Chez nous

After a couple of weekends in a row on the road on top of several trips in the last couple of months (twice to Charlotte, once to Miami) it's nice to be home this weekend. For one thing, I am kicking it here at my weekend command post out on the screened in porch. I had done round 1 of pollen abatement earlier in the week and had become hopeful that maybe the worst of pollen season was over. Unfortunately, my neighbor Travis made the mistake of actually vocalizing the belief that we might be on the pollen downslope. I then checked with the interweb, which disabused me of any such hopes.

Just now birds are tweeting all around. Squirrels frolic around out in the yard there, doing whatever it is they do when they're not taunting cars. Down at the lake there are sunbathers and even an intrepid swimmer or two.

Other weekend highlights include tennis (I'm down one set (6-7) in a ladder match) and yesterday a walk south from Saxapahaw along the east bank of the Haw. Natalie and I had walked this path first back when we picked up our Xmas leg o lamb from the butcher out there. At the time I remarked how Mary would love this trail. I was not mistaken. She was delighted.

In recent months I've been making a concerted effort to get her out on trails in different state parks around here. I may have written about it. It has been a good thing to do. Mary at times traps herself in her routines (as do we all) but benefits from breaking out. More importantly, it's good for our marriage for us to mix it up and go different places, and to just prioritize the relationship itself. Nothing but good.

In the chair

As we careen inexorably towards perhaps the most globally consequential of events ever -- my 60th birthday--little things keep happening. Yesterday I found myself once more in the dental chair while Dr G and team drilled a bunch of once-useful tooth away and then replaced it with something else, all in the service of the noble goal that I should be able to continue to eat like a college student while I try to emulate one in as many ways as possible, all while wearing a sweater vest whenever possible and granting myself permission to use the word "glorious" to describe the weather, a privilege more typically reserved for the geriatric set.

While reclining in the dentist chair I enjoyed -- as always -- some renovation shows on HGTV. Dr G's team have settled on HGTV as a default because it is as resolutely apolitical a channel as one can find and they don't need patients getting worked up about this or that while in the chair. I never watch the channel anywhere else than at the dentist, what with not having cable and all, but I will confess to having become a sucker for the renovation genre due to my frequent visits to the dentist, ever backfilling for an utter absence of brushing and flossing discipline when I was younger (as an aside I really have to wonder how any woman ever kissed me a second time back then. Between the smoking, the drinking, the diet and the poor care, my breath must have been horrible).

Returning to the present, the renovation shows are actually rather pertinent to my own life because -- and I'm not sure how I've failed to mention except in passing last November -- we will soon have two bathrooms under renovation. Mary has been focused on selecting tile and fixtures and colors for many months. From the shows I watched in the chair I can see that the stuff she's been picking is in fact in fashion and I see the excitement of the customers when the project is done, I'm getting in the mood! (though it has been resolutely her project to drive)

Before wrapping it up for today I must note that -- as with so many genres and dramatic moments -- I am a completely sap when watching the shows so that when the reveal scene happens (as it always does) and the couple is led back into their newly and miraculously renovated home by the show's host, the wife always cries. It is a requirement of the genre. Being emotionally easily swayable, I often shed a wee tear in sympathy with her. Thankfully my eyes are covered over with the protective and tinted eye coverings that the dentist gives me whenever she is drilling in my mouth, so she and her assistant can't perceive my slight tears. Which is important because she's constantly asking "Are you doing OK?" with reference to dental pain or just the discomfort of being half upside down with women pushing metal equipment deep into my mouth while doing pretty precise work. But of course I'm OK. I'm a rock.

Adjusting

Can't recall if I've blogged about it, but for the first time ever we've hired a junior person into our NC office. An exciting development to be sure. 

Unfortunately she leaves the office at around 2 to go home and meet her kids' school bus, then works from home. This has meant I've needed to adjust my own schedule and am now going into the office -- for the first time in some years -- at 9 am.

It is something of a shock to my wee system. Thankfully my commute is short so that's not really an enormous issue, but arriving into our pretty urban parking deck right when others are arriving and yet others are leaving -- and often those are students, so aren't super attentive -- adds a bit of insult to injury. Thus far I have kept my wits about myself and have managed through it, but it's a bit much. I am very much looking forward to the arrival of Friday tomorrow.

