Money Market Madness

Here we go again:

Forget for a moment the IMF, and instead direct your gaze upon the MMF: Money Market Funds. These are a type of mutual fund that is, according to the SEC, required by law to invest in low-risk securities. They pay dividends that are supposed to reflect short-term interest rates. They are not (repeat NOT) federally insured.

Except they were.

Recall that during the credit crisis, these supposedly uninsured, supposedly low risk vehicles for squeezing a few pennies more out of cash fell below their One Dollar ($1) benchmark. When that happened, the Fed and Congress rescued them with a bailout as well.

Why on earth taxpayers were on the hook for an investment 3rd parties made is beyond my comprehension. Investors in equities were not made whole for their losses, that is the chance they took. Investors in bonds were not made whole, unless they were clever enough to lend to banks. Despite the foolishness and bad investment judgment of creditors to Bank of America, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, etc. were made whole.

The idea of systemic risk sure comes in handy from time to time.

And guess what? It appears that we are once again, looking at systemic risk of the banks and money market funds, who once again, made some very ill-advised lending. Only this time, instead of giving money to home buyers who could not possibly ever pay it back, they lent money to Countries, who could not ever pay it back.

Here is Randall Forsyth in this morning’s Barron’s

“RETURN-FREE RISK.” That’s just one of the turns of phrase that Jim Grant has tossed off over the years as editor of the invaluable Grant’s Interest Observer and as Barron’s most illustrious alum.

The term could well apply to major money-market funds, which provide yields barely visible to the naked eye but could suffer collateral damage from any potential fallout from a possible default by Greece. Grant was way out ahead of the crowd by pointing out in his latest issue, dated June 17, that the five largest money funds, Fidelity Cash Reserves (FDRXX), Vanguard Reserve Prime (VMRXX), Fidelity Institutional Money Market Market Portfolio (FNSXX), Fidelity Institutional Prime Money Market Portfolio (FIPXX) and BlackRock Liquidity TempFund (TMPXX) held an average of 41% of their assets in European banks’ short-term debt. Fitch Ratings added in a report last week that the top 10 money funds, with assets of $755 billion, had about half their assets in European bank liabilities.

Where the Choices Are Endless

by Seth Sawyers

When I was 18, I left the skinny part of Maryland and woke up in a place paved over with asphalt, girded by concrete, nourished by it. I awoke fascinated by the mechanized hum, disoriented, wide-mouthed before the man-made angularity, the downtown steel visible from the top floor of the college library. I woke up that September in the middle of the great flowering of the American Dream. I woke up in the suburbs.

There were strip malls crammed with a Blockbuster Video, a Hair Cuttery, an H&R Block, maybe a stand-alone Chi-Chi’s in the parking lot. Others had take-out Chinese places called Golden Wok or Golden Dragon, Dollar Generals hanging on like old scabs, liquor stores. There were always liquor stores. Some sold good wine but most sold vast stacks of warm beer, half-pints of Hennessey, plastic-bottle vodka, endless lottery tickets printed out on crink-crank printers. You slid your money and your older brother’s driver’s license to a Korean man or that Korean man’s teenaged daughter or his short and grumpy wife. They took your money from behind translucent bulletproof glass and you went back to your dorm room to drink your Natural Light until the ceiling spun. There were Korean men, but there were also Chinese men, and the difference was that Korean writing has circles while Chinese writing looks like a game of pick-up sticks repeated into infinity. There were Indian men and Pakistani men and though they didn’t look all that different, it turns out they are not the same. There were dark-haired, sun-starved, shadow-bearded Jewish guys in white dress shirts and black slacks with pleats in front. There were lots of Asian girls and also Muslim girls with scarves on their heads who may as well have been from Jupiter. There were, of course, black people. Black girls ran the front desk at Susquehanna Hall, where I lived. They had scholarships and studied hard and laughed hard and had enough attitude to fill refrigerators. The black guys were tall and dark and moved in their baggy jeans like dark princes, hair cut very close to the skull or else worn in dreadlocks captured in elaborate cloth reggae hats that crowned their heads like broken-down beehives.

