Bandarlog


	Shocked and Outraged; but not Awed "Foam-flecked" really captures the tone of politics as practiced in the Iowa and New Hampshire primary season. The hyperbolic indignation of each campaign at the slightest attack of the others puzzles me. One candidate chides the other for some inconsistency and the target's spokesperson fulminates that it is, "just this kind of vicious mudslinging that has made the American people fed up with politics-as-usual" (or some similarly breathless complaint). Who does this ginned-up outrage convince? Is is supposed to rile up the candidates activist base? Wouldn't even they realize that such a statement is pretty much out of proportion to any attack short of calling the candidate a paedophile? The charge and indignant response has become a really queer ritual, not unlike, as Andrew Ferguson aptly observes, what you might observe at a Star Trek convention. I think it's more like a pre-modern drama; maybe like a Webster play, all convoluted intrigues with poisons, and stylized 15-minute-and-two-scene death agonies. The actor doesn't believe his lines, the audience doesn't take them seriously, so why does either side care for the show to go on? Increasingly, the political audience doesn't. Yet the candidates' imagemakers and publicists persist in their invective and their meretricious umbrage, perfecting what has become a purely abstract craft. But unlike the authors of, say, Clerihews or No plays, they show no awareness of how detached from reality their art has become. Do you guys think that to is an act, that their efforts are in fact purely perfunctory (but their boredom is well concealed) or do you believed that their are coccooned in an alternative reality? [1/12/04 19:22]


	It's Funny Because It's True "Unless you have a natural taste for it, politics in the age of cable and blogs must seem as cultic as a "Star Trek" convention--and what sensible person, watching a foam-flecked debate over the relative merits of Spock and Bones, would want to be a Trekkie?" --Andrew Ferguson [1/12/04 16:42]


	Don't feel you need to justify "isonomy" -- its roots are as obvious as a bad dye job's. But its history is interesting. I was gratified that Safire sanctioned my use of "actionable" yesterday. But the word of the week is "Schlagsahne", German for "whipped cream", which we had at Enja's baby shower yesterday. (Yes the men were invited.) [1/12/04 16:16]


	Tinfoilhead and the Jeffordsian Metamorphosis By now, you've probably read about fomer Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's 'revelations' about George Bush and the Bush White House. I will not repeat them at length, but in case you haven't seen them, take a look here. Referring to his past role as CEO of Alcoa and also to his strange, inappropriate public manner, my desk took to referring to him as Tinfoilhead. O'Neill's tenure as Treasury Secretary was a disaster. He would pop up in the news from time to time, wearing a zombie-like expression, to make a wildly inappropriate comment and then to disappear back into the bowels of the Treasury building. Many of them I remember especially well, because they had to do with U.S. policy toward the emerging markets. While Brazil teetered on the edge of the abyss and its leading presidential candidate (now President Lula) prepared to make painful but salubrious policy commitments in exchange for IMF aid, Tinfoilhead declared testily that he didn't think American "plumbers' and carpenters' taxes" should be given to countries like Brazil so the money can "end up in some Swiss bank account." He prompty sent all the Latin markets into a tail spin and almost managed to push Brazil over the precipice. And what did this avatar of tough love do in the end? He gave record bail-outs to Brazil, Turkey, and Argentina. When the financial markets reacted to some dumb pronouncement of his in a way that displeased him, he airily dismissed all Wall Street traders. "They stare at a green screen all day," he said and went on to claim that he could learn to do the job given "six weeks." He also pissed off the left with his off-the-cuff declaration, unendorsed by anyone in the administration, that anyone who knows anything could see that the corporate income tax should be repealed. The mainstream press reacted indignantly to each of these gaffes, painted O'Neill (rightly, I think, though I won't get into a detailed argument in favor of the proposition here) as a hack and a buffoon, criticized how he tried to hold on to his Alcoa options even while entering government, and savaged Bush for having selected perhaps the worst Treasury Secretary of the post-war era. Now that O'Neill has made characteristically brusque, broad and unsubstantiated charges against Bush, we will soon see if Tinfoilhead undergoes the same metamorphosis as did one-time rube and latter-day profile-in-conscience James Jeffords. Watch for the press to talk of O'Neill as a "respected captain of industry" (not the grasping former bureaucrat who got a place at Alcoa and reaped a windfall there thanks to his public sector contacts, as they use to describe him); as an "independent voice" who paid with his job for his refusal to toe the Bush line (not the out-of-his-depth loose cannon causing chaos with one ill-considered comment after another); as a "advocate of fiscal rectitude" whose conscience would not allow him to preside over a widening budget deficit (not an insensitive baron of industry in favor of turning back the clock to a highly-regressive, consumption-oriented tax system). It's not impossible: Jeffords was once the "dumbest" Senator, a man of few words only out of necessity. Once he switched parties, he became a flinty, independent-spirited New Englander, a quiet man of deep conscience. [1/10/04 12:29]


	Isonomy.. "...a word which the Elizabethans borrowed from the Greeks but which has since gone out of use [not in the bandarlog! -ed]. 'Isonomia' was imported into England from Italy at the end of the sixteenth century as a word meaning 'equality of laws to all manner of persons'; shortly afterward it was freely used by the translator of Livy in the Englished form 'isonomy' to describe a state of equal laws for all and responsibility of the magistrates. It continued in use during the seventeenth century until 'equality before the law,' 'government of law,' or 'rule of law' gradually displaced it... "The history of the concept in ancient Greece provides an interesting lesson because it probably represents the first instance of a cycle that civilizations seem to repeat. WHen it first appeared, it described a state which Solon had earlier established in Athens when he gave the people 'equal laws for the noble and the base,' and thereby gave them 'not so much control of public policy as the certainty of being governed legally in accordance with known rules.' Isonomy was contrasted with the arbitrary rule of tyrants... The concept seems to be older than than of demokratia, and the demand for equal participation of all in the government appears to have been one of its consequences. To Herodotus it is still isonomy rather than democracy which is the 'most beatiful of all names of a political order.'" -- F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty pp.164-165 I recommend the whole thing. [1/10/04 11:57]


	I think it would be fun to replace certain words of beatles songs with "isonomy". "All we are saying, is give isonomy a chance." "All you need is isonomy." Now I'll read the rest of these posts. [1/9/04 19:13]


	How Can I Need What I Don't Understand I really can't beleive I got through six years of philosophy and didn't get "isonomy." Bummer. But let me object to the substance of your point. We all recognize opportunities for cynicism inherent in democracy, and the proverbial definition of electoral politics as "the art of buying a man's loyalty with a grant of his own money." Fair enough, and those driven to fits of rage by predictable interest group politics can rightly be derided as naive. But that doesn't mean political cynicism has no bottom. There must be a stopping place, a point where interest group politicing moves from predictable log-rolling to the obviously corrupt. The response "everyone does it" isn't always true: everyone doesn't advocate for a frickin' moonbase. That's over the line, damn it! [1/9/04 18:29]


	That's Democracy You let just anybody vote and what you get is a Moonbase. I wish that those in favor of an activist policy in the Middle East would stop talking about bringing democracy to the region. They don't need a Moonbase, either, though I suspect their demogogues would opt for a less benign megaproject. What they need, what we all need, is liberty and isonomy. A certain amount of electoral influence over the direction of the government helps preserve liberty and isonomy, but it will not create either, nor will more elections mean more liberty and more perfect isonomy. It will, however, mean more Moonbases and speculations about the effect of cardigan sweaters on the voting patterns of middle-aged women. [1/9/04 17:28]


	To Infinity and Beyond Perhaps it's sollipsism, but I increasingly see presidential elections as just another mechanism the world employs to make me feel disgusted about myself. This reflection was occassioned by the unveiling of the new Bush space plan. So depressing. I'm not trying to be Morris the cat here -- I'll cheerfully overlook serious flaws to get a foreign policy I regard as basically sound. But how can I vote for someone who advances boondoggles of such staggering magnitude? Why must the choice be between a moonbase, Howard Dean, and arrogant neophyte/Clinton cats-paw Wesley Clark? [1/9/04 16:07]


	Polish Cuisine Many months ago I posted about liking some Eastern European/Russian food, and about going to a decent Polish restaurant in Paris. Today we tried out a Polish joint in our new neighborhood (East Village), called "Little Poland". The "Little" in its name is misleading. The portions are fit for NFL linemen, which looked like it might have been the previous career of some of the waitresses there. I also take issue with the menu cover: "Our food is as wonderful as music of Chopin." This may be so false as to be legally actionable. It would be funny to take them to small claims court, with a waltz-playing boom-box in one hand, a lump of greasy, tasteless pierogy in the other. [1/9/04 10:17]


	Smarm Watch Inspirational morning message from Citibank today: "There is no fluctuation in the value of the compliment." Ha. Ha. Ha. [1/9/04 10:02]


	Dude ... it's, like, a whole nother language Installing new version of voice-recognition software here, I see that the company just gave up trying to pretend that one program could handle both teenager-speak and English. The first installation choice is vocabulary: "general" or "teen". This reminds me of a good friend of ours in Paris who nonetheless uses "was like" to mean "said" in English. What's funny is that she translates this literally when speaking French. "J'etais comme, 'c'est pas vrai'! et il etait comme, 'si si'!" [1/8/04 18:59]


	"If there's one Democratic candidate who knows how many hit dice a Gelatinous Cube has, it's Dennis Kucinich" Check out the pants leg. Alas, I cannot claim authorship of the caption in the title. [1/7/04 20:39]


	Expunging the Colon: An Interdisciplinary Approach You guys surely remember the screensaver we programmed back in college. A context-free grammar generated plausible humanities paper titles, which flashed across our Mac CRTs. Some large fraction of the generated titles were of the form Blah Blah: Towards a Blah Blah Blah. I think we very cleverly captured many of the annoying mannerisms of pretentious paper titles, but it was the colon that for most viewers identified the butt of the program's mockery. Apparently, even in the hermetic confines of academia, they now recognize that gratuitous display of the colon tends to disgust. [1/7/04 18:49]


	Live Richly, Die Poorly I have always suspected that Citigroup launched that ad campaign not to attract new customers but to prepare existing customers. The bank will preach about the merely subordinate importance of money for a few years and then uncork a Parmalat on its remaining depositors. "It's true, we lost all your money investing in an ill-conceived Martingale strategy at the roulette tables," the spokesman will announce. "But, as you know, there are more important things than the integrity of your bank account. At Citigroup, we've always maintained that." In fact, the ads may take the most annoying possible tone in order to drive away anyone who really cares deeply about his money. That way, when the financial disaster is revealed, Citigroup will be left with the customer base least likely to sue or storm their branches with pitchforks in hand. [1/6/04 14:26]


	Smarm Watch Has your market been penetrated by Citigroup's insufferably smarmy "live richly" ads? If not, here's a funny introduction and critique from Slate. It begins: Surely one of the most bizarre ad campaigns of recent years has been Citigroup's "Live Richly" series of billboard, TV, and print ads, all of which carry the implicit message, "Money isn't all that important" � a healthy worldview, perhaps, but not one that's necessarily reassuring coming from an institution whose sole job is to protect your money. But the ultimate rebuttal -- ultimate because it may actually hit Citigroup's bottom line -- was just launched by the bank ING. Example slogans from their new ads: "Love has never been the international language"; "Learn to count higher." Help the fight against smarm! Open an account at ING! [1/6/04 10:22]


	heh [1/6/04 10:22]


	Quality Through Quantity It's the season of year end lists, and equally, the season of list-criticism. And true enough, compiling a list of the top ten novels/movies/exhibits of the year/decade/millenium necessarily involves jarring comparisons across genre and tone. As much a hardy perennial as the year-end lists themselves are the arguments against the very notion of a list, or at least gentle mocking of list conventions. I myself am a pro-list partisan. Top X lists provide a useful summary of a critic's taste -- his assseement of broad field may render transparant aspects of his judgment that do not emerge from indvidual reviews. I also find these lists the easiest ways to identify worthwhile books/movies that slipped past my notice duing the year. So you can imagine my delight at finding a massive aggregation of critics top ten bests and worsts of the year. Enjoy [1/6/04 09:31]


	Faith +1 Spectacular photos, Doug. The group picture has an album cover look... [1/6/04 07:55]


	Photoblogging Pictures from New Year's upstate. Strangely, I find more inclined to photoblog in New York than in Paris or Hanoi. The other day I saw some street vendors on Broadway selling knockoff goods with a sign saying "Only 5 frigging dollars!!!" Wish I'd had the camera. These, however, aren't our pictures but Enja's. Thanks Enja! [1/5/04 19:42]


	Comic Transcends the Dialectic of History A while back, the name Yakov Smirnov came up on the desk here. Among the few sad consequences of the fall of the Soviet Empire could be counted the end of Yakov Smirnov's career. He built out of the pitiful humiliations of life under a totalitarian regime what he must have imagined would be a timeless schtick. And then the butt of the jokes passed from existence. He might has well have been a Roman comic telling one-liners about Nero. But life in Soviet Russia bred in Mr. Smirnov great resourcefulness. As it turns out, he has a very popular act -- at his own theater -- in Branson, Missouri, the country music kitch capital of the U.S.. Unable to get the yucks and make the bucks with jabs at the Evil Empire, he turned his gimlet eye to the oddities of his new home and the foibles of his new countrymen. As Yakov would say, "What a Country!" His act kills the audience. Good thing he is no longer in Russia; in Russia, the audience kills you! (This is literally true, as we saw in the theater hostage crisis, if Chechens are in the audience). [1/2/04 16:48]


