Continued arrival

My days continue to be sucked up by the little details of arriving here: making this house suitable for habitation by the family, especially Mary. Today we consulted with our boy Marvin about some paint colors and techniques for lightening knotty pine panel, then hosted a chimneysweep (who informed me that one of the chimney liners was cracked which will cost ducats), got the old Subaru fixed, paid some bills, and otherwise delt with crap.

In other news, check out the sweet article on my once-fleetingly colleague Felix Salmon, who has recently taken up residence behind the wheel of economic discourse at Reuters.

The Dark and Bloody Ground

Tonight I'm watching a 1974 episode of The Rockford Files with the title given above, in which Jimbo gets put in harms way by some chick he used to date. I realize that's not narrowing the field very much, because this is pretty much the plot of half of the episodes. I predict that Jim will come out unscratched in the end, but that he won't be a penny the richer or wiser.

The Power of Song

We watched a documentary about Pete Seeger named The Power of Song, one of the rare occasions when we actually pulled the trigger on one of those many documentaries on our Netflix list. It was a fine piece, and Seeger is a very inspiring human, an uber-grandpa for all of us.

But his role in the propagation and popularization of folk music and the banjo may be more problematic and complex than this movie lets on. The film tells of how Seeger's parents, classically trained musicians, went South in a wagon with violins and a piano to take music and culture to "the people" and were stunned to find that the people already had music of their own. Seeger went back to the well and mastered pickin and a grinnin, no one doubts that.

But the next day I was listening to some Porter Wagoner and I had to wonder: what does the Grand Ole Opry set think of Seeger? Probably the same thing some Schwabian bard thought of Herder when he came nosing round back the glades back in the 1760s: "buy me a drink and leave me be."

Carolina Chocolate Drops

Say no more.



Also

Adjustments

I continue to be surprised by the rain delays at the US Open, thinking: but how can it be so rainy there when it's sunny here? And then I remember that I'm 500 odd miles away.

Which was the point of moving.

Government salaries

Was doing a little benchmarking last night at JobNob and saw some interesting trends in Raleigh. We all tend to think that federal government jobs don't pay well, but these numbers seem to indicate otherwise. Putting aside some biases in sampling (the large numbers of reported government salaries seem to indicate that there's some official effort to report to the site, probably as a recruiting measure, whereas in the private sector lower salaried employees are more likely to self-report), these numbers are nonetheless a little eye-opening. Once you factor in the long-term benefit conferred by a defined benefit pension plan (I think the Economist back of the napkined that at 25-30%), those are pretty good ducats.

Consider that the AFGE -- the American Federation of Government Employees -- has 600,000 members. I imagine that numbers those large would hinder any effort to impose any sort of management discipline on the federal government.

Things are poppin

A lot of activity at the desk over the last few days. The steady drumbeat of good market news and positive soundbites from the economic and political establishment is clearly translating into some hiring, at least for people like the kid. If I am not careful, I could be gainfully employed in a manner of days, which could put a crimp into my tennis and otherwise diversified portfolio of sporting.

Explication du texte

Certain of my readers have at times expressed frustration at the opacity and arcaneness of the blog, which is kind of just par for the course. But certain things can be explained.

The title itself, "Chew Your Grouse", has been touched upon in earlier posts, like the inaugural one.

But the current subtitle is probably a little bit mystifying. Who are these mysterious Kaufmans to whom I liken myself?

• Andy Kaufman -- less of a mystery. Lattke from the 80s sitcom Taxi, he of Mighty Mouse fame from SNL and later career forays into extreme life/art boundary crossing as a professional wrestling provocateur.
• Walter Kaufman -- Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, translator of Nietzsche and others. A horrifically egotistical man, who would pepper his volumes with footnotes to his own books and would place his own introductory essays (for example in a sampler on existentialism) on a par with those whose works he edited (i.e. Kaufman, Kierkegaarde, Sartre, Heidegger). This amused us to no end in college.
• Henry Kaufman -- The original Dr. Doom (an interest rate hawk). A fine old Wall St eminence grise, a sober economist and long-time Managing Director at Salomon Brothers, who very charmingly and affectingly nodded to his wife at the end of the acknowledgements to On Money and Markets: "She has been the center of my world for more than four decades, and has shared all the strains and triumphs of my life and career. How could I ever acknowledge her enough." In other words, a very centered and balanced guy.
  

Cigarette break

I've been running in the mid-late morning (I know it's foolish and I should go earlier in late summer heat), but twice I've seen the same foolish thing: a bus driver stopped at the bus stop right by Booker Creek apartments who has left his bus -- a double, accordion-length thing -- running, while he stops for a cigarette in the bus stop enclosure. I'm sure the bus is empty. Probably his schedule accomodates this. It may even be that the energy expenditure break-even period for turning an engine that big off is less than that of a typical car (typically reckoned to be 1 minute).

But still it seems excessive, if not downright wrong. The best way to disincent this behavior would be to build in some performance-based compensation possibilities for bus drivers around fuel consumption, and/or itemize their health care insurance premia based on tobacco consumption. But I'm sure that ain't going on.

Owls in the night

Last night from down the hill into the ravine outside our window we heard what could only have been bird sounds, but from a thick thorax cavity. One was nearby, on this side of the lake, and it called out at a somewhat regular rhythm. And then, from across the lake, came an answering call.

A little poking around shows this to have been the typical call of a Great Horned Owl.

I don't remember owls being around when I was growing up. Maybe there are now no predators, letting populations rebuild, or maybe I was ignoring them back then.