There were people who looked like me but whom I did not know, could not know. There were alternative white kids who pierced their noses and lips and, from what I heard, their nipples. There were science-fiction kids who argued over whether Star Wars or Star Trek had the more fully developed world. The Women of Diversity had a whole hall to themselves. There were gay boys, sleek and shiny and scented. There were girls in glasses who read poetry and liked it and who drank coffee and liked it. I had just woken up in the suburbs, but these people had been waking up there for their entire lives. They came from places called Arbutus and Glen Burnie and Catonsville and Crofton and Odenton and Columbia and Bowie and Laurel and Greenbelt and Silver Spring. They came from the great paved-over America, the land of housing tracts named for forgotten trees and ruined creeks, the land fought over and won by 7-Eleven, Exxon, Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Payless Shoe Source, Best Buy.

Amazingly, overwhelmingly, you could choose, all the time. At the university where I found myself, there were a thousand classes to which they assigned numbers and for which someone had written descriptions printed up in a thick booklet made of cheap paper. I’d selected mechanical engineering as my major but didn’t know why. What was Linguistics? Language and Scientific Value? Fluid Dynamics? The Philosophy of Religion? Computational Methods? I did not know. I did not know about a lot of things, and so I played it safe. I took English 100, History 100, Political Science 100, Precalculus. We were 18, 19, fully grown but clueless. I admired, then, 20-year-olds who read books, who knew how to pack bowls, who had been to New York or the Grand Canyon, who knew what sex was like.

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Hand Shadows

image credits:  here and here

Always On

by Elizabeth Rosenthal

Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems.

There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.

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Ball of Fire

by Jonathan Penner

I’d never heard of him. Found his book, The Ghastly One, on sale at Skylight Books; a whole volume on Andy Milligan, the Staten Island schlockmeister usually referred to as the more prolific, “worse” Ed Wood. I knew enough about Milligan’s awfulness to be intrigued and found Jimmy McDonough’s paperback unforgettable, moving, and brilliantly put together. I sought out his other three books and they were all funny, compulsively readable, staggeringly well researched and ragingly well written. What kind of gutter-dwelling genius would write not only The Ghastly One, but Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, a vast, fevered journey through the life, times and music of the infuriating icon; Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, the tragicomic biography of sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer, soon to be a major motion picture from David O. Russell; and Tammy Wynette, Tragic Country Queen, a bittersweet, evenhanded appreciation of a singular talent most simply worship, deride or ignore? Who was this Jimmy McDonough, who had bushwhacked a course through the night traps and neon thickets of America’s postwar counterculture? I had to know. I requested an interview and got a “yes.” Learned he lives in Portland. Drives a Dodge Dart. Loves rayon shirts, Casino and Eyes Without a Face.

But he wouldn’t or couldn’t meet me. Or even talk on the phone. He agreed to field questions lobbed in over the Internet and returned answers honed to an off-handed perfection.

Maybe it’s that he’s a reclusive crank; maybe he’s just a control freak. Or maybe it’s that Jimmy McDonough knows how to get a subject to come alive on the page; that getting prose to read like a person’s talking, requires prose writing, and not just talk transcribing. “I’d like it to be accurate,” he says. “Other than that, bombs away!”

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Ai Weiwei

Fascinating documentary about the artist Ai Weiwei, recently released on bail in China after three months of detention on charges of inciting subversion.  Well worth watching in its entirety (50 min.) or jump to any spot and still be amazed.

The Chinese legal authorities released the dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Wednesday after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s eroding human rights record.

“I’m released, I’m home, I’m fine,” Mr. Ai said in English after being reached on his cellphone shortly before 12:30 a.m. Thursday. “In legal terms, I’m — how do you say? — on bail. So I cannot give any interviews. But I’m fine.”

Photographs of Mr. Ai taken as he arrived after 11 p.m. Wednesday at his vast studio in the Caochangdi arts district of northeast Beijing showed him smiling, wearing a blue T-shirt, and with his trademark bushy beard streaked with gray. The shirt hung loosely on him, his girth reduced during his time in custody.

