY 371 to NY21 to Wells Curtice to West Lake RD).

However, at the intersection of 80 and 580 (“Gateway to the Poconos”), there was traffic. As there often is. And bladder pressure, as there often is. So we stopped and relieved.

And, backing out of the parking lot of our relief spot – what with all of the chattering in the back seat and the poor visibility due to bags and bikes and guiding our path solely by the side mirror – of a sudden our backwards progress was arrested by a loud “BAMM!!” Shock set in. Had I backed into another car? Everyone seemed fine. The car was at rest.

Stealthily, I stepped out of the car to see what had happened. I walked to the rear of the car and found the malefactor to be an otherwise innocent-looking telephone pole. The car was mostly fine enough, given how old it is. But my bicycle, my expensive, my sleek, my shiny bicycle was a little mangled. Front wheel mashed.

Undeterred, we recited the Griswold motto in song and headed on.

Prepping for vacation

Actually, I haven't packed a damned thing.

And I'm gonna be upstate at Canandaigua with only dial-up access, but I'll do my best to stoke the old blog with text on a daily basis. Not that there's much to say.

Lake. Mountains. Beat-up tennis court. Wacky cousins of Kate's. Grill.

These will be our themes.

My butt is tired

Yes it is, from driving to and fro here in the Garden State and across that rivulet they call the Hudson over in the Empire State.

Tomorrow, I return to the inaptly named Roseland to chat with a firm that is soon to become the newest member of the Citigroup family. And then I floor it to a Mexican restaurant for my triumphal, official send off from the firm which dare not speak its name. I may be late, but not too late to dig in to some frickin chimichangas and fish tacos, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink.

I am surprised that a search on "fish tacos" at google images takes 3 screens to yield any non-tortilla related results. It used to be a very common euphemism. What's wrong with the young people of today?

Pre-disastering the car

Our 1996 Legacy Outback wagon has one very rude trick that it likes to play during vacation season. At some point in time, I will stick the key into the ignition and the think doesn't start. It doesn't click or turn over. Just a funereal silence in the steaming summer heat. We've had it happen twice in the Finger Lakes, once on Block Island, and once on Martha's Vineyard. Never more than once a summer.

This happened today when I stopped -- on the way to pick up Mom at the Newark airport -- at the rest stop between Exits 11 and 12 on the Turnpike (was this once the Walt Whitman?). I went in, had a "bio break," and then came out to a non-responsive wagon.

But I know by now what to do. I walked away from the car, affecting nonchalance. I got a drink and a very healthy (to be sure) snack. Ten minutes later, I wiped the grease off my face and went back out to the car. She started right up.

So I'd have to say the car is pre-disastered for the summer.

Ahh, youth

After a nasty hot and sweaty ride out Hollow Road and back down Spring Hill, on which I saw many fine examples of New Jersey excess (how bout 9 frickin garages) cheek to jowl with country gumba white trash bungalows, I was standing astride my bike next to Maggie's playground at the circle at the end of Spruce St talking to Carol and Craig. We looked down the street and here comes a black Nissan, going suspiciously fast for these child-filled parts.

The Nissan parks. Out get five people, a totally hot young mestiza chick, a buff Rafael Nadal looking dude, and another motley trio of guys. The one black guy, sensing our suspicion, walked passed us and said "good evening." What can you say to that?

Meanwhile, young Nadal had begun his courtship ritual. "Cmhere," he says to the doe-eyed young Mexican girl. "I'll put you on my shoulders." She passes. So he proposes a demonstration of his prowess. He walked across the field to an oak by the basketball court, pulls down a branch, and climbs all the way to the top of the tree.

But he was not finished with his display of masculine skill. No he was not. He gave us a cartwheel of sorts, and then he jumped up on a picnic table and did a diving somersault, after which to played dead most infectiously. Then he climbed up on the jungle gym and hung by his knees. I for one wanted to fuck him by then, but I had to go home to water Mary's plants. But I do hope he got some. She was cute.

The Road to Greenwich

I brought my old bike to Larchmont, and when casting about for a destination, I found that Greenwich was a mere 12 miles away. And so I headed out along US1, the Boston Post Road in these parts, for the capital of the Gold Coast.

Mamaroneck. Up hill. Rye. Mercedeses. BMWs. 1 crosses 95. Big Box trucks.

Port Chester. Finally something interesting. I knew Port Chester was largely hispanic, but going through on bike let me check out the variety. Peruvian, Columbian, Brazilian, Salvadoran restaurants collectively outnumber the Mexican, and there's good looking Indian and a "Middle-Eastern" grocery to boot. Much promise for dining.

