Self-restraining shotgun

First off, a quick recap of the tournament. Graham and crew (or, more accurately, Ben MB and crew, which included Graham), took an unexpected 3rd in the National Academic Quiz Tournament, AKA Quiz Bowl. They really outperformed expectations and were at some point in time in there ranked #1. It was pretty thrilling. I can't believe I considered not going.

After and excellent breakfast with my childhood friends George and Eric Dusenbury, Graham and I headed north. We had a fine drive back from Atlanta yesterday, mostly occupying ourselves with the two-part episode of Acquired on Standard Oil and John D Rockefeller. On the way down we had listened to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, partly to familiarize him with the plot in case it was a question in a Quiz Bowl round. A good if not great book.

There was very little traffic, praise the lord. As I had on the way down, I put Graham behind the wheel for a couple of hours. For this leg I was more successful in sitting on my hands and letting him make his own decisions. A couple of times he got closer to the car in front of me than would have been ideal, a few times we found ourselves going 48 in the right hand lane behind some truck going up a hill. For the most part, I let him draw his own conclusions.

Conservative talking points in liberals' mouths

Yesterday we had dinner with the ECHHS Quiz Bowl team and parents, a nice group of people for sure. Mostly academics, scientists and a couple of political scientists. There was much discussion of the excess of ineffective administrators at the universities as well in at the school system. It was not the first time I've had the discussion with liberal faculty.

It could have been lifted right from a set of conservative talking points about what's wrong with the schools. There was also indignant outrage about an instance of someone serving on a search committee and for a Principal and having heard someone say: "do we really want to end up with some white guy?" 

The same thing happens quite often when people are discussing the crazed frequency with which we hear of someone's kid wishing to transition from one gender to another. Liberals are certainly less rooted in the idea that there are only two genders, but there's a great deal of skepticism about the medical establishment's feverish embrace of gender transition as a cash generator.

Of course, people would be very careful saying such things in conversation with Republicans, since it would signal weakness. But since Democrats so rarely speak with Republicans, in practice it's not too problematic.

Atlanta, National Academic Quiz Tournament

At the Hilton in downtown Atlanta, for the national quiz bowl tournament. Graham and the A team went 6-1 in the morning, narrowly losing the one. 

After losing lots of sleep in Houston due to crazy noise toxic males and their jackass engines in the streets, I got us a room on the 24th floor of this Hilton. which made for much better sleeping. Now it's time to get ready to go meet a friend to watch the Champions League finals somewhere else in the car-crazed metropolis. Very odd scenes on TV from Paris where the game is happening and Liverpool fans have not been let in to the stadium. Game delated 30 minutes for no clear reason. 

Long COVID and our CHO

Sometimes it seems to me that out household Chief Health Officer Mary goes overboard in her obsession about health risks. Of late she has seemed to be a little focused on long COVID. Unfortunately every time I see an article about it the statistics cited seem to bear out her concerns. 

Large numbers of people do seem to be getting long COVID and vaccination confers little protection, according to a recent study. Regrettably, this argues for continued mask-wearing and managing down of exposure by not hanging out in large venues, for making use of warm weather that lets us be outside. We are fortunate to live in the south, where we get more of it.

Once more, Mary is right. Thank God she doesn't read my blog so she can't see me admitting that!

Yale Graduation

We are back from the Northeast and Yale graduation, filled with vaguely equal measures of hope and sadness. Hope, because Natalie has passed through the august institution and kept her balance and poise and general goodness and has found a fine thing to do with her future. On August 15, she heads off to Juneau, Alaska to work as an intern (I think, but who cares?) for an organization that lobbies in the Alaskan state legislature on behalf of public school administrators. It will be a fine adventure in a markedly different place and she will learn and experience a lot of new things. What more could one ask for from a post-collegiate job?

Sadness because... so much of her college experience was taken from her by COVID. But also, I guess, because I had so hoped that she might be able to have a much better experience there than I did. Mine was marred by my parents' marriage falling apart and my own substance abuse challenges. I tried to be cooler than thou and hung out with all these super cool off-campus artsy people and somewhat marginalized myself from the core of the student body. So I was something of an outsider by graduation.

It felt like Natalie ended up having a similar trajectory, for different reasons. It made all the sense in the world to move off campus her junior year. Living in an apartment and cooking and getting food from around New Haven seemed much more sensible than living in a dorm and getting takeout from dining halls and living largely sequestered in a dorm. But then she was cut off from the great mass of her peers in her residential college.

