What to Do in Korea

For my friend Lindsay, who's headed to Korea (yay!): the following are some activities that you might find interesting.


Go check out a big fish market with your camera. Then go to a big department store like Lotte and hang out on the food floors.


Eat some seolleongtang.


Eat kimchee.


Time and weather permitting (it snows a lot there), go to Seoraksan National Park.


More Seoraksan.


There is a cool concentration of arts and crafts in Insadong in Seoul.


Insadong

Sweatbox

I don't care who you are; your first financial priority should be to keep your credit cards paid off. The minimum payment is a tool of the lender, not you. If you are not convinced, please read this. The lenders want to keep you sweating as long as they can manage.

What to See in California

Moon, trees


Barn in Point Reyes


Yuan's living room at night


Alcatraz


San Francisco, from Alcatraz

What to Eat in California

Raw pork is not good for you, but it is often very tempting.


Cooked pork.


Raw oysters.


This fruit was really weird but pretty delicious. