They came by butterfly

It was one of those evenings for which God most likely would have invented New Jersey, had He existed.* 65 and mild in the backyard, flowers a bloom, sandbox. A new visor from Elijah's 5th birthday party. Dinner at the picnic table.

And then, from behind the walnut tree, they came flying on the backs of butterflies, the fearsome aliens.




*And I do mean He, as male is the gender most consonant with absence. If God were a woman, She would exist.

It's pathetic

but typical that it's a fine spring day, and I should be headed home, but I'm stuck in this lame basement fulfilling a contractual obligation to text production. I in fact have nothing to say which fits within the confines of bloggable material, oodles outside of it. But that's another story.

Our nation's capital

Union Station, where 20 years ago, after I had hit a bowl coming off the Amtrak going between New Haven and Chapel Hill, this guy picks me out of a crowd from across the room and says, "Hey, dude, come here, I've got the stickiest, hairiest bud. Here, smell my fingers" I swear that's what he says to me, and like an idiot I do and I give him a twenty for an eighth or something, and he says: "Wait right here, I'll be back." So I wait. And wait. And my train's supposed to leave and where's my dude and my eighth and I run back to the train and barely make it on, swearing and cursing, having somewhat learned my lesson.

A cab in Washington is $6.50 anywhere downtown. In Princeton it's like $16 from the train station to my house. If only this could be arbed.

There are all these well-coiffed prewar and International Style apt buildings, but where do the people buy milk and cheese doodles, I ask you. There are no convenience stores. Don't get it.

Much to do

Must bustle to get ready to head out of town. Check train schedule. Pick up suit. Confer with elders.

And in the middle of that write a note to my godfather, who is apparently in, shall we say, rather poor health. He who gave me my guitar. I haven't seen him for years. He didn't make it up to my wedding, though he bankrolled a good little chunk of our honeymoon in Italy. It is an odd chore to dash off a note to someone whom you may never see again, particularly in the middle of making calls to various recalcitrant would-be clients, like the one who said she would call me back in two minutes 3 hours ago. From the sublime to the ridiculous, as the Hegelians would say, is but a shlep.

Hear here

I got a piece of mail on Saturday that looked like junk mail, until I saw a sticker on it that said "From Chad Ludington." That's a diabolical marketing ploy, I thought. In fact, it was no ploy at all. Inside was a brochure and a letter from Chad, in which he courageously writes that he has been losing his hearing for the past 15 years and has set a goal for himself to raise a million dollars to fight hearing loss.

Chad is the only person to have been with me in childhood, at college, and in graduate school. His father, the so-called "Townie", placed me at left-halfback on my first day of soccer back in 1972, a decision from which I've almost recovered. At 15 years, Chad's hearing malady was not long-enough running to account for his scandalous inability to dunk when he returned from Exeter at 6'4" in 1980, but nor did it stop Chad from waxing me 15-0 one-on-one in 1990 (I think I hit the backboard once). This was during a period when I had momentary delusions of ball. Chad cured me of those.

Around 35 million Americans suffer from hearing loss, and that's just Americans. 80% of all hearing loss is sensironeural in nature, which implies that focused research could have a real impact, and indeed real progress has been made in the last few years. To date, the National Organization for Hearing Research Foundation has raised $7.5 million. This modest capitalization means that the marginal impact of every dollar donated is high, and there's a good chance that it can help fund a solution.

So I ask you all today to help Chad work towards his goal of raising a million for a cure by donating by credit card or check to the:

National Organization for Hearing Research Foundation
225 Haverford Avenue
Suite #1
Narbeth, PA 19072-2234

And stick Chad's name in the comment field so he'll know when he's reached his initial goal, on the way to his ultimate goal of a cure.

Fresh Air, no Terry Gross

Brow furrowed, work on the lobe, I piled into the car and stuck in the new CD Kevin had handed me last week. Through the funk cuts the unmistakeable, undulcet tones of Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields: All the Umbrellas in London. There's nothing like a good song to reconfigure everything and put you, as they say, in the moment. Though which moment you're in is unclear. Could be a vision of the future, or, with an oldie, or, as the Magnetic Fields are wont to write, a pseudo-oldie, in an alternate time and space. Whatever. Gotta like it.

