One of my Investments, in the News

Although not in the way my investments usually are. This is the restaurant several of us invested in during our last round.

Lucky!

I leave Seattle and come to Palm Springs to get away from the rain.

On average 354 days in Palm Springs each year are sunny, and the percentage of available sunshine is about 85; ... and humidity is low, reflecting the small annual rainfall total of only 5.8 inches, and around 20 days each year on which rain actually falls.

Guess which days I picked? 2 days, 2 days of rainso far. Also, an inch or so of rain.

Adventures in Parking

This is a repost of something I wrote 3 or 4 years ago. Today my son was driving around Philadelpia looking for a spot and I was reminded of it and told him I'd put it up again now that he's old enought to appreciate it.

I am torn. While I like the fact that Boston has freshly cleaned streets every week so that muggings and drug deals can take place in a clean environment supportive of the habits shitting dogs and barfing drunks, I'm liking the towing of my car thing not so much.
The other day , I went to get my car, and I couldn't find it. For those of you unfamiliar with Boston's Parking Calculus, with it's myriad streets, even/odd parking schema, let me explain what you have to do to simply find a parking spot.

Let's say you live in the South End at the corner of Union Park and Shawmut. Let's call this spot home. Intuitively you know there is a spot at some radius, R, away that qualifies as parking. This what you do to park:

• Drive by your apartment in the hopes there is a spot. This is called the Christmas Spot since it happens once or twice a year.
• Drive around the block looking for a spot.
• Neighborhood parking requires a sticker. Drive to BackBay or Bay Village, see a spot, curse the lazy bastards who live there and their ample parking. Think about moving to Back Bay. You now now approximately how large R is. Exceed it again only at the risk of also exceeding the pressure tolerances of the delicate network of veins in your brain.
• Drive past your apartment. Notice an unstickered car parking in front of it. Throw a gypsy curse at the tourist bastard. Think about calling the city to have them towed. Remember that the city won't do that. Curse the lazy bastards at the tow lot.
• Drive around the block in circles of increasing radius.
• Watch a valet from the restaurant around the corner steal a free spot at R/10 away from your home. Stop your car, scream at him for parking there. Threaten him with dubious threats like, "I'm calling the tow lot, that car won't be there when you come back in an hour", or "I'm often responsible for unexplained car fires when I'm off my meds!". If the valet is new, this has a chance to work, otherwise they know what lazy bastards they are at the tow lot and will flip you off.
• Drive around some more.
• Watch a tourist pull out, grab his space and park!
• Realize tomorrow is the 3rd Tuesday of the month and this, the south side of the street, gets swept at 6am, so your car will be towed at 5:59am.
• Tell yourself you will get up at 5:30am to move the car.
• Remember that a) there will be even fewer spots at 6am when everyone else is moving and b) it still sounds too stupid to get up at 5:30am just to move the car.
• Tell yourself you could drive over to the gym
• Realize the gym has an even worse parking situation at 5:30am.
• Drive around some more.
• Get desperate. Park next to a hydrant.
• Realize that the hydrant is on the south side of the street and tomorrow is the 3rd Tuesday of the month.
• Drive around some more.
• Drive out to the sketchy section of town at 2R from your house. There are no neighborhood stickers here. There is no street cleaning. There are a surprising number of syringes of the street. Broken car window glass grinds under your tires as you pull into one of the many spaces. Eyes light up as it pulls in and you reflexively touch your wallet.
• Tell yourself the syringes are because there are a lot of diabetics here.
• Tell yourself the glass is really from taillights where people touch park.
• Tell yourself you had a successful parking experience here "that one time last year".
• Tell yourself that, after 45 minutes looking for fucking parking, you really need to move out of the city.
• Weigh the possibility of having your car stolen vs. having it towed vs. actually finding it at 8am tomorrow.
• Drive around some more.
  After an hour, find a spot at exactly R, on the north side of the street.
• The spot is the size of Miata
• You drive an Eclipse.
• Jam the car into the spot through a combination of superlative parking skills and crushing the bumpers of the other cars like egg cartons under an Acela.
• Double check the north/south orientation of the street. Think again about which Tuesday this is.
• Realize it's the second Wednesday not the third Tuesday.
• See a red wall of rage descend over your vision.
• 5 or minutes will pass, you will have no memory of them. This is normal.
• Note the impressive dents in the hood of that guy's car. The gym is doing you good!
• Realize you must have missed a spectacular accident since the parking sign is now on the ground tied into the shape of a Bavarian Pretzel.
• You note that you see that a lot around here.
• Walk the 15 minutes it takes to cross R and go home.
• Go to bed.
• Wake up at 5:30 and think about moving the car.
• Go back to sleep.
• Leave the apartment at 8:00am and try to remember where you parked the car last night.
• Thinking about it, you can only remember a big red wall and your fists aching a little.
• Walk the perimeter of R, looking for your car or a big red wall.
• R is not a circumference of a circle, but a highly fractal path due to gerrymandering and neighborhood geometry.
• The fractal dimension of R is .99287. That is absurdly high for 3 dimensional space.
• Find a car that looks like yours but, in fact, has pimp wheels.
• Keep walking the perimeter of R, looking for your car...

