Watson!

Going through a bag of crap I got at trade shows last year I came upon a cheap little notebook I got from IBM with something about Jeopardy and Watson on it.  So I gave it to Natalie. When she realized what it was about her face warmed up and she gave a little smile and said "cool."

Sometimes it's hard to get to the tweens, but when you can, it's nice to do so.

Rapprochement

Since the real Leon has returned, he has reverted to form, staying elusive and reclusive during the day, maybe hanging out with Natalie on her bed, but generally being a scaredy cat. Then at night, after the kids are in bed, he becomes attention seeking. Last night he came up on our bed and just begged to be petted, then lay down between me and Mary and purred.  So we're sure it's him.

Rascal, however, doesn't recognize him, and has been very territorial and dominant.  The first few days she would always position herself on a bed, chair, couch, table, something elevated, and look down at him. There has been a fair amount of hissing.  Apparently, with him having been gone for six odd weeks, he's like a new cat to her.

They have, however, been spotted sitting closer and closer to one another on the couch, and have today had a couple of little nose kisses, though afterwards Rascal swats at him a little, not quite ready to give in entirely.

Chicken and waffles

Chicken and waffles seem to be popping up on menus in lots of places around here. Yesterday I was in downtown Durham and this place that serves them had a line out the door.

I had never heard of chicken and waffles till I read James Cain's Mildred Pierce some years ago. When I read about chicken and waffles back then, I must confess that, as a confirmed low to middle brow eater, it sounded good. As I noted in my original musings, it's a good book, offering a lot of texture about what it meant to persevere through the Depression. When I read it, it was 2006, and nobody was thinking about the Depression.

Now we are, and presumably that's what got Mildred Pierce made into an HBO miniseries last year (I just found out about that when I googled it a few minutes back). And chicken and waffles must be to 2011 what meatloaf was to 1991, a return to lost roots.

Post-Renovation stress

So, after thinking for months that getting done with my renovation would remove my stress, I found instead that it made it worse in certain regards, as the removal of the immediate financial demands of the seemingly bottomless whole of remaking the home now leaves me standing naked -- to paraphrase Steve Jobs' eloquent Stanford graduation speech -- before the rest of my life. So I've been going to more AA meetings of late. Tonight I was at one describing my predicament and I kept confusing "rehab" with "renovation."  There was much belly laughter.

I was talking to my mom about my issues and she suggested I read some management books, so I picked up The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, mostly because it is one of those books whose title is so repulsive to arrogant intellectual snobs like myself that I knew that just picking it up would be a good act of humility. And, lo and behold, it's a good book. I've been reading it with breakfast instead of reading the paper, which I'm having trouble focusing on anyway.

I will give myself a smiley face sticker.

Suckerburg?

I've been a little stressed out recently, so when I was looking for someone on the dominant social network while laying on the couch with my son I started scrolling through people's faces (using a tablet from a certain computer company) --  and was somehow overcome with joy looking at all these people from various phases of my life, all of whom having selected a picture of themself which they think represents them best to the world -- an excellent smile, or a picture of them with kids.  And I was, truth be told, thankful to Mark Z. for having put together this pretty cool platform.

It's not that I'm not conscious that users of fbook are lambs to the slaughter of marketers.  I get that and find it a little discomforting too.  But at the end of the day, the platform has its uses, and it does a good job putting and keeping people in touch.

There was an article in the Times somewhere recently on the death of the cyberflaneur, the early promise of the web to promote random strolling and serendipity in the style of the heros of Walter Benjamin's and Charles Baudelaire's visions of the great avenues of Paris back in the day.  And it's true, one doesn't do much of that.  But if your network on the platform which must not be named is fat and random and inclusive enough (i.e. you're friends with people of opposite political parties), you can still get a reasonable degree of randomness out of it.

In any case, the overwhelming feeling I had looking at all those smiling faces was that I'd love to see so many of those people more often.

It gets better

So a couple of weeks ago I told of how our cat Leon had run away, and was now living in our basement. Well, this evening at work I got a call from Mary, who tells me that she is at the vet with.... the real Leon, which means that the cat in the basement is.... you guessed it, an Impostor!  The nerve of the cat. We had a definitive ID on Leon from the microchip he had implanted in his neck.

Truth be told, I had thought that the cat looked a little different from Leon and even meowed a little different, but I figured he had been off in the wild for 5-6 weeks and so he had changed a little, manned up, as it were.

And now Leon is back and is so much friendlier and more trusting than ever he was before, and all are overjoyed. Except for the poor sweet woman who had been feeding him for only the last 5 days, had been in fact plying him with eggplant parmesan, which she said he had taken a shine to (indeed, what's not to like with a nice eggplant parm).  She apparently was moved to tears when it became clear at the vet that Leon was lost from his former home.  We will have to have her by.

The fall of the ACC

The Wall Street Journal today ran a story about declining attendance at ACC basketball games.  Here's what the commish had to say:

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, said in a statement that the conference's "proud and storied" basketball history has "captivated fans over five decades." In recent seasons, he said, the league has experienced "transition in coaches and membership including eight coaching changes in the past three years." Swofford said the ACC's conference tournament has the highest average attendance of any in the country. He added that TV viewership "remains strong and we are on more platforms than ever before." With Pittsburgh and Syracuse scheduled to join the conference by 2014, he said, "the future couldn't be brighter."

With all due respect, what has the man been smoking.  The league has been bastardized beyond recognition for the sake of football revenue.  Miami and Boston College already make no sense -- and not just because the BC bus clipped and killed CHHS legend Harry Alston --, Syracuse and Pittsburgh even less so, with no disrespect to Boeheim for taking Dean Smith's place on the all time win list or for harboring pedophiles.  Florida State was fine, even Virginia Tech. They are from the same general region with similar institutional profiles. Even with the mass murderers and all. But leave the freaking Big East teams out of it. The reason people don't go to watch games anymore is that it's harder to sustain rivalries if you don't get the home and way thing. It's not organic anymore.

Vaporware

Met with some guys today in a rather dour office somewhere in Research Triangle Park.  I had met with one of them a year ago (along with a guy who passed away in the interim), and they told me about this great software they had.  All they needed was a client. Checked back in with them today, one year later, and the song remains the same. All we need is the one "pilot" client, then everybody will clamber to get on board.

A new low, a new chanteuse

What with having a first name that occurs most often as a last name, and a last name that occurs most often as a first name, I'm really quite used to name confusion. People call me by my last name all the time. Even my good friends often call me by my last name, though they do so advisedly and often rhyming with "your boy."

But yesterday, on Facebook, someone I went out with in college called me Troy. Admittedly it was a brief thing almost a quarter of a century ago, but by God it felt significant at the time. That was kind of a slap.

On the positive side, I caught wind of this young singer Sharon van Etten yesterday on Last Hotel or whatever the evening show on WUNC.  I like her, particularly when she harmonizes with this Charlotte Rampling looking person whose name I haven't yet figured out (3/2/2012 -- Turns out her name is Heather Broderick). They are each the kind of young ladies I would have courted when I was younger, and I would hope that, had I succeeded in wooing them, that they'd keep track of my fricking first name.

updates from the crib

When we started on our renovation a year and change ago, I thought that maybe I'd have one of those renovation-centric blogs with lots of before and after pictures and stories about travails of working with contractors. Somehow it slipped my mind. The renovation took a long time and there was definitely before and after (and there's some of that over on Facebook), but basically it was more a grind than a drama. I think I wrote some about liking our rental, and, in truth, the rental was just fine, if a little tight.

Now, we are back in our real house.  There have been some traumas since then, like when one of our cats (the always skittish Leon) meowed all night once we moved back in, then high-tailed it out of the house when our house-sitter was in here while we were up north. We found him after he was living in the wild for 5-6 weeks and was being fed by a couple of eccentric cat ladies about half a mile away, and he was nearly feral, hissing at us and whatnot when Mary brought him back in the house in a cage she had borrowed from the local shelter.

But it gets better.  So Mary closed :Leon in Natalie's bathroom, so he could get re-acclimated, and he spent a couple of nights in there and seemed to be getting better, recognizing us and meowing a little. Then, Thursday or Friday morning, Natalie goes into the bathroom and Leon had pried the grate off of the duct in the floor and, as she came in, he dives down and disappears into the duct. I kid you not.  So I'm having visions of dead cat smell in our HVAC system, but we had to call in a couple of heating and air guys and they opened up the duct where he was stuck and had to push him out.  So now he's in the basement for the weekend and Mary will try to trap him on Monday and get him to the vet or whatever as we try to figure out whether to try to bring him back into the house or maybe find a nice barn for him where he can chase mice.

You can't make this stuff up.

The weekend

Somehow, over the course of each weekend, I have lots of good ideas for things to write, but insufficient drive to get to my computer and write them. Perhaps it is best, as life is not really about writing it.

On Saturday, I took the kids to the Children's Store, but to get there where we had to pass through the Thrift Store (no good clothes, but some decent books were had), and the dry cleaner, and then walk past Three Cups, where we saw and talked to some folx, and then we hung at the Children's Store and I talked to Becky while Graham picked out a Ninjago spinner and Natalie snagged a plastic ring and a necklace and a lavender piggy bank. Awesome.

Thence back to Whole Foods, where Natalie was clamoring for some dried seaweed, and there was such a profusion of samples to be had that it was hard to imagine that there was any ambient economic malaise at all.  I had: chips, orange sections, salmon with guacamole, some sort of chicken, more chips, three kinds of yummy cookies (we bought one kind) and probably other stuff too.  Which was great, because I was very hungry.  And then we got the seaweed snacks and Natalie inhaled them.

The Bliss of Blogvivion

When I kicked off this blog way back in 2004, it was meant as a place for me to do some regular writing. Then I found out how to track traffic to my blog, and I started paying attention to that, and I tried to promote the blog some. More recently, I've had little time to blog, and I've had to make peace with the fact that my traffic has died back quite a bit from its previous, not all that elevated levels.

But it's actually quite nice.  Now I can get back to just writing to keep my fingers and brain limber, and don't worry too much about who comes by.  OK, I do still check, I just don't care that much. Admittedly, it may be my fingers and not my noggin that's getting juiced, but it's all good.

Now back to writing for money.

The Basketball Jones

For the record, this was written for the Phillips newsletter, whatever it's called, last year.  My daughter's a rising 8th grader there now.

Chapel Hill has always been a basketball town, but like so many other things in life (young readers will understand this in 20 years), it was so much bigger and purer when we were young. UNC basketball was the cultural heart of the town. The ACC had only 8 teams then, and all of them were good. On any given night, anyone really could lose to anyone. When the ACC tournament came around in March, some teachers (our favorites!) would bring little black and white televisions into the classrooms on the first day of the tournament – always a Friday -- and we would watch the games for the last couple of periods of school. And it wasn’t like the principal didn’t know.

The coach then was Dean Smith, who defined the spirit of the time and place. An unfailingly polite, flat-toned Kansan, Smith succeeded on the court, but was more important for what he did off of it. We natives like to think of Chapel Hill as a bastion of enlightenment, but it is in fact in the South, which means it was once segregated. The schools were desegregated only in 1966, and around this time Smith worked with civil rights leaders to desegregate local businesses and neighborhoods, and was since that time a beacon of good sense and manners for everyone.

Back on earth, as us 7^th graders rose from childhoods cocooned in elementary schools (I went to Seawell), our visions of the world expanded first to grasp that not only were there other elementary schools, there was a whole other junior high school (Phillips was a junior high, grades 7-9, back then). At the time, there was only Culbreth, so the cross-town rivalry fairly described our universe. And it was an unadulterated rivalry. It wasn't that one side of town was fancier than the other or anything, we just wanted to beat them, and they us, because they were there.

This was before club sports had become prominent, drawing attention and energy away from school sports. Basketball was king, and it was only natural that the Phillips-Culbreth basketball game was larger than life. As game days approached, excitement levels got out of hand. The gyms were always packed, and were steamy from overoccupancy, exertion, and sheer anticipation. Phillips was led by Ranzino Smith, who would go on to play at UNC, and who always brought the house down by dunking during games despite being only 5' 8" or so. But it was a team effort, and both Phillips and Culbreth typified the era of relatively early integration by featuring a balance of white and black players (including current Phillips Athletics Director John Beyle). Players from both schools look back fondly to this day about the discipline forged by the coaches, of fingertip push-ups and wind sprints without end, and strong team bonds.

I personally had been and remained a very skinny kid, and never had a real hope of playing basketball for the school. I played soccer, and we were good and had our own real rivalry with Culbreth, but soccer was kind of a marginal sport then. We didn't command the attention that basketball did, particularly the attention of the girls. So we wanted to prove ourselves on court. On Friday nights my mom would drive me to the Phillips gym, which was often open for free play, and I would practice, whether anyone else was there or not. At lunch when the weather was good I would wolf down my food and then try to wedge myself into the games on the blacktop by the gym. I was fast and could jump but I couldn't shoot, but I wanted to be a player nonetheless, so I was probably a little out of control, pushing too hard, fouling people left and right. The more talented guys would often taunt me, "come on, soccer boy," but I shrugged it off as best I could. I remember one time Clarkston Hines - who went on to star in football at Duke and even played pro football – barked at me, almost certainly after I fouled him: "There's only room for one Clark on this court." And he didn't mean me. But I stayed out there because, for an early teen boy with something to prove, it was the only place that seemed to matter.

What I'm reading now

It's a little ironic, looking back at my last post, when I felt I had such a wealth of books and media in general.  I finished the Peter Hessler book, which was brilliant, and the one about Henry Aaron, and I'm glad I did that too. 

Then I just blew through Michael Lewis's Boomerang, although I skipped the first two chapters, on Iceland and Greece, cuz I had read them in Vanity Fair already.  On the one hand, Lewis is just brilliant, able to write about anything and usually add insight.  On the other hand, he does just continue to dial it in much of the time. He's reached that rare state of elevation where he can pretty much interview anybody, and he does. He is such a golden child of prose, I think it would be nice to see him really challenged by something.  What would happen if he had Joan Didion's luck, a husband who just up and has a heart attack and then her kid dies a year later? I don't wish this on Lewis, but I suppose I'd like to see him tested in some way just to see him grow, because I'm not seeing much growth book to book. Just continued virtuosity.

I started a Ruth Rendell novel, as I tend to do a couple of times a year. This one, just like the last one I read, features some deeply disturbed young working class kids in some dusty corner of London, soon to get involved in some sordid violence.  I gotta say, I'm not sure I'm gonna keep with it. I don't need to be cohabitating the skull of a psychopath, even where it's done well. When I think about it, I suppose I tend to prefer Rendell's Inspector Wexford novels, where the narrator more or less tracks alongside the detective, trying to restore order.  I guess that's pretty much where I am in life these days.

I'll take Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto upstairs.

End of year riches

At this time of year, these long days off, it's hard to know what to consume.  On the one hand, there are all these books I'm in the middle of, most prominently Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones and Ron Susskind's somewhat overrated Confidence Men, but also that biography of Henry Aaron that I need to polish off. Just finished John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye, which is well worth reading.

But then there's all the year end journalism, including the Economist year-end edition, always good, and the New York Times necrographies of those who died during the year, including Ira Glass's "These American Lives," much of which is touching.  And then, being here in Larchmont, there are all these Time magazines lying around, and many of the cover stories resonate.

And then there are movies to watch with the kids, including Elf, surprisingly good, with Will Farrell and James Caan and Ed Asner and Zoey Deschanel. 

And new CDs.  It's all just so much.

The Christmas Spirit

It is a shame in many ways that I am so apart from the giving part of Christmas.  I participate in gifts Mary and I give the kids, but I never do any shopping whatsoever, now that the family has gotten out of the habit of giving gifts between adults.  Which is kind of a shame.  It is, admittedly, a total pain in the ass to figure out what people want, and I have done considerable and pretty successful research trying to find new Christmas music for Mary, but other than that I've been totally out of the hunt. Ahh well. Maybe next year.

Lessons and Carols

Just went to the Christmas eve service at the Episcopal Church in Larchmont. After all one reads about the waning of the traditional denominations, I felt like I was doing the church a favor by putting on a jacket and showing up. I needn't have worried. The little church was packed to the gills with dolled up WASPs.  Here in Westchester, the ruling class lives.

And they put on a nice little pageant, the kids did. Confident 7-year olds in front of the mike.

The odd thing was that the carols differed.  "Away in a manger" was sung to a completely different melody.  "Go Tell It on the Mountain" was very officious and formal.  I grew up singing:

Once I was a sinner,
I sinned both night and day.
I asked the Lord to help me,
And he showed me the way...

