The Gatekeeper

Maitre d' Adnane Kebaier has been with Marcel's since Robert Wiedmaier's acclaimed French-Belgian restaurant threw open its doors in 1999, meaning he's seen a lot happen in the past 13 years. Beyond playing a role in hundreds of marriage proposals, Kebaier has developed a few strategies in keeping the front of the house running smoothly. In this month's edition of The Gatekeepers, he explains why he accepts cash from would-be diners desperate for a table and how race can be a factor in seating guests.

Say it's 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. What's the wait for a table?
Maybe 45 to an hour.

Is there anything I could say or do to make my wait shorter?
If they're really polite and a regular and they're wearing good things, depends on the way they present themselves. Some people they walk in and they lie, they say they have reservations. A lot of times it happens, Fridays and Saturdays when everybody is sold out and they can't get in anywhere, they put on nice clothes and they go out and they say, "We have a reservation. It's your mistake. We called and we made a reservation." And we have to deal with it.

How do you deal with it?
Well, I usually act like they have one. Mistakes can happen. Maybe someone answered the phone and didn't put them or someone canceled the reservation by mistake. So I have to deal with it. What's my strategy Friday and Saturday night when we're sold out? Always a few seats for VIPs left. Always I have Plan A and Plan B.

Has anyone ever tried to slip you money or give you gifts?
Oh yeah. Of course.

Does that ever work?
It works all of the time. I'll make it happen.

Oh yeah? So you accept the money or gifts?
Yeah, of course. You can't turn those away. That's your job. That's how you get paid sometimes, with tips. I learned something a long time ago [from] one bartender who's my friend. He gave me some money as a tip and I turned away the money. I said, "No, don't worry about it. I'll just help you." And he said, "Listen, if your father comes to your bar and orders a beer and tips you, take the money."

So if the restaurant's booked but somebody comes up and gives you money and asks for your help to get in earlier, what do you do? How do you make that happen for them?
As I said, I always have a few seats available for last-minute VIPs, so I take one of those seats and I give it to them. Usually, Friday and Saturday, almost every day when I look at the book, I have my plan. I brief my staff what's going to happen and who's who on which table, whose anniversary, whose birthday, who is gluten-free, stuff like that. So when that happens, I have to brief my guys again and change the plan, changing tables, everything. It's very hard for me to keep the balance in the dining room.

How so?
Just look at the dining room. For example, you cannot have two African-American next to each other. Or two Chinese or Japanese next to each other. It kind of looks like a different section just for this race. I have to split them around and it depends. If someone for example wears a nice suit with a nice watch, nice lady, I'm not going to sit with him a guy wearing just a khaki and a shirt. You have to have the balance in the dining room. (...)

What's the most outrageous request that you have accommodated?
I've been in a situation that I have to present the ring for engagement. All the time. I act like I'm taking the dessert to a table and I put the ring on a plate, cover it and I go to the table and I tell the lady, "Listen, the chef saw you not eat that much so he sent you an extra course. But the real chef is this guy next to you. He made that at home and bring it with him and I just put it in the oven, warm it up and I brought it to you. And I take the cloche off and she see the ring and he finishes the rest."

That's cute. What's your success rate for accepting the proposal?
Well, so far in 13 years, I saw only one reject.

How many proposals have you done?
Maybe 300-400.

by Amy McKeever, Eater DC |  Read more:

Photo: R. Lopez

The Heretic

At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard—donned eyeshades and earphones, sank into comfy couches, and waited for their government-approved dose of LSD to kick in. From across the suite and with no small amount of anticipation, Dr. James Fadiman spun the knobs of an impeccable sound system and unleashed Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68.” Then he stood by, ready to ease any concerns or discomfort.

For this particular experiment, the couched volunteers had each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they’d been unable to solve for at least several months. In approximately two hours, when the LSD became fully active, they were going to remove the eyeshades and earphones, and attempt to find some solutions. Fadiman and his team would monitor their efforts, insights, and output to determine if a relatively low dose of acid—100 micrograms to be exact—enhanced their creativity.