This is pretty much what goes on every night. You can count on getting towed about once a year.
Why is it you live in the city again?
I had parked on a first Wednesday side on a first wednesday. After walking 2R, I called the lazy bastards at the BTD. Sure enough, they towed me at 8:01. $105 later, I got a new lesson in parking calculus. :(

Facebook

Facebook is the current craze amoung my friends, so I have been spending a lot of time over there. The result is less time in this blog since my overall amount of free time tends to be conserved. If you have a chance, ping me over there as well!

Dentistry

Another root canal this week, this one a particularly unpleasent one. I spent 5 hours in the chair. 5 hours. The anesthetic wore off after 2 and half, I got renumbed but it only last another other hour. After that, it didn't really work at all. As was explained to me afterwards, when one's gums are infected, they are highly resistant to pain killers. The more inflamed the get, the more resistant they become. Needless to say, mine were pretty inflamed. So I spent the last hour and a half with little or no numbing. It took so long because the roots of the tooth were not straight like normal, but curved around in shapes which made it difficult to clean out the root completely and, you absolutely positively do NOT want to leave nerves in there.

I admit freely I screamed loudly at several points. Enough to scare the other patients and some of the staff.

That said, the dentist did a good job and despite the conditions, a very professional one. He called the next and we talked, I think he wanted to a) see how I was doing and b) make sure there were no hard feelings. There are not, I understand why he needed to do what he did and respect him for it. He did confide to me that, "it's patients with teeth like that one which cause some dentists not to do root canals at all".

I thought that was funny. My mouth is a dire warning to others.

Looks good!

The new Star Trek trailer, set to reboot the franchise, looks pretty good.

Investitude

I've been a member of a small investors club for a few years now, and to say the last 12 months have been rough is a huge understatement. We've lost significantly in the market, although some of our private investments have done okay (as well as some investment in gold). Occasionally we make limited, non-controlling buy-ins for various private businesses, either as direct investments or structured loans. Yesterday we agreed to buy a restaurant in Seattle that I have been going to for a few years now. Despite the climate, it looks like a pretty good buy given food, the neighborhood and the management. While not, by any means, a controlling interest, it's enough that we should do pretty well in a market where 2% bonds look like genius. If we have this right, we should be getting around 9% if you don't count the fringe benefits (i.e. I eat there a few times a month or free, they are now stocking my favorite drink etc.).

If you have a chance and are in Seattle, check out Amore on the corner of 5th and Bell.

How 7 of 9 Changed History and Elected Barak Obama

I was thinking about the chain of events that got us to where we are today, I remembered an obscure link between 7 of 9 and the US Presidency.

In 2004, Republican Peter Fitzgerald left the US Senate and Jack Ryan, former Goldman trader, wanted his seat. He ran on a platform of "staunch family values and rock-rib conservative principles". He won the republican primary and his only opponent was a little known, poorly funded black guy named Barak Obama. He was, in other words, a shoe-in.

However, Ryan's wife was famed actress Jeri Ryan, at the time coming off her famous role as 7 of 9 in Star Trek: Voyager. You'd think that was a plus but, alas, not so much. Jeri divorced Jack for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his taste for group sex and her complete version to joining him. All of this was under seal until the Chicago Tribune sued to unseal the records, was successful, and brought to light a host of highly graphic and, well, hypocritical details.

Ryan dropped out and the GOP ran comedian Alan Keyes as his replacement, resulting in a 70%-30% loss.

And now you know, the rest of the story.

Bill Mahr on America

Just past the "new rules" and totally worth it:

Cassandra

I have to admit, I didn't grok what was going on as well as Peter Schiff:

Mormons

Let me get this straight: The LDS Church has spent $25 Million to break up the marriages of people who don't share their faith ... just becuase they can.

Right.

And somehow I am supposed to beleive they should have to pay taxes?

Monsignor, that dog won't hunt!

If you want to beleive in invisible sky father, go right ahead. Just don't start passing laws based on your nonsense, that's where I draw the line.

The Count, Censored

I have watched this a half-dozen times and I always laugh.



(From Geoff)

Vetern's Day

Go Hug a Vet today.

