Poop in tub

Graham put soy nut butter in his hair on Sunday. Globs. So we stuck him in the tub, despite his screams. He calmed down with the new froggy toy that makes a little ribbit. Then he pooped. Super, we thought. Took him out. Doused him in disinfectant. As it were.

So the next night his hair was still dirty. I run another tub. He poops again, gloriously unaware.
This time we clean the tub, run another bath and stick him back in. Wash hair, to the tune of more screaming.

The soy nut butter is gone. For the moment, at least.

Foggy

With the knowledge that my cozy little world and minimal commute will be all ripped up in a couple of month's time because my current client has shockingly decided it has spent enough ($1.5 million) money on us. Can I sell something else right there in town? There are leads, but it'll be a stretch.

So now I have to call people I don't know on the phone and sell them whatever they want. Or find them on the streets.

In other news, the one they call Squakin apparently is on track for some nuptials. We'll be meeting his lady friend in a couple of weeks at my greatiest 40th birthday party ever. It's gonna be grand.

Update from the brackets

I mused a few days ago about how validating it was to have my tournament picks ranking way up in the 90th-plus percentiles. Let me add that, now that my picking accuracy has plummeted to the 58th percentile, I no longer regard it as particularly significant.

Progress update

At the office in New York. Where a few months ago there were workmen and the world's most awe-inspiring crane throwing up the bare bones of a building, today stands a glass-sheithed 35-odd storied skyscraper. There is glass up to the 30th floor, and on the 16th, eye level to me, a guy is sweeping up. Is this a normal progression? Will he sweep his way along behind the upward progress of the building, or did he just spill his french fries? It's pretty late for a construction worker to have been eating lunch.

Meanwhile, along the building's exterior, construction elevators and their counterweights alternate with mesmerizing regularity, as if there were some swank club up there.

Story time

Graham was in fine form tonight, having had no nap. I began the reading with the 10o Trucks book, which I sometimes avoid because it takes too much time to read. We have to declare our favorite trucks on each page. At any rate he makes me do that.

But it had been a while since we had read this book, and yet Graham started off knowing all the names of the trucks. I was impressed. But after 6 or 7 trucks on the first page his memory waned, and he got frustrated with himself, flailing about and hitting his head on the wall. The wall didn't phase him.

And so we see that, at 2 and a half, his memory is prodigious, but imperfect, and it vexes him.

Parking ticket on a Bentley

That's what I saw on the way into the office. I can just see the person, handing the ticket to a personal assistant, if even bothering to do that.

Perhaps these cars don't have a place for change. Surely this suggests an enhancement: built in change dispensers. Maybe in the trunk with the tools.

Anyhow, I keyed it.

Diving in

Let it be known that, after leading my client's NCAA
tourney pool through the weekend, the second round
pushed me back into 2nd place in a field of 13, behind
my colleague Nathan.* Among the total pool of millions
of tourney players and high rollers, my percentile
ranking ranged from 96th to a current low of 84th.

What's pathetic is that, for someone who's never been
in a tournament pool before, who doesn't gamble and
really only pays attention to how UNC does at any
degree of detail (knowing starters' names, for
instance), and at a high level Duke and the rest of
the ACC, or at least the core ACC, how excited I would
be about all of this. I think it's the statistics that
turn me on, the objective measures of how many people
I seem to be outsmarting, even though I know there's a
very strong component of randomness to the whole
proceedings. And the numbers are the purest of
ephemera. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.


*Today is his birthday

Uchitelle on JOLTS report

Louis Uchitelle's Times article reads job gains figures as reflecting not tons of hiring but risk aversion: people are not leaving jobs at normal rate. Skill illiquidity? Surely, it gives rise to ossification, and a lack of cross-fertilization.

And it correlates to lack of ideas out there. There's nothing making people want to go and do things. The big idea now is Hedge Funds and Private Equity, balance sheet crap, not new products. There are diversification and risk dispersion benefits to be had, perhaps: thus far we've rode out GE downgrades, Katrina et al., Refco, etc. But as companies go private to skirt SOX, opacity rises, and things become more insiderish than ever.

People should have ideas.
Here's a few from within the Grouse ecosystem

Mind Alliance
Memory Miner
MTV Ukraine
Rick's Picks

Bitter sweet

So the Tar Heels got beat. It was never reasonable to expect them to do what they did this season anyway. It was almost worth it just to see the expression on the faces of those guys from George Mason as they figured out that they had pulled it off. I don't smile like that very often. And at least this makes it more probable that we'll get more good years out of Hansbrough.

Shoulder season and the living is easy

These intraseasonal moments rule from the point of view of beverage management. By God, you can leave your soda on the back porch and not worry about it freezing, and yet, it stays cold, so you don't have to plan vigilantly to pre-cool everything as you do in summer and winter is well, when the bevs are all toasty inside. Except in the wintry morning, when your cold-assed house with masonry frame walls has cooled the bevs in the pantry.

This may be less of an issue in middle america, where the houses are big enough for monster fridges and people don't pack em full of umpteen types of olives and mustards and whatnot. It's all so complicated.

Child risk management

On the way to school saw Steve Schultz in the rust Volvo Wagon, then Amy White in the fetching gunmetal Honda Odyssey. Both of them live within a stone's throw of me, less than half . And I know Lisa Levine was out there somewhere, from across the street, and I know the only reason we can't carpool is this thing about booster seats. Ya gotta have em, but nobody keeps spares around.

So what, really, is the greater risk? All these unnecessary cars on the road, or kids riding around without booster seats? Seems like the former is pretty bad, particularly in a town where there's a lot of pedestrians who are bound to get hit during rush hour as everybody sneaks through these beat-up residentail streets to get kids to school. Think of all the costs associated with the potholes, the freakin crossing guards at every corner.

They should have pools of municipal booster seats that the school dispenses and collects. Even better, all kids should carry knapsacks with detachable booster seats.

Then we could get them cars off the roads.

Single point of contact government

I tallied up my total tax burden today and, while in percentage terms it's not that horrific, it's still a fair number of dollars, a reasonable chunk of the cost of an full-time employee. Which got me to thinking. Wouldn't it be cool if you could have a dedicated government rep, and client services person who just did your bidding with the various agencies? Looked after your interests, and went to bat for you.

I could just see it. I call up and my rep says: "United States Government, oh, hello Clark, what can I do you for today."
And I'd be like: "Can you blindfold and whip some A-rabs for me down in Gitmo?"
Him: "Right away, no problem."
And then I'd be, like: "Hey, can you build me a chunk of highway out in Missouri?"
Him: "As good as done."

And so on. Twould be fabulous.

The man who swung both ways

Will Blythe's celebrated new book on the UNC-Duke rivalry, whatever it's called, contains a chapter about my dad, "The man who loved both UNC and Duke." Starts on page 294. For those of you familiar with my dad, you will see that Blythe did not fake anything. It is clearly based on either an actual interview, or legend. True to form, my dad recites poems, flits across many topics, curses, offends people at nearby tables, and even raps. He impresses Blythe with his shade of blue agnosticism, which is earnest and not entirely derived from beer revenues. Though Duke both in BA and JD, he criticizes young Dukies for "all coming from New Jersey and frowning a lot." I think all the young Jerseyites are just sad from yearning for the great Garden State.

Give em holes!

I'm sure many have thought this, but I'll just put two cents in. Some data points from the Philadelphia Zoo raise this question: why are there always lines for women's rooms but not for men's rooms?

Obviously, the ladies are in there using up lots of toilet paper cleaning up every drop, but we can't reform that. Clearly they should have more holes and square footage for the femme rooms in most public places. Yes, it feels great to be a guy and sail right through, but at the end of the day we pay the price by having to stand around waiting. And if there are free snacks (and there usually aren't) and you've quit smoking (as most of us have), there's no useful purpose to the time spent waiting for your wife to get out of the bathroom. OK. Sitting on a bench and resting has its virtues.

New frontiers in psychopharmacology

Recent clinical trials have shown that so-called "talk" couples therapy, for years the method of choice for helping challenged couples work through their issues and diminish instances of household corporal abuse, has been shown to be inefficacious in resolving these problems. As in so many other areas of psychological inquiry, chemico-neurological imbalances have been demonstrated irrefutably to determine spousal behavior.

A next generation set of drugs has just entered the marketplace, and it will transform marriage counselling as we know it. New pills by Warner-Lambert and Burroughs Welcome have proven to smooth over even the roughest marital patches, and some couples have reputedly taken to alternating them seasonally just for kicks.

Next up for the pharma industry: career counselling

Let them eat lingonberries?

Bored and hot in a windowless building where the heat is still on when it's 70 outside , I turn to random blogs for inspiration, and quickly find it. Some Swedish public health loon, with a passion for Swedish risk management. He he goes:

The difficult question is: Why did Sweden?s immense resources for prevention not identify that Swedes spent a lot of time on Tsunami prone beaches? Is this too much to ask for? No not in a country that has reduced domestic risks to extremely low levels.

What would he have the Swedish government do, refuse further visas when the concentration of Swedes on the beach was too high? Launch public health campaigns against visiting disaster-prone areas? Let them just stay home and watch hockey on the settee and eat cinnamon buns, that's what I say

Top this

Met a guy at a conference a year and a half ago. Sharp guy. Socialite type. Kept in touch a little. But he's been too busy to get together for coffee.

Today an email: "Graham, we need to get together my friend ... looking for a job and need one
pdq ... Here's my resume. Thoughts?"

So I look at his resume. And find such chestnuts as this: "Co-award-winning luxury gift bag creation; brands sponsorship including Davidoff, Cliquot, Christiania, Holly Kristen Couture, Maybach. "

Now, in certain circles, it's hard to compete with "Co-award-winning luxury gift bag creation." Just gotta find em. Am thinking.

Codicil. This came in on spam: "If you want personlized 401k rate of return graphics that drive new sales and retain existing clients this is for you." Stick that in your luxury bag.

Brary

Stopped into the Princeton library at lunch today to pick up... you guessed it, a book. Walked into the lobby cafe and marvelled to see that every single person in there was a woman. Except for the kids. Striking. Though, it's true, they serve tabbouleh and salads and the like, so there's little surprise.

My book was out, but I went to the general area to see if any of the adjacent books might be of interest. They weren't. Then I thought of another one, so I went to one of the computers and logged in. But where's the catalog icon? Not on the desktop, which would be a logical place. It's swell for my tax dollars to support internet access for cardholders, but I just wanted to look something up. Coulda launched a browser and gotten to the catalog over the internet, yeah, but that's a lot of work. The damned server was right through the wall.

Meanwhile, looked around at the mid-day library clientele. A bunch of sour folks, largely, radiating pride that the public domain afforded them such luxury.

Didn't get a book.

Purest Alpha

Here's one that came over the wires about a hedge fund scam in Chicago:

The three men promoted what they said was a risk-free investment that could yield profits of 10% per week. After giving the men US$25 million—US$23 million from a hedge fund Ms. Vaughn started in 2003 called Directors Performance Fund LLC, and US$2 million of her own money—that money was transferred several times and Ms. Vaughn eventually lost control of it

Never mind the monumental stupidity of the woman who got took. The SEC is prosecuting here as well as the guys. Think about the audacity of the guys that took her. Can you imagine sitting around thinking: "Lets find somebody stupid enough to believe in these returns", and then actually pulling it off, finding the sucker? That's top-notch suavity.

Oscar pans

Rachel Weisz should not have won best supporting actress for The Constant Gardener. No way. Amy Adams from Junebug actually acted. Weisz just traipsed and flounced, for the most part, through a crappy movie.

John Stewart flirted with danger all night. You could sense the crowd willing him out of his acerbic shell to a wuzzah wuzzah. Haven't had time to read the reviews, but I doubt he's establishing a dynasty there. He's got an East Coast groove.

Cameron crazy

I found it very moving to watch Duke's seniors speak to their Cameron constituency last night. Such a fine bunch of young men, part of such an illustrious program, having such a challenging week.

And they played so well, fundamentally. If only they had scored more points, or had caused us to score fewer, they might have won.

The fish place is gone

Just when you think that Princeton's Forrestal Village couldn't sink any further, the fish place at the food court closes. That was a good place. Probably spoiled by spoilage of real fish and inability to forecast demand. Should have hired consultants, clearly.

Princeton continues to hollow out, gradually, imperceptibly. A Bloomberg building is also vacant. Is this some creeping harbinger of the economy at large, or just a local thing?

One thing's for sure. There ain't no great or compelling ideas out there, and however you slice it, much focus is on defense, defense against invasion, hedging against bubbles, etc. Not only does nobody know what the next big thing will be, nobody's even trying.

Edward Altman of NYU said that debt markets forecast about a 30% probably of a GM default this year, much higher as you look out a few years. The distressed investment community is girding itself up for a troth. But that ain't much a new new thing.

Amongst the uber

Today took us 38 floors above Central Park, 11 floors above where I used to webmaster for what would become Eurasianet, to a snooty hedge fund which branched out from Goldman, where all the women are lanky and everyone is kind of an ass. And they demand from us something they didn't say they needed, and huff and puff a little because we're not something that the publicly available evidence wouldn't suggest that we are.

It's a class of people who, because they sort of rule the world, enjoy acting like they rule the world.

Nothing quite makes you feel so Jersey, in senses both good and bad. Like the popular kids in high school movies, you both hate them and want them to have you over for wine coolers and bong hits, to show that you've arrived.

Inspires confidence, #2

From Investment News interview with Lori Ensinger of Columbia Management Group. First off, they say she's 44, but she looks like she's 53 but then tried to remove 9 years surgically. Failed.

Q: How have you been able to generate consistent returns?
A: Diane and I have been doing this for 23 years... We have developed a process that we adhere to rigorously.

Q: How did you arrive at that process?
A: I tend to dabble in behavioral finance. I'm by no means an expert at it...

Umm. Don't "rigorously" and "dabble" kind of cancel each other out? And then she gets behavioral finance wrong.

Inspires confidence

Don't have MS Office on the laptop at home. Some spam comes to my yahoo email, promising Office 2003 for like eighty bucks. Go to site. Here's what it says to me:

"All the software you can order from this site is OEM and DSP software. In the majority of points DSP software is similar to OEM software."

With a ringing endorsement like that, how can you not buy it?

From Moscow to Nairobi

The Economist had an article recently about Moscow in winter, the homeless, and the all but homeless migrant workers from throughout the former USSR getting stepped on. About how developers have these Asian construction workers work for 3 months and build a house, and then don't pay them and have the cops beat them up. It took me back.

Semi-educated Russian men are toxic pond scum, and cops are the lowest of the low. I can see these pigs taking a twenty buck payoff to beat the shit out of some Azeris or Tajiks, and then blowing it on beer, vodka, and a blowjob from some Belarusian whore in a filthy bathroom. They think they're big men, enriching themselves, but in fact they impoverish the country and, therefore, themselves. Business climate is execrable. No rule of law. Who's gonna invest there?

At the end of the day, Russian cops are akin to African ones. Marauding whoremonger punks. No regard for human life at all. I put some quotes from the Slavophile Khomiakov next to one from Fanon, and they were scarcely distinguishable. Russians don't like being compared to sub-Saharan Africa, but there's so much shared.

Highlights

• Webb spent 2 hours looking for tickets for the Bernanke lecture on campus at Princeton today. By contrast, my friend Steve emailed to offer me free ones.
• Mary picked up a book about a moose (Morris) and a bear (Boris). Each page has a stupid pun: Boris "Is your nose running?" Morris "No, it's walking." Natalie cackled like a three year old on each page. Can't wait to get home.
• Visitors from a CDO of CDO firm I hauled in expressed desire for a "long term relationship" with my firm. My CEO showed little, as if, another day at the office. Known issues.
  

A new one

With lots of opportunities coming up in Manhattan, I'm a little scared that my cozy little lifestyle will be rocked, even as I delight in the shwarma and baby bok choy and whatnot you find there but not here. So today I set out through my current building, the most notorious hedge fund hotel in Princeton, armed with flyers for an industry event as a plausible pretext.

And I walked in doors. A simple action, but a nerve-wracking process.
Most receptionists were not delighted to see me.

"We're not a hedge fund, we're a VC."
"We're not a hedge fund, we're long only. We don't hedge." Like anyone cares. I bet they called themselves a hedge fund in 2004.

I walked through one the door of one ambiguously-named firm down at the end of the hall to find a big trading floor, populated with 15 or so dudes. They just looked at me, without getting up. Bemused, they heard me out, nodding politely. "We do fixed-income, relative value" Seemed half-inclined to be drawn out, but then went back into shells.

But got one OK lead and a couple of cards of the bigwigs. OK for 20 minutes work.

Anger Management

As we commence the countdown to my 40th birthday (April 14th, for you the great unwashed who don't know), I'm going to push for greater introspection and the meatier, riskier topics that sometimes get pushed aside in the rush to eat lunch, read a couple of paragraphs, and get back to work.

Today: Anger management. Or, what am I so pissed off about? In the course of my life, there've been a sequence of things that gnarl me. Here's a list of some of the big ones:

1. Other kids picking on me for being a buck-toothed geek
2. My mom for pushing me too hard
3. My dad for being elsewhere, literally and/or figuratively
   
4. Myself for making so many irrational decisions that I've had to fight my way back from
   
5. My company's management for being so short-term in orientation and for not investing in the growth of the firm or the staff
   
6. Myself for not just getting on with things and move past 5
7. My wife for hassling me about carbs

In truth, I manage my anger relatively well, directing most of it internally. Until, that is, I don't. Not that I get violent or chair-throwing, I just lash out or undercut myself and/or don't sleep.

My 15 minutes are up. For today....

President's Day Holiday on ice

Took Natalie to Alexa's birthday party at the Mercer County Skating Rink on President's Day.

She done me proud. Natalie sometimes vexes us with her lack of drive and stick-to-it-ness. She can't be bothered to get comfortable swimming, won't really push to ride her bike, and hasn't really been pushing forward with reading with much vigor. We were forecasting a short skate.

How wrong we were. She loved the ice, despite the fact that the ice seemed to love her right back with its frequent embrace. She kept falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up. She didn't make a ton of technical progress, didn't get much smoother, but she stayed out there, and didn't even care if I went off to sit by the fire. She was a very big girl.