	In Soviet Russia, Bandarlog update you! Sorry to hear that your New Year's was such a bummer, Ben. We went up to Thor's family's place upstate with Thor, HK, Enja, Joerg, Walt, Susan, and Thor's friend Brian. It's great to be back in New York among friends who share the same American nerd cultural background, where all of one's Simpsons and Monty Python references are appreciated. We have great friends in Paris too, but I can't imagine any of them responding (in a Yakov Smirnov voice) to all sentences of the form "subject verbs object" with "In Soviet Russia, object verb you!" Thor started doing this in plausible ways ("I was watching TV" -- "In Soviet Russia, TV watch you!") but it became the holiday's running joke and got funnier as the iterations got more nonsensical: In Soviet Russia, website surf you! All in all it was a wonderful holiday full of rum drinks, roast pork, and enormous home entertainment systems (I had no idea how far this aspect of American life had advanced in our three-year absence). It's great being thirty, with a grownup's salary and no children to suck it up. In fact, with Enja eight months pregnant and most of the rest of us married with children a real possibility, we are probably now basking in the zenith of our disposable income. Basking in a zenith? Consider yourself lucky, comrade. In Soviet Russia, zenith bask in you! [1/2/04 16:14]


	Still Here... You might think I mean that New York has not succumbed to a nuclear blast. In fact, I was referring to my own New Year's Eve at the office. Despite a rigorously organized year-end book-closing process, which I mostly completed on Dec 30, my crack HQ managed to drag out the final steps until 8:30pm tonight. By the end, I yearned for an atomic blast to end my frustration. [1/1/04 02:30]


	New York New Year In the last three years a new factor has entered calculations of where to spend New Year's in New York: in addition to choosing price, distance, desired blood alcohol level, return time, and probability of being pelted with bottles or vomit, you must now estimate your distance from likely nuclear bomb sites. I think the top spots for bombs are, roughly, Midtown, the Financial District, and the proverbial Barge-on-the-East-River. So the Upper West Side seems to me to maximize safety. There might also be a ribbon of safety between Midtown and the Financial District, say along Houston Street. But to see how safe you'd be down there in the hipster zone, you'd need to consult the RAND Corp. Bomb Damage Effect Calculator. I'm proud to say I've owned one since childhood (although it's now lost in some box in my parents house). Indeed childhood is the ideal time to receive the RCBDEC because it resembles nothing so much as a souped-up Count Chocula code wheel. It's a bunch of laminated cardboard circles, beige, attached at a central grommet so that they can be turned independently. Slide-rule-style numbers are printed along each wheel. The main wheel is "bomb yield", which I think could range from Hiroshima-sized (a few kilotons) to Bikini-sized and beyond (tens of megatons). Logarithmic, of course -- really it's just wonderfully evocative of the buzz-cut defense-tech slide-rule 1960's. Anyway, once you set the bomb yield, and maybe some other variables like altitude (I remember the phrase "ground burst" appearing on it), you could read off all kinds of cool stats: fireball radius, crater radius/depth, and, most important of all, the overpressure. Measured in PSI and determined for distances up to a few miles from ground zero (I really can't remember if it was miles or kilometers, and a tension within the RAND culture makes it impossible to know on first principles: do you go with the icy techiness of the "kilometer" or the USA! USA! patriotism of the "mile"?), the overpressure is the maximum increase in air pressure caused by the expanding blast wave. This is what causes things like buildings being knocked over and your lungs exploding. I wonder how much they go for on E-Bay. In addition to being the unsurpassable kitsch embodiment of a certain cold war subculture, they may have a big potential market in New Year's revelers and real estate agents. Another business opportunity, guys: license the data and market a Bomb Damage Palm app! Oh, and me? I'll be upstate in New Paltz, thank you very much. Hope to see you in 2004. [12/31/03 10:59]


	34th and Lexington A young latina woman is standing on the corner handing out yellow flyers for a sale, at Best Buy or Walgreen's or something. She dances around a little bit to her Walkman music. Ten people pass, a hundred, a thousand. Some of them take a flyer. Now a young guy crosses the street, he too passing out flyers, only white ones for some other company. As he nears the woman they exchange collegial smiles, then flyers. But no words -- he just keeps walking, keeps handing out flyers. [12/31/03 10:58]


	Paradise In answer to your question, Doug, it was Hawaii. And let me say that all extravagant claims made by travel agents about the archipelago are fulfilled. It�s hard to convey just how wonderful the place is. A grad school classmate of mine returned from Hawaii enraptured, and he kept emphasizing the lack of walls. And it's true: hotel lobbies, restaurants, living rooms, heck even the airports (both HNL and Kailua-Kona) are exposed to the elements. Even on a December night, only balmy breezes obtrude. Some vacations locations relax and refresh, some excite and entertain; Hawaii made me immediately start investigating possible local employment. Those with portable careers should move immediately (Ben H, I�m thinking of you. And University of Hawaii law is only 1.3 orders of magnitude away from Columbia on the US News ranking In additional to the generally paradisiacal setting, the island (Oahu in particular) exudes a groovy late-70s/early-80s vibe. Some of this feel surely lies in the mind of the a Magnum PI influenced beholder. But the facts speak for themselves: the color palette of public buildings tends to the brown and orange, residents exhibit an un-ironic commitment to �living aloha,� and the license plate features a rainbow on a white background. What have I missed? (other than an increase in the quality and volume of posting in my absence, which I�ll hope is mere coincidence). Welcome back Doug and Dao, of course. And I empathize, as you know Doug, with the feeling that philosophy runs out as a centrally organizing life-principle. I fear I am retreating into a Kant-inspired metaphysical quietism which casts those elements of existence I find essential as indubitable conditions of experience. The topics that once exercised me � the baneful extrapolation of naturalized epistemology, or anti-realism about ethics � don�t haunt me anymore. I am able to dabble with them, let them go, and focus my efforts on reading Conan Doyle, Kipling, and (let me hope) becoming a more generous minded, less irascible person. So good luck with the country estate, I suppose is what I�m saying. I will venture one comment on War and Peace. I know that expressing outrage about plot elements of favorite novels shows a certain weakness of imagination on my part, but Tolstoy�s shabby treatment of Sonia absolutely frosted me. Sterile flower my ass! The love of her life threw her over for a homely (but pious! No bourgeois enlightenment virtue here!) rich women, and somehow her dutiful nature (and her insensibility to charismatic cads, contra Natasha and Katya from Anna Karennina) gets cast as a flaw in her. I�m still riled about this� [12/29/03 19:09]


