Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Greed is Good
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| Brett Favre: Calling an audible against NFL owners |
Take a deep breath, suspend all disbelief and walk through the following hypothetical (and admittedly ridiculous) scenario with me ...
It's December 2006.
I decide to leave ESPN, start my own blog and charge $10 per year for anyone to read my column. Just for fun -- again, it's hypothetical! -- let's say one million readers sign up, guaranteeing me $10 million for that first year (2007). And let's say I sign advertising deals with three sponsors for another $2 million apiece, raising my total haul to $16 million for Year 1. I spend the next 12 months writing and pinching myself for my good fortune. Life is good.
Fast-forward to December 2007. I just learned something about myself. I don't like it. I know it's wrong. I can't shake it. I can't deny it. See, I really, really like money. Even if I never imagined making $16 million in my lifetime, much less for a single year, I now find myself smitten by those dollar signs. How much more can I make? How high can this go? Someday, I want my financial adviser to cackle and say, "Good Lord, I don't even know what to do with all this cash flow." That's what I want.
Hence, I need to raise the total value of my "franchise." I build a more sophisticated website, pay for designers and extra bandwidth, then hire a team of writers and editors to work for me. That creates $2 million in expenses for Year 2, which I pay off by finding a fourth sponsor. In order to cover these additional expenses, I'm "forced" to raise the 2008 subscription fee to $25. (That's what I tell my idiot readers.) This time around, only 700,000 readers sign up. Between sponsors and subscribers, I am still guaranteed a total haul of $23.5 million for Year 2. Profit. This is good. I am showing "growth." Even as I slowly antagonize my audience.
By the end of Year 2, I have the hottest sports website on the Internet. Everyone wants to work for me for the visibility and prestige, and also because I share revenue with employees (they get salaries plus a small piece of everything I am pulling in). An overload of potential sponsors allows me to jack my rates and pocket $30 million in ad revenue for Year 3. But you know what? I love the smell of money. I can't get enough of it. Sometimes I go to the bank, withdraw a wad of $100 bills, throw it on my desk, lean my face over it and smell the pile like cookies baking in an oven. I can't get enough. I am insatiable. I need more.
For Year 3, I limit subscriptions to 300,000, then sell "personal subscription licenses." For an upfront fee of $200, a reader would purchase the right to subscribe for 10 years -- a decade-long contract of sorts -- at whatever price I charge. Did you catch those last five words? At whatever price I charge. How stupid are these people? Yeah, I know, they are my fans ... but don't they realize that I'm throwing on a ski mask and holding them up? And so what if this makes me the greediest, most soulless a-hole who ever lived? I WANT THAT MONEY! This is America! Greed is good! I have lost my mind.
Incredibly, I sell those 300,000 PSLs for a total haul of $60 million, then make another 50,000 PSL-free subscriptions available on a first-come/first-serve annual basis. (Those sell, too.) Was that influx of money worth getting ripped by media reporters and savaged on message boards and blogs? Are you kidding? Please. Throw in another $12.25 million from the $35 subscription fee for Year 3 (which, very quietly, I jacked up another 10 bucks) and a robust $20 million in ad revenue and, even after you remove expenses and revenue sharing, I still pocket $80 million.
Now I'm on the cover of Business Week, I'm featured in Vanity Fair, I'm making appearances on Bill Maher and "The Daily Show." ... I'm a rock star, the writer/entrepreneur who turned his little blog into a nine-figure operation. I spend another $5 million on staff, then another $10 million on a five-story building on Hollywood Boulevard, then another $10 million renovating it into a state-of-the-art office that features a lavish two-story sports bar with a 250-inch Panasonic HD plasma that costs $400,000 (the first of its kind) ... which, by the way, I didn't have to pay for because I convinced the city of Los Angeles to fund almost all of it with taxpayer money. I will generate revenue from journalism buffs, tourists, you name it. Or so I think.
See, I may have bitten off a little bit more than I could chew this time.
read more:
Pat Metheny, Secret Story
Above the Treetops. Finding and Believing.
[ed. When I first heard these songs I thought there might be a Chinese children's chorus involved, then I saw the videos]
Music From a Tree
Sound designer and composer Diego Stocco plays a tree as a beautifully rhythmic musical instrument, recording it using a custom stethoscope and other masterful techniques. From his description:
In the garden of my house there's a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs. It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it. To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I used two Røde NT6 and a NTG-2 as microphones, combined with a customized stethoscope.
