Warm glow from transactions

I spent a good deal of yesterday going through a download of last year's credit card transactions categorizing them, firstly so as to declare charitable and political donations (which we have gotten up to a reasonable 10% of income by fighting through and against deep-seated if ill-founded fears of reversal and penury) but also to get organized for tax season.

As I pawed through last year's transactions, certain of them brought back good memories. Above all, it was the ones I wasn't present for: Mary's trip to Alaska. Each time I saw one of those charges I got a warm feeling within, glad that she's able to get out and enjoy the world.

There were also good memories from a lot of trips I participated in, France, Spain, Alaska, the northeast, there were a lot of them. I could stand to travel less in 2024. Then again, I could stand to travel some. We'll see how it flows. Mostly I need to travel around NC to keep Trump and Robinson out of office. Job one.

Most superb of news

This morning I got confirmation that our next door neighbor Margot had gotten into medical school, which is fantastic. Both Margot and her sister Natalie are absolutely wonderful young people, but Margot had the mild misfortune of being slightly less of a rocket scientist on paper that her younger sister, graduating from Denison rather than Harvard, having to build a resume to get into med school instead of joining McKinsey straight out of college, etc. Margot has been around the neighborhood more the last couple of years, taking care of their house and dog while her parents spent a couple of years in Cincinnati on a career move they ultimately didn't embrace, so we've gotten to know her a little better. Fantastic news to put a cap on the year.

The whole ahnchilada

It is rather interesting that Mary and her siblings say "ahnchilada" like my mom does, like Mary Lee must have, like I used to before I studied Spanish, and like I probably still do if I'm tired and unattentive. This almost certainly derives from the fact that our moms had a glancing familiarity with French when Mexican cuisine first came to America and just figured that Spanish and French had similar pronunciation, or that they just kind of mapped French sounds onto Spanish words because each were "foreign". Entirely innocently, trying to pronounce new words as best they could. My generation carries it forward.

Christmas Eve in NC

Our first hosting of Christmas in NC for the Berridge clan gathers steam. Yesterday Rob and I played doubles with Z and Patrick, then I made a vegetarian enchilada pie for everyone before dashing to RDU to pick up Kevin. Today we will try to balance late young adult wakeups with Mary's very sensible desire for a walk in the woods at Brumley and the long time it takes to cook this enormous pork roast.

It appears I have neglected to tell the tale of the pork roast so let me lay it out here for posterity. In accord with her ongoing effort to have us eat less meat and also Rob's near vegan "flexetarianism" (he tries not to eat meat or cheese but will stoop to anything -- including eating meat -- to make sure food is not thrown away) -- Mary and Natalie decided that they would be making vegan and vegetarian galettes, respectively, while I would be permitted to make a "small pork roast." Pork because it has a lower carbon footprint than beef or lamb.

Unfortunately, by the time they decided this it was too late to order something from the fancy hipster butcher out at Saxapahaw. They had all this beautiful things like bacon-wrapped porchetta that were expensive but just right. On Friday I ended up in Carrboro -- I'll spare you that story for today -- and stopped into Weaver Street to get Mary her favorite breakfast bread (walnut raisin). Master foodie Chad has long sworn by Cliff's meat market, so I went over there (not without moving my car to avoid the parking Nazis currently roaming the Carr Mill parking lot to generate big commissions). 

Upon consultation, the guys in Cliff's told me that for a group of eight diners, a six- or seven-pound bone-in loin roast was just right. It was also the only one they had in the case and I didn't have the heart to tell them to cut it down into two pale shadows of itself. So I came home with the largest hunk of meat I have ever purchased, a far cry from the "small roast" that was authorized by our queen of the kitchen. I hid it deep in the meat drawer and then sprung it on Mary when she was in a good mood.

Turns out, Kevin has to fly back to NYC on Xmas day to see some of his people so he will miss Christmas dinner, and he was going to be one of my main carnivore allies at the table. So I am cooking it today. 

Oh yeah, I neglected to mention that, Tuesday or Wednesday evening, we all received instruction from Sadie and Natalie that there would be family PowerPoint night on Xmas eve. There was light grumbling in some quarters, primarily amongst those for whom PowerPoint (or the Google analog) presents a technical challenge. That's not me, but I have neglected to get my shit organized thus far and am not 100% certain what I will be presenting on. I'll figure it out.

Rivers of wealth

For some years now I've been reading Nick Murray's Around the Year, a daily reader for financial advisors and planners, in the morning when I'm at home. From his newsletter I know that he's to the right of me politically and I don't agree with him on everything about practice goals, equity allocations, etc, but he's generally a thoughtful guy and has been around and thinking about the role of the advisor for a long time, so he remains absolutely a solid read. If someone else would come up with another daily reader for advisors, I'd probably check that out.

Here in late December, Murray ruminates on the nature of wealth and postulates that wealth is something that transcends generations and allows families that have it to do good. It's true that lots of families with wealth do focus on giving to causes they believe in and that in the best cases philanthropy becomes a driving force within the family. But few of them really trim their living standards to give a ton away. And philanthropy can also evolve into a greenwashing myth that validates peoples' lifestyles.

We quickly get back to the questions of what is the best way for society as a whole to allocate funding between the effecting of public vs. private goods and how to balance economic dynamism and the desire to provide for one's own with making sure that everyone can live a decent life. Europeans always tout the relative lack of extreme human privation in their countries, but that is balanced by the fact that they don't make much of anything new that the rest of the world wants much of. Luxury goods and a pharmaceutical here or there are the obvious exception. Plus tourism

By now I'm oversimplifying dramatically because my work bell is ringing pretty loud. This always happens. One of these days I'm going to have to stop skirting around the edges of problems and write a book.

Reading more deeply

In a somewhat duplicitous move, I've turned off receiving the paper Journal while Rob is in town, out of respect for his deeply honed and entirely heartfelt environmentalism. Rob prefers e-books to physical books for environmental reasons, for instance.

Since I still don't want to turn on my computer first thing in the morning, I find myself reading more of the Economist with breakfast and coffee and therefore just reading more of it. This is probably an information consumption regime I should seriously consider.

But there is the problem of Monica, who delivers my newspaper each morning (though I never see her, not even at the recent show at the Cradle raising money for research for a cure for Glioblastoma, which took her sister Sarah from us all too early). I addition to Sarah, Monica also lost her brother Joe a couple of years ago and her mother passed this summer. Meanwhile her brother Dexter, to judge from his recent performance at the Cradle, is not conquering his own demons quickly.

We'll see what happens with the physical paper in 2024.    

Doubles vs Singles

We were supposed to play doubles again this afternoon but Rob is having some pain in his forearm so Z and I may end up playing singles, as per usual. But that would leave Patrick out, so Z suggested doubles, which may yet happen.

I am inclined to prefer singles because it is freer for me, in my mind. I've written about this before. In singles it's more me against myself (and, admittedly, my opponent). If I fuck up I don't mess anyone else up. It's rather like managing my own portfolio and financial life vs. helping others. Maybe this is part of the problem. Throughout the work day I feel responsible to others so it's nice to have that removed during my leisure.

But I do need to look at doubles as a growth opportunity and roll with it. Nobody really cares much, though they kind of do. Mostly people are out there for yuks. That's what I have to keep in mind.

Some very good people moving on

Yesterday the news broke that former UNC star Eric Montross had passed away after a relatively brief struggle with cancer. I was stunned. I knew he was sick, but had no idea he was that close, but that is how it should be because even though I am good friends with some people who are close to him and his family, nobody wants their cancer journey to be broadcast even semi-publicly.

Though I didn't know him well, every time I had ever seen him, whether in person or in video, he was doing something positive, usually raising money for some kind of cancer-related cause, whether Be Loud! Sophie or something else having to do with UNC's Lineberger Center. I spent more time on Facebook yesterday to see people's tributes to him, the best of which was Orange County Sherriff Charles Blackwood who shared about how Montross would come by his office when the Sherriff was out and move stuff around on his desk to mess with him. Good fun. But maybe the most moving was a picture of Montross near the bench with his arm around Coach Smith. It is hard sometimes to believe that Coach Smith has not been coach for over a quarter century and left us altogether about a decade ago. We are fortunate to have one of his players at the helm of the program now acting as lodestar.

Last week Liz Magill was defenestrated from her role as President of Penn after her admittedly suboptimal performance in Congress answering questions from Elyse Stefanik in too lawyerly a way. Liz was the first to pay for a few reasons: because her facial expressions were impolitic when she responded to questions posed specifically to elicit the answer she gave (answers very much on the advice of counsel); because Penn is dominated by Wharton and thus money; because photographers caught her at some very bad moments, and because she is blonde and blue-eyed and a Hillary Clinton proxy, easily sacrificeable. Liz was in my year in Branford College and was politically active from a young age and went out with (if memory serves correctly, and it may not) a guy named Bill from Arkansas. They were both a little too clean-scrubbed and positive for me, as my college years were kind of a dark time, so I didn't get to know her well. But I ran into her again in Princeton somewhere around 2004-2005 when she was doing a sabbatical from UVA at the Woodrow Wilson Center and we had lunch, then she brought her kids to our house for a play date. She is a lovely and excellent person and will go on to do further good things in the world. Admittedly, her ability to do great things at scale will be temporarily constrained by having fallen into the maw of the outrage machine, but such is life. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was acting on advice of counsel.