	Oh, sure ... they "evolve" into "new forms" You probably know about the flu-vaccine crisis -- there's not enough, especially of the most up-to-date vaccines that combat newly evolved forms of the virus. Here's my proposal for rationing this vaccine. Rank the 50 states by the percentage of people who claim not to believe in evolution. Kansas and Alabama would presumably be near the top, and Minnesota and Massachusetts near the bottom. Start from the bottom, giving states as much vaccine as they need, until you run out. Then say to the states above the cut-off point: "Hey, what's wrong with last year's vaccine? It's not like viruses can "evolve" into "new subspecies", like these so-called "scientists" would have you think. Or are you denying the word of Jesus?" [12/29/03 19:03]


	The Cure for Jet Lag Ben A., whose job is developing combination-drugs for a pharmaceutical company, will be especially interested to know that I discovered, just after flying in on Christmas Eve, a mixture of substances guaranteed to prevent a widespread medical complaint, jetlag. Do not nap; continue to next step when serious fatigue sets in. Take 50 g foie gras with 70 ml Monbazillac. When fatigue returns (1-2 hr.) take 200 ml roast-pepper puree with sambuca-infused cream. After 10-20 minutes, follow with 200 g roast loin of pork, garlic- and peppercorn-crusted, juices reduced with truffle butter, chicken stock, and wine. Take with 100 g green beans and minced portobello/shallot mixture, and 100-200 ml Chateau Troplong-Mondot 1994. 15-25 minutes later, take one unit homemade fallen chocolate cake, just out of oven, with more sambuca-infused cream. Unfortunately, Ben A., I think it would be hard to squeeze all these substances into a pill, or really into any medicinal vector, and even if you did their therapeutic value would suffer. Given that you won't be seeing this remedy at CVS or RiteAid, my advice for anyone interested would be to marry a fabulous chef, or else marry so as to have as in-laws a couple of the best amateur chefs in New York (keeping in mind that the top ones, Carl and Que, are now out of available siblings). Ben H. seems to be on the first track, b�che rat�e notwithstanding, and Ben A. avoided the problem entirely with a skillful choice of parents. (btw this Christmas Eve was one of the only homemade meals I've had to rival the one your parents put together back in 1994.) Le r�embourgeoisement de Douglas M. Our sojourn in Vietnam was, among other things, a way to put off deciding where we want to settle down: Paris or New York. The sojourn ended in medical disaster and we had to face the decision prematurely, or at least maturely. In fact the decision kind of made itself. Before the Paris round of blood tests came back negative, back when I thought I might have a permanent condition, it seemed clear that I should get to a place where I had good doctors, insurance, and an unambiguous right of residence: New York. Once my symptoms started fading away I guess we could have decided to keep stringing along in Paris; by then, though, we had built up too much momentum for a NYC return, and now of course we're here. I have to say I'm really happy to be back. Not that I wouldn't have been happy in Paris. But I don't feel the weird deja vu feelings Dao reports. It just feels like (another) home. My list-based au revoir to Paris was kind of frivolous; since this is more of an adieu, I feel I ought to provide a more serious summing up. Obviously my great accomplishment of the last three years was marrying Dao; my health scare has proved more conclusively than ever how lucky I am to be with her. Not just because she got food, medicine, books, and videos for me, but because she kept a good attitude and kept my spirits up. The work I've done in the last three years isn't such a stunning success, though. A main reason why I wanted to come to Paris was to escape expensive, work-addled New York to have time to think out the meaning, or at least the full explanation, of life. I am one of those people whom life baffles, who rack their brains trying to make some kind of sense of it, who are troubled and sometimes ashamed that they don't understand what the world amounts to, why it is like it is, why it exists at all. Now it's not like I spend all my time thinking about this stuff. I've kept doing programming work to pay bills and keep a tether to reality. Still, I spent a ton of time in Paris trying to figure out what, broadly speaking, is going on; this involved a lot of pacing around parks, scribbling in notebooks, and, yes, sitting in cafes. Predictably, three years of this have left me without much more of a clue of what's going on. I have a better idea why science fails to explain everything, or even, in a sense, anything. I see better how some scientist's beliefs that they can understand the world is related to their false belief that they understand mathematics. (Mathematics is deeply mysterious and hardly anyone appreciates how non-cut-and-dried it is.) But the better way of understanding the world that I've been concocting is, to put it charitably, not compelling. I myself am ambivalent about it. On the one hand it has the marks of a crackpot work of pseudo-mathematics; I can easily picture parts of it being foisted on passers-by in Washington Square Park by a hirsute, unhygienic gentleman wearing camouflage. On the other hand it is the most plausible idea I can come up with to the question of what the world might be; it is marginally less implausible to me and marginally less bleak than the standard scientific views. Not to be pretentious, but the whole experience has left me with a feeling of kinship for Leibniz. His scheme, with the monads and the prearranged harmony and whatnot, is laughable, fine. But it's the result of a serious attempt to grapple with problems that most people just ignore. If you were actually to confront him with a copy of his Monadology and a patronizing smirk, he would be far, far from apologetic. He'd say, "Go ahead you can laugh all you want, but not only have I got my philosophy, I can show you how your philosophy, to the extent that you've thought one out at all, is much more obviously wrong than mine." Still not to be pretentious, but these three years have given me an even stronger feeling of kinship with the hapless heroes in Tolstoy. Ben A., I know you mentioned feeling the same thing, and having finished War and Peace I see what you mean. Reading of Pierre Bezhukov's appeals to freemasonry for the meaning of life, I can almost (but, in my defense, not quite) see myself reading books on Buddhism. Reading of his hilarious attempts to prove via cabalistic numerology that he's destined to vanquish Napoleon, I can almost (but again not quite) see myself scribbling out these pseudo-mathematical models of spacetime. And above all I empathize with the characters in both Anna Karenina and War and Peace who spend huge amounts of time trying to perfect their thoughts and to present them in the form of books that are read in the end by absolutely nobody. Now I suppose I'm at the point in the novel where I settle down and run the country estate or take a post in the civil service, where I look at the book I've been working on and say, cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. (Sorry for the French, but now that there are two New Yorkers on the Bandarlog, I have to distinguish myself by adopting a Eurotrash persona.) And so I don't see much more philosophizing in my future. In New York I intend to develop well-designed software, to go to the gym, to meditate, to talk with people over coffee or wine about politics, books, movie, television, and music, to do what I can to make Dao happy, to eat and sometimes cook unnecessarily fine meals. Possibly also to produce hip-hop records along the lines I mentioned to you, Ben H., yesterday, but we'll see about that. [12/28/03 17:46]


