Underbelly

Francine Got This One Right

2009-11-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

Gracian says one should always be more alert to what fate has granated than what it has denied. My friend Francine is a high-rent law professor but for the moment, she is sojourning in San Francisco's Tenderloin:

[I] love living in the Tenderloin. It allows one to appreciate the simple things in life (e.g., shelter, food, mental health, good health care coverage and family support and love). We are so fortunate ...

There's a girl who has a knack for knowing when she's well off, which is a gift all its own.

First They Fell Upon their Knees....

2009-11-26T09:59:00.000-08:00

...then they fell upon the Aborigines.

Happy holiday. We're having tapas.

Wonky footnote: the Italians have a nice variant (in Latin): quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini, i.e., what the Barbarians did not do, the Barberini did--about the rapacious family of Pope Urban VIII.

Is This Anything? Dubai and Israel

2009-11-26T09:41:00.001-08:00

As Letterman would say, is this anything?

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu says he intends to halt residential construction in West Bank settlements for 10 months (link).

And this?

Dubai triggered the bigest sovereign debt default since Argentina in 2001 (link).

I should have thought that both were pretty big deals, but my paper New York Times put both inside. The Israeli plan does seem to have been hit with a withering fusillade of abuse from those who say that it's not nearly enough, etc. I did catch George Mitchell's press conference yesterday afternoon, where you got the feeling he wasn't sure himself whether it was a big deal.

Dubai, meanwhile, certainly seems to have shaken up a bunch of bankers. But isn't it the kind of thing we've seen coming for months? (Update: Well, lots of people are expressing surprise.)

FWIW, my Google aggregator is paying a lot of attention to Dubai, almost none to Israel. Just tells you about my choice of sources, I guess.

The Tragedy of Home Schooling

2009-11-25T18:01:00.000-08:00

HT:Kieran Hardy.

"Remember Me When I Am Dead ...

2009-11-25T13:27:00.001-08:00

...and simplify me when I'm dead:"

On the BBC's Nationwide programme in March 1973, he was the second person on the nation's television to say "fuck" ...

--From the Wiki bio of Pergrrine Worsthorne.

[Poem quote: link.]

A Note on Phil Agre

2009-11-25T12:27:00.000-08:00

I don't suppose I had ever heard of Phil Agre until I started reading stories of his disappearance. I don't for a moment want to be understood as being snarky or dismissive about what is obviously a serious matter, but I do note one remarkable fact: the police notice describes him as six feet tall and weighing 120 pounds. Shouldn't be too hard to spot.

Camelback, Horseback, Assback, Muleback, Old Civilizations Put to the Sword

2009-11-25T12:14:00.000-08:00

Visulaization of the fall of empires:

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo. And H/T Kottke.

On the Economics of Chinese Food

2009-11-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

I meant to comment before on Carpe Diem's post pointing out that by some measures, Chinese food is more popular in the United States than big-market franchise food (link). It's an interesting factoid and I take it mostly at face value. CD draws the moral that "Globalization is good," though what that has to do with the price of chai in China I have no idea (but then, the lesson CD draws from everything is that globalization is good).

But what I'd like to know is more about the internal structure of the Chinese restaurant biz. Note tht the menus, the decor and the outside signs bear an impressive similarity from one end of the country to the other. When you stop and think of it, this is hardly surprising. It isn't plausible that some Chinese family in, say,Wichita, will just say "hey. gang! Let's start a restaurant!"--and then go and invent the whole process from scratch. Sooner rather than later, they will stumble onto somebody who will want to "help" them with the benefit of his/her experience or knowledge. Might be a "restaurant consultant." My guess is that it is likely to be the equipment supplier, whose main job is to get the highest price he can squeeze for that high-BTU stove they will need,* and who finds himself morphing into a restaurant consultant whether he intended such a result or not.

And then--what? I suppose there is no megacorp to which mom & pop must be royalties (unless you count the monthly payment on that stove). But what about the mob? Tony Soprano understands that the best way to squeeze the profits out of a restaurant is to control the towel concession--an excellent index of marginal revenue. Isn't it fair to assume that somebody in the beef & broccoli circuit has figured out the same strategy.

