Bandarlog


	Swiss Miss The controversy in Switzerland doesn't really concern African immigrants, which is why I think the "shock and outrage" over the "black sheep" advertisement is a ginned-up controversy designed to end a legitimate debate. The Swiss People's Party's main worry is over Islam. The party sees Islamic culture as incompatible with Swiss culture, and holds that immigration policy ought to take note of the conflict. A very sensible notion of striving towards cultural value-neutrality in the legal relationship of citizen and state has been imported perniciously into an inapposite context, that of immigration. The Swiss state does not need to be neutral with respect to culture when it comes to immigration. A state doesn't have the same duties toward non-citizens as to citizens. Immigration policy ought to serve the benefit of citizens, and to the extent that this means favoring or disfavoring certain nationalities, cultures, or ideologies, that is the perfect right of the community of citizens. And you're right, Doug, those UN wankers do piss me off. How many of these crap countries can hold the merest candle to Switzerland on any of the dimensions that define a successful open society? Come off it, rapporteur!! [Ben H.: 9/8/07 13:56]


	Swiss Immigration I think they should only allow in immigrants who trek in from Austria singing "Edelweiss". Seriously, I have more sympathy for the Africans there than for the racists who want them out. (And the infamous posters show that the rabble-rousers in Switzerland are racists, not merely disinterested champions of some notion of sovereignty.) I mean, say I'm an African, and here's a country whose banking system was one of the chief enablers of the despots who plundered my country these last decades. It's only natural that I'd come looking for some of my stolen patrimony. I think it's the self-righteous U.N. twits who have pushed your buttons and pushed you into an extreme position. This too is understandable. "Rapporteur"? Dude, that's not even real French, I'm calling you on it. If the Honorable Doudou Diène called himself the special rappeur on racism, he'd get more respect. [Doug: 9/8/07 12:11]


	Did You Ever Think a Day Would Come When I Would Recommend Mime? Me, neither. And it was with great trepidation that I accepted a friend's invitation to see an "avant-garde mime" performance at the Flea Theater. This wasn't mime. It was meta-mime. Billy-the-Mime performed a series of vignettes on the most un-mime-like of themes: a brief Life of JFK Junior; A Night With Jeffery Dahmer; The Sixties. It was amazing how the guy managed to convey complex concepts through just a couple of gestures. Watching the show is actually surprisingly congnitively challenging. The audience needs to connect each gesture to a cultural reference in order to get the joke. It's a credit to Billy-the-Mime that the connections were delightfully surprising, but never so obscure that one felt lost. And -- seriously -- you have to give credit for convention-shattering boldness to a mime whose only use of the "glass box" cliche comes in a vignette called "The Abortion: 1963", where the perspectively suddenly shifts: the "glass box" is the amniotic sac and the mime is the foetus! I noticed this morning that the NYT gave Billy a tepidly positive review. Of course, the humorless douchebaggery of the Times takes Billy to task for being insufficiently political. "There is very little substance or commentary here." Yeah, true that. It's a mime performance, not the goddamned New York Review of Books. It's merely totally engrossing and riotously funny. But no jabs against (oooooooooh) DICK CHENEY? Guess it ain't art, then, huh? Billy: here's my suggestion. For your next show, add a vignette called "Newspaper of Record: Jayson Blair." [Ben H.: 9/7/07 06:59]


	Can I Vote Swiss People's Party in the U.S. Presidential Election? What sort of a pass have we come to when the simple exercise of Westphalian sovereignty draws threats from a UN "special rapporteur on racism"? The Swiss notion of citizenship-by-consent strikes me as much more readily understandable and justifiable than farrago of claims-based principals at work in the US and the rest of Western Europe. The Swiss community gets to decide who it shall admit as a new member, based on the interests and preferences of the community itself. That's sinister? [Ben H.: 9/7/07 06:19]