	No, Really, Welcome Back I think I know that woman... Wes Hill's mother right? "Wanna see my kniiiiiife collection?" The insane and importunate customer is a New York archtype. I was over at Soros Mgmt's offices last week and while I was waiting to be cleared to go upstairs, a bedraggled fellow staggered up to the security desk and asked to see George Soros. The security guy was clearly a cut above the zombies they employ at my building. He asked the man if he had an appointment. The visitor paused before answering that he did not. That he paused is, I've noticed, a classic behavior of lunatics. If you were trying to lie your way in, you would have anticipated this question and had a good answer at the ready. If you didn't, you'd guess one way or the other quickly. But this fellow's delusion did not descend to the detail of whether or not he had an appointment, leaving him genuinely confused at the question. Anyway, the guard very suavely told the guy that he could not go in without an appointment, but that he might call for one from the payphone outside. He pulled a quarter from his vest and said, "I don't do this for everyone, but here's a quarter to make the phone call. And remember, you can't go up without an appointment." The guy took the quarter and meekly shuffled away. The guard dispensed with a potentially cantakerous loon briskly, efficiently, and miracle of miracles, politely. Perfectly sane visitors at many New York buildings get rougher treatment. Then again, perhaps bums all over the city know this secret code: enter 666 7th Avenue and ask to see George Soros and you'll be given a quarter. Easier than begging! As to your experience at Customs, you're being unfair. You and the wife are U.S. citizens smuggling in nothing worse than possibly unpasteurized cheese. After numerous foreign trips where I and other citizens get the third degree (not that I am complaining about receiving the third degree, it's my little contribution to homeland security), while veiled Arabs waltz in unmolested, I am happy to hear that it is not in fact the case that they are all getting a free PC pass. (And for the record, the guys at the booth are only responsible for checking your papers and sizing you up. It's the dudes right before the exit, to whom you hand your stamped landing card, who are charged with detecing rogue cheeses, er, sorry, cheeses of concern.) The U.S. Customs Services runs not a risk of standing guilty of intolerance of religious dissenters (not that the Arab mind is capable of grasping Islam as dissent), but rather a grave danger of giving quarter to Islamic enemies out of a miscontrual of the notion of toleration. Some Muslim woman in Florida sued the Dept of Motor Vehicles because she didn't want to remove her veil for her driver's license picture. And this went to court and up several levels of appeal. I don't ask that we go as far as the French, but, hello! Take off your goddamn face rag or do like your Saudi sisters and hire a licensed driver to shuttle you around. It's very considerate of you to hide your ugly, whiskered face from the photographers, but the DMV employees on very rare occasions must and can put up with worse. [12/26/03 20:27]


	Big Apple II Upon flying back to NYC on Christmas eve, I saw that if my Bandarlog post frequency has been low, it may be due to my not living here. Here's an example of what I've been missing. At the Barnes & Noble on Lexington and 86th, a seventy-ish woman in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and a mini-skirt and freakish sunglasses and a ratty coat strides up to the information counter and announces in a thick NY accent: "You're gonna find me the ultimate book for knife collectors." A conversation ensues, the employee trying to get rid of the woman, the woman exclaiming things like "I'm not talking cooking knives, honey, and I know you've got this kind of book on guns," the line behind her growing longer. Luckily I'd been just ahead of her in line. Later I saw her stomping through another part of the store announcing, "Weapons, weapons, weapons!" Merry Christmas. Speaking of weapons, we were lucky to sneak four fromages of mass destruction through U.S. Customs. We step up to the desk and the officer asks, "How long you been out of the count..." but he's interrupted by the agent at the next booth, who's interrogating an Arab woman in a veil. (In fact two or three agents are called over to harass/attend to her.) When he comes back to his own desk he just waves us and our cache of cheese through. Score one for profiling. But it's kind of ironic in light of the anti-veil laws at the flight's origination, considering that America was settled by people fleeing European religious intolerance and sporting funky black headgear. [12/26/03 19:45]


	The apartment search starts today -- until we find something we'll be shuttling among friends' and relatives' couches and spare rooms (including yours, Ben H.) and trudging around town on the quest. Actually Ben, do you have any of those fruitcakes left? We could carry them with us as a form of portable, concentrated energy to sustain us on our quest, kind of like the elvish lembas in Lord of the Rings. [12/26/03 12:30]


	Welcome back! Glad to hear you're back! I hope you enjoyed your cow gray matter. I spent the saddest holiday of Jewish calendar with Bernie's family. This year she attempted, in spite of my Francophobic protestations, a buche de Noel, following a recipe from the New York Times. Apparently, my vociferous and prolonged denunciation of this froggy dessert (which, nonetheless would probably be an improvement over the traditional plum pudding) distracted her, for the omission of a key ingredient caused it to turn out, in Bernie's words, "like a sweetened, petrified omelette." The chocolate icing, on the other hand, turned out marvelously, especially spread over the tops of the cupcakes that she substituted for the failed Gallic pastry-log. [12/25/03 23:18]


	Back To The Vertiginous, Fuliginous Apple Merry Christmas. I'm back -- luckily I wasn't trying to get to L.A. from Paris. I've written a bunch of posts longhand which I have yet to get into digital form. Stay tuned. First though I want to respond to your 2 posts there, Ben H. In Italian, mad cow is "mucca pazza". I know this because I was there during the big outbreak in March 2001. This is even more fun to go around repeating than the average Italian phrase, and it's about the only phrase I retain from that trip. When we were in Naples (less than which no city suits me) an aggressive bum came up to us on the street. Actually came up to Dao, as I was in the phone booth trying to move up our departure date to get the hell out of Naples. I stepped out of the booth, and in my most offensive Italian caricature, using the hand-to-chin kiss-off gesture, said "Mucca Pazza! Mucca Pazza!" This pissed the guy off, but at least he left. As for your question, Krazy Kow is unbeatable! So is "Nork" as an abbreviation of North Korean. Is that your coinage? Now the Christmas baksheesh question. In the past I've tried to get creative for my client. Last year, knowing that they'd get tons of heavy food, Shannon (our friend who does design work on projects with me) and I got them two bottles of chartreuse, a digestif. It's not really practical because nobody dares drink the stuff during working hours. At least Shannon made a beautiful presentation of it and it retains its decorative power. All in all I can't count it a complete success. This Christmas, having just gone through a couple weeks of illness when i ate nothing but plain rice and carrots (and on some days nothing at all) I have come to the conclusion that eating yummy stuff is great. And so I've come to the same neo-conservative approach you applaud. I asked Carl my brother-in-law, of whose epicurean exploits I've written and will soon write again, for the best supplier of corporate cookie baskets, and sent one off. I think I sent them off so late that it was a bit gauche, but on the other hand there may be some left when I actually physically come to the office. My client showed this year that the creative approach can work, though. They air-mailed to me (in Paris) this beautifully presented little book by Jean Giono, "The Man Who Planted Trees," which tied in with some of the firm's pro-bono work. In fact it was so classy I was almost embarrassed to have sent them mere lipid/sucrose blobs. On the other hand, in the words of Harvard's dining-hall-staff wage-increase agitators, "We can't eat prestige!" Like I said, I have many more posts to share, but now I have to sit down to a Christmas feast of braised beef spine. [12/25/03 17:22]


