Author: Gil

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 20, 2006

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been kinda busy in the evenings, and a little outta sorts in the mornings. Fortunately, I’m still up for some Unrequired Reading if you are!

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When the official VM wife became the official VM fiancee, we had to go out ring-shopping. (Since I proposed a little sooner than I had planned, I didn’t actually have a ring for her.) She researched a bunch, and decided that the diamond trade was just too venal for us to get involved with it as a symbol of our love. So we went for a gorgeous aquamarine instead.

Here’s a piece (plus slide show) about shopping for the guilt-free diamond.

(Note that I’ve resisted making any comments about using the term ‘conflict-free’ as it relates to engagement rings.)

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Congrats to the state of Oregon, for upholding a law restricting asset forfeitures. I never really understood how cops were able to seize and sell a person’s assets even if the person isn’t convicted of a crime.

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I admit to letting the Darfur slaughter fall off the VM radar since I first wrote about it in May 2004. This is mainly because I believe the western world has failed to stop the Sudanese government and militia from killing the civilians and rebels in Darfur. By failed, I mean it’s gone past the point of no return. To make up for my lack of coverage, here’s an interview with Paul Salopek, the journalist who was imprisoned in Khartoum for a month on trumped-up charges:

FOREIGN POLICY: What is the biggest misconception about the crisis in Darfur as reported in the Western media?

Paul Salopek: Well, I think it’s been oversimplified as this Manichean struggle between ethnic Arab herders who are armed by Khartoum, and these helpless African farmers who are struggling for their rights in this very desolate, Western region of the Sudan. I think that has a fundamental truth to it, and that has been historically a problem that goes back for generations, if not centuries. But I think that perception has to be overlaid with much more complicated tribal rivalries that are then manipulated at the national level in Sudan. Even internationally, there’s a layer of interests that are tugging and pulling at that area of Sudan.

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Holy crap! Discs of Tron was on the Atari 2600?

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Playing it safe with the design for the NYTimes’ new HQ.

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If you have a Wall Street Journal account, you really oughtta read this article about how Holt & Co. blew more than a million bucks trying to engineer the next Da Vinci Code.

Historical thrillers in particular are hot. One theory says readers are seeking a certainty in these books that since the end of the Cold War they’re having trouble finding elsewhere.

“We’re seeing a return to the past because everything was in its place, and people were recognizably polarized in a way that gives us comfort,” says literary agent Richard Curtis. “In the post 9/11 world, we aren’t clear about our enemies. Is the military officer in an Iraqi uniform a friend, or is he a terrorist posing as one? We need to know who to root for and historical fiction provides us with that.”

So Holt went after a novel starring Freud & Jung. No, seriously. (In what may be a first, it looks like Amazon is actually charging more than a bricks & mortar store, since I saw this book with a 50% off sticker in Borders on Wednesday.)

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The new issue of Men’s Vogue (sue me) has an excerpt from the autobiography of art critic Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know. It centers on Hughes’ awful car wreck in 1999 and the legal problems he had after. He was raked by the “meejah” for being an elitist expat.

For of course I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and ufll to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails or someone trying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be iwth as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unles the latter is a friend or relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm arond apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has.

Here’s a review of the book in the Telegraph.

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Why is NYC losing financial jobs? Relocation, relocation, relocation.

The city and state bear some responsibility for the space shortage. A nearly ten-year effort to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side for commercial development wound up getting bogged down in Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to build a stadium there and lure the Olympics to New York. Potential construction of office towers in the area is thus still years away. The city has now missed two real-estate expansions, going back to the late 1990s, in trying to rezone the Far West Side.

Meanwhile, state and city officials haggled for years over the plan to redevelop Ground Zero, with some observers, including Mayor Bloomberg, pessimistically calling for a reduction in the office space planned for the site, assuming that it would be unneeded. As a result of the delays, only one building, 7 World Trade, is nearing completion — developer Larry Silverstein could rebuild it quickly because it wasn’t part of the site that the government controlled. Other Ground Zero towers won’t be ready for years.

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VM bleg: Anybody know a gin snob who can tell me if Cadenhead’s Old Raj Gin is worth the $44 for a 750ml bottle they want at Wine Library?

