I Am Very Tall

I have been watching, How to Train your Dragon recently, because it's on HBO all the time and it's awesome. And I was really starting to get bugged by the fact that the dragon in the movie looked... familiar. AND NOW I KNOW WHY.


This website also has lots of other awesome/terrible discoveries. I particularly like this one:

The inherent appeal of tumblr over a standard blog. Every so often, I just want to post a song link or something, and tumblr is way better for that than blogger. Facebook would actually be the ideal venue for everything, except the audience is too big. I don't actually want everyone on facebook to see everything that I put down. And I don't really want to manage a list of 500-600 friends, or what not. Blaaaagh.

Anyway, it's a gorgeous day for once in Boston, and I am of course wasting it by sitting around writing at home, listening to Taylor Swift (exploratory listening, humoring a friend). Catch you guys later.

The following link goes to a page with audio clips of Bill O'Reilly reading from his (assumedly) craptastic novel, Those Who Trespass. Here's the Village Voice's synthesis of the plot:

The murderer, Shannon Michaels, is pursued by an O'Reilly-esque cop, Tommy O'Malley. These two Irish-Americans share their author's tough-talk, lust for power, and (alleged!) belief that the best way to seduce a woman is to seize her breasts, preferably as she showers.

Selected quotes, which you can hear being read by Mr. O'Reilly:

"Say baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up."

"I would like you to unhook your bra and let it slide down your arms. You can keep your shirt on."

"Cup your hands under your breasts and hold them for ten seconds."

There's also an amazing clip of him reading through one of his soft-core porn scenes. Needless to say, I was hideously embarassed for the man.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/03/off_with_those.php

[Hat tip to Rob]

Steven Pinker isn't an English Professor, but rather a highly regarded cognitive scientist. Even so, I really hope that his latest Op-Ed is right. Here are the money quotes:

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

The rest of the article talks about how Justice Roberts messed up the oath of office because he's one of these "language shibboleths." But I don't really care about that so much. I'm just glad that the split infinitive thing has been put to rest. Because that rule never made any sense to me and it really messed with my writing.

So, word on the street is that the hammer will fall on Thursday. And by word on the street, I mean that the head of North America just e-mailed everyone in North America and told them that they had to be in the office on Thursday, with no explanation. Particularly interesting is that we just have to be in the office, we don't have to attend any meetings or anything.

There were a lot of conjectures out there, about a possible sale or something like that, but that's just a bunch of turtle poo as far as I can tell. The economy is bad, North America is the epicenter, they're laying people off. I'm surprised we didn't do it earlier.

That leaves me with the question though, what exactly do you do if you think/know you're going to be fired? Are there any special sorts of things you need to do to prepare yourself for the inevitable? It doesn't seem to me that there's much you can do in three days that would make getting laid off any easier. I suppose you could start calling people for a couch to crash on and start packing your shit in anticipation of vacating your apartment. Maybe get a slight head start on looking for a job?

If I had to guess, our snack and supply cabinets are going to get emptied over the next few days.
I'm also guessing that there will be some hilarious e-mails. But mostly just a lot of sadness.

Another weekend, another day in the office. Here's a quick picture to lighten up my day.

Another weekend, another day in the office.

Neon shines through smoky eyes tonight
It’s 2 am - I’m drunk again it’s heavy on my mind

I could never love again so much as I love you
Where you end where I begin is like a river going through
Take my heart, my eyes 'cause I need them no more
If never again they fall upon the one I so adore

Excuse me please one more drink
Could you make it strong cause I don’t need to think
She broke my heart my Grace is gone
One more drink and I’ll move on

One drink to remember, then another to forget
How could I ever dream to find sweet love like you again
One drink to remember, and another to forget

Excuse me please one more drink
Could you make it strong cause I don’t need to think
She broke my heart my Grace is gone
One more drink and I’ll move on
One more drink and I’ll be gone

You think of things impossible then the sun refused to shine
I woke with you beside me your cold hand lay in mine

Excuse me please one more drink
Could you make it strong cause I don’t need to think
She broke my heart my Grace is gone
One more drink and I’ll go

Excuse me please one more drink
Could you make it strong cause I don’t need to think
She broke my heart my Grace is gone
One more drink and I’ll be gone
One more drink my Grace is gone
One more drink my Grace is gone

As a follow-up to the previous post, here's a bumper sticker that someone is trying to sell:

Have you ever wanted your own house? Don't think you can afford one, especially since mortgage rates are spiking and your job pays you crap? Well I've got news for you. In Detroit, you don't need a mortgage. Why is that? Because you can buy a house for $1 freaking dollar.