None of this is meant to contract CD's point--as I suggested above, I'm not sure exactly what the hell his point is, anyway. It does suggest that life closeup is usually more complicated than it seems to be from a distance.

*Afterthought: One of CD's sources offers an enlightening mini-history of the Chinese restaurant in the US. But it includes an odd bit of cultural blindness:

...home cooks may use the Chinese wok pan for simple stir-fry dishes. Authentic Chinese cuisine usually calls for a level of heat unknown in Western cooking. The quick flash fry, on a high-BTU restaurant stove, seals in flavors in a way almost impossible to match in a non-professional kitchen.

Whoa, big guy, you never heard of a pizza oven? I think I make a pretty good pizza if I do say so, but I don't dare crank my kitchen oven above about 515 degrees. Unless I'm willing to spring for something like this, I'm not likely to get any better. Of course, not having a the fancy oven, I always have an excuse for not achieving perfection.

First-ever Underbelly Gold Price Commentary

2009-11-24T21:40:00.000-08:00

I see that the price of gold hit $1,177.12 this evening. That's getting on towards 40 percent of the price at the end of the previous gold boom in April 1980.

Except that it isn't. Adjust for inflation and the 1980 price of $850 translates into a today price of $2268. So we've got a ways to go.

Sweet Jesus! (The Sarah Chronicles)

2009-11-24T21:19:00.000-08:00

I popped in on Amazon a few moments ago to see if the Sarah wars are still going strong in the book review trenches. Sure enough, we are showin' 147 five-star, 130 one-stars, and 29 two- three- and four-stars altogether.

But wait a minute, folks. Take a look at "the most helpful review," with 4,485 (of 5,581) favorable votes. That's enough to polish the vanity of any of those ink-stained wretches in the Amazon free labor brigade--especially, as seems pretty clearly the case, it's a parody, or perhaps I should say a mockery, the work of our old friend General J. C. Christian, proprietor of Jesus' General weblog, "an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender." I will concede that the General's wit can appear a bit scattershot at times, sort of like Hunter Thompson on acid (joke). But the other day, I was wondering if anybody actually read the book. Today, I'm wondering if they read the reviews.

Update: Mrs. Buce says I'm being a chump (again?). She says those 4,485 favorables are (unlike me?) all in on the joke--that they are just extending the mockery. Hey, I thought of that. But I doubt 4,485 mockers could pull the levers for five-star even if they knew they were only joking. Next thing you know, somebody like me might take them seriously (follow that?).

Follow the Hair

2009-11-24T17:53:00.000-08:00

I suppose it is silly to expect reliable business advice from a novel but this sounds like it has the ring of truth about it:

"Wigs don't last long. Bet you don't know; toupees are good for two, maybe three years max. The better made hey are, the faster they get used up. They're the ultimate consumer product. It's 'cause they fit so tightly against the scalp: the hair underneath gets thinner than ever. Once that happens, you have to buy a new one to get that perfect fit again. And think about it: What if you were using a toupee and it was no good after two years--wht would go through your mind? Would you think, OK, my wig's worn out. Can't wear it any more. But it'll cost too much to buy a new one, so tomorrow I'll start going to work without one? Is that what you'd think?"

I shook my head. "Probably not," I said.

"Of course not. Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's like, his fate. That's why wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like drug dealers. Once they get their hooks into a guy, he's a customer for life. Have you ever herd of a bald guy suddenly growing a head of hair? I never have. A wig's got to cost half a million yen at least, maybe a million for a tough one. And you need a new one every two years! Wow! Even a car lasts longer than that--four or five years. And then you can trade it in!"

"I see what you mean," I said.

"Plus, the wig makers run their own hairstyling salons. They was these wigs and cut the customers' real hair. I mean, think about it: you can't just plunk yourself down in an ordinary barber's chair, rip off your wig, and say, 'I'd like a trim,' can you? The income from these places alone is tremendous."

"You know all kinds of things," I said, with genuine admiration

--Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle 110
(Jay Rubin tran. 1997)

Comment: I wonder how, if at all, this picture is changed by the emergence of the hair transplant. Transplants are pretty obvious, IMO--or at least the ones that are obvious, are obvious. Yet they are neat and consistent. Sort of a piece of grooming. I know one guy: I knew him in his 20s with a full head of hair, and then in his 30s, bald as Fabius Africanus. Now in his 50s, he's perhaps 15 years into his transplant and it looks perfectly respectable.