On to Greenwich, up and down hill and dale, past (what's this?) the Ferrari-Maserati dealership, where I considered stopping to browse. Thankfully, I didn't, for after sailing past the Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, and Jaguar/Land Rover vendors, I arrived at the much more distinguished Lamborghini guy, who had probably just popped over to Port Chester for arroz con frijoles.

Undeterred by the allure of fresh steel, I soldiered on to Greenwich, savoring the deliciousness of arriving stinky and sweaty in the capital of hedgefunddom on a mountain bike which was handed down to me almost 20 years ago by my now stepmom.

Stopped in to Whole Foods for a sports drink. Of which they had none chilled, pathetically, but there was a bevy of high-end trophy wives putting perfectly coiffed kids into high-end SUVs. But I guess that's just America today.

Went down the main street, looking for something interesting, something unique. Very little to be found. Just traffic and super-high end retail. The most interesting thing was that there were traffic cops instead of lights. That's a good way to spend tax dollars. Personalize the most anonymous transaction. It's probably meant to deter traffic from auslander like me.

We'll probably go back to Port Chester soon for something grilled and garlicky. As for now, I have no business in Greenwich, a town of no chilled Gatorade.

The Manor of Stone

The Larchmont Manor. Where even a renovation can run you $5-6 million. Recently a profusion of stone foundations has sprung up. It's too much, I tell you, too much.

Words of wisdom

Mary got some marketing goodies in the mail from Liberty Mutual that say she can "Save up to $576.92 a year or more on home and auto insurance." Up to X or more. I gotta remember that.

In other news, amidst the general tumult of the exciting Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (just don't say "SIFMA") exhibitors hall I saw Denise Valentine, with whom I interviewed at Celent back in December. She has now left Celent, meaning that now 4 of the 6 people I interviewed (including the one who let slip that Celent had turnover issues) with are now gone from that seemingly unhappy firm, leaving only CEO Octavio Marenzi and the none-too-prepossessing Mayiz Habbal. One wonders how one could allow a small firm to hemorrhage so badly and be so blissfully oblivious to the horribly obvious causes of the defections. That's the one job I'm happiest to have not gotten.

In praise of the teachers

Natalie's 1st grade teacher Mrs. Mills is a creature of note. She has a voice that is permanently stuck on the talking-to-child mode. She has full body, 24/7 commitment to teaching, in a way that one sees only very rarely, so that though she may occasionally seem over the top to adults, the kids gaze at her with an awe and reverence utterly denied their parents. The other night Natalie told me in bed that she was sad she wouldn't have Mrs. Mills for 2nd grade, though the fact is she might, as Mrs. Mills is being up-graded.

Let us note also Linda Rockoff of Graham's U-League's D-class. Cash money. Absolute command of the classroom and marvellous rapport with the kids. Though she broke her arm in umpteen places she pulled through and finished out the semester.

It has been a fine year in school.

The big ride

Tomorrow morning I'm off into the big blue yonder of biking, leaving me one last occasion to harass you for a donation to the fight against diabetes. I'm feeling good, Gatorade's a chilling, the bike's all tuned up, with shorts fresh from the drier. I'll tell you all about it.

In other news, Graham is moving forward with potty training. Upon taking his maiden poop in a potty, he looked directly at Mary and said "can I have the coal-tender cars now?", since this was in fact Mary's bribe for him to sit on the potty. Kids are rather transactional these days.

Guitar lessons

Heading into a subterranean warren of drop-ceilinged basement offices behind the Sovereign Bank I see there's a guy with a beard and yarmulke giving electric bass and guitar lessons to shaggy, quasi-pubescent Princeton boys. Guys who may or may not have figured out how to masturbate productively, at the same age as the one we refer to as "Cool" stood outside of Purdy's on Franklin one smelly July eve in the late seventies and proclaimed he had been counting his pubic hairs and had gotten to well over a hundred. You know the age.

So it's good to see that guitar's not dead, although, given the level of engagement with which these kids attack their instruments, it's almost there.

Update from the shed

Well, I thought that the Raccoon had eaten all the kittens, but apparently it had not. Yesterday a pair of gray fluffy kids appeared, along with one scraggly tomcat pop. They mewled softly -- but damned near continually. Mary chased them from back to front and back, and then meowed to one of them in the shed. It meowed back. She was deeply moved, whereas I could really give a fuck, being preoccupied with matters much weightier, of which in due time. So Mary put out some tuna and dad ate it. As dads are wont to do.

This morning one of the kittens was in a cage. The other cavorted nearby, perhaps a kitty victory dance. Animal control was called, and arrived, parking a shiny white "Princeton Borough Animal Control" truck across the mouth of the driveway, diesel engine on and spewing, as he had done the time before. Only this time the truck had a built-in cage holder compartment, and a big hydraulic lift in the back, presumably for hefting deer carcasses. Our tax dollars at work.

Once more for the money, one more for the road

Yes, my grousereaders, we are nearing the end. This Saturday the Rock and Ride Against Diabetes team, to which we have recently recruited Dinni Jain of CHHS '86 fame, will set off to ride 30 hilly miles through the lushly bemonied and sparsely betrucked New Jersey countryside, in an effort to raise consciousness and cash in the fight against Diabetes. Diabetes, we will recall, is on the rise:

• The incidence of diabetes has increased by 61 percent since 1990 and continues to rise at an alarming rate.

• One out of every three Americans born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes.

• More than $132 billion direct and indirect healthcare costs are attributed to diabetes (2002 statistics).

These are some serious numbers, but we can all help. I'm calling on all of you out there, you vast readership you, those of you who haven't yet given, to reach down and make a contribution and help me make up the small remaining gap between where I am and my ambitious goal of raising $2000 towards a cure.

Every dollar helps.

Critters in the shed

It is astonishing to think that this drama has played out over such a long time period. I reported kittens in the shed almost two weeks ago.

One of them got snarfed by a wild animal, with some remains left over in the alley between our shed and the neighbors. The siblings kittens came over and batted playfully at the remains.

So Mary called Animal Control. This guy came over, leaving his racing green Princeton Borough pick-up truck parked at the mouth of our driveway on the no parking side of Linden Lane. Clearly an emergency, so why not bend rules. He left a couple of traps, one of which got the mama cat, whom he took away later the next day.

The next night he left the traps inside our shed. In the morning, I opened it up to find one of them populated by.... a Raccoon. No sign of kittens. I have my suspicions. The raccoon was scared, and postured and hissed at us when we tried to give him water. Not surprising.

We called the animal control guy, left messages, and in the evening, while I was out biking, (training for the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure next weekend in Princeton) the guy slipped in and took the Raccoon's cage.

I'll let you know if I see any more kittens.

The Amistad

Greg Belanger, CEO of the Amistad, was in the house this evening with son Jon telling us all about the ship and its upcoming hype journey across the Atlantic to England and Africa and whatnot and how they're just gaga about it in England.

I gotta get me one of them.

In Traffic near Philly City Hall, 4:05 pm

Nothing is much more vexing than being caught in traffic for no good apparent reason. In the heat of the day, a 15 minute crawl of a mile around Philly's City Hall was particularly vexing. Lots of people smoked on the nasty hot streets, people from all strata. I guess they can't smoke inside. One woman pushed a populated stroller through the gridlock, which didn't seem all that wise.

A typical New Jersey day

For team lunch to conclude wrap of a project (I wasn't on the project, but the lead guy has left), we set off for the much-acclaimed DeLorenzo's Tomato Pies in Trenton. We went to the one in Hamilton, actually, because it has a bathroom, unlike the original and staunchly anti-plumbing joint in the heart of the Chambersburg section.

After picking up the tallest of us in downtown Princeton, we headed off down the Princeton Pike. Quakerbridge Road, which we woulda taken, is shut down. Flooding? Last rains two days ago. Whatever. A bunch of women in SUVs who really should have taken that turn are shunted south to Province Line Road. Traffic where we least need it.

5 minutes later, US1 Express is shut down because of some wreck. We divert onto US 1 business. This is getting old. Finally, we pick our way through some of Trenton's less scenic parts (that takes some doing) to DeLorenzo's. This one is also pretty old, and though it has a bathroom, it's through the kitchen and clearly intended for staff initially. This family was never pro customers really, "You like the pizza, you eat it. You don't like the pizza, get out!" would seem to be there motto.

The pizza, in the end, is quite good, but not in the same league as Pepe's and Sally's in New Haven or John's in the city. Even though it won the coveted "Golden Pie Award" from the National Association of Pizza Operators in 1986.

5:16 Northeast Corridor Express

At first I couldn’t see them, at least only one of them, a 250-pound woman exhorting another onto the train. “Just lift your foot, you got it.” She said. One of the two guys in the 5-seat cluster gets up, offers, his seat, then the other one.

In comes another 250-pound white woman, blind, in a bright pink matching shirt and trousers. Then another big one, this one black, in day glo kelly green coordinates, with a cane. They smell of urine, and carry cuisinarts in blue bags and other parcels. They thank the very polite men profusely, and then keep talking loudly. Some commuters leave the car, their commuter silence, so precious yet so often violated by cellphone conversations, now thrown in the street and trampled.