I recorded the tracks live on a Pro Tools LE system. I didn't use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on.via:
When Plates Collide
It's easy to get caught up in the hysteria of a major catastrophe. But it's also a good time to get schooled on the risks involved in our societal balancing act with technology, economics, politics and Mother Nature. Think about how much more we now know about deep sea drilling, blow-out preventers and oil spill cleanup technology.
via:
via:
The Hard Way
By Carl Hegelman
Back in the days before the great bull market began to charge in August of 1982, there was a soothsayer called Joe Granville. He was the Mad Money Jim Cramer of his day, a showman and exhibitionist whose performances included walking on water (across a swimming pool in Tucson, dressed in a tuxedo) and a piano-playing chimp. Despite that his demeanor wasn't what you would expect of a great financial brain, he attracted a large following of investors for his $250-a-year financial letter (about $615 in today's money), partly because, as People magazine explained, he had called four major stock-market turns in two years. His reputation grew to the point that when he issued a "sell everything" fax to his premium subscribers in January 1981 the market dropped 2½% on its busiest trading day to that point in history.
For every big financial turn, there's at least one hero who saw it coming. It's not surprising, when you think about it. Given the number of promoters airing their opinions, it would be surprising if someone, somewhere, hadn't called it, maybe even three or four times in a row. It's like the monkeys with the typewriters. The surprising thing isn't the occasional masterpiece. It's when the same lucky monkey who wrote Taming Of The Shrew then proceeds to peck out Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labour's Lost. And, sure enough, Joe Granville's reputation didn't survive the Great Bull. Apparently, he's still in business, but I read somewhere that over the past 25 years his recommendations have lost an average of 20% a year. No word on his piano-playing chimp.
There are various heroes for the financial crunch of 2008-10; such as Robert Shiller of Yale, who called both the dotcom and the housing crashes, and Meredith Whitney, the banking analyst formerly at Oppenheimer who first exclaimed, in October 2007, that Citigroup was wearing no clothes (and who, by the way, is now predicting a meltdown in the municipal bond market). Perennial doomsayer Nouriel Roubini of NYU is also often cited, although he was already something of a stopped clock by 2008, more focused on the trade deficit with China than on the exponential rise of house prices.
Lately, the economic duo of Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have become talk-worthy because of a series of studies of past financial crises focusing on the dire consequences of having too much debt. Their most recent paper on "The Aftermath of Financial Crises" caused a stir because it's telling us that running up bigger deficits will only prolong the problem, a prescription that goes against the current policy of deficit-financing backed by both political parties—whatever they may say to the contrary—in the recent tax-cut-extension act. Probably nobody disagrees with Rogoff and Reinhart that our debt is a problem, but how big a problem is it and why is it a problem?
Well, if you add up $14.5 trillion in mortgage debt, $14 trillion of national debt (Treasury bills and bonds), $2.5 trillion in consumer debt (credit cards, student loans, car loans, etc.) and $3 trillion in state and municipal debt, you get to around $34 trillion. Given that we have about 140 million people working right now, that works out to about $240,000 for every working stiff in the country.
more here:
Ama (Pearl) Divers
We landed on our feet, getting a small apartment in northern Tokyo, and training daily. We were invited to the training camp of a Japanese living treasure, and left our little place to head south.
After the training camp ended, we traveled in the coastal areas of the renowned Diving Women of Japan. I had heard of them since I was very small, studied them in graduate physiology classes, and wanted to know if the stories were true.We were invited to stay with the Ama diving women in several villages. "Ama" literally means "sea woman" in Japanese. When you spell 'ama' you use two kanji characters, 'sea' and 'woman.' In Japan, they are more properly called Ama-San; "San" is an honorific suffix. The Japanese have long held these professional diving women in high regard for their hard-working life.
The SeaWomen have breath-hold dived in chilly waters for perhaps thousands of years to harvest shellfish, seaweed, and other food. They were the major providers for their villages. At one time, the Ama-San were the world's largest fleet of commercial divers. Now there are few left. The youngest are in their 50's. The oldest working divers are now 70 and 80 years old, and even older. The daughters move to the cities, not wanting to train in the cold waters with their mothers to become Ama-San. Soon there may be no more.
