Month: December 2008

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The Icening

(You can just go to the flickr set, if you want.)

Amy, Rufus & I missed the last two Sunday greyhound hikes up in Wawayanda State Park due to headcolds (hers, then mine). She had to miss today’s too, because of a hair appointment, but I decided that Rufus could sure use the exercise and the grey-companionship, so we headed out around 8:30 a.m. to meet up with the regulars.

The park is about 20 minutes away from our house, a lovely drive up through the wooded roads of West Milford, skirting Greenwood Lake. With all the rain we had at the end of last week, the lakes and streams were all swollen. Nothing was spilling up on the roads, so the drive wasn’t hazardous at all, even with Rufus walking back and forth in the back of the car, checking out the view from the windows (and obscuring it by pressing his wet nose against the glass).

About 4 minutes away from the park, I saw an interesting sight on Upper Greenwood Lake (U-G-L-V, you ain’t got no alibee / You UGLV, you UGLV, yeah, you UGLV!). On the other side of the lake, there’s a ridge of tree-covered hills, and I noticed that the trees from midway up the ridge to the top were covered with ice, while the trees below the midway point were clear. The sun was shining from my left side, and the reflection off the top of the ridge was gorgeous. I thought of stopping to take some pix, but didn’t want to get to the park late.

Then the road began its gradual elevation of another 75-100 feet. And that’s when The Icening began.

Suddenly, every tree was coated in ice, dipping down on the roadway. Broken tree-limbs were strewn everywhere. One minute earlier, I’d been driving through clear roads, with no sign of ice. It was gorgeous and bizarre. Was the temperature difference so critical that a few dozen feet of elevation was the difference between heavy rain and a blanket of ice?

We arrived at the entrance to the park, only to discover that the gate was locked. Another car of our group was waiting to see what the backup plan was going to be. I shrugged, parked the car, took Rufus out for a crap, and started shooting some pix. I found myself transfixed by the noise of the ice cracking. It followed the wind, and

Soon, another 4 cars had arrived, and the organizers decided that we should  drive down the road a hundred or so yards to the Applachian Trail segment that leads into the park. There were some misgivings about walking along trails where ice-covered limbs could fall and clock somebody on the head. There were also concerns about the trail being blocked by fallen trees, but the Hiking Greyhounds crew is nothing if not intrepid! (Also, we have nothing better to do on a Sunday morning.) So we drove over to the trail, parked our cars, put our dogs’ coats on, and started marching through the ice-covered woods.

It was an adventure. Stretches of the trail were iced over, and the dogs were surprised to discover that they had zero traction. Fortunately, we didn’t let them build up any speed, so none of them got hurt. Still, the trail was tough. We had to clear a lot of (small) fallen trees; the dogs were not good at improvising their way around the branches. Many of the damaged trees were young, so the branches weren’t brittle and tended to snap back after we pushed them aside. Still, no one lost an eye.

icegreytrail

Soon, we made it down to a pond and then arched up the trail toward the ranger station where we meet on other Sundays. Two of us had gone ahead a bit, pushing through ice-covered branches that hung down like beaded curtains, and arrived at the station as a ranger was walking from the station to his patrol truck.

He was carrying a large black shotgun with a side clip of six shells and said to us, “You know the park’s closed, right?”

He advised us to stay off the trails, because of the possibility of getting walloped by falling branches. We let him know that we were just going to walk on the main road through the park for a bit, and that we’d be careful. “Okay,” he said. “Because I never saw you.”

The rest of the group soon arrived, and we took a pleasant walk down the road and back, meandering through this icy wonderland.

As is our wont, we traded grey-stories, asked advice, and wondered whether “all of them do [x],” or if it’s just ours.

Now go check out the slideshow!

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Write What You Know?

I don’t know whether the Sulzberger family exerts any influence on the NYTimes‘ editors. All I know is that today’s business section seems pretty heavily loaded on the Bernard Madoff case. Bernie’s a legendary money manager who appears to have been bilking hedge funds and the super-wealthy out of their money in a huge (he says $50 billion) Ponzi scheme.

Now, I know it’s a big story (although no one knows how deep the losses really are yet), but I get the feeling that if it weren’t about the pain of wealthy people and socialites, we might not see four articles totaling more than 4,500 words in one edition: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The best part about today’s Lifestyles of the No-Longer-So-Rich coverage in the Times is that the paper chose this very day to debut a new bi-weekly web column about . . . money strategies for the wealthy!