It was the summer of ‘66. And the morning was beginning like many others at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, an inconspicuously named, privately funded facility dedicated to psychedelic drug research, which was located, even less conspicuously, on the second floor of a shopping plaza in Menlo Park, Calif. However, this particular morning wasn’t going to go like so many others had during the preceding five years, when researchers at IFAS (pronounced “if-as”) had legally dispensed LSD. Though Fadiman can’t recall the exact date, this was the day, for him at least, that the music died. Or, perhaps more accurately for all parties involved in his creativity study, it was the day before.

At approximately 10 a.m., a courier delivered an express letter to the receptionist, who in turn quickly relayed it to Fadiman and the other researchers. They were to stop administering LSD, by order of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Effective immediately. Dozens of other private and university-affiliated institutions had received similar letters that day.

That research centers once were permitted to explore the further frontiers of consciousness seems surprising to those of us who came of age when a strongly enforced psychedelic prohibition was the norm. They seem not unlike the last generation of children’s playgrounds, mostly eradicated during the ‘90s, that were higher and riskier than today’s soft-plastic labyrinths. (Interestingly, a growing number of child psychologists now defend these playgrounds, saying they provided kids with both thrills and profound life lessons that simply can’t be had close to the ground.)

When the FDA’s edict arrived, Fadiman was 27 years old, IFAS’s youngest researcher. He’d been a true believer in the gospel of psychedelics since 1961, when his old Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) dosed him with psilocybin, the magic in the mushroom, at a Paris café. That day, his narrow, self-absorbed thinking had fallen away like old skin. People would live more harmoniously, he’d thought, if they could access this cosmic consciousness. Then and there he’d decided his calling would be to provide such access to others. He migrated to California (naturally) and teamed up with psychiatrists and seekers to explore how and if psychedelics in general—and LSD in particular—could safely augment psychotherapy, addiction treatment, creative endeavors, and spiritual growth. At Stanford University, he investigated this subject at length through a dissertation—which, of course, the government ban had just dead-ended.

Couldn’t they comprehend what was at stake? Fadiman was devastated and more than a little indignant. However, even if he’d wanted to resist the FDA’s moratorium on ideological grounds, practical matters made compliance impossible: Four people who’d never been on acid before were about to peak.

“I think we opened this tomorrow,” he said to his colleagues.

And so one orchestra after the next wove increasingly visual melodies around the men on the couch. Then shortly before noon, as arranged, they emerged from their cocoons and got to work.

by Tim Doody, The Morning News |  Read more:

Illustration Credit: Jonathan Castro

A Conversation with Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs is variously known as the guru of cities, an urban legend—“part analyst, part activist, part prophet.”  In the more than forty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her influence has been extraordinary—not only on architects, community workers, and planners but also on Nobel Prize–winning economists and ecologists.  As one critic recently put it, “Jacobs’s influence confirms that books matter. It isn’t easy to cite another writer who has had a comparable impact in our time.” A couple of years ago, she won the top American award for urban planning, the Vincent Scully Prize.  This in itself was unusual, not only because she regularly vilifies planners, but also because with the exception of the Order of Canada and a few other prizes, she typically turns down awards—some thirty honorary degrees, including one from Harvard.  Jacobs herself wasn’t interested in finishing university—she went to Columbia for just two years.
     
Her editor, Jason Epstein, puts her among a handful of innovators—Rachel Carson, Julia Child, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Benjamin Spock—who gave their fellow citizens “the confidence to challenge the life-denying follies of their times.” On Canada Day 2002, she was named one of Ten Canadians Who Made a Difference by Maclean’s magazine. Finally (one of my favourites), the New York Times Magazine included her in its hallmark list of “Irritating Women”—women who through the centuries have “tugged at history’s sleeve and wouldn’t let go”—from the mediaeval abbess and composer Hildegard of Bingen through the eighteenth-century feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, concluding with Jane Jacobs.

EW: You wrote your 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities when you were living in New York. You said, “Most of the material for these musings was at my front door.” In your case, I think the front door was, and still is, more than a metaphor. It neatly captures your own special qualities as a thinker and a writer because it’s open, it’s curious, it’s down-to-earth. You’re famous for helping us look at familiar things in a new way. I think one critic said your books are principally about what one could see if one opened one’s eyes. How did you come by that attitude, do you think, to be so observant or naturally inquisitive?