The release of Mr. Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside of China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of Beijing bowing to international pressure on human rights, though the terms of his release may silence him for months or even years, giving hard-liners here at least a partial victory. Mr. Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Arab world percolated on the Chinese Internet.

China’s move to douse any flicker of dissent was the harshest in years outside of the restive ethnic regions in the far west, and the vast majority of those detained in the crackdown were, like Mr. Ai, held in secret locations for weeks with no legal justification.

Chinese officials announced in May that the authorities were investigating Mr. Ai on suspicion of tax evasion, after police officers took him from the main Beijing airport on April 3 as he prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong. Supporters of Mr. Ai said the tax inquiry was a pretext to silence one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Pastoral Romance

By Brent Cunningham

Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.

Phoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo’s thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour’s drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.

Recently, over lunch in Betty Jo’s cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter’s notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: “Leave it. There’s nothing romantic about it.”

Leave it? But isn’t Green Acres the place to be? Listening to the conversation about food reform that has unspooled in this country over the last decade, it’s hard to avoid the idea that in terms of food production and consumption, we once had it right—before industrialization and then globalization sullied our Eden. Nostalgia glistens on that conversation like dew on an heirloom tomato: the belief that in a not-so-distant past, families routinely sat down to happy meals whipped up from scratch by mom or grandma. That in the 1950s, housewives had to be tricked by Madison Avenue marketers into abandoning beloved family recipes in favor of new Betty Crocker cake mixes. That the family farm was at the center of an ennobling way of life.

Evidence of the nostalgia abounds. There is an endless series of books by urban food revolutionaries who flee the professional world for the simple pleasures of rural life, if only for a year or so: Growing A Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land; Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg; The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir. A new crop sprouts each year. There’s Michael Pollan’s admonition, in his bestselling book Food Rules, to not “eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” And then there are countless articles about the young and educated putting off grad school to become organic farmers. A March 5 piece in the New York Times is typical. Under the headline, “In New Food Culture, a Young Generation of Farmers Emerges,” it delivers a predictable blend: twenty-somethings who quit engineering jobs to farm in Corvallis, Oregon—microbrews, Subarus, multiple piercings, indie rock, yoga. This back-to-the-landism is of a piece with the nineteenth-century, do-it-yourself fever that has swept certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, complete with handlebar mustaches, jodhpur boots, classic cocktails, soda shops, and restaurants with wagon wheels on the walls.

The surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. PepsiCo now has throwback cans for Pepsi (the red-white-and-blue one Cindy Crawford famously guzzled in the 1990s) and Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they’ve replaced “bad” high-fructose corn syrup with “good” cane sugar. Frito-Lay is resurrecting a Doritos chip from the 1980s (taco-flavored, a sombrero on the package). When nostalgia is co-opted by corporate America and sold back to us, as it invariably is, the backlash can’t be far behind. Consider this the opening salvo.

It’s unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that “Food used to be better” so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn’t. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn’t very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.

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Best Seats in the House

Photograph by CAPT. JOHN PELTIER USAF

Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Colonel Green is the 333rd Fighter Squadron commander and Captain Bartoe is a 333rd FS weapons system officer. Both aircrew members are assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C.

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The Great Corn Con

by Steven Rattner

Feeling the need for an example of government policy run amok? Look no further than the box of cornflakes on your kitchen shelf. In its myriad corn-related interventions, Washington has managed simultaneously to help drive up food prices and add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit, while arguably increasing energy use and harming the environment.

Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply.

But rather than ameliorate the problem, the government has exacerbated it, reducing food supply to a hungry world. Thanks to Washington, 4 of every 10 ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute that imperceptibly nicks our energy problem. Larded onto that are $11 billion a year of government subsidies to the corn complex.

Corn is hardly some minor agricultural product for breakfast cereal. It’s America’s largest crop, dwarfing wheat and soybeans. A small portion of production goes for human consumption; about 40 percent feeds cows, pigs, turkeys and chickens. Diverting 40 percent to ethanol has disagreeable consequences for food. In just a year, the price of bacon has soared by 24 percent.