History decimated

I was dumbfounded to discover -- while trolling around Atlantic Beach, North Carolina using Google Maps Street View -- that the putt putt golf course that my dad always claimed was the first one on the East Coast, which had belonged to our family in the 40s and 50s and which would have made us so much money just to own the real estate in the 80s -- is gone. Decimated. History.

From the looks of it, some developer flattened the whole boardwalk carnie scene Ferris Wheel scene around there and was gonna put something big in there, and then (you guessed it) ran out of cash. Or maybe this is North Carolina's version of Asbury Park, faded glory. Only there's not enough of a gay community in this state to give it the hope of a comeback that Asbury Park has.

Wrinkles in faith-based investing

I have always eschewed active stock selection, buying instead into random-walk, Boglehead theory. But overweighting domestic stocks is actually a form of faith-based investing: faith that the US will come out ahead. In general this has been a good bet. In the late 70s and early 80s it looked like were were toast, but then we turned out to be more like French toast, enriched by eggy ideas and the sweet sweet syrup of continuously confident fiscal policy. But somewhere along the way this confidence metastasized into hubris.

For now, The Economist cites as basic US competitive advantages over the rest of the developed world productivity growth and population growth, especially via immigration and assimilation. Europe doesn't do the latter nearly as well, and Japan totally doesn't.

But relative to rising Asia and Brazil, an entirely different set of dynamics are at work. Those folks are hungry and competitive, while we are threatened by educational underperformance by Anglos. We have great universities but a bunch of slacker kids. We only have a fixed quantity of very high-end imported talent from India and China, and they are geographically circumscribed to specific regions, and as the balance of economic power shifts the talented ones will be drawn inexorably back to their homes.

We need to do a number of things to be sure they want to stay here, or reverse brain drain will accelerate. We need to maintain the comparative advantage of open and civil society versus the male-dominated and caste and statist constraints of Asia. And we need to kick our own kids' butts into gear.

Is Yahoo slipping?

Yahoo mail is dramatically more feature-rich than gmail, no question about that. But is Yahoo! getting squeezed in terms of keeping the servers running smooth? It seems to me t
hat I'm seeing hiccups in the way the thing works all too frequently. Emails don't get sent. I can't search my inbox without throwing an apache error. And so on and so on.

Is this a result of the failed monetization of a free service? Build it and they will come, but then what the hell are you gonna do?

I remember riding to a wedding with someone from D.E. Shaw back in '94 or '95 and she's telling me that they're starting up a free, web-based email service called Juno and I was just dumbfounded. "How's that gonna work?" I asked. Maybe it hasn't.

The Rockford Files

Rather than writing a quality post this evening, I reposed on the couch and watched a classic episode of The Rockford Files from my complete archive on DVD. In this episode, guest-starring the ever lovely Linda Evans as a former flame, our hero goes toe to toe with Sergeant Becker and a surly captain over some undercover cop whose been shaking Rockford's ex down for years. Evans "has no money", despite an opening chase sequence in a pretty sweet Mercedes spider (240 SL?). In any case, it was perfectly decent watching, and I'll have to return to the well for more soon.

The gentle roar of the acceleration of history

After a run around the lake, I stopped in for a quick swim at the shared beach area behind our house. The last other swimmers were leaving, and I had the place to myself. The water was end of August brackish, but I drifted out a little on my back and could see the almost full moon rising over the trees at the top of the hill above the grassy park area.

In the not so great distance (1.2 miles), I could hear the gentle droaning of our new neighbor, I-40, which is nestled over a rise or two to the Northeast. It makes for easier commuting to RTP, and quicker beach access, but is it worth it? A toughie.

Wrong number

Some teenage girl in New Jersey keeps calling me and insisting that she has the right number and that I'm lying when I say there's no Thomas there. "Thomas?" she says. "No," I say. "I'm Graham and this has been my cell number for the last seven years or so." And she says: "But I looked it up." My guess is that Thomas works for Verizon, he ran out on his girlfriend and changed his listed number to be mine to get the whiner off his back.

But it's definitely getting old.

Gossip from the bus stop

A dad at my kids' bus stop is the son of a former Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools' Athletic Director, and he told me a little anecdote today about hiring a basketball coach for Chapel Hill High School back in 1981 or so. Roy Williams was, at that time, an assistant to Dean Smith, and he interviewed for the job. The AD looked at him and threw him out on his butt, because it was clear that he was too talented and would never stick around.

Then Ken Miller came in wearing sweats. He was hired.

Apparently Ken Miller never tipped when he went to restaurants. He claimed that it wasn't his responsibility to pay those people, they weren't his employees.

Downtown Durham

Had a meeting in Durham today. Prowled Main St. looking for my dad's old office. Vacant storefronts jostled with fancy eateries and lawyer's offices for space. Waited on at lunch by a guy who was a waiter at a restaurant when I started there as a dishwasher in 1984, and whose mullet has not changed substantially. Nor, for that matter, has his skin.

Haunted by memories of shopping at a long since departed department store in Downtown. Long gone.

Update from the pile

It appears that the Grouse will have to obtain a compost bin or somesuch device here in the South, as his open pile is being pillaged by the local fauna nightly.

In other news, while walking home just now from Estes Hills Elementary Kindergarten orientation, I saw some intense mushrooms and caterpillars.

Next, a trip to Durham for lunch with the man who Forbes has called the "Ralph Nader of mortgage lending," more or less.

Sitting at my desk

Another day of disruption at the desk. Graham puking on what was supposed to be his first day of school. Puking and very whiny.

