Category: Uncategorized

This week’s Carnival of NJ Bloggers is up! They’ve got one of my posts, along with a ton of other good stuff.

Alex Toth, one of the great comic artists, died yesterday at 78. He was at his drawing table.

Ironhead Hayward also died, after a long battle with a brain tumor. He was 39.

(Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter has much more on Toth and his stature in the comics field.)

Forget M:I III! Forget the X-Men! I’ll be on line for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan!

Great (lengthy) article about the messed-up-edness of Paul Allen’s Charter Communications. I think Paul Allen’s greatest skill was his ability to be friends with Bill Gates back in the day.

From a financial perspective, Charter has turned into one of the ugliest U.S. companies still in solvency. Its $19.5 billion in debt dwarfs its market cap of $510 million. Its interest expense alone devours a third of its revenue; rival Comcast Corp., which has four times Charter’s revenues and subscribers, pays about the same. Charter also has a knack for posting nasty quarterly losses, including, earlier this month, red ink of $459 million, or $1.45 a share, for the first quarter, vs. $353 million a year ago. Charter’s quarterly losses per share now exceed its share price, which, at $1.20, has collapsed from a 2001 high of $25. It’s perverse, the realization that each of my $1.20 shares generates a $1.45 loss. It’s a wonder I don’t owe Charter money.

A company spokesman says Charter has ample liquidity and financial resources. But because so much of its cash flow is eaten up by servicing the debt, say analysts, it’s unable to invest in the things necessary to keep customers from flocking to satellite TV and the regional Bell rivals. It’s no coincidence that Verizon Communications chose a Charter cluster in Texas to pilot its foray into video last year. So easy were the pickings that Verizon says it quickly took 25% of the local market. (Charter does not agree with Verizon’s calculations.) And spending-constrained Charter, say analysts, is the cable provider most susceptible to AT&T’s competitive onslaught now that it’s in the process of acquiring Bell South Corp. The company says that its overlap with AT&T-BellSouth in major markets is minimal. Nevertheless, news of that deal sent my Charter shares down to 94 cents apiece — barely enough to get me in the door at a Taco Bell.

Sporting the fiscal soundness of a banana republic, Charter has every reason to erase its debt by declaring bankruptcy, finally wiping out long-suffering holders like yours truly. But it won’t, because Allen, who has billions of his own money plowed into the equity side of the ledger, refuses to cede control to creditors, who would pick through the choicest assets the way they did in the Adelphia Communications Corp. bankruptcy.

Even if you’re not business-minded, it’s an enjoyable read (I think).

Sounds like that story about Jews in Iran having to wear ribbons is BS (as I hoped). This story is even stranger, and I hope to gosh it’s true.

Nested in this NYTimes article about the principles behind the Geek Squad computer repair service is a passage about how much people value their time:

Economists say industrialized societies are spending less on the basics of life — food, clothing and shelter — and more on leisure pursuits. Indeed, Robert Fogel, the Nobel-winning economics professor from the University of Chicago, has gone so far as to predict that by 2040 it will take the average American household only 300 hours of work a year to supply its basic needs.

As leisure time becomes more valued, Americans are loath to give it up. We spend money to get more of it. How much we are willing to spend depends on what we make as well as a more intuitive process of how we measure what our leisure time is worth.

The results from two online calculators that determine what your time is worth may surprise you. Try this or this. First, your hourly rate may be lower than you think. For instance, someone making $70,000 a year, but who puts in 50 hours a week and commutes an hour each way, may discover the hourly rate is not $33, but about half that.

So does that mean you hire a handyman only when he costs less than $16 an hour? It’s more complicated than that. With only about 12 hours of true leisure time a day, each precious hour is bought with more than 5 hours of work. According to the calculator, each hour of spare time would then be worth about $85.

How an economist measures the value of leisure time is inexact because do-it-yourselfers sometimes have a stronger motivation than saving money. They enjoy the process. Because seeking joy is less understood than seeking money, economists are still struggling to decide whether growing tomatoes or making drapes is rational.

My boss once told me that the first time in his life that he really felt he’d made it was when he looked out his window and saw some Mexicans mowing his lawn. I now pay a local lawn care company $35/week to take care of my grass. On the other hand, I assembled a dresser and two nightstands from Bo Concepts because I foolishly was too cheap to pay for delivery and assembly. The lost evenings and the frustration of the incomplete instructions more than offset the money I would have saved. But that’s hedonics for you.

I was a lot smarter when we bought our new buffet from Crate & Barrel last week, scheduling assembly/delivery for a Saturday. The Salvadoran delivery guys showed up early (8:45 for a 9-noon window) and were out the door in a few minutes.

Today, Amy’s planting tomatoes. Maybe I can pay someone $25/hour to have witticisms for me, so I can watch more basketball and keep this site up to date.

