Notes in brief

• Just read Josephine Tey's first novel, the 1926 The Man in the Queue. Good stuff, different groove.
• Last weekend's flick here at the crib was Zach and Miri Make a Porno. Worth watching, though formulaic.
• David and I were out on the tennis courts today at the high school. This rather large woman came out of the building at 5:01 and fastidiously pulled something sticky (turned out to be duct tape) off the sign in front of her parking spot, which read "Reserved for Athletic Secretary," before toodling off in her Taurus. It was clearly important for her to defend her station in life.
• I have, in fact, also been doing some work.
  

Loose tooth #1

Graham is about to lose his first tooth. He says it hurts, but, from the looks of it, it hurts so good.

New enthusiasm

Graham is keen on going to toy store, so is attacking few chores with unprecedented zeal, even stopped filibustering at bedtime. Most excitingly, he has gotten into dumping compost on to the big pile. Not that it doesn't sadden me to have my own favorite responsibility taken off my hands, but it's good to get him into the compost, that steaming allegory of everything, at such a young age.

The jargon of authenticity

I've been going to more AA meetings recently. I've recently heard this young woman tell exactly the same anecdote, exactly, in meetings a couple of weeks apart, about how she saw a tender scene that made her value life.

AA has the great virtue of being a place where people can speak in semi-public about their problems and fears, as if directly from the heart. But when you hear people repeating themselves like this, really performing their respective personae over and over again, it's clear that there's a fine line between direct authenticity and a mask of the same.

Posture and being

In their book on Kafka and minor literatures, Deleuze and Guattari make a big deal out of head postures in Kafka: the way K's head is ever prostrate before the court, the contrast between bending and being upright and what that implies about relations of power. When I was in college I didn't really get it. I thought the book seemed cool and it was a nice bright orange and I like Kafka, but I didn't get their point.

I've got an OK desk chair that I've had now for about a decade. Wrote my dissertation in it, and then have learned much of markets and earning a living in it. But as my eyes have gone and my laptop screen has gotten progressively smaller over the years, I find myself scrunched over, shoulders bent forward, slumped. Bad energy. Bad chi. And it translates into back pain.

So I have to force myself to sit up straight, and when I do that, I have more energy. Probably exposes some chakras or something. But, inevitably, I find myself slumping again.

Adieu, adieu

Slow to post

I must say that if anyone other than myself could be blamed for the occasional lack of posts here on the blog, it would have to be our old Durham Academy nemeses Mike and Brendan Moylan, who with their many-tentacled empire of soccer-related enterprises are top sponsors of the Fox Soccer Channel, which is the one thing that sucks me into the couch on weekend afternoons. Right now Serbia is outlasting Austria in a World Cup qualifier. What's not to like?

Quote of the day

Watching French Open semifinal between Robin Soderling and Miguel Gonzalez, Carol opines that Soderling should lose "on facial hair alone." This didn't happen, though it made sense at the time.

From the Archives

Combing through my draft posts from years past, I've found some interesting stuff that never saw the light of day. Below, a sampling.  I'll do more of this later.

10/24/07  The Joys of Labor

Here's actual text (translated from stilted scholarly Russian) that I've been taking in for a project I'm working on (and they're not paying me half enough). From the journal Defense and Security.

"When carrying out special operations Ministry of the Interior employees must come into contact with professionally prepared and equipped criminals, who know well the tactics of law-enforcement agents, the composition and structure of their armaments, as well as defensive measures to minimize the damage from any special means employed."

I.e. tear gas, pepper spray, what have you. That's all kind of intuitive, but here's something truly fun:

"Another thing that diminishes the effectiveness of special measures is the fact that the combatants are also under the influence of psychotropic narcotics."

The implication is that the forces of law and order have to figure out the right cocktails of "non-lethal weapons" to get around whatever drugs the baddies are taking. They've been working on this.

10/18/07 E to 53rd @ Park
28ish rail-thin Asia-hip Chinese woman reading McKinsey Report ("The Asset Management Opportunity in China") on the train. I have not yet opened that McKinsey email.

28ish woman in high heels and a skirt bending forward like a cripple as she walks up the stairs from the E Train. Turns out she was not a cripple. It was the shoes.

28ish guy with pasty skin and a suit with no tie sucking on a Starbucks Iced Venti like it was his mother's teat. I too was inspired to buy one.

28ish corporate blonde comes up to the cashier at Starbucks and wonders if she can get a receipt. Reminds me to get one.

At work (where I'm doing a project), 28ish Duke grad doesn't even know where He's Not Here is. Redounds to his credit, but also means he probably didn't get much.

Ahhhh... To be 28ish again.

5/15/07
SEC has sent out warnings about people impersonating its inspectors. Very Gogolian.

Princeton Public Library, 3:30 pm

Kicked out of house for a showing, Natalie and I descend upon the library to further her quest of hoovering up all age-appropriate books before we leave town later in the summer. As she continued on to the 3rd floor, I diverged onto the 2nd, grown-up floor, where a pretty high school girl in turquoise pants was walking with her sweatshirt hood pulled gratuitously over her head.

At a table nearby sat four Mormon guys -- resplendent in white short sleeve shirts with ties, square hair cuts, and promotional brochures in their breast pockets. At least two of them furtively but distinctly turned their heads to check out the girl's butt as she went by.

Latter Day Saints my white ass. They had Big Love in mind.

Community Park Field Day

Despite the torrential downpour at around 8:30 when I went to read to Graham's class at Riverside, Field Day was on at Community Park, so I threw on shorts and headed over. Natalie's class was at the soccer station when I got there, and Pers was leading the show mightily, though he had to shout over some awful din coming from over behind the giant hedges by the Princeton public tennis courts and paddle tennis courts (yes, readers, you read that correctly). Sounded like power washing or jack hammering, one.

So, since I didn't want to direct kids doing this soccer thing anyhow, I sidled around the monumental hedge around the courts to see what was up. Some dude in a hazmat suit was sandblasting the tennis practice wall. Brilliant.

So I made my way over to the Rec Department offices to see what was up. Didn't seem like a good idea to sand blast with hundreds of kids and adults trying to have fun 50 yards away. After working past a couple of clock-punching admin types, I found myself in the presence of a generously girthed apparatchik in jeans. He explained to me that there was a tennis tournament scheduled for Thursday, and this was the only day they could get the sandblasting contractors and they needed to get the job done because (gasp!), there was some graffiti on the tennis wall!

In the end, he agreed to have the guy in the space suit work on the other side of the wall so that the sound would bounce the other direction while the kids were on the field. In any case, it is certainly comforting to know that, in times of dire fiscal crisis, our tax dollars are hard at work attending to crucial matters like sandblasting offending gang tags.

Death of an Icon

When I got home from playing tennis at 10:30 or so, Mary had MSNBC on the television, and I saw Michael Moore through the window with the words "the death of an icon" under him and I thought for a second, "wow, Michael Moore is dead," then I realized they were talking about GM.

Later, Keith Olbermann, in a moment of rare clarity, sobriety and cogency, advocated for a "quarantine" of Fox News on account of the excesses of Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck, etc., specifically in their support of terrorism against abortion providers like George Tiller.

Virtuosity in developing socieities

As an inveterate punk rocker, I am in general not all that impressed by skill and virtuosity. I heard some opera singers at the New York Philharmonic a few weeks back doing a modern piece of poems set to music and was not impressed, not in the slightest (though a performance of a Mahler piece later that night was quite something).

But I was in an art museum the other day with the kids, who were not in good moods, and caught a quick gander at an illuminated manuscript, and I must confess that it's hard to imagine the impression an illuminated manuscript or, for that matter, stained glass window or vaulted nave -- would have made in Medieval Europe. There is a raw power to artisanship, a transcendence, in the context of developing societies, where all outside is chaos.