And what do they talk about so loudly and incessantly on their way home?
Of their victimhood (“they should have hydraulics to lower the trains down like kneeling buses”, “That man should have told us these (round-trip excursion) tickets weren’t valid during rush hour! $78 to go to New York and back”).
About human nature: "Everybody talks about how people are rude but I see so much decency, so many truly kind people, those nice men..." which was answered by a round of profound "mmhmms"
About how rich people are brought low by death (“It don’t matter how many pairs of shoes you got when the time comes.. You could have one foot in a shoe, but when the time comes…”)

48th St, Convenience Store, 3:37 PM

All the newfangled caffeine drinks were hidden back behind the counter, like pornography from back in the day. What's up with that? Are there bands of marauding youth who are out there snagging Red Bulls and dashing out? I know I'm old but those things are not tasty.

In Nirvana

Walking onto the sidewalk, I heard a young voice come out of the house singing "Don't know what it means, don't know what it means," and it took me a few minutes to place it. It was Nirvana, from 1991'sNevermind:

He's the one who writes
all those pretty songs
And he likes to shoot his gun
And he likes to sing along
And he don't know what it means, don't know what it means

And the singer was Zeke, who is maybe 12 or 13, thus born well after the song was released. Which tells you something about Nirvana.

In other news

In the midst of a very loud thunderstorm, which made Natalie jump when I was reading stories to her, I went and looked in on Graham, whom I had put down 15 minutes before. He was out like a rock. Very sweet.

They're both from Texas

Maybe it's just me, but I find there's something spookily Bushean about Michael Dell. He looks like the younger brother who daubed a little enlargement cream on his jowls.

Next blog

Tooled around with the "Next Blog" button today, hoping to enter into random consciousness. Was surprised by the passive prevalence of porn, of non-porn sites taking paid ads from porn companies, of videos that turn out to be porn on sites that don't look like porn. Perhaps I'm just naive.

It was also interesting to see which blogs don't have the next blog button, where you dead end. First off, there's a lot of them, maybe a third. Secondly, what, they want to be disconnected from the rest of the web/blogosphere, standing there unlinked? Like their discourse is better than anybody else's? It can't be sullied? Annoying.

In other news, the blazing hot Community Park school picnic was at least distinguished by being clever enough to have the food in the shade. As per usual, the Mexican food was phenomenal (sopas, taquitos), and each wave of it disappeared before the rumor of it could ripple through the crowd.

Thin veneer

I was picking up something, maybe a comforter, from the floor in granny's room, and it ripped a thin strip of veneer off the side of the old desk we picked up at the store off 202 in the fall of 1998, back when we were living in Somerville and still a pair of young of academics with a dog.

I stuck the veneer back on, and it stayed there, however precariously.

It was all so deeply metaphorical, as we shall see.

George Perec built his classic 1978 novel Life: A User's Manual, around descriptions and stories associated with objects in a Parisian apartment building. This would be an interesting exercise in our house.

Kingston, NJ 8:34 AM

As I got into the right hand lane to turn off 27 onto the road to the Forrestal Center, a woman pulled up next to me on my left in a 1988-ish Corolla, white with one of those faux-fabric tops you used to see on Tbirds, Coronados and the like. One hubcap missing. The woman wore a goofball quasi-skiing headband and some Zsa-Zsa Gabor sunglasses. When she stopped for the light she reached down by the gearshift and picked up a.....

....bowl of cereal! I kid you not, a ceramic bowl filled with cereal and milk with its very own metal spoon. I kid you not. Bowls of cereal do not make most people's lists of car food, but hey, why not? It's the United States of America, right?

I'm guessing she was a nurse headed for New Brunswick. Nursing is a very nerd-friendly field.

Little blessings?

Home safe from Cincinnati, I prep and then install our fleet of air conditioners to fight back the vicious Jersey heat. Later, getting an update from Natalie and cousin Sadie, I learn that there are new residents of our little patch of earth. To wit, kittens. Living with mama in hole in one of rotten floarboards in our old shed. These kittens are said to be, I'll have you know, quite cute.

Hmmmm... This could throw quite a wrench into the "we'll talk about getting a pet when you're a little older" line of argumentation we've been taking with Natalie. Should Graham perk up and join the fray, it could get complicated.

Denial, one would think, would be the right way to approach this. Act like it's not happening or like it's so trivial that it might as well not be happening. Is that the tack we take? Oh no. We have to feed the mama and kittens. For starters, half a can of tuna fish. And when I get home from the airport and eat the other half of the can, they all look at me like I'm some horrible kitten-meal-depriving criminal.

We'll have to see how this situation evolves.

A good place to be a white man

Off the plane in Covington-Cincinnati inter-frickin-national, I hasten to the place to catch a bus to terminal A. There are many signs saying this is the right place for me to be. There is also a portly Caucasian gent who informs us loudly, "Bus to terminal A here." Then, as the bus approaches, he informs us that it is approaching and, as the driver prepares to open the doors, he says "he'll have those door open in a minute."