JJ: A couple of weeks ago, I finished writing an introduction to one of Mark Twain’s books, The Innocents Abroad, which is being reissued by the Modern Library. One thing I was struck by in reading it, was how much Twain emphasized that what he was trying to do was tell readers what they might see if they looked with their own eyes. He inveighed at great length against guidebooks and people who believed the guidebooks instead of what they were seeing. So this is an old problem. I suppose it comes from people wanting to be correct and not trusting themselves, fearing they’ll seem like uneducated country bumpkins in his day, if they told what they saw and how it struck them. I don’t remember ever being forced to wear those sorts of blinders when I was a child. Children do report what they see. If they’re not pooh-poohed and are listened to respectfully, grown-ups usually hear something interesting. That’s a way of encouraging people to look with their own eyes.   (...)

EW: It was while you were working for Architectural Forum that you began what has become your most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. You’ve described a moment of awakening when you visited a new housing development in Philadelphia designed by a celebrated planner. Can you talk about that moment, that revelation?

JJ: Yes. The chief planner of Philadelphia was showing me around. First we walked down a street that was just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows. I think he was taking me on this street to show me what he regarded as a bad part of the city, to contrast it with what he was going to show me next. I liked this street—people were using it and enjoying it and enjoying each other. Then we went over to the parallel street that had just undergone urban renewal. It was filled with very sterile housing projects. The planner was very proud of it, and he urged me to stand at a certain spot to see what a great vista it had. I thought the whole thing was extremely boring—there was nobody on the street. All the time we were there, which was too long for me, I saw only one little boy. He was kicking a tire in the gutter. The planner told me that they were progressing to the next street over, where we had come from, which he obviously regarded as disgraceful. I said that all the people were over there, that there were no people here, and what did he think of that? What he obviously would have liked was groups of people standing and admiring the vistas that he had created. You could see that nothing else mattered to him. So I realized that not only did he and the people he directed not know how to make an interesting or a humane street, but they didn’t even notice such things and didn’t care. People sometimes ask me if I wrote this book to educate planners. My reply is always no, because I thought they were hopeless.

by Eleanor Wachtel, Brick |  Read more:

Illustration: drawing of the Acropolis by Zbigniew Herbert

Self portrait of Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola module of the International Space Station observing the Earth below during Expedition 24.

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#0981009301 by les brumes on Flickr.
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Alfred's day off.

Want to hear a joke about sodium bromide? NaBrO
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[ed. Haven't posted much lately, there doesn't seem to be much new or interesting stuff. Hopefully things will pick up soon.]

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John Brosio. Tornadoes.

Study for “Terrarium”, 2011.

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Avett Brothers

Obama's ‘Choom Gang’

[ed. This clinches it, he has my vote.]

Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale.

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

He would smoke it here and there. He would smoke it anywhere.

Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled “Barack Obama: The Story” gives more detail on Obama’s pot-smoking days, complete with testimonials from young Barry Obama’s high school buddies, a group that went by the name “the Choom Gang.” Choom was slang for smoking marijuana.

Maraniss portrays the teenage Obama as not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.

“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.”  (...)

Hawaii of the early 1970s was something of a pot-smoking Mecca.

“It was sold and smoked right there in front of your nose; Maui Wowie, Kauai Electric, Puna Bud, Kona Gold, and other local variations of pakalolo were readily available,” writes Maraniss.

Obama’s pal Mark Bendix had a Volkswagen microbus known as “the Choomwagon.” They would often drive up Honolulu’s Mount Tantalus where they parked “turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult and Stevie Wonder, lit up some ‘sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds’ and washed it down with ‘green bottled beer’ (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Becks, and St. Pauli Girl). No shouting, no violence, no fights; they even cleaned up their beer bottles.”

by Jonathan Karl, ABC News |  Read more:
Photo: YMFY

Craigslist Sues to Prevent Easier Apartment Listings

Following-up on its cease-and-desist letter sent last month, Craigslist has now filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement against PadMapper, a website that plots Craigslist apartment listings on a map and makes it much easier to use.

Craigslist also sent similar cease-and-desist letters to Carsabi (which Ars profiled in April 2012) andMapskrieg, which use the site’s data to show used car listings and apartment listings, respectively. The three sites recei ved similar letters from Craigslist’s counsel in June, alleging violations of Craigslist’s Terms of Service.