Ok, the $1 house is admittedly fire damaged and sneakily tells you that you have to pay an additional $2500 and closing costs. But still. There are 182 properties below $1,000! I could skip a couple of Pudge's meals and buy one of those things!

I just noticed that this video was filmed one block north of my office at the Altria building (the blurred out corporate logo on the wall). How serendipitous.

So here I was, sitting all by myself at home on a Sunday night and feeling a little sorry for myself, to be perfectly honest. And then I ran across this ray of sunshine on Take a Report, a blog from a trader (formerly) at Citi. I nearly wet myself.

Pudge, don't look.

Pudge is gone for a bit. She's off on vacation with her family for about a month and will be off to HBS afer that. Her being gone has allowed me to do certain things - play Rock Band, stay up really late, eat unhealthily and irregularly - but at the same time, it's strange not having anyone around. Watching TV now feels like a depressing and loserish activity. If it wasn't for the fact that the kids on South Park are now my imaginary best friends, I would probably have to give it up.

In my spare time, I am trying to convert myself from a wad of banana pancake mix into an healthy-looking human being. I am also trying to work up the will to learn things for my personal betterment, but that's not going so well. In any case, I am hoping that this terribly depressing experience will soon reveal itself to be nothing more than an exercise in character development.

Random quote from the Daily Show:
"If there's a can of whup-ass out here, I'm going to open it." - Brian Williams, possibly the best recurring guest ever

I was reading an article by William Kristol on Tony Snow's passing, when I came across this quote:

For quite a while now, optimism has had a bad reputation in intellectual circles. The fashionable books of my youth — and they are good books — were darkly foreboding ones like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984.” Young conservatives of the era were much taken by Whittaker Chambers’s gloomy memoir, “Witness.” We who read Albert Camus — and if you had any pretensions to being a non-Marxist intellectual, you read Camus — loved the melancholy close of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The basic attitude one derived from these works was that pessimism is deeper than optimism, and existential angst more profound than cheerful confidence. This attitude remains powerful, perhaps dominant, among many thoughtful people today — perhaps especially among conservatives, reacting against a facile liberal belief in progress.

I will freely admit that for a long time, my thinking was very similar to that in the previous paragraphs. I had an implicit belief that people who smiled too much were probably too stupid to recognize all the reasons that they should be unhappy. My mom referred to me as "being a bit of a Raskolnikov." It was all very high school and I'm very glad that I've moved past that point.

So, I'm definitely a bit puzzled by the fact that Kristol has politicized this point of view, tentatively claiming it for conservatives. Especially if this type of overly intellectualized brooding is rooted in particular books, my immediate thought would be that it's more of a matter of one's education. I mean isn't wearing black, smoking a bunch of cigarettes and talking about nihilism more in the domain of liberals with artsy-fartsy degrees in existentialism. It seems much less well-suited to Southern baptists or libertarians. Anyway, just my thoughts.

So, Pudge has been trying to get reservations at a restaurant called Momofuku Ko for a really long time. From what I can tell, Ko is a fine place for food, charging somewhere around $100 a head for a fixed menu. However, it has catapulted itself into the position of being perhaps the most difficult restaurant to eat at in NYC for two simple reasons:

1. There are a limited number of seats and seatings per night
2. All reservations are done on-line, with absolutely no preferential treatment at all.

In order to prevent scalping, the restaurant forces you to enter your credit card information and verifies that you are exactly who you say you are when you get to the restaurant. So, essentially what you have here is a reservation system that is extremely accessible, paired with a lack of supply.

Now, a lot of people have been wondering what would happen if you were to convert the reservation system into an auction system. Here's what happened at a recent auction, where a seat at Ko was offered up for charity:

It started quietly: at the end of the first day, the top bid was $175. Day two saw the price rise to $245, where it stayed for four more days. On day six it went up to $275, and then on day ten it hit $315: still less than the retail price for the dinner alone. On day 13, when the auction was blogged by Eater, the bidding went a little crazy, ending at $700. A bidder named "kyanza" dropped out at $650, but reappeared on day 14 and started bidding the price up again: by the end of day 14 kyanza had the high bid of $1,250 - which would value the reservation at $865.

