Stieg Larrson

As I mentioned a few days back, I was reading Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  I finished it.

In the middle of it, I was excited about it.  By the time I got to the end, less so.

Yes, he is readable.  Yes, the mystery is good and compelling.  But in the end he's too focused on S&M, bondage, rape, pedophilia, violence against women, etc.  And he's too obsessed with tying up loose ends in quintuple knots.  When the main enigma is resolved, there are still 60-70 pages left and I'm thinking "what's left?"  Well, there was another plot thread he decided he'd better beat to death, so he did.

And, what's more, as with Henning Mankell's Wallander, our hero Blomkvist is so focused he only eats and drinks one thing, in his case coffee and sandwiches.  Towards the end, we don't even know what's on the sandwiches.  It's just "sandwiches."  It gets old.  Not that mystery novels need to be food-centric.  Patricia Cornwell trips over herself writing about fresh garlic and extra-virgin olive oil, as if to convince us that they're sophisticated in Richmond.  But check out the food in the novels of Qiu Xiaolong.  You could just keep the noodles and dispense with the murder.  It's good to have balance.

 

Larchmont retail

For the last couple of days I've been working at the public library here in fancy pants Larchmont, NY, whence my wife hails. I will confess that I am surprised to see that retail here appears to have become even more rarefied over the course of the crisis and its "aftermath".  On the Boston Post Road, for example, there is a spot where within the last two years two boutique chocolatiers have moved in across the street from one another.  There are now three fairly upscale cafe/bakeries on one block. The old school sports store on Palmer Avenue -- which had a lot of racquet sports stuff in it -- closed, seemingly a victim of the Dick's or whatever up at New Roc City in New Rochelle. Now there's a racquet sports store pure and simple. There is a truly world class fromagier here. 

What this says to me is that there has been no real impact of the crisis on Wall Street compensation.  But, then, we knew that.

True Love

As we have reported, Graham is going through a period of obsession with the Revolutionary War.  Which is only natural, after all.

So when his cousin Sadie, scarcely one year younger than him at five coming on six, asked him on the beach yesterday if he loved her, I suppose there's no reason we should have been surprised at his answer.  He paused and thought deeply, and then said:  "I love you when you talk about real historical data."  (or perhaps it was historical "facts," or "dates", the record is a bit murky here).

Maserati with a bumper sticker

Luxury insouciance apparently knows no bounds.  At the Princeton Shopping Center this evening, after picking up a variety of Klondike bars (Oreo! Heath Bar!  who knew?), I saw a navy blue Maserati sedan, the four door, an admittedly very handsome vehicle.  On the left side, just behind the gas cap, was a bright yellow and green round sticker that said something like "Frogbridge Rules" with picture of a frog in a baseball cap or somesuch.  A school sticker.  I inspected it and am 90% certain it was a sticker, not a magnet. This car lists for about $120k.

This is very strong fashion statement indeed:  "Here in a lengthy and nasty recession, I care so little about my status vehicle that I put my kid's school sticker on it."  I think we get the point.

Excellent trip to the pool

It was very hot here in Princeton yesterday so we all went to the Broadmead pool late in the day.  Graham, who has been very circumspect around the water, ended up being pretty active.  Over and over, he walked along the side of the pool, holding onto the edges, and then climbed out when he reached the lap-swimming divider.

Even better, Natalie was very excited to climb on my back and play bucking bronco. We did it again and again.  This after months and years of her scarcely wanting to touch me at all, except when giving me the occasional punch in the arm.  It warms dad's heart.

TV appearance

So I was sitting on David and Carol's porch in the heat yesterday, plowing through Stieg Larsen's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, when my cell phone rang.  It was a producer from Bloomberg, who wanted me to be on Bloomberg News that night to talk about management changes at AIG's Asian subsidiary AIA.  Of course.

So I borrowed a jacket and a tie from David to go with some of the office casual stuff I had brought with me.  Then I dropped Mary and Natalie off at Stacy and Sophie's and went to the Princeton Library (after buying the FT and the WSJ to read on the train and stopping in Iano's for pizza).

At 4:37 I was on a NJTransit train to Manhattan, sweating like a pig from being over dressed in a heat wave.

At Bloomberg, it was just like everyone had said. Fish tanks. Free snacks. A little pancake makeup.

The experience in the actual studio was odd.  They gave me a mike and an earpiece.  I was gonna be talking to a woman in Hong Kong.  A man's voice came on from London and we did a sound check.  They told me to look at the camera.  Problem was, there were two monitors of just my face right below the camera, and another monitor with another camera angle of me in the corner.  I couldn't see the face of the woman I was talking to.  What was worse, I was in a glass room and all these people were walking by leaving work.  Naturally I looked to see if I knew any of them.  There was a guy with what was probably a viola in a case on his back, probably going to quartet practice after work.  He walked back and forth.  The camera was by far the most boring thing in my visual space, and that's what I was supposed to look at.  Ridiculous.

Then the anchor came on and introduced me, and mangled not only my firm's name but the last names of the CEO and recently deposed chairman of AIG (who had been CEO of American Express and is a really well-known person).

It was all pretty confusing.  Considering that, I think I did OK.

Here's the video.

Home from camp

I picked up Natalie from Gwynn Valley on Tuesday.  She had an excellent time there, and has in particular gotten excited about riding horses.  Naturally, I have scheduled time with a certified financial planner to map out the ramifications of this newfound love.

No but seriously.  I now have a new picture on my desktop.  It's a little small, I need to go back to the camp website and buy a higher quality one.  But I think you get the point from looking at it. She is very happy.

When I look at the picture, I almost instinctually sit up straighter, as part of a shared posture improvement drive Mary and I have embarked upon recently.  I also try to concentrate more on my work to bring home them ducats, at least when I'm not blogging.

Final thoughts on World Cup winners and losers

I just need to say once more, the biggest loser of the World Cup was not France, not Italy, but the Fox Soccer Channel.  And our buddies at FSC did nothing to earn this maltreatment at the hands of FIFA.  The worked diligently and enthusiastically to pump up the volume leading into the tournament, and then got served up... still images.  It was sad to watch them try to wax eloquent about still photos, when ESPN and ABC and FIFA.com got to show all the highlights.

If I wasn't having a strange allergic reaction to my couch right now, I'd be in their watching Premier League reruns from 2007 just to show my undying devotion.

High seriousness

Morrissey is like the Steve Martin of rock and roll.  Not every record is great, but he is remarkably consistent, and he can veer into territory where others dare not tread.

As in below:

Always be careful when you abuse the one you love
The hour or the day no one can tell
But one day "goodbye" will be "farewell"
And you will never see the one you love again

Hmmm.  Morrissey's writing about death, again. Nobody else writes songs about death like this.

I think it's because heterosexual people in the developed world don't have the same experience of death that gay men who came of age in the 80s did. And secular straight people don't have a ritual or devotional context for dealing with or thinking about death, outside of movies.  And, perhaps, Morrissey.

And in the back, his drummer, pounding out a furious, improbable beat, as if to underscore the speed of life's passing.

The Talent Given Us

Rarest of rarities, multiple recommendations in a single day.  Rent The Talent Given Us.  It has a different pace than most.  Watch the whole thing.  Then watch the credits.  Then watch the short about the making of the film. 

I'd rather not say more.

A new contender

I am pleased to say that I have been blown away by another book, to wit, Peter Hessler's Country Driving.  The book divides into 3 sections:  the first is about driving along "the Great Wall" (actually, lots of different great walls) in China's hinterlands.  The second is about the village of Sancha, north of Beijing, where Hessler and a friend rented a small house for some years to get away from the city. The third is about a factory in a new city in a "development zone" in the South of China.

When I read the review, I remember thinking the driving around part would be interesting. It was kind of good, but -- like Rory whatever his name is's The Places In Between and Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, the review was more spellbinding than the book itself.  The second two sections -- where Hessler settles down and gets to know a place and its inhabitants -- are brilliant.

The best way to think about it is to compare him to Michael Lewis -- and he is the rare active nonfiction writer (of my admittedly limited sample) who compares favorably to Lewis (OK.  Michael Pollan does too).. Lewis is attracted to exceptional people and situations, and is a brilliant stylist. He is, in fact, all too often blinded by his own virtuosity.

Hessler, by contrast, is a simply a keen observer with the patience to sit and watch things change over time. Yes, he writes well, but mostly he cares about what he writes about, and it comes through. The section about Sancha, where he befriends a family and in particular their young sun, reaches a rare intensity when the boy gets quite ill and the author becomes an extremely active participant in saving the kid's life. When reading Lewis's The Big Short, I stayed up late reading because the writing and the narrative were engrossing.  When reading Country Driving -- and in particular when the kid was sick -- I stayed up late reading because I needed to know that the kid was going to be OK.