The joys of marriage

As has been my habit since the beginning of the pandemic, I gave myself a buzz this afternoon. I had been feeling a little fuzzy. Since it's chilly and will be even more so later this week, I decided that the "3" setting on my clippers was short enough for the back and sides, then finished up with a little free range, self-expressive scissor work on the top.

Towards the end of this period of manual snipping, I noticed that this cow-licky spot on the back of my head -- one that professionals have called out as a challenge -- looked a little bushy and figured I'd give it one more go with the clippers to see if I could bring it down a little. So I grabbed them, turned them on, and ran them over the area in question, only to see an implausibly large clump of hair drift downwards towards the bathroom floor. I gasped then looked at the clippers. I gasped again. There was no 3 attachment on them at all. No indeed. I had in fact run them bare backed over the back right of my head. When I looked in the mirror at the area, it looks somewhat like the head of someone in the early stages of recovering from chemo.

This, my friends, is where I am happy to be married, and happy that our large fundraiser is in the rearview, as indeed is pretty much all business development-related activity for fiscal 2023. I've got plenty of work to do in the next couple of weeks, but no sales. Yes, it is possible that my mom may notice and be vaguely scandalized at Christmas, but I doubt it. The light will be low and hair grows fast. Onwards.

Accepting dental situation

A couple of weeks ago I shared the story of the gums around my front lower incisors not so felicitous encounter with a plastic toothpick hidden inside a catered slider. Since then things have been getting slowly if steadily better. My bite has gone from feeling out of whack to back to normal. The pain has subsided except for in certain situations, for example when biting into crusty bread. So I had been largely avoiding those.

Then I had an appointment for a cleaning at the dentist. My hygienist, an excellent woman, took a closer look at the situation, got my read on it ("93% better"), shot an xray, looked closely around the tooth, then gently informed me of her opinion. "If I were you, given your amount of bone loss (from periodontitis), I'd be very careful biting into things that require you to tear, like apples or pizza crust." Her tone of voice implied that she was giving me general advice, not strictly limited to this specific tooth and its period of convalescence.

Which leaves me in the camp of more knife and forking, smaller bites, generally more circumspection, lest I fall into the permanent soft diet camp or even more expensive and tenuous dental interventions. Rage, rage against the dying of the light is not really on the menu here. I just have to make peace with the situation and roll with it. 

Fortunately, now it is lunchtime and I snapped up an intriguing new bowl from Trader Joe's, the chicken schwarma bowl. Let's see how this one goes.

Post game wrap up and transition

It's now Friday and Mary and I are largely recovered from hosting what turned out to be 113 people in our home Tuesday to raise money for Josh. We raised good money, though I feel like touting the exact figure -- if I even had it -- goes against norms.

Of course that night we were completely toast but we also went to sleep in a house that was 95% clean because that's just kind of the worker bees we are. On Wednesday I worked from home. Mary seemed to spend a good part of the day carefully scrutinizing the sun as it played across the wood floor at different angles. When she espied a stain of some sort, she pounced and broke out some combination of broom, wet Swiffer and vacuum cleaner and remediated the issue.

Partially it was because we were having one of our patented night after hoover up the leftovers get together. It was hard to rustle people up so close to the holidays but we eventually fed a few people and poured a little wine down the throat of a neighbor. 

But Mary was also, in typical but also necessary fashion, on to the next. Namely, Christmas, which kicks off this afternoon when Graham comes home. Then Mary's brother Rob arrives for two weeks on Sunday, then Natalie on Thursday, Beth, Sadie, and their dog Catfish on Saturday (they have an AirBnb to keep the dog away from our cats). 

It will be our first Christmas hosting, the first since both Mary Lee and George Jr left us, so it will be new territory.

Lost Girls, the wrap

I was all keyed up to write about something that someone had told me -- that it is illegal to ship books in France (to protect book stores from Amazon) -- but it turns out that what I was told is not true. The French did, however, recently institute a minimum 3 Euro shipping charge on orders of less than 35 Euros to protect booksellers. Which doesn't appear to have been particularly effective at protecting them outside of major cities, if Google Maps is to be believed.

So let me turn instead to Bob Kolker's Lost Girls, which I finished recently. It's a very solid book about a bunch of murders I had never heard of, the Gilgo Beach murders in which four clearly connected murders of prostitutes were unearthed after the disappearance and death, possibly directly connected but probably just etiologically twinned, of a fifth, Shannan Gilbert. Indeed, I just Googled the Gilgo Beach murders and found out that someone was recently arrested for them this summer.

Kolker does deep investigative work into the life arcs of all the murdered women as well as Shannan Gilbert and then tracks the course of the investigation while getting to know the people in the Long Island community near where they were found, as well as the online community of true crime gawkers and speculators who got sucked into the drama of it all. Which makes for a lot of dramatis personae, a lot of mothers (but few present fathers), grandmothers, siblings, children, and pimps/drivers/boyfriends. It became a lot like a Russian novel in that there were an overwhelming number of names of people to keep track of, particularly when I was reading in short chunks when tired before bed which made me feel guilty because so much care had gone into the research and writing but as a reader I was somewhat failing to individuate.

In the end it was brought home beautifully and humanely, albeit tragically. I won't say more. I cried. There is much to think about in this book about an America seemingly very far from my own, but just around the corner and available via the internet and a phone call. 

Game day!

After months of build up and coordination, in eight short hours we'll have a hundred-odd people streaming into our home to support Josh Stein's candidacy for governor. Thankfully I've arranged the day so my work responsibilities are light after a 10 am team meeting.

From here on out it will be a rolling process of checking off things on a task list while discovering ever finer bits of tuning as I go. The first thing I discovered is that we are a little bit short on toilet paper though we likely have enough. Mary thought she had bought some and then we discovered, in classic fashion, that it was in fact paper towels she had bought. We've all been there.

Later people will start arriving, first helpers and staff, then campaign team, then guests. Enough of this writing stuff. Andale.

A year in carbon

The odometer on my car just went over 96,000 miles, which reminded me that we had flipped 90,000 back in January when Mary and I were out at Lake Mattamuskeet. Given that my car is by far the biggest mileage vehicle in the family, that's not too bad. Mary's Prius (whom we call Beatrice) pretty much just goes to the store these days. The Subaru (AKA the "Marubaru") largely sits there while Graham is in school unless I am quite intentional about getting her out for exercise.

Admittedly, I'm cheating a little here. I probably put 1,250 miles on rental cars in Europe this summer. And maybe 300 on rental or borrowed cars in Alaska in June.

Then there was the flying. Europe, Alaska (though I did pause and stay in Seattle for extra days so as not to fly West twice), 4x to New York for George Jr's funeral, David Dennis' shiva, my 35th college reunion, and just business. Actually, the proximate motive of the last trip was to meet the children of a client with terminal cancer while she is still alive so that I wouldn't be just some random dude who is a trustee on their trust when she leaves us, so it was a pre-funereal exercise. Even on the Europe trip, I will give us credit for not just flying for four days but instead extending the trip to two weeks and vacation to be sure we made use of the carbon burnt.

I've also done a pretty good job dialing back the red meat. I really am at just about once a week and fairly often it just crosses my path at some kind of business event, which is to say I'm not consciously ordering it. Honestly I'd rather have less of that random red meat and more burgers I order at Al's or the like but such is life.

All in all, not too shabby. But tell that to the planet. Reading a pretty daunting survey in the Economist of the current state of carbon capture and storage technology and how woefully inadequate it is to the scale of the planet's problems.

Acceleration

Right about now, after a more than adequately busy fall, the year feels as if it is accelerating quickly. The fundraiser is fast upon us and there are a few more things that need to get done by then, followed by Mary's family coming in for the holidays. Meanwhile client questions and wrinkles are popping up left and right. It is hard to keep it all stable and solid to hold down the middle.

Which is where the virtue of my routine comes in. (Even as I type this, I hear that the neighbor's landscaper has fired up his leafblower, which is my signal to get it in gear and get to the office).

Staying on the topic, however, of acceleration, I should note that the Bible too accelerates a little as my reading of the New Testament progresses. I am now reading First Romans, Paul's first letter. We've had the four gospels and then Acts, in which the early church, primarily Paul, travels about spreading the Word amongst Jews but more notably Gentiles. In First Romans, Paul (it appears that the authorship here is not questioned) starts to abstract Christianity up into more of a general proposition, presumably based on thinking occasioned by a lot of wrangling and debating with others during his travels. He goes back to the Old Testament for precedents, but really he's at the beginnings of building a systematic theology on the basis of a lot of tales and stories. Moving from haggadah to halakhah, but in a more universalizing way. 

