Friday, April 12, 2013
What the Hell Happened to David Duval?
"David, David! Mr. Duval! Over here! Please!"
Autograph hounds were brandishing visors and balls and pictures of him in his prime as he moved toward the first tee, where four nervous amateurs awaited the start of their Pro-Am round at the Honda Classic. It was the first week of March; a cold wind was rattling the palms on the Champion course at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Duval, in a blue shell and black trousers, stopped at the rope line and scribbled his name on some old magazine covers bearing images of the person he used to be.
"Good luck, David!" a man shouted as the Pro-Am party set off.
If the thin crowd that tagged along didn't know his game, they did know the outline of his story: his rapid emergence on the PGA Tour, a fixture in the mix on Sundays, the player who might have won the Masters four years in a row but for the sort of breaks that make you appreciate golf's cruelty. When Duval had a good round going, he wasn't afraid to try for a great one. In one incandescent period from the end of 1997 to early 1999, he won 11 of 34 tournaments, including a come-from-behind victory at the 1999 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, where he eagled the last hole for a total score of 59 and one of the most sublime rounds ever carded in the history of the game.
"David Duval is On Fire" read the cover of the April 12, 1999, Sports Illustrated, showing the new star in his wraparound sunglasses, blowing the smoke off a sizzling midiron. By then the world rankings had made official what had been obvious for months: It was no longer Tiger Woods who was the number one player in the world. It was Duval, the four-time All-American from Georgia Tech with the hidden eyes and the fluid, homegrown swing that left him peering out over his right shoulder, his back in a twist, hands hoisted up around the side of his head as if he were trying to open a locket at the nape of his neck.
As much as Duval relished being the best, he wasn't born for the showmanship of being number one. He didn't smile easily like Tiger, didn't play to crowds with uppercuts and primal screams. His three fist pumps and a hand smack after the immortal 59 were the most extravagant display of emotion most fans had ever seen from him.
He was as composed in adversity as in triumph. His signature Oakley shades, worn to correct astigmatism and protect his sensitive eyes, seemed symbolic of a desire to keep the world at bay, a reluctance to be seen. His shyness and social anxiety came across as callow self-absorption or a lack of empathy. He was suspicious of people who wanted his opinion just because he had a one beside his name. Unlike Woods, who in interviews had perfected the art of talking without saying anything, Duval spoke his mind, sometimes with a brutal lack of tact. He was candid and cerebral one moment, prickly and aloof the next.
He was the sort of golfer it was easier to admire than to love. He didn't want your heart. Few fans mourned when his approach shot found the bunker on the Road Hole at St. Andrews in 2000 and he foundered in sand, taking four shots to get out and effectively ceding the Open Championship to Woods, the people's choice. Duval won only once that year, and only once on the Tour the next year, capturing the 2001 Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes. That November in 2001, on his 30th birthday, he won the Dunlop Phoenix championship on the Japan tour.
And that was it.
Slowly and all at once, the way people lose fortunes or love, he lost his game.
by Chip Brown, Men's Journal (June, 200) | Read more:
Image: Gregg Segal
Gold Loses Its Luster
And in Pocatello, Idaho, the tiny golden treasure of Jon Norstog has dwindled, too. A $29,000 investment that Mr. Norstog made in 2011 is now worth about $17,000, a loss of 42 percent.
“I thought if worst came to worst and the government brought down the world economy, I would still have something that was worth something,” Mr. Norstog, 67, says of his foray into gold.
Gold, pride of Croesus and store of wealth since time immemorial, has turned out to be a very bad investment of late. A mere two years after its price raced to a nominal high, gold is sinking — fast. Its price has fallen 17 percent since late 2011. Wednesday was another bad day for gold: the price of bullion dropped $28 to $1,558 an ounce.
It is a remarkable turnabout for an investment that many have long regarded as one of the safest of all. The decline has been so swift that some Wall Street analysts are declaring the end of a golden age of gold. The stakes are high: the last time the metal went through a patch like this, in the 1980s, its price took 30 years to recover.
What went wrong? The answer, in part, lies in what went right. Analysts say gold is losing its allure after an astonishing 650 percent rally from August 1999 to August 2011. Fast-money hedge fund managers and ordinary savers alike flocked to gold, that haven of havens, when the world economy teetered on the brink in 2009. Now, the worst of the Great Recession has passed. Things are looking up for the economy and, as a result, down for gold. On top of that, concern that the loose monetary policy at Federal Reserve might set off inflation — a prospect that drove investors to gold — have so far proved to be unfounded.