In the West in the 1960's and early 70's, there was a sudden scientific interest in studying the mammalian dive reflex. Many studies centered on the Ama. Scientists wanted to study how deep they dived and for how long, to measure slowing of heart rate and redistribution of blood from limbs to the core, representative of the dive reflex. Studies were also initiated to estimate oxygen saturation and decompression stress. It was often conceded that the real interest in the Ama was because they dived nearly naked.
Hot Water
Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima
Union of Concerned ScientistsBecause of their high radioactivity, fuel rods continue to produce very significant heat even after they are no longer useful for generating electricity and are removed from the reactor core. Such “spent fuel” rods need to be continually cooled for many years to prevent them from heating to a level where they would suffer damage.
To cool the rods after they are removed from the reactor core, they are placed on racks in a spent fuel pool that circulates cooled water around them. This water is circulated by pumps that are run using electricity from the power grid. Typically these pumps do not have backup power from deisel generators or batteries, so if power from the grid is interrupted, as it is in the case of the Japanese earthquake, they will stop operating.
Once the cooling pumps stop, the water in the spent fuel pools will begin to heat up and will eventually start to boil off. The pools are typically 45 feet deep with the fuel rods stored in the lower 15 feet of the pool, so 30 feet of water would have to boil off before exposing the rods. That could take several days, so this issue may only be appearing now.
If water cannot be added to the pool, or if the pool has been damaged and is leaking, the fuel may remain uncovered. The exposed fuel can get hot enough to melt, depending on how long it has been out of the reactor. If the fuel melts, it would release significant additional radioactivity into the air.
If mechanisms to fill the pool at Unit 4 are broken, or if there is a need to repair the pool, it will be difficult to get workers close enough to do this. If spent fuel has been in the pool for a relatively short time, even if the water level is at the top of the fuel rods, the radiation dose to someone at the railing of the pool would give them a lethal dose in well under a minute. This would explain why there have been reports of requests to use helicopters to deliver water to the pools. However, it appears that this is not a practical way of delivering water.
full article here:
Sex, Hastily, Then Beignets
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| T.S Elliot |
By David Orr
As you may be aware, The Paris Review has been publishing a series of blog posts called “The Culture Diaries,” which are apparently diaries about… culture. The diarists thus far have been a delightful assortment of sophisticated folks, a few of whom appear to consume culture—perhaps even Culture—in amounts that would stagger much larger land mammals. Anyhow, since The Awl is basically The Paris Review with more videos of bears, the editors here suggested that I offer a glimpse into my own humble work schedule as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review. (This is not, of course, in any way a parody of The Paris Review series. That would be uncivilized.)
9:00 a.m.: Wake from a dream in which François Villon and I are sharing a dream about Susan Sontag making out with Simone Weil. Hot. Yawn artfully. Make vain attempt to free my left arm, which is trapped beneath the slumbering bosom of “Marguerite,” whom I met last night at a party in Soho for a Hungarian rotogravure artist/DJ. No success.
9:02 a.m.: Ask my wife if she could perhaps assist. Merci!
9:25 a.m.: Post toilette, began my morning perusal of the Berlin papers. Sigh over inadequate coverage of my friend Gerhard’s production of Michel de Ghelderode’s Red Magic, which he has staged entirely in ecru. Philistines, the Germans. I will have to write stern letters to several editors. Possibly using my ostrich quill.
10:15 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then beignets.
10:30 a.m.: Prepare to enter my “writing mode.” Place one hand on a dictionary originally owned by T.S. Eliot (a fortune at auction, but worth it!). Place the other hand on a bathrobe belonging to Hart Crane. Place my feet in a laundry hamper thought to have been briefly in the possession of James Merrill’s dentist. Soak it in.
11:00 a.m.: Begin sketching thoughts about John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud into moleskin notebook. Ostrich quill? Oui. Oui indeed.
12:30 p.m.: Gaze poetically heavenward while sharing a light lunch of organic pearl onions and filet of local cassowary with James Franco and Harold Bloom at the Yale Club. Franco gets a little tipsy and punches a waiter while shouting something about “Twitter” (possibly “water” or “mother"; his enunciation was suffering). Waiter out cold. I cover waiter with my favorite made-to-measure ascot and flee.
2:35 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then petit-fours.