In the lawsuit (PDF) filed in a San Francisco federal court, Craigslist charges PadMapper with copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark infringement, and unfair competition, among others. The lawsuit also names 3Taps, a San Francisco startup which openly scrapes Craigslist data and makes it available to other websites, and Does 1-25 as defendants.

The move seems rather odd for the for-profit company that has been a darling of the Bay Area Internet community for more than a decade. Most of us have used Craigslist to find all kinds of things, ranging from jobs to apartments and cars. (Heck, I found my cat on Craigslist’s free section seven years ago!) But if there’s one thing that has frustrated Internet users for years now, it's Craigslist’s lack of a proper interface, which these sites have attempted to bring to the fore. (...)

In an e-mail to Ars sent just after this article originally posted, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder wrote that he only found out about the suit on Tuesday, and is currently looking for counsel now.

"3Taps doesn't get any data from Craigslist directly, they get it from the Google cache, which is the difference—before I was just crawling, à la Google," he wrote. "Since I'm not actually re-posting the content of the listings, just the facts about the listings, I figured (with legal advice) that there was no real copyright issue there." (...)

“I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world,” he wrote. “Also, court seems like it’d be no fun.”

by  Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica |  Read more:

My Big Fat Belizean, Singaporean Bank Account

Earlier this month, I decided to see how hard it would be to set up my own offshore bank account. I figured it would be pretty difficult, because I’m not rich and don’t have a team of tax lawyers to oversee my money and because the E.U. and U.S. governments have been cracking down on tax havens by imposing stricter tax-sharing requirements. So I proceeded with some caution.

First, I Googled “company registration tax haven” and randomly picked three firms that set up accounts in offshore jurisdictions. Then I called each and explained that I was hoping to minimize my tax exposure and didn’t want anyone to know anything about my finances. Each company quickly noted that I should consult a lawyer to make sure that I wasn’t breaking the law. Then they calmly explained how to create an account that, it seemed to me, was unlikely to be discovered by the I.R.S. or any other authority.

I ended up working with A&P Intertrust, a Canadian company that I chose largely because I liked its Web site the best. (The other two companies’ sites appeared stuck in a late-’90s style with lots of flashing boxes.) A&P works with the governments of Panama, the British Virgin Islands and Belize. (Other companies that I contacted prefer the Seychelles, Cyprus or the Cayman Islands, where Mitt Romney has been reported to have money.) I decided to start my shell company in Belize because it would be exempt from all Belizean taxes and, as A&P’s site explained, “information about beneficial owners, shareholders, directors and officers is not filed with the Belize government and not available to the public.” And I’ve been to Belize and like the place.

Setting up the company was a lot cheaper than I expected. A&P charged $900 for a basic Belizean incorporation and another $85 for a corporate seal to emboss legal documents. For $650 more, A&P offered to open a bank account to stash my fledgling operation’s money in Singapore — a country, the Web site also noted, that “cannot gather information on foreigners’ bank accounts, bank-deposit interest and investment gains under domestic tax law.” And for another $690, it offered to assign a “nominee” who would be listed as the official manager and owner of my business but would report to me under a secret power-of-attorney contract. Then an A&P associate asked me to fill out the incorporation information online, just so she wouldn’t type in anything incorrectly. The whole thing took about 10 minutes. (...)

Setting up an account may be easy, but managing one is expensive. Following the law requires a team of lawyers and accountants to carefully monitor tax laws in dozens of countries and maintain accounts that stay on the safe side of confusing rules. It’s not really worth the cost for anyone other than wealthy investors looking to put aside money, tax-free, for future generations. Or for large multinationals who prefer to centralize their global cash-flow stream in a place that doesn’t tax corporations or require a lot of financial reporting. Why would a huge company like G.E. want to pay U.S. taxes every time its Spanish subsidiary sells parts to a company in Belarus when it could avoid them by incorporating offshore?