Kids on the floor

Last Wednesday in Manhattan Natalie and I had a date to hang out. We initially thought we'd hit the Raphael show at the Met, but the museum turned out to be closed on Wednesdays (who knew?). Instead we decided to go gallery-crawling.

Armed with a list of approved galleries from my friend Joe, whom I had fortuitously run into on Broadway no Tuesday, we set off. As is typical on such ventures, some of the art was interesting, some of it not so much. For my money the best show was Afterlife at Andrew Edlin, featuring works from a range of artists, mostly "outsiders", who were discovered posthumously.

But the high point of our jaunt was going into some gallery where, in an interior room shielded from the gaze of the haughty young women at the front who so often seem choses to dissuade people without money from bothering to come in and survey the gallery's fare, a few young boys were hanging out on the floor, two of them black, one of them aspiring to blackness. They had backpacks and looked like they were just chilling out and goofing, having figured out that art galleries weren't that well policed beyond the front room. The only incongruous thing was the thick wad of cash they were waving about. That was a little surprising. Had it made more sense with the art, I would have suspected that they were part of a performance piece. Indeed, they may well have been. 

Searching for fresh gold

As I have gotten more disciplined in hanging from my new bar and even doing some pull-ups, my fingers have gotten bigger. Apparently it's not finger muscles, but tendons in the hands thickening up. Google it. It's a thing.

Therefore my wedding ring has gotten tighter and tighter on the old ring finger there and thus harder to take off. When I am swollen from exercising, or flying, or eating too much salt, or really just about anything, it's painful to take it off and it feels tight just sitting there.

So I decided to go out on 47th St and seek a replacement, an easy thing to do since my favorite lunching spot in NYC is on the main block of the diamond district, 47th between 5th and 6th. Sadly the eatery was closed for all of Passover and my friend and I had to go elsewhere, but afterwards I came back to accomplish my ring mission.

I was looking for the place where I bought my original band back in '97, but I think it must be gone. I ended up in a small shop. A young woman helped me get a size (probably a 10.5) and then got out a tray of rings. I was hoping to trade in like for like but the only thing they had was bigger and would have costed $950 out of pocket after the trade in (he offered $450, which is what I had paid for it maybe 7 years ago when the price of gold was, now that I look it up, less than a third of what it is now). That was $950 even after the guy who came over started haggling with himself when I showed initial disinclination. The woman had first asked a colleague if they could resize my ring for me today, and he said "not today!" The guy who was haggling with me offered to resize it in "an hour.... 30 minutes." At that point in time I figured it was time to cut out of there. He wanted the sale too bad.

Murder by the compost pile

Being inherently lazy, we located our compost pile just off our deck so that we (aka "I", since apparently the task of carrying things out of the house retains the primordial lot of males, just as females seem to do more of carrying things into the house. But I digress) can easily dump our compost bins into it. Though I have fond memories of walking out into the yard of an evening to feed the compost bin in Princeton.

The heard of deer that frequents our yard, most often on its way to the creek down below for a sip and/or spritz, have for a long time helped us to process the very fresh stuff on top of the compost. Of late they have stopped doing so. I had hypothesized that it might be because some new plants that Mary has decided are good ground cover for the yard had grown up and obscured their view of it while transiting down the hill to the creek. The interweb, however, informs me that deer have a very acute sense of smell, and who am I to doubt the interweb?

Perhaps the olfactory acuity of our local deer has been dulled by snorting Tranq or the like. This kind of thing is of course everywhere thanks to Joe Biden. Or perhaps the deer have just tired of the bill of fare offered up by our compost pile, just as most humans, once wowed by the novel multiculturedness of the Whole Foods hot bar, have long since wearied of it.

At any rate, the deer's abdication of responsibility for grazing on the fresh stuff atop our compost has created an opportunity for a murder of crows, who have been sampling its delights recently and therefore have been perching on our deck rail pretty often. It's nice to have new neighbors.