All I can say is that, as soon as I post this, I'm going to Amazon to put Hessler's other books on my wish list.  I'll be sure to buy them soon.



*Speaking of Lewis, I heard him speak at Sungard's New York City day a few weeks back. Again, he's brilliant, but it was basically Charlie Rose live, only the guy he was sitting with wasn't as good as Charlie Rose.  He dialed it in, gave us the 25-minute synopsis of his book, and then walked off.

once more, My Brightest Diamond

Code of conduct

I went to the dry cleaner today to pick up some shirts. They were ridiculously expensive to freaking launder and press.  Thanks to jah that I mostly wear t-shirts these days. In any case, I take comfort from the dry cleaner's Code of Conduct, as posted on its wall, which states that it does not engage in "gender-based pricing."  Excellent.

Prediction -- Germany vs. Spain

I haven't watched any of the game yet, though I'll tune in for a little. I want to go on the record as saying that -- though I'd prefer Spain to win, I think Germany will take it today.  I think the overhang of the debt crisis will be reflected on the pitch.  Germany is strong now and calls the cards in Europe.  Spain is a supplicant.  I think this dynamic will play out on the field.

Sadly, I think much the same thing happened between Ghana and Uruguay.  Uruguay believed in itself -- in this context -- and did what it took to win, however nasty.  Ghana did not believe in itself at the penalty line.  It was a failure of will.

Doubtless many will censure me for this Nietzschean logic.

Trip to the mountains

This weekend we drove out to Asheville, and then Brevard, to take Natalie to camp.  As I had mentioned.

I had gotten Natalie all excited about not just going to camp, but also about staying in a relatively fancy hotel.  The Hilton Biltmore Park did not disappoint, though it was right next to an interstate.  Natalie was quite impressed that both the area around the sink (the vanity, or whatever) and the window ledge were made of granite, though I don't think they actually were.

The beds were quite nice though, and they were placed a fine distance apart.  So I introduced the kids to the fine art of jumping from bed to bed.  Graham was first to get into it, while Natalie maintained an ironic distance.  This could not be sustained for long.  Soon they were both diving from bed to bed in time together, innovating a wide range of knee-bouncing techniques.

We went into Asheville, and had a fine meal at the Early Girl eatery (which Marvin later told me was owned and run by our boy Butch's brother).  This place rocks. Very mellow, welcoming, and understated, the kind of place Chapel Hill desperately needs.  Out on the streets of Asheville, there was a wide range of buskers and tourists.  I could tell that Natalie thought the street performers were wierd and distasteful.  She is at that phase.

The next day we set off for Brevard and Gwynn Valley.  It was as lovely as I remembered it, and strikingly open air, much more so than I recalled.  It seems as if there are no actual windows in the whole place, including the dining hall. Only screens. Natalie was quite nervous by the time we got her to her cabin, and very ready for us to get out of there and let her meld with her peers, which, as the picture above seems to indicate, she seems to have done.  Before we left I bought a hat and a t-shirt(which I am wearing now). I also waded in the creek.

Graham, unfortunately, had a major tantrum moment after we dropped her off.  Having been up till 10 the night before, a lack of sleep had something to do with it. Leaving his sister at camp was also a factor.  Mostly he wanted to get back to the hotel, bounce on the beds, and watch Liberty's Kids.  All of which we did, in due time.

Sunday, however, was more his speed.  As planned, on the way back we stopped by the Guilford Courthouse National Battle Ground site, the turning point of the southern campaign of the Revolution, where the Brits enjoyed a pyrhhic victory but began their inexorable slide towards humiliation at Yorktown. We were pleased (if underwhelmed) to see that our stimulus money had put a fresh coat of asphalt down on the parking lot and all the roads through the woods. But that's a matter for another blog.

Graham was totally psyched to watch the videos about the war, especially the one which depicted the broad narrative course of the war up to the Guilford Courthouse battle.  The 30-minute movie about the battle, which featured a bunch of pretty talented and dedicated if sporadically superannuated reenactors, was a little too naturalist and bloody for our youngun. We should have heeded the parental guidance sign posted outside the auditorium.

All told, it was a hit.  Graham informs me that we need to get back there soon, possibly for his birthday, and that we will only visit revolutionary war museums that have similar videos.

Gwynn Valley

Taking Natalie to camp at Gwynn Valley this weekend. I'm so excited for her. An awesome place.

Revulsion

I must say that, thinking back to the last acts of the Uruguay-Ghana game, all I can feel is revulsion.  I mean, I didn't really care who won, I was fine with either one. They're both underdogs.

But then Ghana, by a miracle of miracles, actually headed the ball into the net on the last play.  It was going in.  The Uruguayan did what he had to do, he hit it with his hand, and got a red card.  But Ghana had it going in.

And then Ghana collapsed, to its great shame.  But they had really won, and lost only to a clever bit of rules arbitrage, really a heads up play by Suarez or whatever his name was, but it just wasn't fair.  And I don't think it's good for the sport.  But soccer isn't going anywhere.  You really can't hurt it.

Digital Concepts $20 camera from Sakar International of Edison New Jersey

Natalie needed a cheap camera to go to camp.  The camp recommended a disposable camera, but Mary hated to do that, so she bought a $20 camera from Sakar International of Edison, New Jersey at Rite Aid.  DO NOT REPEAT HER MISTAKE.

For some reason to make the camera work you need to install software on your computer first, and then install from there onto the camera.  The installation disk wheezed.  Just to copy some inert *.png files, it practically froze up.  After about 30 minutes it had not completed the install. I used Task Manager to force it to stop.

It seems to have messed up a script on my Windows Active Desktop.  It may have tampered with my Trend Micro Anti-Virus (I'll ask the IT support guys tomorrow).  For all I know it sprayed all kinds of viruses and spyware all over this cheap brick of a Dell my employer gives me.  Resist the siren call of the digital camera that seems to cheap to be true. It probably is.

Right now I'm going to back up all my files.

Running and Blockus

Last night was a little cooler here in the Piedmont. Graham and I went out by the lake for some running races and, if you'll believe this, he beat me every time!  Amazing.  No but seriously, he is getting faster.  We must encourage this running thing.  Low tone resolves from the bottom up. It was the case with me too, I excelled first at running, then at other physical stuff.

In other news, Natalie and I played our second game of Blockus last night.  The first time we played it resulted in a dead tie as we each got all our pieces down, which made us realize that we needed to get more players in to make the game more challenging, so we invited the unsuspecting Mary.  Natalie and I both kicked off trying to get strategic on the other, but Mary didn't know anything about the game.  In the end, Mary humiliated both of us, crushing us by multiple squares.  She claimed to know nothing, but I think in fact she had been practicing on the sly.

Toy Story 3 -- a scary part

This is a very good movie, even in 2-D. I will confess that I am a pure sap (as many of you may have figured out), so I am very reachable by a sweet little story about friends and growing older and moving on etc.

If you can believe it, it was my first time to the movies with Graham. Thankfully, it wasn't insanely loud. For many years we wouldn't take him to the pix for fear his sound sensitivity would kick in, but this was OK. 
I wouldn't have expected this movie to have a scary part (plot spoiler here), but as all the toys are staring down the maw of an incinerator and they join hands in resignation to their fate in a very 9/11 way, it was difficult to figure out how they were going to get out of it, even though you knew they had to just so the movie could go on.

Graham, however, didn't really know that at a core level, and he was terrified.  He was crying from fear. I held his hand and told him it was going to be OK, and I wanted to scoop him up and put him in my lap, but didn't, for fear he might think he would lose face in front of Natalie and Makenna (both rising 5th graders) and Josh (going into 3rd). I should have picked him up.  Man, you hate to see your kids scared like that.

Historical temperature data at weather.com

When I look up historical average temperatures at weather.com, they always seem lower than what we experience. I'm pretty sure that's because they're working with a relatively long data series, back to the forties or something.  The problem, of course, is that global warming is a very real thing, so the data skews cooler than what's going on outside.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have the historical data to work with, and it is directionally accurate. It's just that it's less helpful than it could be.

Southwest Airlines Flight 933 -- Family boarding

Caroline.was flying back to Boston today, actually Providence, so as to avoid regional jets.  Southwest is the one that flies the fat boys on such short hops.  So I take her to the airport.

After waiting around in the cattle pen that always precedes boarding SW, everybody lines up by those little posts.  Caroline being 12 and traveling alone, I figure they'll let her pre-board. You can forget about that:  "If she's 12 she's not considered flying unaccompanied, she can board with the families," says the nice lady.  OK, I think, that's not too bad.