It’s easy to imagine that most other kinds of offshore activity are shady, but there is no definitive way to know, because we don’t even know how much money is in these centers. The estimates, however, are striking. The Bank for International Settlements, which collects voluntary reports from banks in 44 countries, offers the best single source of data. It counts around $31 trillion of foreign-owned assets in the world’s banks and estimates that about $4 trillion is in offshore financial centers. An estimated $1.5 trillion is in the Cayman Islands alone. The country of 52,000, which is about the size of Blaine, Minn., has more foreign-owned deposits than Japan or the Netherlands.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Marilynn K. Yee

川瀬敏郎
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Liu Maoshan（Chinese, b.1942）

Songs of Birds Echos in Jiangnan  

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Yankees Acquire Ichiro Suzuki From Mariners

[ed. Good job, Mariners. Ever since 2000-2001 you've excelled in trading your best players away. See also: Careers of Suzuki and Matsui are further intertwined.] 

In their recent search for help in the outfield, theYankees explored several modest options that might have created a small ripple inside the world of baseball. Instead, they made a move that surprised two continents and helped reinvigorate their pursuit of a 28th World Series title.

With a little more than two months remaining in the season the Yankees acquired Ichiro Suzuki, who became the first Japan-born position player in the majors when he joined theMariners in 2001, when he was named the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player.

Before Monday’s game between the two teams at Safeco Field, the Yankees sent minor league pitchers D. J. Mitchell and Danny Farquhar to the Mariners for Suzuki , whose five-year, $90 million contract expires after this season. The Yankees will also receive cash to offset the financial commitment. (...)

The Yankees designated outfielder Dewayne Wise to make room on the roster for Suzuki , a 10-time All-Star whose success in the majors helped pave the way for many other Japanese position players, including the former Yankee Hideki Matsui.

But Ichiro, who signed with the Mariners before the 2001 season and then put together a record 10 straight years of 200 hits, had grown tired of all the losing in Seattle.

About two weeks ago his agent, Tony Attanasio, called the Mariners on behalf of Ichiro and requested a trade to a contending team. The Mariners are once again in re-building process and Suzuki wanted the chance to play for a playoff-bound team before his career ends.

He will have that with the Yankees, who went into Monday’s game against the Mariners with a 57-38 record and a six-game lead in the American League East.

The Mariners were only too happy to accommodate Suzuki’s wishes, considering they were 42-55 going into Monday’s game, and had little interest in re-signing him. Although still considered a gifted player, Ichiro is in the midst of his worst season after a precipitous decline over the past two seasons.

He went into Monday’s game batting .261 with a paltry .288 on-base percentage. He scored 49 runs and had 15 doubles, 5 triples, 4 home runs, 28 runs batted in and 15 stolen bases.

It is a long way from the player he was as recently as 2010 when he hit .315 with 214 hits and had a .359 O.B.P. Suzuki became an instant sensation in his rookie year with Seattle, hitting .359 with 242 hits and 127 runs scored for the juggernaut Mariners. He joined Fred Lynn of the Boston Red Sox in 1975 as the only rookie to win the M.V.P. award.

Suzuki helped take the Mariners to the American League Championship Series in 2001, where they lost to the Yankees in five games. He went 16 for 38 with two doubles and seven runs scored, but he never made it back to the playoffs. It was the only time he ever played left field, he said.

He would go on to carve out a Hall of Fame career, with a historic list of accomplishments. He has led or tied for the major league lead in hits seven times, matching Ty Cobb and Pete Rose as the only other players to do it, and is the only one to do it in five consecutive years.

by David Waldstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

Steve Jobs: Inspiration or Cautionary Tale?

Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.”

The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs “would have fired me anyway,” he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.

What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want. Jobs routinely told subordinates that they were assholes, that they never did anything right. According to Isaacson, even Jonathan Ive, Apple’s incomparable design chief, came in for rough treatment on occasion. Once, after checking into a five-star London hotel handpicked for him by Ive, Jobs called it “a piece of shit” and stormed out. “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him,” Ive explained to the biographer. Jobs’ flouting of those rules extended outside the office, to a family that rarely got to spend much time with him as well as to strangers (police officers, retail workers), who experienced the CEO’s verbal wrath whenever they displeased him.

