This week I have been Reading
The 2011 Tour de France race guide.
Watching
An Idiot Abroad
Listening to
The xx
Discovering
(Or rediscovering) Hamlet - Nicki Greenberg's beautiful new version, thanks to the fabulous Snarkattack, who invited me along to see Nicki talk about the creative process behind the book.
Eating
- An enormous serve of bangers'n'mash and a nourishing pint of Kilkenny at the Town Hall one dismal Tuesday evening.
- A "Chachi" - chianina meatball sandwich - another brioche donut and some amazing chocolate tart at Beatrix, which Essjay has reviewed.
- A lazy Sunday lunch at The Crimean. The Polish hunter's stew (bigos) was just the thing to revive me after a chilly bike ride.
- Generous piles of fried food with oodles of chillies and sichuan peppercorns at Sichuan House
- Succulent suckling pig at Liberteene.
- An array of bright, zesty flavours at Chin Chin, where the only problem was having to choose only some of the items from what looks to be a menu that is all hits, no filler.
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By injera, on May 25th, 2009% Edmund L. Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, has recorded his tale of financial woe in the soon-to-be-published Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. An excerpt was published in the Times magazine a couple of weeks ago and, since I am still having trouble getting my head around the financial mess, I curled up with my laptop for a read.
If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.
So far, so good. This seemed like the kind of person who might be able to put the crisis in terms I can understand and an anecdote is always a fine way to illuminate difficult concepts. Even now when I see the initials “GFC” my first thought is a that perhaps Mary Mac’s in Atlanta is franchising their yummy chicken; “perhaps after reading this,” I thought optimistically, “I’ll understand how so many economies lost so much money so quickly”.
Continue reading "My Personal Credit Crisis", or "WTF, charge it!"
By injera, on October 14th, 2008% Cyclingnews reports that “Bernhard Kohl of Gerolsteiner tested non-negative for CERA”. Even the quaint locution of “non-negative” didn’t distract me from the real news: another cheat found, this time a man who finished on the podium in this year’s Tour.
Updated leaderboard:
I’m not going to try to predict who will be next, but I have no doubt there’ll be more.
By injera, on September 24th, 2008% … the administration continues to balk at introducing any legislative curbs on Wall Street salaries. Paulson, who earned up to $30m annually when heading Goldman Sachs, said compensation was an issue to be dealt with separately.
“I’ve heard your concerns on executive compensation and I share those frustrations,” he said, adding that he was equally “upset” by certain examples of excess.
The Guardian Online
I’ve been trying to find a word, or a phrase, to describe the hideously inappropriate levels of compensation provided to people in certain jobs. That Henry Paulson isn’t the most generously remunerated person in the history of banking stinks. That, judging from his comment, he doesn’t consider consider $30 million a year excessive reeks. Thirty million dollars a year? I can’t understand how a person’s contribution can valued at $30 million annually; I’m trying to imagine a company budget sheet where one of the salary variables, when replaced by $30,000,000, returns a result that represents the best possible use of $30,000,000. It’s beyond my capacity, as a pathologically lazy person, to believe that a salary of this magnitude would provide any incentive for the person receiving it to do a good job for longer than, say, a year. I know that if my employer told me that I’d receive $30 million in the next financial year, I’d be planning my retirement. In fact, I’d probably try to do them a deal – say, $10 million for six months?
I know that these extraordinary (can I use the word “extraordinary” when, in fact, these obscene amounts appear to be quite ordinary in certain circles?) salaries are made up of bonuses and stock options and other things I know absolutely nothing about, but even taking that into consideration, the weekly/monthly paycheck must certainly inoculate the recipient against the sorts of concerns that harry the average person. For someone who has revelled in the largesse of an investment bank to then be in charge of the US Treasury, officially styled a “public servant”, and in a position to determine how the money of the average taxpayer might be spent on bailing out an economy run into the ground by people in his former profession seems absurd.
Maybe “paulson” is an appropriate (pejorative) adjective for ludicrously large sums of money.