The moment of maximum pressure

Listening to the Acquired podcast about the history of Visa now, fascinating story both in its unfolding and its telling. But for a dork like me, the most compelling moment was the 1968 processing crisis for Visa's predecessor entity BankAmericard that brought all the issuing banks of the time together and ultimately gave rise to Visa. Back then, authentication of charges were done manually. If you were trying to charge something that was above the "floor limit" for the card, often $50, the salesperson would have to call the store's bank to check the customer's remaining credit limit. Then the store's bank would call the purchaser's bank and speak to a person there. It could take minutes. Obviously this constrained growth.

In 1968 all the banks that were using BankAmericard -- then a licensed product of Bank of America -- got together to talk through approaches in some boring place, maybe Columbus, Ohio. The solution that emerged (I'll spare you the details -- listen to the podcast) became Visa.

What's most intriguing here is that all this coincided precisely with the "paperwork crisis" on Wall Street which closed markets for months at a time and gave rise to an analog to Visa in the capital markets -- the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation -- much less a household name but similarly important in terms of providing a shared standard for data transmission and payment exchange for securities trades. Nb. and fun fact the DTCC was helmed by the father of a Larchmont neighbor of Mary's and the father of a friend of the Berridge family.   

It seems likely not entirely coincidental that all this came to a head in 1968, not just the great year of social upheaval in the streets of Chicago, Paris, and also the Mexico City Olympics but also the year the first cohort of Boomers turned 22 and headed out into the working world. There was just too much growth, too much commerce. It was also the year Intel spun out of Fairchild Semiconductor as the world began to spin up ever more computing power, which would be key to facilitating the liberation of commerce from the shackles of paper, with all its attendant goods and ills.

Dialing it in

Enjoyed the Gliobastoma show at the Cradle last night, for the most part. It was great to get out and see people and to watch some of my contemporaries revisit their respective youthful selves onstage. What Peggy Wants were great as usual, Ensslin remains the master performer, though he was a little more understated than recent incarnations and could, honestly, have used a little makeup. No matter, we cannot ask him to live out all of our dreams of disinhibition and full flight for us all the time.

The Popes were solid, the Bad Checks rocked hard and super tight. Snatches of Pink unfortunately fell victim to the temptation to live out years away from maximum amplification by turning their amps up to 14. Too much.

Then came Dexter. He has lost a lot, admittedly, in recent years. Not just Sara, but also quite close in time to her passing his brother Joe (of the band UV Prom, I think) died. Then sometime this year his mom did. His sister Monica fought her own battle with cancer, seemly doing OK now. She delivers my paper every day and it's nice to know it's her passing by, though I never see her.

But Dexter just came out on stage last night and pretty much winged it. It didn't seem like he'd been practicing much at all, or had a set list worked out or anything. Indeed, it might have been hard for him to practice, because not long ago Benson had been looking around on Facebook for a guitar for Dexter. Let's be clear here. Dexter is a genius, a genuine talent who has done amazing things in his life and has been consistent throughout all of it. I'll never forget the time he showed up in European History class and did a oral report on Denmark, and specifically a cultural trend that was huge in Denmark at the time: Rockabilly.

But just being a genius doesn't absolve you of doing the work. If you wants my time and attention, show up. Dexter last night was a few inches from Jack Whitebread (may he rest in peace) with a case of beer onstage at BeLoud! a few years back. You have to respect your audience and its time.

Blissful quiet

Tennis was cancelled because of rain this morning and Mary was out at the Extraordinary Ventures holiday sale hawking her book, so I came home to a blissfully peaceful home. I almost didn't know that to do with myself. In the end, of course, I read my book,.in which I've gotten a little bogged down. 

There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be done around the house and we have a flood of people coming in in a mere ten days. I suppose I'd really better go and do some of it now that Mary's gotten home. I always feel better having done so, even if the doing of it is drudgerous.

My tooth seems to be improving with time, though it's still a little off. I keep thinking back to the example of Mary Lee's best friend from college, who had lost her sense of taste some years before I last saw her and kept a sense of optimism about her. The worst case scenario is I loose the tooth and either get it replaced or learn to work around it.

The First Deadly Sin

Really since the beginning of the pandemic I haven't getting out much and meeting and seeing new people, something I used to do in the early phases of my practice and, though it's very hard to draw a straight line between all this "networking" and my practice, certainly I met a lot of people and learned an awful lot about a lot of things, including the strengths of the local universities, economic development, and entrepreneurship. All in all it's been a positive thing.

So when Nathan mentioned that he was going to some thing at Duke about technology transfer (from academia to private sector), I saw no good reason not to go. With the exception of other work I could be doing. In the end, I went.

Being a little rusty and off the circuit, I didn't know that many people and my ability to bullshit about science, which I had honed a little during my years when our office was at the NC Biotech Center, had declined precipitously. Also, I just didn't care much. So, after chatting for a while with my former neighbor Mary Beth (lovely to see her) and catching up on one another's kids, I made my way over to the food table. It's not that I was that hungry, mind you, it's just that the pull of free food honed over many years in a doctoral program in the humanities exerted and irresistible pull on me.

I had seen people wandering around the floor with these little slider-looking thingies and when I approached the table I saw that they contained brisket, so I put a couple of those on a plate and some funky fall-themed ravioli. I was making my way around the table to where the salads were (I promise I was) and I decided to take an investigatory bite of one of the sliders to assess its merits. But when I bit down, there was sharp and piercing pain in one of my front incisors.

Upon closer inspection, there was a sturdy plastic toothpick (verily, the work of Lucifer himself) which my jaws, which are after all some of the body's strongest muscles ounce for ounce, had driven into the area around my lower incisors, already a tad precarious. Just then I saw Mary Beth's husband Dennis standing there and had to go say hello, though my teeth were writhing in pain and it kind of felt like I had dislodged one. He and I caught up while in my mind I'm standing there going what the fuck is up with my mouth. I made my way to the bathroom as quickly as I could. There was nothing visibly amiss but man, was there pain. And my bite was different.

After a dinner of cheese grits and the very last of the Thanksgiving stuffing this morning my mouth is decidedly less bad but not altogether good. I will stick with soft food for the day. Clearly the Lord hat smited me for my gluttony, and I do sincerely repent. It makes me want to revisit Wittgenstein's reflections on the topic of toothache which I think made it all the way into the Philosophical Investigations though they may have been relegated to the notebooks which became Culture and Value or perhaps the lectures distilled into the Blue and Brown books. It should also, obviously, temper the rapacity with which I attack buffet spreads in the future.

Routines nearing 60

Over the weekend there was a story in the Journal about some guy who turned 60 and went about doing a bunch of novel things to mix things up out of a fear that he had become too boring. I am not quite 60, but it's true that I am now closer to 60 than I am even to 55 so it was worth pondering. 

Part of the guy's concern was that he was so set in his routines that he didn't even have any fresh stories to tell. On the one hand, I can see that. On the other, I'm not a freaking entertainer over here. My kids seem to love me. I do OK with my friends just by staying consistent in calling and showing up. My cats like it when I pet them.

At the same time I do know that keeping some diversity of experience rolling through the old noggin benefits me so it can only benefit my self-presentation, my "product," as it were. The rump shaker, the money maker. How to arrive at adequate, appropriate, and carbon-lite diversification of experience? Working on it.

Notes in passing

Moving books from upstairs to downstairs -- and from Natalie's overburdened IKEA Billy shelf -- to populate our new built in shelves downstairs. It's noteworthy that all of our "pocket paperbacks" are several decades old. They seem to neither print nor sell many of these in the places we shop. You have to wonder if these very small paperbacks used to be marketable because the median age was lower back in the 70s-80s. Now that the average age has trended up the small fonts and tight leading don't fit people's reading habit.

****

On the theme of just reading rather than worrying too much about what I'm specifically reading, I started reading a New Yorker profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian from a July issue. Turns out the guy basically fell into art by accident. It was just the first thing he found to sell and he made money at it so he kept going. Now he rules the art world from almost twenty galleries spread across continents. If there were any doubts that markets ruled high as well as middle and low culture, let them be summarily dispelled. Yet another reason to not live in New York or LA or San Francisco etc. in a place where people get entirely caught up in jockeying for cultural prestige. Chapel Hill is surely bad enough.

****

Should probably get Graham out to practice parallel parking. It's good just to get him behind the wheel and the Subaru needs exercise.

No so effective altruism

The concept of effective altruism as apparently espoused in and around Silicon Valley is, in my limited understanding, deeply and tragically flawed and indeed sums up much of the worst features of a system of remedying public goods through private means. At root, the core of effective altruism seems to be people out making as much money as they can to give it away to solve the world's problems. Sounds nice.