I'm sure this is Art History 101 level thinking, but it did strike me at the time. Which is something these days.

La gente, unida

So tonight was the end of year picnic at Community Park School, when everybody brings potluck dinners.  And since CP is located in the only neighborhood in Princeton with a substantial hispanic population, it's a poorly kept secret that the best Mexican food in town is served at this picnic.  And that the Mexican food is far and away the best food at the picnic, although someone Asian usually makes some delicious dumplings too.  Us gringos are kinda slack.   We, for instance, showed up with a lame noodles with peanut sauce, peas, and scallions dish.

So imagine our dismay when we showed up at the picnic, and saw delicious looking stuff on the plates of various Mexican and Guatemalan folx, but we couldn't find it on the picnic table.  Apparently, some private label distribution was going on amongst la communidad.  And who can blame them? 

Eventually some of the good stuff made it to the table.  We should really host a dinner at which we cook real food for the ladies (we assume) of the hood, because they are getting a raw deal at present.

On Target

In "Heard on the Street" today, the WSJournal calls attention to the recent outperformance of Target relative to WalMart despite decreasing same-store customer traffic, market share, and relatively weak P/E ratios.

Me, I think Target's long-term potential (like that of, say, Williams Sonoma) will be hampered by its association with blue state metrosexuality of the boom era going forward, Obama victory notwithstanding. Sam Walton's brand (or lack thereof) is more malleable and focusable on the bare bones of subsistence, which is what everybody's thinking.

Similarly, I'm still waiting for the arrival of the style equivalent of early nineties meat loaf for our era. I see high-school girls out looking like early thrift store Madonna (very much a product of Volcker-era austerity) and I see thrift and consignment stores a-perkin, but I'm looking for more.

Soaring above the data

For years I was frustrated by big numbers. Some industry rep would come to Washington or get on the news and say, for example, "Toilet scrubbing brushes are a $100 million dollar industry, we can't allow it to be threatened." And I thought to myself: "Do I care? Should I? How much money is $100 million in the big picture?" I now imagine that banks and analysts keep similar spreadsheets fresh real time.

So I began cobbling together data by hand to put things in perspective and kept it in spreadsheets, usually on my desktop so I could update them frequently (which I rarely did). But, of course, the desktop is a perilous place for data, because it often doesn't get backed up, and that's bad on Windows machines in particular, which share certain properties with their namesakes (i.e. fragility).

So here's the current version of my spreadsheet, now up on Google and free for editing by anyone. Some of it's out of date. See also sheet two for adding good data sources. If you do feel like adding or updating, please initial where you make changes.

Rendezvous in Paris

Rendezvous in Paris by Claude Lelouch.
On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris, early in the morning.

The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 km/h (86.99 mph) in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch
was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground. It is a classic. Turn on your sound and enjoy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqHrCLt3Geo

Why doesn't BofA sell Black Rock stake?

AnUntil this morning, I had somehow forgotten that BofA, having swallowed Merrill Lynch but not quite digested it, thereby inherited a huge chunk of BlackRock. Now, it's been clear for a long time the BlackRock and PIMCO were ideally positioned to do well in the TARP-PPIP environment, and they've been doing well.

So if BofA is divesting itself of CCB for $7 billion to get its stress test money, why shouldn't it also dump BlackRock. In fact, if the government is in a strong-armish mood, witness its treatment of Ken Lewis in December and Rick Wagoner more recently (not that either episode made me lose sleep), this should be the occasion for twist an arm and force BofA to raise money by selling its BlackRock. I mean, talk about conflict of interest, of piece of BofA -- the BlackRock Toxic Avengers -- in the driver's seat valuing the degraded assets of the old Merrill book.

Another thing that's been bothering me: How BofA / Merrill Lynch has decided to plump up First Republic as its wealth management arm. Never mind the difficulties with integrating US Trust, BofA Private Client, Merrill Wealth Management, etc., they're just pushing out First Republic as a main brand as if to wipe the slate clean, even though you can see the little Merrill Lynch down at the foot of the page. It's just silly.

A geek for the ages

This is a pretty amazing talk. Twenty minutes long. Just watch the first five if that's all you've got. The moral is: publicly funded data should be free.

Milk

In the end Milk lived up to the hype.  Earnest, yes, and Dan White's actions were marginally undermotivated (where were the famous Twinkies?), but that was a sideline.  It was a biopic that transcended the genre, about an issue that remains, sadly relevant.

Glut of construction workers and Habitat

Has this surplus been addressed? Could construction workers come in and upskill people? But how can you convince construction workers to give away something that destroys their market value, and how do you teach them to teach?

Generally speaking, Habitat is could be net destructive of value. From Mercy Corps New Orleans anecdotes, construction workers have to go back in and rebuild shit on Monday that Habitat people cobble together over the weekend to assuage their guilty feelings. Better use of bourgeois people's time than swinging hammer would be to tutor and/or clean brownfields and plant trees or somesuch. Variously learn/teach financial literacy, as needed. Just donate money.

Habitat makes people feel good and that they're doing something. That could be a good thing, if it inspires them to do more, or a bad one, if they go home and do less.

Reading habits

Natalie's new habit is to read up to eight books at one time.  At bed time, when I now lay at the other end of the bed, feet intertwined with hers, she reads the books serially, reading a chapter from one book and then, at something like seven minute intervals, she gets up, puts the book on the bedside table behind her with a bookmark in it, and takes another book out.  And so on until I force her to turn her lights out.

Which is fine.

A day in the life, or, how United Health Care sucks

Natalie was scheduled to go in for a procedure tomorrow to implant a subdural device to diffuse hormones to arrest her early onset puberty (she'll be nine in June), which threatened in turn to stunt her growth and subject her to schoolyard taunting. The device is very expensive (ca $20k) and the procedure to implant it not cheap (ca $3k).

To get approval for the device, we had to actually speak to the manufacturer to confirm that we had coverage, and we did, with United Health Care, I thought, which one of my now former employer's partners had assured me was part of our "Cadillac benefits package" (how apt the GM analogy seems today). Turns out the device was covered by Medco, not UHC. Praise the Lord.

So this morning we get a call from William F. of United Health Care's Customer Care Denial team who tells us that the procedure is not covered. Quoth he: "...one of our doctors reviewed the claim and notice that the device (covered by Medco, already shipped by the manufacturer) is approved for use by symptomatic females up to age 8, while your daughter is 8 years and 11.25 months of age..." William F, it must be owned, was well suited for his role in the Customer Care Denial department, as he remained calm and unflapped as Mary and I berated him vigorously and I threatened to blog. Little did I know there was a whole blogosphere out there devoted to the theme "United Health Care Sucks".  So UHC, unlike other companies, doesn't really worry about bad blog press, as there's already so much out there.

So over the course of the day we've had conversations with:

1. United
2. Our pediatric endicrinologist
3. Our pediatric surgeon
4. The device manufacturer
5. My Professional Employer's Organization and Cobra administrator (not to be confused with my former employer)

And, as you can imagine, nothing is resolved, though we've been told the device has been shipped and Medco has covered it, which is some comfort.

Fat guys with power tools

Running down by the towpath on Delaware & Raritan canal at Carnegie Lake, I saw the state of America as if etched in amber. Over by some sort of bunkerish water treatment facility, about four obese municipal workers were cutting overgrowth with chain saws, then throwing the overgrowth into a big chipper they left running. Think about the externalities of this, all these two-stroke and other large engines left running to reduce the aggregate carbon sink, and how much it costs to manage the health of these fat guys: the disability and health insurance.

What about the good old axe? And hasn't anybody developed a pedal-powered chipper? That's obviously the ticket here.