And so Wall Street is growing increasingly bearish on gold, an investment that banks and others had deftly marketed to the masses only a few years ago. On Wednesday, Goldman Sachs became the latest big bank to predict further declines, forecasting that the price of gold would sink to $1,390 within a year, down 11 percent from where it traded on Wednesday. Société Générale of France last week issued a report titled, “The End of the Gold Era,” which said the price should fall to $1,375 by the end of the year and could keep falling for years.
by Nathanial Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jay Directo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Tyranny of the Taxi Medallions
The root cause of taxi drivers’ problems is that they need access to a medallion in order to drive and make a living. Because of this, taxi companies that distribute medallion access can charge usurious fees and freely abuse the drivers. If the drivers don’t like it, well, then they can’t be taxi drivers then.
In a study of Los Angeles taxi drivers, UCLA professors Gary Blasi and Jacqueline Leavitt found that taxi drivers work on average 72 hours a week for a median take home wage of $8.39 per hour. Not only do they have to pay $2000 in “leasing fees” per month to taxi companies, but the city regulates things like what color socks they can wear (black) and how many days a week they can go to the airport (once). None of the drivers in the survey had health insurance provided by their companies and 61% of them were completely without health insurance.
Recently, the Boston Globe, published an undercover expose on the Boston taxi industry. One of their writers (who used to drive a cab in college) started driving a taxi for a company called Boston Cab. He discovered a corrupt system where medallion access empowered taxi dispatchers to abuse drivers.
The writer describes the fees drivers faced as follows:
Boston Cab charges him the standard shift rate of $77, plus an $18 premium for a newer cab, as well as a city-sanctioned, 30-cent parking violation fee. Factor in the sales tax ($5.96) and optional collision damage waiver ($5), and his cost per shift is $106.26, not including gas.In order to get the opportunity to pay this $106 fee, taxi drivers had to bribe the dispatchers to get good shifts or to drive at all. The author waited around for hours before he could drive a taxi since he didn’t bribe the dispatchers. (...)
A number of mobile phone apps, however, are replacing taxi dispatch services and allowing anyone with a car to become a taxi driver without needing access to a medallion. Increasingly, if you want to become a taxi driver, all you need is a car and an app that tells you where to pick up passengers.
In the last half decade, two trends conspired to end the taxi medallion regime. First, people are more comfortable with trusting strangers. This is evidenced by the success of the company AirBnB where regular people people rent out extra rooms in their home to strangers. Marketplaces like AirBnB provide the data (reviews of guests and hosts), brand, and insurance that allow strangers to trust each other.
The second trend is that we all carry around location enabled sensors in our pockets in the form of our phones. Before smart phones, the best way to find a taxi was to go outside and wait for one on the streets like an idiot. Now, you can click a button and an app that knows your location can connect you with the nearest car. Since you can see reviews of the driver, you can trust that it’s safe to get in the car.
The ride-sharing economy started conservatively with Uber allowing anyone to call a black town car via its app. That quickly led to companies like Sidecar and Lyft, that let anyone with a car act as a taxi driver and hybrid services like InstantCab that lets taxi drivers and community drivers both get fares. These companies and their products are called “ride-sharing” apps.
Cheekily, if you hail a ride using one of these ride-sharing apps, the payment is called a “donation.” This sort of seems like a made up legal loophole that can justify any behavior (“Officer I wasn’t paying for sex, I was making a donation!”). But for now that’s one of the ways ride-sharing apps nominally get around local regulations that restrict who can be a taxi.
The ride-sharing economy started conservatively with Uber allowing anyone to call a black town car via its app. That quickly led to companies like Sidecar and Lyft, that let anyone with a car act as a taxi driver and hybrid services like InstantCab that lets taxi drivers and community drivers both get fares. These companies and their products are called “ride-sharing” apps.
Cheekily, if you hail a ride using one of these ride-sharing apps, the payment is called a “donation.” This sort of seems like a made up legal loophole that can justify any behavior (“Officer I wasn’t paying for sex, I was making a donation!”). But for now that’s one of the ways ride-sharing apps nominally get around local regulations that restrict who can be a taxi.
by Rohin Dahr, Priceonomics | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Humble Paella
Fine. My culinary heritage is so limited that almost everything I make is an adaptation. But my rice with things is better than just about any other I’ve had in the United States. And to make real paella, you probably should start with a wood fire; anything else is a compromise.
Anyway, paella really is just rice with things — as is risotto, as is pilaf. There’s a technique to it, and it’s pretty straightforward, and by applying that technique to a variety of ingredients in a variety of ways, you can make something that really approaches great paella, even if a Catalan might scoff at it.
Only a few things are fixed: you need rice (it should be short-grain, like the kind you use for risotto, though to be authentic, it should come from Spain, of course); you need olive oil; you need some vegetables. A few things are optional, and among those are sausage and lobster and chicken. The standard paella at your local Spanish restaurant, the one with sausage and lobster and chicken, is not the only possibility, and vegetarian paellas exist.