	The Story Behind The Story In this Indian Summer of slow news, the media will try to turn an uptick in suicide rates into a big story. But look at the chart in that story. The first thing you notice is a big drop in teenage suicide over the last 15 years -- around 25 percent! -- against which the latest numbers look like the merest blip. The real question is thus why teenagers (especially boys, if we consider raw numbers rather than rates) have been choosing not to take their own lives. And the answer, brought to you by the Bandarlog Instant Sociology Squad, is that the unprecedented licentiousness of contemporary America means that just about any teenager can get laid! [Doug: 9/6/07 17:27]


	Preserved In Amber(-Colored Smoking Jacket) One of my favorite figures on the French political scene is Bernard Thibault, General Secretary of the CGT labor union (Confédération générale du travail). I don't know what his line is and I can't recall ever hearing him speak. What's awesome about him is revealed by any press photo. Just as the Hasidim dress precisely as they did in a time and place where, they believe, their people reached their spiritual apogee, Mr. Thibault looks as though he just warped in from the last golden age of syndicalism, 1971. Check out that haircut. Far out, man. [Doug: 9/6/07 17:01]


	Ha! That would be "veer decisively into make-believe" then. Not having worked in an office for a while, I'd forgotten the utility of a blog for venting about work. I'm helping out to get this new web site ready to launch for the French audience. In the list of bugs to fix, I find "reduce the font-size of cities displayed on the weather page. Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume doesn't fit in the screen." Indeed, the final two letters go off the screen. Were I less concerned about causing offense here, I would just write back "FUCK Saint Maximin AND his holy balm!!!" As it is I think I'm just going to ignore this bug. [On second thought, I could get my point across to the finder of this "bug" more tactfully. "Your solicitousness for users from small towns is admirable. However, given that users will see enough letters to prevent any confusion with 'Saint-Maximin-the-Holy-Banana', we may be able to let this one go."] [Doug: 9/3/07 13:21]


	The Thompson Threat The election of a photogenic, gruff, yet masculine President brings with it an unacceptable risk of globe-threatening catastrophe. Consider the following: Attractive female scientist: "It is a comet as large as Nevada, and it is heading straight for Earth" The President: "May God preserve us!" Distinguished African-American General: "Sir, the Swarm has surrounded the White House." The President: "Bees! They were supposed to be our friends!" We are in no danger of Mitt Romney or John Edwards ever uttering these words. With Thompson, however, something like them seems almost inevitable. Vote your conscience, America. [Ben A.: 9/3/07 10:41]


	... A Stall in an Airport Bathroom! Please note that this is merely a remark on current events and in no way related to my previous posts! Seriously, the Grand Old Pederasts are on quite a roll. Can't wait to see the presidential nominee. The name of this guy Thompson keeps popping up in the news; I gather he's an actor. Nostalgia for the Reagan administration and a time before today's total intellectual and moral bankruptcy? Or a feeling that, since Bush Jr's dream-based policies held up poorly when confronted with reality, we ought to veer more decisively into make-believe? [Doug: 9/3/07 10:04]


	Golden Age Seen (and sampled) at work: Pringles' "flame-grilled steak & caramelised onion flavour". [Doug: 9/2/07 12:41]


	The 2007 "Pimp Jane Austen" Awards As Ben A memorably told us, the film "Becoming Jane" richly deserves this year's award. (It has, of course, already won the Oscar in the category Present Participle Proper Noun.) Starting with the premise that the young ... wait, what's this!? A dark horse is catching up to "Becoming Jane" ... it's the back cover of my Mansfield Park paperback! And at the finish line, it wins by the length of its concluding ellipsis, which begs us to write in a last word or two: Eighteen-year-old Fanny has grown up in the shadow of her glamorous relations. In fact, no one seems to remember she's there at all, which is why they don't notice that she's gradually been falling in love. But while she hides a secret passion, she has no idea she's become an object of interest herself for another admirer. As a scandal begins to unfold that will have devastating effects on everyone, Fanny discovers that love will blossom in the most unusual of places ... Since this is a FAMILY WEBLOG your suggestions for ways to end this sentence are NOT SOLICITED. Let me just add that there is more "secret passion" in every other book currently on my table, and that includes "Programming PHP". [Doug: 9/1/07 07:23]