So they let Business Select customers board.  Well, that makes some sick sense, I think,  business before families, sure.  And then they let all the "A" Group passengers board.  That's maybe 40-50 people.  So I figure I just missed something and insert Caroline into the queue around B10, where she would be supposed to be if she were an adult.

But no, now they announce "all families with children 4 or under."  NOW is the time for family boarding.  After half the plane is already on.  Got it. So Caroline gives me a little hug while the boarding bitch is trying to her along.

Thanks Southwest.  Thanks a lot. It all makes perfect sense now.

Teenage poetry slam

After a feast of pulled pork at Bullock's, Natalie and I went to Duke for the poetry slam at the end of cousin Caroline's poetry camp.  Baldwin Auditorium was not well cooled, for sure, and many a teenager took the stage to trot forth their poetic stylings.  There was much talk of flying, nestling in pillows and falling asleep, flesh hanging from limbs like baby pigs after napalm bombings (OK, only one of those), domineering mothers.  Some kids wrote about friends who died of cancer, or how much they loved their dads (that was an awesome poem).  There was much angst and hinting of sexuality, but not much sweating or thrusting. Rhyme and meter were rare, and rarely coincided with much talent. After the poems by the popular kids, there was much whooping.

Caroline's poem rocked, and I captured it on "film" for posterity.

Obama seeks more Ass to Kick

President Barack Obama, apparently not feeling that he had kicked enough ass for one week, has summoned Malian referee Koman Coulibaly to the White House after the official's questionable call of an unspecified penalty resulted in the canceling of the US's go-ahead goal against mighty Slovenia in the World Cup:  "The American people demand an explanation, and we demand accountability.  However I may sympathize with Mr. Coulibaly for being skinny and having a funny name, we cannot allow for such a travesty of justice to deny us the victory which should rightly have been ours." 
The President, on the recommendation of key advisors including David Axelrod and most likely Larry Summers, though possibly Paul Volcker or even Peter Orszag, is considering a demand that FIFA set aside funds to compensate possible victims of this heinous crime, which could include t-shirt vendors and bars who might have derived income from elimination round games had the US progressed, in the event that England defeats Slovenia and the US fails to defeat Algeria, or if England should score enough goals to progress on the goal differential in the event that both of the group's final games result in a draw.  Obama continued:  "The businesspeople of this great country of ours will not be deprived of revenue opportunities that should have been theirs, had this egregious misjudgment not occured."  Rumors abounded as well that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were in preliminary talks with Tim Geithner about possible release of TARP funds, and/or were writing some compensation for potentially harmed into the pending financial reform legislation.

Lonely Hearts

Tonight we started Lonely Hearts, a 2006 noir thing with Travolta, James Gandolfini, Salma Hayek, and some sick fuck who looks like Jim Carrey. It's a stylish thing, but nasty and formulaic at once.  Then again, when you've watched thousands of movies, they all start to run together.

Analysis makes paralysis -- in the lunch line

There is a guy at the lunch counter where I get my sandwich who is so painfully deliberate that it's, well, painful.  Every step in making a sandwich takes more time than it should.  When he cuts into the sub roll (always "whole wheat," mind you), he lacks the confidence to cut towards the ends, and then pushes them open a little by hand.  When he puts cheese and meat in the sub, he nudges each piece in individually.  When he wraps the sandwich at the end, he doesn't seem to have developed a technique for wrapping it, he seems to be doing it almost anew each time, despite the fact that he's been doing it for months.  I tend to order simpler sandwiches when he's minding the counter.

I don't mean to bust on the guy too hard.  He has a job. He comes in to work. He may have anxiety issues, he may be on meds, he may be doing as well as could ever be hoped.  He may sense my impatience and get freaked out.  I should probably strive harder for zen calm when I order from him.

I do wonder why store management puts him in a customer-facing role.  Does he do worse in back prepping chickens?

Mostly, I view him as an object lesson in confidence, or the lack thereof.  Most people, when they do things over and over, come to believe in their ability to do them. He doesn't seem to. Belief in oneself is key to any process improvement.  It's his manager who should be paying attention and encouraging him.  And, I guess, in the absence of management, maybe his customers.

Things heating up

Today I was wearing my "I love Slovenia nogometna"* T-shirt. Coming back from Harris Teeter with my lunch, I heard out of the corner of my ear:  "Slovenia's going down" (i.e. against the US later this week), and then "Lucky goal!", in reference to the Algerian keeper's fumble of the Slovenian captain's good but not great shot yesterday.



*The word for soccer in Slovene, as well as Croatian, is of course "nogomet," not "nogometna" (an adjectival derivative [nominative singular feminine]). Note also that this shirt from WorldSoccerShop.com was available for $6.99 a few months back, but has been marked up to $17.99 during the World Cup.  This argues more for inflation than deflation, or at least for cleverness.

Netflix needs to get it in gear

I find it astounding that Netflix is one of the top performing stocks of 2010. Every disc we get from Netflix has major scratches on it. Every one. It's a pain in the ass. I don't know what its licensing agreements from studios look like, but given that we're talking about eminently reproducible digital content, I can't imagine there would be any constraints on Netflix burning new discs and retiring old ones whenever it wanted to. The cost of the disc itself can't be high, and the process for burning it shouldn't be labor or capital intensive.

Netflix is running serious brand risk. I mean, think about it, we pay them $20 a month or some such, we probably get around to watching 2 or 3 videos on average a month. And for this we're getting a good catalog, good fulfillment, but a really shitty end user experience. They need to get on this or they will be the toast quickly.

Why no world cup footage on Fox Soccer Channel?

I must say this: for all the enthusiasm and focus that the Fox Soccer Channel has brought to the buildup to the World Cup, the fact that ABC or ESPN or FIFA or whoever has not let them license / show highlights from the game is out and out pathetic. For shame. The stateside audience for soccer would be dramatically lower without FSC.

"I scored a goal in the World Cup final"

OK. Not me, exactly. Because I don't get ESPN3 and can't watch games live, I went to good old ESPN to check the scores, and saw its video feature on guys who did score goals in the final (no coverage of the women's final, yet...). Pretty amazing. A guy from Uruguay who beat Brazil in 1950. The guy who scored 3 to beat Germany at Wembley in 1966.

Though Mary would mock me if she bothered to read my blog, this is heady, emotional stuff. Many of us get married and have kids, and unless you're first to die, everyone loses loved ones over the course of a life. Those are huge moments. But even Michael Jordan hitting the shot in '82 to give Dean Smith his first title doesn't compare. The World Cup is on an entirely other level. Go to ESPN and watch some of these clips. It's pretty cool.

Then try and return to your day job.

Breakfast with a cop

I had breakfast with a cop today. He had arrested me 18 years ago, and I bought him breakfast to thank him for doing the right thing and not cutting me any slack just because we had gone to high school together.

He asked me what I thought of the economy. I gave him a long-winded answer about how we're at a tricky point in needing to encourage debt and consumption in the near term when we really need to cut it in the long term, how we don't need big SUVs and McMansions blah blah blah.

I asked him what he thought. He said he sees the marginal portions of society and it's been very alarming how they've been underserved in the last decade or so. How the closing of the mental health center in town in 2003 had left a lot of people stranded and in need of services, how private sector contractors had ridden in on a white horse and said they could take care of the "segment" and turn a profit, and then had pulled out and run for the hills when they couldn't. He said that the disparities in wealth he saw were deeply troubling and that the passage of the health care bill was clearly a step in the right direction. He worries about seething anger amongst the poor.

This is a long-time cop, a guy who sends one of his kids to Catholic school. A guy who pulled bodies from the wreckage of 9/11. Not someone you think of as classic bleeding-heart liberal, though we are, admittedly, in a liberal town (but an affluent one and one where the underclass is relatively small -- which lends more credence to his POV).

It was another one of those moments where I thought about what I was doing with my life.

Musical interlude

Financial Reform: Faces of the Affected

The Wall Street Journal ran a story that nearly had me in tears. It charted the wide implications of the financial reform legislation currently pending in Washington, including pictures of the sad lot shown below. They come from all walks of life: derivatives trader, auto dealer, attorney general, retailer. What they share is a deep foreboding of dislocation should the current legislation pass. It will rip through their lives like Katrina and Rita, or Thelma and Louise.