And then I tried to set up my printer, this Hewlett-Packard Photosmart C7280 which has been such a pain in the butt when talking to my Dell Latitude D420 running Windows XP. When it talks so nicely to Mary's Macbook. I downloaded 193 megs of crap only to be told that I needed the original installer disks to install a bunch of features. If I needed the disk, I wouldn't have downloaded the .exe, for chrissakes.

Anyway, now I can print.

Wet n Wild

At the Wet n Wild water park west of Greensboro, NC today, the Grouse experienced extreme culture shock, despite running into the son of a regular reader, a certain Jake. I haven't seen as much skin as that in a long time, and the incidence of obesity meant that the per capita square inchage of skin was high, too. Tattoos were also very much in evidence, including on otherwise bourgeois looking women who looked like they might in other times wear black cocktail dresses and comment on the oakiness of a Merlot. There were one or two of those.

And blaring metal and soul oldies, in blazing hot sun.

I was very glad Mary had not come. This was not the new South whose praises we have sung.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Driving south

After a deeply anticlimactic struggle to get our sorry butts out of our beloved Princeton house while our obese movers huffed and puffed and cursed our three stories, we finally set out caravan style at 3pm in a torrential downpour. We got across the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and soon thereafter diverted onto 896/301 to skip the Baltimore/DC traffic scene.

Before long, a two-lane road through generic Delaware suburbia opened out into a rural two/four lane highway, and it was us and farms and trees and trucks, and I had the distinct memory of the seeming endless monotony of pine forest and the loneliness of it all. In the North, there's all too often a sense that you're chasing after something going on over there, or down there, whereas in the South all too often it's just between you and the trees with no illusions of something you might be missing out on, because no one cares, or it's easier to believe that they don't, or that you shouldn't care if they do.

27514

Fear not, faithful readers, the Grouse's plaintive song has not been silenced or even stunted, it has simply been stifled momentarily by transit. The family has now arrived safely in the bosom of the Great North State, but, for shame, I must wait till Friday for real internet service. But I'll make an effort to post here and there.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Lack

Apologies for the lack of posting to those few faithful of my regular readers. I've been packing to move this Thursday, which was interrupted by a need to inter my recently and sadly departed father-in-law George Berridge, whose eulogy needs to be adapted to fit the needs of the blogosphere. I'll climb back on the horse soon.

Aren't TIPS a type of derivative?

Are they not kissing cousins to interest rate swaps? You pay a fixed amount and then get yield plus the adjustment on an underlying instrument, in this case the CPI. There are, of course, a good number of arguments against the efficacy of CPI in reflecting inflation as it is actually experienced, and TIPS are relatively young (born in '97) and not that large an asset class in general, so they're sort of not quite battle hardened. So if China is going to bully us into using them as a primary means of debt issuance, we need to think long and hard about what that might mean for us down the road.

How bad does Verizon suck?

Let me count the ways. I've been on the phone an hour now trying to disconnect my FIOS service. I guess they don't staff anyone on that branch of the phone tree. That's not really a good client retention strategy.

For one, it just gives its customers time to mouth off on the blogosphere.

Lots of members of my former firm worked for Accenture in the 90s and they told horror stories of what a cesspool Verizon was and how they would spend many millions of dollars on projects that just failed outright. And for this I spend $250 or so a month for all of my home and mobile data services. I look forward to severing this relationship, if I'm ever able to do so.

Talking heads on CNBC

One of the benefits of working at home recently has been that I haven't been subjected to CNBC in public spaces, but I tuned in the other day while constructing boxes. And there before me was a familiar face, an attractive blonde Russian woman with her own "quant trading strategy" firm -- an energetic self-promoter, met with her in summer of 08, had a beverage in the basement of Grand Central, where she was all too happy to minimize expenses and jumped at the chance to advise on a simple FX transaction.

As of August '08 co-published an article (with her husband) on raising capital from high net worth customers (rich people but nonetheless retail clients) through structured products, which seems like a relic of a bygone era.

The other day she was talking about whether CITI is too big to fail, she talked too much and tripped over herself and got beat down by a more media-savvy guy from Connecticut AG's office.

Generally speaking, this is indicative of CNBC's status as a good source of analysis: this woman really didn't need to be commenting on Citi, nor was she particularly qualified to do so, but she fills the screen better than she does the air waves, and she'll do it, so hell, run with her.

The supply side is dead?

This afternoon I had the displeasure of getting my haircut in a place where the guy was watching Fox News. I should have had the backbone to tell him I wouldn't let him cut my hair and walk out, but I wanted it shorter.

So I was watching the Neil Cavuto show, and he was all bent out of shape -- among other things -- about Geithner and Summers getting on the talk shows yesterday morning and hinting at raising taxes on the middle class. And he brings on Governor George Allen, a Virginia Republican, who says: "the only way to pay down these big deficits is by raising taxes."

Hmmm. Since the age of the great Arthur Laffer, the Republicans have been the party of the supply side. He're a not so ancient quote from our buddy McCain: "Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes. Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues." — McCain, [1/17/08]. So Allen should be arguing that raising taxes will make budget deficits worse. But somebody handed him the wrong script, I reckon.

CIT playing catch up

CIT is still working things out. Today it revised a tender offer to buy-out noteholders, and has left in place some outdated company profile boilerplate in its press releases.

