XLR8

The Instapundit rhapsodizes the Xcelerator hand-dryer in his new column. The official VM wife and I have used Xcelerators at the Palisades Mall restrooms for a while now, and they’re a hoot. You really do get the “rippling skin”/skydiving visual from them. And if you leave your hands stationary under the vent, they’ll be sore for the rest of the day.

We’ve been waiting to hear stories about, um, other parts put under the vent from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but no dice so far. They’ve been too busy taking chemistry sets out of the hands of potential meth-making bombers or something.

X(cavate)-Men

Oh, sure: Amy & I could have spent Memorial Day at a nice party at Breezy Point, in Brooklyn. But wouldn’t we have even more fun if I spent a second straight day excavating a portion of my backyard? In 88-degree weather?

Okay, we wouldn’t, especially since Amy stayed inside and degreased the stove/grill in the kitchen. But stay home we did, and I actually accomplished my goal of clearing a chunk of land on the corner of our backyard.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any “Before” pictures, largely because I was convinced I would never finish the job. But I found reservoirs of will to go along with my reservoirs of Patrick Ewing-like sweat. So, all you get are a couple of “After” pictures, here and here.

Doesn’t look like much? Well, it measured out to 23 feet by 24 feet, which comes out to about 550 square feet of yard that hadn’t been cleaned in more than 15 years. The thick layer of rotting leaves was a mixed blessing: a lot of the weeds hadn’t laid down deep roots, but those leaves get awfully heavy when they’ve been left for that long and that much rain.

Then there were the rocks, which sure made things difficult. My idea for this patch is to turn it into some sorta garden or zen-palace, so hauling out a bunch of those suckers is necessary. It wasn’t as bad as some of the small trees I had to rip up, since they did lay down some significant roots.

But you guys know I wouldn’t write about this sort of thing unless something funny happened, or if an ex-girlfriend was involved. Fortunately, it’s the former.

See, my father is genetically incapable of disposing of anything in the conventional manner. A few years ago, when he replaced his water-heater, he called me and said, “We can dump it behind the bank building in Ramsey tonight when it’s closed!” I told him that I’d gotten out of the dump-and-run business, and that we should see when bulk-trash day is in his neighborhood. It turned out to be the next day. We still had fun trying to roll the water-heater down his sloped driveway, nearly losing control of it, which would’ve led to the heater bounding across the street and into the neighbors’ front yard.

Which is to say, I had some trepidation about digging up that section of the backyard. This trepidation was warranted. Over the years, it seems Dad dumped a bunch of crap in that relatively small patch of land.

Airplane cables (from our dog’s run when we were kids), metal pipes and tubing from his old HAM radio tower in the backyard, flowerpots, a Sundae Smiley Saucer from McDonalds, cables, rope, shards of glass, and what appears to be a fuel-tank that was filled with rocks.

You read that last one right. I had to get all the rocks, dirt and rust out before I could haul the tank up to the pile o’ junk.

Now, you’d think that a fuel-tank full of rocks would be the piece de resistance for my excavation, but it’s not. No, that honor goes to this:

What’s that? Oh, it’s a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi from about 18 logos ago. If you check out the back of the bottle, you’ll notice it’s still two-thirds filled.

I hope everyone else had a good Memorial Day. I know I’ll remember this one for quite a while, especially if I get tetanus from that damned fuel-tank. . .

Ghost boat

Creepy story about a boat washing up in Barbados, filled with mummified corpses of African immigrants. Some of the passengers wrote goodbye notes which, as you’d expect, are the saddest things in the world:

I would like to send to my family in Bassada [a town in the interior of Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye. This is the end of my life in this big Moroccan sea.

The varieties of diversity, or something

Timothy Garton Ash on the stultification of Europe:

In the great age of Renaissance Florence, diversity was indeed the dynamo of Europe’s extraordinary creativity. There’s a marvellous book called The European Miracle, by the economic historian EL Jones, that explores why Europe rather than China – scientifically and technologically more advanced than Europe in the 14th century – produced the scientific, agrarian and industrial revolutions that led the world into modernity. In brief, his answer is: Europe’s diversity.

But this was the diversity of a restless, often violent competition between cities, regions, states and empires. Florence and Siena, England and France, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire – they did not resolve their differences by coalition agreements and endless negotiations in airless committee rooms on the Rue de la Loi in Brussels. To reverse Churchill’s post-1945 adage: they made war-war not jaw-jaw.

Many readers will remember the speech that Orson Welles put into the mouth of the gangster Harry Lime, in the film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Has Europe today entered its age of the cuckoo clock?

Sorry to have been so light on the posts, dear reader. I’ve been pretty busy with the magazine. Have a good holiday weekend.

Anti-Midas

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).

Market Down

Rachel Donadio at the NYTimes has an article about why literary fiction sucks. Okay, it’s not really about why literary fiction sucks; it’s really about why the market for literary fiction sucks.

It has the dumbest concluding paragraph I’ve read in a while (soon to be topped by the conclusion of my article on disposable components in bioprocessing), despite the promise of this opening:

The pride and joy of publishing, literary fiction has always been wonderfully ill suited to the very industry that sustains it. Like an elegant but impoverished aristocrat married to a nouveau riche spouse, it has long been subsidized by mass-market fiction and by nonfiction ripped from the headlines. One supplies the cachet, the others the cash.

Having run a mini-publishing house of allegedly literary fiction, I’ve taken a somewhat jaundiced view of the relationship between book and marketplace. I’m all for fantastic literary writing, but it’s pretty clear that a market relying on people with my taste is doomed to insignificance. I love great writing and wish it would sell better, but it won’t.

And, despite Jonathan Galassi’s bizarre non-sequitur, it’s not because we’re living in a “post-9/11 world.” Read all about it.