I, for my part, got back into skating despite a 20-year absence, and was able to work my way back to being as bad as I ever was. Fast, but largely unable to stop. Tried to skate cross-over around the turn and fell on my butt, injuring my shoulder a little.

If I hadn't hurt myself that way, I would have kept pushing myself till I got some sort of injury, just to prove I had been there.

You, me, and everyone we know

This film made 10 best lists for many critics. Maybe we're just getting old. There was some good stuff, like the 8-year old kid doing online porn chat and wanting to poop into his partners butthole, "back and forth." But mostly the movie was just pathetic. Little narrative drive. No characters you could latch hold to. Film a these at its worst.

As a corrective, we watched a few minutes of Jerry Maguire on TNT after it was over, which reminded us why we watch indie films. Though indie actors conspicuously lack the pecs and abs a big budget can buy you.

In praise of a brand

Trying to save 70c, bought CVS shaving gel instead of Edge. Have been shocked at the difference. In this case, science built into the brand is for real. Much smoother.

This is unpaid, unsolicited testimony, and you know I'd just as soon bitch.

Savings and Salvation

(sorry about this Z)
It's funny how similar the prevailing theory of savings and investment--

the wonders of compounding combined with the continual deferral of pleasure
("cut out that daily Starbucks latte and save $53,743 over 20 years")

-- is to ascetic, and particularly Protestant, traditions, which would have us forego the pleasures in this world for the sake of salvation in the next. Saving for the next generation or the next world, is there a difference?

Combine this with passive, index investing, which is essentially a faith-based play on the United States and world economies, and you've got a full-fledged theology. To which I would seem to ascribe.

Is this just an easy package to sell cuz there's a bunch of us suckers out there?

Raider of last resort

All the stars were out at the Helmsley Plaza today. Carl Icahn spoke, starting off much on message in his campaign against Richard Larsen, reiterating the same analysis of lame CEOs that I had read from his mouth days before. But, for all his Deputy Dawg cum Other People's Money stylings, he said much that was sensible, and without resorting to powerpoint. Edward Altman and Thomas Lee did use the dark arts of Redmond, but they broke out some cool numbers, so it can be forgiven.

Later, during cocktail hour, the largesse of our hosts Droege Consulting could be measured in such items as actual little lamb chops and sashimi grade tuna. This more than made up for a little bad hair.

Grizzly, man

Grizzly Man is a disturbing movie. Yeah, Werner Herzog has the good taste not to play the audio of our hero and his girlfriend being eaten alive by a bear. Well done. In some ways this restraint, this not showing the monster, conveys as much horror as it did in the Blair Witch Project. And just as with the whiney, wet, nicotine-starved stars of that flick, it's hard to really be too worried about the inevitable in this movie.

Timothy Treadwell was, in his desire to pet the sweet little grizzlies, an idiot and a freak. Then again, aside from the fabulous bear footage, including the roaring fight where one of two big boys takes a dump. it is Treadwell's freakishness and his implicit consciousness of it, his tortured sexuality, his substance abuse, his self-declared self-destructiveness, which make the movie worth watching. When he looks at the camera and -- with his fem voice -- thanks the bears for giving his life meaning, it's pretty poignant.

But late at night, I couldn't help but think about Herzog's commentary after watching the tape. It's just scary, nasty. I don't like the thought of anyone being eaten alive by a bear, even for someone who's into it.

A number of people seem to draw inferences from Treadwell's story about nimrod environmentalists. He was both green and a fool, and the kind of fool that does a lot of damage. He was a tree that would have been better off falling in the forest, right next to where a bear was shitting.

Managerio babble redux

I sucked down the rest of that Lencioni book pretty quick. Despite the somewhat wooden character of it, embarasssing though it might seem, I was deeply into it, this corporate Breakfast Club. And for the most traditionally realist reasons ever: I identified with their plight, and I wanted everything to come out all right. I probably don't need to tell you what happens, but I will: everything comes out all right.

Sure, one person is fired, another quits. But all the other team members take the brave CEO's counsel to heart, assess themselves and their faults, and work together to establish and achieve common goals.

Why does this touch so many nerves for your fair blogger? Could it be that his present place of employment lacks such commonality of focus and such admirable teamwork? Yes, yes it could.
I must say, I also felt like I derived some insight into what leadership and management could be, which was interesting and compelling, given the dearth of role models in my immediate work environment.

If only they could make a movie.

Managerio babble

I started reading Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of Team recently, after taking it from Walter at Christmas. I thought it looked stupid, but like something I should read, as I never read books about leadership yatta yatta.

It's about one savvy old economy exec who comes into a high-tech start up that's not running well. She diagnoses poor team dynamics and takes the 7 top people to an offsite in Napa. They sit in a conference room and discuss the theory of interpersonal dynamics. Doesn't exactly sound like a page turner, but it is.

Part of it is because the type is large and many chapters are 2 pages long, with only a few lines on the second page, so you get a quick and easy sense of accomplishment. But part of it is that it's less bad than most business books, the characters somewhat less wooden and emblematic. You actually want them to work throught their shit, function as a team. Why? dunno.

The slackening magic word

Natalie has long instituted a magic word, at the end of snuggling, that she says and then I have to say it back to her before she lets me get out of her bed. Lately, it's been flattening out. Where once she would go on for as long as 3 minutes, stringing together endlessly strings of fairies kittens and nonsense syllables, by now it has been reduced to "bleh blah bli, unicorn." Which is very easy. I can't tell if she's trying to say that she doesn't care if I get up, or if she's just tired.

On the other hand, last night she made me give her 29 kisses, as that was as high as she could count in Spanish. Not too shabby. If she learns to count by tens, I'll be in trouble.

All in one jaunt

Borrowed Hemant's car to go to the doctor today.

• Your tax dollars at work. 1
  On the way there, in front of the Princeton Township office complex, were four cops with pylons stopping traffic. Why, you ask? Checking to make sure people had on seatbelts. Way to go!
• Isn't it ironic
  The doctor had some Viagra pens handy for filling out forms. For a while, I couldn't get the inky part to poke out. Turns out it was a twister model, not a clicker. You would think it would be easier to get the Viagra pen up.
• Down with vowels
  The guy minding the register at the sandwich shop felt a strong urge to overgeneralize the New Jersey tendency to clip terminal vowels, especially in Italian food words, as in "Moozarell" (or "Mooz") or "Prosciutt." This guy said to everybody "Take it eaz." I'm sure the ladies love it.
• Your tax dollars at work. 2
  On the short drive back to Hulfish street I saw 1 parking cop in a tricycle cart, and then 2 Borough cops in cruisers, 1 Township cop in cruiser, 1 cop in unmarked car. God I feel safe. And ripped off.
  

A rare bifecta

Derived pleasure from two media last night, in pretty rapid succession:

• Caught the tail end of Dazed and Confused on AMC. You gotta love that movie. Even if our adolescence really wasn't like that, Linklater walks the fine line between reality and ideality so adroitly that it takes you back to a place you meant to be.
• Closed out Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker article on birding, mating, and the death of his mother. What can you say, the guy is just a good writer, adroit at bringing disparate sensations together and fishing out the right word for whatever. Must go search on him at Amazon. More than just the Corrections.
  

This a day after listening to the Magnetic Fields, giving me good listening, reading, and viewing in a short period. At least my readers should know I don't just bitch grouse bithch all the time.

The Dinky, 9:40 AM, 2/506. An excursion

Getting on the Dinky, the little train from Princeton out to the main line at Princeton Junction, I couldn't help but to be struck by the sheer number of Princeton undergrads up and all ready to go at such a tender hour on a Sunday morning. Fresh-faced, muffin-nibbling, off to the big city with a plan in mind. That wasn't me at that age, I'll tell you that. If it had been, imagine where I might be now.

Graham wasn't 100% sure about his first trip on a train, admire them though he might in books. But he settled into it. Natalie, a more experenced rail customer, knew just what she wanted. A window.

Going through the tunnel to the New York bound side of the tracks at Princeton Junction, couldn't be but struck by the burnt newspaper that lined the concrete tunnel intermittently. Kids were having a little Saturday night fun, looked like.

The train to New Brunswick was faster, funner, though Graham stayed on my lap and let me sniff his hair. At length, I convinced Natalie to stay and walk around New Brunswick rather than taking the next train back. On the platform an express screamed past at 60 or so, rightly freaking Graham out. Thanks Amtrak.

Though perhaps Natalie was right about turning around. New Brunswick sorta sucks. It was cold and breezy. And there were no fresh-faced Scarlet Knights gamboling about with baked goods. No. More mortal they than Tigers.

On the way back to the station, a quick hot chocolate for the good sport Natalie. Not wanting to miss the train, she walked that fine line between knocking it all back and burning her chocolate thirsting lips. She took care of it just fine.

The Constant Gardener

This was a very confused movie, uncertain as to whether it wanted to be a Gap commercial, a music video, or a sermon. The CD has a picture of Ralph Fiennes pointing a gun, though he actually forgets to in the movie. The title is also misleading. He likes to garden, but he rarely gets to. And then he dies. So sad. Is it supposed to be deep? One's things for sure, the people of Africa are long suffering, but big of heart and spirit. Except the evil ones.