CIT is a bank holding company with more than $60 billion blah blah blah... Founded in 1908 and headquartered in New York City, CIT is a member of the Fortune 500. www.cit.com

In fact, CIT was dumped from the S&P 500 a couple of weeks back and replaced by Raleigh, NC-based open source vendor Red Hat. I guess CIT has been cutting back on its flack expenditures.

CAPCO busted

Friday's NYTimes had a story on CAPCO, a captive excess insurer of deposits for brokerages. The long and short of it was that CAPCO, founded in 2003 by 12 major and minor brokerages, including Lehman, Goldman, Wachovia Securities, Morgans JP and Stanley, Credit Suisse, Fidelity, Edward Jones, Raymond James, and some smaller fish.

When I called my broker in October following the “breaking the buck” freak out, I was told that SIPC plus Capco coverage protected my shares if not their value (as if the latter were an issue at that point in time). As of February: poof goes CAPCO.

I’m not generally one for the general free for all pile on Goldman and Wall St in general thing, but it seems that, to the extent that the remaining big banks and other CAPCO participants may have $11 billion unfunded liabilities emerging from Lehman litigation, that some of the YTD profits could have been steered to a recapitalization. At the very least, we may hope that CAPCO participants are now reserving adequately against the possibility of future Lehman-related claims.

If anything, this should raise red flags for customers of Fidelity which, as a private company, is itself pretty opaque.

Humorously, there is a warning on the CAPCO site that some unscrupulous firm is misrepresenting itself as being covered by CAPCO. After Friday's article, that firm may regard its nonparticipation as a boon.

Diner envy

I was reminded by a Googling of my friend Levon Kazarian, now impresario of St Francis Fountain, a San Francisco landmark, of my intent to post about a piece of Central Jerseyana which I will miss.



The place is called Rose and Chubby's, in the middle of Hopewell, NJ (just across the street from the old railroad station where -- 9 years ago -- an upstanding realtor assured us that NJ Transit was going to reinstitute commuter service to NYC. You can guess the punchline there). Anyway, the exterior of the place is, as you can see, none too preposessing.


Once you get inside, however, it is somewhat less decrepit, but nonetheless furnished basically straight out of the Hardy Boys series.



The proprietors of the place are two septua/octagenarian lasses, perhaps they for whom the joint is named. When Ted and I visited recently and he took these pix, we were the only people in there not on a first name basis with them. The food is fine, basic, but the menu is noteworthy.



Most trips to Rose and Chubby's are low on drama, but I remember when I was in there one time and this 80ish couple was having a nice civilized lunch, he with jacket and sweater vest, she in a nice dress. When it came time to leave, he paid the bill, and his wife got up and walked to the door, he turned, watched her, making sure that she wasn't going to turn her head, and then pounced his teeth into the half of an egg-salad sandwich that she had left on her plate. Some marital dynamics die hard.

Lox n grits (note to Bill Smith)

Cleaning out cubbards, and with a celiac disease suffering child in the house during a heavy thunderstorm, I came across some grits. After making tha girls a traditional cheese grits (i.e. with cheddar), I set to thinking: "if grits combine so well with salt and fat in the form of country ham or sauteed shrimp with lots of butter, why not smoked salmon and cream cheese?"

So I tried it this morning. Works fine. To charge $12 for it in a restaurant all you need is some adjectives ("artisanal", "organic"), and substitute creme fraiche for the cream cheese and top with fresh dill.

Benjamin Button

is Forrest Gump. Then again, if you just Google it, you can see that that's no news to anyone. There's just less humor and action, and Brad Pitt is no Tom Hanks.

Then again, Tom Hanks is no Brad Pitt.

The movie drags on and on.

Waiting for the big man

Stuck here alone in Princeton as the family has gone to Larchmont to deal with sad events, of which there will be news in due time.

Right now I'm waiting for this big hispanic guy, John, husband of Kathy, who babysits here in the hood. John works in a garage, and in his spare time he drives around and collects scrap. And boy do we have that for him...

Flash back 3 years or so, when Anne and another John were moving from an 80s colonial to a more manageable 70s ranch over on the lake with an apartment for their special needs child, approaching his/her 20s. In their basement they had a treadmill, which Anne proferred to Mary on the cheap. Here's the post about moving the heavy thing into the house and disfiguring our lovely stairs.

So, a thousand days and nights on, how many times did we use the damned thing? 15? 20? Not much more. Global warming and the concomitant warm winters have helped, but so has general lassitude and the siren call of the Fox Soccer Channel, which calls my name all too often. And John will come with his F150 and, with the help of David across the street, we will haul this heavy bitch down from the 3rd floor to the street, without marring this house which will soon pass into the hands of others. My shoulders are pre-knotted in anticipation.

Oh, the thrill

I recently dropped a note on Facebook to someone somewhat famous in literary circles, telling him/her that I had gone and read his/her big book (winner of a big prize in its day) and found it very rewarding and instructive -- which was true. I won't delve into more detail.

Today I note that this same person has expressed -- again on Facebook -- considerable glee to have been said (in print) to have been on the bedside table of another Notable Author type. So I guess that shows that even when you're famous, your ego still particularly appreciates being stroked in public, rather than in private.

Humid

At long last we have given in and installed the air conditioners in all windows. I have spent the days going up and down stairs carrying heavy stuff from the third floor down, the basement up, stuff to the curb or to the shed, all over. Calves and quads showing signs of crampage.

This is what they call aging, I believe.

At least the grey hair means that, twice within recent weeks, tween or teen girls have said I look like George Clooney which -- while not true -- I can live with.