I'm sure that, gazing on their anxious countenances, you are seized with empathy and compassion and you think, how can I help? What can I do to make their lives a little easier, to protect them from the impending storm? What you can do is take up a quill pen, like the ones our Founding Fathers used when moved by the spirit of sweet little baby Jesus, and write to your congressman or senator. Man the proverbial levies of freedom! Line them with the sandbags of liberty! Let them know how you feel about the impending threats to the ways of life that these good white men have known and loved for generations. Don't let a tragedy that we can prevent come to pass without a fight.

Obama's Katrina?

A lot of people are asking whether the Gulf crisis is Obama's Katrina?  There are a lot of heady themes wrapped up in this simple question, and I think it's best to address them head on.

• Was Katrina Bush's Katrina?  The idea is that the moral emptiness of Bush's regime was laid bare by the images of the forgotten underclass languishing at the Superdome and Bush and Chertoff's failure to respond. In fact, we were all complicit in the first bit, and Bush's failure to respond probably didn't cost him many votes in 2008.  It may have galvanized Democratic voter registration drives, though.
  
• If Obama fucks up, is the Democratic Party fucked forever?  Of course not. A lot of people were panicky around Scott Brown, the Tea Party, and now BP.  The fact is that, as Obama has noted, the regulatory apparatus and culture around oil drilling, suburbia, and energy consumption have been bipartisan and cultural for many decades.  That said, three decades of Republican domination and wild west mentality have played a big role.  It is shameful that auto sales in recent months have been driven by SUV and truck sales (though lots of these have been fleet purchases for contractors).  People have short memories.
  
  To come back to my point, lets assume the Republicans regain seats in the mid-terms and Obama loses in 2008.  That does not mean we'll never have another black president or another progressive one.  In my view, the senate supermajority has caused the Democrats to be suboptimal listeners and reactive opportunists, and this is coming back to bite us.
  
  Deepwater Horizon is not Obama's fault, and he can't fix it, any more than he can fix unemployment.  Things take time. People are freaked out about hyperinflation when deflation is the bigger threat, but Fox News and the Tea Party have gotten the upper hand in terms of defining the debate.  I think Obama should bring Volcker to the podium to talk about more than just proprietary trading. People respect him and will listen to him.  There may be a fear that he will overshadow Bernanke.

Anyhow, my gut is that however bad Obama fucks up, he will eventually be viewed as a positive figure, because he has a good heart and his vision of America is one that is credible and in line with what most people, if not white people petrified by change. And because he's young and has a great career ahead of him.

OK, this is rambling, but hell, it's a blog.

Theme to Liberty's Kids

Graham, in the full throes of his revolutionary war obsession, has gotten really into the "Liberty's Kids" series, which we've gotten on DVDs from the library. He particularly loves the theme song.  When it's on, he sits there and half hums along, mouthing those few words he's really gotten a command of.

I remember this stage of childhood, when you know that you've memorized a song but can't really sing it. It's awesome.

I've gotten so I like singing the song too.  Natalie hates it.  She tells me to shut up.  I think she's jealous that Graham has a favorite song.  For me, it's just the same as that Owl City "Fireflies" song she's into. It's a sweet little pop song that's positive in tone, so it's great for kids and even better for adults.  Soon enough they may well be listening to something with a hard edge to demonstrate that they are bad-assed ironic teens and are separating from their parents.

Back from Vegas

What a shithole.  At around 6:30 last night I was consumed by a need to get out of the massive Mandalay Bay Hotel and habitron.  So I went outside. First off, it was very difficult to get to the street.  Once I was there I walked aways and observed the sites.  The Luxor.  The Excalibur.  New York New York (OK. I give em props for the rollercoaster).  Basically it was like being inside the hotel complex, except it wasn't air conditioned.

I was pleased to see that I could've eaten all day for $29.95 at the buffet at Excalibur, but I didn't.

On hotel TV there was a long infomercial for the City Center complex, set on "67 acres of invaluable land".  If it's so invaluable, why was there a convenience store and a McDonalds across from my hotel, and a fleebag motel that had been converted into studio apartments, and even a derelict parking lot.  Something was amiss.  And why did City Center's financing almost collapse?

Then we went and had sushi at a restaurant with some name chef and it wasn't very good, but I didn't have to pay for it (as in Repo Man:  "Hey dude, lets go do some crimes!" "Yeah, lets go eat sushi and not pay.)

There were things I liked.  I liked lying on my bed and watching planes take off at the airport across the way, with the mountains in the distance as a backdrop.  I liked Shark Reef in the Mandalay Bay complex. Walking through one of the water tunnels, I saw a sword fish swim over my head.  That was cool.

Basically I like the kids' stuff.

And then I get home, and Graham starts puking.

Vegas

Haven't been here since '76. Somewhat overwhelming.  The Back Street Boys are playing here at the Mandalay Bay, where people smoke indoors (what a throwback) and all the waitresses seem to have tattoos in the smalls of their backs and other enhancements. Is it the world's largest mall? Exhausted. More tomorrow.

Waitress

This is a sweet little idyll of a movie, enhanced by the ogre like husband character, cubed in its poignance by the nasty murder of the writer / director / supporting actress Adrian Shelly between wrap and release.  Andy Griffith is as good as ever.

Inspiration

We are now actually paying an architect to help us gear up for our renovation.  Hard-pressed to say what we wanted, from somewhere in the dregs of my bowels I pulled out "Scandinavian country house."  Little did I know there was actually a defined style.  Quoth one book's website:
"Of all the European country home styles, none is more universally popular than Scandinavian Country. These fresh, light-filled northern interiors have an effortless grace that never fails to delight the eye."

So we're off to the races.  Here's one I like.

Obviously we're not getting all the way there, but we could pull out some elements.

Graham gets his white belt

After months of stonewalling, I finally got Graham to recite his student's creed to his dojo at tae kwon do.  I only was able to do it by half-threatening to not take him anymore if he didn't do it.  Graham practiced once for me, and in his soft little voice he said:

I believe in myself.
I am confident.
I can accomplish my goals.

I believe in what I study.
I am disciplined.
I am ready to learn and advance.

I believe in my teachers.
I show respect to all who help me progress.

So when we got to class, I told the dojo that Graham was ready to say it, and at the beginning of class he called Graham over to him in a corner (I was glad he didn't have to do it in front of all the other kids).  But then, before class began, he called Graham over to him in front of all the other kids, told them Graham had said it and was going to receive his white belt.  Graham was visibly very happy. Then he told all the kids about how he had gotten his own white belt not so long ago (he's about 24 or so), but had stuck to it and become a black belt.  Then he pulled the white belt from within his robe and tied it snuggly around Graham's waist, and all the kids gave Graham a big round of applause.

I was very proud.

Good fun

This is the kind of band I would like to be in.

Into the Wild

This is a serious movie, beautiful but cruel and shocking, in its way. It will make you think about how you treat your children.

Dizzy from numbers

Tonight I'm hard at work on a piece of research on life insurance in India. Dizzying.  3 million agents, 45 million policies a year, somewhat different numbering system:  "755 lakh crore Rs" = 755 * 100,000 * 10,000,000, and then divide by 45 to make it dollars.

And then to top it all off the statistics come from different places and they don't all make sense together, so you've got to figure out how they all fit. It's enough to drive you bonkers.

China subsidy for rat-proof refridgerators

This article, at Bloomberg, is an instance of a thoughtful use of stimulus/subsidies. It details how the Chinese government has been subsidizing farmers' purchases of appliances that don't get gnawed on by the rats that cohabitate with them. In view of an article in the New Yorker I recently read on the quest for the perfect stove for use in developing countries (a quixotic quest if ever there was one, since people don't take care of them or use them as directed), it will be interesting to revisit this 3 to 5 years down the road to see what the long term impact has been. Hopefully it delivers sustainable benefits.

Stomach bug

Have scarcely left the hosue this weekend.  Mary and Graham have both had stomach bugs. I have at least been psychosomatically afllicted with the same. Have been reduced to carting Natalie around so that she, at least, could have some fun for all of us.

I did get her to the library and, while there, checked out the complete set of Liberty's Kids DVDs, just right to help your Revolutionary War obsessed 6-year old while away the days.  And with Walter Cronkite as the voice of Ben Franklin.  Who knew?

Bird and fire

On my way to get my coffee from Weaver Street at 3:30, I spied a small baby bird by the back steps of The Station, Mike Benson's establishment.  It had its mouth wide open and was peeping vigorously.  What's up with that?  I thought.  Meanwhile, up on the deck rail of the station, another larger bird was looking at me and squawking pretty aggressively, so I took that to be the mama bird, and was somewhat comforted.

