A good chart

From Energy Information Administration, a Federal Agency funded by the "discretionary budget" which is being frozen so that politicians won't have to address the hard issues of underfunded entitlements based on longevity assumptions which have long since been rendered obsolete.  This one chart speaks volumes about the politics and reality of energy.

Table R2.  Energy Consumption by Source and Total Consumption per Capita, Ranked by State, 2007
Rank	Coal		Natural Gas a		Petroleum b		Retail Electricity Sales		Total Consumption per Capita
	State	Trillion Btu	State	Trillion Btu	State	Trillion Btu	State	Trillion Btu	State	Million Btu
1	Texas	1,609.1	Texas	3,641.4	Texas	5,886.9	Texas	1,173.1	Alaska	1,062.3
2	Indiana	1,574.5	California	2,440.4	California	3,946.3	California	901.6	Wyoming	948.6
3	Pennsylvania	1,490.7	Louisiana	1,423.1	Florida	1,983.5	Florida	788.5	Louisiana	861.2
4	Ohio	1,461.7	New York	1,218.9	New York	1,633.4	Ohio	552.0	North Dakota	671.1
5	Illinois	1,090.3	Illinois	979.3	Louisiana	1,599.9	Pennsylvania	517.2	Texas	496.3
6	Kentucky	1,020.4	Florida	950.3	Pennsylvania	1,455.6	New York	505.6	Montana	483.1
7	West Virginia	983.0	Michigan	847.8	Illinois	1,418.1	Illinois	498.3	Kentucky	477.5
8	Georgia	934.7	Ohio	836.3	New Jersey	1,373.3	Georgia	469.0	West Virginia	469.9
9	Alabama	888.4	Pennsylvania	781.7	Ohio	1,357.0	North Carolina	450.0	Alabama	460.8
10	North Carolina	827.8	Oklahoma	690.6	Georgia	1,100.2	Virginia	380.7	Indiana	458.4
11	Missouri	802.4	New Jersey	640.7	Virginia	1,016.6	Indiana	373.3	Oklahoma	445.8
12	Michigan	799.9	Indiana	548.1	Michigan	987.3	Michigan	372.9	Mississippi	424.3
13	Florida	720.8	Colorado	515.9	North Carolina	970.8	Tennessee	364.1	Iowa	414.0
14	Tennessee	672.4	Georgia	453.9	Indiana	877.7	Kentucky	315.3	Kansas	409.1
15	Wyoming	494.8	Alabama	431.4	Washington	846.8	Alabama	313.3	Arkansas	406.1
16	Wisconsin	464.9	Massachusetts	417.3	Tennessee	827.1	Washington	292.6	Nebraska	391.6
17	Iowa	464.4	Wisconsin	403.9	Missouri	758.9	Missouri	291.8	South Carolina	384.2
18	Virginia	457.9	Arizona	402.1	Kentucky	747.4	South Carolina	279.6	Tennessee	379.0
19	South Carolina	444.0	Minnesota	396.5	Minnesota	706.2	New Jersey	279.6	South Dakota	367.2
20	Arizona	438.5	Mississippi	374.9	Massachusetts	684.6	Louisiana	271.5	New Mexico	361.8
21	North Dakota	420.1	Alaska	371.8	Alabama	626.4	Arizona	263.4	Minnesota	361.7
22	Kansas	396.3	Virginia	332.7	Wisconsin	619.5	Wisconsin	243.3	Idaho	354.0
23	Utah	391.3	Kansas	291.6	Arizona	595.4	Minnesota	232.8	Ohio	352.8
24	Colorado	388.5	Washington	279.7	Oklahoma	578.0	Maryland	223.1	Delaware	350.4
25	Oklahoma	373.2	Missouri	277.6	South Carolina	576.5	Massachusetts	195.0	Maine	346.3
26	Minnesota	366.0	Nevada	263.6	Maryland	557.3	Oklahoma	188.3	Virginia	339.1
27	Maryland	327.8	Iowa	261.9	Colorado	525.4	Colorado	175.0	Missouri	334.1
28	New Mexico	296.1	Oregon	258.2	Mississippi	470.9	Oregon	166.3	Wisconsin	329.8
29	Arkansas	275.0	North Carolina	245.2	Iowa	441.6	Mississippi	164.3	Georgia	329.0
30	New York	257.5	New Mexico	240.3	Kansas	424.5	Arkansas	160.6	Pennsylvania	322.6
31	Louisiana	249.8	Kentucky	236.0	Connecticut	396.8	Iowa	154.5	Washington	320.5
32	Nebraska	216.8	Utah	232.2	Arkansas	386.9	Kansas	137.0	District of Columbia	318.5
33	Montana	202.5	Tennessee	229.7	Oregon	384.7	Nevada	121.6	New Jersey	317.1
34	Mississippi	184.9	Arkansas	228.0	Alaska	324.1	West Virginia	116.6	Illinois	315.2
35	Massachusetts	120.1	Maryland	208.5	Hawaii	306.3	Connecticut	116.4	Colorado	305.5
36	New Jersey	111.8	Connecticut	184.1	Utah	305.6	Nebraska	96.4	Nevada	304.3
37	Washington	95.7	South Carolina	180.3	Nevada	292.6	Utah	94.8	Utah	301.8
38	Nevada	82.9	Nebraska	146.4	West Virginia	288.7	Idaho	81.1	Michigan	301.2
39	California	66.4	West Virginia	122.6	New Mexico	284.8	New Mexico	76.0	North Carolina	298.6
40	Delaware	63.8	Wyoming	117.6	Maine	235.6	Wyoming	53.0	Oregon	296.7
41	Oregon	45.3	Rhode Island	90.8	Nebraska	235.1	Montana	53.0	Hawaii	269.1
42	New Hampshire	44.9	Idaho	83.9	Montana	210.6	District of Columbia	41.3	Maryland	265.0
43	Connecticut	39.9	Montana	75.0	Wyoming	176.2	North Dakota	40.6	Vermont	261.2
44	South Dakota	33.2	New Hampshire	64.6	New Hampshire	169.6	Delaware	40.5	Florida	252.9
45	Hawaii	19.1	North Dakota	63.0	Idaho	165.8	Maine	40.5	Connecticut	249.5
46	Alaska	13.0	South Dakota	54.1	North Dakota	142.7	New Hampshire	38.3	Arizona	248.3
47	Idaho	10.2	Delaware	49.8	Delaware	135.8	South Dakota	36.2	New Hampshire	239.5
48	Maine	6.6	Maine	47.9	South Dakota	121.3	Hawaii	36.1	Massachusetts	234.2
49	District of Columbia	0.5	District of Columbia	33.9	Rhode Island	91.5	Rhode Island	27.3	California	233.4
50	Rhode Island	(s)	Vermont	8.9	Vermont	87.5	Alaska	21.6	New York	209.2
51	Vermont	(s)	Hawaii	3.0	District of Columbia	22.5	Vermont	20.0	Rhode Island	206.6
	United States	22,739.9	United States	23,677.6	United States	40,358.1	United States	12,844.8	United States	336.8
aIncludes supplemental gaseous fuels. bIncludes fuel ethanol blended into motor gasoline. (s) = Value less than 0.05 trillion Btu. Web Page:  All data available at http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/states/_seds.html under “Complete Data Files." Sources:  Data sources, estimation procedures, and assumptions are described in the Technical Notes.