Natalie at Harry Potter

WARNING! POTENTIAL PLOT SPOILERS IN TEXT BELOW. DO NOT READ IF YOU CARE ABOUT PLOT OF MOVIE

Natalie and I took in the new Harry Potter movie, the 5th book, The Half-Blood Prince. In it, Harry and his crew are progressing well into puberty, making out ('mugging"?) and coupling up prodigiously. Natalie, in all her glorious tweendom at the age of 9 and 2 months, smiled sheepishly and blushed during the romance scenes.

And then, at the end, the untimely death of Dumbledore, and she turned her head away from me to conceal the fact that she was crying, she who has done her damnedest to conceal any emotion she might be feeling about the fact that her grandfather is in hospice care. I'm just getting to know this Harry Potter thing and I cried, and I knew exactly what it was about.

She was also indignant about places where the movie deviated from the plot of the book, which took me back.

Tim Collins on Citi Board

Tim Collins is an interesting choice for the Citigroup board. The swashbuckling story of Ripplewood, JC Flowers, Volcker and how they restructured LTCB into Shinsei was one of a big quick buck for our private equity guys and some dispersion of keiretsu murkiness. But now that Shinsei has stumbled into a proposed merger with Aozora, is it clear that they did unequivocably good work? Is he really the right guy for a long-term salvation of what is -- after all -- 35% ours? Or is he a value extractor first and foremost?

I read Gillian Tett's book on Shinsei and then I heard Collins speak once in 2005. Smart guy, but sort of self-involved and not someone who gave the appearance that he would be overly concerned with safeguarding shareholder (i.e. taxpayer) interests. Other than that I don't know.

Actual insurance text

BofA sent me an offer of free Accidental Dismemberment and Death Insurance with the option (imagine that!) of buying up more. Coverage is through the Hartford. For kicks, I read through it a little bit:

The Hartford will not pay more than the Principal Suim for all Losses due to the same accident. Loss means, with regard to hands and feet, actual severance through or above wrist or ankle joints; with regard to sight, speech, or hearing, entire and irrecoverable loss thereof; with regard to thumb and index finger, actual severance through or above the metacarpophalangeal joints.

You just gotta love lawyers for keeping it all straight for us.

Still throwing out books

Today, Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. But before I do that, lets transcribe the classic opening coda just for safekeeping.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

He may not have ended up redefining political economy, but the guy could bust a rhyme here and there.

Skip Gates behind bars, finally

The story of Henry Louis "Skip" Gates being arrested in his own home is all over the blogosphere, and rightly so. I normally don't pick this kind of thing up, but it is ridiculous. Some neighbor called in a report of "two black men forcing the door"? Like she had never noticed he was black before?

In truth, he ain't no Wesley Snipes or Charley "Midnight" Murphy in terms of depth of skin tone, but he is distinctly a black man, and a frickin world-famous one at that. If he were my neighbor, I would know.

Now, it's possible that -- like my actual neighbor, Toni Morrison -- he doesn't spend any time at this particular residence. But still, everybody would know he lived there. Even in Cambridge.

More on Taibbi and Goldman

It seems a lot of people are getting all lathered up about Goldman Sachs and Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece about it, specifically. There's more than a dollop of anti-semitism at work here, and since I did a little digging for some posts on a thread elsewhere on the internet, I might as well recirculate it here. The key bit is that Taibbi likens Goldman Sachs to a "blood-sucking squid."

The blood-sucking squid metaphor shows a little originality on Taibbi's part, but deviates only slightly from the image of the "Symbolic Snake of Judaism" promulgated in the apocryphal Protocols of the Elders of Zion which have served as one of the grounding texts of anti-semitism since their initial publication in turn of the century Russia. See this, for instance:

"These learned men decided by peaceful means to conquer the world for Zion with the slyness of the Symbolic Snake, whose head was to represent those who have been initiated into the plans of the Jewish administration, and the body of the Snake to represent the Jewish people - the administration was always kept secret, EVEN FROM THE JEWISH NATION ITSELF. As this Snake penetrated into the hearts of the nations which it encountered it undermined and devoured all the non-Jewish power of these States"

and also, further on:

"In all corners of the earth the words "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms at work boring into the well-being of the GOYIM, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the GOY States."

And why does Taibbi situate himself in this tradition? Because he's ambitious and he's out to make a bigger name for himself as a journalist. Taibbi was one of the editors of The Exile in Moscow in the 90s, a zine run by frat boys on steroids that made its name mixing serious exposes of Yeltsin-era crime and politics with celebrating an emigre culture of abusing drugs and cheap street whores.

Taibbi is a classic bad boy run amok, but he hasn't done any real legwork on this one.

No comment

CIT and a new crisis

To what extent did early 90s chaos facilitate the rise to preeminence of the Big Boxes? Having started to pay attention to the economy only this decade, I never really thought about it, but the Journal today kindled thoughts in your correspondent.

"CIT isn't providing loans to all of those companies (a million-odd small businesses -- grouse), of course. But companies like MetFin are indirectly dependent on the future of CIT. If CIT fails and its loans are sold, to rivals, the marketplace would lose a source of credit and the disruption could force many companies searching for financing into a marketplace where credit is tight.

That was the environment in the early 1990s when a rash of bank failures created havoc for small commercial borrowers, said Charles Ou, senior economist for the SBA. He added that the SBA has no comment on the subject of CIT Group and that he was only offering his personal opinion."