Except when you say "make as much money as possible" in a world in which seven companies control about 30% of the market cap of the S&P 500, or about $11.5 trillion, which to give a sense of scale is about 45% of US 2022 GDP, this creates real problems. Basically what it boils down to is a lot of techbros -- the same community lets not forget that also espouses the merits of micro-dosing LSD to improve productivity -- getting outsized sway over how to fund the achievement of public goods. With zero oversight. Who voted for these guys? Why should they determine what society's problems are that need to be addressed? These are some general lines of critique I've seen advanced against philanthropy in general, but it's much worse when it's techbros in charge because in general they spend so much time alone and not out in the world seeing people and their problems. I guess the same is true for all of us in a work from home and let Amazon deliver it world, but at least I am conscious of it as a huge gap. Maybe they are too but I'm not hearing it from them.

Also, the idea that AI is going to create a great deal of abundance that does away with human need is just hogwash. There's a basic human need to feel that you are producing, contributing, that you're part of the web of being. If AI is just figuring everything out for us and delivering AI-baked pizzas using AI-flown drones to our homes built by AI-robots so we can all play pickleball, people will feel like shit because they didn't do anything useful that day.

Lost Girls

At bedtime last night I reached around the filing cabinet temporarily (due to some closets Bobby and Julie's boy Thomas is building for us) in front of my the IKEA Billy bookshelf that houses my shelf of books that are not yet read but may get read in the next year or two. I couldn't see what I was grabbing but in my mind I was looking for the next Elizabeth George novel in the Inspector Lynley series.

Instead my hand alighted upon the 2013 Lost Girls by Robert Kolker, the story of the Gilgo Beach murders, a recent addition. So I started reading it. Really good. Thus far he is setting the stage by telling the backstories of the murder victims, each of whom thus far come from hardscrabble backgrounds from small towns and cities around the Northeast. All of them from broken homes, not a stable family situation in sight. Multigenerational broken homes, with worthless fathers drifting in and out for cameos and moms and grandmothers who themselves struggle to keep it together. So many sibblings that it's a blur of names, as impossible to keep track of who is who as people always say Russian novels are.

An America that is, by some miraculous stroke of infinite good luck, largely foreign to me. The state, in the form of schools, foster care systems, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, drifts around the margins of the narrative, sometimes disdained by the families out of pride, sometimes eagerly invoked.

I'll keep reading.  

BOGO with a twist

Interesting article today in the Journal about the evolution of "Buy One Get One free" or "BOGO" offers from places like Dominos, Starbucks, etc. It seems that the new thing is to link BOGO offers to clearing some other hurdle like signing up for a rewards program or coming back in to the store a second time so as to separate out the "price-insensitive" customers who are less likely to be influenced by a BOGO offer. This lets you collect more data about these customers Which makes a little bit of sense when you think about it for a second.

But then when you stop to think about it for more than a second, it is pretty counterintuitive. Why do you want to get all this data on your less affluent customers and exclude the more affluent ones? Contrast this with Costco's longtime strategy of locating stores in more affluent areas, which allows Costco to have a super-affluent client base, albeit a bargain-thirsty one.

Then again, what do I know?

The Spider Network

As a weekday bedtime book -- a slot into which I sometimes insert a narrative finance book out of an attempt at ongoing professionalism -- I've been reading The Spider Network by David Enrich, the finance editor of the New York Times. Detailing the story of the LIBOR-fixing scandals of that followed pretty hard on the heels of the financial crisis, it's a good not great book.

For starters lets focus on its strengths. First off, it exists. There are a couple of other books about the scandals, one by one of the traders involved in it, the other seemingly by someone at Bloomberg, but that's it. When it was all going down back in the early 2010s, the LIBOR scandals were a big deal. But the whole thing was so deep in the belly of the banks that it was hard for non-finance people to grasp how it impacted them. 

The book is appropriately clear on the extent to which Tom Hayes was scapegoated and had the book thrown at him because some banker had to be shown to pay not just for LIBOR but also for the earlier unattoned sins from the financial crisis proper, after which no major bank employee get sent to jail. A head needed to roll, and it ended up being Tom Hayes. The guy was guilty as shit, no question there, but so were a lot of other people and they all walked.

In general there is too much detail in this book. It could have clocked in closer to 300 pages and covered the topic, but for some reason Enrich kept wanting to hover over the same land, like a slow moving hurricane near Houston.

Most importantly, and most interestingly, the book doesn't really touch the question of how much the scandals actually costed the many people downstream from it: first and foremost mortgage-holder. If traders all across Wall Street and its global extensions were continually exerting pressure to drag LIBOR this way and that for the benefit of their own trades, it's highly likely that in the end the impact netted out to nothing. After all, they were continually taking both sides of the trades. Unfortunately this is an entirely unprovable and unfalsifiable hypothesis. But it's quite possible it never really mattered to your average mortgage-holder. But they were a bunch of crooks and more of them should have answered for it.

The Spider Network marks, sadly, the last of the tomes of popular finance writings that came to me from the shelves of George Berridge, Jr after he passed earlier this year. Maybe Rob has a few more, but I doubt it. I still have a number of such books, admittedly, from George Sr. But they are older and written in the more stilted idiom of the 60s-80s. But maybe it's time I dug into them

Power Failure

The day before yesterday I finished listening to William Cohan's Power Failure in the car. Clocking in at over 28 hours long (I'm kind of surprised I made it through), Cohan retells the story of GE, and particularly more recent GE, first first in ascendancy under Jack Welch, then in slow decline under Jeffrey Immelt and his successors. 

Under Welch, of course, GE was corporate America's golden child, the company that could do no wrong. Then Immelt came in and first some of the sheen came off, then the financial crisis hit and shook GE's finance-heavy business model, then Immelt just continued to plain old fuck shit up.

Right now there is a sense in the markets that the Magnificent 7 (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Facebook, Tesla and Amazon) can do no wrong and will continue to dominate the universe of into the foreseeable future. How quickly we forget how power shifts in markets and everything comes to an end. Before the financial crisis it was all about Wall Street, then they fell. In the 60s it was the Nifty Fifty. Walmart had its day in the sun, as did Exxon. Even Enron once looked invincible.

For Big Tech to maintain its dominance forever, its masters will have needed to perfect the art of management so as not to be derailed by hubris and the errors in judgment that inevitably trail behind that sense of inevitability that surrounds them now. If we need any indication of the corruptibility of Big Tech, just gaze for a moment on this picture of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, the woman for whom he left Mackenzie Scott. Say no more.

The Children of Dynmouth

Some years ago I picked up a copy of William Trevor's Selected Stories. There must have been a glowing review somewhere, and with good reason. Since then I have been slowly working my way through the book, often reading a story or two between other books and have fallen deeply in love with Trevor and his Vermeer-like character sketches.

As I've made my way towards the end of that volume I wondered if he could keep it up at novel length or if he was (like Chekhov) really best suited for the short story. So I got my hands on a copy of the 1976 The Children of Dynmouth, which somehow struck me as a good place to start.

My instinct was rewarded. It's a wonderful little book about a small British town, about secrets, interdependency, humans. About the role of the narrator.

It made me think how it would be wonderful to reach a course called something like "Some Novels" which would not start with a reading list but would have the students and professor bring ideas into the class, jointly agree upon a list, and then read the novels together. Maybe with temporal or geographic constraints on it like "Some Post-WWII European Novels" or "Some 20th Century Asian Novels." It would be a great exercise.  

The most important things

Sam Altman -- who was the CEO of OpenAI at the time before his recent unceremonial defenestration -- said this recently in an interview with the Wall Street Journal (10/24/23 print edition, online reads slightly different): "The two things that will matter most over the next decade or few decades to improving the human condition are abundant and inexpensive intelligence: the more powerful, the more general, the smarter the better."

I disagree. We aren't going to be able to smart our way out of our various current predicaments. Honestly there are plenty of intelligent people around and if smarts were the issue, we'd be just fine. 

For humanity to survive and thrive more of us need to be rowing in the same direction more consistently and acting in a manner that is aligned with what we say we want. Which means we need good leadership and also good listening all up and down society. We can't be sitting around waiting for the next Obama to come inspire us with stunning oratory. Though a few of them wouldn't hurt. Getting our shit together will not ultimately be an intellectual act but a matter of spirit, will and reshaping our notion of what a/the good life is.

A nearly perfect weekend

After a fairly exhausting trip to New York we had a pretty perfect weekend here at the house. I went to my meeting first thing Saturday morning but otherwise didn't leave the house. Instead, Mary and I worked around the house getting ready for this morning's expected arrival of Bobby and Julie's boy Thomas to put in these long-delayed closets upstairs. We moved a bunch of stuff around and also got rid of some. Could have been more, but some. Then I got up on the roof and got the season's first tranche of leaves down.

Through all of this, we argued not a whit.

Graham was almost stranded in Charlottesville when his ride lost his keys but they figured it out. A locksmith showed up and got him a new fob then and there. Didn't know that could be done.

Finally booked my ticket for Colorado in January.

Gotta go get ready for the day.

ps. Later in the day I learned that I had missed Amy's Barbie movie party out at the Farmhouse. Bummer. 