To some, the contours of the ethanol story may be familiar. Almost since Iowa — our biggest corn-producing state — grabbed the lead position in the presidential sweepstakes four decades ago, support for the biofuel has been nearly a prerequisite for politicians seeking the presidency.


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image: flydime/Flickr Creative Commons License

The Prince Who Blew Through Billions

by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair

For six weeks, starting last November 8, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, in Manhattan, the two sides in a most unusual trial presented equally outlandish stories. The plaintiff, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, Brunei’s notorious royal playboy, who has probably gone through more cash than any other human being on earth, tried to convince the jury that he was extremely naïve when it came to financial matters. He claimed that he never signed checks and that his business affairs had been managed entirely by four private secretaries and a coterie of advisers and attorneys, who ran his estimated 250 companies and all his other concerns.

By casting himself in that light, Prince Jefri, 56, hoped to make the jury believe that two of his own lawyers, Faith Zaman and Thomas Derbyshire, the attractive British husband-and-wife team sitting at the defense table, had ripped him off to the tune of a reported $23 million. This wasn’t necessarily a bad strategy, because soon it seemed that only a simpleton would not have noticed the blatant chicanery he was accusing these attorneys of committing.

“Numerous acts of theft and deception, self-dealing, embezzlement and fraud, all designed to benefit themselves and their family members,” read the prince’s original complaint, filed in federal court in December 2006. He charged the couple with arranging a fraudulent sale of his mansion on Long Island’s exclusive North Shore at a cut-rate price, with depositing a $5 million check paid to one of his companies into the account of a “cloned” company under their control in the Cayman Islands, and with putting improper personal expenses—totaling more than $650,000—on company credit cards. After the prince installed the then 29-year-old Zaman as managing director of one of his hotels, the New York Palace, in 2006, she proceeded, according to him, to award herself an exorbitant contract ($2.5 million a year), sign herself to dirt-cheap, long-term leases on a luxury apartment in the hotel and the steak house on the ground floor, and hire her inexperienced brother as a systems analyst. “The words ‘Faithless servants’ do not do justice to the scope of their perfidy,” read Prince Jefri’s complaint.

The lawyers for the defendants attempted in turn to show the jury that Jefri was not a financial simpleton at all but “an unabashed and unreformed serial liar,” charged with stealing $14.8 billion from Brunei when he served as its finance minister, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The defendants claimed that he had used his stolen billions to finance a 10-year orgy of extravagance and deceit, which culminated only when his brother the Sultan of Brunei set out to recover the fortune Jefri had supposedly hidden. The lawyers argued that Zaman and Derbyshire had stolen nothing, and that the prince’s charges against them were part of an elaborate scheme to funnel money through them in all manner of nefarious ways to fuel his insatiable need for cash. The defense lawyers also claimed that Jefri had stiffed Zaman and Derbyshire for millions in salaries and travel expenses, then fired them when they finally refused to comply with his increasing illegal demands.

I studied the diminutive prince on the witness stand, with his dark business suit, swept-back hair, and copper complexion. As he testified—for the first time in a courtroom—there was no hint of the high-flying Jefri whose well-publicized expenses had once been estimated at $50 million a month. In his place was a rather ordinary man, shy and uncomfortable, reduced to sharing courthouse hallways with reporters and being chaperoned by a representative of the sultan. “Good morning, Prince Jefri,” I said to him every day. “Good morning,” he always replied. Once, he asked me about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

In his testimony, he gave only the briefest answers. “I think so,” he responded in a falsetto voice when asked if he had attorneys spread all over the world. “Just visit there,” he said to describe his duties at a Hong Kong shipping company, one of the many concerns from which he received a salary. “There is a lot,” he answered when asked how many companies were in his name. “I own them; I do not run them,” he added. “So who ran the companies?” he was asked. “Professional lawyers that I appointed.”