Generally speaking, Rahm Emanuel pert crack about "not wasting a crisis" is one of the key soundbites of our day. But why should he be taking a page from the Naomi Klein "Shock Doctrine" playbook? Isn't that supposed to be the domain of uber capitalists? Who will be the big beneficiaries of a CIT collapse? More than GE Capital and Wells Fargo etc., will it be the lords of Bentonville who cash in?

Boxing books

I am, at long last, boxing some books, moving forward with moving. The truck gets here in a month. With effort I am culling books that I have not read, and/or will never read again.

Prominent cullees at this point in time include:

• Gary Shteyngart
• Rory Stewart
• Patrick Leigh Farmer
• Heloise and Abelard
• Sigmund Freud
• Nikolai Dobroliubov
• and others

I should chuck more, but it's hard, you know.

Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on GS

I tried to read Taibbi's article, but found it too sophisticated. I'm waiting till he dumbs it down to the level of People.


No but seriously. I like squid.

Northern Invasion

I am, at present, exiled to New Jersey, unable to get back up to Gotham because of primary caregiving constraints. While I, in fact, have tired greatly of commuting up there all the time, and have recently turned back interesting opportunities there because I'm going home, right now I really want to get up there because...

...Tim Horton's is coming! Or, rather, it's already here. Certain Dunkin Donuts stores were rebadged and branded for Monday morning and are now serving the donut stylings of the legendary Canadian donutery, including some in Penn Station.

Now, as we all know by now, Kristy Kremes -- while delicious in their own right -- have proven for their combination of lightness, fluffiness, and accounting trickery to be the quintessential donuts of the Greenspan / bubble era. Dunkin Donuts, while having fought back and maintained good quality coffee in the face of the Starbucks onslaught, has uneven donuts and suffers from strategic distraction with little pizzas, crappy bagels, and other whatnot. Tim Horton's, on the other hand, has, in my limited sampling, produced good stuff. Once, in 2003, flying back from Toronto, I snuck a dozen back into the country, and ate a shameful if nondisclosed quantity of fritters and sour-cream donuts on the plane and on the way to the office.

CIT, so pity us

Time was, in summer time CIT stood for "Counsellors in Training," and it was all in good fun.

I'm of a mixed mind about CIT the commercial lender now tottering on the brink of demise, now about to hoover up more tax dollars. On the one hand, I think it does sound like a systemically important institution, and the fact that it supports a lot of franchisees and other small businesses makes it seem worth saving. On the other hand, the time must come when we stop stepping in and propping things up.

This would be a good time -- perhaps -- for messrs Buffett, Blankfein, Dimon, Kovacevich, Fink, Gross and other bad asses to saddle up some white horses and ride in. Or perhaps they could be corralled, a la Long Term Capital Management. The etiology isn't as direct as it was back then, but the risks are still somewhat pooled.

Suspicious men with laptops

My friend Craig, a somewhat eccentric looking balding guy with a grey beard, had his laptop propped up on the chest height stone wall of Maggie's Playground in Princeton the other day, with its screen facing out. He had a wireless connection from his house across the street, and his 8-year old daughter was running around nearby.

Nearby, a group of Stepford wives grew suspicious. One of them snuck aroind behind Craig and snooked a peak at his screen, muttering something about men and computers.

Now, I ask you, would they have made a fuss if he had been a corporate guy in khaki shorts? Would they bug me right now if they saw me in the same park with my Blackberry? I doubt it.

It's this fearful, Megan's Law, corporatist mentality that makes it easier for me to leave Princeton, this would-be, somewhat wannabe somewhat not college town.

Tell No One

This is a very serviceable French thriller, interspersed with typical continental PCness and postcardness (i.e. full of scenes that shout out "look how nice Paris is.") Given that the movie came out in 2006, it's unlikely that many of you will see it, so I'll spoil the plot and say that the evil looking "State Senator Neuville" is the root of all evil here. This guy is rich beyond all means and able to retain a crew of crack spies and torturers to maintain surveillance over our Dustin Hoffman look a like hero for eight years, but we have no idea where he gets his money.

Which makes the movie a love story about a couple of good looking and noble working class kids (sired of a cop and a stable manager -- both of whom worked for the rich guy), who fight back against power and wealth and bring him down. So it is a parable of the opacity of Europe's wealth and power structure, which flies in the face of Eurogovernments' rule of law.

My trip to Greece and hanging with an adoptive member of the Euroaristocracy this year gave me some insight into how this works in Greece at least -- lots of tax evasion and a clear delineation of public and private space, with the spoils going to the latter.

Throwback

Today, in an accidental throwback to the 70s, I lathered, then rinsed. Then repeated. I scarcely recognize myself.

Money pit?

A good friend of mine, a developer of fine homes and regular reader of the blog, counseled me when I bought our current abode in 2003: "Those old houses can become money pits," quoth he. We put some money into it, but it never really got bad.

Until now, when we're trying to get out of the durned thing. Having been built in 1913, it had knob and tube wiring. Most of that stuff got taken out, but there's still some up on the third floor and going to the 2nd. On our disclosure form I dutifully checked the box "Has knob and tube."

Now, back when we bought, I was concerned about insuring the house with this wiring, but it turned out I had to pay something like $300-400 more because of it. In the interim, turns out, many, if not all, insurance companies have decided they don't want to write coverage on it at all.

So the ground shifted beneath our feet, just as it did in 2001 when we found that Princeton Boro, which had granted us an onstreet parking permit at our prior home, had revoked it, claiming it had been "issued in error" years before. This cut the value of our home. The moral to this story is that there is regulatory risk inherent in house transactions, particularly in densely populated areas where the involvement of pooled interests (govts, insurance companies) in markets is high. These factors may move against you, but they are unlikely to move for you.