As stupid as only white people may be

On the train back from the city today, ended up in front of a couple of kids who were maybe coming back from a Mets game, one maybe 11, one in the neighborhood of 13. The two of them, especially the younger, kept up an incessant string of inane prattle, like Beevis and Butthead in real life. "Dude, they make some really cool graffiti.... that one's awesome.". Singing along puerile lyrics to classics of hair metal. Never an instant of quiet. And their parents behind them never say a word.

One things for sure, I'm showing signs of age-derived grumpiness.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Not really ideal for posting on Mother's Day

...but I just saw Rushmore for the first time last night, and caught the "you are forgiven" part therein, which is as classic a piece of rock and roll as you're likely to find, so here's the whole piece for your delectation.

Gevalia Coffee canister

Cleaning the house today, my eye alit to the porcelain Gevalia coffee canister, which currently holds 8' O'clock coffee which Mary insists we mix with Starbuck's because she hates the thought of paying for the latter at McCaffrey's.

This canister has a long history.  First off, it came with Gevalia coffee, which is, many years of coffee culture later, still really good coffee.  Secondly, it was sent to me in the winter of 1988, a snowy winter in Chapel Hill, when I was living south of town in a glorified shack heated only by a coal stove in the living room which, fortunately, burnt wood too.  These were hard times for the kid.  Having returned from a northern swing full of avant garde glamor and romance in New England, I settled in for a nasty winter when I got a DWI and was freezing my butt off.  My mom and sister chipped in and sent me a down comforter and chamois sheets and pillowcases, which were helpful.

And then, one day, the mailman brings me this coffee canister, sent by one Elizabeth "Betsy" Bishop of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, with whom I had hung in Moscow in the summer of '87 and who was doing a dissertation on Russo-Egyptian relations. She subsequently married some Egyptian guy and settled in a suburb of Cairo.  If anyone knows her whereabouts, send her to comment on this blog or have her email me at mct7@columbia.edu.  Good people.

Highlights

• The geese, absent of traditional predators, have been rather emboldened here in the Garden State.  Running along Carnegie Lake, the parents stood close by their chicks and hissed and did a little dance with their necks, rather than give ground to the rather bigger me.
• Graham selected Babar's Castle for tonight's reading, telling me that we were going to have to read the books about moving many times "so I can understand what it's like to move."  If only we had elephant-shaped medieval armor and secret passages where we're going.
• After one week on the market, our house has now had at least 20 real prospects as well as a dozen-odd curious neighbors and 40-50 brokers tramp through it.  And it still looks clean. Which makes me wonder how I got myself bossed into taking off my shoes when I come in the house.

Mercer County Tennis Complex, 9 pm

David and I got a court next to a couple of roundish guys, one 52 or 3 who looked like Don Rickles, one 45 or so.  They had somewhat unorthodox strokes, but they were whacking the shit out of the ball and running each other all around.  I was torn been fearing that I would ever end up looking like them and wishing I could be just like them.  Fact is, both are probably already true.

David Foster Wallace

Was someone I had basically avoided. Infinite Jest seemed like something I should definitely read but something so taxing that I shouldn't actually try to, and so many of those young bad boy genius authors have been so disappointing. But now am reading his profile in the New Yorker and he seems rather kindred in many respects, and the extract from his last work published there is interesting, so I may need to wade into the guy.

Went to the city today. At 8th and 30th, on the West hand side of the street, I espied a Chinese restaurant called "Dinersty". Hmm. I think they were aiming at a pun, but somehow went off track.

Wondered if I would see anybody wearing masks. Sure enough, an Asian couple on the 1:01 train back to Princeton had their mouths scrupulously covered.

Cranes and beams

Today in downtown Princeton where the new 5-story building is going up the guys were swinging steel girders with a big assed crane. Sadly, Graham was in school.

Three showings of the house today, and three more tomorrow. The ones who were supposed to be out at 1 stayed till 1:20. I was starving for the chicken quesadilla in the fridge, but stood across the street talking to a neighbor, scarcely feigning to care.

The limits of virtuosity

Of late I've been smitten with both Neko Case and the New Pornographers, a band she's been a member of on and off. One great song is this one. It's slow for 2:30, let it keep rolling.

I initially assumed the female lead must be Neko, but it isn't, it's Kathryn. Neko sings backup. You can see what accents she adds in this live version.

Now, one of the commenters on the live acoustic version notes how great Neko's voice is and that she "blows away everybody else" or something like that. And yes, her voice is great, but she's singing backup, it's not her song, she's part of a delicate harmonic arrangement and what is she doing blowing her teammates away? She's part of an ensemble, for Christ sakes.

And this is the frequent problem with virtuosity. It is not lost on its practitioner. Stephon Marbury was a great point guard, then something happened.

Listed

After much hustling and scraping, our house is listed and there will be a broker's open house tomorrow, to be attended by 40 or 50 brokers. The listing can be viewed here.

While it is nothing but sad to be selling this house, it's good to be done with the initial stages of prepping it. Now we just have to wait through the agony of keeping it clean until somebody snaps it up.

Rites of passage

It's difficult enough getting to the point where your own children don't want to hold your hand. But it will be as poignant in its own way to move away from a place where other people's children are comfortable taking your hand.

Rachel Getting Married

This Jonathan Demme film apparently got very good reviews, and it has many excellent qualities about it. Great music. Generally a picture of the kind of wedding many of us would have liked to have had in the Connecticut house we would also liked to have had.

Anne Hathaway, in the lead, plays a disturbed girl with a long history of substance abuse and associated mayhem. In general, she overplays, or is rather overdirected. Demme, at least, spares us overwrought reconciliations at the end.

Home improvements

I feel like I've been through this before. After years of abiding imperfections in the crib, you get energetic and polish it up right when it's time to move, and then you're like: "this is a great place!" Or maybe it's just me.

The birds

We had window cleaners by the house yesterday, and, working on the second floor windows, they broke a shingle, exposing a hole, which in turn exposed the blown-in cellulose insulation we paid good money to some scumdog contractor for a couple of years later. In no time flat some clever little birds figured out that they could get in there and snag cellulose with which to feather their nests. I had to shoe them away with a broom and then climb out onto the the roof over the back porch to wedge some shimmies in that hole, and then color their heels with a walnut marker so the opening would not draw the attention of any prospective buyers.

On leaving a place of wealth

There is a sadness and at the same time a relief at leaving a place of tremendous wealth: Princeton, Westchester, New York metro as a whole. The houses, the old buildings, the whole 9, wealth creation has been going on for a long time here, more or less continuously, and it has accreted and sedimented notably. Even if your own crib is modest, when you tool amongst the manses, you feel it rub off on you. Sort of. And it is, at least, pretty, in an excessive way.

On the other hand, it's all vaguely oppressive. You have to imagine how hard people have to work, what kind of assholes they must be, to live in houses that big, to care that much.

And then there's all the dirt poor people 10 miles away.

Demons of the dust

I remember -- digging twenty years back -- reading a poem called "Demons of the Dust" by the Russian symbolist poet Valerii Briusov, who wasn't really a great poet. In fact, his idea of being rad and avant-garde was to crawl under a table for a photograph, as we see above. Small wonder that he is not celebrated in world culture as a must-read guy.

But anyway, this poem is all about dust and memory and imagination and whatnot, and the scene of the action is pulling books off of shelves. And, as I prepare to move nine years of crap accumulated in Princeton, on top of 10 years of accumulated junk from New York, back to North Carolina, this whole dust-imagination-memory nexus keeps cropping up. Mostly I have to try to ignore it to just get things done. The internet has changed the scope and shape of memory, after all, and I myself draw ever nigher to the dust as I dawdle. Time to pare shit down and move on, as if to show that You Can Go Home Again.