Whatever it is, it's better than the present of work, if not the the alternate competing futures to which work might lead. A little holiday.

Sometimes I think, rather Bachelardianly, of the car as an extension of my skull.

Clubland

Wednesday AM The Nassau Club, Princeton
Wednesday PM The Harvard Club, NYC
Thursday AMPM The Princeton-Columbia Club, NYC

At some point in time today I came out of the bathroom and saw a portrait of Princeton prez Shirley Tilghman and I was, like, what's that doing in the Harvard Club? Then I remembered where I was.

In these clubs, people aren't popping ecstasy and drinking Red Bull drinks. No sir. It's all about suits, business cards, hand-waving, and prognosticating. What they share with night clubs is attitude, including ladies with attitude, like the skinny blonde bitch from Pacific Investment Management with a powder blue blackberry and a ridiculous scarf knotted around her neck. I didn't waste breath getting her card, of that you can be sure.

The Harvard Club sports an obscene amount of Crimson. It's like, OK, I get it. Nice book-filled rooms. The Princeton-Columbia Club, on the other hand, is decorated like something out of A Family Affair. Kinda lacks flavor. Food OK in each.

Jobs jobs jobs

In Silver Spring we saw signs on the side of buses: "Cable means 10s of thousands of stable jobs", sure it does. Until a disruptive technology blows it out of the water. Or, alternately, cable becomes a counterproductive legacy with lots of overhead, and a net cost. Could be. Don't get me wrong, I love my cable, even if Mary wants to get rid of it and we really don't watch it, but producing jobs is not a reason to patronize something. Producing value is. Similarly, on the side of 95 coming North into Philly there were pro-dredging signs which cited job production as a rationale. Idiocy. Dredging is good or it isn't. What kind of next jobs would come out of a terminal dredging project? Lots of skilled dredgers? Job creation is not a good rationale for utility selection or public works, particularly when unemployment is 4.7%.

The 1979 Accord

At mom's house over the weekend, going through the tons of crap that's been waiting for me in the attic lo these many years, I found a 1979 copy of Road Test magazine, which reported on all the hottest cars of the year. I did a little research on gas mileage from back in the day, which I remembered as being a lot more impressive than what we get on average these days, which makes no sense, given how much more power we can get with less now. And indeed, I found clunky looking Chryslers getting 37 mpg on the highway, 31 around town. What was striking was how hard I had look for mileage info in those post oil-embargo days. It wasn't featured all that prominently in the ads or in the reviews.

But there was the '79 Accord, its horsepower boosted from 68 to 72. Ready to rock. The 2006 starts at 166, ranges up to 244. Driving Cyrus' felt like being in a frickin Firebird. Impress your friends with your macho Accord. yeah right.

In country

Had coffee with my dad in Hillsboro. Ironically, dad finds himself once again in a Volvo, years after distributing framed quotes from Trevanian disparaging them as not worth driving.

Headed north to Roxboro to meet Mary and Mom in Roxboro. Stopped for a Cheerwine at convenience store. Woman at counter was from the West Bank.

Turned East on 57, into the country. Pine trees, dogwoods, green springing out. Passed taxidermy shops, antique store, general store, hair salons running out of trailers. Country. Oldsmobiles with huge shiny bling wheels, a style feature I associated with the other ghetto. Signs for the county sherriff race, in which a guy named Dempsy faced down another named Duffy.

In Roxboro, stopped at Pete's Sandwich Shop to get burgers "all the way" (i.e. chili, slaw, mustard, onions). It takes 20 minutes, as regulars come in and order around me, and the counter girl gets them hot dog after hot dog as our burgers got overdone. Reminded me of what it's like to be an outsider in an insular small town, as my mother was when she came back to Roxboro after her divorce to perk up the business grandfather had founded in his retirement as an excuse to get out of the house, drink, and play cards in the day time: the trailer parks. But that'll have to wait for another grouse.