Jobs has been dead for nearly a year, but the biography about him is still a best seller. Indeed, his life story has emerged as an odd sort of holy scripture for entrepreneurs—a gospel and an antigospel at the same time. To some, Jobs’ life has revealed the importance of sticking firmly to one’s vision and goals, no matter the psychic toll on employees or business associates. To others, Jobs serves as a cautionary tale, a man who changed the world but at the price of alienating almost everyone around him. The divergence in these reactions is a testament to the two deep and often contradictory hungers that drive so many of us today: We want to succeed in the world of work, but we also want satisfaction in the realm of home and family. For those who, like Jobs, have pledged to “put a dent in the universe,” his thorny life story has forced a reckoning. Is it really worth being like Steve?

In one camp are what you might call the acolytes. They’re businesspeople who have taken the life of Steve Jobs as license to become more aggressive as visionaries, as competitors, and above all as bosses. They’re giving themselves over to the thrill of being a general—and, at times, a dictator. Work was already the center of their lives, but Jobs’ story has made them resolve to double down on that choice.  (...)

The second camp is what you might call the rejectors. These are entrepreneurs who, on reading about Jobs since his death, have recoiled from the total picture of the man—not just his treatment of employees but the dictatorial, uncompromising way that he approached life. Isaacson’s biography is full of stories of Jobs as an unpleasant individual—the fits he would throw over the most picayune-seeming details, like the type of flowers in his hotel room or the way an aging Whole Foods barista made his smoothie. He would park in handicap spaces; he refused to get a license plate for his car. And he abandoned his oldest daughter, applying his “reality distortion field” to the question of his own paternity.

by Ben Austin, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: Gregg Segal

XTRATUFs versus SORT-OF-TUFs

Those accustomed to XTRATUF boots, and they are numerous around here, might have noticed a change in quality lately. If you bought your boots after Christmas, chances are that your previously U.S.-made boots are now a product of China.

Beyond the argument of whether or not the company should have left its home in Rock Island, Illinois for cheaper Chinese workforce, both customers and the company say the quality of the product has suffered from the move. Word around the harbor is that XTRATUFs aren’t so tough anymore.

Andrew Moravec, a 29 year-old fishing guide, has been a regular user of XTRATUFs for years. He bought his latest pair one month ago and the boot already shows decaying symptoms.

“I had my first pair of XTRATUFs for two and a half years and they were fine,” says Moravec surrounded by fish oil, a knee on the ground getting the flesh out of a halibut’s cheek. “I got these a month ago and literally within two weeks they started to separate,” he says while inserting his finger right through the brown body of the boot and the white rubber seal above the sole.

Ian Winder, another fishing guide working at the Orca Adventure Lodge during the summer, looks at his colleagues’ boots with frustration and jumps in the conversation. “Look at this, the rubber is chipping off, that’s ridiculous after a month!” Winder wears his XTRATUFs 24/7 throughout the season.

“These are my footwear. I’m going into town in training: I’m wearing these. I’m cleaning fish: I’m wearing these. I’m out on the boat: I’m wearing these. I go everywhere,” he says proudly. (...)

Determined to verify the trustworthiness of such allegations against one of Alaska’s most cherished items of clothing, I called a few stores in Valdez. There, Joe Prax, owner of Prospector Outfitters, tells me of similar problems encountered by men working on oil tanks. Their boots too, have been falling apart as they hadn’t before.

“They need to know it's a big deal. The boots are called XTRATUF and not SORT-OF-TUF,” says Prax over the phone. The owner of this apparel and outdoor gear store says he decided long ago to share his clients discontent with representatives of the brand. “I have really tried to get that across to them.”

So, does this mean XTRATUFs devotees should switch for competition? Not quite yet, say Honeywell - XTRATUF’s manufacturers and representatives in the U.S. “We did not change any of the components, we build the boots in the same way,” ensures Steve Haynes, a sales representative at NorthStar Sales Group.

The problem seems to be coming from the poor training given to employees in the Chinese plant rather than the material or technique used. According to the company, both equipment and molds used in the U.S. were moved to China, as well as a management team from the Rock Island factory to oversee training.

“By moving to China we knew we would be under the microscope, and we goofed with the training of the people making the boots,” says Haynes.

by Diane Jeantet, Cordova Times |  Read more:

Stephen Bone, The Artist’s Studio. 1938
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The Basics of Owning Bonds

I need some yield!