	Headline: Vials of Nerve Gas Discovered in Office at U.N. The solution is pretty obvious: open them! [Ben H.: 8/30/07 12:38]


	My Take On The Whole American Health/Pharmaceutical/Insurance Thing A truly free-market system like one that Ben and Ben might design would be okay. A nationalized system would be okay (and indeed is okay in France and Canada). What isn't okay is the wretched patchwork of businesses, regulations, lobbyists, stress, uncertainty, and infinitely duplicated paperwork that exists in the US today. The deadweight loss is just incredible. There are many defensible answers to the question "who should receive medical treatment"; "Those who can yell into a telephone at insurance company flaks the longest" is not among them. Here's my proposal. George Bush flips a nice, chunky Eisenhower dollar in a Rose Garden ceremony. Heads, he re-animates Ayn Rand and makes her Health Czarina. Tails, he gives the job to Michael Moore. We win either way. [Doug: 8/29/07 02:26]


	Naipaul On academics: "They publish the books for these courses, and it gives an illusion for great popularity, of ideas sweeping the world. But they’re not. They’re just ideas in grubby little textbooks that are stuffed in students’ bags." Self-interest vs. Ignorance Let's hope you're right, Ben H. My sense is that when ignorance meets self-interest, ignorance wins. [Ben A.: 8/27/07 23:06]


	Politics of Pharma Price Controls It's my impression that the the limousine left does not show much enthusiasm for pharma price controls. It's an eloquent silence, one which supports my view that hollywood leftism is ultimately grounded in the same self-interest as most political ideologies. The rich will always have the purchasing power to pay the market price for drugs. To the extent that price controls will retard the progress of drug science, the rich are denied non-existent drugs no less than the poor. Consider how the politics of global warming "abatement" (and environemntalism by state regulation more broadly) run in the opposite direction. A stable climate is pretty much a good of exclusively public character, that no rich person can buy on the open market. Throwing money at pro-regulation politician is the only practical way for the rich to purchase this particular good. [Ben H.: 8/27/07 19:18]


	Are American Actresses The Dumbest People In The World, As Commonly Supposed? I don't know, but French actress Fanny Ardant gives them stiff competition, saying to an Italian interviewer that the Red Brigade's founder was a hero. It's appropriate that her name, in British English, translates as "flaming twat". [Doug: 8/27/07 02:12]


	Why Did I Link That Epstein Piece? Why did I link that Epstein review-of-a-review below? An explanation is in order on two fronts. First, content: To anyone not interested in the US health care debate, it’s inside baseball and not terribly useful. Second, intellectual hygiene: I am generally of Epstein’s party insofar as the pharmaceutical industry goes, and so it is bad practice for me to dwell on mismatches in the favor of my position. Relman is out of his depth criticizing Epstein, and is trounced as a result. Market advocates like myself should focus on mismatches the other way if we want to learn anything. (Uwe Reinhard vs. John Stossel?) So again, why the link? Three points: 1. Stupidity at the mainstream, not at the edges. Relman served as editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, and the New Republic is a major center-left policy journal. These are voices of the respectable mainstream, and they are advocating policy on the basis of ignorance, stupidity, and spleen. Relman, to take one stunning example, refers to time-value of money as “speculative” concept. This, in the context of a discussion of research and development. If you believe, as I do, that a relatively free market in pharmaceuticals has enormously increased human well-being over the past thirty years, this should chill your blood. 2. From interest group to villain category. Whenever an interest group becomes closely tied to one political party, it inevitably becomes a villain. “Trial Lawyers” and “Big Pharma” play these respective roles currently on right and left, and one could list numerous others (teacher’s unions and ‘evangelicals,’ in the spirit of ostentatious even-handedness). It is of course very natural to appreciate those who fund your friends, but if the goal is to understand how the world works, at some point the division of society into rival camps must have an end. It is now rare to see a conservative acknowledge the positive role of the tort system or a progressive to acknowledge the value of a private pharmaceutical industry. The result of this is that nonsense of the kind Relman spews finds its home in the New Republic. 3. Political vulnerability. The Pharmas have money to burn, heaven knows, and they may just succeed in buying their way to invulnerability. Certainly Medicare D supports this view. Nonetheless, the basic political logic of pharmaceutical price controls is so powerful that they seem inevitable. Democratic politics excels at mortgaging the future. Price controls provides benefits immediately, the damage from reduced R+D will occur in the future, and will be hard to quantify. Indeed, these costs may not even be recognized if those formulating policy are as ignorant as Relman. [Ben A.: 8/27/07 01:42]