Homeward bound

And so, after many months nay years of hair pulling and soul rending, the Grouse and his Mary brood will relo to the land of the man pictured at left, therein to gaze from on high at the waters of Eastwood, until, perhaps, more suitable accomodations can be found.

Not all are delighted, but we will persist and then some.

An end to content

Sitting at the airport the other day, my mind wandered, as it does, to the subject of the economy. What, I thought, is not happening in the economy? How do things shut down, how to spigots turn off, and how does it get reversed?

Then I began to think: what is the role of content in this ecosystem: books, movies, etc.? What if the production of all narrative or content was banned or simply became unfeasible, what would become of us then? It's really the premise of a dystopian novel. Or is it really what we've already got: a bunch of crappy reality TV and cooking shows? Hmmmm.

Growing up

Natalie has in general not wanted to let me snuggle with her at bedtime, but I thought last night she might make an exception, since we were at Grandma and Grandpa's.  But no.  So I ask her, directly, why she won't let me snuggle with her anymore.  "Because I'm growing up," she says, word for word.

OK.  Hard to argue with that.

(West) Palm Beach

An article on the impact of Madoff on Palm Beach quotes people saying they live in Palm Beach when in fact they live in West Palm Beach which, as anyone who lives there knows, isn't the same at all. But people fudge things to give an impression of affluence.

When I was growing up in North Carolina, my neighbor's grandparents had a place in Palm Beach, but they always said it was in West Palm Beach, presumably to minimize the impression of their true affluence. But of course, being from resolutely middle class North Carolina and having never been to the Palm Beach area, we had no clue. It all sounded pretty swank to us.

It was only when I actually visited many years later and saw the place that I got it. And it was pretty swank.

This was, of course, the early 80s, when the country had been through a similar economic trauma.

This time, in a band

Here's Neko Case in the New Pornographers, a band enhanced by her.

Still to ragged out to write

In Larchmont

Talking on the phone. A flurry of emails, then of flower petals.

Spring is here. For what it's worth.

How bout em?

Somebody paint it blue for me.

Winner takes all continues to crumble

The Texas private equity group that bought the Texas Rangers from George Bush and a group of other Texan cronies has defaulted on an interest payment on a $525 million loan secured by his ownership interest in the Rangers and hockey's Dallas Stars. They have retained Merrill Lynch to help them find an investor. Maybe Merrill can shop the interest to Lonestar and get 22 cents on the dollar. Or, yetter bet, Merrill could sell it to BofA.

First off, let me ask you, how big can the interest payment on a $525 million package of loans be? $50 million? Who knows, but not that much money for these people. Basically, they're pulling an Ecuador, saying, OK, we've decided not to honor this commitment. They coulda sold something. And if private market participants opt not to honor contracts like that, what does it say to the argument that the government wading into compensation agreements like AIG debases the sanctity of contracts?

Lastly, and most importantly, this is an indication that sports compensation, like executive compensation, will regress towards a mean, and pay differentials will narrow. Similarly, we read that Hollywood stars are less able to cut favorable deals these days. This is all for the good.

And I think that hockey should retreat to the North anyway.

Power Lunch Smackdown

Not that I bother watching it, but I do see it in the kitchen at work, and it has recently come to my attention that the World Wrestling Federation is marketing a big pay per view event every day at lunch on CNBC. Now what does that say about the status of the investing public? If that's who's trying to figure out how to make money by watching TV at lunch, how can you blame Wall Street for trying to fleece them? Then again, the guys on the trading floors are also thugs.

From the files of Joe Wolin

The Onion

Balzac famously declined to have his photograph taken for fear that the apparatus would strip away his person, his soul, like the layers of the onion.  These days I kind of think Obama should take this kind of thinking to heart.  Sure, I love the guy, and I'm happy to have seen lots of him.  But I think he is hogging the camera a little right now.  He is a great leader, and now he needs to learn to be more of a manager.  Delegate and empower his team, pull them to the foreground, before his charisma is laid bare by overexposure.

The redneck rebellion that's a brewin' in the heartland demonstrates that Hillary, in particular, may have been stuck in the wrong slot.  She should be domestic-facing.  Somehow this very elite woman developed a rapport of her own with Joe Sixpack which is wasted on Beijing.

Flying ships

Today I read Graham a great book, adopted from a Russian fairy tale, about the Fool of the World who sets out from his village to build a flying ship and thereby win the princess's hand and -- by virtue of his generosity -- gets totally hooked up by this magic dude with a flying ship.  He then collects a motley crew of other magic dudes who sing a lot and they go out and, by God, win the princess's hand.  Very nicely drawn, clearly the basis for the Baron von Munchhausen tales (though minus the teenage Uma Thurman).  

This book made me want to go back to Russia, Putin notwithstanding, and also irrespective of my fears that I'll be hassled at the border because of the mild industrial espionage I at length extricated myself from last autumn.  We may just see.

Once more on the curses of Redmond

So I blogged earlier about signing up for Hotmail Plus and what a pain it was to try to get it to work. I ended up setting up a second Yahoo account and, while I had to send batches to get around spamming restrictions (this was not spam. This was legit bulk email), I got what I needed to do done in 45 minutes or so while watching sports.

Now I've gone back to Microsoft to try to get my 20 bux back, and it's like something out of Kafka. It's like dealing with the Federal government. The workflow is bass ackwards inane. Links go to dead pages. It's pathetic. I've had some very bad experiences with Microsoft over the years, but this ranks right up there with the worst of them.

Guilty

As the crisis draws on I find that I have little life experience (save for a B-list celebrity spotting on Nassau St today -- Melrose Place's Andrew Shue) to blog about. And much of my writing effort, too much, has flown to another of my online avatars: "Ruckmaker", under which name I do battle with the short-sellers and libertarian loonies on Marketwatch's comment boards. It is a relatively victimless addiction, as it's entirely zipless discourse, but still.

I have earlier characterized the voices of the messageboards as "demons," and I don't think that's entirely wrong, but the question is are they my demons or are they shared. "Stock up on ammo," "Obama is a commie","Go long gold", "S & P 350," this is the kind of stuff that floats by on the boards. Some of it is more cogent and disturbing, other is less cogent and disturbing, mostly it's disturbing. Which is why I fight it.

Also because there's a scoreboard.

The CPIC

I have to say that it's interesting that Jim Chanos's Coalition of Private Investment Companies is empowered to speak for the hedge fund industry to any extent. The Managed Funds Association is a much longer-standing industry organization, and has, unlike Chanos's group, a web site.

This is not to say anything against Chanos or Kynikos. He, after all, was instrumental to say the least in bringing Enron down and has long been a forthright and articulate advocate for short-selling amongst other practices. I sometimes disagree with him, but am rarely better informed than him. I just wish he'd bring some transparency to the CPIC if it is to become an influential lobbying arm.

A couple of things that suck

1. The Riverside School in Princeton conducts "code blue" exercises to prepare for the extremely unlikely eventuality of a shooter incident at a freakin elementary school. Members of the pre-K class were ushered into the bathroom, where the lights were turned off and they were told to hide. This is for four and five year olds, mind you. Rank idiocy which is not shared by other elementary schools in the same system, and Principle Michael Cirullo has been apprised of his stupidity in person.
   
   
2. I created a hotmail account so I could send out messages related to an upcoming high school reunion, and Microsoft wants to hassle me about how many messages I can send out to prove I'm not a spammer. I was stupid. I should have known to just set up another yahoo or gmail account. Avoid the curses of Redmond whenever you may.
   

The permanent campaign

The Economist recently dubbed Obama's leveraging of his campaign machine from the White House "the permanent campaign," and it sure feels like it. While I think it's great that he's trying to stay in touch with his peeps, I think it's getting old.