But the auction still had three more days to go. On day 15, kyanza was still the high bidder, at $1,501. On day 16, "srittvo" came in with a bid $20 higher, but everybody knew that there would be more activity on day 17, the final day.

The auction was due to close at 4pm, but there was a twist: it was extended by five minutes every time somebody made a new high bid. Thus were there no fewer than 24 bids between 3:55pm and 4:12pm. At 3:50pm, the high bid, from kyanza, was $1,870. By the time the auction ended, kynza was still the winner, but the final price was exactly a thousand dollars higher: $2,870. Which would put the value of the reservation at about $2,500.

That's an expensive table.

Hat tip to Felix Salmon.

Cool link from Pudge, who has started blogging again:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo. Guy's sure done a lot of travel.

Kanye West is posting about Nintendo coming out with a "mind-controlled" Wii in 2010. According to Yeezy, as he now refers to himself:

T3 gives a little clue that all you have is a headset accessory that uses brainwaves to control characters and features immersing in-ear headphones.

Though brain-wave technology has already become a reality with Emotive pioneering in-game systems, but soon it seems Nintendo will come out with the first mind-controlled console on the market.

My first instinct is that this is complete bulls***. However, a quick Google search tells me that there is indeed a company called Emotiv out there that is actually building headsets for "mind control." One article on CNET discusses how the reviewer was able to make an orange cube appear and disappear on a screen, using nothing but his brain. So, degree of veracity is still unclear. But still interesting.

In case you haven't seen either of them, I would highly recommend seeing "Wall-E" from Pixar and "Hott Fuzz," which is now making the rounds on HBO on demand.

I'll start with Wall-E, which I think is a little closer to people's minds right now. A lot is being made of the fact that there isn't a whole lot of dialogue in the movie, which is a striking change from the usual jabber-filled blab fests that are animated movies these days. The lack of dialogue highlights the simple fact that there is much more to communicating than just words. The characters in the movie, despite having a limited vocabulary, are very expressive. In a post-Seinfeld world, where people are used to talking so much about absolutely nothing, it's great to have a movie that says all that needs to be said with grace and economy.

Which is why it kills me a little bit to see people writing like this about it:

I read a great review on Wall-E at the Hollywood Reporter. The author heaps praises on the film and says that Pixar's streak of success is intact. That's pretty pleasing. Yet, the review also worries me to some extent (I'm a Disney shareholder). The author says that there isn't a lot of dialogue in the picture (I guess the robot characters don't speak) and that it might be such a smart project that some moviegoers might not fully appreciate it. In this competitive timeframe, that doesn't make me feel good. I'd rather the film be simple blockbuster material for the popcorn crowd. I don't want the young kids in the audience to feel their attention spans being strained in the least. I'm not looking for art in this case. I just want my company to make as much money as possible.

I'm not sure where to begin here. I'm sure that there are plenty of people/investors who agree with the opinions being voiced by this guy. I'm also guessing that these would have been the same people that would have urged Henry Ford to forget about the "automobile" and to just try and breed faster horses.

Hott Fuzz was the other movie I saw. I could talk about it, but there's not much to say. It's just a very well written and well executed parody of the action cop buddy drama genre. The reason that it's so good is that it succeeds as both a parody and as an action cop blah blah. I could keep talking about it, but it's definitely better that you just see it on your own.

This video is amazing:

Of course, J.C. Penney claims that it's a fake.

In the last couple days, I've been checking out some of the major NYC attractions. Went to the NYSE and actually got to look at the floor in person. It looks like this:


What's interesting about the floor is that there's more weight on it than can actually be physically supported. So in order to keep the pits (those giant circular things surrounded by computer screens) from falling through, they basically have a superstructure connected to the ceiling that helps to relieve the stress. The superstructure looks like this (sorry about the resolution):


If you look closely, you can see the wires connecting the pipes to the pits. Also of interest was passing by the news stations posted in the building. For CNBC, Bloomberg, etc., it's basically just two-three guys sitting in a room full of radio equipment speaking into a mic and punching out quick posts on old-looking computers. Of course, I've got a picture of them too.


Definitely gets my vote for worst office-space in the financial services industry. Anyway, that concludes the tour.