Just outside of security, a somewhat angry, trim affluent-looking 45-year old with a business cut and neat shirt and tie held up a sign saying something like "Olmos-Fitzguerroya" or somesuch. That would have been inverted in NJ.

Then, the guy who drove the bus (also white) for Enterprise car rental tells me that despite high demand/volume, the rental car prices are low this weekend because prices are high in Indianapolis for the 500. Which makes less than zero sense.

Yes, the midwest is a fine place for a white man to have a menial job and feel no shame.

Later, at the 7-11, four high school girls in bathing suits and a souped up Civic snapped up twelvers of Mountain Dew and Fresca. Ahhhh summer. Straight outta Mellencamp.

Staff development day

Natalie won't have school tomorrow because it's staff development day in Princeton. I could rant and rave till the cows come home about my tax dollars blah blah blah.

But, the fact is, that with a simple application of a certain balm, every day is staff development day.

Books I thought I'd like

Deborah Garrison's The Second Child. The smart Jewish versifying equivalent of Sex in the City moves to New Jersey and breathes quasi-deeply into the experience of suburban living. Read a few poems and then checked out her earlier work. Hated it. And I'm not just saying that because I'm jealous. It scarcely qualifies as poetry, it's all would-be profundity scarcely wrapped in meter.

Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape. I'll try read some more of this, and I feel tremendously for the guy for losing his wife in the blink of an eye, but this book sucks. Sappy sentimental claptrap wrapped around a self-glorying enumeration of cultural items consumed. All those years of working at Rolling Stone have clearly gone to his head, leaving a 40-year old shilling to his mental image of himself as a 23-year old. Which he ain't.

PJ Clarke's, 55th & 3rd

Lunch today took me to PJ Clarke's, a Manhattan "Institution", a fine olde pub with a dark olde bar tended by an Irish guy and with bulbous urinals as tall as your shoulders which fairly catch you up in their come-to-Mama embrace. Which makes for some splatter.

At the height of the lunch hour, a variety of lunch-eating types came in, from young besuited banker boys to scraggle-faced francophone hipsters to women with heels and tan cleavage, and everything in between. In between these types of people, you sickos.

On the menu, classic bar fare, from crab cakes to burgers to steaks etc. There in the dining room with scarred up tables, and ambiance, I assumed it would take a few minutes to bring in the food. Wrong. All this dark wood and leather was but a thin disguise for a food production line of uncharacteristic efficiency. No sooner had we spoken than food arrived to our table. It was OK.

But I dig the joint.

Body farms

I recently saw a story on CNN.com about body farms, where enterprising young law-enforcement researchers test human cadavers for decomposition to help them date time of death. This is what our tax dollars get spent on? How often do cops actually have to establish time of death?

Here's a little brain tickler from Officer.com

Consider this scenario: a victim is found, shot in the head, inside a car on an off-road trail. The temperature has been in the 80s for some time; however, since the car windows are closed, the temperature inside the car has been well over one hundred degrees. Because the car windows were closed, the insects normally involved in decomposition cannot reach the corpse, so the rate of decay is not what might be expected. How do investigators determine a PMI? The Body Farm's database contains data on experiments performed with corpses in closed cars under a variety of similar situations. Access to this data allows investigators to compare known results to the corpse in their situation, and to more accurately determine a PMI.

This is some important shit, and I feel a lot safer knowing that the various arms of government are working hard to make sure that real-life cops aren't getting outpaced by their specular brethren on the various CSI shows, as once they were put to shame weekly by Night Rider and McGyver.

No but seriously, what's with all the reconstructive frenzy? As if DNA analysis didn't do well enough. It's just like with the fetishism of 9/11 remains.... didn't some construction project get kiboshed recently because they found an ankle or two? Who cares? If they're dead, they're dead, I say. Society as a whole shouldn't be spending a bunch of money to becalm relatives and solve mysteries that aren't really mysteries. They're dead.

A fine line

In preparing my talk on "The Trouble of Marcie Flint," in which a dug into why I identified with Charlie Flint, the male lead, it never occurred to me that the story might be read as a parody, how the guy's thoughtful earnestness could be construed as ridiculous abstraction. Try this passage, for instance:

And then, like some trick in the movies, I saw myself as my son, standing in a like garden and sending up out of the dark a plane, an arrow, a tennis ball, a stone -- anything -- while my sister drew hearts in the gravel. The memory of how deep this impulse to reach into the light had been completely charmed me, and I watched the boy send the plane up again and again.