Fact is, I don't form my opinions first and foremost based on what campaigns say. That's what the press is for -- to offer viewpoints and help us form opinions. And the press is having a hard time right now. The idea has been floated, for instance, to make newspapers endowed not-for-profits.

So if the Obama campaign has extra cash, I think it should use it as seed capital to form a fund of funds for newspapers, or perhaps just to support the trusty and beloved New York Times, which doesn't have a Rupert Murdoch to prop it up. David Swensen of the Yale Endowment, who has publicly called for the NGO route for papers, should pony up some dough too. And money should be raised from the right wing too to keep things "fair and balanced."

We don't need emails telling us to call our Congresspeeps and read a script. We need good reporting.

Man on Wire

I thought we had Disc 3 of Season 1 of The Wire in from Netflix, but it turned out we had Man on Wire, a documentary about Philippe Pettite, the David Bowie looking muthafucka who strung up a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 and walked between them. It was a good film, but the film itself pales beside the still archival footage of the walk, which is itself a pale shadow of its idea. Without a doubt, the most absurd and singular thing anyone has ever done. Most likely.

Setbacks

Was recently looking at photographs of single narrow row houses in Belgium set off in the middle of fields, built there and like that because of restrictive stipulations tied to land grants to farmers,i.e. “you may build a house with a 8 x 10 meter footprint and no more than two stories.”  Very odd.

 

Today coming past North Elizabeth on the train, looking at fully detached houses whose eaves are within six inches of one another, you have to wonder how that came about.  It’s so energy inefficient not to share the common wall, it just cries out at you.  Are they detached because of market forces and the deep seated American dream of owning one’s own four walls, or because of regulation?  It makes me just want to wade in there with a bunch of fiberglass batting and plug the gaps.

Cap a banker

Maybe the storm has died down, but last week it felt for sure that one of these days, an investment banker's gonna get capped by some pitchfork-wielding outraged populist, and then Obama will inevitably get on TV and give a cathartic calm down speech which will heal the wounds that run deep. And, since it's gonna happen, the government might as well arrange it so it happens right. So handpick some onerous AIG exec and have a deep subterranean FBI operative (maybe one of Jack Bauer's team) to blow the guy's head off with a shotgun outside the WaWa's in Wilton and then disappear into the either.

Or, as I said, maybe the storm has passed and this only makes sense as a TV show.

Dostoevskii's notebooks, 1872

Going through some boxes of books I happened upon a handwritten (by me) card, transcribed from Fiodor Mikhailovich himself:

"Each of you is dashing along in a cab, prodding the coachman on the back to get you home fast.  You keep rushing along in the coach, the coachman keeps prodding his poor innocent nag, but the horse is dodging away from his driver and, alas, does not know what literature is.

In passing you envy his innocence and are aware of your duty to him as that of the rich class towards the common folk.

But the idyllic feelings are replaced by furies."

I will note in passing that I had quit drinking long before I wrote this.  The shit is deep.

Ruth Rendell

Have taken up yet another Ruth Rendell mystery, of which I've probably read 15-20 by now. Definitely best in class.  In times of drive and great yearning I find that the small town life on which she so thrives stifles me as it does her characters, and I sense that reading these books is just marking time on the way to death.  But now, as the crisis drags on interminably and so much of the future remains unsettled, there is great comfort in her ordered universe and the little irruptions that rend its fabric, and in the dutiful workings of Inspectors Wexford and Burden, who bring resolution to all.

Lay off Geithner

It is bizarre that the Times should have to run a cover story today saying that there's a crisis of confidence around Geithner because of the AIG bonuses, like he should have seen it. First off, Obama should never have jumped in on that subject, he's debasing the office of the Presidency a little bit. Secondly, it's not the job of the Secretary of the Treasury to micromanage agreements entered into before he took the job.

Not that I have anything against lynching AIG Financial Products. I just think the task should be delegated appropriately.

Why no UHO on Wall St?

Have been spending most of my time on Wall St of late, so on a recent foray into MidTown, I was struck by the presence of money collecting tables for the UHO, or United Homeless Organization, which are always topped by the UHO's signature water jugs - the 10 gallon variety of water cooler fame. And then it struck me: you don't see these down on Wall St. Which is odd, as midtown is no less dominated by finance, really. Are people down there really so stingy? I for one would give.

I think I know how a lot of people out there would answer that question right about now, and I have to say, the evidence supports them.

Penn Station, morning rush

The other day as I was passing from Penn Station to the subway I fell in behind a perky little blonde wearing some variant of those stupid fleece lined muk muk boots that all the teenagers and 20-somethings are wearing, some sort of a business suit, and on her back a knapsack with a little umbrella with an Izod logo on it. How precious, I thought. Then I saw that her knapsack had an AIG logo on it. That one I would have left at home. But that's just me.

They buy your car by phone!

Enjoying a 45 dollar cab ride through lovely Jersey City, listening to 1010 WINS. One ad promses to but used cars sight unseen with one of the best monosyllabic mnemonics I've heard in a long time: "They buy your car by phone," repeated 4 times in a thirty second spot with the URL carcash.com. Unfortunately, the phone number wasn't as memorable.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

PATH Train, Journal Square, 11:46am

After getting stuck first in traffic leaving Princeton, then behind a municipal tractor in Plainsboro, making me miss my train, now I'm on the PATH. The train is however, stuck indefinitely because of a police action related to someone who jumped off a bridge in front of our train, whereupon he/she was struck dead. Creating a nasty smell, like when you burn hair, only more.

Not a good day.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Showertime

Natalie continues to complain about taking showers, claiming that it takes too long, keeps her away from her reading. Of course, the fact is that she gets in the shower and stays there forever, humming little tunes like "Deck the Halls" over and over again.

The dismal scientists

The Wall Street Journal reports today that a bunch of economists are giving Obama an "F" for his performance to date. I think what this may signal is a welcome return to normalcy in which the opinions of economists are taken with the appropriate grains of salt. I think, through the run-up to the crisis, we've all been a little frazzled and have had to seek guidance in the opinions of the various Tyler Cowens, Gregory Mankiws, Nouriel Roubinis, Robert Schillers, Alans Blinder and Krueger, Paul Krugmans, Mark Zandis and so on and so on, of the world. But now we remember clearly that they don't have all the answers. Nor, I think, should we return to the point where we malign and belittle economists for being idiots. They know their biz better than I do.

Not to say I think Obama should get an A for economics. Maybe a B/B-. The stimulus bill isn't perfect, Geithner isn't perfect and his plan isn't perfect. I like Peter Orszag a lot, personally. But imagine what we would be up to if McCain was in there with his cowboy hat and Budweiser distributorship.

In the end, this "F" grade may be viewed as a collected attempt by economists to maintain their perch at center stage of public discourse. I, for one, think that their retreat from collective glare, as well as that of the Secretary of the Treasury, will be viewed as a positive sign for all of us.

Franklin Township Municipal Building. Traffic Court, 3/12/09

Although it was Franklin Township, the Borough of Millstone was subleasing space to wring some tickets out of us unwary speeders, and the judge was just in from New Brunswick, where he had learned he had hopes of getting on some reality show about judges. Right on!

I had showed up early, as instructed, to talk to the prosecutor. I was #7 in line. This little DeVito like dude came out from the cops' area of the building in wraparound shades. Turns out he was the prosecutor. He took each of us in turn. Two were hispanic, and the prosecutor's Spanish was pretty good. Usually he chatted a little bit: "Where do you work? Where'd you get your degree from?"

There was none of that for me. Maybe because I was second to last in line, maybe because I'm a cold looking WASP. I came in there and he was like: "This is a 4-point offense, but I can make it a 0-point offense. The fine is about $400. OK?" I think you know the answer.