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The official VM wife sends word that Cameron Diaz looks like crap.

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Whatcha really get’s a box of Newports and Puma sweats (damn!)

(I just felt like making a 3rd Bass ref; sue me)

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We should go to the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens next Thursday night! Who’s with me?

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Congratulations to the Cardinals for pulling the upset on the Mets, earning the right to walk into a buzzsaw.

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This week’s non-web reading: Chronicles Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan. The first chapter, covering the period he first arrived in New York, is fantastic. The chapter discussing losing his mojo in the late ’80s, and rediscovering it while playing with the Grateful Dead? Not so much.

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More congrats!

First, Official VM just-about-closest-friend-in-the-world Ian gets his chief petty officer pin, and now he goes off and pops the question to his One True Love! Much congratulations are in order! Go, Ian!

In additional friends-of-VM news, my buddy Faiz reveals the true reason he couldn’t meet up with me & Amy in Paris: he and his wife are expecting their first kid! (And Paris is evidently inimical to developing life!) Also, I’ve been insanely remiss in not mentioning Faiz’s first children’s book, My Alien Penfriend! Go, Faiz!

That’s the extent of the super-wonderful news. In not-so-wonderful news, it looks like I’ve got an upper respiratory infection, so I’ve got some antibiotics working on that. Go, azithromycin!

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Let Them Eat Tort

(here’s the From the Editor column from my magazine this month)

Sometimes, writing this column requires compulsive news-trawling, and my paranoid-detective method of reading people’s quotes. It can be a painstaking process, involving market and biographical research, trend analysis, and interpretations of government health statistics. And sometimes there’s a Vioxx trial, in which case this column pretty much just writes itself.

Recently, Merck won a federal Vioxx suit in New Orleans. The plaintiff, Robert Smith, took Vioxx for four months and suffered a heart attack. Or we could say that Mr. Smith was obese, had high blood pressure and atherosclerosis, took Vioxx for four months, and suffered a heart attack after shoveling snow for nearly an hour. After the verdict, Merck’s lead lawyer on the trial, Philip Beck, commented, “Unfortunately, Mr. Smith would have suffered a heart attack whether he was taking Vioxx or not.” After a few hours of deliberation, the jury agreed with Mr. Beck.

But that’s not the part of this trial that so lends itself to my mean-spirited but occasionally entertaining tirades. No, that honor is reserved for Mr. Smith’s lawyer, Christopher Seeger, who is the plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel for federal Vioxx suits. According to the Reuters report for the trial verdict, Mr. Seeger didn’t exactly put his heart into this one:

“This was a defense pick. . . . It was an impossible case to win going in,” said Chris Seeger, . . . referring to the process of selecting which lawsuits go to trial.

He said Merck could have settled the suit for far less than the $10 million to $15 million it cost them to take it to court, but the company’s “scorched earth strategy” leaves no room for such calculations.

Got that? Provided his definition of ‘impossible’ is the same as mine, it would seem that Mr. Seeger, who co-represents 39 law firms across the country in federal Vioxx suits, pursued a case that he knew he had no chance of winning. From that second quoted paragraph, I infer that he pushed this ‘impossible case to win’ because he wanted to get paid off by Merck to make Mr. Smith go away. A shakedown like this would embarrass the mafia, but it seems that Mr. Seeger and the 39 law firms figure that enough of these $10–$15 million price tags for victories (could it really have cost Merck that much?) will lead Merck to start settling, which will bring them contingency fees without the risk of going to trial. Merck, on the other hand, seems to have the mindset that forcing the Contingency Corps to walk away with empty pockets will cause the ‘impossible cases’ to go away on their own. And that might be the biggest tort reform of all.

While I think there is a benefit that comes from trial lawyers’ discovery processes, I have to wonder about the ethics of a person who told Robert Smith, “You may be entitled to compensation from Merck!” Scorched earth, indeed.

Gil Roth
Editor

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To the Manor

Spent yesteday at a barbecue/party with friends in Wappingers Fall, NY. The scenery was pretty on the drive up, but I didn’t feel like stopping to take a picture. There were all sorts of great opportunities for pix at the party, but I brought Amy’s super-camera with me and never took it out of the car. It sorta highlights my dilemma with upgrading my digital camera: I really don’t want a camera that will be hanging from my neck or shoulder, but I don’t know if I can get really good shots with a camera that fits in my pocket.