When we adopted our cats Leon and Rascal, the hippie chicks at the cat shelter argued that we should keep them inside because cats eat a lot of baby birds who are left nesting on the ground while their moms go out prospecting for worms and whatnot.  Mary buys this entirely, plus she fears the cats could get snagged by hawks or by nasty snakes.  I have been somewhat dubious on this argument, feeling that felines want to be free.  This baby bird, however, argued in the other direction.

On the way back I saw that the bird was still there, but the mama wasn't peeping at me anymore.  Strange, I thought.  Then when I came around the corner of the Station, I saw that a bunch of mulch was on fire, and appeared to be moving towards the building.  There was a bird laying near the fire that could have been mom.  I went and got a waiter from inside and he doused the fire with water and I stamped on it with my flip flops, until a guy with better shoes for the job came out and dealt with it more authoritatively.  The bird didn't look good, though.

I think I'm a little sensitive today, perhaps. It was kind of a freaky scene, something David Lynchy about it.

A hairy day out there

I made the mistake of looking at the markets around 2:30 today, and all of a sudden it was 2008 again. But now, to bed, for I must speak with reporters from Bloomberg and Reuters about AIG's 1Q results at around 8 and, by gum, I'll need to have something clever to say to them.

Thunder rumbles.

Obesity trends

This is a scary picture. Hadn't seen this one. Thanks to RGA Reinsurance for sticking it in their newsletter. Keep at it Jamie Oliver and Michele Obama.

Independence from foreign oil

This oil in the Gulf situation continues to anger me, and the suggestions from various politicians and others on the right that we need to keep drilling to reduce our dependence on foreign oil rankles in particular. To me it's very clear. To reduce our dependence on foreign oil we should:

• Drive much smaller cars and many fewer fucking SUVs
• Drive them less
• Live closer together

It's not that complicated.

"Drill, baby, drill"

I sometimes stop by Fox News just to see how they are representing things, and how that side of the world is reacting to something.  Today I was interested in how they'd be presenting the oil spill in the Gulf, which I think is going to go down in history as a chapter we don't like.  While Fox wasn't extolling the spill's virtues, they did poll their visitors to get their reaction to it and its implications for future offshore drilling.  Here's what the poll looks like around now.

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Note the "fair and balanced" construction of the poll "...reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Drill, baby, drill!" And the fact that 83% of the visitors would rather drill then figure out another way to reduce dependence, like smaller cars, smarter growth, etc.

As a contrast and an example of a more responsible conservative viewpoint, George Will had an opinion piece in Newsweek a week or so back where he exhorted Americans to think about nuclear power again, citing the example of France -- where most electricity comes from reactors and there haven't been any major incidents ever. One reactor could produce as much energy as some outlandish number of wind turbines. I don't know if I fully agree with Will on this, but he certainly has a point that we may need to be more open-minded about this and at least let it enter mainstream discourse.

Big, heavy, and slow

Tonight after dinner Graham reminded Mary that she should wrestle with him sometime (which was my idea originally).  It seems that he is tiring a little bit of wrestling with me because.... he always wins, so it's too easy.  "Dad is too big, heavy and slow, so I can always get around behind him and throw him on the ground."

White Eldorado and more

Just went out to pick up my afternoon coffee.  On the way back, saw the most pimped out white Eldorado convertible that I have seen in some time.  Probably a '76, with very dope shiny rims and very slim tires.  Fuzzy dice on the rearview, natch.

In other news, Glen Heights' own Niklaus Steiner will be speaking on his best-selling book.  See below. A "thought-provoking textbook", as if that weren't a contradiction in terms.Everyone should turn out and pelt him with soft fruit for trying to keep this on the DL.

Niklaus Steiner discusses International Migration and Citizenship Today

Start: Thu, 04/29/2010 - 7:00pm

End: Thu, 04/29/2010 - 8:00pm

Timezone: Etc/GMT-5

Thursday

04/29/10  7:00pm-8:00pm

Niklaus Steiner discusses International Migration and Citizenship Today

 International migration has emerged in the last decade as one of the world’s most controversial and pressing issues. This thought-provoking textbook offers the reader a more nuanced and knowledgeable understanding of the complex economic, political, cultural, and moral concerns that arise when people move across borders seeking admission into other countries. 

 

Niklaus Steiner is director of the Center for Global Initiatives and Adjunct Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His research and teaching interests are immigration, refugees, nationalism, and citizenship and his publications include The Problems of Protection: UNHCR, Refugees, and Human Rights (ed.)

Location: 

Flyleaf Books
725 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514

UNC NCAA Compliance

I was talking to someone who teaches at UNC, in a notoriously easy department historically favored by student-athletes, and he/she was telling me about how athletes would cut and paste from the internet, get dinged and get bad grades, and then some handler from the athletics department would call up and explain how the athlete really didn't know what he/she was doing was wrong and should be cut some slack. No shock there. Those of us who have lived in Chapel Hill on and off for our whole lives know that the school is not as lily white as it seems, compliance wise, though it may be less bad than many others.

Tellingly, UNC's NCAA Compliance officer is housed within the Athletics Department.  I have seen university org charts where the sports compliance person reports directly to the general counsel, to internal audit, or to the President.  This is more effective governance, in theory at least.

None of this would be bad if Roy Williams with his big mouth and bad manners hadn't been such an embarassment to the university this season.  The guy is 59 years old and he doesn't know the difference between a real natural tragedy and a mediocre season. If he doesn't calm down it would be appropriate for someone to do some real investigative/forensic journalism on UNC sports.  The university should be focused on its core mission of educating people, not on the secular religion of hoops.

Spinach

Graham has decided that spinach should be incorporated into his dinner every day.  He eats the same thing everyday, but Mary was certainly happy to add the dark leafy one to his repertoire.  She showed him some Popeye videos on YouTube, and Graham was certainly pleased to see how Popeye's muscles grew when he tossed down a can of spinach.

So last night after dinner, I was trying to rush things along because I was making one of my forced annual pilgrimages to the mall to buy clothes. Graham resisted when I said it was story time. "Can't we wrestle a little?" He asked.  It seemed he had had spinach for dinner, and wanted to try out his newly enhanced muscles on me.  As usual, he pinned me to the mat every time.

I dreamed I was John Kuester

Last night I dreamed I was John Kuester. That's right, UNC pretty slow white boy point guard from the 70s. For some reason, when the rest of the team headed off to the game, I told them I'd catch up. My friend Jimmy Braddock stuck around with me. We did something like clipped our toe nails, and then headed off to the game at in an old beat up van. There was traffic.  We were already almost late when we arrived at Carmichael Auditorium.  That's when I realized the game was actually at the Dean Dome. Whoops.  We headed off, but we lost our way, and the van broke down.  I stopped and asked for directions and also a ride from this nice lady.  She said she could help us out, but she sort of lollygagged.  As we were headed there, I realized how incredibly embarassing it was going to be, that we were going to be late, and that the game couldn't really be played without us, but it was on network television, and they couldn't hold up the network.  Boy was coach gonna be mad...

This is a pretty elaborate spin on a classic dream, eh?

Glen Heights' finest under fire

Some tea party half brain has taken it upon him/herself to attach Glen Heights's own Eric Stein, currently working insane hours in DC to get a viable Consumer Financial Protection Agency up and running.  Please visit the site here and join me in injecting a note of sense into these dimwits' heads.

By the way, I must say that I find shocking the level of utterly brainless uniformity in the commenting of nitwits outraged by the bailouts all across this great, so-called world wide web of ours.  I really wonder if some master spammer hasn't just gone out and written some little script-bots that troll the web looking for places to leave comments and write things like:  "Lets hang the whole lot of the thieving bankers with the bindings of our pocket constitutions" or "Food labeling is tyranny" or "I wear my pistol in this visible holster just in case that communist darkie president happens by."  Obviously it's not me who does this, because I don't have the verbal facility for reductive vitriol, but you know what I mean.

Owl City

Natalie has recently begun to slightly grow past the Beatles stage, and has been listening a lot to Owl City.  When I first listened to it, I thought it was insipid, but it has begun to grow on me a little, as it is, as the kids say "catchy."   The guy's got a way with hooks, and it is very sweet and escapist, and, most importantly, when she listens to it, she has that childlike glow of "isn't this cool, dad?"  Which is to say, she still kind of cares about my opinion.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Doubts

The blog has been pretty much skimming the surface recently, so I guess it's time to dig a little deeper to reconnect with it.

I will confess that, given that I've paid the bills for the less decade or so thanks to the financial services industry, the continual revelations of miscreants and misdeeds of recent weeks, months, and years have been discomforting. It's not that I'm an idiot and I think that everyone in the industry is pure as the driven snow, but at the end of the day you don't want to think that you've spent your life in service of evil.