3:00pm: Drinks in Alphabet City with Greta, a Norwegian tea sculptor and amateur horticulturist whose great-grandfather invented the meatball. We agree that the state of Danish cinema is dire. Adrien Brody is seated beside us, and I deliberately order a Stella while smirking.
4:00 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then meatballs.
4:20 p.m.: Realize I’m a bit drunk. Decide to call on my friend Laurence, a philosopher cum structural engineer whose father invented the ounce. We debate the merits of capitalism in light of Dior’s recent scandals and the existence of Canada. I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.
6:30 p.m.: Realize that I am still a bit drunk. Realize that realizing that one is drunk is… banal? Yet what is banality but the infinite white space of sobriety? Write this down in Moleskine notebook for possible publication in N+1.
6:39 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review: “heymrfancyshrts.”
6:40 p.m.: Immediately regret text.
6:41 p.m.: Send text to Lorin Stein: “sorry mrfancyshrts.”
6:42 p.m.: Throw phone away.
6:43 p.m.: Retrieve phone and send text to James Franco that reads, in its entirety, “what.”
6:46 p.m.: Pre-prandial drinks with Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke. Both wearing black.
8:00pm: Dinner with Jonathan Franzen in his private arboretum. Franzen sporting blindfold again, has trouble with fork. Awkward scene involving prawns.
9:30 p.m.: Sex, hastily, then slightly bloody shrimp cocktail.
10:00 p.m.: Attend Wallace Shawn’s latest play, Yes, I Was in ‘The Princess Bride’ but my Dad Edited The New Yorker and My Plays are Huge in Europe, Also Remember ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ Which You Probably Haven’t Seen But Feel Vaguely that You Should Have, and Yes, You Should Have.
12:00 a.m.: Participate in standing ovation.
12:05 a.m.: Standing ovation still going on.
12:08 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then leg cramps.
1:00 a.m.: Post-play drinks with two matadors, Gore Vidal, a team of Belgian weightlifters, the last man to see John Berryman alive, and Peter Singer. Tense moment between matadors and Singer is rescued when Vidal challenges weightlifters to justify Flemish.
2:30 a.m.: Home at last. Fall into a dream in which Villon and I are having a dream about Susan Sontag having a dream about Edmund Wilson’s cat making out with Simone Weil. Wake in terror.
2:35 a.m.: Sex, hastily, then… repose.
via:
David Orr is the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review.
Macadamia Nut-Crusted Halibut with Mango Purée and Scallion Oil
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| Photo: Anchorage Glacier Brewhouse |
I first fixed this dish while still Executive Chef at The Grill Room of the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans. I created it one night for my father, who was in town visiting and dined at the Chef's Table. My father liked the dish so much that I put it on the menu. It soon became second only to lobster in popularity, thereby securing its place on the menu at DC Coast, where it has been a top seller since the restaurant opened in 1998.
—Jeff Tunks
Cook's Strategy: The Scallion Oil and the Mango Purée may be prepared several hours in advance.
Ingredients:
2 pounds Pacific halibut fillets, thickly cut
1/2 cup macadamia nuts
1/4 loaf brioche
Salt
2 eggs
3/4 cup light olive oil
1 teaspoon black sesame seeds
Mango Purée (recipe below)
Scallion Oil (recipe below)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spread the macadamia nuts in a pie pan and toast until golden, about 5 to 7 minutes. Cool and reserve. Pulse the brioche in a food processor until crumbs form. Pulse in the toasted nuts until a crumbly mixture forms. Reserve. Leave the oven on.
Cut the halibut into 3-ounce pieces for appetizer portions or 8-ounce pieces for entrées and season with salt. In a shallow bowl, beat the eggs and 2-1/2 tablespoons water to make an egg wash. Dredge the fish in egg wash, then coat completely in the nut-crumb mixture to make a nice crust. Heat the oil in a nonstick pan over medium-high heat. Sauté the fish until golden brown on both sides, about 1 minute per side. Remove from the heat and place fish on a baking sheet; set aside.
Spread the black sesame seeds in a pie plate and toast in the oven for approximately 5 minutes. Reserve.
To serve, place the baking sheet with halibut in the hot oven and bake for about 4 minutes. Ladle a generous amount of warm Mango Purée onto each plate, and place a piece of halibut on the purée. Garnish with a ribbon of Scallion Oil and sprinkle the sesame seeds around the plate. Serve immediately.