Swiss Army Knife Heaven

2009-11-24T17:21:00.001-08:00

Teresa Nelson Hayden directs us to the site where we find all out stuff confiscated from TSA (link). She also links to Bruce Schneier, on "Stabbing People with Stuff you canGeThrough Airport Security" (hint: think obsidian).

BTW, what is all this "-Buddha" stuff? Take away the minus sign and find out for yourself.

Vox Popoli

2009-11-24T14:56:00.001-08:00

Waiting for some service at the car repair shop this morning, I slipped into a chair in the "customer lounge." It was almost like a library, with only two other patrons, both absorbed in their reading.

Presently a young man rolled up in a hand-powered wheelchair, carrying a laptop computer. CAN WE GET SOME TV IN HERE? --He asked loudly. From somewhere somebody flipped on a talk show. The young man, watching TV with one eye and gazing at his computer screen with the other, remarked to anyone:

Yeh, now that they've got this health care thing there'll be nothing on the talk shows for two years but health care, health care.

Yeh, responded one of his fellow customers, they're just takin' away more of our freedoms...

Having found each other as kindred spirits, they began a loud and friendly chat. I retreated to the front of the building and perched on the curb, where I could read in relative peace. I was tempted to ask who paid for the wheelchair. Military, maybe.

Mistakes in Novels

2009-11-24T14:42:00.000-08:00

When a character in a novel makes a simple mistake, you want to stop and think to make sure you understand whether the mistake is the character's or the author's. Here are a couple of examples--the first from Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities.

Believe me, income has dropped by twenty percent and prices have gone up twenty percent, that's a total of forty percent!

--Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Part III
(p. 729 in volume II of the Viking Paperback ed.)

So one of the "driblets of the general conversation around him" that Ulrich hears as his train rolls into the station. Strictly speaking, (1.2/.8)-1=0.5=50 percent, not 40 percent. This may seem a fine point but it wouldn't have been lost on Musil the engineer, and the stance is in keeping with his general negative opinion on the masses. So, character, not author.

Compare Toro Okada, the narrator of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles as he undertakes to cook dinner. I can't find the page reference but I am intrigued to learn that Toro starts by browning the onion and the garlic. Now, any decent cook knows that if you brown the garlic it tastes like overshoes. You can roast it or (as here) you can add the other ingredients and then throw in the garlic to stew.

Whose error? Toro is not a conspicuously great cook, but he is a careful and somewhat fastidious man, and he likes to prepare food with care. I suspect he knows that you don't brown the garlic. So, author, not character.

Cutest Character Slur of the Day

2009-11-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

...a guy whose natural place in the universe is on the third block of Hardball ...

Link.

Holiday Stimulus

2009-11-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

My friend Allison points out that the gummint is out to recruit a head elf.

Election Guesswork: The Size of the GOP Gains

2009-11-23T18:05:00.000-08:00

I just caught a few minutes of Charlie Cook with a panel of six political strategists--three and three, Republican and Democrat. Quel surprise: everybody is predicting Republican gains; the only dispute is over how much. But it was possible to suss out some new and interesting insights. Perhaps the most interesting (to me) came from Joe Trippi talking about the turmoil internal to both parties. On the Republican side, it is obvious: Sarah and company versus the grownups. On the Democratic side, it is not quite so easy to notice, but the progressives are really mad--over, as you might say, the Glenn Greenwald agenda plus the Joe Stiglitz agenda. So Trippi, if I understand him right, is expecting a lot of tough primary fights in both parties as the "extremes" try to take out the middle. He somehow thinks that this may lead to limiting the amount of bad news for Dems, but I'm not sure I follow that.

The second thing that struck me was a pitch by Alex Castellanos, the GOP strategist, arguing that the Obama Administration is making a George W. kind of mistake. That is (my paraphrase) in each case--Obama and W--you've got a President who achieved power on a not-very-specific agenda ("Yes, We Can!" is not an agenda). And then each turned out to have a fully articulated agenda which he was determined to pursue whether the voters wanted him to or not. In particular, I understood him to say, the Dems have taken a lot of their necessary support and left it more or less parked, enjoying 10 percent unemployment while the party in power worries about health care and bailing out banks.

