Howard

Howard was a student of mine in a college chemistry class. A few years later I met him by chance at supermarket. "Howard," I asked, "have your grown? You seem taller than when you were in my class."

"No," he replied, "I've been this height ever since you knew me." He added, "I think instructors look down on students." It is a pun worth remembering.

It turned out he was in computers. A comparison of our earnings motivated me to look into switching careers. Howard moved on from computers, but that's what I've been doing for about 30 years.

Later, he became my broker. His only problem was that he didn't treat me like my mother. Howard used broker speech whereas my mother would say, "Sell it you damn fool."

It may not seem funny now, but when we couldn't get into a van Gogh exhibit, Howard suggested that we threaten to cut off our ears unless they let us in. We laughed ourselves silly. We laughed even harder as we walked up Fifth Avenue as mothers yanked their children out of the path of the two giddy lunatics.

I miss him.

Farewell Steve Post

Steve Post, a legendary, wry, long-time morning personality on WNYC-FM, died yesterday, Sunday.

A self-described curmudgeon, I found his sour, irreverent comments on the news appealing.  When reading press releases about accidents at the Indian Point nuclear power plant he might conclude "Authorities claim - all together now - no significant release of radiation".

Once, as part of a group invitation to broadcasters, he got to meet with Richard Nixon.  A non-disclosure agreement prevented him from discussing the specifics, but he was able to say, "I've never seen a man more uncomfortable in his own skin."  It was an illuminating description.

His last show, carried this tagline: "The No Show is a showcase for the idiosyncratic views and humor of Steve Post, a world-class curmudgeon whose irreverence and iconoclasm have entertained audiences and appalled radio station managers for four decades.sm have entertained audiences and appalled radio station managers for four decades."

Of course, fund raising could never be the same without his emotional breakdown during on-air fund drives.

He appealed to me in part because he claimed to live a life of not so quiet desperation

Amazon's profits

The headline "Why Amazon is Losing $410 to $810 Million this Quarter" led me to an article in SupplyChain247 with the image shown below.

 It took a third look before I found the line on the baseline to see how trivial Amazon's profits were.  I remembered advice given by Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation.  After confessing that he hadn't known what the word entrepreneur meant he said that the people who were willing to finance a young business were old.  They expected the business to showprofits during the time they had left on earth.

Times seem to have changed.  Profitless businesses are given sky-rocketing valuations.  Olsen is long gone now.  DEC was purchased by Hewlett Packard.  He'd probably be as mystified as I am by the money and services available today.

Bookshelf Porn

An article in the April 25, NY Times Magazine, "On Their Death Bed, Physical Books Have Finally Become Sexy" by Mireille Silcoff mentioned the web site bookshelfporn.com. which consists of pictures of books and book shelves.

Links from that site lead to tumblr.com ("I Have Bookworms"), a Zurich hotel's library, and book art.  It isn't clear how to get the books from the top tier from the hotel's library.  (A more fastidious person might wonder about dusting them, but it was an afterthought for me.)

The sight of all the the books makes my heart skip a beat and then there's the twinge of sadness for the knowledge that I'll never be able to read even the good ones.

Most of the images are from book stores and libraries, but there are occasional images from private homes.  The crux of the Times article was that physical books were now perceived as a status symbol to be displayed as backdrops in advertising layouts or demonstrations of culture in shelter magazines.

There's so much to say about the non-reading culture, those who don't want to read.  I think I get an insight when I visit a home where the books devoted to religious piety, promoting "perfect health", or "food porn". I have no interest in reading them.  Is that the non-reader's attitude to all books?

All the world's a stage ...

I stumbled across an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon which seems to have gotten it right: life is obviously unrehearsed and everyone is ad-libbing their lines.  Sometimes, when watching a movie, I'll respond to a character's question by saying that if they read the script they'd know what was happening.

Trailer Park Investment Vehicles

Today, Yahoo Finance's Nicole Goodkind interviewed Anthony Effinger, the author of a forthcoming article, "Double Wide Returns", for Bloomberg Markets.  Describing trailer parks as “a supply and demand curve that’s super attractive to investors”  Effinger pointed out the demand is created by the shrinking middle class: "people with bad credit and criminal histories who are often unable to rent or buy homes."

There are problems of course.  Home meth labs and the occasional visit from a SWAT team can add to the excitement of the investment.

A comment by Mariner calls for a bumper sticker: "Paperless office to cardboard box homes in less than two decades. I am America (and so can you!)"

Stunned Again By Ignorance

In my computer science class I was trying to make an analogy between the way a computer monitor displays color and the famous painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat.

There was something about their response, or more accurately their non-response.  I asked them to raise their hands if they'd seen the picture before.  None had.

It was not just an analogy wasted.  It was a smack in the face making manifest the complaint that art education is suffering.

The painting should be famous.  How had they managed to not see it?

I wrote to a number of friends who were unsympathetic.  One replied that it was something which was going to happen more frequently as I got older.  I understand people not knowing my obscure references, but "La Grande Jatte" is supposed to be famous enough to be the source of inspiration for the musical, Sunday in the Park with George.

It should be something to motivate me to become an activist, but I look at the exams to be graded, lessons to be prepared, and I despair.

A few days later I picked up a pre-publication copy of Intel Trinity, How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company By Michael S. Malone.  There was a description in the first chapter of  a set piece in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: an older engineer enthusiastically explaining the details of an obsolete piece of hardware to a bored looking younger engineer.  I wondered whether it would be an accurate description of my fate.