Rolled up

My newspaper did not arrive at the top of my driveway this morning. I hope that Monica, who delivers it, is doing OK. She has had a hard few last years, wrestling with cancer herself after losing a sister to it and a brother to either it or something else. To top it off, her mom passed away recently, having lived a pretty full life.

On Friday I had lunch with Alberto, an old friend from Yale. He had been a Poli Sci grad student there but deigned to hang out and party with some of us younger folx. He hails from Guatemala but has had a pretty global life and splits time now between Rome and Brooklyn. We were talking about the state of the world and politics and US vs Europe in terms of the fabric of life, pluses and minuses. The things one talks about. I broached my thesis that one of the underdiscussed and perhaps underappreciated factors in the emptying of the countryside and the rise of populism everywhere has been the rise of corporatism in almost everything and the way that has made it so difficult to be a small businessperson in the country.

Far from disagreeing, Alberto said that he thought it wasn't a phenomenon unique to the country but was equally true of the city. That the city was increasingly hollowed out and wiped clean of businesses run by small proprietors in favor of chains.

I can totally see this, and how sad it is to see the Jane Jacobs idyll of the urban neighborhood get scrubbed out. There is a simple capital maintenance aspect to it, which is illuminated by some recent dynamics on the main block of Franklin St here in Chapel Hill. The old Spanky's space got taken over by the chicken tenders and fries chain Raising Cane because the 1910s era building needed a lot of upfitting (probably to come up to code) and only a chain had deep enough pockets to undertake the work and have the patience for it to pay out. The building had been owned by the 411 Restaurant Group since the 70s and had likely been able to take advantage of some grandfathering of compliance (bringing bathrooms up to ADA standards, for instance). Meanwhile, down the block, Linda's struggles to raise enough money to do some upgrades and has started a GoFundMe to fill some of the gaps. So there is a regulatory component to this too. Higher compliance costs make it harder for small businesses to compete.

Five or six years back I had coffee in NYC with Katja, whom I had met in '95-96 when she came to Columbia on a Fulbright. A Kievan Jew, she want to college in Tartu, Estonia and then grad school in Moscow. When I was there for my dissertation in 97-98, we hung out, including a memorable excursion up the Moscow River to some island where Mary and I had to take separate boats because of the crush of people boarding and Katja took care of Mary while I waited with Kirill for the next boat. Katja eventually married a nice German guy, moved to Berlin, won a major prize for her first novel written in German and then moved to Tbilisi. At least until Putin invaded, it all seemed pretty glamorous to me. But when I told her I lived in my hometown and hung out with people i had known since I was a small child, she was incredibly jealous. And it's true, I'm incredibly fortunate to live in a place where it's still possible to have these kinds of relationships. Even though the inexorable rise of chains (and the cost of real estate) even here in Chapel Hill makes them harder to imagine going forward.

A new view of "The City"

Just back from a quick 2-day hop to New York, which marked a milestone for me. For the first time ever, my trip did not see me step foot once in Manhattan, above ground at least, because on Thursday I did have to change from the N to the 4 at Lexington Ave. I stayed in Queens at Beth's house and visited exclusively with clients, prospects and friends in Brooklyn. I even spent a good chunk of the afternoon at a branch of our co-working space on Park Slope.

The gentrified parts of Brooklyn, of course, feel very much like the Manhattan of my youth, if in fact a shiner, better appointed version thereof. A couple of clients as well as my co-working space were right near the intersection of Flatbush and Bergen where Hilary and Mattie lived back in '86. The place is literally unrecognizable, the Barclay's Center having arrived like a meteor in the heart of the neighborhood. 

Yesterday after a lunch in what I think was Fort Greene I took the G train from Brooklyn to Queens without even bothering to pass through Manhattan underground. That was novel and kind of liberating.

Walking down Atlantic Avenue I passed the first ever Removery I've seen, a business dedicated to the removal of tattoos. Not surprisingly it is a chain. There are a number of them already in NC, maybe 150 of them nationwide. I was surprised to learn that Removery features partnerships with tattoo artists, offering to remove their tattoos for free. I can't quite figure out if that's because people clients come to tattoo artists feeling remorseful or because they want to remove old ink so they can put something new on their body. Whatever. Removery has, I think, a lot of potential. I wouldn't be surprised to see an IPO somewhere in there, because it does not yet seem to be a franchising opportunity. One path or the other, if not both, will make sense as it expands.

Dust

Late in the day yesterday I got an email from Frank in Princeton saying that the wife of someone we knew had passed away after a long struggle with early onset Alzheimer's. She may have been 5-7 years older than me, but not much more than that. I remember running into her in the thrift store down the alley off Nassau not far from where we lived. I think she was a little embarrassed to be seen there but I sure wasn't. I have a jacket in my closet right now from that thrift store -- the jacket I wore pretty much every other day the first quarter of 2008 when I was working at Goldman Sachs as the financial crisis was raining down upon us. I also got one of my absolute favorite garments of all time there, a super-soft lightweight flannel that passed as a work shirt and that I also sported to 85 Broad that winter, feeling a little mischievous as I did so (which should give you some idea of how lame WASPs are).

But I digress. She died. I guess I should say her name, Joyce, married to Alex, so that if I see this post in a decade or so I'll remember who I was talking about.

I commented to Mary that it was perhaps a blessing, and Mary said no it wasn't and she hates it when people say that. But Mary has never watched a family member have Alzheimer's or dementia for a long time. All of her family have been entirely with us until they passed, which has been truly a blessing.

Rare animation

I got a text yesterday evening from one of the candidates in today's municipal election asking about a neighbor of mine. It seems the candidate's daughter -- a fifth grader -- had been verbally assaulted in class by the son of my neighbor -- apparently a fervent supporter of the opposing candidate. So her daughter came home in tears. I gave the candidate my neighbor's email but not her cell phone.

It will be good when this election is over. Things are a little crazy out there. I certainly hope that the candidates I'm supporting win but honestly Putin is not going to drop a nuclear bomb if the election goes the other way. And China will not move on Taiwan.

Big Man

I met the founder of one of the big dotcom era services -- whom we shall call "L" -- at a networking thing, where he was "pitching his new deal," as they say. I had heard L might have an interest in a technology a friend has, so I went to thumbnail it to him and get his card.

I described it: "You know, I invented that" L says to me.
Me: "Yeah yeah, but he's got a fresh wrinkle, he'll tell you more about it."

So I get L's card and hang out there listening to him talk. Nice guy. Good looking. Younger than you would think. Near mullet. Big lapels.

And then he goes, in the context of something else: "I know the 3 richest people in China and the richest Chinese person in America." Which is odd, that he should say that.. We know the guy's rich. Why the need to brag and compete with people clearly less rich than him. Maybe he's saying he's got access and could help with "deals," dunno. Or maybe to be that successful you've got to just want to compete and demonstrate all the time.

Or maybe we all posture and name drop a little to bolster ourselves, and it just comes out more strikingly when the names are big. For instance, me telling this story here. I know L

*BTW -- this was an old post from 2007 that I had unpublished for some reason, judging by the old comments. This was Sean Parker of Napster, for those of you with memories going that far back.

A random grahamism

Something Graham thought when he was a child: men die younger because they get grey hair and women don't.

BTW, this was sitting around as a draft for years. I'm glad I kept it and came back to review it. One of the original premises of the blog was to keep track of funny things the kids did and said at some point in time so we could come back to them in the future.

Come to think of it, here's one from this week. Graham voted in Chapel Hill's municipal elections on Tuesday. I am pretty sure he had the good sense to vote for Jess Anderson and a smattering of the candidates for Town Council who aren't part of Adam Searing's block, though I stop short of asking him directly because after all it is America and he deserves the sanctity of the voting booth.

Graham did say that Adam Searing was at the polling place when he went there on Tuesday and that he said hello and told Adam he had been unable to attend an information session Adam and cronies had done near our house because of a very bad sore throat. Bravo.

Roadside Library

Back in 2013 I drove north in August to New York without the family. I honestly can't remember why that was the case. Northwest of Clarksville, VA I passed a charming little library in what looks to have once been an old country store. The Wylliesburg Public Library. Some of you may remember reading about it here. On the way back from where I was west of Richmond yesterday I decided to blow off the 95/85 corridor once more and realized I'd be going past there again, so I decided to stop and investigate.

The library was closed when I got there. It is usually open M, W, F 9-5 and Saturday 9-12. If I had to bet I would wager that books on the LGBTQ experience are dramatically underrepresented, but I really don't care. I really like the fact that this library exists and that there's a place for rural folks and kids to come and borrow books. If I could figure out how I would donate some money.

From the mean streets of Clark Hills

Last night, for the second year in a row, instead of waiting with baited breath in our respective homes for hordes trick or treaters we knew would not come, we all gathered in the Sherman-Jollis driveway next door for an outdoor fire, chili, snacks and baked goods. I made a cornbread in a big old cast iron pan, which has become surprisingly easy now that I've done it a few times.