The price of bad pricing

The Times recently reported on iniatives started by a variety of losers around inaccurate pricing in retail establishments. Punitive measures for bad pricing by stores are suggested. This is a bad idea. The tax costs of developing technology and infrastructure to monitor and enforce any such laws would dwarf the benefits to consumers, particularly since we know it would be done in the public sector.

It wouldn't be bad if, say, Consumer Reports spun out a group that certified retailers as having reliable pricing on a fee for service basis to the stores. Pricing insurance. It could even tell stores if their prices are wrong as a reputational risk management tool. But it would take a while to make this pay for itself. The best thing would be to develop the process and export it to emerging markets.

Mostly, this is about people liking to have something to sit around and gripe (or grouse), about. "They charged me $1.49 a pound for those, when they were supposed to be $1.19!" Certain consumer advocates say we should check each item on the receipt for accuracy. Imagine the lost productivity costs of people standing in line behind them. Somebody pulls that in front of me in line, I'm gonna cap em.

Lunch

Went to lunch at a restaurant that had the same telephone # as a took a reservation for the restaurant that had occupied its space previously, failing to mention anything.

Was OK.

Where I'm at

1. Graham's still up, downstairs, at 9:30, practicing some vowels and consonants, which bound up the stairs to my attic study perch, itself littered with 130-odd blocks and God knows how many Playmobil and Polly Pockets items.
   
2. Ragged out from last night, when Natalie came in from a nightmare at 3, then I took her back to her bed and almost fell asleep before she came back in, and Mary squeezed me out. So I went to "Granny's bed" and took appropriate drugs. Was asleep by 5.
   
3. Tomorrow have 3 meetings in Manhattan, with Private Equity communications specialist, hedge fund dealing in distressed bonds and loans, and an Agency broker. Mind still reeling from yesterday's meeting with CDO of CDO manager. Much to wrap noggin around. Much to bullshit.
   
4. Have minor deliverable due tomorrow for current client.
5. Mary must make allergy group meeting back here in Pton at 7.
   
6. Don't feel like working.

So you'll excuse me for lack of wit.

The Aristocrats, ta dah

It's interesting that my riff on The Aristocrats, shown below, in its attempt to push in directions the comics in the movie hadn't gone, pulled out the Downs Syndrome thing, just like Sarah Silverman did, as I saw when we resumed watching. I went for the total sick gross-out groove, which is something in the context of that joke.

But my version was morbid, not funny. For the most part, it is a life-affirming joke. Violent, disgusting, yes, but at the end of the day, it's straight out of Mikhail Bakhtin's 1965 classic book on Rabelais. Sex, excretions, violence, it's all about life. OK, the incest part is pushing it. That's why Gilbert Godfrey breaking it out so hard in late September, 2001 was such a big deal: very much Le chaim, fisting or no. As Warhol's Frankenstein put it: "To know life you must fuck death in the gall bladder."

It all took me back to Dushan Makaveyev's movies, esp. Sweet Movie, where, if memory serves correctly, there's actually an on-stage shitting contest, as well as a stabbing in a boat full of sugar and naked or bikini chicks in a vat of (one presumes) chocolate. A must see, if slow.

Heard in passing

9:45 AM Woman headed to cafeteria through courtyard at our office, Princeton. In a hopeful, aren't I clever tone of voice: "But you know, I keep getting all these notices from credit card companies about transferring my balance..." You go girl.

7:00 PM A neighborhood in town. A high-school guy Rodrigo, an uncomfortably obese high-schooler with a declared love of statistics and a demonstrated ability to stay up till 4AM, talks to his buddy on the sidewalk. The buddy, who sports a ponytail and glasses, says: "But you know, time is two-dimensional..." Poor dudes were not fighting off dates to have this conversation.

Breakthrough

Natalie can read. Some. Most importantly, she seems to want to and is actually trying. She picks up a lot of words.

It had been a long time since I had thought about how systematically perverse the English letter h is.

Consider these lilies:

• Hen
• The
• She
• Chew
• Through
• Tough
• Morph

It's almost as if h, in and of itself, spells trouble.

But not for Natalie.

Home and improvements

As I've said before in different ways, I hate home improvements. The only good justification for doing them rather than outsourcing and reading something productive is that one feels connected to one's home. Disalienation.

But is that just neo-peasant hoo ha? Do rich people who outsource all routine maintenance and concentrate on doing their own business lead less fulfilling lives? Is it even necessary to be tied to a house, a locale, to be fulfilled? Is it true that the rich, powerful, and fabulous are so miserable and isolated, as the myth of the earnest middle class -- supported by the scandalous tales of celebrity divorce and excess trumpeted in People and Us and the like -- would have us believe.

I don't know about the latter. And I'm probably too old to work real hard finding out. But I surely hate fixing stuff.

Interruptions

Barton Biggs cites studies that say that email impairs intellectual development.

20 somethings email and IM each other all day long. NY Times cites an instance of IM posting a question to an informal network (etymology of "pinging") that returned an answer as quickly as google.

It seems entirely plausible that individual intellectual development slowed by constant interruption. It sure feels right. But this is a heroic investor-intellect model, which some think is receding. But does collective knowledge suffer when the network is used as a mental prosthesis? Is one genius better than a highly interactive swarm?

The youngsters I work with are not stupider than I was at their age. Quite the contrary. But maybe they're just retro-oddballs.

At the end of the day, the truth is surely somewhere in the middle.

The Aristocrats

(this after watching 60-odd minutes of the movie)
So this guy walks in to an agent's office, nicely dressed, well-shaven, sits down and rests his fedora on his knee. His eyes sparkled. "Listen," he says to the agent, "I've got this fabulous act for you. It played in Peoria. It fairly bloomed in Bentonville. It brought down the house in Branson. Ashcroft and Jimmy Carter came on stage at the end and did a little jig as Amy Grant sang."

The agent, somewhat louche, stubbed out his cigarette on the ratty shag carpeting and said: "Tell me more."

"Well, for starters, it's called the Aristocrats."

"Be gone with ya, we book family acts," said the agent, reaching for his flask, as his Downs Syndrome-afflicted daughter lifted her head up from behind the desk, where she had been sucking his slightly green and shrivelled cock, and wiped from her face the blood spattered on it from jamming a can of WD40 into a orifice in his leg freshly bored by maggots.

"You tell em, pa!"

The moral story

The Times mag recently posted a story about the living wage movement inisinuating that it was to become the moral issue around which liberal politics would galvanize in the near future (i.e. 2008). Apparently, pushing the minimum wage issue as a moral rather than an economic issue gets people all riled up and moves em to the polls. "This is our gay marriage," said a leading activist.

Indeed it is, if by "gay marriage" we have in mind a seemingly black and white, moralizing issue which is used as a pernicious, demagogic red herring. Time was, interracial marriage, women voting, smoking and working, or the right of parents to beat the shit out of their kids were clear cut moral issues. Any time politics is aimed at the gut, look out.

If they're gonna make a moral thing out of it, might as well have some fun: peg the minimum wage on a percentage basis to the average pay of CEOs, to constrain the latter.

Raise the minimum wage, yes. Tomorrow. But keep your bible in your pants.

The meta lunchpail

I knew I was getting somewhere in life when people began to impugn what I was doing: "that's not real work," they said. "Why can't you program anything?" is very much like saying I don't swing a hammer.

It's the same deal for "action-oriented" or "implementation" consultancies like ours or, more likely, clients -- critique the McKinseys and BCGs of the world. "That's bullshit" or "Powerpooint jockies," they say. Everybody jokes about consultants being bullshit, even on the occasional TV commercial. Royal Bank of Scotland's "Make it Happen" series of ads is the same sentiment in I-banking. MBAs are another classic butt of jokes: "what the hell do they know? What does that MBA actually teach you?"

And yet, the strategy consultants and MBAs keep getting paid. When CEOs are confused, they call people who know how to help out at a high level. The whole idea of coming up with "tangible deliverables" is a production line mentality.

The Knitting Factory, NYC, 11 AM, 1/21/06

A matinee at the alt club. Ralph's World -- with Ralph growing his hair out a la Ric Ocasek -- takes the stage. On the floor, 150-175 odd moms, dads, and kids ranging from 1 to 8 sit Indian-style, waiting for the star.

And the band takes the stage all power pop, major keys, clean harmonies, and lyrics like: "la lal la la la la, I love lemonaid" and the like. Pure sweetness. A little louder than I would have thought. But it's frickin awesome. Kids pogoing up and down, acting along with Ralph's directions for such classics as the Barnyard Blues. One little 4-year old stood there with his mini-uke the whole time, not even smiling.

How odd, I thought, all this positivity in such an alt rock space, a space dedicated to noise, smoke, booze, and discord. And yet, there was perfect continuity. The parents had all lived through the alt aesthetic and come round, and, really, the apparent negativity and self-destructive introspection of the post-punk days always implied that it was at least worth caring, where the Top 40 chose to surf the shimmering surface of mass cultural vacuity. So it all made sense.