By injera, on September 22nd, 2008% From the NY Times:
Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy. … Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.
The thing that amazes me about the “culture wars” is that they are, if not a conservative construct, a conservative obsession. Why aren’t conservatives satisfied with having the bulk of the money and the political power? Why do they have to rule the culture? Anyway, I would have thought that if a group was going to invent a “war”, they’d invent one they’d be capable of winning.
What really bothers me about this is the idea that the teaching of American history should follow a “triumphal interpretation”. How would that paradigm be at all useful to students and scholars? Fortunately, this is an idea that will probably fail, particularly since there appears to be a certain level of tone-deafness to the current times. This cannot be the best time for a group to launch “programs and centers … concentrating on American democratic and capitalist institutions” if they are planning to work a “triumphal” interpretation into their programs.
By injera, on July 28th, 2008%
By injera, on July 15th, 2008% I’m not sure why it is deemed important to uncover the “identity” of somebody who has chosen to be anonymous. A Google News search brought up 141 articles from the past 22 hours on the search term Banksy. I’m at even more of a loss to understand why it is considered interesting that the artist known as Banksy might have been privately educated. The tone of the various “public school education” revelations seemed to suggest that this rendered his work somehow inauthentic.
Huh?
By injera, on July 9th, 2008% This is infuriating in so many ways:
“Some African leaders mentioned that we should bear in mind that Mugabe will retire in a few years. Putting pressure on Zimbabwe, including sanctions, might lead to internal conflict. We should be discreet and careful,” a spokesman for Japan told the paper.
…
[Tanzania's President Jakaya] Kikwete said at the G8 summit: “We are saying no party can govern alone in Zimbabwe and therefore the parties have to work together, come out to work together in a government and then look at the future of their country together.”
BBC News
Just. Rendered. Inarticulate.
So, after the break are some things that make me smile despite all of this.
Continue reading A break from reality
By injera, on July 2nd, 2008% I know this is particularly childish, but as I’m on holidays and have nothing better to do I am seriously considering going to Sydney purely to annoy and inconvenience people.
As if last year’s APEC security hullabaloo wasn’t enough, now ordinary, non-God-fearing Australians in Sydney aren’t allowed to annoy people. It’s probably just as well that extraterritoriality does not extend to the average person on a working holiday visa in the UK, otherwise Australians in London would probably lose most of their wages in fines for annoying the locals…
Anyway, what constitutes annoyance?
The head of the Rum Corps New South Wales Police Commissioner explains: “These are powers to stop people taking things in … like a paint bomb, all of those sort of things that … certainly you couldn’t take to the football on Saturday.”
What about condoms?
By injera, on June 3rd, 2008% I’m glad I can rely on The Age to be on-the-ball with breaking news. Twelve hours after the newspaper’s own immediate vicinity was closed off, an online news report appeared. Two guys, on the roof of The Age building, were making their own version of I Am Legend. According to the report, which seems to have disappeared, they had replica weapons and were taking turns photographing each other in poses from the movie. A security guard at the newspaper noticed them on via security cameras and called it in to the police and… well, I saw the result.
There was no mention of a man lying in Little Lonsdale Street, so perhaps I imagined that. Apparently the two film-makers tried to escape on their bikes (I’m not sure whether the image I have in my mind of two lanky guys on BMXs is due to reporting or wishful thinking) and were caught in King Street. Not, then, apprehended violently in Little Lonsdale.
By injera, on June 1st, 2008% As I was walking down Spencer Street this morning, a police car sped by with lights flashing but no sirens. When I reached the LaTrobe Street corner, the citybound lane was blocked off by a police van and two officers were standing by, redirecting traffic. Odd, I thought, but kept walking.
At the next corner, another van was parked. Beside this van was an unmarked car with a flashing dashboard light. More officers were standing by. A group of people (onlookers? voyeurs? passers-by? evacuees?) were standing on the western side of the street, angling for a view of Little Lonsdale Street.
Continue reading Another mystery police operation
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