So what, is this guy deep, or is he a sap? Is he more Clark W. Griswold, or Clark.... Or, indeed, is there any difference?

The thing is, the reason the suburbs offer such ready material for parody is that they are always teetering on the edge of self-parody.

The firm handshakes.
The convivial greetings "Hello! So glad to see you!"
The complements "My! Your flowers are beautiful!" or "Isn't she just precious"

You can just go around saying this stuff and never have to think about anything.
Try it. "My, those steaks smell delicious!"

As with the society of the aristocracy and gentry whose mores it seeks to mimic, suburban society glides through on a set of rituals and formalities. However, unlike its predecessors -- which acknowledged their artifice -- it pretends to itself that it is natural. That's why streets and subdivisions so often have bucolic names "Shady Lawn", "Windy Hill", "Brook Lane".

Damn, it's confusing.

Moving on

Now that last night's lecture on Cheever and waspiness in general is done, I can move on in my reading.

Back, perhaps, to Rory Stewart's book about walking across Afghanistan, The Places in Between, which somehow cried out for a rest on the bedside table somewhere around page 55.

Forward, perhaps, to Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape, in a stacko on the radiator, written by a guy I went to college with but never really hung with whose wife died nastily young.

Sideways, conceivably to Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, also about sudden spousal death, but on many a must read list and now, thanks to my thievery, on my chest of drawers.

Probably not to Emmanuel Berman's My Life as a Quant, in which the author is recounting being a physics grad student at Columbia in the 60s. That should be read at work.

Whichever way it flows, it's good to move on.

Next steps

Speculation that Vladimir Putin will move from the Kremlin to the helm of gas gian Gazprom when he's forced to relinquish the presidency are, in fact, quite welcome. I wouldn't have considered it a foregone conclusion that Putin, like Yeltsin before him, would step down at all. I thought he might prefer and custom-built loophole in the constitution. In fact, I still would lay odds on it.

Here's a scenario: sometime between now and the March 2008 elections there's another bomb or terrorist attack, blamed on the conveniently placed Chechens or Al Qaeda, which threatens the stability of the Russian state and just demands that Volodya stick around. We shall see.

More of the same

I'm doing my part, I assure you of that. Just look at me at left, lean muscles churning, pumping up the hill, faster and faster....

Towards a cure for diabetes! (thanks to my upcoming participation in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure in Princeton on June 16).

So as I said, I'm doing my part, but some of you, fair Grousereaders, are bogarting on support for a cure. You know who I mean, you select few down there in North Carolina. You who would enlarge with cream. Don't make me name names and put this down on your permanent internet record.
Don't make me turn this into an NPR-like fundraising filibuster.
Break out those credit cards and make em do what Sweet Little Baby Jesus designed them for. Put em here.

Poster child

So we're in Battery Park on a fine spring day yesterday and I'm showing Graham this tugboat that was actually towing a barge, and this kid comes over to me with a wallet: "Is this yours?" He says, handing it to me and walking away. So I look in the wallet for a card with the guy's phone number, and before finding it I look at his driver's license and find that he's 35-ish, white, lives in Tribeca. Upon inspection of his business card, I learn that he's a VP at US Trust. I call his office and leave a voicemail, and then I scan the crowd as Graham and I make our way back over to the playground.

Later, as the fam and I head back to Beth's place, the guy calls me and I wait for him at a designated spot. And here he comes, happy as a clam to have been reunited with his billfold. After brief pleasantries, he reaches into the wallet and foists a twenty onto me. I'm like, "No no, I don't want it" but he's persistent so I take it. And then he turns and literally runs off. Perhaps he sensed that I was gonna network up to him and ask about his role and talk about the people we knew in common and generally make him want to throw a little business my way. I know he wasn't headed anywhere in particular because I saw him going into the convenience store 10 minutes later when I headed into Starbucks for a tall cold one.

Anyhow, I really shouldn't sweat it because a weasel like that is likely to be amongst those who get sliced away when US Trust continues to fail to integrate well into the Bank of America culture after BofA snapped it up off the side of Schwab, where it was also failing. US Trust has a very nice lobby, to be sure, but go upstairs of their Manhattan flagship and you fall into a shithole straight out of Office Space. It's a failing company, and it's because of rude schmucks like Mr. Tribeca.

And his twenty is headed straight for a United Homeless Organization jug.

Kids going in circles

At the carnival at the middle school, the DJ was playing the 1991 hit "Jump Around" while middle school kids walked in a circle playing some game. Despite the classic beat, none of them could make him/herself dance, preferring instead to walk while staring embarassingly at their feet. Now and again one of them would twitch a little, as if making a brief foray into the world of rhythm before retreating.