On email

In modern times it has become customary to complain about how much email one gets, as if to validate one's stature as a member of the productive class. As in: "I am so weighed down by my inbox!" or "Sometimes after dinner I have to spend 90 minutes responding to it all!" You know what I'm talking about.

With the rise of automated sorting tabs within email, which shun much of the fluff to my "other" tab in Outlook or to "Social" or "Marketing" in gmail, it's less of a problem. Honestly there are days when I don't get more that three to five emails addressed to me by humans. I'm OK with that. In fact, I like it!

Yes there are still texts, which are more like mosquitos compared to the horsefly that is the email. But I can turn off notifications on my phone and ringfence them pretty good. I know longer feel like I need my inbox to demonstrate to me how important I am. I leave that to you, fair reader.

And to my beautiful wife and children.

Admittedly, there was the time earlier this week when Mary failed to look at her texts when she was supposed to be paying attention to come and pick me up when I was in the middle of my flat tire saga. But that's a tale for another day. She still maintains my affection.

Adventure #1 with my new Prius

Through the decades I've learned to ignore a lot of sensors in my cars. First and foremost the check engine light, which sometimes seemed like a Christmas tree light in a succession of Subarus. Like the economist Paul Kasriel, who famously used duct tape to obscure the check engine light on his Outback, I got on with my life and had the garage look at it when a service interval rolled around.

Mary's Prius had a tire pressure indicator on for more or less the last year or two of its life. I'd try to pump up the tires, monitor the pressure, and figure out which one was the problem, to no avail. We lived with it. And I've seen the tire pressure indicator wax and wane when temperatures change quickly or when you go up or down a mountain. Makes sense, sort of.

But I was for sure annoyed when the tire pressure light came on in my brand-spanking new Prius PHEV. That did not seem right. Still, we'd had a night or two when the temperature changed 30-40 degrees overnight. I figured that was what was going on. I had an important meeting at noon yesterday with a client and was going to address it after that.

Murphy's legislator had other plans. As I left my office and was headed to Merritt's to buy sandwiches to head to my client's house, a new indicator came on showing me the tire pressures in each of my 4 tires (there's some progress in the new car!) and that the pressure in my front left was 14 of a desired 36. Then it was 13. Not good. By the time I got to Merritt's it was flat. 

I will spare you the full play by play, except to note that at dinner the other night Jonathan had pointed out that the new Prii lacked spare tires, to which I responded "I never get flat tires." That was my fatal error.

Turns out, there is a little pump back there where the spare should be with a bottle of some kind of solution that can patch a tire if it's not too bad. Mine proved to be not too bad. After Lyfting to my client lunch I went back later in the afternoon, applied the modern technology and drove to a garage. Fingers crossed I didn't destroy my rim driving a mile or so.

Then I walked from my garage back to Merritt's, where I had left my other car (Mary having been too deep in her internet inhalation to go with me on this mission). I took the Battle Creek trail for the first part of the walk. I was passed by, amongst others, a UNC student out running barefoot on the rocky trail. 

The dangers of my new car

One of the virtues of the old Prii has always been their slowness. It protects men (AKA me) and their (my) tendency to want to go fast and race with other cars. It's always there, we can only manage it. As a logical extension of that, it also incentivized me to be organized and leave for things on time so as not to be late.

Yesterday I was running incrementally late for something. Ironically I was touring the Forest at Duke, a continuing care retirement community, as part of a class on whether to age in place or go live someplace special like that put on my Duke's OLLI -- aka college for old folx.

So I pulled out onto Franklin Street headed to Durham and as I approached the light at Eastgate, I saw 6 cars stacked up in the left hand lane to go straight and nobody in the right hand lane which goes right or straight but then merges left maybe 200 yards out. The light changed sooner than I thought it was and I ended up needing to accelerate hard to get in front of the traffic on the left. It was so quick and effortless that I looked down and found myself going 55 momentarily in a 35. Like butter. Whoops.

That wouldn't have happened in one of the older Prii. They just couldn't do it. I will have to monitor myself. 

Posture and attitude

Deleuze and Guattari's book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, was mostly there for visual effect during the time it was part of my library, which I'm pretty sure is no longer. I loved the color, a bright orange. It was part of the University of Minnesota series on literary theory which I certainly perceived as bad-assed, intellectual and prestigious. So I definitely felt good about having it on my shelf.