Conflict of interest

Was contacted late yesterday by a young go-getter reporter from Bloomberg who for some reason has come to believe that I am worth quoting on insurance M&A and other high-end topics, who wondered if I might be willing to comment on the AIG 2009 earning which are being released today.  "Sure," I said.  I actually dreamt that he called me on my cell phone at 5 in the morning and let me in on an earnings video for AIG, wherein executives were cracking a lot of jokes and really trying to make it look like AIG was a great and homey place to work.  At some point in time, the jocular CFO was actually lathering up the disembodied head of some ethereal woman.  I was the only member of the analyst/press corp there, and I thought that odd, and a senior executive guy from another insurer/broker whom I really like was there too, not saying anything, and I wondered why he was there.

In the same dream I went grocery shopping and was able to score a sample piece of stuffed spinach pizza, but somehow I ended up at checkout with nothing but meat, cheese, and bread and wondered if I would be chided for returning home from the store with zero fruits or vegetables.

On the drive to work today I found the best of the three CDs from the Magnetic Fields' epic 69 Love Songs, which is Merge Records' great and lasting contribution to world culture. Though I was somewhat rushing to get in to work to bone up on the AIG sitch, I sat and listened to a song or two once I got to work, bedazzled as I always am by the shimmering brilliance of the lyrics. This song reminds me very much of the early 90s as I lived them.

A couple of thoughts

• The Journal today reports that the town of San Mateo, CA, lost $155 million on Lehman securities and now are annoyed that they couldn't get any bailout money from the government. Oracle is headquartered there.  I would suggest that the town should ask Larry Ellison to bail them out instead.  And instead of running off chasing the America's Cup. Oracle should be impacted by this more than anyone else.  And the town should think again before wagering 6% of its assets on one companies debt.
• Apparently GM is shuttering Hummer now that its planned sale to a Chinese concern has fallen through.  May the big ugly gas-guzzling thing burn in hell where it belongs.

Social Graphing of Board Appointments

The Economist ran a story a few weeks back citing a study that said that corporate boards where there were social ties between the CEO and board members (roughly 45% I think) resulted in share price underperformance. Serving on multiple boards together also doesn't look like it enhances performance (insert your penis enlargement joke here). I find it hard to believe that none of the big vendors tracking corporate actions (dividends, stock splits, mergers, etc.) doesn't / couldn't easily track board appointments.  From there it would be trivial to overlay some sort of social graphing thingamabob to show who's on what board with whom.

You could also add some kind of manual wiki thingie which would let people observe social ties via sightings in Vanity Fair and other society rags and plug them into the graph.  It would be very interesting.

Tea immersion

I have recently been reading and nosing around the internet more to learn about the whole Tea Party thing. Much as we would like to dismiss it, there are a lot of angry people out there.  Looking at pictures of movement members, one thing that springs to mind, aside from the general whiteness of most of them, is that they look like people who have typically not had intellectually engaging professions, though I'm sure there are lots of white collar movement members.  But, to the extent that the movement is engaging working class people, reading the Constitution and playing an active role in political discourse, it's not all bad.

Nor is it entirely delusional. Lots of people are mad about bailouts, deficits, banks, etc. Arianna Huffington's "Move Your Money" campaign has similar drivers, to the extent that it seeks to deny the big banks of their power base.  Matt Taibbi's whole "blood-sucking squid" discourse around Goldman Sachs grows from similar conspiracy theory soil.

However, to the extent that these people are polishing their guns as they plan for armed insurrection, it's all bad.  Some members advocate sherriffs and other law enforcers should only support laws that are constitutional.  They should therefore be determining constitutionality on their feet, from behind the wheel of their cruisers.  Hmmm.  I thought that's what the Supreme Court was for.  Much as I disagree with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas on a variety of issues, they are doing their jobs as the Constitution defines them.

Right now I'm listening to the Runaway Slave show of CL Bryant, a black msn.  They are railing against Michele Obama's program to control obesity, defending individuals' god-given rights to be fat or skinny.  Everything is the fault of the government.

Anyway, the main problem is the guns and the fact that they are fomenting armed rebellion. If they dominate mid-term elections, it is the Democrats fault for not figuring out good counter-messaging.

postscript:  I was so caught up in work that I failed to notice that a loonie tax "patriot" had torched his house and slammed his plane into an IRS building.  It is encouraging at least that a Republican congressman has been willing to stand up to the tea party pressures and call it an act of terrorism even before law enforcement does the same.

Uniforms

At lunch today I happened to catch a few minutes of a men's curling match between the US and Germany. I must say I was pleased to be able to figure out which country they represented by looking at their outfits.  Frankly I find the fact that Olympic teams are sporting more corporate logos than flags a little confusing and, frankly, a little boring. I'm not Joe Patriot or anything, but when you're watching sports events you know absolutely nothing about, it's helpful for starters to know who your supposed to be cheering for.  From there you can decide if you actually want to pull for them.

Kabluey

While this was a somewhat disappointing performance from the normally fabulous Lisa Kudrow, the actual lead actor was awesome in this movie.  Worth renting.  A number of good laughs.

How-to and Reality TV for the downturn

The viewpoint that companies need to create jobs these days is, on the one hand, based in the hard, cold reality of nasty times and tight-fisted banks, but it is equally underscored by a cynical belief that people don't know how to create value bottom up.  That a substantial portion of the population is so deracinated, disempowered and undereducated that all they can do is get and learn jobs of limited complexity. I, for one, am not so down on the capacity of working folk as to think they can't learn how to grow into new roles and responsibilities.  Just think how creative otherwise unexceptional people can get with narcotics production and distribution.

How is it, then, that these same people who were so educable in the ways of complex consumption in the preceding decades cannot be shown how to start and run businesses.  Which is to say that, for every "This Old House," "Punk My Ride," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", "Home Makeover", cooking and endless flavors of shows that tought us how to consume things in a complicated way, that equally compelling TV couldn't be created around producing value.  Imagine Click and Clack doing "Start-up Talk," Bob Vila doing "This New Start-Up," a reality show which brought us the trials and tribulations of a Quiznos.  It wouldn't necessarily be great, but so much TV isn't.  If you get charismatic people in front of the camera, and, for the lower grade ones, good-looking people in their 20s with strategic piercings and enhanced physiologies, there could be a lot of passable and cheap to produce TV.

Cash Hoarding and Activism 2.0

There's a lot of talk of sloshing these and hoarding these days. Bloomberg today ran a story entitled "Jobless Suffer with Corporate Cash Climbing to $1.19 billion". Other recent reports in the Wall Street Journal have called attention to a trillion bucks gathering dust on bank balance sheets. I'm sure there's some double counting in there that I don't have time to sort out, but even in 2010 a trillion dollars or two is non-trivial money.

Here's what I can't figure out:  where are all the activist investors, the Bill Ackmans and Carl Icahns of the world who should be muscling onto the boards of all these cash-hoarders to demand that something be done with the cash:  M&A, capex/expansion, buybacks, dividends, etc.  Is it that we believe that the cash is doing the best job it can just sitting there on corporate balance sheets?

I think the answer is that activist investing -- for all the swashbuckling that the name implies -- is generally a pretty slowmoving train.  You've got to build up a position in a company and push your way onto the board to be heard.  It takes time and effort, and with all the returns that could be had just by buying and holding since last March.  Plus Ackman's still smarting from the underdiversication in a portfolio consisting of nothing but Target stock (whoops!).

But why can't the tactics of activist investing -- assembling voting blocks to pressure boards and senior management to put cash to work or sell off units or whatever -- be adopted to the 2.0 world?  What about organized campaigns?  I know I know, it would be hard as hell to do.  But who thought you could elect a President that way until 2008?  Why can't grass roots techniques be adapted to the corporate arena?  CERES mounts similar campaigns to organize environmentally-minded institutional investors to pressure boards to improve governance around sustainability issues.

Could someone actually make money on it?  Are there regulatory reasons an institutional or discount broker couldn't raise awareness and motivate voting blocks of clients?

A target should be selected for a proof of concept, and once the methodology is in place, it could be rolled out and replicated selectively.

Great moments in filmed Rock n Roll

Tapped out

Am trying to make a foray into respectable, semi-pro, adult blogging (no not in that sense).  Visit my non-alter ego here to see my attempts at coherent commentary on my newfound professional domain.

Otherwise, no thoughts this evening.

Countdown to South Africa

On Fox Soccer tonight, a spotlight on Paraguay on "The Contenders."  Amazing that TV can be this good, and that, as Friedman would have it, the world is as flat as the futbol pitch.  Frankly, no matter what Roubini and Marc Faber and all the doom and gloomers say, if I can see a focus on a resurgent Paraguay team and see enthusiasm there, I feel good about about the world economy over time.

Henry Paulson on his Prius

Stephen Wozniak of Apple days of yore was cited today on Huffpost and Bloomberg, concerning "scary" issues concerning cruise control and acceleration in his Prius.  This caused the Grouse to wonder about how other famous Prius drivers are doing in their little love boxes, specifically Henry Paulson, so beloved for his roles at Goldman Sachs and the Treasury.  So the Grouse picked up the phone and gave Hank a call.  Here are a few of his comments:  "If anything, I'm concerned that the Prius is a little underpowered at present.  Does the gasoline engine have enough power to keep the electric one fully charged?  Stepping on the brakes is the last thing we need to do right now.  In conditions as icy as these, one shouldn't be tapping on the breaks at all. If the vehicle is beginning to slip, I see my job as steering it in the direction of the spin to stop it from having a hard landing. And as for Wozniak's problems with his cruise control, well, we're anything but ready for cruise control right now.  I sent Kashkari out tooling around in mine to come up with some emergency plans for the Prius's navigation in a holistic sense, and he and his task force came up with a proposal that we've shared with Chairman Bernanke and noone else, but I'm prepared to take to Congress if it becomes necessary... the absolute worst is when birds fly into it, but they don't break the glass... I always insist that Corzine wear his seat belt.."

At this point in time the former Secretary began to ramble a little bit, not unlike grandpa Simpson, so I quietly excused myself and returned to my task.

Classic footage from Letterman's daytime show

Toyota as resilient enterprise?

Watching Toyota fall all over itself in its attempt to react to its recent crisis brought to mind Yosi Sheffi's seminal book The Resilient Enterprise, in which Toyota plays a starring role.  In 1997, there was a fire at a key supplier in the supply chain for Toyota's brakes, just as there was a crunch on to get cars out the door because some incentive was coming to an end.  Toyota's supplier reacted immediately and informed Toyota, which in turn marshalled its keiretsu into a war room, shipping out technical specs to other suppliers and getting production back up to speed with minimal disruption to production.  Much rejoicing ensued.

Somehow this sense of urgency has not been maintained in the current environment.  One suspects it has to do with the presumed impact of the 1997 and 2009-2010 incidents on the corporate top and bottom lines.

On another note entirely, I have to say that it strikes me as mildly improper that
the US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has sprung into action today by telling Toyota drivers to stay out of their cars until they're fixed.  However rational that may be, the fact that the US Treasury has a controlling interest in GM and Chrysler makes LaHood a not disinterested party.  Yet another of the lamentable unintended consequences of the government's extraordinary actions during the crisis.  We may hope that this conflict of interest will be removed in an orderly fashion over the next few years.

Naked without my laptop

I had a dream last night that was a variant on the old "naked in public" dream, except it was more pathetic even.  I was headed to work, on a plane, and I needed to give a presentation that evening for the "graduating class" of my consulting firm.  Except, when I lifted my bag, I discovered that I had ("gasp!") forgotten my laptop.  I was dreadfully embarassed, as all my colleagues were gathered around me in their cubicles, grinding away, and I tried to figure out how to extricate myself from this without being discovered.

And then, thankfully, I woke up, though initially into that half-sleep where you don't yet entirely realize that you're awake and therefore in the clear.

Lost in the Trees

Saw these guys on student TV the other night.  Am not 100% sure I'm down with the band, but this is a great song.

Grahamisms du jour

• As we were stacking our half cord of wood, Graham says to Mary:  "This is just like in the olden times, when everyone would gather whale blubber"
• After collecting some kindling, Graham referred to it as "kindlington"
• In discussion with Natalie, Graham declared that it was the Marx brothers who were the first to fly a plane

You really can't make this stuff up

On Greece

For those of you who are monitoring the debt crisis in Greece, let me direct you to the posts from my trip to Greece in the September '08 (yes, that month).  It was mildly portentious.

Greek television
Checking out of hotel
Lodgings
Day 1

See also this, written as if in another century.

GSE regulators

Dealing with the press

In my new capacity of industry analyst, I have occasion to talk to the press not infrequently.  It has been an illuminating experience.  Years ago, I was working on a project for a major newspaper publisher where my firm was writing software for placing ads in the paper, and I was writing a small program (my one and only attempt at being a programmer) to test the bigger application.  In so doing I learned that the newspaper ad salespeople referred to the content of the paper as the "news hole," and that newspapers are all about selling ads.

Now that I am in the position of providing journallists with content, I see that the hole metaphor is entirely apt.  Journalists will call you up looking for answer X.  "Do you think X is true?"  And you say "Oh yes, X is very true."  And then your name appears in the press, as if by magic.

Sometimes I will take some time to think about X and consider why X might be true, what might be some of its preconditions, or what we may from X's awesome trueness.  I may share these musings with the journalist, who will run off and print that I said the X was very true indeed.

If you write a press release, the press may read it and restate this or that ever so slightly, and print it.  Or they may just print it.  I guess that's why they call it a release.  If you put numbers in a report, they will definitely print those, often without even reading the caveats.

Big day

Rarely are days as packed with potentially market-moving news as this one:

• Geithner goes before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to talk about AIG.  Personally, I'm sick of the whole thing.  Congress likes to hover over AIG and Goldman because it stirs up populist sentiment which makes them feel important.  Rarely in human history have people worked under as much pressure as the Treasury, Fed, New York Fed, and others did in the fall of 2008.  Did they fuck up some?  Sure they did.  We got through it.
  
  I'm beginning to think Goldman is like Iraq after 9/11.  Definitely some shady shit went down there.  But is Goldman the primary cause?  No.  Just like after 9/11, we had to hit back somewhere.  Nonetheless, the optimal resolution is for GS and Blankfein to offer a haircut to the government now:  give back $1-1.5 bln to Treasury in recognition of the extraordinary circumstances of last fall.  Show leadership.
  
  
• Bernanke cloture vote.  Is that even happening today?  It was supposed to but has dropped off the radar;
• Federal Open Markets Committee.  What will they say about QE and rates?
• State of the Union Address.  Can Obama build momentum and trust again?  (I hope so).  I will watch, despite good Premier League action on FSC.
• Continued expansion of Toyota recall:  clearly good news for Ford, Honda, Hyundai.  Can GM also capitalize?
• If the markets can stay stable and the markets close within .5% of where they start, that's good.  There's a risk the dow goes below 10,000 today, which is actually fine from and end of month 401k contribution perspective.
  
  
• In a positive indicator, Carolina beat State on the road last night.  Glad to see it. 
  

Too big to fail?

Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big to Fail has been praised pretty much by everyone as the definitive book on the credit crisis. All I can say is that, if this is the case, I'm glad I haven't wasted my time on any of the other ones. Because for the first 100-odd pages I haven't really learned much that I hadn't read elsewhere except that Dick Fuld was really loyal and that his good buddy Joe Gregory probably wasn't cut out to be #2 at a big investment bank and that Erin Callan also wasn't the best choice for CFO. But I don't really care about that.

I already knew Stan O'Neal had a great rags to riches story and was an asshole and I knew that Henry Paulson was an environmentalist. OK, I didn't know he drove a Prius, but I don't really care about that either.

So I'm taking time off for Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios.

Mild day

Graham and I went looking for deer prints down by the creek and found no fewer than eight of them. Later, after tetherball with Natalie, I returned to a project begun for Leslie's wedding reception in 1990 and since delayed a little: building a rock wall along the edge of the property in a shameless pseudo-Connecticut affectation. Carrying those dogies up the hill is no joke. This will continue to be a slow burn project, but it will move forward nonetheless.

Was trying to think of something to write but then noticed that Tottenham Hotspurs are taking on Leeds on the Fox Soccer Channel, Murdoch's great contribution to American culture. More later.

Speedy Gonzales

It is astonishing that Obama should move so quickly and so transparently in response to the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts to attack investment banks cum bank/holding companies for blending proprietary trading and more traditional banking functions. Everybody predicted that he would have to kowtow to populists and make this move if the senate supermajority was lost.

The fact is, working through these contradictions in the banking system should have been the focus of his first year in office. It shouldn't have needed to be a knee-jerk reaction to apparent failure on another front. Rahm Emanuel's cynical evocation of Milton Friedman and Naomi Klein's shock doctrine ("never waste a good crisis") took the Democrats off course from where they needed to be.

A careful and considered reevaluation of financial regulation could have been more easily followed with a measured advancement of health care reform, conceivably with less injury to the Democratic agenda as a whole. We may hope that Obama will battle back to fulfill his promise of being a truly awesome and excellent president. Dropping a surprise bomb on Wall St, even if it contains the right explosives, is a little risky.

More of cousin

This picture should give you a good idea of what Natalie thinks of her cousin Caroline.

Tiny little Nightingale

In keeping with our recent theme of women singing on stage, here's Natalie (and Margaret) in last summer's production of The Nightingale.

Singing her heart out

This came off well on the big screen, still a pretty intense tune.

A chip

I will confess to paternal pride when told of how Graham is viewed as a general authority on a wide range of questions in his kindergarden class. He's been out sick for much of the last week with something (bronchitis?). Apparently, the teacher was asking the kids why you could see your breath when it was cold outside and nobody had the answer. Then someone said "I wish Graham was here, he would know."

Aid to Haiti

Everyone is coming out of the woodwork urging relief for Haiti. I gave some today too. Here's how I did it.

First, I went to GiveWell, a new service which does due diligence on and rates charities in terms of their efficacy in getting money to their stated causes, their transparency, and other metrics. There I found a charity called Partners in Health that is on its rather short list of top-rated charities.

Then I went to Network For Good, a website that lets you aggregate the recordkeeping of your charitable giving for tax time, and generally serves as a conduit for giving. On their front page I saw that Partners in Health was listed as a popular organization providing direct relief to Haiti. I donated money to them over NFG's platform, and tacked on a surcharge for NFG to keep them going.

I'm not certain that GiveWell's ratings are perfect, but they seem pretty dedicated to their mission. Network For Good I like, though clearly their servers are having some difficulty handling high volume days like today.

I think I'm in love

What more is there to say.

Stuyvesant / Peter Cooper two-step

Is it just me, or did BlackRock and Tishman/Speyer's decision to default on debt payments coming due over the real estate deal of the century in the East Village smell funny. Coming on the heels of Ecuador's decision to thumb its nose at its creditors in December of 2008, the Federal government's decision to interject the UAW in front of more senior creditors in the GM bankrupcy negotiations, and the new fad for walking away from underwater mortgages, there's a whole new culture of debt repudiation coming round.

BlackRock and Tishman Speyer couldn't come up with the dough? I don't know about T S, but BlackRock? What, are they strung out from the Barclay's Global Advisors acquisition? Come on, Black Rock sitteth at the right hand of the Fedder in every matter these days. They just decided it didn't suit them to own up to this clusterfuck of a deal. A whimper rather than a bang.

The Hazard of Love

Incredible stuff. Be sure to listen to the end if the harpichord stuff doesn't float your boat.

Newsflash: A little digging shows that the star of this song, Shara Worden, isn't even a member of the band. She's a guest. Whoops! Never want to have a guest blow the hosts right out of the water. Still, the band has merits.

For TED?

Was talking to Tom last night at the bar of Lantern, hearing his war stories from the TED conference, thinking how cool it would be to go. So he tells me you have to write a short essay to get in and I think: what would I write?

The best I could do, really, would be to pull excerpts from this blog, anecdotes about people I've met or observed here or there, the woman on the train instructing her 14-year old daughter about cash management and the importance of customers, Oleg's grandfather Senya telling us how cold it was on Red Square on Great October day, 1941, as the troops headed out to face the Nazis. Because in the end people are really the most interesting thing, the fabric of existence. And yes, the trends and themes that hold them together, the commonalities and identifications are what make it possible to cohere, but it's the delicate interplay of the particular and the general that form the warp and woof.

Pseudo-Zen / Taoist afficionados often wax lyrical about "being in the moment," appreciating where you are, air you're breathing, landscapes, whatnot. I would refine that to "being in the social moment." Appreciating who you're talking to and the way in which they present otherness to you, the simultaneous variety and continuity of human experience. That's where it's at.

So, for instance, last night before heading up town to see Reardon I was lying in the upper bunk (with her in the lower one, of course, as she's long past snuggling) of Natalie's bunk bed, in the same room that used to be Leslie's, half-reading her Wizardology book, leaning against her big stuffed tiger, looking up at crap she and her friends have been smudging on the ceiling, really quite at ease. And then I go and hear Tom's stories of sparring with Roubini and Taleb, Gates and Brin at TED and I'm sucked into the glamor of it all for a moment, but then recall the warmth of the upper bunk.

The Marlboro Man

On my floor in my building there is one guy who still smokes. In his late 40s, he looks a little bit like Seinfeld's neighbor Newman -- both hair and shape-wise -- and drives a Mercury Marquis into our lot full of Prii and Minis. I recently saw him carrying a twelver of Tab out of his car. No slave to fashion he.

He indulges the evil weed (and I must admit I'm jealous) out on the open-air second floor staircase landing. A few weeks ago he plugged in a space heater and ran the cord out the door, presumably to keep his feetsies warm. He left the heater on, and the cord kept the door propped open. He did not persist in this habit for long, presumably being brought low by the spoken or silent pressure of his peers.

I am somehow inspired by this guy in his quixotic attempts to shrug off the norms of society. However, given his predilections, one suspects that his ride off into the sunset will not be slow.

Open, soon to be closed

I will confess that I was excited by the advance press for Andre Agassi's Open. I like the guy, his comeback-ness, his bald stylings, the way he strikes the ball on the rise. Not as interesting to watch as McEnroe, but considerably more so than all these tall server dudes.

So I put the book on my Amazon list and got it as an Xmas present (thanks, Rog), and open and read it. By now, I'm 2/3rds of the way through the thing and pretty much sick of it and his gee whiz gollie "I'm a victim, but a good guy, I've just been so misunderstood" stylings. OK, I can see how marrying Brooke Shields was a mistake and how he would have sensed it as the church bells were ringing but couldn't back out. OK. I get that both his dad and Nick Bolletieri are jerks. OK. I understand how he chooses alternate father figures. Great. He founds a school in Vegas for poor kids and really grooves on helping people. That I really believe and find infectious, even if the ghost writer is a little ham-handed.

But spare me the details of how he conquered Stephanie Graf by whipping off his shirt during an initial practice session while hardly on the rebound from Brooke Shields. Somewhere in there the guy just needs to dial it back and show a little circumspection.

By now I'm just finishing the book because it's so featherweight and it feels good to finish books. Probably a bad instinct. Better to move on to an actually good book.

A nod to Prince

I saw some stats attributed to the Insurance Retirement Institute in the Journal yesterday and I thought "what's that? An insurance industry association I've never heard of?" Really should be no shock, as the acronym soup is thick in the insurance world, but I looked it up anyway. And what did I discover?

The Insured Retirement Institute, the variable annuity trade group formerly known as NAVA...

I.e. National Association of Variable Annuities, which I remembered from bygone days as the kind of association that would have a former President (to wit, Gerald Ford) come and speak as a member of a panel, not even as keynote (I think Giuliani had that honor that year, probably 2003). Which is to say, it's an organization with a lot of money behind it. So why did it change its name? Too many hookers at the convention?

addendum: A little sleuthing shows that NAVA's complete rebranding dates to July of '09. Undoubtedly the group wanted to distance itself from pure play variable annuities, as the minimum guarantees associated with the most popular flavors of these little products were so detrimental to the financial health of such TARP recipients as the Hartford and Lincoln Financial, as well as ING, CIGNA, and a number of others. Variable life and annuity sales have fallen through the floor in 2009, so it seemed wise to wipe the slate clean and start all over! Good work guys!

New shoes

Mary and the kids went to the shoe store today. Graham totally needed new sneakers, as his old ones were pretty literally falling apart. Also because, as it turns out, all the boys in his gang had ones with flashing lights except for him. No longer does he lag behind his peers, I will tell you, because his now flash a good number of colors.

Natalie, on the other hand, has some perfectly decent New Balance sneakers. But now, as she has cruised right past the age of nine-and-a-half, she's venturing into the pure years of pre-tweendom where multiple pairs of shoes are very much in order, and she's been outfitted with a pair of aquamarine lo-top Chuck Taylors. Gotta love it.

Hot money controls in Russia

The Journal yesterday ran a story about how Putin wants to institute controls on capital flows in and out of Russia to stem the toing and froing of "hot money." One wonders if one-time Putin supporter Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital fell into this class before Putin locked him out of the country at that time, before Browder's lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died at the age of 37 of pancreatitis acquired in prison, one week before being released from prison because the state had failed to bring him to trial within a year. I kind of doubt it. Putin, though popular, remains the kleptocrat par excellence.

This talk by Browder is pretty amazing.

Econoblog notes

Somewhere in the Journal today -- in the article about the federal government's promise of unlimited backstopping of Fannie and Freddy despite the fact that they haven't maxed out the $200 billion of support promised them as of yet-- there was mention of the fact that lots of bond market folx are concerned that mortgage rates may go as high as 6% by the end of 2010. Hmmm. I seem to recall that when we locked our rate at 5.75% for our house purchase in 2003 that was a record low rate at the time, or going back to 1961 or something like that. 6% is, historically speaking, very cheap money. Our first mortgage back in 2000 was at 8.625%. The country remains addicted to cheap money as if it were the proverbial glass pipe. Why deleverage under those conditions? The dollar carry trade will live for some time. Until it dies.

Anecdotally, based on what I'm hearing in AA, the job market is improving. People are bitching more and more about their jobs and less about not having them.

Calm

One almost forgets the preternatural calm of a real (as opposed to pseudo- or semi-) university town during the depths of winter break. I pulled right up to the student union, parked, and returned books to the library without seeing a single soul, the same place where not two months ago students were practically tripping all over themselves trying to get to the next ATM or burrito.

Then, just for kicks, I went to the nearly empty Whole Foods and pulled up right by the door to the cafe area. In and out in three minutes with dinner. Got to love it.

LGA-RDU

Flying home from LaGuardia this afternoon. Will report on how bad the airport security is for domestic flights. Maybe is nothing.

Yesterday made copious use of the traffic feature in Google maps. Where once Traffic.com seemed to have a lock on this market, I now predict its imminent demise if it hasn't gone away yet. Traffic.com is slow and clunky to the nth. Google maps is, well, Google. I got the kids from Princeton to 42nd and Broadway in 2 hours on zero notice (via Pulaski, Holland, and 1/9. Thanks also due to 1010 WINS). Then we made it home from Tribeca to Larchmont in no time via FDR when Manhattan and the West Side Highway were painted the deepest red for gridlock. Once more Sergei and Larry win.

1982

In keeping with the holiday spirit, I took it upon myself to relieve my mother-in-law of some of the many stacks of aging and dusty magazines she archives around the old homestead. While she was busy in the kitchen getting ready for dinner, I decided to go through some of the stacks underneath the coffee table in the sunroom. And what should I find there -- not, mind you, in some far off corner of the attic, but in a room used by the family every day, looking out at the beloved Long Island Sound and before that Manor Park, apocryphally rumored to have been designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. What should I find indeed, but an issue of Smithsonian magazine from 1982. 1982!

And the amazing thing about is that every advertisement in the magazine is chock full of text. On page 3, and ad for Land's End Corduroy pants had probably 200 words of text. I know 1982 was also hard-assed recession time, but was stagflation really so bad that people were sitting around taking 2 hard-earned minutes to read about cords, even ones with lovely elastic wastebands? I guess so.

Best for the holidays

Pathetically enough, the Grouse is still grinding it out at his desk this late on Christmas Eve, evidence of his general conscientiousness as a footsoldier in the great game of capitalism. Or just demonstrating that he appreciates his paycheck and other benefits.

Tooled around Westchester today in Susan's Mini convertible. Sweet handling, crappy visibility. Got some pizza cuz hey, I'm in the Northeast, what else are you gonna do?

A hearty Grouse-style fart-out to the boneheads at Hearthsong.com, who discovered that one of the items Mary had ordered for Natalie was out of stock, did not even send an email to let us know, and then the "customer service" person who answered the phone didn't even begin to apologize. I know where we'll never be spending another nickel of our hard-earned cash.

Now back to the grindstone for another hour or so.

Hooves on the rooftop

So I read Graham a version of The Night Before Christmas tonight, and afterwards I asked if he had ever heard the sound of reindeer hooves up on the roof. And he said no. And so I said, "you probably sleep through it. I sleep through it to." And he looked at me and said "but one time, you heard them, and you ran out in the yard and saw the sleigh as it was flying away."

And I realized that I must have made up a story of a Santa sighting, perhaps sometime when the ever precocious Natalie had been trying to disabuse him of his Santa belief at an all-too-tender age. So I quickly reassured him that, of course, I had heard and seen the reindeer that one time.

Instead of a card

We have been too slack to get together a card this year. It may happen later, it may not. We are still settling in here in the south, adjusting and whatnot. In any case, here are a couple of pix to give you the flavor of good things that are going on to tide the curious over.

Natalie with cousin Caroline at the Life and Science Museum in Durham



And below is Graham throwing a balsa wood plane down by the lake.



More later.

Great comfort

In these intermittently troubling times, we here at the Grouse are comforted to read today at Bloomberg that the Tiger Woods Dubai golf course will be built to completion. “The Tiger Woods Dubai does not comment on the personal lives of our valued partners,” said a spokesperson in an email. The Grouse continues to have the utmost faith in the utter probity of both Tiger Woods and Dubai, and consider them an integral part of the cultural legacy of the 21st Century.

None too excessive protection

The Times yesterday ran a story about Madoff victims seeking compensation for their losses from the SIPC (Securities Investors Protection Corporation), a government-chartered non-profit that offers limited account protection to brokerage customers against default by participating brokerages. The agency has $1.2 billion in reserves now, with a lifeline of $1 billion from Congress. Madoff claims at present exceed $20 billion. If you want to understand the intricacies of this specific dispute, read the article. SIPC’s position is undoubtedly correct.

The article brings to mind, however, the outstanding issue of CAPCO Insurance, nestled up in the verdant hills of Vermont. Astute readers will recall the July story in the Times about CAPCO, a captive insurer owned by nine large broker-dealers, including Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Edward Jones, get whole list) to provide excess protection for brokerage accounts, including those at Lehman, where claims may run to $11 billion dollars. CAPCO was stripped of its ratings in February and is no longer writing coverage.
With bonus season upon us and broker-dealers having enjoyed much better 2009s than 2008s, one would think it would be a fine time for participating firms to recapitalize CAPCO, or at least to earmark reserves for that purpose in anticipation of Lehman-related claims. It would be nice to hear commentary on this issue from David Viniar and his counterparts.

Another delicacy in the SIPC article in the Times came from the mouth of former SEC Commissioner Harvey Pitt, who argues that the SIPC “is missing an opportunity to stand up by those who have been defrauded by a master swindler.” My gentle reader may recall that the SEC under Pitt was utterly deaf to repeated and well-documented entreaties by whistle-blower Harry Markopolis to shut Madoff’s master-swindler ass down. She may also recall that, in the Spring of 2007, after the initial statute mandating hedge fund registration with the SEC had been beaten in court and after well-publicized but now laughably puny scandals at hedge funds Amaranth and Bayou, Pitt – already at the helm of his own hedge fund -- vigorously opposed further efforts to bring hedge funds into the SEC umbrella or to raise the asset and income thresholds for investments in hedge funds. Our hirsute erstwhile “regulator” argued at the time that middle-class investors should not be denied the opportunities to enrich themselves in alternative investment vehicles just like their richer counterparts. Hedge funds in aggregate did not do their jobs well during the credit crunch and considerably aggravated market volatility as a whole. Bu it is good to know that Harvey is ever and always on the side of the common man.

24 at lunch time

On the way across the railroad tracks to Harris Teeter at lunchtime I passed a 50ish caucasian male, wearing aviator glasses and something resembling cowboy boots (jeans, obviously), sitting on the little railroad tie bridge over the ditch next to the tracks, smoking a Marlboro Light, drinking a 24 ounce can of some Budweiser varietal. Still in its little plastic bag from the store. On the way out saw a black guy covering up a 40 of Old English(?) with his jacket, for some reason.

TARP extension

Geithner has informed Congress he's extending TARP till October of 2010, utilizing the authority granted Treasury in the initial TARP statute or whatever it was. Fine. They want to put the money they've gotten back to work for small businesses, small banks, what have you.

How's about kicking a little of it over the transom to Sheila Bair at the FDIC? Banks keep going bust, and the FDIC is tapped out. Which means it's raised the rates its assessing on banks (mostly in Georgia) to pay into its reserve pool for making account holders whole when banks go bust. Which means banks will soon be charging us for checking accounts, online bill payments, etc.

Admittedly, I'm happy to pay for online bill payments, for now, no biggie. And I do find it a little bit objectionable to be continually bailing out morons in the gated communities and McMansions of Alpharetta. But the FDIC have been troopers throughout it all.

However tight-fisted banks have been about making loans, somehow I doubt the ability of Treasury to build up alternate programs and infrastructure to get credit out to small businesses. And bailing out specific banks that have underserved their clientele, even if it's cute little ones, serves little purpose.

A less modest proposal

The Fed is test-driving a reverse repo scheme with primary bond dealers to drain liquidity from the banking system. Frankly, I don't entirely get it: the Fed sells securities to the dealers, taking money out of the system for a spell, and then buys them back at the end of a set period. They're practicing now, did $180 mln in volume in recent days. I guess it would work if they did it once and kept doing it, so that cash stayed out of the system. But that would get expensive just from a process standpoint.

My proposal is: sell treasury and agency (Fannie and Freddy) debt back into the market via the Fed Open Markets desk. When the Fed receives cash, it hits the delete button and "poof", it's gone. Like Kaiser Soze.

Right now is not the time to do this. The housing markets are still too unstable. Shit, I'm too unstable. But there will come a time when it makes sense to, gradually, in a pre-announced fashion, sell down it's portfolio. Yes, it will have the effect of gradually raising interest rates, but to the extent that it excites confidence in our fixed income markets and, more importantly, the somewhat wilted greenback, it might attract capital. Remember how all those fed funds hikes from 2003ff didn't really cause mortgage rates to skyrocket? Emerging market treasuries liked the dollar. They still want to, they're just confused is all.

History lesson

Yesterday Graham wanted to see some African warriors, so I broke out YouTube and watched Maasai warriors throat-singing and leap and then Zulu warriors doing a dance for some tourists while drums were pounded. I don't know why I couldn't leave it at that, but lest he get the impression that they really still lived like that, I went into a little discursus on tradition and culture, and we watched Scottish highland dancers and Ukrainian Cossacks to get the point about folk dancing and drums generally, and then went on. I showed him some Brazilian stuff, including Carnival, as well as some killer African-American high school step bands, to talk about the transmission of culture and African heritage specifically. We watched a little Capoeira (awesome!), and then some Lakota dance.

By this time I had to talk about slavery, the difference between Northern and Southern economies and why slavery was more prevalent in the South than in the North, and the Civil War. Somehow, I also let slip that the Europeans weren't all nicey-nice with the Indians, and that we pushed them back over the Appalachians and fought wars with them too.

I didn't go into all the gorey details, but I did mention wars and killing and such, and that was enough to fire the imagination of the 6-year old boy. He was talking about it rather animatedly later in the afternoon, including how karate was the best method of fighting.

Luckily he was also interested in seeing some whale song videos, so he was a little distracted.

Insurance nerds

With my new job and all, I keep getting calls back from people I left voicemails for earlier in the day. These calls inevitably come at 5:30 in the afternoon, typically issue from New Jersey, and are inevitably from people (OK, guys) who are extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the insurance industry and eager to share this knowledge. This is a toxic combination in terms of letting me get home to participate in the dinner to toothbrushing to story reading slope.

But I do learn a lot. In fact, I typically learn more than I had bargained for, and it gets downright confusing. Oh well.

Late as fuck

That's what it is. Work kept flowing over the transom today, once I got there after being at the dentist and getting an NC plate for Mary's car (mine will come in due time). Barely had time to stuff food into my yawning maw.

And now it sounds like it's pouring down rain outside when, in fact, it's just water rushing over the damn way down at the bottom of the hill.

Connecticut unemployment fund goes broke

Worth reading. It ain't over till it's over. Remember, Connecticut is the nation's 2nd richest state. According to the article, it is now one of 25 states where the unemployment fund is insolvent, and states are borrowing from the US Dept of Labor.

So yeah, we need to keep paying taxes, and anticipate rising tax rates.

The other morning, in fact, I was musing over coffee that what the Obama administration really needs to do is communicate a plan for raising taxes over the next few years, probably starting in 2011, so that businesses could plan for it. And then I read the Economist, which advocated the same thing. Which means that either I'm deucedly clever, or that my thinking has been too swayed by years of subscribing to one publication.

Spam

I must say I love it when I send email from my yahoo account to my yahoo account and it ends up in the spam folder. Brilliant.

More from Graham

Graham continues to say cute things.

For example:

• Last night, when praising the blue Ikea "coverter" with white circles on it, he said he liked it because it was "very decorationable"
• Just now, he was talking about how the Indians knew how "if you live souther you had gooder foods"

Natalie is by no means done with cuteness, mind you. She continues to give the temperature every morning quite strictly: "high of 52 degrees fahrenheit", lest we should be confused with celsius. She also quite regularly says "morning time" and "o'clock" with a very robust and articulated initial "o" sound, as opposed to a brusque and clipped schwa.

Trouble in Dubai

The markets are upset that Dubai will have trouble servicing its debts, and there is trouble in Vegas as well. Nevada has the most underwater mortgages of any state, big casino deals are having trouble working.

Pardon me for not caring. Neither of these places have ever held any fascination for me, except a perverse one. They strike me as being emblematic of all that has been wrong in the world for some time, and the only reason to rue their downfall is to think of the quantity of productive labor that has been squandered on them. Yes, they have fed many construction and service workers from the hinterlands of here or there, but also many more or less enslaved sex workers. Some significant portion of that cash could have gone into math and science education. Oddly enough, just as pornography has driven the development of internet technology, I'm sure that there have been worthwhile advances in engineering which have come out of the otherwise fruitless exercises in building front shaped islands and choreographing fountains. Or maybe not.

Anyhow, I shed no tears for Abu Dhabi this week

Panera

Enjoyed the hospitality and bandwidth of a Panera on Six Forks Road in North Raleigh today, a corporatist no-man's land that I had visited once before in 2003. Today I was astonished by the number of people who came in and had cheesy bowls of soup at 10:45 in the morning. The place was veritably hopping with people both with laptops and without.

If this is any indicator of the fiscal mood of the nation, it's good. Much casual dining, and before noon, when, as I'm always telling my daughter, one could get busted for having lunch.

The End of History and overconsumption

It occurred to me sometime this ending that the whole supersizing trend: cars, houses, compensation, restaurant portions, malls, as well as the pseudocosmopolitanization of America: a mocachino in every pot, seared ahi tuna on every grill, really got rolling in earnest after the end of the Cold War 20 years ago. At that point in time, the great narrative of history having come to a close, not with a bang but with a whimper, America really got down to indulging its taste for just about everything. What else was there to do, after all? We had won.

And the last decade has been little more than a steady realization that history hasn't really come to an end, after all, that there were forces below the surface all along, in places little suspected: the Middle East, China and now Brazil. We shall see how it plays out.

Lunching

I have received inquiries from my readers regarding my lack of reportage concerning my lunching habits of late. My sincerest apologies. Although there are a lot of fine eateries in Carrboro, sometimes referred to as the "Paris of the Piedmont," and others within walking distance just over the line into Chapel Hill, I will confess that I have recently fallen victim to the sober and niggardly mood that has swept our fair nation, and have therefore been frequenting the deli at the Harris Teeter (a grocery store) just across the railroad tracks and a ditch or two. Said deli has daily specials for $2.99 half subs: each day has a hot sub and a cold sub option. Recently, in fact, a $3.99 meal option has reared its head, which offers a half sub with a bag of chips and an house brand iced team or lemonade. They offer a "whole wheat" sub roll as well, designating a roll containing whole wheat flour.

There is also a display where one can get a free sugar cookie each day and, should the mood strike one, there are samples of ham on toothpicks and little cuplets of cake or pie to be had. Fairly bountiful sampling indeed.

And -- and this is the kicker -- if one scans one's VIC or "Very Important Customer" card at check out, after purchasing 15 half subs, one earns a 16th whole sub free, a further 13.3% markdown, though it does encourage a little feasting (or at least chip skipping).

Needless to say, lunches have been had elsewhere, to wit, Neal's Deli, Amante Pizza, IP3, Jade Palace, Tyler's, the shitbox Chinese all u can eat at the corner of Lloyd and Main (never again), and even Weaver Street, though I am largely suspicious of the prepared foods in that cruncheteria. I will keep you up to date on the story as it emerges.

Potter and friends

I started reading the Harry Potter books some months ago in an attempt to get on the same page with my daughter, who can be a stubborn protopubescent pill at times. I have since learned the rhetoric of "muggles", "snogging," "butterbeer" and "you-know-who" plenty well. I have also started enjoying the books.

And, I must say, it's not the magic or the fantasy or the enigmas or the denouments at all. That stuff, altogether, is rather plodding. But just as in Huck Finn or Dead Souls, the journey was said to be a device for the displaying of society, so in Harry Potter the magic and thrills and chills, hokey as they may be, are but a backdrop for the main plot of growing up and developing and maintaining friendships and loyalties. The emerging and deepening bonds of Harry - Ron - Hermione - Hagrid -- Dumbledore and later Neville -- Luna -- Ginny et alia. is really what it's all about. Harry and crew are rewarded time and again for having good hearts and good execution to back it up. And you don't get that everywhere. And I'm happy that my daughter likes it.

My sister once said that she no longer wanted to watch movies that didn't have happy endings. And, while I haven't gone that far, I know what she meant. There is a point in time in life when you really appreciate the positive in art, whatever that is, and Harry and friends have it going on.

The day cafe

After a protracted spate of telephone calls this afternoon, walked out and grabbed a cup of coffee from the groover cafe and wine bar up the block, just across the street from the KFC that has been there forever. Inside was the kind of hip setting that I would have just eaten up when I was in grad school, just the place to go to of an afternoon with laptop and books to smoke, space out, pretend I was working, try to look good, scope out women and dream of hooking up with my true love who might just come through the door at any minute, though it didn't work out that way in the end.

Today, I just wanted the be-banged barista to hurry up and get me my coffee so I could get back to my desk.

Flood o spam

Is it just me, or are more and more spammers figuring out how to hijack people's Facebook accounts and send spam and potential viruses? What a pain in the butt. Why can Zuckerberg et al. get this straight?

Also, I can tell you for sure that there's a lot of lag time in DoNotCall.gov getting my business phone off of people's call lists. Every day I get calls from morons trying to get me to accept credit cards. So I have to tell them that a. I'm not the boss and b. we're corp to corp and would never take credit cards anyway. On the other hand, our home number remains blissfully free of callers, which promotes marital harmony. If not always successfully.

Hold my life, until I'm ready to use it

Every once in a while I put on the Replacements, and I'm continually struck by the extent to which a band this drunk, this out of control, was in so many ways the voice of a generation, or at least the piece of one to which I belonged. I don' t know why this should surprise me.

Unfortunately there's no good video in the public domain of the Replacements, but this cover is close enough. All you need to hear is the sound and the chorus to get it.

Tinkering

There was a story yesterday in the Wall Street Journal about how it's become the hip thing at high end engineering schools to form up in clubs, pool tools -- especially fine tolerance machine tools whose prices have dropped dramatically in recent decades -- and tinker and make physical objects. Well, hip is one thing, extensible is another. It got me thinking about all the bubbas sitting around America drinking PBR, watching Glenn Beck and NASCAR, and generally freaked out and disempowered about having a black president. What if those guys had high-end tools and could tinker? I bet they'd feel kind of empowered, after being eviscerated by multiple decades of real income declines at progressively shittier jobs. And I'll bet they'd produce some interesting gadgets, too.

It's just a question of building out a little business plan (though not for profit), getting some seed funding from universities and Soros, and running a pilot at a community college or two here in the great state of North Carolina, where, thanks to Terry Sanford and others, we've got strong community colleges. This could be a scalable way to encourage innovation while making a bunch of rednecks shut the fuck up about the government always doing something for somebody else.

The battle commences

The sweet little kittens that we brought home a few weeks ago are performing according to script. Last night in bed, I thought I smelled bad, bringing back bad memories of years long gone by when a nasty brew of cigarettes, beer, greasy food, garlic and an obstinate refusal to bathe enough meant that I had a body odor problem. Not atypical of your young athletic substance abuser.

But last night it wasn't me. The kittens had peed all over the bed and comforter. After one had shat on the sofa the day before.

The vet tells us they have giardia, which is normal for cats coming out of a shelter, and they have to be fed antibiotics (force-fed, in Leon's case). Why doesn't the shelter treat for this since it treats for other things, that's my question?

I have a feeling I'm going to be buying some furniture and other stuff soon.

And to top it off, Jennette is coming down from New York this weekend.

New kids in town

Bustello. Supergroup ex of A Number of Things, Pressure Boys, Sex Police, Metal Flake Mother.

Click to Enjoy.

Fear of Falling

In the Times biz section this weekend, there's an interesting article about studies being done to decrease the incidence of old people falling down, which is estimated to cost $75 billion a year in the US (a decidedly non-trivial ~0.5% of GDP). Good and innovative work is being done in the field, to be sure. But I have to wonder how much effort is being taken to provide long-term preventative approaches to help older people develop better senses of balance: I'm thinking of Tai Chi or Yoga specifically geared towards 50-60-70 year olds.

I also have to wonder about the relative incidence of injuries on wood floors vs. wall-to-wall carpet. The latter would seem to have an advantage once you've fallen, but would its unevenness encourage falls? Or is moving from wood floors to individual rugs and back again the greater risk? One can imagine having suitability standards for floor covering salespeople, as is the case for financial advisors etc., who have a fiduciary duty to inform clients of risks associated with products (high-flying stocks, variable annuities, etc).

Just minding the store

So Mary ran uptown to drop something off, and then she stopped into a little antiques store on Rosemary St, and then she thought, "I'll just pop my into Red Window" (a furniture store opened by Elizabeth Edwards promising some sort of oddball discounting of fancy chairs and whatnot). And Mary goes in and who does she find sitting there jabbering on his cellphone, alone minding the place, but mister all-teeth-and-Breck himself, Chapel Hill's own would-be President, Mr. John Edwards. He looked up from his phone and flashed his pearly whites at Mary, but kept on talking on his phone, which is, I will have you know, not considered best practice for retail salespeople. But it kind of makes sense, if you think about it: if you can't be the most powerful man in the world, you might as well be an underperforming employee of your breast-cancer afflicted wife, particularly after you sire a child by some vixen but deny it.

Or maybe he just thought Mary didn't look like she had money.

Hell to pay

Now that it looks like Steven Cohen's SAC Capital may get dragged bodily into the insider trading scandals, things could get interesting. If you think there's been an uproar over bonuses at AIG and Goldman Sachs, wait till the mainstream press starts chewing over Cohen's compensation ($1 bln in 2005) and lifestyle (35,000 square foot house in Greenwich, bought for $15 million but with jah knows how many improvements put into it). Jim Paulson may have made more in 2007-8 betting against housing, but at least it's pretty well understood how he did it. Cohen's modus operandi has always seemed dubious: being the closest to information, getting the first phone call from the broker.

Once its understood how much money hedge fund people made relative to investment bank people, main street people will be hopping mad. And it will be hard for Glen Beck to keep thumping Atlas Shrugged as if it were the Bible.

Bonita

Just bought a Diet Coke at Wendy's at Boston Logan. The woman in line behind me, perhaps Dominican, ordered a Chicken Nuggets meal. The cashier, almost certainly Filipina, responded "Ok, bonita." (I.e. "beautiful"). You don't hear too much of this between us white folk. Very nice.

In other news, stayed at a Sheraton for the last couple of nights. I watched the corporate propaganda tv channel for a few minutes for yucks, and it informed me that one of Sheraton's new deali-os was all white beds: sheets, pillows, blankets, duvets. This was nice, but didn't help me when I woke up at 6am cold. Because everything was white, it took me 45 precious minutes of grogginess to recognize that I was missing the duvet. Thanks, Sheraton.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Boston breakfast

In Boston. After a 7AM (no typo) meeting with my boss at the convention center I walked across a couple of bridges into town, observing the morning rush. I felt I deserved a proper breakfast, where I could sit at a table and someone would bring me a plate of eggs that someone had actually cooked for me and which I could eat with something metallic. Alas and alack, it was nowhere to be found. Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks seem to have sown up the joint (where, indeed, is Tim Horton's, purveyor of a superior round product that has made incursions as far south of the Canadian border as New York?). I ended up at a bagel place where they did, at least, cook my eggs, but I had to carry it to my own table and eat it with plastic.

Such is the world we live in today.

The incident of the Volvo oil cap

It was 1998, and we lived in Somerville, NJ, with one car. Mary taught at Princeton, and I taught at Drew, 45 minutes in the other direction. I was in a sort of DIY period, and had recently bought a book called Fix Your Bike Yourself. For me, this was very ambitious, almost starry-eyed.

So I drove our 1987 Volvo to Drew one Monday, and I had to get the car back to Mary so she could drive to class in the evening. Normally, it would have been no problem. However, as I pulled off 287 at exit 33, I had the distinct impression that there was smoke coming from the hood. And I was not wrong! And I knew what smoke meant. Fire!

Luckily, there was a fire station right there, with a garage, and I went back by the garage and this guy looked under the hood, and there was oil all over everything. Apparently, someone had been changing the oil and had not put the cap back on. That someone was of course Mr. DIY himself, alias moi meme. So he broke out some duct tape, covered up the oil putting-in area and advised me to get a real cap quickly (or, as Graham would have it "more quickerly").

So I go and teach class, with like an hour's wiggle room before I needed to get back to Somerville, and right after class I went to the nearest garage to figure out what to do. They told me of a dealer some 10 miles and two exits north and called to see that they had the part in stock. The gods smiled on me that day, as a very nice Asian woman, relative newcomer to this fair land of ours, driving a white 240 station wagon, offered me her oil cap as a loaner to get me up to the dealer. Naturally, I took the cap and ran, went up, bought another, raced back, returned hers, and then high-tailed it down the interstate back to Mary, who was getting a little nervous.

And this all took place long before we were hip or bemonied enough to have cell phones, so I hadn't even let Mary know how close we were to a major fuck up.

Trick or treating

We did the first tour of the new/old nabe as a family on Halloween. The hills are as steep as ever they were. Most impressive was Graham, who, despite his milk allergy, was as aggressive and predatory as any non-allergic kid at the bowls of unsuspecting neighbors: he dove in for handfuls and was only slowed by considerable parental intervention.

Not that Natalie didn't get her own. After our local tour, we took Natalie to Meadowmont, a nouveau-riche neo-urbanist development to the south of town, where we hooked up with Nick-Nack and his family and Natalie was able to go through one "totally awesome" haunted house, before retreating to his house with 5 other 9-10 year olds for a sleep over and a viewing of one truly horrifying movie: Mama Mia. Thankfully, Mary and I were spared this viewing.