Go tell it on the mountain yatta yatta

Here they picked other verses:

While shepherds kept their watching
o'er silent flocks by night,
behold, throughout the heavens
there shone a holy night.. yatta yatta

And some other voice closely tied to the Xmas story. The point is, it was very formal, nothing about sin or salvation, as we had in our southern rendition, which certainly felt more influenced by Baptist, Methodist, proto-charismatic traditions where the emphasis was much more on the personal connection to Christ, the Lord, the whole nine.

At the end of the day, I don't feel a strong need to go back to church anytime soon.  I got my taste for now.

Young adults

Interesting discussion with Diablo Cody on NPR this morning about her new film Young Adult.  She mentioned that the movie was typical for our generation because we were so incredibly self-involved and rearwards-facing, that with Facebook and all we have succeeded in "completely recreating high school" and judge ourselves relative to our peers based on wealth, etc. yatta yatta.  Obviously I find this an interesting comment.  Initially it sounds very deep and true.

But, then again, it ain't all that true.  The prior condition, that of earlier generations, was of limited mobility where people lived in the same place and had relatively stable social environments over the course of their lives. More people lived amongst those they went to high school, and so were already doing the stuff she talks about. America has traditionally been a place of relative mobility, and certainly the Depression-era, WWII, and post-war generations did move around some. Those that did were less able to keep in touch with those they grew up with, and that's frankly kind of a loss.

At the end of the day, I don't feel oppressed by social networks or the fact that I'm back in my hometown.  I'm happy to see friends of mine who are doing well, but it's not really about money. The ones with good vibes in their homes and happy kids are in that category. I could give a fuck how rich people are, I want to see a good aura.

Check Engine

The "Check Engine" light on our 1996 Subaru Legacy Outback has been on for about 6 months now. It has been coming and going for many years now, almost always put down to a solenoid switch somewhere in the transmission, which we've fixed a few times. How liberating, then, it was to read a couple of years ago in the Journal about how Paul Kasriel -- the chief economist of Northern Trust. Kasriel -- according to his daughter -- put a piece of tape over the very same indicator on his 1995 Outback.

I will confess that, as we prepare to pack the thing Griswold-full of stuff to drive north to New York for the holidays, I am sorely tempted to take it in to the shop for them to double check that nothing is wrong with the car. It is, after all, gently creeping up on 200,000 miles (we probably won't quite make it there on this trip).

Mostly, though, it makes me wonder if I should have been an economist. Certainly, just writing this reminds me that I should try to drive the thing a little bit today so I can be sure to check the oil, which sometimes gets low this late in the oil change cycle.  We're about 2400 miles into the 3k cycle, so I should really get it changed in up North (if not before).

Xmas tunes

Thought this was published on Monday Started a quest for new Xmas music on Facebook last night, and got some good suggestions (if you're friended to me, and likely are, check out the thread). Then I realized that all I really needed to do was go to YouTube and look up "Lo How a Rose e'er Blooming," because the song is really difficult to mess up. Here are three versions. One we've been listening to for a couple of years, and a couple of ones new to us. Tallis Scholars Sufjan Stevens Feist Actually, the Feist version somehow stuck in my head so much that I was seemingly unable to go to sleep till about 2am, despite or perhaps because of the fact that I was in an excellent mood. Somehow new music and the promise of new music, particularly in a category where we had been stalled, got me all worked up, right when I needed it least.

The Colonel Sanders Story

After a somewhat crappy day at work, came home and turned on the TV. The soccer on FSC was kind of middling and definitely a comedown after last night's defenestration of Man U by Basel (who were impressive), so I ended up on CNBC, for the first time in years, really since the crisis. While eating my Chinese leftovers, I settled in to watching "How I Made My Millions," which featured first a guy who made mattresses, and then a woman who printed bags and other promotional materials. Now I'm watching the biography of Colonel Sanders. I gotta tell you, CNBC is striking a good note here. Instead of focusing on financial markets or drug dealers or pornography, as it so often does, it's going back to the roots and looking at entrepreneurs. Of course, I really should be working, but that's another story entirely.

Driving and spacing

Was driving Graham to Tae Kwon Do today, after I dropped Natalie off at her singing lesson, when I put on Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, which my uncle Ballard gave me vinyl of a quarter of a century ago and which I've never grown tired of. This is, by the way, the recording of the second time he recorded them, from the early 80s. When Gould recorded them the first time, in the 50s, it was, if memory serves correctly, a career-making event, and listening to the two recordings one after another is a fascinating study in growth/maturation/flux, but that's a different blog post entirely, and one which I may have already written... In any case, I was driving along listening and, before I knew it, I found myself going 40 in a 45 zone, even though I should have been going 50 to be sure of getting Graham to class on time. This is, of course, a great space to be in. After class, I will face a dilemma, because Car Talk is on and even Graham seems to enjoy listening to Click and Clack. This is what is known as an embarassment of riches.

Long, slow weekend

My zealous colleagues kept sending me emails but I've done my best to ignore them. It has, after all, been a holiday weekend, and I've been in need of a holiday. Natalie, Graham and I hit the Muppet Movie today at the Lumina, where some very geeky kids gave us very good service. One guy even opened the door for me when I had nothing in my hands but a bottle of lemonade and some peanuts. One thing a long recession does is make suburban kids appreciate whatever freaking job their scrawny selves can get. No more "I'm gonna be an entrepreneur" or "I'm gonna day trade" for the pre-diploma set, just slingin sodas like we used to back in the day. At Tyler's on Saturday night I was trying to talk to a guy I hadn't seen in like 20 years when these graduate student or early 30s women were trying to flirt with us. On the one hand, it's nice, but on the other hand, I hadn't seen the guy in 20 years, and I'm freaking married. Can they not see the ring on my finger? If they wanted to get my attention, they need to be thinking about buying me a plate of nachos grande or a Cheerwine or something, things I can actually get involved with.

If you haven't seen this....

Police pepper spray UC Davis protesters. This is absurd. This is not how we handle protest in America.

Geeks love studs

I was at a customer conference for a big Indian offshoring firm earlier this week, and Malcolm Gladwell was one of the speakers.  First, I must say that Gladwell is to be commended for taking his talk from his next book, rather than his last one, for generally putting a lot of energy into his talk, and for not using the phrase "10,000 hours of practice" once.  I'd contrast this with the spectacle of Michael Lewis, a better writer, totally dialling in his onstage talks and pulling from recent books.

However, there was an interesting moment where Gladwell started talking about reading Keith Richards's autobiography.  I don't really remember what his point about Richards was, but somewhere in there he made some point about Richards getting laid a lot and what the key was.  At the time, it didn't seem that significant.

A little bit later, Vivek Tanadive, CEO of TIBCO and a pretty good speaker himself, was holding forth on the same stage, pulling mostly from his most recent book, The Two-Second Advantage. Tanadive was talking about how complex event processing like the stuff TIBCO makes uses predictive technology in rapid iterations to model the fluid decision-making of top-performing humans. One of the examples he pulled out was some guy who's an amazing pick-up artist at bars, because he's able to anticipate how women will react to what he says.  No doubt Tanadive is trying to build an algorithm to model this.

But here's my point: here are two pretty geeky, truly brilliant guys totally gawking at the accomplishments of modern-day Lotharios on a stage in front of a thousand people.

Lets turn this around and think about if they were praising the incredible accomplishments of women who got lots of men to do the nasty with them. What would we call them? Hmmm, let me think.  Not geniuses.

The thing is, just like the Zuckerberg character in The Social Network, we're talking about geeks who just want to get some action and approval from the ladies. The real question for men who are driven to sleep with lots of women is not the how of it, but the why.

Child puking into bag at Orlando airport

8 years old, bespectacled, geeky.  As the somewhat anxious, still geeky father of a skinny, anxious geeky child, my heart goes right out.

The 80% and the 20%

After Graham's Tae Kwon Do, we met Mary at Crate and Barrel to look at some bar stools to go at the counter at our house, once it's done. There were lots of plenty affluent people there, looking to buy this that or the other. Most of them, it must be owned, belong to the 99%.

The fact of the matter is that, even if my real income has declined over the course of the crisis, even if I lost a job and moved from one region to another for somewhat if not entirely economic reasons, I am incredibly fortunate.  If I am not in the 1% by US standards, I probably am in global terms.  Not that I'm gonna go run down the numbers. I was born to the dominant ethnicity in a place that values education amongst all else, and grew up with great people.