I think there are a lot of flaws in that theory so complain to him, not me, but I think there is enough truth in it that attention must be paid.

Much more good stuff here, worth the listsen. But as a final note, for extr credit: why is it that I find all six of these commenttors (plus, of course, Cook himself) more sane, balanced and realistic than almost any of the party noisemakers I see on TV?

Standing Tall on the Shelf

2009-11-23T13:07:00.000-08:00

At Palookaville's fine second-hand bookshop this morning, I picked up a copy of Konstantin Paustovsky's The Story of My Life, which I read with great delight about 30 years ago, and have been wanting to reread. It's a "Pantheon Modern Classic," dated 1982 (I must have read an earlier version. The inside back flap says it is one of four in the set. Here's the entire list, as presented:

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, " the remarkable story of a Sicilian prince perched on the brink of historic change" [$5.95];

Yashar Kemal's Mehmed, My Hawk, " a modern-day Robin Hood's struggles against the beauty and brutality of Turkish peasant life" [$6.95];

Konstantin Paustovsky's The Story of a Life, " a brilliant portrayal of a coming of age amidst war and revolution" in early 20th-century Russia [$8.95]; and

Robert Musil's Young Törless, a novel set in a military boarding school in the Austria of the Hapburgs [$5.95]

Now I ask you: are going to find any other list of "modern classics," composed 27 years ago, that stands quite so solidly on the shelf? A list like this is bound to look dated or parochial after such a time, but every one of these entries, to my mind, still stands tall on the shelf. But it does look like they couldn't find something good to say about Törless, though.

[And BTW, I got my copy for $2.95.]

Mystery Google

2009-11-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

For no reason that I can fathom, a number of searchers just showed up at Underbelly on redirect from something called Mystery Google--surely the lamest web app I've seen in quite a while and if it really is related to Google, I think it may be time to short the stock.

Gillon on Johnson

2009-11-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

Cleaning the kitchen last night, I listened with one ear to Steve Gillon on C-Span flogging his new book, The Kennedy Assassination--24 Hours After. It's a super concept and it's hard to imagine why nobdy seems to have thought of it before, and it sounds like a fine book. Gillon's point is to focus on the transition, and in particular, the role of the unexpected President, the bane of all things Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson. As Gillon tells it, Johnson understood almost from the first gunshot that he was in a world-changing situation--which (subject to one possible qualification) he handled faultlessly.

If you need just one focus-point, consider the Cecil Stoughton's unforgettable photo of the swearing-in--the new President, with his wife Lady Bird at his side. Whom do we see upstage, next to the President and closest to the camera? Oh, look, it is Jackie--the wife of the dead president stands at the elbow of his successor. I can't think of anything more likely to send the message of stability and continuity, and per Gillon, it was Johnson's idea, and he was ready with it on the spot.

Gillon freights a lot onto the animosity between the Kennedy loyalists and the successor. Perhaps he overdoes it a bit for literary purposes, but I suspect he is mostly on the beam. Recall that it was Bobby who went so far as to ask Lyndon to turn down the Vice Presidency after it was offered (and it was Bobby who remained the defining figure in Johnson's White House for the rest of his term).

For all his apparent admiration of Johnson's initiative and instincts, Gillon seems to feel tht he overdid it--that his behavior in this first moment of crisis prefigures the (per Gillon) too-clever-by-half paranoia that dominated and ultimately destroyed the Johnson presidency. I wonder. If the loyalists were indeed as hostile to Johnson as Gillon represents them to be, then every Johnson haad every reason to put his survival instincts on stun. But you can leave that issue to the Monday morning quarterbacks. He's got a great story to tell and it sounds like a fine book.

The Sarah Wars: Amazon

2009-11-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

Monkey Cage points out that the Amazon reviews of Going Rogue are pretty much either five star or one star. So far so good, although the next question would be: how many of either side have actually read it?