Today's headline in the Journal was particularly disturbing, as it chronicled accusations that Rajat Gupta, a Director at Goldman Sachs and Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey, had tipped off Raj Rajaratnam of hedge fund the Galleon Group about Warren Buffett's September 2008 investment in Goldman Sachs. Now, Gupta had already been implicated in the insider trading ring centered around Galleon, so what was the big deal, you may ask?

I don't know where you guys were in September 2008, but I was on Wall Street, physically there, on the beach at my consulting firm, and in many ways I've gotta say that the fall of 2008 was as stressful if not more so than the fall of 2001.  Standing on the street and watching the Twin Towers burn was surreal, living down the street from where the anthrax letters were mailed and working at Rockefeller Center where several were mailed to was bad, but the fall of 2008 was beyond that because cause and effect were so distant and it was so hard to isolate the bad guy. So when Buffett plugged $5 billion into Goldman and stanched the bleeding, it was a huge moment.  Someone -- and someone with a lot of credibility -- had stood up and said he didn't believe what was going on made sense and I actually slept better that night.

So when it turns out that this scumbag, who surely had no need of money or anything, was insider trading on that, at that particular moment, is just beyond the pale. And, while I've not been right at the center of it, as the various misdeeds here, there, and everywhere come to light, it's hard not to feel tarred by association.

Meanwhile, last night, I had done a little research on the big Shakori Hills festival down in Chapel Hill this weekend, and read up about the venue and what it's about, and it's hard not to sit here and think:  "what the fuck have I been doing the last 20 years?"  I could have been making music, doing something worthwhile. Well, at least somebody has.

Advising on Supreme Court

If there's one guy the Obama administration should be looking to for guidance on appointing a replacement for John Paul Stephens, its the guy who beat him to the exit door:  David Souter. Souter, a total nerd and mama's boy from New Hampshire, was a pretty exemplary guy and justice. More than anyone, he abided and lived by stare decisis, meaning that he insisted on compelling evidence to overturn precedent. Not some bullshit about "the intentions of the framers," not some convoluted argument about how something wasn't fair to someone.  He really lived and breathed the sanctity of the court. Even this nonsense about corporations being people thus eligible to give whatever they wanted to to campaigns that Alito and John Boy Roberts have foisted upon us. It's on the books now, he would argue we've got to respect it. And he voted on the correct but losing side when W ascended to office via a few hanging chads in 2000.

A judicial, if not political, conservative of this type would bring balance and stability to the court -- to some extent deligitimized by some of its recent decsions -- right now.

One other thing about Souter.  You've gotta give the guy props for retiring at a reasonable age and going home to enjoy the rest of his life, rather than clinging to the bench.

Up late

Back in the office till 11:30 last night, cranked out a piece of research. Then, this afternoon, payback time:  a nap.  I pulled the back cushion off of my armchair, lay down on the floor, covered myself with my raincoat, and was out for a good 15-20 minutes. There are virtues to having your own office, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, Graham got a new book on the revolutionary war for me to read to him.  He has informed me plentifully about the power of mighty revolutionary war cannons and even missile shooters.

Mixed emotions

The Boston Marathon is underway, and it's hard to say who to pull for.  There's Ryan Hall, a white guy like me.  And, yes, it is nice to see people of your ethnicity do well in sports, there's no getting around it.  When I was young, with Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Bill Rogers, Frank Shorter, Steve Scott, Alberto Salazar etc, there were lots of white American and British middle- and long-distance runners to make kids like me feel like we too could be great.

And then there's Meb Keflezighi, the immigrant who personifies the Horatio Alger story, the idea of America, the things Obama speaks about so movingly and which are most important in the end.  So, at the end of the day, I'd like to see Keflezighi and Hall pushing for the tape at the end, and for Keflezighi to win it.

Postscript:   Alas and alack, once more it is not America's year as Hall takes 4th, Keflezighi 5th.  Could have been a lot worse, though.

Julie and Julia

The best movie we've watched for some time.  I don't know how I have at times likened Cate Blanchett to Meryl in my mind at times.  Cate has range, yes, but not spirit like Meryl. Meryl is the Meryl of our generation, and she's not even of our generation.

I look forward to seeing how the film ends.

Back from our nation's capital

I just spend a fun-filled two days in the basement of a hotel in our Nation's Capital, scurrying from one conference room to another, passing out my business card and taking other peoples'.  It was fun!

While people gave talks, I took notes!  In the evening, I went back to my hotel room and took notes about conversations I had had with middle managers, sales execs, and technology vendors!  I did, in fact, learn a lot.

In the evenings I got out on the town a little bit.  I wish that I could regale you with some dramatic stories about something wierd or interesting that I saw, but the Capital is not like that, alack. It is a place at once clean and corporate and poor and black.  Last night as I waited for my man Cubeddu to come and pick me up I noticed a shiny bar across the street from my hotel where a bunch of guys in suits and young ladies in little cocktail dresses standing in a line outside to get in!  They must have mixed a mean drink in there, or some wonk was having a reception!

The truly great thing was that, from paying the check for mediocre sushi in Chinatown (I know, I know, stupid) to being at my gate at Reagan National it was only 35 minutes via the Metro.  Gotta love that.

Pelada at the Full Frame Film Festival

Since I was out of town Durham has gone and grown itself a highly regarded documentary film festival. Lots of films, lots of people go there, everybody loves it.

Last night I went and saw Pelada, a film about two well-educated good looking white kids who play soccer in college and dream of making the big time, then don't.  So they decide to make a movie about pick-up soccer games around the world.  They apply for grant money and get some, and then fly around the world and play pick-up in Brazil, Argentina, Kenya, Iran, Japan, China, South Africa, and more.  They totally have a great time, and there is fine soccer footage.

Unfortunately, the soccer overwhelms the introspective voiceovers that constitute the film's other narrative. There was just insufficient nuance to it, they sort of hit the viewer over the head with it. And they felt a need to blast rock and roll when rolling footage of travelling from place to place, which was kind of overkill and made it feel like you were sitting at a multiplex ingesting tropical oils.  So it seems at times like a really and truly awesome episode of MTV's The Real World, with phenomenal soccer footage and some insight into other cultures.

The applicable sections of Stuff While People Like are #19 Traveling, #20 Being an Expert on Your Culture, #71 Being the Only White Person Around, and #120 Taking a Year Off.  One that does not apply to them is #80 The Idea of Soccer.  These kids know and love soccer like few people do.

Don't get me wrong.  If I could have spent my post-collegiate angstful years as productively as this, I would have been very fortunate indeed. I am, in fact, quite jealous of them, and I hope this comes through in my review.

Phantom memories of college

At times the Magnetic Fields remind me of college, or some idealized notion of what college would have been like, had they existed at the time.



Truth be told, they call to mind many different worlds at different times. Most of all, I think it's great that there is this whole generation of mixed gender nerd bands, including them as well as their progeny Beirut, the Decemberists, even the Arcade Fire, who have made it cool for wierdos everywhere to snap up oddball instruments and sing their little hearts out. Two examples. In particular love the guy on the visual bass in the first one:

Lunch sighting

At lunch today with mom at Panzanella in Carrboro an older fellow and a younger woman were seated behind me. Upon inspection he proved to be none other that Dean Smith himself. I was, of course, star struck, having not seen the man in some 20 years, and at first I was afraid from the way his daughter/granddaughter was helping him that he may have been beset with some sort of degenerative neurological condition.

But my mom said hello to them, so I actually shook his hand, and he actually seemed fine, just reflected his non-trivial 78 years of age. I had always thought that he should challenge Jesse Helms for his senate seat, as he was one of the few if not the only person who could have hoped to have kicked the racist old fuck out of office and wiped his stench off of our fair state, but I also understood that he had done plenty for North Carolina and just wanted to retire at a normal age and be left alone.

The most striking thing, I must say, was how blue his eyes were. Paul Newman, movie star blue.

The other yellow snow

OK. So I've been away from the South for a long time, and I've forgotten what tons of trees produce at the onset of Spring: pollen. A thick, yellowy green carpet of the stuff which is just like yellow snow, only without the urination.

So I was sitting shivering in my freezing cold office today, wearing a fleece and long pants and man clogs despite the 90 degree heat, so I opened both my windows. But it still stayed chilly. I went out to get a coffee at around 3, and when I came back, I noticed that my laptop and my desk and everything had also gotten covered in pollen. Great.

Speaking of the heat. Everybody has been telling Mary that 90 degree heat is atypical for April. And, certainly, in the longer historical view it is. But how atypical is it for the period of accelerated global warming? That I don't know. I just got back here too, and historical median temperatures typically refer to data over as long a period as possible, not recent history.