A key problem with OWS as well as the Tea Party is that they frame the plight of the middle class as one of victimization. Ever since Rick Santelli started ranting on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade about how he didn't want to be paying other people's mortgages, the white middle class -- no doubt sick of being guilt-tripped by every other sub-segment of the population -- has been trying to make itself out to be getting screwed. Santelli didn't want to be paying other people's mortgages although, in fact, owing to the Chinese government's reluctance to let the yuan float, his own labor was in fact being subsidized by some Chinese people working at, say, Foxconn, who themselves were getting hosed, and who later found another way to express their own discontent, a la Werther.

So, though my real wages have declined over the course of the crisis and have not appreciated dramatically since over the last decade, I'm really in no position to whine since I've benefited so incredibly from where I was born and raised, from the fact that I am white, male, a WASP, and even from the course that the economy has taken over the last couple of decades (technology and finance). And ever since I started working in the private sector and earning a real wage (April, 2000), I've been astounded by how low taxes have been.

I even worked at Goldman Sachs for a little while and, though I didn't think the people there were evil, I thought that the way they lived their lives verged on it.* They work too hard, take themselves too seriously, and focus too much on money. And all across Wall Street, Manhattan, and the upper echelons of the corporate world I see much of the same.  It's not that it's necessarily evil, it's just a little repulsive.

But at the end of the day more than 1% benefit, and taxes should be higher on more than just the very rich. Not that it's all about more tax revenue. It's good to have Republicans staying vigilant on government expenditures.  "Should the government be in that business?" is an evergreen question.



*As an aside, I must say that the technology groups within Goldman that I saw are very meritocratic and ethnically diverse, with particularly strong female leadership.

Life in the Rental

Met with our general contractor about our renovation today....

Oh yeah, the renovation. Many people pepper their blogs with pictures of their renovations in progress and, truth be told, I had intended to do the same thing, but I keep forgetting. Renovating your house is, shall we say, a process, and a torturous one at that.  At the end, alluring, is the promise of moving back in to the finished process.

But I, in zen-like fashion, am firmly rooted in the moment. At times the renovation is itself a horribly distended moment, but mostly I must say I kind of like being in our little rental house. It's cozy, much smaller than the main abode.

On weekends, when we try to watch movies, with the kids' bedrooms right off the living room, Natalie sometimes complains that the TV is too loud, which is a bummer. And Mary with her interior design magazines and various and sundry house parts, and Graham with all his millions of toys and Star Wars books spread out all over the place, all that gets a little old. Not that I anticipate it will automatically fix itself in a bigger house.

But mostly it's just kind of nice to come home and be a few steps from any given family member.  Once back in the manse, we will undoubtedly disperse to our respective corners from the overwhelmingly huge open space that was once four rooms and an attic but now can only be called "the Nave."

And the rental sits up on top of a hill on a cleared lot, so when I step out the back door to grill or go get the mail or juggle the soccer ball or carry out garbage, I look up and there are the stars and the moon, which ain't bad.

Another Year

This weekend we watched Mike Leigh's most recent film, Another Year. While the film can be a bit difficult to watch as much of the screen time is occupied by a couple of alcoholics who are friends and colleagues of the protagonists, one of whom is pretty much an open and bottomless wound, it is, in the end, a Mike Leigh film, which is a good thing.  Leigh has a vision which is infinitely more human than most of the rest of the directors over the course of cinema history, and all he cares about is people.

And it is, moreover, a film warmed by the presence of Jim Broadbent, who is really one of the great actors of our time.  It wasn't until I looked at his IMDB page that I realized just how omnipresent the guy is, he's really the Morgan Freeman of Great Britain, the moral center so many directors call on.  And apparently he's done 7 films with Mike Leigh, and I haven't seen all of them.  I'll be fixing that.

This weekend's viewing

Finished up City Island, with Andy Garcia. A nice little movie, very much worth seeing, like a younger and less ambitious cousin of Moonstruck.

Then we watched In the Loop, with James Galdofini and a bunch of foul-mouthed Brits.  Extremely funny and cynical, though it putters into an anti-climactic end.  Still, well worth seeing.

Pigs

Flying from Ft Lauderdale to Charlotte last night, a couple got into the two seats between me and the window.  He had on a Guns and Roses like bandana, with long hair, with his head shaved up under his ears and some patchy jeans. I started talking to them, and it turns out they were down in Florida getting married.  Alone.  Without family, on purpose.  Stayed in some luxury time share on Fisher's Island near Palm Beach.

Turns out, they needed time alone.  They had 5 kids between em, 3 from previous marriages and a couple of their own.  Both were in college, and he had two jobs.  One of them, it turns out, was in a slaughterhouse, slaughtering 1300 pigs a day.  And he gave me a fair amount of detail around the processes involved in killing them, which.... I will spare you. It made me think about vegetarianism, but when he hit the ground he was intent on finding some bbq (and rightly so, though the slaw down in that part of the state kind of sucks).  I think he wanted to fuck with me a little bit (and he did).

And between the five kids and two jobs, he had found time to master Angry Birds, to get up to levels Graham and I have never dreamed of.  A very sweet guy.  Spent a lot of time looking through his wedding pix (they were both in white) on his computer and declaring that this one or that one is the best.

Businessweek

I never thought an issue of Businessweek would make me cry, but here comes this week's with a picture of Steve Jobs on the cover, and I'm thinking:  oh, here's Businessweek's tribute issue.  So I start thumbing through it and see, in fact, that it's something more than that.  It's all about Jobs and Apple, every page, and there only appears to be one advertiser, and you can guess who it is.  20 consecutive pages of pictures of Steve and people around the world with Apple products, with quotes from Steve about life and death superimposed on them.  No logos.

It is, in short, a little breathtaking.  I'll read the articles later.

And keep in mind that I'm not even really an Apple fan. I'm writing this on a wintel machine, have an Android phone, mostly use my iPad (which I got for free) as a reading device.

Went back and read the articles, and they didn't add a ton to what I had read earlier in other places, but I did read it all.  Jobs was a compelling figure.

The New Yorker for the iPad

Is ridiculously large.  This week's is 186 megs.  The whole iPad stores 12 or 16 gigs.  Unless I'm mistaken, the New Yorker could theoretically max the thing out in a little over a year.  Absurd.  Nobody needs the ads to be this freaking hi-res.

Occupy Together

I really need to do some work tonight, but I keep coming home and getting sucked into reading about the Occupation, because, yes, it's important. If you haven't read Naomi Klein's speech from Zuccotti Square, do.

OccupyTogether is also impressive.

I have outlined some of my misgivings about the Occupation, but, while everything they say is not right, and they don't have all the answers, in essence they are not wrong.

Lots of TV

Graham, was sick today, so we watched a lot of TV, or, as the case may be, videos.  Late morning, it was Looney Tunes, including "The Scarlet Pumpernickel". Later, as part of his new Star Wars thing, we watched Revenge of the Jedi. I guess I had never watched it before, because I definitely had never seen Darth Vader pick up the Emperor and hurl him down into the conveniently placed abyss, and then have him die, helmet off and looking all space skanky, in Luke's arms.

The 99%

I have been spending a fair amount of time at We are the 99% reading the stories there.  Much of it is moving and powerful and times are hard and lots of people are getting fucked, but sometimes it's annoying to read about people who undertook impractical courses of study and huge debt loads and then are surprised they can't find work.

I know it is ridiculous for someone with a PhD in Russian Literature to say that, but it's true. I wouldn't have studied what I did if it meant taking on debt. I am definitely amongst the 99% in terms of income and wealth, but I'm towards the upper end of it, and am perhaps amongst the 1% in terms of good fortune and educational attainment. I probably could have joined the 1% had I been more practical in my career choices and had that world just not seemed shallow and repulsive and just too focused on work.

And if you think America's 99% are hungry, think how hungry the 99% in China, India, Zambia, Indonesia etc.are, how hard they're working, and what they're getting back in real terms.

But a big part of our problem now is indeed that America isn't producing things the rest of the world wants to buy.  To stay affluent we really do need to focus on science and math education -- which means that people need to be focused on the potential economic returns of what they study.  I have been extremely lucky in my ability to fight my way back from being impractical, and that I chose to do it right when unemployment was very low.

But we also need support for entrepreneurship, which means that making credit available to small and medium-sized businesses is important.  And at the end of the day the government is not going to do the best job doing that. Well-regulated capital markets can and should do a good job.  Does Dodd-Frank do a good job of doing that?  Who knows, there's too much of it to say and it's not well articulated. It's better than nothing, but probably too much. Reinstate Glass-Steagall?  Maybe.