Itinerary

4/13 4:04PM Go home, pissed for missing train
4/13 5:15 Undeterred by sane counsel, head off from Princeton into NY Metro rush hour to cross Hudson, into Westchester
4/13 7:30 Arrive Larchmont. Rush hour has added 30 minutes to normal trip
4/13 8:00 Read stories. Graham under blankie between legs during Natalie's
4/14 1:30AM Stupid cat meowing at top of stairs
4/14 8:55 Depart Larchmont for Princeton
4/14 10:30 Arrive Princeton. Pick out outfits for dinner. Get sandwiches from Wild Oats.
4/14 11:30 Depart Princeton for Philly airport
4/14 12:05 Try to eat shitty roast beef sandwich. No mayo.
4/14 12:25 Arrive Philly airport. Get Mayo.
4/14 2:15 Depart Philly. In flight listen to blonde teenagers provide good argument for why America is doomed: "Wouldn't it be totally sweet to, like, have a private plane?" "Like, totally sweet."
4/14 3:55 Arrive RDU
4/14 4:30 Arrive Chapel Hill

Motherfucking NJ Transit

The train had just got there when I got to the Dinky and started buying my ticket. By the time the ticket was done, the train took off. No "All aboard." No nothing. Jackass.

70th and 10th, 6:30 pm 4/11/06

So it's Johnny's birthday, and I go and meet him a dive bar that he favors at 73rd and Amsterdam. "I'm gonna have to cut out at 6, he tells me."

5:30 I get there, he's gone around the corner to smoke a joint.
6:15 Wife calls. He needs to got pick up kid at school. I walk with. We pick up Jacob. He needs to feed the kid. Burger King, naturally.

On the street, Johnny's telling me how he's now the man at work, where they've got half a billion dollars to invest in hedge funds and traders.

Behind us, a guy who looks kinda like Huey Lewis is listening. He bustles up to us.
"Excuse me, I couldnt' help overhearing. I used to be trader at Tudor (a big fund), I'm trying to get back into it." Johnny gives card, invites follow up, goes into BK Lounge for Kingnuggets and fries.

Trader man continues to regale me with anecdotes. Was with Tudor. Founded own shop in World Trade Center. Whoops. Got rear-ended and fucked up his back. On and on.

I try to get away. He comes into BK and hits Johnny with more and more qs. Like a pit bull. Nearly psychotic. Maybe you want that in a trader.

Drunks in a bar

Don't spend much time in them, so I forget what it's like, the delusional conviviality, the tragic lameness of it all. A woman sat there at the corner of the bar for some time. Not particularly attractive, as those who sit at bars a lot tend not to be, but it turns out everybody knew her, and recounted meetings at other bars. Then she got a quarter to use the pay phone on the wall. As I watched her, it took a little while to sink in, what she was doing. That's how long it had been since I saw a pay phone.

One guy recounted how he had had a burger, and then two hot dogs, and they were awesome.

And so on. I left.

Blonde lives

They each looked a little bit like Sharon Stone, sitting there on one of the nearly vertical end seats of the NE Corridor 7:01 Express. Like Stone worn down, with brown freckles from too much sun and the haughty disdain for those less blonde and a half disbelief that they were on the train at all. Sporting an odd amalgam of business and club wear. Had they been "working"? Would they drink a buttery Chardonnay when they got home? One had to wonder.

Home alone

Having the house to yourself seems like such a great idea. It's quiet. You're not driven by the same routines. You can watch sports.

But it's sort of barren too, and seems to foreshadow the days of empty nest which lie ahead, the quiet despair that Elivs Costello and John Cheever write about.

Better see what's on Comedy Central.

Lecture

Boris Mikhailovich Gasparov
Columbia University
*Lecture: “History of a Triplet. Pasternak and Scriabin”

245 East Pyne

Gotta go.

Tsunami

A giant sucking sound, so they say. Huge choo choo train project in Omaha. Unprecedently huge choo choo train project in Chicago. And nobody wants to work on them. What to do? Will there be a place for budding practice areas like mine?