Admittedly they looked like the same somewhat daunting class of tightly wound overachievers that were there when I was there, maybe even more so. If anything there seems to be less room for divergence from the straight and narrow than in my day. But also greater diversity and tolerance in important and meaningful ways.

In the end I think she was able to make better use of her time there in important ways than I did. She got involved very energetically in super positive endeavors organizing Yale kids to provide mini-courses and other services to kids from the community. Her friends were all very nice and looked less dissolute than my did (though mine were also all fundamentally good people too). I was very happy to see her have a genuine and heartfelt interaction with a dining hall worker in Branford on her very last day; she had taken the time to treat them as peers and it was clearly appreciated. I guess mostly the problem was that so much of her college life ended up spent alone behind a computer screen, not a recipe for joy. There will be more to come.

Mein Phone ist tot!

Getting into the elevator at the Osborne in Rye, headed out to the beloved Sal's Pizza in Mamaroneck, my phone died. It had been low on battery and sometimes it gets a bit skittish at that level, but I was hoping to make it to the car to plug it in.

Made a little nervous by not having navigation, it was confusing getting out of the Osborne, I haven't done it all that many times, but after a wrong turn I made it to the Post Road and was able to navigate because, after all, I was going to Sal's, a place I have been picking up pizza from for coming up on 3 decades.

Then, to add insult to injury, when I got back with the rapidly cooling pizzas and less rapidly warming salads, nobody answered the buzzer because they were out on Mary's mom's porch in the back and they were all just assuming I'd call or text when I got back. Eventually, they heard it.

Being without a phone is exhausting, but I think I've thought of everything I absolutely need and will make it though the day.

Time to Board at LGA.

A surprise

On Friday I visited with a pretty well-known author, someone I went to college with, in his family's brownstone in lower Manhattan. When I arrived and pressed the buzzer, a voice responded that its owner would be right there. I wasn't sure it was the writer's voice, but then you know how those buzzers distort people's voices. Nonetheless, I was surprised when the door was opened by...

The butler. Or perhaps he was not a butler, strictly speaking, but rather a valet or some other kind of manservant. At any rate, he was clearly in the writer's employ. It was, in my time here on this big blue marble, a first. 

The butler/valet escorted my into a very lovely library and offered me a sparkling water, which was served in a crystal type glass, which was very welcome, because I was rather sweaty from having walked south from Rockefeller Center after visiting with a former colleague because I had the time, needed the exercise and wanted to have a look at more of my beloved Manhattan. It was a beautiful day for it and many memories continued to flow past as I walked the streets. It was particularly nice to see such rareties as the storefront of a hat wholesaler on the west side of 6th Ave somewhere around 26th.

Acting my age

On the train to New Haven, somewhat crowded, a young woman got on with a small pet carrier and a large suitcase and looked around quizzically for a place to sit and put her bag. Ever the gallant, I offered to put her bag on the upper rack for her.

Turns out it was a bad idea, cuz the bag was heavy as all get out, and I seem to have yoinked my back a little. I'm sure it will be better in time, but it might hurt tomorrow morning. Such is life. 

My cousin Neva's husband Tim recently married off his daughter Nola while in excruciating pain from what turned out to be cancer that required a bone marrow transplant.* I'll make it through this graduation. Probably if I dressed more like a 56-year old I'd act more like one.

*I guess that's probably a leukemia of some sort. I have successfully maintained a studied ignorance of many of the details of cancer, just because I know that commanding them won't help me sleep better.

Midtown magic

Spent the day at Midtown with Corinna, my first time there since the beginning of the pandemic. I had read that Wednesdays were the days of highest occupancy in the new culture of return to the office from work from home/hybrid work, and was pleasantly surprised to see that this was somewhat accurate in Manhattan, though the 7 train back to Queens that I hopped on around 5:20 was surprisingly uncrowded, if not outright empty. Still, the sidewalks were pretty crowded, and Bryant Park at the end of the work day was operating near capacity on a beautiful spring day. Though frankly, I was reminded of sitting there at 8:40 in the morning on 9/11, right before it all got started.

Just before Corinna and I walked south from Rockefeller Center, who should I see ambling across the street but David Buza, my old colleague from Princeton, a Duke grad who met his wife Caroline in Kryszewskiville (sp? Who cares?) back in the 90s. We will have coffee tomorrow morning.

That took me back to sitting with him in the food court below Rock Center in 2002 just after I joined a project at AXA when I explained to him and Cyrus that I would be running into people I knew at Rockefeller Center through the simple expedient of looking at people as they walked past. Shortly thereafter, maybe that same day, an old colleague from Soros named Greg walked by. Haven't seen him since.

In general, this will happen less often as I age and people leave the workforce through retirement and death. But I was happy to see David yesterday, and moreover, this is the magic of cities and even their economic value. People come together and share ideas. Some of them end up being good ideas. Companies form or iniatives take flight. Value is created.

Burnt out but need to burn

Had my alarm set for 7:10 this morning but didn't actually get up till 7:45. It was a long weekend of cleaning and then hosting the robotics end of season party, not just of the inside of the house but also the porch and deck. The irony was that in the end, people were super-observant of the COVID restriction and almost no one ventured into the house, immaculate though it was.

There was a moment when I enlisted Graham's help in putting back the upper sashes of the windows in the living room when I explained to him my limited comprehension of how the damned things work, and he remarked that the spring-loaded mechanism was not unlike one of the designs they had considered for the robot. It made me wonder whether I should have been getting him more involved all this time in the variety of tasks I do around the house. Of course, part of the problem is that I am in fact not Mr Fix-it so I am so often reminding myself of how things work or just trying to figure it out myself. Maybe that's in fact how most people are. I think I'm just a little fixated on the idea of him leaving, for some strange reason.

The food at the party was ridiculous. Egg rolls, ribs, chicken, plus some vegetarian Indian stuff. The most amazing carrot cake ever from Nathan's girl Dharma.

Then after going out for a bike ride I was about to hop in the outdoor shower when I saw some shadowy figures moving on bikes through the woods. One of them I recognized as Woody, who's often passing through with one or the other of his kids; the last in line was Crabill, who stopped in for an outdoor shower and helped us eat some of our party leftovers.

I awoke tipping the scales at just shy of 181, up from a pandemic low of 168. Sigh.

A brief interlude of calm

In 27 hours we will be hosting the end of season robotics party, which means that shortly Mary will likely come up here and want to talk about the things that need to be done first. I have the makings of a list in my head already (get most recent deposit of pollen off the stuff on the deck, get tables from LFA shed down by the lake, clean off stacked plastic chairs down in the basement and array in the flat parts of the back yard, clean toilets, get Graham to clean room, wash windows, clean out fireplace, more or less in that order).

Meanwhile it's calm, the air is pretty cool, up the hill I can hear Judy's chickens clucking. 

I have started to think more and more about a book. Right now I'm thinking the focus should be on public and private goods and how they are funded/delivered (insourcing/DIY vs. personal savings vs. bank loans vs. capital markets (equity vs. debt) vs. taxing and spending by public entities (local, state [or province], or Federal) and how that changes over time and space. It's also necessary to think about risk management spending in this context. I.e. how much time and effort is spent on paying for something to be done vs. preventing the need for it in the first place (risk avoidance and mitigation) vs. aggregating spend (risk transfer).

Obviously it's a big question set. I nibble around the edges of it all the time here on the blog. I may have to try to sort it out somewhere in the 250-300 page mode. I don't think it's worth writing an academic magnum opus that answers all the questions, but it is worth trying to frame them in an interesting way that facilitates discussion.

Frances Ferguson

In a departure from my normal practice of focusing on TV shows, I watched this short movie on Amazon over the last couple of nights. It's an ultra-deadpan tale of a young woman in a Nebraska town in a soul-deadening marriage who has an affair with a student in a high-school class where she's a substitute teacher. That said, don't expect much sex. All we see is her masturbating in her car fully clothed, and even there we don't actually see her hand doing any work.

Indeed, the movie is very much an exercise in what it doesn't show, in not showing things. Which makes sense, since a quick search reveals that it had a budget of only $500k, which makes it something of a miracle that it has voiceover from Nick Offerman of Parks and Rec. Or, rather, instead of a miracle it's a reminder that lots of actors are artists first and foremost who love participating in projects they like.

The movie is billed as a comedy but I didn't laugh a whole lot. And yet... it was pretty memorable and clever in many ways, for instance in how it thematized the titular character's good looks. Part of me wondered if I would have kept on watching if the lead actress had not been an attractive blue-eyed blonde, albeit in a very conventional way. The film plays with and dances around this topic. Early in the film an older guy in a store says to Frances: "You're very attractive," to which she responds "You say that as if it's a good thing." Later, in support group, another pretty blonde says to her "You're not that hot," to which Frances responds "Thank you." All of this she does with an absolute minimum of affect, save for a more or less permanent application of so-called resting bitch face (Google it).

In short, in only an hour and 15 minutes or so, Frances Ferguson is able to get a fair amount done. Not a waste of time. And the ending offers hope. I am inclined to check out other stuff from its director, Bob Byington, especially now that I see that an earlier film with high ratings -- Harmony and Me -- stars my brother-in-law Kevin Corrigan.

Old White man

Some months ago my college girlfriend Hilary dropped me a note on one platform or another informing me that she intended to spend some time reading my blog. It's always an honor when someone allocates a chunk of any given day to reading my blog, what with the veritable universe of content out there I'm competing with and the negligible pizzazz of my modest corner of it. I awaited her feedback. Somewhere in there she asked for my address and then she sent me a copy of EB White's apparently classic tome of essays One Man's Meat, a collection of columns he published in Harper's from 1938-1943 after he had retreated from New York to Maine to tend an old family farm. White is of course the author of children's classics like Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, neither of which I have read, and one of the two creators of The Elements of Style, which I have around here somewhere.

This handsome little tome has now shared space on my bedside table for a while but I've been reading a little more of it recently, in preparation for maybe seeing her sometime over the next few months on some foray north. The first thing that strikes me as how old mannish White's reflections sound, despite the fact that he was only 39 when he started writing the essays. Then again, I was 38 when I started this blog. Surely some of the relative maturity of White's style derives from the historical moment when he was writing. His project commenced long prior to the advent of rock and roll and the permeation of youth culture down through the age deciles, which encourages all of us to pretend to be young for a long time (I of course still do a two-footed hop over the tennis net in every match) so as to preserve each individual's identification with the acceleration of product cycles and manufactured obsolescence. Young people consume more so it behooves a consumerist society that we should all feel young and ever in need of the ego support of our next purchase.

But around 1940, life expectancy in the US was 61 or 62. White was 2/3rds of the way there, roughly where I am now. Old assed bitch.

Victory?

Somehow I had failed to chronicle the smell in Mary's Prius. A mouse, it seems, had crawled up into the climate control and died, yielding a rich smell for all of us. We took it to Auto Logic and spend maybe $600 with them trying to get rid of it, but in the end they said it was so deep in there that it would could $1500 or so to take the whole dash apart to get to where it seemed to have died.

So Mary suffered and I tried all manner of remedies to address it: sachets of charcoal, plug in ionizers, etc. Admittedly I never sprinkled baking soda on all the seats and carpets and then vacuumed it out.

The internet told me that the animal should have long since desiccated, meaning that the only conclusion was the the smell was deep inside the upholstery. The car was also filthy after first being the family road trip car for a long time and then after accompanying Natalie to California and back last summer, so it just needed some attention.

Eventually my office mate Adam asked if I had tried one of these "Little Green" machines. Essentially they are small steam cleaners, the kinds of things car detailers use. I of course had not. He lent me his. Over the weekend I finally did the baking soda thing and then spent a few hours attacking the seats and carpets with the Little Green thingie. Let's hope that the smell stays in abatement. 

The moral of the story of course is to just keep plugging and not accept defeat from trying only lazy man approaches to problems. As with many things, I surely could have outsourced this one and a detailer would probably have done a better job, but then I wouldn't have the satisfaction of having done it myself. I know I've said that before.

Epiphanic Delusion

Yesterday morning at AA the topic was "moments of clarity," which in the context of AA is really about the conversion narrative: the moment when one realizes that one can live without drugs or alcohol and be happy or just live at all, for starters. The moment that makes the rest of your life possible. It's a big deal, this moment of clarity. I'm sure I've told the story of my big similar moments somewhere on this blog over the years, though I just did a quick search to make sure I haven't written this exact same post before, which sometimes happens.

The problem is that the moment of clarity is also analogous to the concept of "buzz" in substance abuse, that ever-elusive state of momentary vision and joy that substance consumers seek. Back when I was in college, Mark and I had a practice of doing mushrooms once in the spring and once in the fall but no more. Timed for nice weather so the day could be spend outside, wandering around, talking, throwing a frisbee, communing with the One. We knew not to do it more often because shrooms were very powerful and took a day or two to recover from. It was clear that tripping was chasing enlightenment of a sort that one could not take with one upon return from the trip, however hard we may have tried. Really good weed offered a shallower and similar if even more evanescent clarity with shorter recovery periods. It also left one more or less on the same planet with other people, unlike psilocybin.