Natalie was shy at first sitting next to Beth, before the latter ferried Sadie out. Natalie stayed in place for a while in the crowded middle of the floor, took the hand of the 3-year old next to her, then held the girl's dad's hand for a while , danced danced danced, and then finally took my suggestion and joined the mosh pit with a bunch of other "older kids". She was fully in her element when Ralph hit a power chord and called out "Ring around the Rosie!" As if they had been planning it their whole lives, 10 little girls joined hands and went round and round, with big smiles.

Basketball notes

So Duke got beat by Georgetown. It's sort of a shame that the loss which will put a bee in the Blue Devil bonnet came from outside the conference. It just increases the probability that the cocky bastards will continue to dominate.

But it's hard to care since the conference has been diluted so with all these outsider teams that I can hardly remember. And no, I don't care that Miami beat Carolina. The Tar Heels have just been outperforming and are now reverting to the expected mean.

At the end of the day, it all comes back to that classic them: Carolina good, Duke evil.

I love Lisa Kudrow!

Bitch crack me up.

My block, v1

My block is in transition. Ten to fifteen years ago, it was probably all grad student rentals. Our house, for example, was let out to 5 grad students who put plastic on the windows and stuff like that. Fucked it up good. So some parts of the block are still like that, while others are people like us, -uppies who no longer justify the y, if indeed the p. Certainly not the u.

On the corner lives Toni Morrison. Or, rather, she owns the house. Nobody lives there. We never see her there. She put hundreds of thousands of dollars into sprucing the old house up, gutted it, but did nothing about the roof. Now, most evenings, there's a statuesque black Mercedes Benz planted out in the meticulously manicured paving stones of the driveway. The author herself! You might think. No, indeed, it is not. It is, rather, her son, who lives half a mile away with wife and kides, but likes to watch the big screen TV up at momsies. Is he sneaking away from bath and bedtime duties? Hard to say.

A crisis of traffic

Visits to the Grouse have abated by about 20% over the last month or two, and I feel that, on the one hand, it's entirely justified because my posts have been probably 20% less interesting, and on the other.... I forget.

As a response to this lull in what is otherwise breathtaking traffic (my legal team insists that I not disclose actual statistics), I think of sending out a broadcast email to my list to pump it up. In the short term, at least, I could generate more traffic that way. Problem is, I'm embarassed to direct traffic to a bunch of subpar writing.

Probably my brain is lulling a bit because, not only am I physically not going anywhere for the most part, but I'm reading work-related books in the evening, which makes me doubly boring.

And, obviously, the initial romance of the blog has passed, now I'm down to the grim reality of having implicitly promised multiple paragraphs a day, like a journalist in a land of no news.

Toothache

Toothache has long been a first-order philosophical problem. Dostoevskii's Underground Man frets about it at length, Wittgenstein treats it as an irrefutable data point in his musings around solipsism. One wonders if, in fact, toothache might make you deep. Dunno. I may have been deeper back when my teeth were less messed up.

Young people out there, one word: Floss.

Seen and heard

• NJTransit, Guy with a phone, v1
  A sixty year old would be hipster on the phone sat over by the window talking with a VerizonWireless, and so on. Talking loud and at length about how he had been ripped off: "The guy sold me this phone for $299 when there was another more Windows-compatible phone coming out in two months for $499. And I need that one for my business so I could receive attachments..." and so on and so on ad infinitum subjecting everyone around him to this pablum, driven more than anything, it would seem, by love of his own voice and desire to enrich the rest of us with it, because the rep at the other end of the call was surely in no position to cut a deal. I about ran out and joined the NRA.
  
  
• Young woman in a bodega, 12th and 7th
  "Your sign is wrong, right? It says you can buy cigarettes if you were born in 1988, but it should say 1987, right, cuz you gotta be 18?"
  Me: "But it's 2006. 2006 - 1988 = 18, right?"
  Her: "Oh yeah. I was never good at math."
  Tough math indeed.
  
  
• Soho House, 13th and 9th
  A degree of fabulous not often seen in Princeton. There's Itamar Kubovy, a guy cool enough to support a name like that lounging in a coctail booth when we come in. Over here a pair of skinny 47-year old blondes, just out for a Tuesday night cocktail, over there some Russian-looking 50-year olds with appropriately younger women. In general, a good deal of sashaying and slinking by the staff, irrespective of gender. On the way out the door, some wierd dude with big eyes and a seemingly painted on tan. No wait, that's Andrew Solomon, he of the Noonday Demon, at least seemingly less depressed. Would have said below, had Steve Kahn not been filling my ears with wisdom.
  
  
• Princeton, 2 am
  Graham, with some middle of night screetching, lets me view his long-awaited, long-resisted haircut. Looks comfortable.
  
  

Escape from Aristoville

John Corzine coronation as king of the fair Garden State takes place today, and of course he'd have to have the party in Princeton. Never mind that Trenton, where his office will soon be, is right next door, and is graced with many buildings which are designed to hold people. Most of them boast heat, running water, plumbing, etc.

So he comes to Princeton to have a party in the Princeton gym, which is, presumably, one of the smelliest buildings in our fair burg. And he snarls up traffic big time, just like football games would if they could ever fill the stadium.

Major traffic advisories for our few and narrow arteries. I'm off to the city.

Seen and heard

One tends to forget how much of a pain English orthography is. Walking across the street today a hispanic guy in a contractor van calls out to me: "How do you get to Hickstown Road?" And I'm thinking, what? He waves me over and shows me what he's talking about: "Hightstown Road." That's not a problem. English is painful, though.

At the restaurant last night, a sign on the dining room door said "Use Nixt Door." There's really no good excuse for that. That's just slack. The restaurant itself, Aladdin's Palace, is better than its spelling. Read Karla's review, that'll show ya.

Meanwhile, Princeton's Nassau St. now boasts 5 street-level vacancies, one of them 3 stories tall in a beautiful building. That's a lot. What is that telling us? Surely we need another specialty retailer, like the canine cooky store.

Longing

On the train yesterday, there was a girl/woman, right on the 18-19-20 year old border between the two, who was a perfect blend of Anne Preston and Sharon Bell from back in the day, when those two ruled the roost at Guy B. Phillips Junior High School, particularly those of us a year younger than them.

And I was transported back to a time before lust, when we were ruled by something that could only be termed longing, as if for ethereal medieval maidens, these doe-eyed, sharp-nosed Wasp icons in kelly green. To a time when the one we called "Cool" could stand on the street in front of Purdy's and inform us that he had been counting his pubic hairs and that he had gone above a hundred. Back to when we were all just getting started.

And the girl on the train was nestled up to a floppy, ruddy-cheeked dude in a knit cap, as if headed off to X-games qualifying. The dude I never quite was back then.

Some things that suck, v2

TIAA-CREF
So I want to take Mary's money out of her TIAA-CREF 403b and roll it over into an Fidelity IRA. That sounds OK, right? A normal transaction.

But TIAA-CREF doesn't want to make it easy. It's not clear how to do it on the website, so I try calling their 800 number: "Due to unexpected call volume associated with our mailing, we are experiencing delays." What the fuck is that! I'm supposed to pay with my time because they can't forecast call volume.

So the guy tells me where to go on the website. The *.pdf form I have to print out needs to be signed by Fidelity. So I'm going to send a piece of paper to Fidelity and have them sign in and send it to TIAA-CREF. In 2006. I don't think so? Don't they have computers?

And their website hangs. But then again, so do the 401k websites of Merrill Lynch and Prudential (Bysis). Nobody, it would seem, wants to really invest in small plan 401k functionality because, hey, why bother, once they've signed up, it's hard to leave. Why serve em?

Some things that suck, v1

Dr Scholl's slippers
I bought the Dr. Scholl's slippers at a discounter in Massachusetts, thinking, "Dr. Scholl's, that's a reputable enough brand. This will help me achieve my quota of 3 purchases in an hour." What I should have said to myself is: what is Dr. Scholl's main product? I would have remembered that, for sure, it ain't slippers.

What it is, of course, is inserts for shoes and other "foot care products". Perhaps that's why the slippers were in such a hurry to slide the furry lining aside and disclose their super-bouncy gel midsoles. I can see it now. A slick entrepreneur with a vision: inserts make slippers! A presentation to a board. A licensing deal...

A little empirical research: Dr. Scholl's is in fact a subsidiary of Schering-Plough, a New Jersey-based pharma company who, some may remember, got in all kinds of trouble with regulators back in 2003 due to its dubious marketing practices. The shoes are manufactured under a license held by Brown Shoes, an inspiring name. The slippers I bought aren't even listed on the DrSchollsShoes.com website. I don't think I need to keep digging.

The moral to the story: don't buy em.

Coming up next on Some things that suck: TIAA-CREF

The tender barber

The barber I go to a lot sets up a bar between Thanksgiving and Christmas. A card table with bottles of random seeming cheap liquors on it, vodka, whiskey, whatnot. I really don't pay much attention. Also snacks, such as Utz potato chips, cheez doodles, little powdered donuts.

Not a huge outlay, but a nice touch nonetheless. Quite fitting for a guy with a healthy salt and pepper handlebar moustache who can recognize the sound of Stan Kenton from a couple of bars.