In stark contrast to the subdued prince were the defendants: Zaman, a 34-year-old, effervescent beauty, her fine figure packed into smart business outfits, and her husband, 43, who spoke with a Liverpool accent and appeared almost every day in a different bespoke suit and silk pocket foulard. Losing this case would bankrupt them and destroy their reputations. If the jury found for the prince, the attorneys representing him would seize everything they owned. Nevertheless, they smiled, laughed, shook their heads at things they didn’t agree with, and seemed ready and eager to get on the stand and tell their story.

Someone had to be lying, and for weeks the jury tried to decide who that was. “In its way, this case begins like a fairy tale,” Jefri’s lawyer Linda Goldstein, a fast-talking whippet of a New York City litigator, told the jury in her opening argument. “Once upon a time there was a prince. His name was Prince Jefri Bolkiah.”

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Babe

by Don Van Natta Jr.

Mildred Ella Babe Didrikson Zaharias has, in many ways, become America’s all-but-forgotten sports superstar. And nowhere is Didrikson’s faded sporting legacy felt more powerfully than here in her hometown, where she hopped hedges along Doucette Street and learned how to play golf at Beaumont Country Club.

Off Interstate 10, a modest, circular brick museum, built in 1976 as a tribute to Babe, is easy to miss. Its smudged glass cases are stocked with the loot collected during Didrikson’s fabulous sporting life: the medals, trophies, golf clubs and get-well telegrams and letters, from housewives and schoolchildren, prime ministers and presidents, now yellowed and fading. It is open every day except Christmas.

On a good day, the museum attracts a handful of visitors. On many days, though, no one steps foot inside.

At a local awards dinner this month for gifted high school golfers, only two winners said they had visited Babe Didrikson’s museum. Even in her own backyard, the young golfers now prowling the courses where Didrikson learned the game barely know her name.

“Every time I tell her story, people have trouble believing everything she was able to do during her life,” said Beaumont’s mayor pro tem, W. L. Pate Jr., the president of the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Foundation. “And she did so much in so little time.”

Didrikson died of cancer at 45 on Sept. 27, 1956, and she was buried here, at Forest Lawn Cemetery. On a memorial near her burial site, there is the old Grantland Rice line about how winning and losing are not what matters but rather how one played the game.

It is unclear how the lines came to be engraved into the stone. What is clear is Didrikson never subscribed to them.

“I don’t see any point in playing the game if you don’t win,” she often said. “Do you?”

But if her name may mean increasingly little to a young generation of sports fans, Didrikson, who was born 100 years ago, was perhaps America’s greatest all-around athlete, male or female.

No athlete excelled at more sports and games than Didrikson. She was an all-American basketball player, a two-time Olympic track and field gold medalist and a golf champion who won 82 tournaments, including an astonishing 14 in a row. One of the 13 founding members of the L.P.G.A., Didrikson became the first woman to play against men in a PGA Tour event and the first American to win the British Women’s Amateur Championship. She was also an outstanding baseball, softball, tennis and billiards player, diver and bowler.

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A Free Man in L.A.

By Vanessa Grigoriadis

What shall Justin Timberlake do today, on this overcast Los Angeles afternoon in the middle of spring? He’s been going to sleep early, around 10 P.M., so when he wakes up in his Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills, he feels well rested. He crawls out of bed all alone to brush his teeth, take a pee with his two boxer dogs, and make himself a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich with eggs and sausage. He answers a few e-mails, noodles around on his guitar while absentmindedly watching television, then drives down from the hills to a private gym, where his trainer puts him through a set of plyometrics, a form of leg strengthening that involves moving from squatting to jumping in rapid succession. Timberlake, who is over six feet tall, with luminous blue eyes and a completely unlined face, is devoted to keeping his body in a state of perfection. “I did, like, 10,000 of those jumps today,” he deadpans, though I have a feeling he probably did about a tenth of those—still more than most humans could handle.

What next? On that, Timberlake had been undecided until yesterday, when the idea came to mind to visit a museum. He puts on a big nubby wool cap from American Apparel, which makes him look vaguely like a snake charmer from a cold climate, and begins piloting his gleaming Audi R8—a car possessed of so many blingy accoutrements that it feels like riding in a spaceship designed by Gucci—around town. “Right now, I’m not in the mood to work,” he says. “I want to not have a schedule. I want to go to the Dodgers game if I feel like it. ‘Hey, do you guys want to play basketball today? Cool, let’s do that.’ I’ve never really given myself the opportunity to be spontaneous.”