Moments of clarity in sobriety are like that. They are highs to which one keeps trying to come back. The fortunate thing is that the culture of 12-step programs, with its well-developed apparatus of meetings, peer support, literature, steps, traditions, etc., is all geared towards helping people memorialize and institutionalize those insights in one's life. But it is the engagement in and doing of those things which offers us hope and the possibility of preserving the clarity found in those moments. 

After all, one would never think to ask Michael Jordan "What was the moment of clarity when you became a great basketball player?" It was decades of hard work and practice, Malcolm Gladwell's proverbial 10,000 hours. Maybe the question would be "When was the moment when, as a sophomore at Laney, that you came to believe you might make the varsity team?" Could be a bad analogy. He probably never doubted it.

On not Reading Solzhenitsyn

I have never read much Solzhenitsyn. Not The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, or even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For that matter I've never read Shalamov or Ginsburg. I had recently written about how I also haven't repeatedly plumbed the depths of the Holocaust. It's not that I try by any means to deny history's worst atrocities. I have read the numbers and high level accounts of the absolute worst moments of the 20th century, I just haven't chosen to dive down into all of the details.

Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recently had an article in the Times Literary Supplement which argued that all of Russian Literature is shot through with the destructive imperialism that led to the invasion of Ukraine. It's tough to swallow, but not hard to understand given the perspective of the writer right about now. It's not unlike a low-income Black person whose path forward in life has been blocked time and again by a world seemingly constructed to engineer her failure and death having a hard time with almost the entirety of white culture, from Bing Crosby to Mia Hamm. After a while you can imagine how it all might sting.

Certainly my own perspective on Russia is limited by my having filtered out the worst of it. I guess I should probably work on that a little.

Along parallel lines, I have stopped in the middle of the bio of Holocaust survivor Siggi Wilzig that I wrote about a month ago. The faults of the book have conspired to halt me in my consumption of its story, which is basically about how this guy kept going no matter what. Maybe I should try to push through there.

Judging people's age

I used to think that I was good at guessing people's age. When the kids were little, I could guess the ages of toddlers within months, but as the kids have grown up my accuracy with that group has gone down tremendously, which is only to be expected. I spend less time amongst them. Half of me wants to add "praise the Lord," the other thinks "sadly."

Now older people have become a problem. I was just up at Sutton's waiting for a 77-year old I had never met. I looked over at one guy in a booth who I figured was 63 or so, or was he? Then another guy came to the door and at first I thought it could be him, but as the guy came in I realized that he was my age or younger.

Of course it's partly about the denial of aging and partly about my potential need for new glasses, no matter what the instruments at the optometrist's office say. For a while I think my internal age was mentally anchored somewhere around 22. It edged up over time, but Jack Benny may not have been far from the mark in saying that he never edged a day over 39.

Certainly I am a long way from giving up my practice of doing a two-footed jump over the net in the middle of each tennis match.

Retooling

Today in the Journal there's a piece about supply chain woes for chips in the chip-manufacturing value chain. Which is to say that the companies that manufacture chips and tools for that process are having a hard time getting chips.

Which pushes us backward in the digitization of everything which techno-optimists have long heralded as a utopia but which many of us with a certain number of decades under our belts have looked and thought "yick." It's not that I don't realize that we derive a ton of benefits from these little computers we carry around in our pockets and those all around us, it's just that we always seem to be rushing headlong towards jettisoning everything uncritically while being pushed by the market and the forces of generalized acceleration into cycles of upgrades and replacements that don't seem to correlate with increased happiness.

For the moment, the process must forcibly slow down and people will have to solve problems differently and tend to their existing objects. It will probably be good for all of us, if not for the centralization of all commerce in fewer and ever larger companies. 

Insulation

As I may have shared in the past, I have a very deliberate rhythm to my mornings through which I very intentionally try to shut out the concerns of the day. In particular, I don't look at stock futures, texts or email till 8:30, if I can help it at all.

At times this is a very difficult discipline. Right now, with the sirens of escalation in Ukraine, inflation fears, shortages, blah blah blah, it's very easy to get caught up in the anxieties of the moment. To make matters worse, our neighbor's dog Opie has been yapping and now the landscapers out at the park in the lake are going full bore with their riding mowers.

But I do what I can. Today I finally made it through the annual letter of Kanbrick, a "mini-Berkshire Hathaway" founded by a woman who was Warren Buffett's assistant for some time that aims act as a Berkshire for middle-market US companies. Her letter is nowhere near as good as Buffett's -- probably because she doesn't have a Carol Loomis to help her with it -- but I like what Kanbrick is trying to do in general, so I'll try to keep an eye on the company.

Anyhow, by now the day is upon me.