It’s stories like this one that keep me from taking China seriously. A U.S.-educated Chinese researcher returns to his homeland to develop innovative DSP chips for China’s internal market, in hopes of breaking China’s stereotype of a being a great at manufacturing and crap at innovating. He ‘develops’ a line of DSP chips called Hanxin, and gets regarded as a national hero.

What happens?

But late last year, according to these reports, the whistle-blowers came forward. Some colleagues who had a dispute with Mr. Chen began contacting the government. They claimed, according to the news reports, that migrant workers had simply scratched away the name Motorola from a chip and replaced it with Hanxin. Presumably, that early version of Hanxin was a foreign company’s chip, the specifications of which Mr. Chen or an associate could give to manufacturers to mass-produce under the Hanxin name.

Repeat: He hired migrants to scratch out “Motorola” and write in “Hanxin”.

Update: Looks like BusinessWeek is with me on this one.

I was cleaning my basement last weekend when I found the program from Simeon’s memorial service. It was in a pile of ephemera: friends’ wedding invitations, tickets to Nets games from 2001-2002, photos of my driveway after the 1996 blizzard, a Volkswagen postcard, the brochures for a Lorenzo Mattotti exhibition in Milan and a religious painting exhibition in Bergamo. Virtual memories.

The program isn’t much: an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet, folded into four pages, a color photo of Simeon printed a little blurrily on the front. It reads:

Memorial Service for Simeon Georgiev Popov

May 5, 1974 – January 20, 2002

“I someday hope to be part of the largest orchestra so that I can share my love and compassion for music with others.”

Simeon came from Bulgaria to study music (trombone) as a graduate student at Syracuse University. Bill Harris, the uncle of my girlfriend at the time, took him under his wing. I met Simeon at a Thanksgiving dinner, since “the kid” (three years younger than me) had become part of the family. He was a little shy, very pleasant, had wonderful manners, and his English was a lot better than that of the last Bulgarian I’d met. He was good company.

In January 2002, Simeon walked in on an armed robbery in an off-campus apartment. He was delivering an order of chicken wings for his night-job. He thought the robbery was a joke, and tried to leave the room to make his next delivery. The robber tried to shoot him, but the gun jammed. They scuffled, and the robber fired again, shooting Simeon in the face and killing him.

So much in life hinges upon accidents, and who we are depends on what we make of them. We walk into each other’s worlds without a clue, sometimes walking right out again, “the moment” lost. Sometimes those accidents are cataclysmic. We could build a chronology of how and why Simeon walked into that room, and lament all the choices that could have been made, all the decisions and accidents, little and big, that could have kept him from being murdered. None of them would bring him or his music back.

The murderer’s name is Dominic Dennard, Jr. He liked to go by the nickname “D Murder.” For his crimes, he’s been sentenced to 75-to-life in state prison. At his sentencing, the judge said, “None of us now will ever know what beauty Simeon Popov might have created in this world. We will never know whether he might have been the next Bach or the next Beethoven. You snuffed out his talents and creativity, and you left this world a darker place as a result of it. My only regret this morning, Mr. Dennard, is that I cannot sentence you to life without the possibility of parole.” According to the NY prison system’s site, “D Murder” won’t be eligible for parole until 2067.

The lawyer for “D Murder” said, “Dominic Dennard is one of the most courteous, gracious, pleasant people I ever represented. It is irreconcilable with the person you’re about to sentence.”

Simeon’s parents left a letter for Bill to read after the sentencing and, even though it’s the saddest possible sentiment I could post on Mother’s Day, I’m going to share it with you:

“We remain on this earth, parents, who are neither alive nor dead, who have nothing left. Our home is now turned to dust, and the most sacred place in the world that we can call our home is our child’s grave. We live in pain and die little by little every day.”

* * *

SU started a scholarship fund in Simeon’s memory. The fund’s original purpose was threefold: to purchase basic equipment (like instrument stands) for the Music Academy Pancho Vladigerov in Sofia, Bulgaria; to provide a new instrument as an award to a promising young trombonist at a competition at the Music Academy; and to sponsor an annual prize to a graduating student at Setnor School.

Bill Harris and his wife Karen headed back to Bulgaria about a year ago for the music competition. Their first trip was to bring Simeon’s body back to his parents. I haven’t found out if the competition was a one-time event; a school rep wrote to tell me that the fund is devoted to providing assistance to music students at SU, but I’m not sure if that’s the sole use now.

If you’d like to donate to the scholarship fund, you can send a check to Angela LaFrance, 820 Comstock Ave., Womens Bldg., Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244. Make sure you note on the memo portion of your check: “Simeon Popov’s Memorial Scholarship Fund.”

Thanks.

Ever wonder how Michael Jackson could’ve gone through so much cash? The NYTimes tries to explain, while slyly running Deke Richards’ comment on MJ’s early talent: “Nobody had seen anything like that since Frankie [Lyman], a kid with chops like that who could sing like that. It was like a 30-year-old man was inside this little boy.”