At its peak last night there were about fourteen of us, almost all empty nesters plus Dylan and Christine, the younger couple across the street who either haven't gotten around to having kids or for some reason decided not to. For all of our sakes over the long run, I hope they change their mind. Over the short run too, it's nice to see kids around.

At a federal and state level, it would be better to see more kids, because they'll be growing up and paying into Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes as we age and need benefits. The local school system, of course, is all too happy for us to stick around paying high property taxes but not sending kids to school, which costs money.

But why am I going off on money all the time. Last night we saw all of one trick or treater. One. All night. Yes it is hilly and yes the lots are large, so kids theoretically need to work hard to get any candy. But in fact that one kid could have just taken our bowls of candy, dumped it in his plastic pumpkin and called it a night. One trick or treater is a new all time low.

But we had a great time sitting around the fire, telling stories about old neighbors, their pets, storms of yore, growing up. The last five of us finally went home around 10:30. 

Post prandial musings

With good reason, I make a concerted effort to blog first thing in the morning. For one thing, that's when my brain is relatively fresh and ambitious so the early start allows me to share some of the very best stuff I can. By the time I'm at my desk I am off to the races, really a slave to the rhythms of my calendar, phone, task list, inbox and the markets, more or less in that order. The best days are full ones run off the task list and calendar and barely acknowledge the markets.

Here's what my set up looks like now. The painting in middle is by CHHS's own Joel Bergquist, the sketch to the right of it in this picture is by some UNC grad student. To the far right is a plaque presented to my grandfather in 1958 celebrating 22 years (what a random number!) of partnering with the long-defunct US Royal Tires. On the left are my Yale and Columbia diplomas. They look a little pretentious but they gotta hang somewhere and if I were a doctor or a lawyer you know I'd have them shits up there.

This is my fifth office in the last seven years. The building I'm in is swankier than my last one (where I had been in 3 places over four and a half years or so). It really doesn't matter where I am, so long as I have a door I can shut when I'm on the phone and an external monitor. It's all good. Though I must say that bringing a comfy arm chair in here where I could read peacefully without being subject to the lame pop music piped into the common area of our Industrious co-working space would add value. I should pop into the Re Store on the Boulevard and see what I can wrangle for cheap.

The Names

As I had mentioned somewhere a few weeks back, I had taken up Don Delillo's 1982 The Names a month or two back for a rereading. I had read it sometime in the early aughts, clearly before the inception of the blog because there's no review of it here. It had made a strong impression, primarily the tension between the seeming meaningless and interchangeability of the globetrotting group that form's the core of the protagonist's social set in Athens and the raw elementality of the murder cult that becomes his fixation. Given that I must have been reading this around 2002-2003, when I was first getting on airplanes a lot to earn money myself, I must have identified with the first part of the guy's condition, though the places I was traveling (St Louis, Charlotte, etc) were much less adventurous than his (Karachi, Amman...).

But somehow I totally missed that there was also a plot back in Athens, that he was employed by the subcontractor to the CIA and there was another spy that tried to kill him but instead shot somebody else. It's not hard to miss this thread, given the many pages of dialog in clubs and bars where the quotes are never attributed back to speakers, a high modernist trick (think Bely, Woolf, Doblin, Dos Passos, Gaddis probably Joyce too though I never read any of his fat ones). I'm sure I also did it because I was reading a few pages at a time before passing out at night because I was still in the early stages of figuring out how to earn a living in the private sector and was also a parent of a toddler so I was exhausted at the end of each day. 

The novel also features an awesome scene of seduction mixed in where the protagonist (whose name we barely learn by the end of the book) completely talks this married woman into going out in the street and having sex with him. Rare elementality.

I rarely go back and re-read books. There's always so much to read that I haven't read before. But it is good to go back and revisit ones that make a major impression on you at a particular time. Often it's hard to recapture the magic. But sometimes you can track down hints of what it was.

BTW, the Wikipedia summary of The Names is just awful and bears the hallmarks of having been written by a college freshperson. This blog post, at least, is written at the level of a junior or senior.

The bustle of falling leaves

It's easy to forget the way things accelerate as the weather gets cooler and the colors change. It's the perfect time to be outside and everybody wants to get together, resulting in a need for choices.

Yesterday I hosted a 40th reunion of our state championship soccer team out in the park behind my house. It was pretty well attended, maybe 22 people there including a few spouses and girlfriends. I also tried to invite people from surrounding years but only a few people showed up, which was a shame.

In any case, operating under the theory that you never know you have enough food unless you have too much, I ordered seven large pizzas. I actually meant to order eight but accidentally ordered only one of one of the variants because I was rushing to get everything set up. Which turned out to be a blessing, because when the dust cleared at the end of the event, there were four and a half pizzas left. I gave one to Warren, who was headed back to Raleigh, because I was a little embarrassed, was concerned that Mary might upbraid me for my profligacy and also wasn't sure I could fit that much in the fridge.

So tonight I have invited over a bunch more people to help us eat the leftover pizza. Which means we have to clean the house. Which is pressure we really don't need because Mary has to host the local Autism Society fall event in the park and our house is kind of in disarray because we are getting ready to have people come in to build us some bookshelves in the rec room and closets in the upstairs study, all in preparation for our December 12 fundraiser for Josh.

All this on top of having dinner out on the lake with Ken and Ellen on Friday night and then going to a fundraiser at Daniel and Andrea's last night for the Transplanting Traditions Community Farm. All of which meant that I for sure did not make it to any of the CHHS '83 40th reunion events, though I had kind of intended to.

I had better go downstairs and help Mary clean up.

Turning my focus

As I survey the various claimants to my attention, beyond the non-negotiables (reading, exercise, seeing people, sleeping, watching at least a little TV to let the brain shut off) there's a tension right now between language study on Duolingo and guitar playing. 

Duolingo is really easy to access and provides clear feedback in terms not just of points and rankings within these admittedly stupid, evanescent and entirely manufactured weekly leagues. It rewards consistency and effort in a clear and quantitative way and I make progress in these languages. It's also supposed to have a long-term cognitive benefit, at least according to one article I read. It is easily done while lying back on a couch -- though some exercises are better done leaning forward with two feat on the floor, the better to focus.

Playing guitar is, by contrast, much more amorphous. I have been stalled around the same chord progressions and finger-picking patterns for a long time. There are a million gurus on YouTube who claim to have a good system for people like me to make progress, but I hesitate to pull the trigger on them. In the end I do not practice consistently, play a few minutes a day, make no progress. But the payoffs to getting better seem so immense. To play and sing beautifully is breathtaking. 

The other hindrance is, obviously, the need to put myself out there and perform for others publicly and thereby expose myself to both criticism and acclaim. I guess I do it in some contexts, but performing music seems to be a particularly vulnerable act. Or, perhaps, solo acoustic performance is unique in this regard, distinct from being in a band where one can hide behind amps and bluster. To an extent.

Things I'm watching and reading

A few weeks ago I was delighted to hear that Sex Education was back on Netflix for its fourth season. I thought I had watched all of them, but I hadn't. I am now five episodes in and -- having read that the show's creators intend this be the last of them -- I'm husbanding and titrating them. It's just so good. As always, so much of the show is utterly implausible and has to happen at the artificially accelerated rate that lets shows and movies jam through things in short time periods, but I can suspend my disbelief and live with that because the show makes such an effort to develop multi-faceted characters. Maybe there are more shows like this and I just don't let them in, but I do try to watch a bunch of shows and don't find many this good. I will be sad when it ends.

For my top of the morning reading I continue to work my way through the Bible. After having skipped a bunch of the Old Testament, so much of which was just unbearable in its repetition, I have now finished all the Gospels. While acknowledging that the Book of John shows more leg than the other Gospels, I will say (as I'm pretty sure I've said before) that I am just not feeling it. I think maybe growing up going to church just makes it too difficult to engage with Christianity in a way not mediated by layers of sedimented aversion. I think maybe it's time to return to Abraham Joshua Heschel. I sent Natalie a copy of The Sabbath a few weeks back, she should have it by now. I'm eager to get her take on it.

In the car I'm listening on weekdays to James Clear's Atomic Habits, which has some good stuff but nothing as better than the one quote I heard at a conference in February: "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." That is good. I scrawled that on a post it note and stuck it on my wall. On weekends I'm making my way towards the end of Deepti Kapoor's The Age of Vice, which probably merits a post of its own.

Back to the notion of systems, though. One of the initial premises of this blog was that I'd write no more than fifteen minutes a day and I've done that now. See ya. 

 

Problem solving weekend

This weekend was a little different than most. Graham was back for fall break, there was the doubles round robin, the mayoral candidates rolled out their bandwagons in the park behind our house... Amidst all of this I applied myself to some rare problem-solving around the house. I fixed the TV's bandwidth issues in the rec room, made some progress going through stuff in my study upstairs (though not enough, to be sure), moved a chair from our bedroom to Graham's room and took the one in his room back out onto the deck, thereby finally declaring the pandemic to be over from a seating perspective and so on. Some movement is better than none.