So we get into court, and the third guy called is this nerd who's pleading not guilty to a speeding ticket from last September. He's already requested all manner of paperwork on the radar gun etc., and now he wants the user's manual. The judge says "are we giving that out now?" The judge, a little annoyed, says "OK, we gotta call in the prosecutor, you go sit down."

And then he called me up. I kinda wanted to stick around and see how this guy got wry, low-level tongue lashing, but I had to get back to work. Alack.

Back to Entropy

I've been reading about estimates of wealth destruction in the crisis, and I must say that this whole wealth destruction thing is indeed very confusing. On the one hand, it's hard to see how even 20% can disappear if there's anything resembling a zero sum game going on: value exiting one medium of exchange should be realized in another. Even leveraged assets shouldn't be entirely spectral. Entities shouldn't be lending but so much money that they don't have (that's one thing that confuses me).

Then again, it's too facile to posit an easy dichotomy between real and imagined value. An object's value is what someone's willing to pay for it, and right now everyone's hesitant to buy anything, reducing turnover. That's what's killing us.

In the contemporary debate on value destruction in the current crisis, lots of people point out that we do still have houses, roads, bridges, and whatnot, rightly invoking the Marxist concept of "use value," which declares that things values are equal to the use we can put them to. The problem, as we are seeing, is that these assets are subject to entropy, and without capital to maintain them they will give us less use value. The real problem is that the culture and tax structure of the last decade have encouraged the storage of value in the private domain: homes, cars, luxury goods, the markers of status. These are even more volatile and subject to entropy than public works.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Relative thoughtlessness

Not much for the blog today, dog-tired from prepping the house over the weekend to get painting done, getting up early to lead a conference call, hauling my sorry ass into the city, blech.

From the consumption side, I can report that Charles Burnette's 1977 classic Killer of Sheep was very much worth watching, but not if you're in the mood for plot or character or any of that claptrap. Presages Jarmusch in its own strange way.

Today for lunch a cuban sandwich from Sophie's. Delish.

Back to work.

Readings

Read Michael Lewis's piece on Iceland in Vanity Fair.  It's interesting, funny, but for the first time I see Lewis jaded at his prodigious talent for writing.  A bon mot here, a taut one-liner there, it all just rolls off him as if he's seen it all before.  And, in some sense, he has.  It may be time for him to push himself beyond the competitive realms of finance and sports into some new domain. I'd love to read it.

Picked up some Salinger I had never heard of in Larchmont:  "Raise High the Roofbeams..." I was initially unconvinced but now am getting there.  And now off to it!

No bull

If I hear one more moron say that the path of the markets reflects the populace's judgment of Obama's performance I'm gonna be angry. The markets reflect the market's judgment of itself. Obama's doing fine and will continue doing fine, and the markets will come along in their own good time.

I used to advocate capital punishment for crimes of capital, and I'm coming back around to that position. I think the best way to deal with the situation would be to take a cue from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Stalin's whole point, in Solzhenitsyn's view, was to punish people for no crimes to imbue them with an arbitrary fear of a random state.

That's how we should treat traders, both within banks and active day traders. We should just "disappear" a few of them each year. 17 one year, 479 the next, regardless of the scale of their infractions. That'll teach em to do shady shit.

Rambling man

Graham has come in and is doing some building here in the garret / study / exercise room / playroom, so I can't quite work, so I might as well blog. Today I break old school.

In human endeavors there is always a need to balance reflection and circumspection with activity. Am I doing the right thing? Does this make sense? These are very normal questions to ask yourself. When you do it too much, you get trapped in "paralysis by analysis," as the consultants like to say. The question, then, is finding the right balance between doing things and thinking about doing them.

As with individuals, so with society. America began to show less healthy skepticism starting with Reagan (this would have been on the upslope from Carter's Malaise speech) and then really threw caution to the wind once the Berlin Wall came down. We were right, dammit, history had vindicated us. Fukuyama's "End of History" came out and said that the last ideological challenge was fundamentalist Islam, and he ended up righter about that then he wanted to be for a little while.

Over in Russia, the story didn't appear so simple. Gorbachev became a villain, and there was nostalgia for the Brezhnev and even the Stalin days.

But we were off to the races with market fundamentalism (to which I myself partially succumbed). Hell, who was gonna tell us we were wrong? The French? Our own scraggly Left?

The earth, admittedly, was sending signals with sun and meltage. And all you had to do was look at all those big boxes and massive SUVs which were products of rule-skirting and you could tell something was wrong, but it was too tiresome to fight it.

And now we don't have to.

Snow day

By most measures a good day.

Did not commute.
Had Thai food from the Y at Ted and Kirsten's.
Am installing this fabulous new printer that I got at a deep discount, listening to Metal Flake Mother and scanning pix for a posting to another, more restricted blog.
And soon sleep.

So lets just call it a day. After I post a little mischeif elsewhere.

Tales from the recession

I had this computer fix-it guy come back by the house today. He had helped me out back in November, I can't recall if I commented on it. Suffice it to say that he is not an exemplar of advanced computer knowledge, I was mildly surprised that they could charge a hundred bucks an hour for him but, I figure, this is what the market will bear. I've seen sys admin guys in a corporate setting who were also not great talents, so this is just how it goes, I figure. And he was an Obama supporter too, which you can't assume in a New Jersey "legacy" demographic (Italian, Jewish, Polish).

Anyway, he got all the data I considered critical, but he missed some stuff I thought I'd never need. Turned out, I needed it for work. So he comes back by the house and extracts the hard drive and connects it to this thingamajiggy and I'll moving data to my laptop, and we start talking. "How's business?" I ask. "Slow, he says. You would think people would be fixing computers rather than buying new ones, but I'm getting like three calls a week." "You got another job?" "Yeah, I work at a WaWa's (a convenience store) on Sunday, just for the extra 60-70 bucks. And I'm living with my invalid 79 year old mother, my family's paying me for that. My brothers have run off to Florida, North Carolina, somebody's gotta take care of mom. And my wife's over at our house taking care of that, so we're separated."

Anyhow, it's hard to convey it within the bounds of a wise-assed blog, but you've got this semi-skilled guy, a tech minor leaguer, kind of a sad sack but fundamentally a really decent human being, trying to retool for the new economy. All good.

Reading the samples

The quantity of samples available at grocery stores around here continues to defy the gravity of the recession. Here are some highlights:

McCaffrey's, Saturday:

• Mild and spicy bbq sauces on chicken chili.  With chips
• Niblets of corned beef with sauerkraut and mustard
• Salmon salad with Chicken in a biscuit type crackers
• Those stupid pretzel chips they always have
• Cubes of marble pound cake at the coffee bar
• Carrots or something like that in produce (doesn't really count)

Does that sound like the Great Depression?

Olive Mays, Sunday

• Vegan fried chicken (surprisingly tasty)
• Seems like there was one other thing

Read my lips.

Toxic assets

If I hear one more nincompoop up there on CNBC etc. bemoaning our inability to value the toxic assets, I'm gonna puke. Assets don't have immutable values. Ever. Houses don't. Car stereos don't. Securities don't. Etc. Prices are always in flux, period.

We will never know if we overpaid or didn't, or if the banks got too much. The best thing to do is cut through the Gordian knot, use multiple valuation methodologies to establish pricing ranges, compel the banks to accept the transactions, ease compensation rules a little to keep bankers at banks, and then raise taxes on upper brackets in 2010 at the very least to the levels of the Clinton administration. Perhaps including capital gains taxes.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Tonight's scorecard

I had hoped Obama would do better tonight. It was a good speech, I just didn't feel like he was able to come up with the narrative component that would make it memorable in the future, the hook. A few years down the road, if we remember it at all, we'll think: "That was the night Obama came out and told us all the things he wanted to do."