I didn't make it by during the inter-holiday season this year, but I asked him about it the other day. Turns out the postwoman became his best friend during these happy days, stopping in for a daily nip of blackberry brandy to ward off the cold even though, usually, "she doesn't even say hello."

So that's how to win friends and influence people.

Token princess

Natalie got a Bella Ballerina video for Christmas that has a white chick, an Asian one, and a black one, all ca 5 or 6. At the beginning, for the warmup period, they're all in bright exercise clothes. Then, when they're actually doing ballet, the white and asian ones get pink lyotards and are shown continually on screen with their little foot placement mats and stretching bars. The black chick stays in exercise clothes, and the camera cuts over to her for rare one-second snippets.

What's going on here? Clearly, the young child of deeper color can't do ballet very well. So who did they think they were fooling with their pseudo-inclusivity? Are they too cheap to go out and find a black girl who's comfortable in toe shoes? I'll bet I could find one in a couple of hours. Morons.

Perhaps it's because the video is Australian? The Parter-Posey looking, braces-wearing, incredibly annoying Bella has an Australian accent. So maybe they couldn't find a black girl who could do ballet in Australia. But why bother including her. The sin of quasi-inclusion far outweighs that of ommission.

Home, sick

The seasonal onslaught continues. First Natalie yesterday, then Graham today, shared the contents of their stomachs with the rest of the household. Now I feel not too far from it, squished here on the couch between the languid Graham and the somewhat feistier Natalie, running through the Charlie Brown archives, half wishing I could find a porcelain god of my own, half cursing Mary for not having taken her cell phone on her walk so I could have her get some ginger ale.

I had never tapped Charles Schulz as a huge influence on Matt Groening, but there's a lot there, in terms of drawing style, if not quite a dissertation's worth. Though Peanuts is distinctly more kids' fare.

The Beat that my Heart Skipped

This recent French remake of the 1978 Harvey Keitel flick Fingers about a petty hoodlum torn between beating people up and playing piano (now I try to salvage this sentence) could have been a hell of a lot worse. You fear the guy's gonna get banged up, while pulling for him to make good on them ivories, even as he's a quivering chain-smoking bundle of neuroses. Classic white devil black devil on opposed shoulders stuff. This being France, the Tarantino-Oasis looking protagonist nails a number of attractive ladies, spaced appropriately across the 2-odd hours to insure that we're never too far from a little erotic intrigue. There are relatively few actual corpses.

Worth seeing.

Little peeps

At 4AM, Graham starts making noises, and I'm like: those are the kind of noises he makes when he rolls over and goes back to sleep. I'll do the same, I think.

5 minutes later. More screeching, so I go in to check it out. He's sitting up in bed: "Mommy, mommy", and I'm thinking: what now, a drink of water? Quite the contrary, a stream of brown vomit erupts from his mouth, which is rare, because I know he didn't encounter any allergens in his crib. So what do you do when your kid is puking? You pick him up, of course, and get a little bit of puke on you. Warm.

He's better today.

The Righteous one

Walter told Mary that one thing my dad and I have in common is that we're sure we're right all the time. I'm sure that was plenty true at one point in time, but I'm surprised that I still project that. I personally feel that I solicit other people's opinions all the time and have a pretty solid notion of where my expertise stops, which is roughly right at the edge of my non-trivial girth.

The one thing that may be confusing is that I long ago came to the conclusion that, insofar as there is no absolute truth and that nobody is ever absolutely right, that it does nobody any good to spend your whole day prefacing every statement with some lame caveat like "In my opinion" or "It seems to me" or "You may not share this belief, but..." No. Whatever you say, everybody knows it's just what you think, so why coddle it? Everyone is always seeking to generalize their opinions, advocating for their ideas. If you don't act like you believe what you're saying, you know nobody else is gonna.

But I think I'm able to implement this idea-marketing rather gently, much of the time. Unlike back in the day, when I was just hepped up. Funny that I seem otherwise.

Employee

The CEO of that mining company in West Virginia kept referring to the sole miner whose status ("deceased") was known at the time of the press conference last night as an "employee." Over and over again, with the discipline of a man who had conferred with counsel. What was he/they thinking? Why "employee"? In place of the guy's name? Because "miner" is too tragically loaded a term? "Employee".

One would think that, strictly speaking, the CEO should have called him a "former employee." Though he may have remained on the books, for the moment.

Smooth blending?

Kwame Anthony Appiah's cover piece in the Times magazine this last weekend: "A Case for Contamination", brings a fresh and welcome voice to the public discourse of cultural identity. Not that Appiah hasn't been around for a long time and highly respected too, both as Anthony and, upon subsequent consideration, as Kwame Anthony. I can't even say if he's changed his tune much, as I haven't read more than book reviews from his earlier work, though I always assumed that his book In my Father's House was in the cultural authenticity camp.

Not no mo. Appiah has come out swinging for a more or less modern/post-modern ethic and aesthetic of blending, largely of market determinism. Mostly, the gemeinschafft vision of a privileged and authentic agrarian way of life has been cut down. The problem, Appiah points out, is that nobody wants to be authentically cold, dirty, and disease-ridden. If this spells the death of cultural forms, so be it, people live better. Dallas and Baywatch hurt nobody, cuz the viewers have minds of their own.

But then, a couple of days later, reading the Economist on the fate of Finno-Ugric languages and the people who speak them, you've got to wonder: are there intrinsic benefits to keeping rare languages and cultures alive, as there are in the biosphere? Is there a cultural pharmaceutical industry which muddles through looking for rare ingredients? History shows that monocultures grow and are strengthened through encounters with resistance. Is not cultural authenticity such a pushing back?

In any case, it's good to see someone on the left veer back towards Enlightenment transparency, away from the neo-Herderian claptrap of the purveyors of pious particularity.

Doin her father proud

Tonight I read Natalie a book about dolphins, which described the Dolphin's use of "echolocation" to find things around it. I was about to point out to her how much this was like what bats do, when she goes: "Just like bats."

Yer dern tootin.

Not paying attention

Out for a walk with Leslie and Walter in Graham, we came across a guy who had a "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention" bumper sticker on a car, which sat next to its owner. That he was late 40iesish, standing outside smoking in cozy subdivision in a very high-net worth zip code didn't raise any ironic thoughts in the guy. He was proud of his bumper sticker.

But, irony aside, it made me think. Have I been outraged enough recently? Have I been paying enough attention? Certainly the grouse has wallowed in the domestic and apolitical for some time.

It doesn't mean that I don't recognize that Bush is evil incarnate or that we have no business whatsoever being in Iraq. I guess, more than anything, it indicates that I think that the vitriolic diatribe corner of the discourse and specifically blog market is pretty well served.

I will say, in passing, that the monotonic virulence and porno-intensity of the graffiti in a men's room on the Garden State Parkway the other night was pretty striking. Was it that W picked up none of the vote around there, or that lefty graffitists self select? Judging from the writing on those walls, W needs some baby oil, fast. And there will still be pain.

Oxtail Soup

For lunch today, a very nice oxtail soup made by a certain Eric Dennis, of Ciampino, Italy, at the old Dennis family homestead at West End and 103rd. Made from no recipe, just because Eric was thinking about how Oxtail soup must be made and has become so clever in the kitchen. With fresh bread and nuked snowpeas, followed by brownies, we were styling.

Meanwhile, daughter Emily, now 10, amused herself by pushing Eric's glasses off her dad's nose again and again and again, even after he said he was annoyed. Emily then gave Natalie and Grampa Bob an Italian lesson.

Oh yeah

Had lunch with my CEO today at Teriyaki Boy and he didn't even pick up the tab. And this one week after the only other would-be junior rainmaker in the firm walked for a job in Seattle.

Whassup with that?

The Holidays

Standing in the Unitarian Church in Wellesley, watching my sister singing in a dorky skit about carolers , it was hard not to start bawling from just thinking about how it must feel to her to have come through to the holidays, after what she's been through this last year, after her bout with near cancer. So I'm a sap.

The odd thing is, you tell people your sister went through that, they're like "uh-huh" or at best share a moment of pro forma piety, and then move right on. Because, fact is, everybody got somethin. Over here somebody's dad is dying of blastoma, over there a mom goes down to Parkinson's disease. At some point in time things tip and all of a sudden there's more death then birth going on, to say nothing of weddings. And near death starts to pale beside the real deal "the chemo worked? So shut yer cake hole" they may say.

I'm not quite there yet, though.

Happy New Year.

A mess of Natalies

Listening both to Dan Zanes's band and the New Pornographers recently, I have heard female singers who sound suspiciously like Natalie Merchant. I begin to suspect that she and the 10,000 Maniacs were a more influential band then I ever gave them credit for.

And surely Merchant is more likely to be behind the rapid growth of popularity of the name Natalie than her name-sharer Portman, who may one day soon complete puberty. The name, indeed has rocketed to #19 (#5 in California) on the Social Security charts since our own one was born, giving us the distressing if accurate sense of being trend participators rather than initiators.