Of course, these strategies aren’t just for the wealthy! Writes columnist Paul Sullivan, “While his [Robert Seaberg, head of wealth management at — no lie — a branch of Citigroup, the bank that lobbied for a $300 billion backstop from the U.S. government and plans to fire 52,000 people next year, most of whom I assume are not super-wealthy] findings are geared toward the highest end of the investing community, people at every wealth level should take note.”

After all:

While losing 40 percent of $100 million gives those investors more wiggle room than that same decline on $100,000, it still requires them to re-evaluate their view of risk, if not a change to their lifestyles.

Good to know!

For my part, I’m just happy that Amy & I started watching Arrested Development this month. I expect to find out that Madoff had a cross-eyed Judy Greer for his secretary:

Or that his sons are really amateur magicians or anxiety-prone dilettantes. But Life doesn’t always imitate canceled TV, I guess.

(Update! The NYPost has a couple of pieces on the story, too. I was convinced that one of their quotes was by an alias for Andre 3000, but it turns out that Montieth Illingworth is a real person! Oh, and it turns out that Madoff’s key strategy was betting on the spread between bids and asks, which — to my untrained ear — sounds a bunch like the “vacuuming up nickels” strategy of LTCM that went awry when it scaled up. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the case of a long-time friend of my mother who got into trouble similar to this, although in his case, I don’t think it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme as much as a case of “I just lost some of X’s money on some bad investments, so if I just move some of Y’s money into X’s account, no one will be any the wiser once my next batch of investments pay off.” And the missing money added up to around $2.5 million, which is bad, but not as bad as (allegedly) $50 billion.)

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My biggest fault? Well, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. . .

Merck gave a “state of the biz-nass” presentation today. Here’s their statement about it. As with every other major pharma company, they plan to

  1. develop more vaccines and biologic drugs
  2. sell more in emerging markets like India and China
  3. use “diversity” when they mean “diversification”

My favorite statement was this sentence on the company’s “focus”:

The Company is focused on developing novel, best-in-class or follow-on treatments for patients in primary care, specialty care, and hospital settings.

That is, they’re “focused” on making all types of drugs for all settings.

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Lost in the Supermarket: The Flavor of Night

This series of posts about adventures in my local supermarkets began with a single product. This is that product:

I suppose the indigo packaging, set off against the sky blue of the other toothpastes, was enough to catch my eye. Who puts toothpaste in a dark box? Wouldn’t that be tantamount selling it in a dingy yellow carton?

Not if your toothpaste possesses . . . the flavor of night!

Yes, this brand of Crest is somehow imbued with “clean night mint,” as opposed to the dirtyDIRTY day mint of other toothpastes. Studying the box, I was struck by two thoughts:

  1. It’s pretty ballsy for a company to try to convince consumers that they need to use two different toothpastes, depending on time of day. Maybe they can come up with a mid-day toothpaste to mask the odor of a lunchtime martini.
  2. The Color of Night was such a bad movie that the New Yorker decided to review it as a comedy, instead of a thriller.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of brain-cloud

I know the news will break your heart, but there’s no Montaigne post this week. My headcold rendered me even less comprehensible this weekend. I’ll try to write about the first few essays of Book Three next week.

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What It Is: 12/8/08

What I’m reading: Dear American Airlines, the Comics Journal‘s interview with Jason, a little Plutarch, a little Montaigne.

What I’m listening to: After reading this Te-Nahisi Coates post — and its slew of comments — on Michael Jackson and his influence on a generation-plus of performers, I listened to a bunch of MJ’s stuff this weekend. Sure, it’s easy to goof on him for losing his mind and engaging in all sorts of bad craziness, but holy crap did he make great pop music. I’ll argue that Phil Collins had more hits spread out over the course of the 1980s, solo and with Genesis — and that MJ has never released a single remotely as offensive as Illegal Alien — but Michael Jackson & Quincy Jones had a run where they made the best pop music in the past 30 years, hands down. Plus, no one exactly made appointment TV to see the debut of a new Phil Collins video.

What I’m watching: Arrested Development. Oh, and Michael Clayton, which was dull, although I was happy to see the bad guy from Bachelor Party return and try to blow up George Clooney. But let me ask: WHY ARE YOU USING FLASHBACK? There was no reason whatsoever for the movie to have a flashback structure, except to show a car exploding in the first few minutes. It was an idiotic decision, making the car explosion tension-free when the flashback caught up to that moment. Why are filmmakers such cretins? Why can’t they tell a story without using a structural cheat? This isn’t Memento!