	It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Cow Argentine beef cattlemen are licking their chops over the U.S. mad cow case. Overseas markets will be shut to American beef for the immediate future, rendering ARgentina's sane herd more valuable. BUt forget that for a second. I want to call your attention to the Spanish name for Mad Cow Disease (itself a Britishism, for Americans tend not to use the word "mad" in that sense): Vaca Loca. It has a great ring to it; if I didn't know better, I'd think it was a special at Taco Bell. We need an American name for this disease that is at least as catchy as the Spanish. I nominate Krazy Kow. Any other suggestions? [12/24/03 11:06]


	Fruitcakes and Zagat's My fund is unusual among buy-side firms in that we send Christmas gifts to our brokers. Many of the brokers would send gifts anyway, but our offerings guarantee that the few prospective hold-outs will end up giving presents. The size of the aggregate loot has increased in the last two years because of the presence of our equity group. Surveying the gifts, we often detect interesting pattern. There was the year I received 9 copies of the New York City Zagat's guide, each embossed with the logo of a different bank or broker. I had never received a single copy before. It was obvious that some marketing suit at Zagat came up with the idea of pitching banks on personalized guides as holiday lagniappes. I can almost hear the proposition: "don't give a bottle of wine that will be drunk and forgotten in a single evening. Give a Zagat's guide and for a whole year, every time your client checks up on a restaurant, he'll think of your bank." Works great, except 8 out of the 9 I got wound up in the hands of friends or family, who while possibly grateful to ING Barings, do not have it in their power to reward that institution. This year, we received several instances of the very same Williams-Sonoma gift basket. In addition, we received sundry other gift baskets, which, though from different purveyors shared a number of items among each other and with W-S. For example, practically every basket contained a box of Beth's Chocolate Chip Cookies. Was there some giant surplus of these that had to be disposed of? Certainly I perceive no special characteristic intrinsic to the cookie itself that would explain its prevalence. Everyone likes chocoloate chip cookies. But what's harder to explain are the "fruitcake" gifts: stuff that achieves yuletide ubiquity in spite of the fact that it is useless or unappealing. This year: pistachio nuts. Every basket contained a little sack of pistachios, and one bank sent us a gigantic 5 pound sack of them. Was there a bumper harvest of pistachios? Did we lift sanctions on Iran? A particular brand of rather nasty caramel candy-popcorn also put in a strong showing. As you can imagine, the cookies, chocolate and other tasty stuff were devoured with appreciation, and we are left with half-ravaged baskets containing relatively untouched portions of "fruitcake." I don't understand how "fruitcake" maintains its holiday status year after year. It's not particularly cheap. One would get a lot more gratitude, and probably spend less, by sending a basket crammed exclusively with chocolate-chip cookies. In fact, one of our cleverest counterparties appears to have had the same thought. He sent us a basket... filled entirely with various Godiva chocolate samplers. Not a pistachio nut in sight. [12/24/03 09:08]


	Baloney They say that Calisto Tanzi's company started out in the ham and sausage business, so I guess one can see how Parmalat's accounts would turn out to be baloney. The company's new management now says that phantom assets amount not to merely $4.9bio, but more like $9-11bio. Watch for a bankruptcy filing today. I have to tell our office manager to log on to grocer.com today and stock up on Parmalat UHT milk. We go through a tremendous amount of that stuff in the office and I would hate to get caught short... [12/23/03 08:26]


	During my period of invalidity I read War and Peace, which Dao very thoughtfully bought for me. I loved it but besides that I can't think of much to say about it right now. What I did want to share with you was a funny line from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. The narrator is a listless college student: "I had nothing I especially wanted to accomplish in society that would require me to quit school right away, and so I went to my classes each day, took lecture notes, and spent my free time in the library reading or looking things up." [12/22/03 11:59]


	Chirac's Enron The Economist broke the Executive Life story back in 2001. Their site requires a subscription, so I can't tell you much more than that. I'll try my best to give a summary of the scandal. The gravamen of the case is that in 1992 Credit Lyonnais used front companies to buy a California insurer, Executive Life, in contravention of U.S. regulations (at that time the Glass-Steagal Act remained in force, barring banks from owning insurers). As with any scandal involving politicians, there is a second leg, namely the coverup. In this case, Jean Peyrelevade a CL executive involved in the deal (and who later went on to head the bank) lied to investigators about how much he knew about it. He claimed to have been uninformed, but The Economist turned up a copy of a fax addressed to Peyrelevade which contained all the details of the transaction. CL wanted to buy Executive Life, a California insurer that had gone bust in the high-yield bond rout of the early 90s. The bank saw an opportunity in the insurer's junk bond portfolio (this sounds implausible to anyone who knows CL, since the junk bonds actually turned out to be a good investment. The explanation is that the valuation of the junk bonds was not CL's idea, but that of American financier Leon Black). CL couldn't simply buy the bond portfolio, since California regulators required bidders to take the remnant insurance operations with the associated portfolio. As a bank, CL could not legally own an insurer. To get around Glass-Steagal, CL recruited a group of trusted clients to bid for the insurer. A secret side-deal provided that these clients would not take the economic risk concomitant with true ownership. The front-men bought the insurer and hived off the junk bond portfolio to a subsidiary of CL. (Sidebar: some people say that CL's subsidiary bought the bonds below fair value to the detriment of policy-holders, which, if true, would to my mind constitute a much graver crime than merely circumventing Glass Steagal, a law which not long after these events took place Congress repealed.) Shortly thereafter CL ran into a similar problem with the bond portfolio. Many of the issuers were going through debt restructurings involving debt-for-equity swaps. As a bank, CL faced restrictions on how much equity it could own in individual companies. Loath to give up the gains from what it believed would be succesful restructurings (again, an accurate prediction totally at variance with CL's unerring nose for bad investments, but one which should be chalked up to Leon Black), it resorted to another subterfuge. CL sold the bond portfolio to PInault's company, Artemis. Again, Artemis did not take economic risk concomitant with ownership: CL lent Artemis the cash to finance the purchase and wound up sharing by various side agreements in the upside of the portfolio. At the same time, CL unwound the existing fronting scheme for the insurance operations of Executive Life, instructing its front group to sell the insurer to Artemis. (Sidebar 2: the price at which the bond-portfolio transaction took place was manipulated to create paper profits for CL in order to cover up losses from a disastrous year for the bank's core French loan portfolio; CL may have made other loans to Pinault on sweetheart terms in order to further compensate him for his assistance) At some point later in the decade, a whisteblower revealed all the shenanigans to California regulators, who initiated the action against CL. At that point Peyrelevade held the top job at the bank. He tried to disavow all knowledge of the scheme and to blame managers who had since left the bank. Unfortunately for him, ample documentary evidence existed implicating him and other current managers of the bank in the fraud. All in all quite complicated, but one should focus on a few key elements: - A French bank deceived US regulators and violated US laws in order to capitalize on a juicy investment opportunity. - The bank possibly defalcated Executive LIfe's policyholders. - The bank cooked its own books. - THe bank's chief executive lied about his role in these shady dealings. - So far as we know, it did all this without the sanction of the UN Security Council. [12/21/03 02:41]


	I guess I ought to take up the slack for Ben A. while he's in Hawaii (it is Hawaii, right?). (And just because you're on vacation doesn't mean you can't post -- have you considered photo-blogging? I would have uploaded tons of pictures from Vietnam had I been able to leave my apartment.) In any case, here are my responses to ... Campaign Finance Reform. I don't know jack fruit about this subject. I don't even know who McCain and Feingold are. Think that will stop me from commenting? Ha! I am blogger, hear me bore! I agree with you in general that the government ought not to restrict political speech. First because free speech is a fundamental principle of America, and of any nation that deserves to be called civilized. Second because money is going to fuel politics in any case, and the net result of complex media regulations is just going to be more US GDP going to lawyers and media consultants. (Just as the net result of America's hyper-complex tax code is not exquisite justice, but hypertrophied accounting and legal professions.) Put another way, Simplicity: woo-hoo! Cumbrous legislation: doh! Libya's Announcement. It's pretty easy to spin this story in a plane normal to the Iraqi Freedom attack vector. Qkgaddafi has been trying to win his country membership in the club of non-rogue nations for many years now, even agreeing to pay billions in damages for past terrorist attacks. This is just another step in that process. However, I was surprised that Libya had skipped so far down the yellow cake road -- didn't one of you link to a DEBKA story about their program a long time ago? If so, that's just about the only bit of that site's alarmist claptrap that's ever turned out correct ... European Business Scandals. Ben H., could you explain the basics of the Executive Life scandal, or give us to link to a good article? Le Monde would never deign to explain the facts, of course; it only provides long-winded analyses that put the scandal into the context of, or at least show their authors' familiarity with, Emile Zola and Third Republic social criticism. [12/20/03 19:29]


	Parmasplat and Executive Death The European left made much hay over the Enron and Worldcom frauds. Only in George Bush's America could corporate titans so brazenly swindle ovine small investors, with the connivance of supine auditors and negligent regulators. In Europe, the state wields its mighty sword against greedy corporations and citizens can rest easy. No half-way informed observer would ever have believed such a canard, but this week even its promoters will be blushing and backpedaling. Italian dairy giant Parmalat is heading to bankruptcy court after Bank of America told the world that Parmalat did not in fact have $4bio in cash and securities in an account at that institution. The document the company used to evidence these assets was a blatant forgery. A fake bank account statement? With $4bio supposedly in the account? Look, at least Enron concocted a devilishly complex web of partnerships, subsidiaries and exotic trades to inflate its worth; Worldcom misclassified a category of expense, the true status of which is open to debate. The might European regulators and auditors got hoodwinked by, what, a guy with PageMaker, a Laserjet and a single piece of paper. Nice work, amici. The Executive Life scandal is much more tangled and was unmasked several years ago. However, the settlement of the California regulator's case against Credit Lyonnais and other involved parties, reached earlier this month, smells almost as rancid as the original crime. The French government repeatedly rebuffed settlement offers -- risking worse punishment -- because they did not include a good deal for Francois Pinault. Pinault is a close friend of that avatar of moral rectitude, President Jacques Chirac. Chirac and his minions have expatiated on the vital importance of multilateralism and international cooperation. Of course, when it came time to make amends for an egregious violation of American laws by a French state-owned bank, he was quite willing to play the stubborn unilateralist to get his friend off the hook. But what do we hear from the Euroleft? That Dick Cheney is in the back pocket of Halliburton because, uh, because, well, uh, they have a contract in IRaq!!! Never mind that the contract was an extension of the pre-existing LOGCAP and that it's completely out in the open... [12/20/03 12:56]


	Message Sent, Message Received One question arising from the debate over U.S. policy in Iraq is how other dictators might change their strategy to deal with the Bush pre-emption doctrine. I have maintained that the dictator's dilemma pre-dated the Bush Administration, arising at least as far back as the Kosovo campaign, which represented military intevention over intra-state behavior. Many of Bush's critics cited North Korea's declaration that it has nuclear weapons as a direct and deleterious result of the Iraq campaign. A dictator, facing the threat of activist U.S. foreign policy, was pushed to harden its line on WMD as an insurance policy against pre-emption. Well, I hope that the same commentators take note of, and reconcile with their theories, the Libyan response. Qaddafi, after several months of secret talks with U.S. representatives, has agreed to give up his chemical, biological and nuclear programs and subject himself to thorough inspection. Here's another loony dictator who saw the same facts as the Norks and drew the opposite conclusion. [12/20/03 12:40]


	Campaign Finance Censorship Once again, thebandarlog is ahead of the curve. I hope that Lott's prediction is realized. It will force the Supreme Court to confront the fact that in its FEC decision it has countenanced an egregious violation of the First Amendment. [12/19/03 14:14]


	Aloha Means Goodbye Bandarlog's New England offices are temporarily relocating to the South Pacific. Expect a week of radio silence. [12/17/03 22:29]


	Kimchee Karmaker Vs. Detroit As election season heats up, Lou Dobbs and his left-leaning chorus of business journalists are singing a familiar quadrennial threnody about the de-industrialization of America. I'm inclined to stop up my ears. However, I thought it was worth noting an interest financial datum that would probably send Lou & co into hysterics. Today, Hyundai Motor brought a 5-year bond issue. As young as we are, we all remember when this South Korean carmaker first entered the U.S. market with its crappy models. Hyundai's new bond traded today at +1.95% to US Treasuries. The comparable issue of once-might Ford Motor company traded at +2.00%. The proud standard-bearer of the industrial heartland has evolved into a worse credit than the Korean upstart. Of course, Hyundai is really and truly a carmaker, while Ford Motor company is an health and retirement insurance company that makes cars as a sideline. Rather than address a regulatory regime that has forced American business into assuming the unrewarding role as underwriter of morbidity and mortality risk, Dobbs & Co lash out at Asian "currency manipulation" or "greedy capitalists." I'd be long Hyundai, short Ford bonds here... [12/16/03 18:00]


	Lady Eldritch Beasts Dominate ECAC Women's Hockey I assume that Miskatonic U's big rival is Brown U? [12/16/03 11:35]


	Give me a 'C'! Give me an 'T'! Give me an 'H'!... Nice little spoof [12/16/03 11:31]


	My pigeon-hole address Mill, followed by Kant (!) and Aquinas. The Mill part doesn't really surprise me, but the Kant does. I'm sure that will make Bernie happy. This little web toy suggests that most of my posting here must be at least in part facetious. On a related note, do you think, "I will disregard all on-line classification tests" is a universalizable maxim? [12/16/03 07:20]