Water is actually the most-often-used liquid in “authentic” paella, but stock is in many cases better. Chicken stock is all-purpose, and a not-too-strong meat stock will work nicely, too. Fish stock is fine as long as you’re including fish, and a quickly made shrimp-shell stock might be your best alternative. You can also use tomato juice, clam juice, red or white wine or a combination of any of these.
The routine, as you’ll see from the master recipe, is pretty simple. But there are two unusual features. One is that, unlike with risotto, paella is not stirred — or you stir hardly at all. The other is that, unlike with risotto (but very much as with Persian rice), you want the bottom to brown if at all possible. Until you’re highly skilled, this is a matter of chance. But the likelihood increases if you keep the heat relatively high, turning it down only when you smell a little scorching. (That won’t ruin the dish as long as you catch it in time.) That browned bottom is called socarrat, and should you achieve it, no one will say you’ve made arroz con cosas.
Related: Master Paella Recipe
by Mark Bittman, NY Times | Read more:
Photograph by Sam Kaplan for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Randi Brookman Harris.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Female “tag” figurine Naqada IIb (ca. 3500 BC) Provenance: Naqada, Grave 271 Graywacke, shell H. 8.2 cm (3¼ in.), W. 3.4 cm (1 in.) Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford.
via:
Poetry to Music
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
W. Shakespeare
Stolen Child
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you
can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you
can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To to waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For to world's more full of weeping than you
can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For be comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than you
can understand.
W.B. Yeats
Fake Facebook Girlfriends: What's Not to Like?
Worse still, my girlfriend – my actual, real-life, flesh-and-blood girlfriend with whom I live – isn't a fan of my new fake girlfriend at all. Whenever my Facebook girlfriend posts anything, my real-life girlfriend narrows her eyes and reads it back to me in a withering voice. Yesterday, while I was looking up a recipe on my phone, she yelled, "Are you texting your new girlfriend? You are, aren't you?" and then fell silent for three-quarters of an hour. This whole situation was a mistake.
Why did I buy a fake Facebook girlfriend? Curiosity, mainly. Name me one red-blooded man who wouldn't want to validate his neediness by paying a stranger of undetermined gender to send him hollow, misspelt platitudes on the internet. You can't, can you?
But I also wanted a glimpse into the thriving, fascinating fake internet girlfriend industry. For a modest amount of money – certainly far less than it costs to start and maintain a human relationship – a growing number of websites now offer the services of pretend social media paramours. Maybe they'll flirt with you on Twitter. Maybe they'll change their relationship status on Facebook. Some fake girlfriends will even phone you at work, presumably so you can bark, "Not when I'm in the office, darling!" then hang up, roll your eyes at your colleagues, walk home and cry.
It's a weird setup. Many of the services claim that they exist to make other women jealous – your crush will see that you're in a new relationship, realise that she's wanted you for herself all along and pursue you relentlessly until you're hers. It sounds unlikely, but apparently it works.
My Facebook girlfriend came from Fiverr, an online marketplace where everything costs exactly five US dollars. Want someone to optimise your CV? Five dollars. Want someone to write your name on their cheek in lipstick and photograph it? Five dollars. Want a stranger to say a prayer to a god of your choice? Five dollars, you numbskull. For a friend's birthday last year, I took a Fiverr vendor up on his offer to dress as a wolf, dance around his basement and film himself singing a personalised, free-form version of Happy Birthday. The finished product looked like something a serial killer might record seconds before turning the gun on himself but, hey, it only cost five dollars. It was either that or an Amazon voucher.
Fiverr is teeming with fake girlfriends. But what sort did I want? Did I want to remain amicable with my pretend partner, or break up spectacularly (one ad was titled: "I will be your jealous PSYCHO girlfriend for a week")? Did I want a deliberately submissive Asian girlfriend, or someone touting themselves as a "crazy angry Russian"? Someone who would "post the sexiest comments you have ever seen", or someone who didn't care if they had to be my girlfriend or my boyfriend, just so long as they got their five dollars?
by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Illustration: Lo Cole for the Guardian
Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Requests
[ed. Sweet irony.]
There’s a dark side to Google’s transparency efforts, especially when it comes to publishing DMCA requests it receives from copyright holders.
With more than 100 million links to pirated files Google is steadily building the largest database of copyrighted material. This is rather ironic as it would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available.
Indeed, the DMCA notices are meant to make content harder to find on the Internet, but in the process they create a semi-organized index of links to infringing material.
by TorrentFreak | Read more:
The Rise of the New Global Elite
If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.
This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.