So, yes, tax reform is necessary.  Wealthy people aren't paying enough taxes, and that includes me. Yes, health care reform is necessary.  Let people keep marching, and let us all keep reading and talking.

I know I keep rambling on.  Must go play with Graham.

Fox Soccer going downhill

Why so little Premier League and Champions League these days?  Has all the good stuff moved to Fox Soccer Plus or something where you have to pay a premium?

Or is this about general Murdoch empire financial weakness?

Murdoch has brought very little good into the world: the Simpsons, FSC.  And both seem to be fading.  So sad.

Update:  just saw that this is an off weekend for Premier League and that Wayne Rooney was off getting himself in trouble in Montenegro, so maybe I haven't been paying attention.   And I will also note that college soccer seems to be getting better in America.

On Steve Jobs and Jim Valvano

I've never been a huge huge fan of Steve Jobs, though he has truly changed our lives. Somehow I thought the back-dating of stock options was in bad taste, and his management style sounded atrocious.

But I was nonetheless very sad to hear he had died, and I had a hard time falling to sleep last night.

I had never heard about his 2005 Stanford Commencement address, but it was everywhere this morning and I read it, and it is moving.  But it reminded me of another, similar, stronger moment even.  I've posted this before, but here it is again. It's worth watching every few years.

Occupy Wall Street

One of my readers asked me what I think of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and that's a good question. I don't know what to think, so I keep reading. In the last few days I read Nikolas Krystof's piece in the Times, this critique of it, this piece in Dissent magazine, this piece in the Awl, and other stuff too.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, and the truth is that I've been working in and around finance for a decade and I'm not always happy with what I see.  I was in the hedge fund world for a few years and I was pretty disgusted, not necessarily with the people who made a lot of money, and I didn't see so much of them, as the hoi polloi in the crowds who fawned on them with so much adulation and so coveted their ducats.  Many of the people who were actually making money were in fact pretty interesting people, and really focused on understanding things clearly -- which is how they became successful -- rather than on strutting around displaying their wealth.  Though I never went to any of their houses. Had I done so, I may well have been disgusted.

So I've been in and around finance for a decade, and have developed a fondness for companies that focus on providing good value to clients.  I love Vanguard, though most of my money's at Fidelity (long story).

So, do I think everybody on Wall Street are criminals? No, but there is a degree of nastiness that gets distasteful.

Do I think that the answer to our health care problems can just be fixed with a stroke of the pen and saying that everybody gets free health care?  No.

Do I think that the wealth dispersion in this country is bad for our society?  Yes.
Do I think that this problem is easily remediated by just taxing the hell out of the rich? No.
Do I think that the Bush tax cuts were one of the stupidest policy decisions of our lifetime?  Yes.
Do I think that the war in Iraq has been the stupidest foreign policy venture of my sentient lifetime? Yes.

Similarly, excessive executive compensation is definitely a problem, but it can't be solved by just outlawing big salaries. More progressive taxation is probably par of the answer, if not a somehow simplified tax code (I'm not a tax guru so I won't pontificate on what it should be).

But do I think that the solution to our fiscal situation is as simple as banksters stealing people's money?  No. Increases in longevity and demographic curves (all the retiring boomers) as well as chronic diseases (obesity, diabetes, etc.) have changed the picture for us. Entitlements will need to be tweaked as we age.

But yes, McDonald's et al. are pretty evil.

But am I substantially invested in the stock market?  Yes.  I'm too lazy to own rental real estate and I think that burying gold in one's backyard is nihilism.  Though the regulatory structure we have is imperfect and Harry Markopolos of Madoff fame clearly demonstrated that it is worse than that in certain ways, the free press and some pretty hard-nosed and hard-working analysts provide a level of corporate governance in the US that's better than most other places (compare recent experiences in China and the collapse of Satyam in India in 2008). I believe that, net net, capital markets are a reasonable way to channel savings towards productive enterprises.  I just prefer index funds because I don't want to pay high fees. Not because fund managers are criminals, but because, on average, they suck.

And, being in the markets, and being employed near the industry, and with a child headed off to college in 7 years for which I'm saving and investing, I feel conflicted and a little guilty watching Occupy Wall Street.
 
So, in the end, I guess I come down being somewhere close to Kristof. I think that Occupy Wall Street is a good thing all told. Certainly the cops don't need to be spraying pepper spray in the face of non-violent protesters. It gives voice to people on the left who are pissed, and by doing so increases the probability that Obama won't be unseated by some right-wing freak.

But he should be chastened.

Off to bed. Tomorrow I'll surely think of something else.

Exile on Wall Street

Although my grousing has cut back some, I continue write a lot (maybe 200-250 pages a year) in both a professional and semi-professional mode, but it's in large part sort of fragmentary and concerning things that I only kind of care about, so I often wonder what I'd write a book about if I had time and energy to write a book. The big immediate if dreadfully boring topic is the challenge of staying focused on earning a living, but also the intermittent push and pull of life in and around financial markets.  On the one hand, as my buddy Jim, who writes marketing stuff for a big bank, said so well, "the American and world economy is so infinitely complex and fascinating," and one could really spend one's whole life reading and thinking about it without dying intellectually.

The problem, of course, is that there is so much else in the world that's also not only interesting, but compelling. There's morality, ethics, mortality too. Which is not to say that being homo economicus is necessarily immoral or even amoral. But I don't think there's an easy answer to that question , which is really just one facet of a bigger one: what is one (or, specifically, what am I) supposed to do with one's life?  And the only way to have a perspective on it is by stepping back from the life financial and looking at it.

And, yes, family and leisure are what's supposed to give us that, but you need a little more even. And that's where culture and just Being in the Social World come into play.  Doing things for others, seeing how other people live, reading novels, etc. To say nothing of soccer and snoozing and cupcakes.

And so, I sense that one day I will write a book.  But, I think, what will it be about, and what will I name it.  If I were to name it based on my current condition, the best title that comes to mind is Exile on Wall Street, the sense of being trapped in the world of money, markets, and, yes, technology, because I have to be.

But then I google that title and find that, lo and behold, it has already been claimed by the ever-energetic banking analyst Michael Mayo, whose book is coming out this November and, in fact, sounds like it's gonna be a good one.

Mushrooms

We've had a fair amount of rain recently, and I haven't been able to help but to notice the sheer abundance of fungi in the yard of my house, my rental, and the woods when I've been running.

I assume the rain and the mushrooms are connected, but, since I know bugger all about nature, since I've spent my whole life focused on first culture and now finance, I really can't be certain. One thing I have noticed, is that there are a lot of mushrooms, and it makes me want to sing the Smurf song.

What we need more of

There's an older black guy across the street from my office who lives in one side of a little duplex.  He goes outside on the porch to smoke (though I've never seen a wife, so I wonder who forces him).  He was just outside trimming his hedge with an electrical trimmer and, I must admit, it looks rather nice.  He doesn't seem to have enough money to paint his house, but whatever.  Anywhere people in a marginal area are working to take care of their homes and properties is a good thing, a small victory for order in the battle against the ever encroaching 2nd law of thermodynamics.

In affluent areas, on the other hand, people go way overboard trying to impose order on the landscape and thereby bracket contingency.  There, I think, a little chaos is good.

Invictus

Just watched Clint Eastwood's Invictus.  It is not a complicated movie, but it is a compelling one, and worth watching. There's no need to for me to recount it, just watch it if you haven't.

But it is a hopeful movie, and in that regard a nostalgic one, because we're not in an historical moment that feels hopeful.  Obama had the rhetoric and the political skills onstage, but in a backroom setting he hasn't swung it, though he's tried to do the right things and I certainly hope he pulls it out and becomes more effective.

Mandela pulled off something very special in '95, it turns out (I missed this story when it happened). If someone could rise above the political fray now and build consensus and direction, we'd all be the happier for it.

Josh on Amendment against Gay Marriage

I'm proud of our boy Josh, let's tack one up for the archives.  Not only is he doing the right thing here, he's doing it in a compelling way.  This is almost as good as his goal again Sanderson.

Lean on Me

Natalie is practicing "Lean on Me" on the piano and singing along. Priceless.

Reading and Control

Mornings I often wake up anxious.  Weekend mornings, of late, maybe marginally less so, but anxious nonetheless.  So I sit down and start reading, trying to get a handle on the world. Yesterday I read about pork prices being driven up as the price of corn rises (ethanol, the Chinese's growing prosperity and their insatiable lust for meat of the pig [they locked in much larger than expected corn futures contracts a month or so back]).  Recently in the MidWest there have been reports of non-trivial pig theft, where people back up a truck to a feed lot under dead of night and take maybe 30 or 40 in a load (hard to miss if a farmer has a couple of thousand of the delicious little porkers.  Also copper, which is generally considered to be a great leading indicator because it's such a fine conductor (copper prices are off a little now, but the Economist offered some caveat [can't recall] telling me why not to freak out about it, so I went with it).