How will this all turn out? Stay tuned, fair reader, and remind me if I don't get back to it. There should be more chapters to this tale.

Selling the house

I have somewhat neglected to mention just how much fun we've been selling our house. Over two-odd months, 50ish viewings, two open houses, all told hundreds and hundreds of feet a pitter pattering through the place we call home. Keeping it clean, I tell you, no fun. Mowing the lawn, similarly gleeful.

But, at long last, things are looking up with an acceptable bid, with another bidder coming up behind them just to keep them honest and ram us through the inspection process (entirely negotiated here in Princeton) nicely.

Inspection requests came in today. Largely reasonable, with mild overreaching.

Slumdog milliionaire

This was a fine movie, not sure it should have swept the Oscars. The lead kid should have gotten the Oscar for his performance at the Oscars, not for his performance in the film. And not for his acting, just for his infectious energy and attitude. In general the overwhelming optimism of the movie is a breath of fresh air in the current context, one feels India rising. Admittedly it is optimistic in a way that would be easily dismissible as Hollywood dreck in a mainstream domestic production (Pay It Forward, for example).

And of course, educated viewers will note that the tension between good (idealism) and evil (pragmatism, cynicism "the way of the world") paths manifested in the struggle of the two brothers in relation to the heroine is a direct allusion to my particularly-well received dissertation on the allegorical uses of love narrative in Russia and novelistic traditions which rose to prominence later. All five readers loved it!

Scratches on Netflix DVDs

Over time, one of the Achilles Heels in the Netflix business model is the fact that it traffics in delicate physical artefacts. Time and again, we're getting scratched DVDs in the mail. They really need to start moving over to a piped delivery model for more of their titles, before somebody else really nails it.

Google, for instance. Why shouldn't it leverage its YouTube infrastructure to push out licensed fare eventually?

Glenn Heights rules!

For those of you who missed it, here's a link to a recent story in Raleigh's News & Observer about former Glenn Heights denizen Eric Stein and his appointment to a senior position spearheading the development of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency in DC.

Our near 40-year master plan to establish world domination from one small wooded North Carolina residential neighborhood continues apace. Stay tuned for further developments.

Oxo for the workplace

Oxo made a bunch of money coming up with kitchen appliances with handle sizes and other ergonomics designed for an aging population. Who is doing the same in the workplace? Who is thinking through tool and workflow design to allow boomers to work longer into their lives to fund their otherwise hosed retirements? Just think about managing passwords, information security, ang going from one program to another for one thing. It's hard enough for me at 43, but it will be much harder for older people, who often can't figure out how to work the DVD player.

This will be a real challenge, particularly for not highly compensated back office work. How to decrease error rates and maintain productivity in the face of aging.

Neko and Morrissey

I don't recall exactly what tipped me off that Neko Case must be a Morrissey fan, something about the trilling and yodelling from the heart. But the clincher, which Sasha Frere-Jones unwittiingly called out in her New Yorker article on Case, was her citation in "Vengeance in Sleeping": "I'm not the man you think I am," which echoes the Smiths "Pretty Girls Make Graves."

Compare:

Neko and her Boyfriends

I'm not the man you thought I was
My love has never lived indoors
I had to drag it home by force
Hired hounds at both my wrists
Damp and bruised by
stranger's kisses on my lips
But you're the one that I still miss
you're the one that I still miss
And the truth is that it comes as no surprise

I'm not the man you think I am
I'm not the man you think I am

The Smiths

Upon the sand, upon the bay
"There is a quick and easy way" you say
Before you illustrate
I'd rather state :
"I'm not the man you think I am
I'm not the man you think I am"

Hurray for grammar! Huzzah for innovation!

Check out the new Saturn slogan: "Wonder where the car business is headed? It's here.", as reported in the Wall Street Journal but, oddly enough, not yet reflected on the Saturn web site. This just doesn't make grammatical sense at all. You could say "it's headed here," and that would be OK. But it wouldn't be a good slogan. Not that this one is catchy either.

North, South, and Entropy

I've been shuttling from North to South and back again recently, a process which will slow when I retransplant to my native kudzu-choked climes later in the summer. In doing so, a number of things jump out at me.

• The breeze. A little-appreciated virtue of the NorthEast, even as far inland as Princeton, which is largely lacking in the South, where stasis hangs languidly over the land as we stare out at it from within our air-conditioned homes. Rob confirms that the renewable energy community has measured the South in aggregate as being low on wind and (surprisingly) solar resources.
  
  
• Decay. I love my compost pile as much as the next guy. Probably more so. But the heat and humidity of the south mean that outdoor wood furniture turns disturbingly quickly into breeding ground for lichens and moss. Hence the plastic lawnwear.
  
  Cold preserves things better. This at least partially explains why the South seems to have more of a tear-down culture than the North, where structures abide for longer and people pile cash into o.
  
  
• Place. The South therefore renews its physical infrastructure more rapidly than the North does. The social infrastructure of the south, however, sticks around longer than that of the north. Because they can, people don't move, and people's sense of home is rooted in an absolute sense of place which tolerates physical change rather than a relative sense of place which roots itself in simulacra of the past (Martha Stewart, the apple cider donut industry, etc.)
  

Todd Snider

Meta-informatics

A common theme I've been encountering recently (The Numerati, Supercrunchers, recent Economist article on cellphone-generated data) focuses on the problem of having more data than we know how to use. There are ambitious initiatives to pull it all together (beyond Google, the crappy WolframAlpha and the semantic web, see Gapminder.org, Pachube.com). Everybody in the corporate world knows that MIS, Business Intelligence, etc, are evergreen and perennial questions.