What I’m drinking: One day it’s Junipero & Q Tonic, the next it’s NyQuil.

What Rufus is up to: Stylishly trotting around the neighborhood in his purple & black coat/snood.

Where I’m going: NYC next Saturday for a birthday BBQ lunch at Blue Smoke.

What I’m happy about: Nick Saban and William Jefferson both lost. And my wife’s still alive in her NFL Loser pool! Thanks, Steelers!

What I’m sad about: I can’t expand my DirecTV DVR’s storage capacity with an eSata drive. (Well, I can, but only by shutting off the internal drive.)

What I’m pondering: My spreadsheet of holiday gift recipients.

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The Orient Express

About four years ago, our company hired an internet marketing guru who was supposed to “bring us into the 21st century” or something. I nicknamed her “The Orient Express.” This wasn’t because she was Asian — she wasn’t — but because she’d managed, within a single week, to alienate every single branch of our 50-person company: editorial, sales, circulation, production, and accounting. Even the office manager hated her. In fact, the only thing that prevented me from throwing a stapler at her head was the fact that my computer monitor was blocking my path.

I started to get called into strategy meetings around this time, because I seemed to know something about the internet and some of my marketing suggestions were bearing fruit, despite the fact that I occasionally walked around the office dressed as if I’d just broken out of prison.

During one of the Orient Express’ presentations on how she was going to reshape our company, she busted out a breakdown of the money were spending on web-hosting, e-mail management, and other online services. She repeatedly hammered the point of how much money we were spending this way, when we could cut those costs by moving things in house (and maybe hiring people she knew, including her son, to handle things). I kept waiting for her to say what we would do after making these changes, but this appeared to be the extent of her “online strategy.”

After her umpteenth explanation of how much money we were wasting by using outside providers, I spoke up. I said to the group (including the owner of the company), “Y’know, the premise of my magazine is that, if you don’t do something really well, then you’re probably better off paying someone else to do it. Especially if you’re a small company. As far as I know,” looking over at the owner, “we’re not exactly hemorrhaging cash, so I’m not sure we need to make a priority of cost-cutting. I mean, it’s cool to want to save us money, but it seems to me that it’s one thing to shrink costs, and another to build new sources of sales.”

She announced that if we just listened to her, we would become a cutting-edge online content provider! I realized then that I should’ve brought a Bullshit Bingo card into the meeting. She had no plans for creating new online products for us to sell. All she saw was our online expense and how it could be smaller.

I was reminded of the Orient Express and her fixation on cost-cutting for its own sake when I read this BusinessWeek article on Edgar Bronfman’s Warner Music Group last week. Warner’s album sales have grown under Mr. Bronfman’s tenure. The numbers are pretty anemic, but they’re positive when the competition is in decline.

The point the article makes is that Mr. Bronfman did cut costs at the company, but savings weren’t treated as their own goal:

How did Bronfman do it? He cut Warner’s artist roster nearly 30%, ditching more than 50 acts that were no longer selling well. He refused to pay big bucks to keep the likes of Madonna and Nickelback out of rivals’ hands. And he found some $300 million in annual cost savings. Result: Warner had more time and money to focus on new potential hitmakers.

Other music companies have slashed budgets for artists and repertory (A&R), the department that finds and nurtures talent. Not Bronfman, whose hundreds of scouts spend their nights in clubs, from Manchester to Seoul, and their days on MySpace, finding new chart toppers such as James Blunt, Gnarls Barkley, and Panic At The Disco. The strategy is paying off: Warner’s share of U.S. sales of new releases is up 7% since 2004, vs. a decline of 2% for the rest of the industry, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales

It’s one thing to say, “There’s no way Madonna can earn back the advances on her albums; we can save $100 million by letting her walk,” but it’s another to actually put some of that money into developing new acts.

What happened to the Orient Express? At our Christmas party that year, I warned her explicitly about alienating the company that was handling our web-hosting and site updates. That company was also an ad agency that had long relationships with several of our magazines. Maybe I was too friendly in my warning. Days later, she sent the company a fax stating that we no longer needed their services. Two days after that, she was shitcanned. She hadn’t lasted 100 days.