It's all about control. I know in my gut that I can't control it all, much less comprehend it, but it's hard to fight the temptation to do so.

Generally, a good weekend day is one in which I get out, see people, gain perspective, and let go and have

the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
(thanks AA!)

Much of it is about talking to other people and seeing that they're not freaked out. Yesterday a cookout at the Sieglings did the trick most awesomely.

Exercise is also key.  By the end of the day I'm usually better.  And then comes Monday.

Optimism

Started reading Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum's That Used to Be Us last night.  I'm with them. Realist optimism is the order of the day. (two days later, I've read 40 pages and am not all that optimistic about the book.  Simplistic and high level thus far.  Must skip forward to anecdotes)

Had started reading Matthew Ridley's The Rational Optimist back during the Japanese nuclear thing earlier in the spring, but crapped out in the middle of that one. It just read too much like a long New Yorker article without an editor.

The New York Times Magazine had a piece this last weekend about the principal of Riverdale (that's Archie, Veronica, and Jughead's nabe, you know) who's focused on a character-building initiative at the school.  He and a peer at a charter school have isolated 7 factors that they believe are correlated with success for students:

1. Zest
2. Grit
3. Self-control
4. Social Intelligence
5. Gratitude
6. Optimism
7. Curiosity

I wrote these on a piece of paper and pasted it next to my desk.

Of course, I remember well reading another study that said that the best predictor of success amongst college seniors was not just having a plan for one's future, but writing it down.  I know I didn't do that.

Meanwhile, my renovation is coming along.  I keep meaning to write about it.

Hunam Restaurant, 9:15 pm, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Chapel Hill, NC

Usually when I pick up food from there it is empty, so I went in sweatpants, but last night the place was hopping.  It appeared that there was a Chinese party of some sort. Somewhat formally-dressed Han  were having pictures taken in front of a picture. A sole white guy stood uncomfortably amongst them in a t-shirt, shorts, and sneaker, a teenager with a moustache clustered with some young ladies in skirts, apparently somebody's date.  That was good to see.

Meanwhile, by the register a black guy in his 60s or 70s sat there. The proprietor came back in from outside, a little flustered.  Apparently, somebody had come in and stolen the guy's food right off the counter.  It seemed like this had happened while he was sitting there, cuz he looked at me and said, somewhat comprehensibly, "I been sitting here for 20 minutes and...."  His wife came in from the parking lot, apparently trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

And this within 200 yards of police headquarters.

I have to wonder if the restauranteur will comp the guy his food after they make it again.

Punch buggies

I am often saddened during the day when i pass a punch buggy and there are no children in the car for me to punch. It seems like such a waste.

Movie Reviews

Road to Nowhere -- Just goes to show you, don't trust movie reviews from the Economist.   The glowing portrait in that mag must have been because it was August and they were desperate for copy and some intern from Oxbridge named Alistair piped up and said "I saw a jolly good flick over the weekend," which appealed to his sophomoric taste for everything meta and a really pretty actress.  In fact, the movie was just a bummer, overwrought, like going back and watching Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise 15 years later and thinking "man, we must have been stoned to think this was cool."  Mary would easily have not finished this one, but I pushed through to the end, thinking it might get better.

The Black Balloon -- Toni Collette stars in this Aussie feel good film about a really autistic kid and his family, mostly about his 15-year old brother, also pretty nerdy by macho down-under standards, if cute.  For some reason, the hottest blonde in the brother's class decides that this skinny kid with the odd brother is hot, and takes after him. The romance is completely unmotivated at a plot level, but from a filmic perspective, it's always good to have and excuse to have eye-candy in a bikini around.  Even with a pubescent blonde model onscreen much of the time, not worth watching, we didn't finish it.

Star Wars -- Graham and Natalie had never seen it, so I got it out of the public library. Surprising how stilted and formulaic it is, after all these years, but you've got to give Lucas credit for creating lots of wierd creatures and a pretty fully-fledged world.  Graham has read lots of books about the series, so he knows what all the creatures are called, but he was still bouncing up and down with excitement. Natalie thinks it's silly and boring and went back to playing with her iPod and reading fantasy novels.

At the tank museum, Danville, VA

After months of delaying it, I finally took Graham to the tank museum in Danville this past Saturday.  There were some surprises.  For instance, I was a little surprised to learn that flash photography was a strict no no, because the tanks were so delicate and sensitive to UV light.  But, OK.

Admission was $10 for adults, $9.50 for kids under 12 and seniors.  You know we hit them up for that fat discount.  It was a little disappointing, having paid all that money, to learn that firearms were not allowed. What about my right to bear arms?! The lady at the counter gave me a map and showed me where the "latrines" were. While I was paying and then taking his camera back to the car, I told Graham to go in and look around.  I meant the gift shop, so I was a little nonplussed when he had hied off into the cavernous museum itself.  

And I really needed to pee, and thought he might too, so I hustled into the bathroom, calling out his name.  A guy in there, who looked a little like George Carlin, told me he hadn't seen anybody.  This guy had a pistol in a holster on his belt which, given the proscription on guns, confused me.  Turns out, he was an employee -- one of perhaps two in this massive hanger-like facility that held some 60 tanks and personnel carriers.  So that made sense.  I mean, of course employees might need a gun or two, just in case somebody else snuck one in.

(to be continued....)

teaching aggression and a desire to win

To what extent is it teachable? Some kids clearly have it earlier, and a lot of it is probably straight hormones. There is a radical split.between competitiveness.and.participatory ideologies at present. As with most things in life, there is most likely a need for compromise and balance.

On the one hand, our kids need to be able to compete or, in time, they, and we, will be eaten alive, first by their peers, then by those hungrier than us (China, India, Korea...).  On the other, a six-year old whooping it up every time he wins some trivial competition -- and we've all seen them -- will get him (and it's usually a boy) in trouble at some point in time.

On Paul O'Neill

I had been meaning to read the book Paul O'Neill did (with Ron Susskind of the Journal) about his time as Secretary of the Treasury under W.  Entitled the Price of Loyalty, it came out in 2004 and sold a bunch of copies then. I finally found a copy not long ago, and am now hoovering it up. It's a good, if depressing book.

O'Neill tells of how he came into the Bush administration together with relatively rational moderates like Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell, and was marginalized by ideologues Cheney, Rove, and welterweight economics advisor Larry Lindsey from day 1. On the economy and taxes, Bush rode into office on his overwhelming mandate of hanging chads and Antonin Scalia having promised to lower taxes and take advantage of a phantasmagorical $5 trillion projected surplus by cutting taxes, and pushed forward with the unqualified tax cuts which have proven to be one of the single greatest policy mistakes of our lifetimes, over the reservations of O'Neill and Greenspan, who advised that taxes be cut only if certain fiscal triggers were tripped. Then, in the first meeting of his National Security Council, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney showed up with a hard-on for regime change in Iraq and, shortly thereafter still in early 2001, memoranda circulated about who might be buyers of Iraqi oil assets.  Hmmm.

In any case, more later.  Good book.  I like Paul O'Neill. If there were still more Republicans like him, our lives would be less painful.  Obama should figure out a way to bring him and Powell into his pantheon of advisors if not his administration.

from the clouds

Read the profile in New Yorker of Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio this evening. Had a hard time putting it down. Many of the really successful hedge fund guys are just so smart it's just compelling.  Jeremy Grantham, Barton Biggs, Soros, you read much of the stuff they write and say about what they're doing and the analysis is compelling by its sheer breadth and ambition.  They make a lot of money, yes, but that's kind of a pain in the ass actually because then everybody comes round and sucks up to you. But the discipline and insight of it all is engrossing.

Often, when they start philosophizing, they go downhill.  Soros -- far from being the evil puppetmaster Glenn Beck makes him out to be (it's clear the puppetmasters are in fact Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney) -- is warmhearted but pedantic. Dalio sounds overbearing.  Grantham, depressing as he may be, is perhaps the exception. Sad to say, he's pretty much a hard-eyed empiricist.

Our renovation

Many people blog a lot about their renovations. I haven't done so. Somehow it doesn't inspire me to write.