	Those Who Don't Get This Joke Should Thank Their Lucky Stars Procrastination Studios Presents Kaboom! The New Republic printed a fairly silly review of Richard Epstein's latest book on pharmaceutical policy. Epstein's response is devastating. [Epstein takes some false steps -- on conflict of interest raised by pharma detailing in particular -- but overall, yikes!] [Ben A.: 8/24/07 10:39]


	Wisdom via withywindle [Ben A.: 8/23/07 09:45]


	Nixon, Kissinger, Westmoreland ... Pansies! Bush's assertion that they succumbed to the "deceptive allure of retreat" gives a nudge to the process, already well underway, at whose end the set of his supporters and the set of people who wish we were still fighting the "gooks" will be identical. At least we will all be able to savor together the moment when he goes on TV to say, "Prime Minister al-Maliki, I've got three words for you: Ngo. Dinh. Diem." [Doug: 8/23/07 03:52]


	Spectacular Poetry, the best words in the best order. --Coleridge (via Haspel) [Ben A.: 8/22/07 13:55]


	Mansfield Park I eagerly await your term paper Doug. Most of what I have to saw about Mansfield Park has been put better by others. Tony Tanner wrote a good introduction to the original Penguin edition that captures most of what I have to say here. The Philosopher’s Heroine The puzzle of Mansfield Park is its heroine. Austen makes Fanny Price hard to like. In particular, she makes Fanny hard to like as a heroine by depriving her of active virtues. Fanny is physically weak, she is not witty, she is not assertive. Throughout the book, she remains passive, acted on rather than acting. If Fanny’s deficits were not apparent enough, they are made even more obvious by contrast with the scintillating Mary Crawford. Mary surpasses Fanny completely: she plays the harp, Fanny has no music; she takes immediately to riding, Fanny remains after years of practice a timid horsewoman; unlike the (almost) humorless Fanny, Mary is consistently and spontaneously amusing. Austen gives her some of the best lines in the novel, including the (very funny) comments on the “brotherly style” of letter-writing. What Fanny does possess are good principles and the judgment to apply them. Within this scope, Fanny is flawless. She always judges correctly and as a result acts as appropriately as her situation and character will allow.* Austen is being very direct here. Fanny possesses the master virtue. Mary, with all her charms, lacks it, and is ultimately revealed as something of a moral monster. This is a fascinating thought experiment to play out, but the consequence is a protagonist not herself compelling. My heart still belongs to Elizabeth Bennett. *This infuriates a certain type of reader. Kingsley Amis – who no doubt saw in Fanny the model of every woman who saw through him and consequently would not put out – famously declared Fanny “morally detestable.” That tells you all you need to know about Kingsley Amis as a potential son-in-law. [Ben A.: 8/20/07 00:56]