Bobby Jindal, on the other hand, played the narrative card hard. "My dad said this... we were hopping in boats to save people that." He crafted that puppy good, so it was great when David Gergen pulled up some numbers that demonstrated that Jindal was basically full of shit. But he was full of the shit Republicans love.

Nancy Pelosi was, in truth, looking a little too happy there.

Bad Brains

Positivity Tsar

I have devoted considerable thinking to the question of who should be dubbed Positivity Tsar: the guy who can play Iacocca to Obama's Reagan, whenever Obama decides he can stop being scary. If you look around the business world, it's hard to find the right person. The only person in finance who's a contender is Jack Bogle, and he's too old. There's no likely candidate from the world of Technology, either. Maybe Larry Page if he would step out. Consumer products also yield few candidates.

In the end, I have settled on Tom Brokaw. The Greatest Generation gives him tremendous cred in the heartland, and it's theme is exactly what America needs to hear: Americans can hunker down, find common purpose, and do tremendous things. It's what we do best, and what we're supposed to do. Brokaw would also appear to be a liberal and, to the best of my knowledge, nobody really hates him. The book and his South Dakota heritage isolate him from "East Coast Media Elite" attacks from Limbaugh etc.

Now, I just have to communicate to Brokaw that he has been selected for this role and figure out how to craft the campaign.

Props to the Economist

In an interview for the weekend edition Nouriel Roubini deflected a question about whether he was the great seer of the bubble bursting by producing a list of fellow-travelling skeptics

• Robert Shiller of Yale and the Case-Shiller Index
• Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley
• Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard
• Nassim Taleb

All true, they've been at it for a while, though Taleb largely seemed more concerned with promulgating his grand theory than with goings on in the real world.  I think, however, we should remember the Economist in this relation.  Every six months or so there'd be an article about the global housing bubble where it would tell us that the US, the UK, and especially Ireland and Spain, were fucked.  It couldn't correctly project how everything would malfunction, I think only Roubini himself started getting close to what has come to pass in his 2006-7 vintage predictions, which were like:  "we will all burn in the fires of hell."  But the Economist did a pretty good job of covering the crisis as it took shape.

Deep in the woods

Working through a New Yorker collection of food writings. Having finished a Joseph Mitchell piece on "Beefsteaks", a beer and meat only social function from the turn of the century through the 30s where people would eat all they could with their bare hands and get wasted.  Good times.  Next up is a John McPhee article about a six-day trip he took with Euell Gibbons in the mountains of Pennsylvania with no provisions and no fishing or hunting equipment.  They fed purely by foraging for nuts, fruits and greens.  Hard core.

Tonight Mary and I watched the Coen Brothers' Burn Before Reading.  Some critics, apparently, didn't like the movie, but we couldn't figure out what there was to not like about it.  Supremely entertaining viewing with a good cast.

Positivity

I have in various forums (which is to say, for the most part, my own mind) advocating for positive and even futurist orientations to the crisis at hand. By which I mean, for those of you who've been napping, the financial crisis.

So here's a couple of ideas, probably already in development somewhere

• A need aggregator for basic service charities. A portal where soup kitchens and the like could go in and give status for what they need: "We're well-funded right now, but need volunteers to serve meals and teach computer skills". That way, if Poughkeepsie is well provided for, I can give money to Toledo.
• I've read about revivals of local stock markets. What about local bond markets? If a store or restaurant is in trouble why not let them issue some small notes locally? Lord knows there's investment banker and lawyer capacity lying fallow. I'm sure there's some SEC reason not to, but hell, the SEC is going away one of these days anyhoo.
  

Belief under stress

On the train ride home tonight I sat next to a black woman in red.  First she called some doctor's office and left a message about a bill she had received late because she had moved in the fall.   Then she called a family member, maybe a cousin, who was home alone and was freaking out because her dad had told her she had to move.  The woman in red tried to help her relative calm down:  "You will always be safe and you will always have a roof over your head.  The Lord will provide that.  You may not like everything that happens, but you will be safe and sheltered."  She talked the other woman for a while, and then got out a small Bible and read to her to keep her under control.

It was pretty moving, in quiet way.   We haven't had to deal with anything like that.  Knock wood.

Herd-culling, the carbon hoofprint and the virtues of progressive impoverishment

The news the other day was that 75,000 dairy cows were culled recently to support milk prices as the markets for cheese and milk diminish. If we're killing cows to support dairy prices, we're also reducing bovine flatulence and thus GHG emissions. This is a trivial number, admittedly, compared with 50 million beef and dairy cows in the US, but it's a good start so maybe if this goes on for a bit we can tack diminished cud chewing next to decreased miles driven in the plus column for sustainability.

Similarly, a study in the Times showing that average calories in Joy of Cooking recipes were up ca 35% from 30s edition to today shows that our obesity problem is tied to societal wealth. Again, this indicates that we might be able to impoverish ourselves into some benefits down the road. But we'll probably have to lose a fair amount of aggregate income before people feel too poor to go to McDonalds, which has done well recently.

Certainly, we may hope to see an increased appreciation for and appreciation for food.

Lewis on Battier

Just got through reading Michael Lewis's piece on Shane Battier in the Times Magazine. As per usual, good stuff. As with Moneyball, Lewis drives into the numbers-driven culture of sports management, but the narrative is anything other than pallid determinism. Instead, with his Shane Battiers, Bill Jameses and Billy Williamses, Lewis feeds us a new heroic narrative: quiet, quirky, but driven people who figure out new ways to do things, be it from the producer or the analytic perspective, which aren't too far removed from one another.

It's not unlike the Jobs/Wozniak tinker in a garage model, but it's more for services than for products. It upends the quant vs. instinct and guts model presented first in the parable of Paul Bunyan vs. the Steam Shovel and resurrected most famously in Rower Lowenstein's account of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in When Genius Failed, the book that everybody read but nobody seems to have taken to heart.

In fact, as we come to the end of an era whose beginings Lewis chronicled in Liar's Poker, it may be time to revisit that book to see how much the worldview has changed.

And, as to Battier, I must say that I always thought he would have looked good in a lighter shade of blue.

A musical interlude

This from our West Coast correspondent and one time drummer of the famed Unity Rockers, a certain John Fox. Personally, I don't quite get why the band is so quiet.

Radiohead with the USC Marching Band

Radiohead - 15 Step
by Alisvideo

Just got off the phone with Guy Whitten, erstwhile lead singer of the same band and now member of the ruling class at the massive Political Science school at Texas A&M, an ecosystem of some 1200 souls with its own IT department. That's no joke. Guy's going to be learning some lessons about life soon with the impending arrival of a first child. So lets all give Guy a rousing ChewYourGrouse welcome into the land of parenting.

One last thing. Isn't it funny how spellcheck in Microsoft Office -- including PowerPoint -- insists that the sequence of letter "Powerpoint" does not indicate a proper English word? Oh, Redmond, how you humor us.

An end of innocence?

At Daylife this evening for a presentation by Jeff Jarvis, author of the book "What Would Google Do?" Basically, he carries on about principles for living derived from the omnipresent transparency facilitated by Google, Craigslist, and the rest. Not much revelation there, and then he opened the floor for some idea generation on the topic of a Google restaurant. A bunch of chipper ideas for cool applications of transparency and networking in the food service context gushed forth. "Drill down into menu items to show ingredients and where they come from," "provide data on popularity of dishes," etc.