But let's just say you've got terabytes of structured and unstructured data (as we do), how do you pose questions of it? The tabula rasa of the Google screen speaks volumes.

Where is the discipline and art of question formation taking shape, save for in the secretive halls of Madison Avenue and Langley?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Highlights

• Underground parking at the Greenwich Hospital is, get this, free! I remarked upon this to the Septagenarian candystriper in the elevator on the way out, and he said "It's Greenwich. The patients pay for it." Or, he might have said, the insurers pay for it, and thus we do.
  
  
• After many months if not years of not washing his hair, averting little blonde dreads only through relatively frequent cuts at, a certain itchiness of scalp convinced Graham to let me apply baby shampoo today. This was, to be sure, huge.
  

Dubai is in India!

• "Dubai is in India! It totally is!" So said some snot-nosed 14-year old outside the Manor Beach Beach in Larchmont today, as I headed out huffing and puffing in the humidity on my run. His friends argued with him, but he insisted he was right. This is just what I would have done at that age, made some wild assertion like that and stood by it stubbornly. I mean, the name Dubai does sound like it could be in India, right?

• Meanwhile, this morning Natalie and I went together on a daddy-daughter trip to the phlebotomy lab, where they took three units of dad's blood and one of hers. Trouble was, the lab tech had a hard time finding the vein in her right arm, and poked around a bit, before deciding to go with the left after all. Natalie stared right at the pokey needle, her tension audible in her stiff nose-breathing, but she got through it. And then we were off to pepperoni pizza at Sal's in Mamaroneck, which I recommend.
  

Neda

I just tried to watch the video of this woman Neda dying in the streets of Tehran and was unable to roll forward with it as the blood started to spurt out of her nose and spill into a puddle on the ground. It is at once like and not at all like the movies.

The situation in Iran is rather tricky for us. We obviously can't just roll the tanks in and declare victory like we did in Iraq. And yet, we'd all like to see the regime fall. This may be the midnight phone call for Obama, but it's ringing all day, every day.

Monsoon season drags on

Night tennis rained out, David ushered me into the parallel universe of the New Jersey firehouse, where we worked out in the deluxe gym donated by a liquor store owner and watched the 2008 Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final.

Some fire districts (Hamilton, for example) have the ability to levy taxes independently of municipal authorities, think about that. "Just give us money so we can build Taj Mahals to our shiny engines," they say.

Preposterous. Which reminds me of a song.

Hot day on the hill

Down in Chapel Hill.

Checked out some cribs.

Hot as fuck.

Soon we'll know where we're headed.

Drank Cheerwine, of course.

Left my copy of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again on the plane headed down.  Was shocked to find that there were no copies of it or any other of Chapel Hill's most famous adopted writer at the Bookshop on Franklin St.  Things change.   Inventories there were generally low.

PHL-RDU

Off to North Carolina for a quick one-day tour of possible relo destinations.  Unfortunately, the weatherman is not cooperating and promises "near record-high" temperatures, short for "record-high" temperatures.  Will not warm the heart of my Yanqui bride.

As of now, the native bugs of the Garden State -- the two-stroke engine, the 747 way overhead and the traffic on the street 35 feet behind me -- drone outside.

Healthcare: How 'bout prevention?

Every time you pick up a health zine it says one thing: eat less -- but more fruits and vegetables, and exercise more. This is the best way to manage a wide range of health issues, from cancer to heart disease to depression to the more obvious, especially obesity.

Now, between them, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are big killers, with clear long-term etiologies. So, if we really want to decrease health care costs, we should be throwing much more substantial resources at getting these messages out, right? I mean, the middle class and up knows this stuff, but actually executing on this is much harder than knowing it. So, while commercial time is cheap during the recession, why isn't the government tossing out a bunch of public safety announcements like the anti-smoking or anti-drugs ones?

And while we're at it, why don't we build in some taxes around the externalities of obesity and meat consumption, from greenhouse gas taxes on bovine flatulence to needing SUVs to haul fat people around? If Big Oil isn't paying it's way, nor is Big Grease.

Sightings

• I wasn't sure what the tooth fairy should give Graham, a dollar or 50 cents.  Mary said he had asked for "a whole dollar," so I went with that, folding it up neatly and putting it in the plastic tooth necklace they had given him at school.  I had five dimes that I put down somewhere else.  In the morning, Graham said "Look what the tooth fairy gave me," and showed us the dollar and the fifty, which he had come across somewhere.  I guess the temptation to dissemble about money starts very early.
• I rode my bike out to Lambertville today.  Good ride.  When I got there, I noticed for the first time that there was  a fencing academy out there.  Also archery lessons.  So I guess we can feel pretty secure.  I ended up with linguine with clam sauce at the local pizzeria, though I found myself coveting the veal or chicken parms these dudes were laying into.  Next time.

How things change

Here's a stunning sentence from the 1965 barnburner Banking and Insurance in New Jersey: A History:

Of the eleven New Jersey life insurance companies, the Prudential is the largest and is, in fact, the third largest private company of any kind in the world in terms of assets, coming after American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York.

No longer true, but it gives you an idea of the place of insurance in the order of things. As of today, about one dollar in ten or eleven goes to insurance cover of one sort or another. And that excludes pensions and social security, etc. However you slice it, the amount of money set aside for things that might happen is pretty stunning.

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.