Saturday lunch took me to Durham for what was supposed to be an alumni football game viewing organized by my friend Steve. It turned out to have been cancelled, so I had pernil with rice, beans and collards at Boricua Soul. Highly recommended. I was astonished to see just how many people were out at the sports bar Tobacco Road for lunch. I think I don't appreciate what hard-core abstemious WASPs we are. The idea of going out to lunch to some random sports bar without a specific event to justify it is just inconceivable to me. 

In general, Durham was hopping.

Beneath the bridge by the ballpark there was a truck serving meals to the homeless. There were many people there.

Saturday night we were supposed to go see the new Scorsese film at the Chelsea, then I discovered it was 3 and a half hours long. Graham was a sport and let us change our plans. Instead we watched Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. With movies like that grossing north of half a billion dollars it's easy to see how the writer community would have concerns about LLMs eating their lunch. The proverbial monkey with a typewriter could have thrown together that piece of nonsense.

The problem of the highlight reel

Participated in a doubles tournament this morning and did fine. I won some, I lost some. The winner of the tournament will represent the club in some spring competition, which I didn't realize when I signed up. I don't really want to play that much doubles.

The really good doubles players seem to place a premium on consistency and keeping the ball in play unless there is a clear opportunity for a winner. I see the wisdom in that. But it is pretty boring. I like to hit shots that make me feel like the man, shots that I can replay for myself internally when my head is on the pillow at night and look be enveloped with warmth. To do that I have to take some risks.

In singles it's just my risk and it hurts only me. In doubles it impacts someone else. Which is a pretty strong disincentive to playing a lot of doubles.

A Golden Moment

Mary and I are getting ready to do some work on the house that was deferred in our 2010 (or was it 2011?) renovation due to cost. Some bookshelves in the rec room and a couple of closets upstairs. We are using Bobby and Julie's son Thomas to do the work. Can't find a web site to link.

To get ready for this we need to cull some of our many things. Mary probably needs to do a little more than I do, but there's work for me too. Mary has been going through some of her stuff and in the process came across this little picture, which we had inserted in our seasonal mailing back then, back before this blog had sucked up so much of my writing oxygen. We had moved from 48 Wilton to 29 Linden in Princeton in the spring of 2003, that brings up a whole bunch of memories around the house sale which I may chronicle another day because it was before the launch of the blog.

In general this was a golden moment in my life. Graham had just been born, Natalie was cute as a button. We bought this bigger house (1850 square feet, 4 BR 1.5 BA) with so much character, if no central AC. In general I was feeling like I had made it and had acceded into membership in the New York suburban bourgeoisie, in many ways an astonishingly interesting group of people. There's so much talent, energy, and intellectual and cultural diversity hiding out in houses like this within commuting distance of the cities of the Northeast.

Professionally I was still trying to figure out how to settle in to the private sector. I was having too much stress at work and was picking probably some of the wrong battles. There were periods of horrible insomnia in the first year in this house. Then I had a breakthrough...

What YouTube laid on me

Man I need to work on my picking, first and foremost my Travis picking. Lest I lose track of these, here are two great Simon and Garfunkel covers. 

AI needs to practice to be in the game

For some time I've been meaning to read back through my blog, at least a little bit, to try to process and synthesize it and latch hold to some of the most salient points and themes. Of course I'll never read the whole thing. That would be ridiculous.

So here you have these AI large language models and you would think they might be good for a task like this. Read the blog. Think about it in relationship to other analogous bodies of work, say perhaps Samuel Pepys's diaries or Dooce's blog. I will confess that part of me was loath to open my kimono wide open to the LLMs, particularly after Sarah Silverman and others are filing suits against their creators for theft of intellectual property. Then again, hers is worth money.

ChatGPT wouldn't even approach the task. Google's Bard at first was fired up, even going so far as to say "I am excited to learn more about your blog and to have a dialogue with you about it" and asked some specific questions. But it really wasn't able to do much, quickly crawling back into its shell by saying "I am just a large language model and don't have the capacity to help with that."

I'm sure I could go back and be more concrete with it and coax some thoughts out of it, but I'm not sure that's the highest and best use of my time. Maybe. For now, it's time to pack it in and go have dinner with Mary.

Here's the original and undoubtedly most generative AI.

The strange absence of pitchforks

Yesterday I found myself musing on our small banking crisis this past spring, which may very well pop back up if non-quiescent inflation and economic activity forces the Fed to raise rates again and thereby push the value of long-term bonds further down. The Fed had to do a surprising and unappreciated amount this spring. I had a gander at the Fed's balance sheet a couple of weeks ago and though it has continued to let its bond portfolio run off and has shrunk its holdings there, it has grown back in other places, presumably in facilities it used to stabilize wobbly banks. But it is down by about $800 billion, which is nice.

Back in 2009, Rick Santelli went on a rage on CNBC and launched the Tea Party movement, famously turning to the traders at the Chicago Board of Trade and asking them if they wanted to bail out people who borrowed too much and was met with a chorus of nos. At some point in time it was estimated that 10% of the US population belonged to a Tea Party affiliate of one sort or another, and you know a bunch of them are Trumpers.

So why didn't people get worked up about the FDIC stepping in and making all of the account holders at Silicon Valley, Silvergate and Signature Banks? For example, Roku, which had about half a billion dollars at SVB, a quarter of its cash and ~5% of its market cap. Where was the outrage?

There are a number of things at work. CNBC's viewership is probably smaller as the media landscape has been more fragmented by the flowering of social media. The crisis was smaller and didn't grip the whole world in the same way as 2008-2009 had. When Credit Suisse, a bit of a basket case for a decade and change, was forcibly merged with UBS, there was a great chorus of yawns.

But also, let's be honest, we're talking about rich white people fucking up here, and the Gods of the tech world here. VCs and tech execs. That's who got bailed out this time and that seems like a good use of tax dollars, I reckon. Nevermind that the money will either have to come out of the Federal kitty or out of a higher fee from banks to the FDIC. In other words, taxpayers. When poor people and black people fuck up, it's an outrage, but this wasn't that.

Cry in the night

Around 1:45 this morning, the most plaintive of voices pierced our slumber, not once but 8-10 times. At first I thought it was a baby, but as my brain ascended through the layers of blear I realized that it was Leon, our shy cat. The most frequently heard and feared variant of his voice alerts us to the fact that his delicate tummy is out of balance and that he is leaving a little pukey present for us somewhere in the house, hopefully on the wood floor or a forgiving rug instead of upholstered furniture.

This was not that meow. Something else was going on, probably a raccoon, possum, fox or coyote out on the patio. Or George, the cat from two houses down who sometimes rambles in the night.

At any rate, by the time I got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was what the crisis was it had apparently passed and Leon was acting all cool and surprised to see me. But it took some time for both Mary and me to get back to sleep and my morning routine is delayed.

Near miss

On the way out to a fundraiser for Josh out West of town, Niklaus, Mary and I were cruising along Hillsborough Rd headed out of Carrboro when something moved in my peripheral vision off to my left and Niklaus started and gesticulated. I slammed on my breaks as a large dear went sailing over the front of my car. There was a light thump. 

I screeched to a complete stop as the remains of a small herd of deer crossed the road. My Prius battery got a good little charge. We continued on our way to the pretty well-attended function, where the food could have been better. Josh was in fine form.

When we looked at the car later there was just the faintest of dents. Over the years it has seemed like the deer have gotten a lot smarter about when to cross the road and when not to, but this specific herd apparently has not gotten that memo. I am happy not to have been the one to deliver it. 

Admissions

Having trumpeted my excellent comeback against Adam a week or so back, it would feel dishonest not to mention that he destroyed me yesterday, 6-0, 6-4. Neither of us has bageled the other like that in a very long time. He was crushing the ball deep into the corners, coming in to the net, and volleying well. No excuses.

I keep being unable to get to bed earlier. Try as I might I cannot kick the habit of watching some TV, however mediocre, from 9-10, then following that up with sports highlights and (the worst) some short videos which I get served to me by Facebook. Natalie correctly asserts that this is basically TikTok and I have no counterargument. Why I need an adrenaline rush of danger -- skateboarding, parkour, skydiving, death diving, trampoline tricks, last night it was British rally racing -- that I can't tell you. A suspicious amount of the content which sucks me in is sponsored by Red Bull or Monster. It probably doesn't help me sleep to get this energy bolus just before I hit the pillow.

In fact, it's not hard to look at this thrill dependency as the nearly exact opposite of yesterday's post about accepting limits and learning to let go of things. Olympia Dukakis character's classic formulation from Moonstruck, that men chase women because they fear death (which I think I've posted before but here it is again for your delectation), comes to mind. Since experience earlier in life has taught me the dangers of chasing women, I watch crazy guy shit before bed and end up not getting the optimal amount of sleep. Which is admittedly more about fearing aging than fearing death, but they're pretty similar fears.

What courses to stay?