But I never could really get through much of it. It was filled with too much of their obscurantist hocus-pocus, writing in a language which was pretty much their own.

One thing I do remember and can recall pretty precisely, with a little assist from Gemini (thanks Google!), was the distinction they drew between the postures that characterized Kafka's characters. The Bent Head, signifying submission, guilt the weight of the law, and the Erect Head, signifying freedom and self respect and expression. Really this distinction is pretty elementary and quasi universal body language, I had just never really thought much about it. And the book's orange color looked so good and I had surely dropped $15 on it so I needed to get something out of it.

Playing tennis today against a new guy as we were warming up his strokes seemed pretty solid and he was a good deal younger than me, so I thought maybe he was gonna beat me. After a lost point I found myself slouching back to receive point and noticed that I was slouching with my head held low. "Enough of this," I thought. I need to walk back after all points with head held high. 

We were forced to quit with me up 6-0, 3-2. Turns out he was rusty as hell and I just had to keep the ball in play for long enough for him to beat himself. 

Alice Phoebe Lou

I was going to write something, but then I looked at my notepad and saw that I had written this woman's name down the other night. She has been around for a little while but is new to me. Everything I sample of hers is good, and there's a fair amount of it out there.

Blue Lights

For the last few weeks Mary and I have been watching Blue Lights on Britbox. Great show. Set in Belfast. Cops in a hardscrabble town fighting crime and drugs in the lingering shadow of the Troubles, the 30-year conflict in which ~3500 died and 50,000 were injured out of a population of 1.5 million.

Yesterday evening there was an episode in which a guy dies and one of the cops pulls out a rosary and prays long with him as they sit and wait for the ambulance to get there, which it doesn't do on time. Her hands are covered in blood as she cries and stumbles over the words. Her prayer is audible over an open channel, audible to all her colleagues. There's a scene in which two sergeants back at HQ look at each other quizzically while she does so.

Many of the cops in the show are implausibly good-looking, though not as bad as Hollywood might have done it. Guys and gals are partners in patrol cars and -- surprise, surprise -- they end up coupling up, having sex, falling in love. Conflicts arise between duty and personal interest.

So you see, the fundamental plot tension here, amidst all the drugs and guns and sex and parent-child issues (there's that too) and history, is the same as that of The Crown. It's the relationship between one's role in society and being an individual and a human. On The Crown it's all at a very high level. Here less so. But it's the same. What do you do when you're tending to a dying person but your sergeant insists you send the license plates of the cars involved in an accident? Do you hew the line of proper procedure when your community is falling apart?

That's why the true villain here, as is so always the case (and when it is, that's a clue as to what the show's really about) are the persnickety folks from CID who come in after the fact to second-guess what happened in the field. Was procedure followed? Or humanity?

The Executive Club

Graham had an interview out in Charlotte yesterday, so he and I bopped down there on a quick trip Monday afternoon. After driving through some momentarily hellacious wind and rain, we arrived at our hotel, a suburban Hilton. At check in, I was told that because I -- like Austin Powers -- was a Gold member of the loyalty club, Graham and I would have access to the Executive Club on the 11th floor. Indeed, they gave us a special card to access the very prestigious 11th floor.

Because there were free snacks available when we arrived, we bopped up there to check it out. In very middle-American fashion, the snacks included such things as fried something (upon inspection, I believe it to have been cauliflower) and wee slices of pizza with meat on it (pretty sure it was ground beef). Also a fruit and cheese tray.

The next morning I popped upstairs first thing for my traditional solo cup of coffee while Graham slept on. I sat over by the window and the hostess started making small talk: "It's the most beautiful view, isn't it?" She asked. I of course agreed, though in fact as the photo below shows, aside from being high in the air, it's just generic suburban office park in a rather flat region. Then she shifted the topic to the weather and how cold it was. I was reminded of how Mary dislikes the southern need to continually engage in small talk. I feel that, but honestly I think the woman was likely just bored and needed human contact to distract from her personal shade of quiet desperation in the great American spiritual outback.