	Actually I Came Up "L. Ron Hubbard" Should I be worried? No, really, Aquinas, followed by Aristotle and Spinoza. [12/16/03 03:40]


	My Predictions: Doug = Plato Ben H = a puzzle -- Hume? Aristotle? Hobbes? All plausible I'm Aristotle all the way, Baby! Actually, took it again and got Plato, but Ayn Rand was #2. Increasingly believing all on-line tests are designed by chimps... [12/15/03 21:47]


	Hah! I was reminded of the world's most dangerous Kantian, Abimael Guzman. [12/15/03 10:04]


	The End of an Era One look at the somber, gray-bearded recluse and I knew America's greatest ideological foe was finished. We finally got Karl Marx! [12/15/03 03:23]


	My heart is a palimpsest ... On the one hand, this is a fascinating story about the discovery of Archimedes' lost paper on combinatorics. On the other hand I fear it will lead to a flare-up in the use of the word "palimpsest" in Serious Contemporary Poetry. Already this word, like paratactic sentence fragments, is a litmus test (not to say gram test, which would better capture my feelings about the subject) for telling whether you're dealing with such Poetry. It may now get worse. [12/14/03 02:40]


	Whig Baseball The common law strike zone may not be with us forever. Major League baseball implemented the Questec "umpire evaluation" system for balls and strikes in ten big league parks last year. Umpires whose calls do not match the electronic verdict 90% of the time rate as underperformers. A number of pitchers have complained that the electronic zone takes away the outside corner, and Curt Schilling attacked the Questec literally, smashing in the system's camera after a bad outing. The league stands behind the system, and denies that Questec shrinks the zone. I fear, Ben H, that technology threatens your tory sensibilities in yet another domain. [12/13/03 14:17]


	Annie Hall I like most of Woody Allen's films, including many of the much-maligned post-Soon Yi oevre. Strangely enough, until recently I had managed to miss seeing Annie Hall. Last year I was on some long business-related flight on which the airline provided DVD kits. Annie Hall was one of the discs included, so I settled in with great anticipation to finally experience the Woody Allen magnum opus. What a disappointment! What exactly about this movie is amusing? Maybe I found it dull because, as Allen's critics charge, several of his later movies, which I happened to have seen first, are retreads of this one. Take for example all the jokes at the expense of L.A.; these were the most generic examples of Left-Coast stereotypes. Was this maybe the first preformance of those gags, whose echoes rendered the original banal to me? [12/12/03 20:55]


	In The Zone The strike zone, regarded from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with baseball, cannot but baffle. Beyond its inherent subjectivity, one must contend with the complication that its definition tends to shift over time. I think, though, that it is a rather appropriate feature of a distinctly American pastime. It is in the US where the common law has reached its full fruition. We eschew precisely defined and unshifting cannons of interpretation, leaving it to the accretion of particular judgments to shape our rules. The strike zone is the athletic equivalent of the common law, a plastic, evolving conception of what constitutes a hittable pitch. Unlike our Supreme Court, however, which has asserted that political speech somehow falls outside the First Amendement strike zone, MLB's umpires have never turned beanballs into called strikes. [12/12/03 20:44]


	I wish I could join in your baseball discussions. I really do. For I have nothing against the game now. In fact it's another of those thousand things -- like macroeconomics, Indian music, constitutional law, history -- that I would take the time to learn thoroughly if only my life span were 400 or 500 years. As it is, I don't know jack fruit about it and can't really justify long remedial study. (Inspired by my Asian (mis)adventure, I'm trying out "you don't know jack fruit" as a replacement for my "you don't know jack cheese" catchphrase.) I had a fairly classic American childhood, yes, but as my ballpark skills approximated those of Binkley in Bloom County, I never got anywhere near a fast-pitch league. The only activity I was worse at was soccer, and that's only because there one can score points directly for the opposing team. Anyway my embarrassing baseball inability led me to avoid even passive discussion or spectatorship. Today my hang-up has worn off but knowledge void remains. Just about the only thing I have to say about baseball is: why can't they eliminate the subjective element of umpires determining strikes and balls? Wouldn't an electronic system be better? Or a cricket-like system where the pitcher has to knock something down with the ball to earn a strike? For some reason I've been seeing a bunch of 1970's movies during my period of invalidity. I really liked Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson's concise, believable character study of an asocial wacko, and also Annie Hall, a very funny reminder that Woody Allen's schtick was not always stale. Of course these are both classics and don't need my recommendation. Last night we saw a less well-known 1969 crime drama, Le Clan Des Siciliens. You could argue whether it's "the definitive French gangster movie" as this review claims, but what's really indefensible in that review -- incomprehensible, really -- is that it doesn't mention the bizarre soundtrack. You know the "boinggg" noise used in cartoons, e.g. for Wile E. Coyote's spring-enhanced shoes? It's played every couple seconds throughout the movie for no apparent reason. Also, congratulations to Bernie. [12/12/03 17:32]


	Yankees Reestablish Dominance Contrary to popular opinion, the Yankees have helped themselves substantially this off-season. Brown is a magnificent pitcher, a true #1, while Vasquez eminently fills the hole left by Pettite. The Sheffield acquisition immensely improves an already formidable line-up. Beyond these headline-grabbing deals, Cashman has stockpiled a number of quality arms (Gordon, Quantrill) to support Rivera. Boston fans still exulting over Schilling have not yet realized how dangerous this new Yankees club will be. [12/12/03 10:19]


	Bye, Bye Andy Steinbrenner's moneybags could not match the allure of... Houston's quality-of-life???. Pettite's departure for the Astro's is yet another blow the Yankee rotation will have difficulty enduring. He's an excellent pitcher, a clutch performer in the playoffs, and a class act. Give Steinbrenner some credit for a quick response. Weaver-for-Brown seems like a good trade... [12/12/03 08:20]


	Some Bad News One of our small-but-dedicated band of London-based readers notes with some indignation that the Academie Francaise has accepted Mr. Giscard D'Estaing as a member. He will fill the seat formerly held by Senegalese President Leopold Senghor. One could argue that moving from a third-world socialist to first-world Gaullist constitutes an upgrade, but, even knowing little about Senghor, I feel pretty sure it's a downgrade in the moral dimension. The headline says that Giscard has been designated "Immortal." Taken literally, it is a horrifying concept, and I fear that in Ankara a few politicians suffered near heart-attacks at reading it. An immortal Giscard would mean a perpetually Turkey-free EU. At first glance, though, I read it as "Immoral", which made total sense except for who was making the designation. Our reader provides a pithy summation of the Giscard philosophy, courtesy of Maggie Thatcher. "He believed government should serve the people, without their involvement." Quite prescient, as his performance presiding over the EU Constitutional Convention has demonstrated. [12/11/03 12:59]