Methinks the text protests too much

Reading a friend's manuscript about the history of Baltimore recently, found myself struggling to keep turning the pages. The author fairly overwhelms his subject matter with flashes of wit and daring and intellect, trying in every sentence to shine. So that each paragraph my easily contain 5 0r 6 mini-performances, and the paragraphs themselves pile up on the themselves numerous pages. It all begs the questions: what is he writing for, and what is he writing about? Style obstructs content, or doesn't let it flower.

This is a pretty valuable lesson, dialling back the style. If what you have to say is worth saying, then you don't need to work it too hard, just like how those with both buff bods and a strong sense of self needn't parade their abs and other marquis muscles.

And you have to know when to stop.

The morning after

Must prepare to officiate shotgun wedding of my mother and David Ontjes, thrown together by Natalie and Caroline as an excuse for a flower-making art project and also to be flower girls. Graham has been appointed ringbearer, as it is believed he will run straight to David, to whom he has taken a proverbial shine.

Should probably shave.

Meanwhile, contemplating dash to mall to pick up all the eminently giftable items that I actually need, but which fell victim to the emerging ban on present-giving amongst adult members of the family.

On the road

Hitting the road for Wellesley shortly. Must find presents for Caroline and mom. Where did I put them?

Watching Christmas Vacation the other night, scene where Clark W. Griswold discovers an anniversary present stashed in his favorite secret spot in the chimney. Perhaps not too far off indeed.

Bedtime

Some time ago it occurred to me that this blog was not so much a stopgap and supplement to my memory which, fade though it may in time, will nonetheless better recall the events of these years than will those of the kids, for whom childhood will likely blur into a morass of indifferentiation and exposed nerves.

So I'm gonna try to transcribe some rituals.

First: Bedtime, ca 12/05

7:00-7:15PM Told it's time to go upstairs, Natalie waffles and defers until I say: "I'll beat you to the top!" Then, she runs, declaring: "No you willn't". Somehow, she always wins. Graham may or may not follow, depending on his mood.

Next hurdle. Getting her in her jammies. Various tactics attempted until one works.

The reading of stories. On Granny's bed. Natalie closest to the lamp. Somewhere into the first book, Graham shows up and plunks on a pillow to my left. Maximum 3 books, depending on the length. When the book(s) are done, Natalie lays on me and says: I'm not getting up until you read me another book or give me a piggyback ride. It's always the piggyback that wins. Upon hearing "piggyback," Graham also wants one. Natalie first.

7:40-7:45 Piggyback into bathroom (alternately, into "our guys' room" to be thrown on bed). Natalie flicks on the light from position on my back. I put her down standing on the toilet seat, where I brush her teeth, kissing her on forehead at the end. Graham, all the while, tries to put cups and boats underneath tap and turn it on, which he cannot. Graham refuses brushing.

7:45-7:50 Back on Granny's bed, time for Graham's stories. Always 3 shorter books. Perhaps preceded or succeeded by a game of "hide and seek", blankies over our heads. Graham usually knows the last word of each rhyming line, and reads it with me or instead of me. When over, another piggyback. Then diaper change. Then bed. 2x Rock-a-Bye baby, perhaps him singing along. Demand for water. Whatever pacy he's given, he wants another one. If lucky, door closes without event.

8:00-8:10 Time to snuggle with Natalie. Perhaps tell a story with stuffed animals: "Once upon a time there was a bear who was sitting on a log..." After a while, give two minute warning. Natalie climbs on or leans against my back. She may purchase 1 additional minute by walking on my lower back. As end approaches, I ask for the magic word. This is typically long and hard to remember: "Unicorn unicorn star, unicorn unicorn fairy, star, Caroline, Allison, Caroline, Allison, princess princess flower" Would be a short and easy one, with typical components. Once I nail the magic word, I can give up, but only after kissing her a fixed (often 14) number of times while counting in Spanish, German, Serbo-Croatian, or some other language.

Spirit of the Holidays

Vaguely hallucinatory, the taste of envelope glue on my tongue, listening to ethereal medieval Hungarian kyries over and over again, writing our four names out in various orders next to a picture of the kids on the stairs.

One of the best things I do all year.

Robert Maguire, in Memoriam

Reading Elizabeth's manuscript for a book on Moscow I learned that Robert Maguire, longtime fixture of the Columbia Slavics department, had passed away at 75 or something back in September. Maguire advised me on my master's thesis on Ilya Kabakov way back in the early 90s, though he knew nothing of contemporary art. Nor did anyone. That's what made it such a great topic.

I always saw Maguire as a gay combination of the John Houseman Paper Chase character and Sherm from MASH, torn between a desire to be stiff and crusty and a native tendency to kick back and gossip. I think he half thought he wanted to teach, where he really wanted to perform. Certainly he was a finicky and thorough scholar. He was often in his office with door open on Friday afternoons and ever ready to thoroughly chew the fat amidst the dust and books of a classic professorial office.

I bought his translation of Dead Souls some weeks before his death.

He was a good guy.

Some sick kind of pastoral

There we were, in the parking lot of the big boxes on Rte 1 in the wan orange light of a December mid-Atlantic sunset. Across many rows of cars, over in the WalMart area, gulls gathered, circled and dove down at something tasty.

We sat in the car and listened to the Peanuts theme as the car's heat slowly dissipated, and as Natalie gassed herself up with a cereal bar and some milk before we headed into the dollar store to blow all of her tooth fairy money in one fell swoop. Perhaps because I had recently exercised, perhaps because it was just the two of us, a rarity, it was peaceful and lovely.

The Meaning of the Grouse

Eat your pineapples,
Chew your grouse,
Your last days are coming,
You bourgeois louse.

- Mayakovsky, 1913 or so

I think everybody always assumes that the Grouse in question on this blog is a verb. It is, in fact, a bird, and looking back at the Mayakovsky, we can clearly see this was some sort of luxury bird back in the day in Russia. Grouse chewing was sort of an apocalyptic thing for the rad young Marxist.

For me, by now, the stakes are kind of different. While I've never actually had grouse literally, I must confess I am generally pro-grouse and wish in fact that there was -- if not a grouse in every pot -- at least a hearty soy-based substitute.

So that the themes that permeate this blog would appear in some sense nostalgic or even conservative, arguing in favor of preserving:

1. The so-called environment
2. The way we live -- our house, financial stability, my frickin teeth, etc.
   
3. The America I thought I grew up in, characterized by open-mindedness and tolerance, both in somewhat short supply of late.
4. A sense of curiosity about things not going on around me, or going on not around me
   

The point is, in the end, for it to be worth Graham and Natalie's while to be living in this overpaved land of blockbuster releases 30 years out, to defer Mayakovsky's last day.

We believe in God, right?

So asks Natalie at the breakfast table not long ago. What am I supposed to say? Should I say, no, we don't, we're Episcopalians?

Who put these ideas into her head? The devout 5-year olds of Princeton? Do I take her to church now?

Or do I just pretend it never happened: "Could you pass the butter?"

Insulation Contractor

What can we say? He might as well IPO, cuz he's pretty transparent already. Blown insulation, fiberglass bats, you name it. Basically has a monopoly for Central Jersey.

• Never been investigated by Better Business Bureau (told me thrice)
• Other business, foam wholesaling, has $500k-$700k monthly revenues
• Plans to install fixed LAN with no wireless in new office (ironically, "for security reasons")
  
• Truck cost $80K: "What'm I gonna do, have some Mexican drive it around?"
• 30-yr old Lithuanian wife recently returned from a visit to the old country with an illegal and non-spousally sanctioned breast augmentation (this he told Mary)
• Used to work in asset-backed securities for Citigroup
• Partial to pork roll and cheese
• Fails to clean up mess made by team at dining room table
• Gets dust all over everything, doesn't bother covering with tarp.
  
• Kentucky-based partner, the IT guy, has been charged with some sort of sexual advances on a 12-year old: ("I know it ain't true, the guy's got 3 kids and I see him with them. But he's gonna need a lawyer.") The guy also recently diagnosed with liver cancer.
• Office without walls:
  
• Makes or takes "600" calls a day on cell phone (uh huh).
• Likes to print documents at other people's house
• Forgets to patch up holes in the wall on the third floor
  

Princeton Record Exchange, 12/12/05 12:42 PM

I went to the Princeton Record Exchange today at lunch, though I probably could have gotten the the Charlie Brown DVD by the register and Starbucks and gotten a good solid cup of coffee too. My thinking was to patronize a local establishment, and deny Amazon some portion of my media wallet share.

As I strolled through the shop, I passed records of days gone by: the Descendents, Dinosaur Jr. It was dim and dusty. Ornette Coleman was a blaring. The black clad staff were a glaring. Especially the guy who still looks like he's still cheesed off for not getting cast in Spinal Tap. Time had stopped, just like it does in some diners, but in a different place.

And I found myself thinking: are indie record stores valuable archives of musical diversity, great centers of resistence to relentless corporatization, or are they just mouldering relics of a great moment in cultural history which has passed?

nb. Got the Peanuts. Natalie has taken to track 8, the wonderfully naive "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."

A Griswold am I, pt II, or the white lights

Back at the house, Mary began to search for the white fairy lights we string along the porch. She looked for them for some time, digging through the attic, muttering under her breath unintelligibly, thankfully. I hung the wreath and whatever you want to call that stuff around the door.