The party was great, albeit overrun with at least a dozen kids under the age of 4. A bunch of us childless people hung out in the cold on the front porch, bantering while avoiding parental responsibilities.

Anyway, to make up for the lack of pix yesterday, Amy & I (she stayed home Saturday with a cold) drove up to Ringwood Manor this morning and she played with the settings of her camera. She tested the high-color RAW file settings, which yielded some tremendous images. The ones we uploaded to flickr are shrunk and converted to JPG, so some of the detail and color is lost. But the original files are about 14 mb each, so it’s a tradeoff.

Enjoy.

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Don’t win Ben Stein’s money

Ben Stein on making money:

You make money by making money for people who already have money. This is another reason finance is such a well-paid field. One good day’s work for a man who has a $100 million account you are trading is worth far more than a lifetime’s work at the checkout counter at Wal-Mart. Yet, amazingly, managing wealthy people’s money is far less difficult and stressful than checking out customers at Wal-Mart. It’s not even close. As my smart sister Rachel says, you make money by making money. It’s tricky, but it’s right.

Oh, and don’t study African feminism in the 19th century.

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They call him the Gambler

In honor of Kenny Rogers’ sterling performance in yesterday’s MLB playoff game against the A’s (but let’s not forget Kenny’s run in the 1996 playoffs for the Yankees, where he managed an ERA of 13.13, even though the Yanks won every game he started), the official VM wife offers us the following quote from Rep. Barney Frank, following Congress’s idiotic passage of a bill banning internet gambling:

If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn’t add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit? Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose? . . . People have said, ‘What is the value of gambling?’ Here is the value. Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.

Well said, Rep. Frank, no matter what Dick Armey calls you.

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Nothin’ stupider than a man chasin’ his OS

Both BizWeek & the NYTimes run interviews with Microsoft bigwig Steve Ballmer this week. I’m not sure why there’s a PR push just now. Maybe it’s due to the impending release of the new version of Windows, but that’s still months off. Could be to get the business world’s attention away from the Google guys, I guess.

Anyway, the interviews both have points of interest. The BW piece centers on the high valuations for recent transactions (Google buying YouTube, News Corp. buying MySpace, and FaceBook talking a minimum of $1 billion to sell). Ballmer seems to be saying that these businesses just aren’t worth it, and might be hinting that we’re heading to another dot-com bust. (But he hedges his bets by saying that MS might just pay such high prices, depending on the circumstances.)

The BW interview also addresses questions about Microsoft’s play into consumer electronics, via Xbox and Zune. Several years ago, there was an article in Wired about how Microsoft was rewriting the outsourcing equation by not manufacturing any of the components for the Xbox. The model worked so well, MS was losing about $100 on each Xbox sold. Bang-up job. (With the new Xbox, launch costs led to a $1.26 billion loss in fiscal 2006. Given MS’s cash & equivalents of around $48 billion, this isn’t a huge hit, but it’s still pretty amazing.)

The NYTimes interview focuses a lot more on the new version of Windows, which is the unsexy part of the MS business. The interviewer seems intent on proving that MS won’t be able to sell an operating system after this generation, since we’ll all be downloading bits and pieces via them thar interwebs or something. Ballmer tries to explain gently that this won’t be the case:

Q. Doesn’t that mean that software product cycles are going to be much shorter, months instead of years?

A. Things will change at different paces. There are aspects of our Office Live service, for example, that change every three months, four months, six months. And there are aspects that are still not going to change but every couple of years. The truth of the matter is that some big innovations — and it’s a little like having a baby — can’t happen in under a certain amount of time. And, you know, Google doesn’t change their core search algorithms every month. It’s just not done.

I bring this stuff to your attention for two reasons. First, even though this seems like boring business-stuff, it actually is going to have an impact on how you use a computer on a day-to-day basis in the years ahead. As ‘regular’ readers know, I’m interested in how businesses work, and what their choices indicate about the way they perceive their markets. Ultimately, it helps me understand the way they perceive the end-user, providing me with yet more perspectives on human psyches, and what people think we’ll spend money on.