	Summertime is "Recycled Content" time Crap, I need an extension on my Mansfield Park paper. I may even have to take an incomplete in Jane Austen studies. My normally copious free time has been slashed since Dao hired to me to help finish coding a new website that's behind schedule. (She must really be desperate!) In order to fill up some <tr>'s here, I offer a brief excerpt from "The Prosperity Pentagram", the success-book parody project I came up with five or six years ago. Its strongest point was surely the drawings and figures that Shannon McG generously contributed. (I think they're in the basement.) After five years in the drawer, the verbal portion appears quite deserving of the rejection that several literary agents gave it -- a flabby imitation of Dave Barry, whose genius remains untouchable. What prompted me to fish it out of my hard drive was our friends Trond and Tina's project for a serious business book. Some of the goofier passages can still make me smile. Here is a small sampling for a slow news day. The following passage occurs in a chapter on hot careers for 2002. --- America’s push for more diversity and multiculturalism in the ranks of its enemies has spawned a huge demand for translators. Today’s wiretap recipients aren’t all white male Russians. In fact, a majority are Arab. To get a sense of the acute need for more competence here, consider the FBI Arabic Department’s rendering of a phone call intercepted before September 11. Mullah Omar’s statement meaning “Big birds peck the twins on the eleventh” was instead translated “These damn slippers my wife got me are not at all comfortable”. The FBI has defended its job on the grounds that the conversation, upon further investigation, turned out to have been in Urdu. But this simply shows that competent translators are now needed in a variety of languages. Law Enforcement Desperately Needs Help Translating The Following: Arabic Urdu Tagalog Chechnyan James Brown Just imagine how many lives could be spared by a more precise translation of this recently overheard threat: When I hold uranium [?] arms I know that I can do no wrong And when I hold [unintelligible] arms My love [?] do Urdu [?] harm ... Wooaaaa! I feel good! Before you rush out to purchase “Counterintelligence for Dummies”, however, you should consider the difficulties in learning languages such as Arabic. Just to take one example, Arabic is written from right to left. Even geniuses need three to four years of study to read fluently. It is true that some students bypass these years by purchasing a hand mirror, but proper linguists consider this “cheating”. --- [The following passage is prophetic of the shift in business literature toward animal stories!] [... D]uring the bubble years, you or someone you love probably got lured into in a start-up venture purporting to be "cutting edge". If you found yourself on the sharp end of this edge when the bubble burst, your impulse now might be to retreat to some earthy, honest toil that never becomes obsolete, like carpentry, farming, or prostitution. Fight this impulse. Yes, these occupations will be around forever, but they are already taken. Just because there’s less demand for broadband therapists and feng shui engineers like you, doesn't mean that there’s suddenly more demand for apple-pickers and brick-layers. Indeed, folks who humbly picked apples and laid bricks throughout the gay 90's will resent your trying to muscle in on their territory now. Let's recall Aesop's famous poem, "The Ant And The Grasshopper". The Ant and the Grasshopper often worked late, Harvesting kernels of corn. One night the Grasshopper said to the Ant, "I shan't see you here in the morn." "Why?" said the Ant, "You know the rules: You must work, or starve ere the spring!" "Not at all!" said the Grasshopper, packing his tools, "Cicada has taught me to sing!" Indeed, the Cicada had buzzed in to share His musical corn-making spell: For one kernel even, he'd teach you an air That you, for yet more, might re-sell. Soon all the fields were abuzz with the strains Of this chirping, this teaching of airs, And the cleverest insects sold songs not for grains, But apprentices' future corn-shares. These insects then lived as though each were Queen Bee, And scorned those (like Ant) who sang not, But when winter came, suddenly, They found they had eaten the lot! Cicada said "cycles" were wholly to blame And returned to his underground seat; To Ant's house the Grasshopper sheepishly came, for forgiveness, and something to eat. "If you were wise," said the Ant quietly, "You'd heed the advice that I pass: If you don't leave my hole by the time I count three, I'll shove this corn-cob up your ass!" Now Aesop is clearly speaking metaphorically here. There is no way an entire corn-cob could fit through an insect’s rectum. Yet his message is clear: those who vaunted their bubble-success will not be welcomed into the brotherhood of honest workers when the bubble pops. [Doug: 8/19/07 15:17]