The One-Termers

2009-11-22T09:32:00.001-08:00

Gary Wills suggests that Barack Obama settle for a one-term presidency and make it something to be proud of *--i.e., by ending a couple of nasty and persistent wars. He set me to thinking about other one-term presidencies. I can't find a strong pattern here. There several--Carter, Hoover--who seem to have been just not very good at the job. I can think of at least one--Buchanan--who was really awful. And at least one--Coolidge--who simply didn't want it all that much.

But perhaps the closest comparison would by the hypothetical mirror image of Obama's hypothetical stop-the-war program. That would be President James K. Polk, who started a war (against Mexico), won it, and went home (and died, perhaps partly from overwork).

It's probably not a comparison that either Polk or Obama would fancy but you'd have to say this: Polk changed the landscape of America more than any other president from Jefferson to Lincoln. It's a record not to be dismissed lightly.
==
*"A One-Term President?" New York Review of Books December 3, 2009, 8.

Whatever It Takes...

2009-11-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

From the NYT Sunday morning story about Norm Radow the Workout Guy who steps in to make what he can out of failed real estate projects:

In 2003, Lehman sent him to Boston to rescue a failed condo tower. ... Ceilings in the tower were seven and a half feet high, about a foot and a half less than typically found in luxury condos. "He tried to squeeze an extra floor into the building," Mr. Radow says of the project's developer ... To help solve the height problem, Mr. Radow hired only sales people who weren't much taller than 5 feet. he sold all the units, and Lehman Brothers was thrilled.

Link.

Update: John says: short sellers. Oh tee hee.

Who Are These Guys, Anyway?

2009-11-21T21:18:00.000-08:00

I used to be able to name about 80 sitting U. S. Senators. I think I am down to about 60 now. I assume this is partly just the result of decaying brain tissue, but it has to be partly also that these guys are getting harder and harder to remember. I mean, I suppose it is no big deal to remember Robert Byrd of West Virginia--he's been there forever. And it is probably easy enough to remember Barbara Mikulsi of Maryland even though she is no longer (almost) the only woman in the room. And her name helps you remember Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, otherwise memorable only as a time-server who inherited daddy's seat.

Beyond that--well, I can get through New England fairly well, perhaps because I grew up back there (though I doubt I would remember Judd Gregg of New Hampshire if I didn't remember his father, the governor back in the 50s). The mid-Atlantic--well, I still struggle with Bob Caey of Pennsylvania and I be dam if I can remember Mikulski's colleague, the guy who replaced Paul Sarbanes in Maryland (Cardin, Buce, Car-din). Going further south--now really, is there any good reason to remember either Richard Burr, the Republican, or his Democratic counterpart Kay Hagen (the lady who beat Elizabeth Dole; got it).

And so forth. I think one reason why it gets hard is that more and more of these characters are just so completely anodyne, designed for no other purpose than to look good under a blow dryer. Over time they can come to distinguish themselves, e.g., as flaming right-wingers like Jim DeMint of South Carolina or Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (about the only guy in the galaxy who cam make Don Imhoff look moderate). And there is the occasional gratifying scandal--how else to remember John Ensign of Nevada? And of course with Dave Vitter of Louisiana we get a twopher--extremism and scandal in a single package.

I would like to, but cnanot honestly, say that the Democrats are a lot better. I mean, I know there are important differences between Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, but what are you going to do when they are both iambics?

And the Udalls--keeping two of them straight is hard enough, but I am old enough to remember--and confuse them with--their uncle/father ("I knew Mo Udall; Mo Udall was a--" well, he wasn't really, but still).

Still, I can't escape the conviction that is me and not them: that they are really turning into an increasingly boring lot. Makes one pine for the days when senators had names like Claghorn and Phogbound, or at least Webster, Clay and Calhoun.

He-e-e-e-re Bo!

2009-11-21T07:33:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Drew reminds President Obama of President Truman's first rule of politics: if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.\

Update: An offline commentator asks: just whom is being betrayed here, and by whom? Interesting question to which, I suppose, I had not given much thought before I posted it. Betrayal is an important concept in the literature of social life: Shakespeare, Cervantes and Dante all pay attention to it, which fact in itself makes betrayal worthy of study. In this case, I suspect that everybody is entitled to a sense of disappointment: The President, the Counsel, the reporter and, oh yes dear reader, you and I.