Our lives to a considerable extent comprise a triaging or titration of influences and activities. There are endless voices out there in the outside world barraging us with ideas of what we should do: build muscle! focus on core strength! Reduce BMI! Work on flexibility! Focus on balance!

My buddy Mark, a physician, gave me a "prescription" for push ups maybe a year and a half ago when I was out in Seattle. According to it I was to do three sets of push ups -- starting at 10 -- every other day for two weeks, after which I was to add a couple. So two weeks 3 x 10, then 3 x 12, 3 x 15, and so on. I made it all the way to 3 x 25 before falling off the wagon, onto which I can't climb back just now, though I still throw in 25 a few times a week now.

With DuoLingo I just "won" the Diamond, or top league, which is to say I was in the top 10 (top 5, actually). My prize for that is staying in the Diamond League. Hooray. It is taking about half an hour a day but I do feel my common Indo-European strengthening as I alternate days of Italian, German, and Ukrainian. But should I keep on with it? I did read that it is good for offsetting cognitive decline in older people in one place. Then again, I just saw that I had written about this within the last couple of weeks so maybe the benefit is limited.

In today's journal there's a piece on how some "older people" are letting go of things (including books) and activities. I haven't read it yet but I probably will. Then again, periodicals are one of the other things I have been working hard in recent years to let go of. They flow through my house constantly, New Yorkers, Economists, Atlantics, alumni mags etc. Ultimately when the stacks get too thick I just have to put them in the recycling bin and carry them to the curb. Usually that conveys its own sense of accomplishment.

A lovely day

Onc couldn't really ask for a much nicer day than today. Sun shining, breeze blowing, mild temps. Sitting out on the porch now.

Mary made it in a little before midnight last night, still all revved up about the pictures she had taken but a little wistful about only figuring out how to scout for locations as she went along and opportunities she had missed. As for me, I'm just glad she's back. I feel more whole and would have slept a lot better had I not been experiencing some pretty bad knee pain while going to sleep. At length I found a comfortable position, but only after taking some more acetaminophen and writhing there. I only hope this does not signify that I'm moving towards a reckoning with the arthritis we documented already four years ago about this time of year. 

Yesterday I also learned that a friend's daughter is, at long last, getting married, though I also learned that she plans to have a destination wedding and just invite her friends and, presumably, family. On the one hand, this is America and this kind of thing falls squarely into the category of Enduring Freedoms. On the other, the whole cycle of life thing should in principle provide us 50-somethings with a stream of weddings to offset the ongoing litany of memorial services for our friends parents and even our friends, who keep getting picked off by the Grim Reaper. 

In Brittany in August David gave a lovely toast at the rehearsal dinner where he thanked everyone for coming to, and I quote, "our wedding." On the one hand, it was a bit of a slip because it was of course his daughter's wedding. On the other, the wedding was really an occasion to bring family and friends together, as are funerals, they just have a different tone. When we got married we had a little bit of an instinct to have a smaller wedding in a more rustic place, but Mary's dad wanted it to be closer to their home and saw it as an event to bring together people from throughout his life, and I get that. Our wedding was the first time I met Mary's cousins and aunts and uncles -- and the last time for some of them. I think we did it right for us and I do hope we get to go to a bunch more weddings soon.

A third

Today marks the 19th anniversary of this blog. Since I am 57, that means I've been at it now for a full third of my life. Or, if we accept the dubious proposition that my adulthood began at age 19 (there are arguments in favor of this -- that's about when my parents split up, signaling a clear end to my childhood if not my adolescence), I've been blogging for half of my adult life.

Rather than reflect on the evolution of the blog, which I've done before, let's focus on where I am today. Mary has been in Alaska for fully two weeks now and is due back late tomorrow. I'll be happy for her to get home. Judging from her credit card transactions, she was not consumed by a bear yesterday while photographing in the woods somewhere near Juneau and I'm grateful for that.

She's been gone a lot more than usual in the last year, first while her mother was fighting her last medical battle, then while her brother was, now on this photography trip, her first in a quarter century. So I've been alone at home a bunch. This has offered me greater than average freedom with regard to what I watch on TV and what I eat for dinner and has left me fully in control of a quiet (excepting neighbors and landscapers with leaf blowers) home during the day. This is all good, to a point, but the bloom goes off the rose quickly.

One of the themes of the last nineteen years has been me successfully trying to travel less for business, though even now I haven't fully gotten that balance right. Mary hasn't had that same fight. She's been on the other side, stuck at home taking care of kids, our very attention hungry cats and home while I was out earning money. It's unlikely that one trip will have exhausted her from the whole endeavor. Time will tell.

Some thoughts on freedom

I had lunch the other day with a Christian Republican. Someone I know from childhood, a really nice guy, I like him a lot. But I knew we were on different sides of the fence and wanted to explore that. I always mean to talk to more people I disagree with and usually underperform in so doing.

I don't have space to recount it all, but one thing did really strike me. His lack of concern for Ukraine on principle. His thinking was guided by realpolitik, by the idea that we had "poked the bear" by allowing NATO's borders to extend to where they were touching Russia's. He quoted George Kennan as saying this was a mistake. I remember early in the Ukraine war when Kennan's opinion to this effect was circulating the interweb, I reached out to friends in Eastern Europe and got a clear and resolute answer: Fuck Kennan. People in Eastern Europe appreciate the fact that they don't live under Putin's wing. Admittedly, these were educated people, the so-called "global elite." Maybe people out in the countryside who are struggling for an economic model (Viktor Orban's constituency) would have thought differently.

But at the end of the day we have to stand for and believe in something, and freedom has been the best idea we've had. Admittedly, freedom is a complex topic which means different things to different people and we are always tripping over our own feet trying to figure out which aspects of it the electorate and society wish to prioritize, but we're always working on it.

And make no mistake, as the US's status as sole superpower has been in retreat for the last decade, we see signs that freedom as a priority retreats with it. Even in places like Taiwan we see polls indicating that a good chunk of the population could acquiesce to dominance by the mainland. In the UAE polls recently indicated that people preferred stability to freedom. And so on. 

But the people of Ukraine have made their preference pretty clear, and if we abandon them it's all over.

Return to the quarantine groove

With Mary out of town I've been working from home and have barely been in to the office. In particular I've been digging spending ever larger quantities of time out on the deck, looking down at the lake and the critters in the back yard. Which raises the question of why I should go into the office at all, except to use the conference rooms to meet people, which is something I could easily do using a roving membership rather than having an actual office. 

One of the reasons I often cite is that the office offers the "absence that makes the heart grow fonder," i.e. that it's good for Mary and I not to be around during the day. And there's an element of truth to that. But there's no reason we couldn't just manage our boundaries better. Mostly I just don't like it when she vacuums and when she comes to me with lots of tech support questions. But she's been getting better about the latter and learning to manage more problems on her own. Surely I could be more intentional on that stuff. Of course, I don't really know all the ways I irritate her.

Yes, my finance library is at the office, but we're building new bookshelves downstairs so I'll soon have more shelf capacity. Plus I could get rid of some of these books I haven't touched for, oh, forty years or so. I could be just be smarter about holding on to books, which would honestly be nice to my kids going forward, as I reflect on the struggles of Rob, Beth and Mary in cleaning out Mary Lee's house. Mostly Rob. If we gave up the office we could save a bunch of money. And I would eat fewer crappy snacks and would generally be more likely to exercise regularly. 

7-6 plus some bonus material

Hearkening back to one of the original ideas for this blog, which was to chronicle goings on so I'd have a personal record of what happened at various points in time, for future me let me say that yesterday was a good day on the tennis court. Adam was up 5-2 and was serving. In a typical game for us, we went back and forth between deuce and ad a number of times, so Adam had at least a couple of set points. Some of them I foiled, others I parried. I broke him and we went to 3-5, me serving to him.

Often at this point in time I might crumple and fold, thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that 6-3 is a respectable outcome and we'll just start another set. But I stanched that kind of thinking and came back and beat him 7-6 and by a convincing margin in the tiebreaker. I did not psyche myself out or talk myself into accepting a respectable loss. It was a good mental performance and I hit the ball well.

Late in the day yesterday Graham texted that he'd like to come home today to get some warmer clothes. No problem. As it turns out, I got him late in the day so we could get some Thai food together, something that's never hard to sell him on. I remembered that, because of a pillar in the corner, there's a space behind his bed where his pillow keeps falling to the floor and getting dirty. We had been discussing possible remedies with him (maybe a small bookshelf?) but had only been able to get rough measurements ("it's one shoe deep") because he lacked a tape measure, so when I went to pick him up I took one with me so we could get precise measurements. The tape measure showed that the gap was about a foot and I was thinking maybe we could just wedge some bankers boxes in there, when my keen eye espied his laundry hamper at the foot of the bed. Upon closer inspection, it fits quite nicely, as shown below, and will guard against the dusty pillow outcome which is the main enemy here. This, my friends, is why they pay me the big bucks and gave me a PhD.