The situation reminds me of Ivan Bunin's most famous short story, "The Man from San Francisco." In this story, a guy from San Francisco is traveling in Italy in March. He goes to Capri, has a heart attack, which eventually kills him. The narrator notes that, though it's always damp and foggy on Capri at this time of year, the locals tell tourists year after year that the grey weather is totally out of the ordinary.

Shed no tiers for Columbia

Was reading Columbia University alumni mag interview with former provost Jonathan Cole about status of the university as an institution. At first he said some smart and well considered things. Then the interviewer asked him some questions about the concentration of wealth in a few rich universities and whether that might have the effect of creating a two-tiered system of universities. Cole responded something like: "Well, there is a danger that the University of Chicagos, Penns, and Columbias devolve into something like a farm system for elite graduate universities."

Hmmmm. When I hear discussion of tiering within the higher education world, I'm not getting all weepy about the "lesser Ivies" and their analogs, which seem to be doing just fine thank you by almost any metric. I think about something like a North Carolina Central, or a SUNY Albany, or a Cal State San Luis Obispo, or a or Mississippi State or something. There are lots of institutions of higher learning in America, and lots of tiers, and all of them have educational missions. Some are better funded than others, and always will be. Some prosper and improve, others go out of business or get consolidated. As a society it's in our interest to see that more of them do better, not to worry about a couple of the better ones falling out of step with its peers.

Hot out

High of 87 today. Turned on the AC, watched a nature video ("The Open Ocean") with Graham, then went running at dusk. At the end, I swam in the lake, and, though it was refreshing, it was not freezing. This is April 2nd, folx.

Locking the door

Carrboro being the "Paris of the Piedmont," I shouldn't have been surprised when a very quirky woman in her late 50s/early 60s in some kind of terry cloth skirt, complemented by a sports visor and prominent yellow earplugs walked right in my door (it's on the 2nd floor, mind you) and asked if there was a phone she could use to call a cab.  She asked if I could dial for her, because she didn't know how to use that kind of phone (non-rotary?), and then gave me a number from memory, saying that I might need to put in some nonsensical series of numbers before it (it was clearly a local exchange).  So I dialled the number, and then she went out into my office mate Josh's room and sat down in his office chair (make yourself at home lady) and started talking quietly to someone she addressed as "mom." She told this "mom" that she was 5-10 minutes away from home, on her bike.  I guess this was some newfangled sort of cab.


What it says to me is that I should start locking the door. This is the second time some wierdo has walked right in without knocking and asked to use the phone.

The New Normal

Mohammed El-Erian and others at PIMCO have been energetically trumpeting the idea of a "New Normal" for the economy, meaning we have to get used to lower growth to work off the excesses of the last decade.  Fine. Makes sense.

Meanwhile, at the deli at the Harris Teeter (a grocery store, for those who don't know) just across the railroad tracks from my office, they have installed big toaster, so that we can get our lunchtime subs toasted, just like at Quiznos.  Well, there's an older guy who makes sandwiches there some days, an older guy with a reasonably luxurious head of hair and a beard, each of which must be encased in individual plastic hairnets to comply with NC sanitary code. This guy, rather witty, it must be owned, refers to the toasted sub as the "new normal."  PIMCO should be rather pleased at the effectiveness of its messaging.

The horrible injustice of it all

A good night for me is when I get to kick back and watch highlights commentated by the wondrous brogue of Bobby McMahon.  Just listen the man talk while marvelling at his shirt and tie combos. A true role model, comparable only to Rockford.



In a truly slack moment, I went by Alexa.com to check on some traffic rankings.  Amazingly, foxsoccerchannel.com comes in at around the 18 millionth most popular site on the web, while little old ChewYourGrouse registers a hearty 20 millionth or so.  Running in fine company, we are.

Fracture

This weekend we watched Fracture, in which Anthony Hopkins gets to reprise his Hannibal Lecter character, only mildly less deranged.  He only kills one woman, and doesn't skin her or anything.

It's a pretty stupid movie, in which our young hero -- a cocky prosecutor who has to put Hopkins away -- has an utterly idiotic romantic situation with an attractive but generic blonde.  But it is well-plotted and appeals to the competitive instinct in any guy, so I made us watch it all the way to the end in one evening.  Shocking behavior for us. Worth renting.

The Exile

With all the hullabaloo around Matt Taibbi and his work on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, it's no surprise that someone should go back and do a serious piece on his earlier career at The Exile in Moscow with even badder boy Mark Ames.  I remember The Exile well.  I got to Moscow in October of '97, some months after it had started coming out, a few months married, a few years sober.

We all read the thing and its accounts of insane and epic debauchery at The Hungry Duck and with cheap prostitutes here, there, and everywhere. These guys were living the dream... the pornographic dream of every angry 17 year old boy.  And, yes, there was good journalism in there, but from what I read the main point wasn't so much what they said (which was largely self-evident) but that they printed it and got away with it. I dunno, they were just in a very different place than I was.

As graduate students in Moscow at the time, the lifestyle these guys lived really seemed like a logical extension of everything the emigre business community thought Moscow was about: Here's a quote from some Berkeley lit professor named John Dolan: "“Everyone in Moscow at the time—and I mean everyone—used prostitutes. That’s what Moscow was in the 1990s. But no one would talk about it,” Dolan says".  Well, I can tell you straight out that I didn't sleep with any prostitutes. I didn't have enough money to go in places where they would be, I didn't drink, I was recently married, and I didn't want to get AIDS.  When I would pass poor wet hookers on Tverskaia Street in front of some big hotel I thought they were a sad and pathetic lot, but I just had enough money to buy myself schwarma, cigarettes and a coke, so it's not like I could do anything to help them. Plus there were a lot of other desperately poor people who had not turned to prostitution or, for that matter, organized or petty crime.

One night when his wife was out of the country, I walked around Moscow with my 4th cousin, who worked in some diplomatic capacity at the American embassy.  We were looking for the Hungry Duck.  When we finally found it, it was just vile and disgusting, and that was just from looking at the people standing outside it, sweaty and pukey.  And besides, it was already 11:30 by then.  We turned around and went back to our respective homes. Walking around looking for the place was much more interesting than finding it.

I was much happier to meet my cousin's daughters, who were 3 and 5 or something like that. They climbed on my back and stuff when we went over to do laundry. That was an early indication of where I was headed.

It's nice out

I don't know if this is a particularly nice spring, or if it's that it's the first time I'm living in North Carolina as a relatively stable adult that the season appears to be breaking out so spectacularly. There are flowers out that I've literally never seen before, and lots of them.

Gendercide and the sexual warfare to come

Was just listening on BBC World Radio to report about "moral policing" in Mangalore, India, where bands of Hindu thugs beat up mixed Hindu/Muslim couples to preserve moral purity.  This came on the heels of reading the very disturbing "Gendercide" article in The Economist, which details how the rates of male births to female births have been dramatically skewed throughout Asia, but primarily in parts of China and India, as ultrasound technology has made it easier to figure out the gender of kids in utero, on top of cultural practices of just killing female babies.What this means is that there's going to be a whole generation where there are lots more guys than gals, which has really bad implications for society in terms of crime, violence, substance abuse, etc.  Look at what has happened in the Arab and Islamic world as a generation of guys has grown up feeling disempowered by society.  And those guys at least could find women to get married to.

So, for societies that prize ethnic purity, there's going to be even more intense territoriality around the control of women's bodies in generations to come. That's not good. Look for more "moral policing," for an expansion in the trafficking of sex slaves to areas where there are too many guys, and for more violence in general.

Moving pains

For tax purposes, let me recommend to all of you that, if you choose to move from one state to another, that you do it on January 1st.  Allocating various bits of income between states is a pain in the butt, as is figuring out taxes paid to other states, etc. It's a big freaking daisy chain, but without erogenous zones.

The real deal

There was so much praise for Andrew Ross Sorkin's To Big to Fail. Everybody was saying it was the best book about the crisis.  So I read it.  Although I stopped and read two novels while I was in the middle of it. For the most part, while I could see the guy had done a lot of leg work, it seemed like a glorified distillation of all much of the stuff we were reading in the press for the last couple of years, only more gossipy. But it wasn't all that great, really. You can only watch John Mack and Lloyd Blankfein sweat and Tim Geithner be all stone-faced for so long.

Then I started reading an excerpt from Michael Lewis's The Big Short.  Sorkin is a journallist, but Lewis is a writer. The excerpt is so good that I have to keep reading it, so I've reserved a copy at the local bookstore and will be go and pick it up after I feed Natalie and put Graham to bed.  And do a little wrestling.