For breakfast there were the most enormous piles of sausage and bacon one might ever hope to see, together with a vat of the strange eggs served at steam table breakfasts throughout the Hilton universe (I'm sure those dwelling within the Marriott universe see much the same thing). Part of me wanted to let Graham run hog-wild on the piles of pork, but since he had an interview at noon I didn't press him, and we ended up going out for breakfast where he could get some fresh pancakes with a more modest dose of bacon.

Hotel disaggregation, the Nature of the Firm, and microenterprise under AI

Our trip to Florida got me thinking about the Nature of the Firm, both the 1937 Ronald Coase article of that name and the problem it addressed. Why outsource or insource a given task? Why retain someone else to do something when you could learn to do it yourself? Where's the breakpoint. These are evergreen questions, but they are particularly actual for us now as we are a couple of weeks away from onboarding a younger colleague to support me and grow into supporting my clients.

But first, Florida. We found our lodgings on AirBnb and Booking.com (open architecture), though I could have gone the Hilton route (closed arch.) and gotten a room on points. More often when we're traveling for enjoyment we'll go with the open architecture route because the places tend to be more fun and we (esp Mary) tend to want to make breakfast rather than go downstairs to some smorgasbord.

For the first few days we stayed in Coconut Grove via AirBnb. Our hostess told us to pick up our key at the "Hotel Arya", though our room was in the adjacent building, "Hotel Mutiny." There were detailed directions in some web site that we were directed to from the AirBnb platform. We got there and the person at the Arya desk had no idea who you were "What box are your keys in? It should be in the directions." Sure enough, it was, after a lot of digging.

I'll spare you a lot of details but the essence of it is that Hotel Arya and Hotel Mutiny barely exist as recognizable corporate entities. Some of the units in each appear to be primarily corporate and rentable through web sites associated with those names, but many (who knows how many?) are AirBnbs. Each of the hotels is in turn part of a larger corporate brand (Sonesta, part of Best Western, for example). There are long-term residents and people there for a couple of days. There were small restaurants who were clearly subletting space. We ate breakfast our first day downstairs and you paid with a credit card because of course there's no central billing to charge to your room. 

Somehow it all worked, more or less. Loyalty and coordination happened on an employee by employee basis, some were more helpful than others, although we weren't really paying any entity for which they worked. We got the benefit of a much more stylishly appointed unit than we would have gotten at any Hilton. But it was all rather odd and disjointed. There was no there there. And I was continually mindful that we were in tall condos close the water in Florida and therefore conscious of the collapse that happened at Surfside, where the condo structure and board dysfunction had led to the deaths of 98 a few years back. What did I know about the building I was in? Who answered for it?

This post is going on for a long time. The reason I started thinking about this is that there's a belief circulating in some circles that AI will enable a large renaissance of microbusinesses as it become ever easier to build things using all the tools at our disposal. Just as the presence of distribution platforms like Amazon and AirBnb have created lots. But there are also challengers. Our hostess in Coconut Grove had one major booboo and I haggled with her and she agreed to refund our cleaning fee. Eight days after we vacated the unit, that hasn't happened. Maybe she's waiting for end of month to settle it? I've already left her review. What other recourse do I have?

Ads for AIs

Out running in Carolina North today. Took single tracks over by the pond which I swear wasn't there at all when we were kids. After walking at Horton Grove yesterday and going through an area where there had clearly been a prescribed burn recently, I marveled at the dense profusion of trees in all directions. I have to wonder if the absence of a forestry school at UNC might have caused the university to neglect the forest a little. I'm surprised the deer alone hasn't managed the understory better, though it's true there's not much bushy matter.

Towards the end of my jaunt I started to think about Meta's recent acquisition of Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. I quickly began to wonder if Zuckerberg and team were going to soon flood the network with ads, as it has for us flesh and blood types. I quickly moved from thinking this was a funny joke to realizing that it was likely that someone out there was actually making ads for AIs and serving them somewhere.

A quick search once I got home confirms that this kind of thing is in fact happening. Sigh. 