Awesomeness from RedSate

Now that they have been taken down a peg or two, I can once again stand to read them. Which is good, otherwise I would have missed this wonderful piece of awesomeness:

Suicide at the Council of Elrond

Of course, it's better in the orginal elvish.

My thoughts exactly

The Cunning Realist:

Conservatism's chastened, soul-searching morning after: bombs, cancer jokes, and some typically incisive commentary on foreign affairs.The wilderness is thickly forested, and the trail maps suck...

All you who believed in WMDs, that compassionate conservatism was something other than ages old religious arguments about who's invisible friend is bigger, and called folks "socialists" who didn't want to give $700,000,000,000 in welfare to banks, I say, enjoy your time in the wilderness! Don't feel a need to hurry back, we'll take care of things while you're gone. When you decide to run someone for public office who knows that Africa isn't a country, let us know, we'll be waiting.

Grace Notes

I watched Sen. McCain's consession speech last night and was highly impressed. He gave a respectful, well-intentioned and completely graceful speech marred only slightly by the booing of his crowd. And, given that Democrats have excelled at these kinds of speechs in the last 20 years, it's nice to see the republicans can summon up the needed class for this.

Crushed!

As Ohio falls, so goes McCain. When he didn't flip Pennsylvania (thanks Becky!), he had to run the table. When Ohio fell, so did McCain. MSNBC is refusing to call Florida and North Carolina, but that's just to keep people from tuning out.

For the first time in my adult life, I got the election results I wanted. (Well... we'll see about ballot initiatives in CA in WA, but largely I got what I wanted.)

Theme's to look for in the GOP Post Mortem:

Center-Right Nation
Blame Bush
McCain wasn't mean enough.
Palin should have been allowed to be Palin
etc.

Anything except their intellectually bankrupt ideas. If your conservative friends say it's not a repudiation of their ideas, ask why they lost so many ballot initiatives, e.g. SD abortion and Colorado's attempt to outlaw contraception.

The world tomorrow will be measurably better than the world yesterday.

and I am going to go drinking!

Call

In poker, after the last check-raise, the opponent can call, bringing an end to the games and winning or losing based on the cards. We've reached that point in the election. My final Intrade bets are in, the final attack ads are out as McCain throws the very last of his dignity at the wall hoping against hope that folks take pity and elevate him to national office.

As a long time independent, I have watched the democrats throw victory away time after time with candidates one would, at the best of times, still have to hold one's nose to vote for, Gore, Kerry, Mondale, Dukakis and Slick Willie. I voted for them (sometimes) largely because the alternative was even worse.

Obama has been different. When I saw his speech in Boston in 2004 (and btw started one of the first posting on this blog), I thought to myself, "wow, the nominated the wrong guy". Smart, articulate and, above all, reasonable. Open to non-ideological thoughts, new ideas and the idea that maybe a hip-shot isn't always the best way to go. In 2004 I assumed there was no chance at all anyone in any party would let him within a mile of the presidency.

So here we are on Election Eve 2008, and I got everything I wanted from the Dems. The campaign ran the way I would have wanted (even though I was ready to put a Clinton on the ticket for unity), with the candidates showing the maturity and leadership I would want to see (well.... Biden.... but he's funny, so it's okay), and Obama, for the most part, taking the high road.

McCain ran a good campaign as well, although he always seemed torn between his desire to do the right thing, his ambition to be president, and the needs of his base (having subsisted on an Atkins-like diet of pure red meat for the past 18 years). If McCain2000 had shown up, and not picked the odious Palin as a running mate, he could easily have taken my vote despite our disagreement on the war. He didn't, but I think he wishes he had returned to that framework instead of the one his campaign built for him. If there was a moment when I thought he lost my vote (apart from Palin) it was when the McCain campaign said, "John McCain does not speak for the McCain campaign". Really? Then who does?

As I have said many times here, if I have learned one thing in my life, it's that regrets occur when you don't try your hardest. I doubt the Obama campaign will have regrets, even if they lose tomorrow.

The bets are in, the candidates are about finished, it's time to show the cards.

there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress

although, also, it is not a requirement.

The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Stevens said he had no idea he was getting freebies. He said he paid $160,000 for the project and said he believed that covered everything.
Stevens asked for an unusually speedy trial, hoping he'd be exonerated in time to return to Alaska and win re-election. He kept his campaign going and gave no indication that he had a contingency plan in case of conviction.

No one anticipated that the levies would fail....

Microexpressions

I've long been facinated by microexpressions, little subconcious facial and body movements which convey our actual thoughts about things, sometimes at odds with what we want to show.

With that, and no other comment, allow me to present two images from SNL where Gov. Palin takes over the stage from Tina Fey as Tina exits.