The house is going to be great, don't get me wrong, but the process is sucking the life out of me. And I'm not even doing a tenth of the work that Mary is.

I have been buying the same razor blades for years

And still, when i look at all of the variants available in the drug store, i get confused.

I keep intending to write

and then end up reading or doing something else. Whoops!

Was just on a cruise ship for a week to the maritime provinces and New England. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, I rented a car and Rob and I drove off out of town into the little peninsula just west of the city. As always, trying to be smarter than everybody else, I did not go in the direction of Peggy's Cove, where the tour buses go, but went instead on the East side of the peninsula, which led us to Crescent Beach park, which was in fact a good thing. Beautiful place.

Intense to get a load of Canadian nature up close, the shit Natalie wouldn't let me check out last year when we were in Quebec. Generally nature is impenetrable there. Rocky. Marshy. Foresty. Rob's word was "inhospitable," which seems right. We went to the end of one road and came to a place where a pine forest was slowly growing and collapsing with moss all over it. I reckon it was the slow formation of peat bog or some such. You didn't see many deer tracks because the forest was so dense that how the hell would the little bambies get through there? In another place there was stuff that seemed like bamboo growing between a path (not a natural one, entirely maintained by the state, as it would need to be) and the rocky shore. Very cool.

Back from the Hills

Drove out west over the weekend to pick up Natalie from camp. Spent the night in Shelby, NC, where I was able to get a room at the Hampton Inn for only 7500 Hilton Honors miles, which is very cheap. The place was just fine. Best of all, it was right across the street from Bridges Barbeque, a fine old very homey purveyor of pig. Only thing is, being out west, they serve that wierd red slaw there, which doesn't offer any sort of dialectical interplay with your pork. Still worth going.

On the way along NC 74 towards Hendersonville, where one cuts over the ridge to Brevard, I saw some interesting stuff. A Jackson/Hewitt shop (tax-preparer targeting lower-middle folks) seemingly sharing space with a tattoo parlor. An insurance brokerage clearly colocated with a photo lab. Financial services firms are muddling through the post-crisis world where they no longer are perceived as workers of magic.

A bag of pennies

After hearing of how someone from the school's 2001 Camry had been broken into (maybe the door was unlocked) and the change in the thing between the seats was taken, I decided to try out a little experiment. On our somewhat lower income street, I left maybe 30 pennies in a somewhat if not perfectly translucent bag. At first it was over towards a corner where a brick wall meets lower brick wall (waste height) which holds a flower bed. 3 feet away from a sidewalk. No takers after a week or so.

So I moved it closer to the sidewalk, about a foot away from it. Still no takers after a day or two.

Today I upped the ante and put a quarter and a dime in there, my change from coffee at Weaver St. Let's see how long that sticks around.

Even more pix from Gwynn Valley

On the couch with Graham

Graham has gotten quite long of leg, and of late has taken to stretching out on our one sofa and reading Harry Potter. When I try to lie or sit at the other end of the couch he claims that it is "annoying," and refuses to really bend his knees much or do the cozy leg interlacing thing. Instead, he likes to extend his legs out fully and push his feet into my penis, in an often successful attempt to make me sit up. Clearly he is growing up.

More pix from GV

At Camp

Say no more.

Drop off at camp

Today was the first day of the three week session at Gwynn Valley.  Natalie was bouncing off walls silly, it was getting annoying.  For the last couple of days I kept saying "we gotta get you to camp."

Turned out, and we were fools not to have perceived it or otherwise discovered it, she was nervous.  Last summer at camp was -- as dedicated readers will recall -- really a transformative experience for her.  She was nervous at first, but she loved it loved it loved it.  She was so excited when I came to pick her up, really glowing in a super-positive way that I hadn't seen for a long time.  The horseback riding, doing a musical, making friends, singing songs, a whole range of pure childlike activities that are somehow less prevalent down in the lowlands, though school's really not that bad.

And when I suggested to her that she go for 3 weeks this summer, she was all over it, no hesitation.  And she is all about whatever bits of independence we grant her at home:  stay at home alone, walk to the library alone, walk to the drug store alone, she loves it all.  She generally revels in increasing independence.

But, 10 days and 3 weeks are, in fact, different, and she's never been away from us for that long before, and she finally brought it up herself on the way there today and Mary and I were like, of course she's nervous.  3 weeks is a long time.  So when she was all settled in and it was time to say goodbye, she leaned down from her bunk and gave us extra big, extra long hugs.  Which is not really her normal way of being.  And then we left.

But in 3 weeks, when I go to pick her up, I'm certain it will be all good.  And then we'll move on to 4 or 5 weeks.

Natalie prepares for camp

In case you have forgotten, Natalie loves going to Gwynn Valley.  This year she's going to a long session, almost three weeks.  Already last week in the hills of Virginia, when she was bored, she began planning, writing a day by day list of who she was going to write to during the afternoon quiet time.  She's been collecting the envelopes in which she will send letters, perhaps has even addressed them.  Last night she was packing her T-shirts in large ziplock bags and then (just like Granny taught her) sitting on them to expel the air from them so they'll take up less room in her bag.  After doing so, she noted that they might get wrinkled and put a finger to her lips and said."don't tell mom."

I forget who it is who has written on the virtues of boredom for kids. Certainly Freud's work on daydreaming points in that direction. Having nothing to do can surely focus them on the things they want to do.

In the hills

In the mountains of Virginia. It looks a lot like Vermont in many regards, except that fresh mozzarella and the like is less readily available, and confederate flags are more frequently seen.

I took my road bike thinking, "well maybe it won't be too hilly for me." It was.

There was an awesome stream down the hill behind the cabin. At first glance, it looked muddy, but in fact it was as pure and cold as most mountain creeks, it just had a sandy bottom. Natalie for some reason could not be drawn in, but Graham and I adventured up it at length, and found many "rapidlings."

For much of the time we just hung out in the cabin and read. I read a Donald Westlake novel called The Hook that had fallen out of a box of books my dad had given me to dispose of a month or so ago and had been lingering in my car trunk.  I knew from years of intensive mystery/suspense reading passed that Westlake was an author that I respected, but I can't really remember any of his books.  This one was intense, Hitchcockian, shades of Strangers on a Train, if more disturbing even in the end.

Back from San Francisco

Out there for the first time in over a decade. A great city, to be sure, but in some ways it feels like New York in the 80s: lots of homeless people and dog shit everywhere.

Admittedly, I was kind of hemmed in by work and didn't really exit the Tenderloin/Nob Hill/downtown region till the last night, when we went down to the ferry building, which was pretty much closed down at night except for fancy restaurants. We walked from there to Fisherman's Wharf, which definitely sucks, although they did have Squirt in the 7-11. They also had a most impressive selection of hot dog and taquito varietals on the hot rollers. Really pretty disgusting.

On the way back, I enjoyed some bonus hospitality at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, thanks to a late plane from New York. I continue to believe that place has reasonably priced food, for an airport.

One thing, though. It was over a hundred outside, and inside the airport it wasn't cooled very well. A woman who lives there told me that it used to be kept cooler. They've no doubt adjusted the temp as a cost-savings measure. What's odd is that, former Texas governor and US President George Bush used to tout air-conditioning as the best approach for dealing with global warming. Where's the strong cooling, oh mighty W? I guess that plan kind of depended on the notion that the US could just buy its way out of anything. Whoops!

Disneyland and guilt - I remember Ensenada

At times I feel guilty about not taking my kids to one of the Disney places.  Natalie just turned 11, she may be passed the prime time.

Then again, I went to Disneyland when I was 10.  We had driven across the country in our Winnebago, and were convinced that we were so superior to everybody else because we didn't have to check into hotels and such like.  In retrospect, that doesn't seem liek such a big deal.

In any case, we went to Disneyland, and I hardly remember anything.  I think we went on Magic Mountain.  I vaguely remember some automatons singing "It's a Small World, After All."  Hooray.  I think I got sick.

A few days later, we drove down the Baja to Ensenada.  We wanted to get tacos, just like the ones we got at Tijuana Fats back in Chapel Hill, only authentic. Actually, I think we just wanted tacos. So we drive into Ensenada and there's some kid selling tacos in a cart.  We get one. Disgusting. No lettuce, no shredded cheddar cheese, the shell wasn't even crispy and fried.  So we head off to a restaurant where we sit at the bar and my dad holds up 3 fingers and maybe says "tres."  So they bring us three orders of three tacos, also not good.  My dad gets pissed off.