In other news, last night we watched 4 Christmases with Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duval, Sissy Spacek, John Voight, Jill Clayburgh, and some blonde with big tits. Quite a cast! It was stupid but very funny.  Vaughn at the top of his game.

Blowing his mind

Read Civil War on Sunday to Graham the other night, something like #21 in the Magic Treehouse series. In this book (warning, plot spoilers coming up), Jack and Annie return to civil war times and hang out with Clara Barton on the battlefield. There they help out an injured drummer boy named John, who looks mysteriously like Jack.  Later, when the kids have returned to the safety of their Frog Creek home, they ask their dad if any of their relatives had been in the Civil War. Why yes, says dad, your great great great grandfather John was a drummer boy for the Union.  Then Jack and Annie confirm that he lived through it and Jack says, like, "awesome" and goes to bed.

Well, when it registered with Graham that they had met their great great great grandfather in the past, it totally blew his mind. He threw his head back and screwed up his eyes and said "Wowww" or something like that. It was mighty cute.

Distracted

Slightly distracted today by work, if you can imagine that. I would go into it, but... it's work, after all.

Wrestling

Graham's teacher sent home a report a week or so ago saying that Graham had been behaving a little bit erratically while standing in line, flailing with arms and legs, that sort of thing. She asked if something had changed at home recently.

Mary called Kate, who suggested.... wrestling!  Yes, as dad, it is now amongst my job responsibilities to wrestle more with Graham.  And, as is often the case, Kate's advice was spot on. Thankfully, we have a new and soft rug in rec room, sitting atop the already soft carpet, so we've got a doubly comfy wrestling surface. Graham, reaching down deep, has discovered new reservoirs of strength, and has somehow managed to pin me most every time, often by pushing his mighty noggin into my chest in a move reminiscent of a kinder, gentler Zidane.

The other night, in bed, he asked me: "How much do you weight?" "180", I told him.  And he rolled his eyes toward the top bunk, marvelling at his tremendous strength.  "And I only weigh about forty pounds!" There was no need to complete his thought for him.

Update from Merseyside, NC

As I reported a week or so ago, Natalie has become obsessed with Beatles on YouTube. I was beginning to have had my fill of the bowl-cut ones, so I had the bright idea of lending her some headphones. Now she sits with headphones on and sings along, somewhat tunefully but fitfully, and, in typical childhood fashion, swallows and garbles the ends of the lines where she's not sure what the words are.  It's hilarious.

The Beatles renditions are interspersed with explosive utterances of "Awwww," and "He's so cute" occasioned by viewings Kittenwar, which is pretty much the prepubescent version of that tasteless old Friday afternoon fave Hotornot.

Paper of record

The Wall Street Journal, along with the New York Times and Washington Post, if memory serves correctly, are "papers of record."  This means they are designated by the federal government as suitable places to file certain regulatory notices, and that filing them there fulfills some statutory disclosure obligation.  Or something like that.

So I kind of understood why there were 5-odd pages of small print in the Journal's "Money & Investing" section today.  Closer inspection revealed that they were seized property notices from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF).  Even closer inspection revealed that it was a state by state listing of mostly invidual guns the ATF had seized with very small values.  Which is ridiculous.  Even closer inspection got even funnier.  There are listings for such items as "Various Pipe Fragments Recovered From Inside and Outside of Portable Toilet.  Recovered on 01/19/2010.  $0.01" or "Shell From Disrupter Rd Utilized For Render Safe Procedures By LSP Technicians. $0.10."

A quick check of the Wall St Journal advertising rate card shows that the lowest rate (offered to highest-volume advertisers) for a full page ad in the Journal is $111,832.75.  Then think about the externalities of cutting down trees, printing, shipping, etc. It's absurd.

And also think about the thousands of proud men throughout these United States of ours who have had their beloved guns and pipe fragments snatched by the ATF, all this tremendous wealth of weaponry to be spread around by the crypto-commies inside the Beltway.  It's the makings of a fine country song.

The sign of the cross

At 3 Amigos Taqueria for lunch. Hispanic woman with a kid in here, leans forward over table to reveal tattoo in the small of her back, over her butt crack. A cross, naturally. And why not?

In late

Came in to the office after dinner to try to get some stuff done.  Was half successful.  Shockingly, when I arrived at 9 at night there were more cars than there usually are at 9 in the morning.  Down in the co-working office it appeared the younguns were playing poker.  Could be people park here to go out drinking. That would, after all, make sense.

Left Behind

After years of meaning to I finally got my hands on a copy of the born-again Christian ("Over 7 million in print!") classic Left Behind:  A Story of the End of Days or something like that.  I must confess it is pretty creepy.  At the beginning, this pilot is flying a 747 to Paris, thinking of banging this hot stewardess because his charismatic Christian wife has taken clutching her bible so closely to her breasts that he can't even touch them. And then he leaves the cockpit to go flirt with her and she comes back freaked out because a bunch of passengers have gone missing, without even their clothes. You guessed it, they were Raptured right up to heaven, and all the rest of the people on the plane -- sinners all -- have been Left Behind.

Down on earth, lots of other people have gone missing, many of them while driving cars or flying airplanes. Chaos ensues.

And this is just the first chapter. Although it's action packed, I may or may not have the fortitude to soldier on through this page burner. Instead, I may have to have ask the book to kiss my Left Behind.

A sad passing indeed

My friend Zeke mentioned today at lunch that he had commented on the passing of the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Main St in Carrboro, as indeed he had. After god knows how many years, certainly since the 70s, there is no more Colonel here in town.

And its passage could not be less timely. Last Friday at a potluck in Natalie's class, somebody had brought a bucket, and it smelled good. Of course, by the time the adults got a chance to attack the table, all of the tender morsels had long since flown the coop (as it were), so my devious mind began to think about stopping in there. It was such a part of the landscape that I really hadn't thought about it much as a source of food, but now I wanted to do me some finger-lickin.

And, as my friend noted, the PETA crowd are indeed claiming victory for the long-suffering chickens on this occasion.  Frankly, I doubt that the Colonel and his crew gave a flying fuck (yes, Virginia, pun intended) about PETA.  I bet the landlord jacked up the rent because that real estate is becoming primer and primer as the western slope of Chapel Hill and Carrboro continues to get hype.  If PETA is gonna get all lathered up about shutting down individual franchises, it speaks rather poorly about the organization's efficacy.  Like the Chinese buffet next door or the wing and burger joint across the street spends a lot of money on free-range cluckage.  Sure they do.

Scenes from childhood

Natalie has become a Beatles fanatic. All she will listen to is the Beatles. All she wants to do is listen to the Beatles and rewatch "Help" and "Hard Day's Night," unless she's IMing with her friends, while listening to the Beatles, or changing the desktop on Mary's laptop to different rapidly changing sequences of pictures she's taken of our kittens, Rascal and Leon. They are cute, it must be owned.

Graham, meanwhile, has me reading from book 1 of the American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans, which I had when I was a kid. Published 1967. Now, you think, the sixties, should be somewhat PC, right. Well, check this out: "Washington headed for home, on a trek through the frozen wilderness that can only be called heroic. The horse, hampered by deep snow, were unable to proceed, and Washington and his guide, Christopher Gist, had to continue on foot, through Indian-infested forests... Near Muthering Town, close to the Forks of the Ohio, an Indian, perhaps a French hireling, fired point-blank at Washington at fifteen paces but missed." Quite aside from the infestation of forests by Indian hirelings, it's pretty striking how our first president is endowed with near magical, epic powers.

At least Graham is not fooled. He comes home from school telling Mary of how the "mighty Indian warriors didn't need guns, they walked like animals through the forest and killed the British with their arrows."

Once more from the archives

Inane drivel about the Fed and the Constitution

This is what the Tea Party folks are watching between episodes of Glenn Beck.

Compare and contrast

Gretchen Morgenson earns her Pulitzer

I am generally not the biggest fan of Gretchen Morgenson, the NY Times finance and economics reporter, nor am I her biggest detractor.  Her piece today on the credit default swaps market and the role played in it by the too big to fail banks was financial journalism at its near best:  clear, concise, well-argued: deposit-taking financial institutions with taxpayer backing shouldn't be trading in underregulated over the counter markets.  Much better than the prolix hand-waving we've been seeing in the last year or so. 

Richard Thaler's piece on auctioning off TV broadcast bandwidth in the same business section was equally compelling.

Michael Pollan on anthropocentricity, permaculture

 Phenomenal talk.  Amazing he can cover this much in less than 20 minutes.  I must buy more of his books.