	Curse you, alien! It's been a wild week-and-a-half here, I can assure you. For the moment, the fed's move on the discount rate has unblocked the machinery of finance. The deadline for 3Q redemption from many hedge funds passed on the 15th. The fed announced it's move on the morning of the 16th. Do you suppose the fed waited until after the redemption deadline so as not to affect redemption decisions? If the fed worries about creating moral hazard, taking account of the deadline makes a lot of sense. [Ben H.: 8/17/07 13:16]


	Wretched Alien! Look what your beguiling shimmy has wrought. [Doug: 8/17/07 11:41]


	Pssst, Looking For Some Debussy? I am not a Debussy fanatic but one CD of piano music we own has come into such heavy rotation that I thought I'd mention it. It's a Philips disc of Werner Haas recordings from the early 60's. Where they stand in the canon of the Debussy interpretations I couldn't begin to tell you, and I'm not much better equipped to speak of Debussy's place in the piano composition canon. All I can say is that, to me, this stuff is astonishing. And luminous. Squared. "Mouvement" from "Images", Book 2. "Pagodes" from "Estampes". Toccata from "Pour le piano". [Doug: 8/14/07 16:59]


	Apostate! My memories of "Homer's Enemy" are too clouded for me to weigh in on what Wikipedia calls one of the most controversial episodes ever. The Frank Grimes character worked for me. However, I think by this point the show was slipping or had slipped dangerously into evil Homer/retarded Homer mode. If that's your beef with the episode, your point is taken. (Is it?) However, there are a lot of babies to throw out with this bathwater, if we're saying yes or no to whole seasons (which isn't obligatory, but would probably be easier to justify). Consider these other Season 8 (1996/7) episodes (transcribed from this handy list: The Halloween episode in which Kang or Kodos says "We must go forward, not backwards! Upwards, not forwards! And always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom!" The Hank Scorpio episode. Certainly in my top five; the syndication gods connived to keep it away from my eyes for years despite addictive viewing habits. At some point (late 2000 I think) I gave up trying to see it again. One evening Dao insisted on watching The Sound of Music on TV and I relented, without flipping away to see if, against all odds, the Hank Scorpio episode was being aired. At the closing credits, I flipped to Fox 5, saw the closing Simpsons credits with the stupendous Scorpio theme song playing, and in a reflex of rage threw the remote across the room and broke it. (I have since seen it.) The episode where Flanders' house is destroyed and he ends up in a mental institution was pretty funny, no? This point in the season is the end of 1996. I have to say that, as we move into 1997, things get dire very quickly. There is the X-Files spoof, which sticks out in my mind as one of the worst ever. There is the "Poochie" episode, a contender for the shark-jumping moment. The "slurry" episode was funny because of the slurry and otherwise forgettable. At the tail end of the season we get the insane genius of the "Mr. Sparkle" box, but embedded in a lackluster episode. Looking at this list of episodes, I get the impression of a genius that has nearly burned itself out, throwing off a few last sparks as brilliant as any it's produced before, but fading inexorably to black. Seasons 9 and above are, indeed, the outer darkness. [Doug: 8/12/07 18:17]


	Endorsing the Simpsons Canon So long as "Homer's Enemy" is cast into the outer darkness, you can count me in. Your take on the movie matches mine -- just a funny movie. [Ben A.: 8/12/07 11:17]