Time to put tree in stand. Natalie is very excited. Is it the tree? Is it the present for mom? Who knows. Out on the porch, it's cold. It quickly becomes apparent that this stand is not going to work with this tree. The tree is too scrawny. Thank god for Ace, 5 minutes away, saving me from the throngs in the big boxes.

The precious nap time was passing. One of us needed to exercise. I went. It was colder outside than I had thought. I wasn't able to cheat and slow down and walk as much as I like, just in order to maintain a good core temp. When I got back, Mary glared at me with only a hint of love. Turns out, I had brought the white lights down earlier. "At least you organized the attic some," I offered. This silver lining was not too shiny.

At long last, it was time to decorate the tree, but sadly I couldn't find the music from the Charle Brown Christmas, which is our traditional accompaniment. Mary liked her present from Natalie. Nice tree, if not exactly what we usually get.

Kids dinner, and it's time to string the white lights outside, around the columns and along the tops of the porch. Mary vetos the dangling strand of white bulbs I called the "tendril of light." It's cold as hell, but at the end, I had the warm feeling of neighborhood beautification and homeowner's pride. I go in and get Mary, then the kids, one by one, and show them the house all bedecked with glow. Clark W. Griswold indeed.

A Griswold am I, pt 1

Yesterday was pretty much taken up with getting the Christmas tree and decorations in gear. As per usual, a number of mishaps befell us.

10:00AM Natalie and I were all excited to wrap up the new ornaments (bird and butterfly) that Natalie had picked out for Mary during our rare cameo at the mall. She selected a lovely blue wrapping paper with sparkly snowflakes and we did as fine a wrapping job as a 5-year old and a ham handed dad (I had trouble tying the bow) can do. While grabbing scissors from the ground floor, I took a couple of boxes of Xmas stuff from the attic downstairs, without really looking at them.

11:00AM Mary, annoyed that I took kids upstairs when we could have been taking Xmas picture in the "good light" (photographer speak), declares it's time to get tree. Off we go to tree farm, where all is mighty picturesque in the snow and we ride in an ATV through streams and gullies, but all the live trees are pretty scrawny. One of the pre-cut ones is OK, and we grab it out from beneath this other family, who are sizing it up, on a "we were there first" basis.

Feet are cold. There are horses in the snow, to delight of kids. Men are loading hay into barn. One declares need to take his wife to work, but he'll be back in an hour, a prospect with dubious economics. Two 12- year old boys in overalls by the barn are discussing the fine points of physics, with a youthful openmindedness that CEOs would love to rekindle: "Imagine if, instead of going down, things went up!"

Tree on car. Home for naptime.

Next time: searching for the white lights.

Snow day

As promised, snow arrived last night, after 4am, to be sure, cuz I was up and peaked out the window. And the whole of Princeton was a winter frickin wonderland, even though it's technically fall. I guess Princeton isn't very technical.

And now Mary's off to Manhattan to have dinner with the Yale photo mafia of the early 90s, so I'm here at the house with Graham, who's staying in his crib long after waking from his nap, calling out occasionally for me or mom or Natalie. It smells like he pooped, but he didn't. We've been getting a lot of that recently.

It's calm, but soon Natalie will burst in from sledding and playing dress-up at Helen and Margaret's, and it will flow straight through till dinner.

OK. Now Graham's being fairly insistent with his "Dad!"

Hard to believe

At a seminar today at the Princeton/Columbia Club on 43rd -- a pretty hideous place, I'll have you know -- on Counterparty Risk Management or, how not to get burned by a Refco, and in strolls this woman from a hedge fund that shares its name with a beer. Asian woman. Got one of these full-sized computer notepad thingies.

And she asks a lot of questions of the speakers. Stupid questions. And shares here own experience freely. How she bought Refco at 10. Lost whole position. Sometimes she trades like that. Still, hey, she's up 15% for the year, so it's OK, ha ha.

And she made a lot of noise clicking on her little notepad thingie, especially when she was playing solitaire. And then she checks voicemail. And then her slinkie little Ipod phone rings -- and she's forgotten to put it on vibrate.

It a was pretty astonishing performance, verging on psychopathic. Luckily, I wasn't the only one that noticed it.

The Restaurant proves Russian

Why was I not shocked?

Off in a group of 6 on a covert mission to evaluate New Jersey eateries for a certain newspaper which we will refer to only as one of the three papers of record as part of the research team of our neighborhood critic, who shall be called Jane. Drive down to Cherry Hill to an utterly non-descript strip mall. The decor was odd. They had not litres of Pellegrino. The salads were eclectic. Funky dishes. Somewhat innovative. Not altogether successful.

Waiter has a clearly Slavic accent. Is he Serbian? No. Russian, it turns out (how had I missed it?). Suddenly, it all fell into place. I felt right at home, and the proprietor is my new best friend: "You understand deep soul of Russia, my friend."

At least we can say that the menu didn't choke on adjectives.

Teach your children, well

A Times article on Wilton, CT cites the woodsy little community's dedication to fine and performing arts education. A common theme, fine and performing arts. The crown jewel in a wealthy and tony little town's crown, a way of saying "our kids don't have to worry about getting jobs." Is this trend just a fetish of the upper-middle and upper classes? A class marker pure and simple?

My mind flashes back to Yale this last spring. A small town educator asked a panel including Yale President Richard "Rick" Levin and Pepsico President Indra Nooyi what his school system should be focusing on, and the two looked at each other significantly, leaned their heads together and chimed together "Math and Science."

On the one hand, all the press has foregrounded America's deficit in math and science education and the risk it poses to future productivity. On the other hand, the American elite thinks itself philistine and so pursues refinement.

I myself, possessed of a PhD in Russian Literature, am forever conflicted by the fact that, on the one hand, math kinda sucks, and, on the other, working in financial services means advanced math would be rather useful. Very useful, in fact.

Green Baywatch and Indian car culture

An article in the Times on the emerging car culture in India reminded me of one of my superdeeduperdee ideas from the 90s: Green Baywatch. Those were the days, of course, when Baywatch was the world's most watched and loved program, when Hasselhof, Anderson, and Bleeth were prominent ambassadors of the American way. Why not, I postulated, throw together an ecofriendly version of the show, where buff boys and girls rode about on bikes catching industrialists and other eco-fiends, all while jiggling and flexing. This would be a great way to promulgate sustainable values to the developing world, to show poorer nations that wealth need not necessarily be objectified in steel and asphalt.

Alas, such a show was never meant for this world. In the era of Mecca Cola and widespread disgust with American foreign policy and culture, Anderson's breasts have diminished moral authority. Internet pornography has made it easier for people the world around to find jiggling without consulting their television schedules. A great opportunity to stem environmental decline has been squandered.

Next week: The Fast and the Furious: the Footrace

Snow

It was supposed to snow last night. It did.

I knew I should have brought the car seats in off the back porch. I didn't. Not too too much snow on em, though.

It was a slushy, dense snow, more suited to snowpersons than sledding. So we did both.

Graham, for once, let Mary put a hat on him. But his mittens, which were suspiciously ill-functioning and photogenic (given Mary's stated intent to grab a camera), kept coming off. So he was cold quickly and didn't fight coming back inside for lunch and the nap which, inexorably, follows it. I'm gonna work such a nap into my next contract.

Dental hijinks

Went to the dentist this morning. It's a 15-mile drive, but a pretty one, and this is the tough love guy who pretty much saved my teeth seven years or so ago. Farzaneh, my personal dental technician, shot some computerized and then gave me a cleaning while cooing about how good I had become (by contrast with the now long gone days a dental neglect). And indeed, from my POV, the cleaning was quick and painless.

And then in comes dentist man, all firm handshake and psychotic piercing blue eyes, pokes around my gums with the sharp thing and then sits down to look at the x-rays. All good...
Except for these small areas on the sides these molars. Ca $600, twill be.

So, just like last year, I'll come back in January when my new pot of FSA money kicks in. Aside from being a good dentist, he's a good businessman: shoot xrays at the end of the year, when insurance-free people will have tax-preferred money coming available. Get the cash before the other health service providers do.

He's a good dentist, but he lacks the rabbinical presence of my periodontist. More on that later.

Ivory and ebony

The question of race and children's commodities is at once more complex and simpler than you would think. Books, toys the like.

I remember when we were headed to the house of a black classmate of Natalie's, we were a little uncertain of what kind of book to give: it was odd, it seemed, to give a book of all white kids cavorting about in some idealized pseudo-agrarian land of plenty, of which there is no shortage. But then we get there and what to they have, Mary Kate and Ashley, Barbie out the wazoo, and so on. No offense, apparently, taken.

The other day I saw a mother with three little black girls dolled up going to Nutcracker, with its neo-imperialist spectacle of Clara and the prince or whoever sitting up on thrones watching the dances of the Chinaman, the Russian, and so on. Sugar plum fairies are clearly universal, as the Allen Blooms of this world could have told us.

I'll tell you this, when selecting children's books, I reflexively turn away from books with kids of mixed race, because I need to choose quickly, and the overwhelming trend of these books is towards cloying politically correct hoo ha. All black or all hispanic books or all Asian books are less likely to be revoltingly pious.