Everyone was rather pleased with.themselves. But were they way out of touch with reality? Are we entering into an era of fewer gadgets and slower progress. Can we clever our way out of it? Maybe we can, to some extent. The Obama campaign is a good example of technology used well. I talked to one guy who was working on.a framework to help massive amounts of unemployed people connect. He was only just getting started, but maybe he can do some good. At the very least, he was tuned in.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Foul on Duke

There is a meme flowing around the internet today that the officials in tonight's battle between light blue good and dark blue evil tonight at Cameron Indoor (like they've got an outdoor one) Stadium will call a foul on the Blue Devils of Duke University. I must insist this is only an apocrypal rumor. There have been no confirmations issued, except by John Wofford, President of the ACC.

Some are speculating that the space-time continuum might implode. In any case, it could be more devastating that Lehman's collapse.

A few things

For starters, thanks and praise to Jonathan Moore AKA JMo, whose blog is touted at right.  After I had complained about Blogger/Google being too slack to offer a way to extract a blog to something one could hold locally, he noted that Google did “expose the metadata” in its RSS feed, and he quickly cooked up a Python script to let me expropriate the means of production.  Full on righteous.

 

In other news, after months of luxuriating in the slack traffic of people visiting the blog via Google images to the post where I mocked Joe Biden’s ridiculous hair.  I have since removed that post to force my traffic numbers back down so as to infuse me with the desire to earn my unique visitors the old fashioned way:  by writing something interesting.  So I’ll be trying to do that again.

 

But not today.  Instead, I’ll tell you about my reading of the testimony before Congress of one Harry Markopolos, the Boston-based finance guy whose been trying to make Bernard Madoff’s life a living hell for years, but failing, but is now having his 15 minutes of fame.  And then some.

 

So Markopolos offered up some ideas for reforming the SEC, most important amongst which are

·         SEC staff are desparately underqualified, undertrained, underequipped with print and technology resources and underpaid

·         The SEC doesn’t even let its staff go to conferences to keep up with things

·         The SEC should be made entrepreneurial, with good base pay and bonuses for collars they make

 

All told it’s pretty damning and cogent, but he goes overboard I think in advocating that SEC people should be paid like bank employees, with a lot of pay in bonuses.  They should undoubtedly be paid better, but the idea of entrepreneurial agencies rubs me to wrong way.  People should elect to work for regulators like they elect to non-profits or police departments, for other reasons.

Winner takes all no longer

The ARod scandal, coming as it does on the heels of the bonus scandal and so many other doping scandal, will mark a new phase in the vilification of the overpaid. ARod famously brought Goldman Sachs in to negotiate his handsome deal with the Bronx bombers.

It was already clear where we were headed when people started objecting to Citi getting its logo on the Mets Stadium. If not Citi, who? Berkshire Hathaway? Walmart? Google? The lists of the deep-pocketed are short. That's $400 million that's not going into the Mets coffers, and it will be reflected in pay cuts to players. And we're gonna see more and more sponsorships get pulled, and athletes will earn less, and maybe, if we're lucky, they'll do fewer steroids.

Nobody's going to object, except the players, but they're not going to be in a situation where they have much leverage. If your Kobes and Lebrons stamp out and bitch, they'll lose the adulation that makes them marketable. I look forward to it.

Dreams of My Father

I've been making my way through the book, and continue to be impressed. Obama is at times a little reductive and corny, but he continue to convey legitimate and earnest questing, and openmindedness. All in all, I'm immensely proud to have as president the guy who wrote this book.

He's gonna make booboos. In the end he will probably rue the salary constraint on the banks, and not vetting people for tax issues will sting. But I really don't see him hauling off alienating the whole world a few weeks after we had everybody's sympathy and starting a completely idiotic and adventurist war because the Vaderesque cronies just promised him it was a good idea. And he'll probably have the good sense not to get blow jobs in the Oval Office. I think we're good.

Reborn

The restaurant where my firm meets monthly, which I reported closed a couple of months back, has reopened under a new name: "Williams", after the street it's on. The food is not better, it is in many ways worse. Tonight they kept trying to serve us these little cherry tomato things with tuna inside, which nobody ate. Why?, you may ask. Because they sucked, you could tell just looking at them. The calamari was fried, at least, but they brought us chicken sliders instead of beef. The nerve.

Paying for 2.0

More and more media outlets are starting to think seriously about the disappearance of new media forms with shaky business models. The blogging network Pajamas Media shut down, there's no saying others won't too.

So we have to ask ourselves: how much would you pay for a given 2.0 form for a year? I already donated money to Wikipedia. I pay monthly for LinkedIn already (should probably try to expense it). Would I pay a hundred bucks a year for Facebook? Without blinking. $250? I'd pay it. Compare with the three grand a year I pay Verizon now for the three cell phones and the Triple Play.* Or the $200 I pay for Netflix.

But without Blogger/Blogspot I'd be toast. I've got 1500 posts up on this bitch, and there's no hint that they'll let me export it to a *.csv or something. There's no way Google could figure out how to load balance the millions of people who might try to extract at peak times. It's just too much of a technical challenge for such a frail company of technical and business bleating morons. Way over Google's head.


*I'd ditch cable if it weren't for the Fox Soccer Channel, truth be told

Around the fire, again

Mary and I were out to dinner a couple of years ago with some people, and a woman began holding forth on how nice it would be if we all lived in villages and grew and ate organic produce and had deep and authentic relationships with one another and so on and so forth. And I've had those reveries before, now and again, but that evening something clicked and I oh so very gently remonstrated her that, were we all to revert to these romantic communal ways, it wouldn't be all that simple.

We derive immeasurable benefits from the massive degree of specialization and division of labor in our economy, and the way technology annihilates space and offers up economies of scale. If we went back to village ways, basic stuff we take for granted like low infant mortality would quickly suffer. Just as importantly, outsiders -- homosexuals, black people, Asians, Mexicans -- could quickly be ostracized. That's how clans work.

In recent weeks, as the stark seriousness of our economic situation has become ever clearer, the neo-communal or nuclear familial idyll has reared its head in a variety of places, with commentators from Tyler Owen and Douglas Coupland on down the pike alluding to the return of simple pleasures, being with family and suffering together by the hearth. Back on Walton's Mountain. We can't let ourselves get caught up in this nonsense.

I don't want to go overboard in my negativity. I think between the PWA and the WPA and the CCC and Woody Guthrie and the rest of it left a positive trace in American culture, which we felt when Pete Seeger and Springsteen channeled Woody a couple of weeks back. I looked up the history of the Klan in the Depression, expecting it would be bad, and in fact the sheet wearing goons weren't that active in the 30s. So maybe America will come together in a positive way in the face of difficulty. But there's a real risk that we won't, that contention for scarce resources will bring out the less good, and we must guard against that by not turning in upon ourselves.

Observations

On route 22 -- which near Plainfield was America's first divided highway -- saw two rotting and moribund gas stations, a rarity in Central NJ. Doesn't make sense.

On the platform for the outbound PATH train, there were big heat lamps there in the open air. That shit don't play in today's economy. The Port Authority should not be paying for that.

Dinosaur Jr. "Forget the Swan". Still my guitar hero.

Superclasico!

Had a moment free and thought I'd tune in for a momement of the Superbowl. Instead, my set, semi-permanently fixed to the Fox Soccer Channel, found something much much better: Superclassico! The game between Buenos Aires clubs Boca Juniors and River Plate. This is a real sporting event, not some marketing fest.

Destructive creation

Ripping copper pipes and other useful materials out of new houses has apparently become endemic throughout this great nation of ours, though the process has likely decreased since commodity prices collapsed in the fall, along with everything else.

This is actually all good, as it reduces housing stock by driving up the value of existing homes, or at the very least, creates demand for police services. With commodities prices down, we'll have to rely on shooting galleries and squats to rein in housing supply through destruction. The low cost of energy should encourage the development of hydroponic farming of the proverbial "killah" in unoccupied homes, which would help improve our balance of trade by making it less necessary to import reefer from Columbia etc. So we're headed in the right direction!