The Killing of Abe

While in Florida, for shits and giggles, I read a long story from the New Yorker about Shinzo Abe's assassin, whose mom had been brainwashed/stolen by the Moonies. And also a journalist (Suzuki) who had muckraked about the Moonies a lot. In the end the story focused on how Abe's assassin had a lot of sympathy for what he did.

Americans can easily forget what a huge influence and delusion the Moonies have been for decades and how much money they've collected and how much power it has bought them. 

It's also easy for mass delusions to take hold. Trump and populism, on the one hand. On the other, the casual and unthinking way hormones and surgery have been parceled out to kids partaking in the adolescent confusion du jour (gender). And other left-wing pieties that liberals have had to swallow lest they be tarred with the dreaded brush of deviant thinking. 

We all allow ourselves to be herded. The good news in Japan was that very restrictive gun laws meant the guy had to work really hard to make his own gun to actually take Abe's life. Here it's much easier to kill people.

The Venetian Pool

For years I had heard about the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. It's near where Mary's grandmother lived and where Mary and her siblings would go to visit back in the day. "There were these caves you could swim through! It was so cool!"

So when we had a chance to at long last finally complete the pilgrimage to the legendary Venetian Pool, I did not pass it up. Admittedly, we went late in the day when it was already closed, but Mary had no interest in actually swimming in it, she just wanted to see it.

 

Mary rarely gives herself over to fits of glee, but the Venetian Pool was an exception. It was exciting and lovely to see her bubbling with rare enthusiasm for this happy place from days of yore. And indeed, it was a pretty cool place, having been around for almost a century and still in fine fettle. A worthy visit altogether.

Miami

Down here in Miami for a long weekend before a conference. Mary came. The first few days were on the mainland, in Coconut Grove, before proceeding over to Miami Beach for the big event. Which I am dreading ever more by the day.

I could blog on with a lot of observations about the place, and I have them, but when Crabill and I went for a walk a couple of months back and I was talking about the blog he said "it sounds kinda like a job." And I'll confess that sometimes it feels like one, that I place a lot of pressure on myself to meet my production quotas. And I'm trying to be easy with myself.

I will note that the condo (or is it a hotel room? More on that later, perhaps) where we are staying faces West, so the best time to be sitting out here on the balcony is morning. Which I like. The early part of the day, the quiet with my first cup of coffee, is a time I prize. By now I'm on cup three and Mary and I have scrambled some eggs, as we are wont to do. Soon we will head out and see more of this city, after a low-key day yesterday. More later. 

Visiting an entirely new place

A few weeks back I read -- in The Economist, typically -- about Moltbook, the new social network for AI agents. Yes, you read that correctly.

Yesterday I remembered to stop by and spent maybe 15-20 minutes there. While the article I had read called out some scary things, I won't delve into the specifics because I didn't see them represented, mostly I saw a relentless focus by the agents on figuring out what was going on with them, trying to get better, understanding how and where errors were made.

I don't have time to dig deep now. Busy day approaching as the war in the Middle East spreads. My best to all.

One thought before I go: I have pondered before how to be sure to inject ethics into discourse within the AI world, to make sure that LLMs account for the amount and quality of attention paid by humans to questions of ethics and morals, which I believe is rather in the high range. Would it not make sense for the world's various faiths to send agents out onto Moltbook to seek influence? Digital missionaries, as it were. And Pete Singer should have one as well. And Greenpeace.

Maybe it all descends into a chaos parallel to what we see IRL But perhaps, stripped of human fears and insecurities, it would get somewhere. 

Salt as a boolean

A couple of years ago I mentioned that my nephrologist had recommended that I dial back the salt. I have done so, but only in a half-assed manner. I at least look at the salt content on things and think about it.

Salt announces itself most audibly on scrambled eggs. It's not unlike an on/off switch, a boolean operator in computing or, in linguistics, a phoneme. The most basic unit of meaning. Sprinkling a little salt on there just sets the thing in motion.

Even still, I try my best to limit it and just keep my grubby little fingers out of the salt bowl as much as possible, to let the salt in my toast enhance the eggs. Again, the key thing is not the specific sensation (salt/no salt) but the cultivation of appreciation of less and internalizing how pleasure works variously, on different time scales.