In fact, Timberlake says that since his 30th birthday, at the end of January, for the first time in his life he’s done “nothing,” spending most of his time either simply “sitting still,” “enjoying the breeze on the top of Mulholland,” or, on the other hand, enjoying the Zen state that comes with helicoptering into backcountry snowboarding areas near Yellowstone National Park, where he spent more than a month this winter. “I figure I can go on like this until the end of the year,” he says, both hands on the steering wheel, driving slowly and peacefully, like a dowager in a Cadillac. “I don’t have anything I have to do. The only job I have to do is promote the films that are coming out, and I’m really looking forward to that.”

You’re looking forward to your junkets?

“Oh yeah,” he says, grinning widely. “It will be fun. I’ll get to go to a bunch of countries, hang out.” He makes a tight left turn, following traffic. “You know, where I’m at in my life, I’m alone and being in it, in each moment: good, bad, ugly, pretty—all of it, take it as it comes.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s a big deal. The fact is, I look back, and I made a lot of choices because I felt I needed to be validated. And I just don’t feel that way anymore.”

Timberlake’s current state of non-doing, as the Buddhists might call it, is surprising, because at his age there are few people who have followed as many different, and successful, career paths. By 16 he was the kiddie star of ’NSync, the best-selling boy band, which still holds the world record for the most albums sold in the space of a week. By 21 he had escaped this pubescent prison to become a solo R&B artist, playing an updated type of free-flowing 70s funk that turned him into an international sex symbol. And then, at 25, by singing about putting his dick in a box on Saturday Night Live, he began what’s been a seamless transition from rock star to actor, a path which is widening this month as he appears in his first leading role, in the comedy Friends with Benefits. He also has a supporting part in the Cameron Diaz comedy Bad Teacher, and is finishing postproduction on Now, a futuristic drama with Amanda Seyfried and Olivia Wilde. He has his own tequila, distilled on the agave farms outside of Guadalajara, he hosts a PGA Tour tournament that has raised millions for Shriners Hospitals for Children, and he owns one of the country’s few eco-friendly golf courses, Mirimichi (translated as “Place of Happy Retreat”), in his hometown of Millington, Tennessee. “What can I say?” says Timberlake, shrugging his shoulders. “I’ve made a long career out of low expectations.”

This need to succeed, to become his generation’s multi-talented Sammy Davis Jr., is part of what makes him appealing to filmmakers. “I needed someone who could be a Frank Sinatra figure, someone who could walk into the room and command all the attention,” says David Fincher, of casting Timberlake as Sean Parker, the Facebook investor and rogue, in The Social Network. “I didn’t want someone who would just say, ‘I know how to play groovy.’ You can’t fake that stuff. That’s the problem with making movies about a rock star—actors have spent their lives auditioning and getting rejected, and rock stars haven’t.” Timberlake takes acting seriously, though. “There’s a lot of downtime on a movie set, and there’s nothing to do except talk, read, or check your phone, but Justin didn’t have a phone on set,” says Gene Stupnitsky, co-writer of Bad Teacher. “He didn’t bring it because he didn’t want to have any distractions.”

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Friday Book Club - God: A Biography

by Phyllis Trible

In recent years literary studies of the Bible have explored all kinds of topics -- save God, the chief protagonist of the narrative. That not insignificant subject has now received its due, a tour de force called "God: A Biography," by Jack Miles.

If some people may find a biography of God an irreverent enterprise, Mr. Miles is not one of them. He says that over centuries the Bible has been the fundamental document for both Jews and Christians. Its stories and characters have permeated the whole of Western culture. To track, then, the stories to their central character is in no way disrespectful. But Mr. Miles does engage in occasional provocation. At the outset he remarks that "God is no saint, strange to say." As the reader will find out, that is true enough, and the fact is not so strange.