Later, I learned that "Cotton-Eyed Joe" has a set Macarena-like dance. Tellingly, it was black girls and white jock boys who dominated the dancing.

Clockwatchers

At first I thought Clockwatchers, a 1997 film starring Lisa Kudrow, Parker Posey, and Toni Collette -- which came out when I was in Moscow working on my dissertation -- was going to be a pale chickflick shadow of Office Space. But, for starters, nothing with Lisa Kudrow and Parker Posey in it can be all bad. While much is formulaic and telegraphed, you have to admire the disciplined cinematography -- with dystopic hints of Tati's Playtime, and there were plenty of yucks. Toni Collette, as per usual, is the good girl.

It's a 2nd tier film, worth having on your Netflix list.

Circle of futility

On the way to work today I passed a nice old house that was having some kind of sale, estate or otherwise. In the driveway were no less than 4 Volvo wagons of different vintages, bumper to bumper. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's a crime the way Volvo (ahem Ford) holds us hostage with the only usable full-sized station wagon. Those of us with driveways too narrow for an Odyssey are hosed. So why, I ask again, does Honda bogart the Accord wagon to us Americans? There it is right there in the picture, the Euro/Japanese variant. All they gotta do is ship those puppies over or make em here, throw a hybrid engine and a rear-facing seat in there for carpooling. And cupholders. And they'd be rich! Oh yeah, they are rich.

Why oh why is it so? Is it payback for Iraq?

Blowing the doors off!

Grousereaders, I just wanted to let you know that thanks to a phenomenal $500 gift from one of our Yankee donors, I've now blown past my initial goal to raise $500 towards a cure for diabetes and have raised it to $2000. Again, I'll be riding 30 hilly New Jersey miles in the heat of summer to earn these ducats.

On a somewhat more somber note, the scorecard in our traditional Northerner vs. Southerner (regional affiliation is defined by where you went to high school) contest stands at:

$650 North
$250 South

My fellow southerners, I say to you now, are we going to let these smug bastards walk all over us in the race to cure Diabetes? The corract answer: "Hell no! We too will have a voice in supporting research to ameliorate and end the suffering of 20 million Americans (and that's just the Americans!)." Step right up and show your pride with a donation.

ps. Northerners. Don't let those rebs get the best of you. Donate here.

Europeans, midwesterners, emerging markets representatives, extraterrestrials, doppelgangers, pets and golems may give at this location.

What can I say?

It's New York in the spring, a good day after a crappy commute, if not a commute from hell.

Our sparsely populated office is being painted, which is not enhancing my head.

Saw no freaks or events on the streets today, nothing more memorable than two Japanese girls passed near 46th and 5th on the way to see Genna at 48th and 8th, musing to each other about the right way to pronounce economics, with and e like bleak or and e like bleck: "Is it economics or economics?" That's actually a good question.

Growing old pains

In the shower this morning, I realized my razor was in the medicine cabinet. As I stepped out of the shower onto the glorified towel that serves us slackers as a bathmat, I tried to gain some leverage with the foot still in the tub and slipped -- catching myself on the shower enclosure with my arm, which is now suspiciously sore.

I used to have no comprehension of how anyone could slip in the shower. Now I get it. I suppose if we had managed the multiple risks involved a little more proactively, I'd be in better shape. Which goes to show you that consultantese is good for something.

Tech n*rs

A few weeks ago during a pretty good talk on Private Equity in Africa, this South African guy with McKinsey and Harvard Business School firmly stamped on his oral resume began to show a snippet from a documentary on his laptop. The sound quality was crappy, so he said to the guy running the lecture series: "Lets get IT in here to fix this." His tone -- haughty and disdainful -- was of the sort which was once saved for the pronunciation of the n word in certain circles, which was picked up on by at least one member of the largely African and African-American audience. Later, he showed an utter lack of regard for the IT guy's time, keeping him waiting around for 10 minutes like he had nothing better to do.

It was funny, and kind of ironic, as he was trying to pump up Africa in his talk.

Commuting use

Humming along the Parkway today, turned off the stereo to be quiet for a while, thought about what I would do if I needed to commute along that road. Perhaps I'd listen to more classical music, I thought, or talk on the phone more. Then I realized how ridiculous it was to think that I needed to be using all my time productively. For what, honestly? This is the Protestant work ethic run absolutely amuck in my delicate skull. Why should I not kick back and enjoy the delicate beauties of our fair state.

And then I go an blog about it.

Oh yes, today was a big day for the Grouse, which got exposure from Felix Salmon's Market Movers blog on Conde Nast's oh-so-tony Portfolio.com. My traffic went straight through it's thatch roof. One discerning reader in Utah even lingered and perused so long that he or she may even join the merry band of Grousereaders.