Mango Purée
1 mango
1/2 cup white wine
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 cup cream
Juice of 1 lime
Salt
Peel the mango and remove all flesh. Place the mango chunks in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the wine and sugar. Cook to reduce the volume by three-fourths, then add the cream. Bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Let cool slightly, then purée in a food processor. Strain the mixture into a bowl. Add the lime juice and salt to taste. Cover and set aside. Gently warm the sauce before serving.
Scallion Oil
1 bunch scallions, green parts only
1/2 cup olive oil
Pinch of sugar
Pinch of salt
Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Quickly blanch the scallion greens, then immediately plunge them into cold water. Remove and dry scallions. Place them in a blender with the olive oil, sugar, and salt; purée until smooth. Place the scallion oil in a squeeze bottle and reserve. The oil may be prepared several hours ahead of serving time.
From chef Rick Bayless, EDF:
[ed. note. Thanks, Barbara]
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Unfinished
The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and “Everything and More,” a history of infinity. Depression often figured in his work. In “The Depressed Person,” a short story about an unhappy narcissistic young woman—included in Wallace’s 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”—he wrote, “Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.” He never published a word about his own mental illness.
Wallace’s death was followed by four public memorial services, celebrations of his work in newspapers and magazines, and tributes on the Web. He was only forty-six when he killed himself, which helped explain the sense of loss readers and critics felt. There was also Wallace’s outsized passion for the printed word at a time when it looked like it needed champions. His novels were overstuffed with facts, humor, digressions, silence, and sadness. He conjured the world in two-hundred-word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed thought itself. “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant,” he wrote in “Good Old Neon,” a story from 2001. Riffs that did not fit into his narrative he sent to footnotes and endnotes, which he liked, he once said, because they were “almost like having a second voice in your head.”
The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is mediated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”
Read more:
First Computer
more:
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
It is a glorious New York spring day: blue skies, clear air, a fresh breeze. A day to skip along the pavement and feel happy to be alive. Just not in Woody Allen's world. Where it's a day, like every other day, ie, one in which to sit in a darkened room and ponder the futility of all human existence and the absence of meaning. Allen's own special brand of nihilism, as expounded in his films, is, of course, well known – equal parts despair and a sort of despairing joy – but entering his office makes me wonder if this is more than an intellectual choice; if he simply has a different physiology from the rest of us.
Because outside the birds are singing, the trees are about to burst into bloom, and yet his office, where he's worked for years, seems to be some sort of black hole, exerting a force field so powerful it swallows all light. The lobby, a gloomy marble sarcophagus, gives way to a suite of rooms lit only by dim puddles from low wattage bulbs. He's like one of those deep sea creatures who have simply evolved differently; the human equivalent of the Antarctic icefish, which has no red blood cells, or the vampire squid with a metabolic rate so low it's practically dead.
At the back is a screening room, which is gloomier still, decked out with a mossy green carpet and Draylon chairs that look like they last saw daylight sometime back in 1972 – but, then, it could be any time of day or night, any point in the past 40 years. There's a record player and a collection of jazz albums, and there, suddenly, in the gloaming, is Woody himself, who, give or take a whitening of the hair, and slight hunching of the shoulders, seems equally timeless. Even at 75 he looks pretty much as he's always looked, the spectacles in place, his eyebrows a cartoon question mark.
The reason for the interview is the UK release this week of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the fourth film he's shot in Britain, and probably the best yet (if you can get over the shock of the opening scene in which Bridget Jones's mother is talking to Shirley Valentine. In a Woody Allen movie). In it, Alfie, played by Anthony Hopkins, leaves his wife, Helena, because "she became old and I wasn't prepared to accept it", and takes up with a twentysomething prostitute instead.
They are all here, the familiar subjects of Allen-esque despair. The feeling, as Alvy Singer explains at the beginning of Annie Hall, that life is nasty, brutish and cruel. But also too short. That death dominates life. And that nothing works out, ever. It's not a film a young man could have made. "No. I wouldn't have thought of it when I was young. It requires years of disillusionment, this is true," he says. The only happy characters in the film are the deluded ones, and the more powerfully deluded they are, the happier they seem. Helena, who takes up with a fortune teller and dabbles with the occult, is grinning like a loon by the end of the film.
"But then I've always felt that if the delusion works, it's great. I always think that people who have religious faith are always happier than people who do not. The problem is that it's not something you can adopt. It has to come naturally."
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