	Simpsons Movie: Not Bad Neither bad, nor good enough to satisfy someone (like me) who venerates the early Simpsons seasons. In fact this movie may drive me to finally animate the Simpsons Canon Project. Any religion that accumulates enough texts eventually finds it necessary to jettison some of them, usually those that offend the dominant sect, or that just suck. Of course you can't just say to your congregation that this or that text is no longer the word of God because it sucks; you need some kind of pretext. This holds for the Simpsons too. My goal is to watch DVD's of all the seasons, discover which ones suck (presumably those after the 1996/97 season or thereabouts), discover some trait that unifies them (presumably the presence of some new bad writers or the absence of some old good ones -- but see also the Evil Homer thesis), and declare them to be, by virtue of that trait, Apocrypha. Yes, these hours upon hours of TV images feature a visually indistinguishable yellow-skinned family, but they are simply not the Simpsons. Signatures will be collected at SimpsonsCanonProject.com once I figure out what the manifesto should say. What's really remarkable about this project is that, by launching it, I would simultaneously attain the status of true web dork and crotchety old "back in my day, TV was much better" guy. [Doug: 8/11/07 17:15]


	The Alien One of the most squirm-inducing adverts in recent memory. I can hardly stay on a web page when he's gyrating away in my peripheral vision. It's vaguely obscene. What kind of person clicks on the dancing alien? [Ben A.: 8/11/07 02:26]


	Stay Classy, Hollywood James Bowman, author of my favorite quote about Hollywood ("vulgar Freudianism is the official religion of Tinseltown")comes down hard on what sounds like an utterly atrocious, and needless to say, mendacious Jane Austen bio-pic. In this movie, we learn, Jane Austen a) admired a philandering rake, b) saw his philadnering as admirable, and c) was swept away by being read an account of swallows mating. I suppose we can complement the director's restraint in neglecting to disinter Austen's skeleton and set it on fire. [Ben A.: 8/11/07 02:03]


	Report from the Trenches The subprime blow-up has sent sparking embers into the dry forest of other credit markets. And from there, the fire has spread even to markets as ostensibly insulated as statistical arbitrage. It's ugly. One thing I'd like to gloatingly point out: the subprime mess provides yet more evidence of my Theory of American Current Account Sustainability. Somewhere on this blog (no time to find the old post), I pooh-poohed fears about the US current account deficit by noting that the US has typically squared its intertemporal balance-of-payments by inflicting capital losses on the rest of the world. That's exactly what the subprime meltdown is doing. The rest of the world, awash in dollars, looked for spread product to buy with those dollars. Clever investment banks packaged chicken shit in exotic tranching arrangements, stamped the lower-risk tranches with a Moody's or S&P "AAA" and sold it as chicken salad to ignorant European and Asian investors. Did you see the first bank taken down by subprime exposure? It wasn't a US bank. It was IKB of Germany... [Ben H.: 8/10/07 06:09]


	Ah, Summer World History goes on vacation and there's nothing much to worry about except stock market gyrations. Speaking of which, these subprime mortgage woes have me puzzled. I don't see how any industry can be "tottering" that is built on the full faith and credit of that amazing dancing alien. I mean, have you seen that alien? p.s. I swear I'm going to write a serious post about Mansfield Park one of these days. [Doug: 8/10/07 01:15]


	Mansfield Park "In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The rest might wait." [Ben A.: 8/6/07 20:14]


	Sowood Sosorry it lost Somuch for Somany Sowood Capital's blow-up will cost Harvard, one of its seed investors, an estimated $350mio. Time for a little gloating. Sowood got its start when one of Harvard Management Co's highly-paid star investors left HMC in the wake of controversy over his outsized bonus. After the hippydippies of the class of '69 succeeded in chasing away the last of the Jack Meyer dream-team, I noted here that Harvard would wind up having the same people manage the money on an outsourced basis. As a result, Harvard would pay higher fees under a worse scheme (no clawbacks for losses), with much less oversight of the ultimate risk-takers. The chickens came home to roost with surprising alacrity. Jeff Larsen, Sowood's founder, made his name as an international equity trader. At Sowood, however, he drifted more into credit trading. Had he still been working at HMC, perhaps risk managers would have prevented this style drift or reined it in. Instead, Larsen took Sowood over the cliff and with it $350mio of Harvard's money. Oh, I'm sure it will be OK. Those professors, activists and politicians among the Class of '69 group will make it up in donations, right? [Ben H.: 8/1/07 07:02]