This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”: In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.
Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.
But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.
Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned is entirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, different from you and me.
What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.
by Chrystia Freeman, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine
The Sailfish
Almost 15 years after my mother’s death, I was the sole passenger on a seaplane over the Indian Ocean when my father died. We landed in a lagoon where a rubber dinghy collected me and ferried me to a larger boat where I was to spend a week cruising the outer atolls of the Maldives, diving four times a day. Mobile phones did not reach to that part of the islands at the time, but the cruiser was equipped with a satellite phone. As I carried my luggage to my cabin, I was summoned to the bridge. On an echoing, static line my wife broke the news. Before I could ask for any details, the connection was broken and I was unable to speak to anyone in the outside world for another five days.
The shock was immense. But I was surrounded by people — ship’s officers, diving staff and a handful of other passengers — none of whom I had met before. There was no point in trying to return home, and I had no means of reaching any members of my family. I decided that there was no one aboard the boat in whom I could confide. It seemed rude to impose my grief on strangers who would inevitably feel awkward at the situation. My loss was a painful, private wound that could not be exposed.
Two hours later I was in my diving kit, sitting on the side of the boat ready to plunge. The dive leader explained that we were heading to a reef promontory that was swept by a strong current. We were to follow him, swimming as quickly as possible to the deepest part of the reef, about 36 metres down. The speed of descent was meant to keep the current from forcing us apart. I was last into the water, and I followed a stream of silver bubbles into the misty grey-blue depths. Halfway down I could already see the other divers clutching on to the reef to steady themselves. Surrounding them were dozens of grey reef sharks, the object of the dive. Keen though I was to join them, I paused, sensing a presence behind me. Swivelling in the water and looking back towards the pale surface of the sea, I stared into the eyes of an ocean giant: a sailfish.
Sailfishes are about the size of a man. They have a long, sword-shaped bill, just like marlin. I abandoned my descent and finned towards the lurking presence. For a few moments the giant fish hung there, suspended like a mounted trophy. Then it raised and lowered its sail, blue skin traversed by flashing shadows in the bright-lit surface waters. It was the kind of encounter that is so immediate and thrilling that time and action seem compressed. For no more than five or six seconds we watched one another, then the sailfish shimmered, sideways, downwards, blending again into the darker water beyond my vision. None of the other divers saw my encounter, though the dive leader did, and we talked about it privately that night. I wanted his affirmation that I and the sailfish had really been just metres apart. I did not, could not, tell him about my father.
I have had hundreds of special underwater experiences, but I have never again seen a sailfish underwater. I know from other dive masters that such encounters are rare. I cannot shake the idea that, for many people on earth, this would have been a clear example of shape-shifting: my father’s only opportunity to say goodbye. My father was not a spiritual man. Indeed, he revelled in denying the existence of God — partly, I think, in order to infuriate my mother who, frankly, believed in everything. At university, I studied, at different times, classical civilisation, literature and anthropology. Did my experience merely spring from a recalled shamanistic tradition? Or was it an evocation of deeply buried lectures on Tolkien’s Sauron, or a childhood memory of a tale of Zeus and Io, Athena and Arachne? The intensity of my meeting with the sailfish was doubtless increased by my reeling mind.
And yet, how strange, in the hours and days following the loss of both of my parents, that I was able to be underwater, the place where I am happiest. I felt blessed by that. My mother had died without ever seeing me discover this pleasure. When I was a young adult, she worried constantly that I was frequently unhappy. I hope she would have been pleased that I had discovered something that gripped me with such deep joy. Dad lived long enough to witness some of my underwater life. And yet his habit was to deny spirituality, to deny faith, to deny any sentimentality. When I met the sailfish in the hours following his death, it bothered me that he, of all people, might have been proved wrong in his view of the universe. But if reincarnation, perhaps momentary, as a sailfish was his route to wishing me farewell, I hope it came with a sense of acceptance: that all shall be well. I take my dead parents with me still, every time I dive.
Immersion gives birth to these thoughts, tilling and ploughing my subconscious and bringing a sense of renewal. I have occasionally met other divers who say that being underwater allows them to reach new realms of spiritual, intellectual and emotional freedom. But they share that knowledge cautiously. By contrast, I have met lots of people who proclaim a special connection with certain marine creatures. I know divers who believe that they can connect with great white sharks, manta rays, even octopuses. I once spent a week with a group of middle-aged women in the Bahamas. They believed in the power of crystals, and were convinced that they could make a connection with wild dolphins. Dolphins seem to suffer that indignity more than most. There was even a woman who engineered an informal marriage ceremony with a captive one.
by Tim Ecott, Aeon | Read more:
Photo by Alastair Pollock Photography
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