This is the battle cry of investors who have become frustrated with the low yields that the Fed’s zero interest rate policy has created.

Indeed, last week saw the 10-year Treasury bond yields fall to near-record lows. This holding, the backbone U.S. bonds for most fixed-income investors, fell below a yield of 1.5 percent. And Federal Reserve chief Ben S. Bernanke gave rather dour testimony to Congress about his expectations for a weak economy in the near future.

The impact also was felt in equities, where, perversely, the bad news led to a stock rally. The traders’ assumptions — Yeah! The economy is getting worse! — was that more weakness will beget another round of quantitative easing. That excess liquidity has a tendency to goose stocks higher.

But it is in the bond market where some very odd things are occurring. Buyers of the 10-year Treasury are agreeing to lend Uncle Sam money for a decade and receive a piddling interest payment of 1.5 percent. That is barely above inflation in the depressed environment, where price rises have been modest. It is reasonable to expect higher inflation in the future, but when that will finally hit is anyone’s guess.

Given these low, low yields, perhaps it is time to revisit some of the basics about owning bonds, bond funds and ETFs (exchange-traded funds). We can also explore what alternatives exist regarding yield and generating income.

The most important thing you need to know about bonds is that they are essentially loans to some entity. As such, there are three main elements to any bond:

Quality: The credit worthiness of the borrower.

Duration: The length of the loan.

Yield: What the loan pays you in interest.

As is always the case in investing, there is no free lunch. If you want higher yield, you are either buying riskier bonds or lending money for a longer period of time (you can also use leverage, making a riskier investment even riskier).

There is something terribly disconcerting about so many people “discovering” bonds AFTER a 30-year bull run in fixed-income instruments.

My point of view on bonds as investments or income sources is simple. Here are five points to know:

1 Ladder: Owning individual bonds in a ladder — meaning a series of bonds that mature in successive years — is the correct way to own fixed income. By laddering bonds (2014-15-16-17, etc.), you are not tying up money for too long. If and when rates go up, you get to reinvest the specific holdings as they mature with higher yielding issues (note that if this happens, inflation is probably higher).

At present low rates, I prefer to keep my bond ladders to no longer than seven years. (This is much preferred to bond funds.)

by Barry Ritholtz, The Washington Post |  Read more:

We Are Alive

The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing. Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the band’s volcanic drummer, wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tal-lent, the organist Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink tune while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend.

Springsteen arrived and greeted everyone with a quick hello and his distinctive cackle. He is five-nine and walks with a rolling rodeo gait. When he takes in something new—a visitor, a thought, a passing car in the distance—his eyes narrow, as if in hard light, and his lower jaw protrudes a bit. His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years, in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners. He remains dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. (“He has practically the same waist size as when I met him, when we were fifteen,” says Steve Van Zandt, who does not.) Some of this has to do with his abstemious inclinations; Van Zandt says Springsteen is “the only guy I know—I think the only guy I know at all—who never did drugs.” He’s followed more or less the same exercise regimen for thirty years: he runs on a treadmill and, with a trainer, works out with weights. It has paid off. His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball. And yet, with the tour a month away, he laughed at the idea that he was ready. “I’m not remotely close,” he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the stage.

Preparing for a tour is a process far more involved than middle-aged workouts designed to stave off premature infarction. “Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes,” Springsteen said. “And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.” His style in performance is joyously demonic, as close as a white man of Social Security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk or a shattered pelvis. Concerts last in excess of three hours, without a break, and he is constantly dancing, screaming, imploring, mugging, kicking, windmilling, crowd-surfing, climbing a drum riser, jumping on an amp, leaping off Roy Bittan’s piano. The display of energy and its depletion is part of what is expected of him. In return, the crowd participates in a display of communal adoration. Like pilgrims at a gigantic outdoor Mass—think John Paul II at Gdansk—they know their role: when to raise their hands, when to sway, when to sing, when to scream his name, when to bear his body, hand over hand, from the rear of the orchestra to the stage. (Van Zandt: “Messianic? Is that the word you’re looking for?”)

Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. He makes you wonder if it is harder to play the riffs for “Street Fighting Man” or to dangle a cigarette from his lips by a single thread of spit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweat—No! It can’t be!—and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. “I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”

by David Remick, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Julian Broad