I know this isn't what anybody wants to read about on a blog, but it's to think about anything else. And I gotta post something.

Madison & 44th, 11:57AM

Zip-up suede coat with some funky collar. Herringbone pants. Heels of some sort. Fade-up sleek moderne wraparound shades. Sixty years old if she was a day. Strutting like a member of Fat Albert's crew, pumping up and down I swear to God. You don't see women work it like that but so often, expecially of that vintage.

At least not out here in demure Princeton.

Her'd on the street

On Witherspoon today, under the lovely white blooms of whatever those trees are, passed by the wife of a prominent local poet, a person whom I've met maybe 50 times over 6 years. A woman at one time known for dropping off her kids at my neighbor's house with no prior warning so she could go, for example, shopping. She walked right past, refusing eye contact.

What's up with that?
Are people really that oblivious?
Or do they just work hard to pretend?

In any case, I hope she's gotten over the insane jealousy which beset her when the launch of her passably-reviewed novel was completely overshadowed by the bestselling debut novel of Curtis Sittenfeld. I know that was hard.

Into the belly of the beast

Soccer has begun. A couple of weeks ago we got Natalie her first cleats and shin guards and socks. Which she tried to wear to bed. For a while it looked like soccer might have been nothing but an accessorizing opportunity, but maybe she will actually get into the game.

9AM Saturday. Soccer time. Off to the Y we go. Whoops! It's not at the Y, it's at the park, of course. Off to the park we go. But, this being New Jersey, you cannot park at the park. So we park on the street.

Down on the field, swarming. By the sign-up table, even more. She's on team B-10, which is on field 10, as depicted on the schematic drawing. But out on the field, swarming. Which is field 10? Dunno. There's Lauren on field 6. We'll go there.

Ball put in play. Swarming. Run here, run there. There are girls to whom it comes naturally. Natalie is not one of them. When the ball is thrown at her, she shrieks, she quails, she flashes those pearly whites. Afterwards, a play date...

The scene changes. Sunday. Back yard. For years Natalie has resisted entreaties from dad to play soccer. No longer. It's time to play kick the ball in the goal. Three goals means you get a goal. Goals don't count if the goalie touches it before it goes into the goal. And so on. A little enthusiasm.

From his perch in the sandbox, Graham observes...

Talking to the IRS

My refund did not show up in my account for the second week running, so the Santa Barbara Bank & Trust (how did they score this gig). So I called up the IRS and talked to operator #5201945 (or so she said). And they're telling me they never received my check for capital gains. And it's not reflected in either of my checking accounts. Hmmm.

Who is this man?

At Bank of America's site, today, counting my scant nickels, when whom should I chance to espy but the fellow up top, kicking it with a cup of joe and a laptop. Which struck me as ironic, given his striking resemblance to this dude below, a certain David E. Shaw, founder and grand poo-bah of D.E. Shaw, one of the oldest quant shops on Wall Street. Ironic, you say, why so? Perhaps because Shaw, back in '97, had established an alliance with BofA, allowing it to play derivative games much like the ones played by John Meriweather's Long-Term Capital Management. When LTCM gave new meaning to the term systemic risk on August of '98, Shaw sustained similar losses, ultimately resulting in a $372 million write-off that nearly scuttled the BofA - Nationsbank merger. Substantial bloodletting ensued at Shaw, rumored to have reached 25% of staff in a single day, 90% overall.

Shaw has bounced back just fine, and is not poor. He continues to be able to hire smart people, and even bought FAO Schwarz, the ultimate toybox. But I didn't expect to see him poster-childing for BofA.

Pro forma post

Well, it's the end of another day and I've got nothing really to write about, only a perverse feeling that I've got to churn something out.

Highlights of the day include:

• Staring at my screen trying to decide whether to call or email these hedge fund dudes I went to college with.
• Settling on the email method
  
• Obsessively editing the email to make sure it hits the right notes
• Sending it

It's striking how agonizing it can be to initiate discourse with people you don't know.

But hell, it's spring. Lunch on the piazza.

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.