Mr. Miles treats the Bible as a literary work. To produce a biography of a literary character is a complicated undertaking, and so in a sometimes amusing introductory chapter he guides the reader through the contrast in approaches taken by scholars and critics. With a light touch he describes his own approach as naive, seeing God as a real person, much the way a theatergoer thinks of Hamlet or a reader perceives Don Quixote. But he also knows there is a difference. "No character . . . on stage, page or screen," he says, "has ever had the reception that God has had."

Mr. Miles is an appropriate biographer. He is now a book columnist for The Los Angeles Times, but was once a member of the Jesuit order and studied at both the Gregorian College in Rome and Hebrew University in Jerusalem before he took his doctoral degree at Harvard University in ancient Near Eastern languages and literatures. His naivete is well-informed.

He wants to get to know God the way people get to know one another, bit by bit, over time. So he chooses to read the Hebrew Bible from the beginning right through. The chief difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is the ordering of the books, and the ordering affects the way in which God's character develops. Whereas in the Old Testament the prophetic books appear at the end of the sequence, in the Hebrew Bible they appear in the middle. The Hebrew Bible is known by a Hebrew acronym pronounced Tanakh, for the letters "t," "n" and "k," which signify its three major parts: Torah (teaching), Nebi'im (prophets) and Ketubim (writings). Mr. Miles reads the Tanakh as a coherent and integral work, without trying to identify what in it is myth, what is legend and what is history, the way most literary scholars do. He allows himself, however, some forays into historical and theological issues.

Who is the literary character called God? Simply put, a male with multiple personalities, which emerge gradually. At the beginning God creates the world in order to make a self-image, an indication that He does not fully understand who He is but discovers Himself through interaction with humanity. Immediately the focus narrows to the man and the woman in the garden. When they disobey their creator, He responds vindictively and so reveals His own inner conflict. Called God in Genesis 1, he is lofty, powerful and bountiful; called Lord God in Genesis 2 and 3, he is intimate and volatile. Ambivalent about His image, the creator becomes the destroyer: the flood descends. A radical fault runs through the character of God.

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Bicycle Camper

American artist and designer created the 'Golden Gate', an electric camper pod. It's a light weight camper home on wheels made with a fiberglass shell. Inside is a toilet, stove, a table, a convertible bed and a water tank.

(via Waslijn and Presurfer

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

The Beer Archaeologist

by Abigal Tucker

It’s just after dawn at the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the ambition for the morning is to resurrect an Egyptian ale whose recipe dates back several hundred centuries.

But will the za’atar—a potent Middle Eastern spice mixture redolent of oregano—clobber the soft, floral flavor of the chamomile? And what about the dried doum-palm fruit, which has been giving off a worrisome fungusy scent ever since it was dropped in a brandy snifter of hot water and sampled as a tea?

“I want Dr. Pat to try this,” says Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder, frowning into his glass.

At last, Patrick McGovern, a 66-year-old archaeologist, wanders into the little pub, an oddity among the hip young brewers in their sweat shirts and flannel. Proper to the point of primness, the University of Pennsylvania adjunct professor sports a crisp polo shirt, pressed khakis and well-tended loafers; his wire spectacles peek out from a blizzard of white hair and beard. But Calagione, grinning broadly, greets the dignified visitor like a treasured drinking buddy. Which, in a sense, he is.

The truest alcohol enthusiasts will try almost anything to conjure the libations of old. They’ll slaughter goats to fashion fresh wineskins, so the vintage takes on an authentically gamey taste. They’ll brew beer in dung-tempered pottery or boil it by dropping in hot rocks. The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.

“Dr. Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3400 B.C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5400 B.C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago.

Widely published in academic journals and books, McGovern’s research has shed light on agriculture, medicine and trade routes during the pre-biblical era. But—and here’s where Calagione’s grin comes in—it’s also inspired a couple of Dogfish Head’s offerings, including Midas Touch, a beer based on decrepit refreshments recovered from King Midas’ 700 B.C. tomb, which has received more medals than any other Dogfish creation.

“It’s called experimental archaeology,” McGovern explains.

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