I'm not an engineer, but I've been fascinated by old technology.  While the specific technology may be irrelevant to today's economy, the lessons learned in the development, marketing, and life span are important: either for relevance or as a cautionary tale.

Faced with a class of students expecting to create the next great app I mention Ronald Wayne, the almost unknown third founder of Apple who gave up his share to Jobs and Wozniak for a few thousand dollars.  While the other two were just kids, he was a businessman with a wife, kids, and mortgage ("The whole catastrophe" -Zorba the Greek) who'd already suffered one business loss.  While the two Stevers had little to lose he had dependents.

I point out to the students that as great as their ideas may be, getting others to join in may be obstructed by something as simple as the need for someone to feed a family.  You may quote me: "It is easier for a family to starve than an individual."

A Sentimental Education

The NY Times February 9th Book Review contained a section entitled, "A Sentimental Education" which contained reflections of a dozen writers on what books taught them about love.

I was struck by Mary Bly's analysis of "Romeo and Juliet":

As the play opens, Romeo is transfixed by his ability to play with language and desperately looking for an object of devotion. He greets Juliet with the first line of a quatrain — “If I profane with my unworthiest hand” — and the two proceed to build a sonnet together, first alternating stanzas, then lines. As Juliet conforms to Romeo’s rhyme scheme, the subject veers from chaste devotion to passion. They must listen intently in order to construct shared rhymes, and Shakespeare punctuates their final couplet with a kiss.

 I doubt I would ever realize that myself.

The same issue had a review of Edmund White's "Inside a Pearl" in which White described himself as "too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer".  The reviewer notes that the reference is to tobacco and alcohol, not "good  meals or sexual encounters, even after being told that he was H.I.V. positive".

Eating sushi off the body of a model in a bikini is politically incorrect.

Who knew?  Hey, you can't make this stuff up.

I went looking after a Madam & Eve weekend cartoon depicted a selfie of someone holding sushi in chopsticks in his right hand and a picture of a young woman with sushi rolls in the background.  I quick web search turned up an article on the British Telegraph date stamped 6:34PM GMT 31 Jan 2011 (www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8293895/South-Africas-ANC-deplores-sushi-on-models-after-scandal.html):

 

A quote without comment is the best:

A statement on Monday from the African National Congress secretary general Gwede Mantashe is unequivocal: "This act is anti-ANC and antirevolutionary. This act is defamatory, insensitive and undermining of woman's integrity."

The statement has a whiff of Stalinist denunciation of ________________ (fill in the blank).  One ideologue  would denounce another for not recognizing the insidious capitalist, counter-revolutionary evil inherent in, say, flossing.

If nothing else, this can be the a great political trivia question, e.g., in which country has eating sushi been denounced as counter-revolutionary.  (There may be a significant difference between "antirevolutionary" and "counter-revolutionary" but I don't give a rip.)

A time line of the scandal can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-groner/south-africas-sushi-scand_b_816724.html.

Greece: Prison Escapee Vows to Fight Again

They say quote without comment (from the NY Times 01/21/2014):

A leftist Greek guerrilla who walked away from a prison while on furlough this month announced his return to terrorism on Monday. ...Mr. Xiros, 55, was serving multiple life terms at the Korydallos Prison near Athens for a series of attacks carried out by the group, chiefly against Greek, British and American business and political targets over nearly three decades. He has been at large since failing to return from a nine-day furlough that began on Jan. 1. 

-/www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/world/europe/greece-prison-escapee-vows-to-fight-again.html

Can you imagine someone in an America jail going on a nine-day furlough after being sentenced to multiple life terms?   Oh those wacky Greeks!  What a bunch of kidders.

His online manifesto  (“Once again I have taken the decision to thunder the guerrilla rifle against those who stole our lives and sold our dreams for a profit”) is not likely to encourage the investment that Greece seems to need.  It's OK to ignore me: I'm  not an economist.

Keith Richard's School of Optimism

"I always look at life as a syringe half-full."

Credit should be give to Amy Dickenson on the January 18^th broadast of National Public Radio quiz show “Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!”.  In checking her names I found a NY Times article about her marriage to a childhood friend which included this:

She kept those thoughts to herself until March, when the couple visited New York. As they walked by the church designed by Mr. Schickel’s great-grandfather, he asked where she saw the relationship going. “She was silent for about a minute — completely silent,” Mr. Schickel said. “Then she said: ‘I’m sorry. I want to get married.’”  

Mr. Schickel needed no apology. He proposed on the spot.

The passage should serve as inspiration for an adult romantic comedy.

You won't need no camel

"You won't need no camel, oh no, when I take you for a ride."  Just loved Maria Muldaur's rendition on youtube:

It's a great song by a woman any guy would be proud to have her call him her man.  Whatever she lacked in purity of voice was more than compensated for with emotion.
I remember her from the Jim Kweskin Jug Band all those years ago and her rendition of I'm a Woman from her LP isn't bad either (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDs-7I3NElE&html5=1).  She had an endearing tick of quickly nodding before each stanza.  You can see it the youtube video Kate and Anna McGarrigle with Maria Muldaur: The Work Song (1984)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGvq2Wl4Zvc)

Perhaps I'm sentimental about a Greenwhich Village kid from the folk era (or as Dave Van Ronk termed it, "The Great Folk Scare").  You can see her describe her accidental career on the LivingLegendsMusic videos (www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-bDEZ4RX38&list=PLsf7UsLoHI7-sGsSq2lTVq78vAVQbeckS)