So we go down to some restaurant in a boat in the harbor and my parents get some kind of seafood stuff. Most importantly, there are seals swimming outside the windows, right down near us.  Or so I recall. It was totally cool.

The point is, I don't really remember Disneyland, but I remember Ensenada.

Meanwhile, I'm watching a little Dirty Harryathon here on AMC and just enjoyed a 1988 cameo by Jim Carrey as a junkey rock star. He just got whacked.

Western Pennsylvania, 1953

I happened across a web site for model railroad enthusiasts. It turns out these guys are pretty precise and granular in their recreations. The one below depicts a railroad in Western Pennsylvania, 1953.

Home decoration magazines are pornography for women

They oppress men with the unrealistic ideals they depict. The big difference is that women can leave them out all over the house, often with the centerfolds spread open for all to see.

Update on kids

Tonight was milder, went in the yard and played baseball with Graham.  For the first time with his new, actual baseball-sized ball.  After a while he started to hit it, and then took to running some imaginary bases, carrying his bat with him.  As he ran the bases, he sang a little song that sounded a like a pixieish version of the shark music from Jaws.

For her part, Natalie went on a school trip to Jamestown/Yorktown/Williamsburg today.  Kids were supposed to get to the school at 5:45.  She insisted on setting her alarm at 5:20 so as to get to the school a minute early.  She is clearly inheriting traits from her father and grannie.

Around the World in 80 Days

Graham and I just finished reading this Jules Verne classic.  Awesomely good fun. Excellent surprise ending.

There were difficulties, to be sure, when our heroes Phileas Fogg and Passepartout pass through India and have to interrupt a suttee, the ritual burning of the wife on the funereal pyre of the husband.  I didn't really feel like spelling that one out for Graham, had to finesse my way around it and improvise filler.

Aside from suttee, I learned one new word:  "resounce".  Unfortunately, I have no idea what it means.  I just looked it up, and it only seems to appear on the internet as a misspelling of "resource" (as in "Human Resounces).  But there are 12,300 instances of it in that way.  The publicly available Oxford English Dictionary has no record of it.  But it was in there, I swear. 

Big readers

Tonight, some 11 minutes after her bedtime, Natalie had about 20 pages left in her chapter. Now, she usually doesn't let me kiss her, preferring to squirm and screech and push me away till I give up. Tonight, as I leaned in to try, she says "I'll let you kiss me if I can finish my chapter."

Earlier, Mary had been trying to get Graham to put away some books. Graham, from his prostrate position on the clinch, responds, "as you know, my career is in reading."

Back from the West

Flew through Dallas, which had been inundated with hail yesterday, causing massive damage to lots of planes and really screwing up American Airlines flights pretty good.

My flight was cancelled but I got on one a couple of hours later, so I had time for some brisket at Dickey's. While it's not pulled pork done properly as in you-know-where, it was pretty decent nonetheless, and the slaw and roll were quite good.  Surprisingly, or perhaps not all that surprisingly, when you stop to think about it, there seemed to be some meat -- most likely a pork varietal -- in my mashed potato casserole, which also had a little cheddar on top. That didn't need to be there. Should've had the mac n cheese.

Basically, I got there at a pretty good time, as the planes were getting rolling. Rumor had it that AA had pulled in excess planes that had been out to pasture in the desert during low volume season.  But people had been stuck in that airport overnight and were cranky and bitchy, so I was glad to see them go, frankly.

Downtown San Diego

On the one hand, people live down here, there's a grocery store, a gym with young people exercising, microbreweries, a Nordstrom's, etc.  In many ways an improvement over what I'm sure it was like 20, 30, 40 years ago.  Greener, sure.

Palm trees.

But there's precious little texture or flavor to be had down here.  All told, it's representative of little more than the malling of urban America.

The biggest surprise about San Diego is how mild it is, temperature wise.  Late May, highs in the mid to high sixties. Cloudy in the mornings.  Not what I would have expected.

J-O-B and more

Nothing puts a damper on a nice blog worse than working does.  All day long, into the night, working on that do-re-mi.

On Saturday I was finally able to get Graham out to Target to snap up a baseball bat to replace the one that has suspiciously vanished. And he picks out a nice, ultra-light metal one, entirely suitable for a boy of his lean profile. The idea was that he could whack the ball off of the most excellent T I purchased for him at the army-navy surplus/junk store on Main St in Carrboro.

But no, Graham wants me to pitch the ball to him, and so I do, and, lo and behold, he sets to thumping the thing pretty good, over my head any number of times.  And then he decides it's time to run an imaginary set of bases, bringing the bat with him.  I couldn't hardly tag him out at all, so quick was he round the bases.

And then, later, I took him back out to Tae Kwon Do where they were having nerf dart gun battle night. When Graham got there, Mary reported, a mighty arsenal of flourescent nerf dart guns was spread out on all the Zen-spare wooden benches, while a bunch of mostly 10-12 year olds sat in a circle out in the middle of the mats, presumably receiving instruction from the dojo. Graham was awestruck, but had a good time.

Meanwhile, Natalie had headed off to an evening of contra-dancing for tweens at some church.  She put on a nice skirt and a little tank top number. 11 is just around the corner, and I think the opposed genders are beginning to take note of each other. She pronounced the evening to be "Awesome!", and then the next morning presented me with a neatly written and categorized birthday list.  When I suggested she type it into the Macbook lest the only copy of it be lost, she said "OK.  I love typing!"

Despite the working thing, times are good.

Back from Gotham

Made a one-night, one-day trip to New York for a conference over the last couple.  Arrived in the fair burg to perfect springy weather.  When I got to LGA, I found out that the guy who I was supposed to be having dinner with had forgotten about it, which turned out to be a great blessing in disguise.  With time to kill, I hopped aboard a bus into Queens to catch the 7 train.  I got off at Roosevelt Ave, got a couple of little empanadas -- ostensibly chicken and beef, but really pretty indistinguishable, as both were mixed with a lot of potatoes, but tasty nonetheless with some green salsa.

I started looking through my phone for someone to have a drink with. Ended up in the west village with a former colleague who has just written a novel about management consulting. Sounds exciting.

Then I walked south to Beth's place in Tribeca, past the haunts of my early courtship with Mary:  Sheridan Square, esp. Patisserie Claude, which was 5 stories below our window.  Lupe's, where we had our first date (after seeing the flick Heavenly Creatures at the Angelica, in which two Aussie tweeners get psycho and whack their mom, if memory serves correctly). Good times all.

And then, yesterday, when I had some time to kill between my conference and drinks with the guy who had blown me off the day before, I called up my friend Corinna who works there on 42nd St and we hung out on the street and chatted, just like we would've 20 years ago, only without the cigarettes.

Good livin.

The Spooky House

At the end of the road where we are renting just now is a very nasty looking little house. Only a dim light ever shines through the window, nobody in the neighborhood knows who lives there, it kind of freaks those of us with kids out, particularly cuz there's a path leading past it that goes through the woods to a place where other kids live, so it's a natural place for kids to walk.  In front of the house are an old Chrysler K car wagon and a Nissan truck, both of them derelict, rotting into the earth.

It is, in short, a mystery, but no longer.

At Johnny's this evening, I ran into Rick, of longtime local and touring band Southern Culture on the Skids. The house, it turns out, is occupied by Mary, the bass player, who has maintained a largely nocturnal schedule. Figures. The big white van that is sometimes parked out front was, in fact, the clue I expected:  a rock and roller lives here, not an actual axe murderer, just someone who cultivates that aesthetic.

Jumping up

This being basketball country, as kids we always liked to jump up and touch things with our hands: branches, ceilings, girders, you name it.  It showed we had reach and hops.

So I wasn't all that surprised when, this afternoon, as I raced against an apparently onrushing thunderstorm (which in fact passed us by) over to Weaver St to get my normal afternoon coffee, a 60ish woman, thinking nobody was looking, bounced up a little bit to touch her head to a banner hanging down over the sidewalk, advertising some kind of seafood for sale. The urge to show hops does not die easily in these parts.

New verbs from Graham

Observate
Maneuverate

The Sportswriter

Coming to the end of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, I'm happy to say.  I was a big fan of its sequel, Independence Day, where I felt like our hero, Frank Bascombe, was sorting through real shit in a real, if stylized, way. This first book reads like Camus comes to the suburbs, pure and simple.

It is definitely bittersweet to read of Haddam, NJ, this thinly veiled Princeton, lacking only a university (which Princeton, in its own way, does as well, and I'm not saying that as a Yale guy).  So much else feels like home.