	Damn, I had that the summer of junior year in college. Not fun. [Doug: 7/31/07 08:57]


	Sorry that I've been silent for the past week or so. I somehow contrived to give myself a nasty dose of poison ivy. In fact, in between Calomine applications I very carefully (and covered up) took botanical survey of my backyard, the only place I could conceive of having encountered the noxious weed. Except that poison ivy did not cause my rash. Rather, I had come down with shingles. And in retrospect, I should have known. I did so much feel itchy; rather, it was like somebody had set a patch of my flesh on fire. I'm happy to report that I'm nearly mended... [Ben H.: 7/30/07 13:56]


	Vacation Just got back from a week's vacation in the regions of Sarthe and Brittany. We'd originally planned to go to Auvergne (to a spa town like Cauterets in the Pyrenees, which Ben A will remember, only even more musty and faded); when Dao's colleagues unanimously said "Ewwwww, nobody goes there", we had to switch to a more acceptable location. Parisians love to go to Brittany because it's relatively close yet feels wonderfully far away from Paris -- and indeed it could easily pass for Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (That's a little unfair since Lancaster doesn't have a coast to provide vistas and seafood.) Since the weather was pretty bad, the highlights of the vacation were a pintade with girolles and toasted hazelnuts, a dinner of the aforementioned seafood, and playing OUISTITI in Scrabble against Dao (who won pretty much all the other matches). Here are some pictures. [Doug: 7/30/07 06:19]


	The Future Of Business Books Eleven years ago Ben H and I were walking around Irvine, CA, and Ben, then a consultant, was trying to explain some business concept to me, using the metaphor of ants climbing up bushes. I followed the little parable, but as soon as he switched back into talking about money and contracts and whatnot, my eyes kind of glazed over, and I said something like, "Can we go back to the ants? That I understood." Now, I may have felt a bit dumb at the time, but if I had only taken my sentiment to its logical conclusion I might have become a best-selling author. It seems that successful business books must now explain everything in terms of animals. [Doug: 7/30/07 05:48]


	Best Conceivable Book Blurb Joe Queenan had a funny article in the NY Times a few months ago revealing that my angry obsession with "luminous" novels, and the reviewers who describe them as such, is somewhat outdated. Several years ago, overwhelmed by the flood of material unleashed annually by the publishing industry, I decided to establish a screening program by purchasing only books that at least one reviewer had described as "astonishing." Previously, I had limited my purchases to merchandise deemed "luminous" or "incandescent," but this meant I ended up with an awful lot of novels about bees, Provence or Vermeer. The problem with incandescent or luminous books is that they veer toward the introspective, the arcane or the wise, while I prefer books that go off like a Roman candle. When I buy a book, I don't want to come away wiser or happier or even better informed. I want to get blown right out of the water by the author's breathtaking pyrotechnics. I want to come away astonished. I was reminded of this article by my first purchase in a long while of an English-language paperback, "Out Stealing Horses" (which happens to be a translation from Norwegian). It's a genuinely good novel (maybe I'll say more about it later) but it is not "stunning" (Daily Telegraph), "breathtaking" (Daily Express), or a "miracle" (Irish Times). (Whether it merits the obligatory "luminous" (The Independent) I leave to others to judge.) If all these adjectives are now de rigueur for merely good novels, what can one say about a genuinely great novel? To answer this question, let us posit a new novel by Michael Chabon, call it Pirandello's Palimpsest, and let us try to come up with the ultimate book blurb for it. Here's my entry: Away with you! Do not importune me for book blurbs, news, or anything else, while I am blissfully rocking back and forth like a madrassa student reciting the best passages of "Pirandello's Palimpsest", as I have been since finishing it a month ago, and as I intend to for the rest of my days. --Tom Brokaw [Doug: 7/29/07 05:56]