Sincerity

I was sending out an initial email exhorting friends and family to support my ride in the June 16th American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure to raise money for diabetes research, and found that I was having a difficult time adopting an unironic, enthusiastic tone to ask those nearest and dearest to me to donate to support this most worthy cause, fighting a disease which afflicts some 20 million Americans. If I had been better indoctrinated in the ways of corporate America, like, say, with an MBA, or by working at Walmart, I would assumedly have less trouble donning this mask of unaffected and perky sincerity. I have not had this training, however, so however much I may believe that it is an unalloyed mitzvah to give in support of diabetes research, I will be at pains to express myself directly.

Slow day in the city

In Manhattan today, not much to report, unless you count this big lunk all dressed in hockey gear, probably Rangers I guess -- skates, goalie gloves -- walking out onto the grass in Bryant Park (behind the library), sitting on a chair and reading a newspaper. Maybe the Post. And yes, I looked in the direction he was looking, and yes, there was a camera crew. 3 guys in all, with facial hair. So who knows, maybe it was for YouTube, maybe it's for an indie film, deeply ironic, or maybe it's for a television commercial. By now, same diff.

Later I ran into little Ms RyeandFlax, who informed me that her decided response to her mid-life crisis will be to leave her Big 4 accounting firm and go to an investment bank. Personally, I think she's just early stage in her crisis. Time will tell.

Update from bedtime

Some weeks ago we brought a big boy bed into Graham's room, and left it there with the crib. We needn't have bothered with the transitional phase. Graham climbed right into that bed as if he had never seen a crib. Had he watched enough mafia movies he would have looked at that crib, waved his hand dismissively, and said "you're dead to me."

So now we can snuggle in bed with Graham just like we do with Natalie, but Graham is proving exceptionally affectionate, matching kiss with kiss, nuzzle with nuzzle. And he's still very little.

It's a very nice phase.

The state of the Garden State

It was a gorgeous day here in Central New Jersey: sunny, mild, leaves a budding, and so on. At the end of the day, Natalie even deigned to play with Graham, who was in heaven.

Out on the soccer field, I got through my season opener without injury. That's saying something.

And, as a nightcap, I caught the end of that true classic, which should be on everyone's top 10 of all time list, Coming to America

The money thing

So this headhunter calls me up about a job at a certain asset manager that has already spurned me twice, but the headhunters keep calling anyway cuz they don't know that. And he's talking to me about a financial advisor job, which usually I wouldn't consider but this one pays enough money to put it on the map. More than enough.

And so they talk to me blah blah blah and they make me put my resume in their format and write a letter talking about what clubs I'm in and what a jock I am to show that I'm both social and competitive. And after all that's done (net 3ish hours of the Grouse's precious time) the guy is like, "so how much did you make last year," and I tell him, and he's like "ummmm, errrr. Well, that's a problem, cuz they're gonna look at that and say: if he likes money, why hasn't he figured out a way to earn more? This is a job that offers the potential to earn seven figures eventually, and they want people who want that." And I'm like "I'm a friggin Slavist already, gimme a break." And he's like "They look at money as a proxy for aggression." Fact is, I probably don't want this job and I probably won't get it, but this is a diabolical logic: you can't earn more money because you haven't earned it before.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu

This movie was the critics' darling when in came out in 2005, and it's easy to see why they loved it so much, which doesn't mean you should hate it. But you must be patient. Like 24, it unfolds in something close to real time, though, unlike the show, only one patient dies. It's a very solid example of naturalism, and gives you a pretty good feel for the lingering old Eastern Europe as it slides into the new. The main tension in the movie is between the humane feelings the surrounding characters show towards our rapidly degenerating hero and a wide range of dehumanizing, workaday disdain. But it's not like good guys bad guys. Most of the neighbors and medical staff come and go from caring the whole time.

If you can stomach two hours of characters and atmosphere, cat hair, urine, and obscure drug names and medical terminology, with almost no plot, but lots of humanity, you should definitely watch it.

Natalie rides

Last weekend I took Natalie out to my office complex to take off her training wheels in the secluded calm of glass box land. It was mild, and she rode beneath the allee of flowering corporate trees. At first she was timid, then once she got it, she fairly brimmed with overconfidence: "I'm gonna be riding good way before Canandaigua (vacation in July), and way before Helen!" I was surprised, a bit touched, at her resolve to kick her best friend's ass. No but seriously, it was great to see her feeling empowered.

Bored Indian security guards sauntered out to smoke cigarettes on the bench, and then one got in the security jeep to drive 50 feet then turn around and drive back.

Further out into the parking lot, a Plainsboro ambulance practicing backing up, beeping, and parking.