The second reason for this post is because there’s a Miller’s Crossing moment. It comes in the Times piece, when the interviewer asks how the company’s getting along since Bill Gates announced his departure in 2008.

A. With Bill Gates making the transition out of day-to-day involvement at Microsoft, what is the biggest challenge you have to overcome?

Q. Well, there are sort of two. First, it’s not like Bill’s written every line of code or designed every product or done anything like that for many, many years. But Bill’s been an incredible contributor. If Office 2007 is a great product, give Bill 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the credit. We have to make sure that — whether it’s 5 or 7 or 10 percent — we get those values someplace else. And second, with Bill people have understood that we’re committed to long-term innovation. Bill’s been emblematic of that. We’ve shared that vision all along the way. But I think I have to pick that up. Because people want to know that the buck-stops-here person is committed to continuing to invest and do things.

Maybe it’s because of his shiny dome, but all I could think of was how much Ballmer delivering that answer in the style of Johnny Caspar’s “Leo ain’t runnin’ things!” rant.

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 13, 2006

It’s the Friday the 13th edition of Unrequired Reading, dear readers!

Maxon Crumb’s not a hockey-mask-wearing serial killer, but he did come off as a weird bird in the great documentary about his brother, Robert Crumb. Here’s a good profile about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Gunter Grass is actually creepier than Max Crumb. Still, he wasn’t a serial killer for the SS during World War II. Sez Tim Cavanaugh:

It’s not so much Grass’ hypocrisy as his self-satisfaction. In what fucked-up parallel universe is it considered persuasive to argue, at this late date, that postwar attacks on the West German establishment (and frequently more-than-tacit support for the East German terror state) in any way obviate, or mitigate, or do anything else but compound the error of supporting the Nazis during the war? Why is it the default assumption that Grass’ anti-capitalism was a rejection of National Socialism rather than a continuation of it? (I actually think it may be neither, but among Germans who are irate at Grass over the lifelong SS coverup there seems to some sense that he’s let down his core principles, so it’s worth asking what those core principles are.)

Enjoy.

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There was creepiness aplenty in HP Lovecraft’s stories. In NYROB, Luc Sante writes about the new Library of America edition of Lovecraft’s work, and Houellebecq’s book about the demented writer of Rhode Island (I visited Lovecraft’s grave once, which evidently is going to grant me invulnerability to harm from nerds):

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, “where. . .they ought to have been left.” Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult — there is no other word — that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

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Beck creeps some people out, but his Sea Change album helped me through some heartbreak a few years ago. Here’s an interview about his new record, work habits, and religion.

And here’s a piece about the unique packaging for that new record.

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Must be Friday the 13th if Gadaffi is making sense. It’s pretty much an article of faith in modern times that countries with great natural resources will fail to develop human capital on a par with countries that have little by way of natural resources. Or, as Kyle Baker put it, “If you can get an A without trying, why work for an A+?”

Give that man a laptop!

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A while back, I explained why I love Vegas: it’s like an alien theme park of planet Earth. Here’s a piece about architecture, engineering and culture in Sin City.

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Vegas is no Transgondwanan Supermountain.

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Congrats to Orhan Pamuk for winning that Nobel literature prize. I’ve got a couple of his books somewhere in the library downstairs, but I won’t even pretend I’m going to break one out in honor of his honor.

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On the other hand, I oughtta get around to reading Bernard-Henri Levy somedarntime. This profile’s got some neat passages, including:

So why has France been quite so vitriolic about America? “France and Germany,” he corrects in fluent English. “It has nothing to do with what America does and was long before Iraq. It is about the idea of America, Rousseau’s social contract, where you decide to join a society. Its people have no roots, no memory. This is seen as an insult to what a real community should be, which is about blood and the soil.”

and

So what browns him off about Blighty? “We, you and France, are the two most snobbish countries on earth — full of invisible keys to invisible doors.” Isn’t America just as excluding, but on grounds of materialism? “Not true,” he insists. “Wealth has to be earned. There is still a very puritanical view of wealth. Without philanthropy it is not respected. Money might be god, but it is a guilty god.”

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Rounding out this week’s Unrequired Reading: an obscure reference from the Simpsons!

Chief Wiggum: “All of our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine.”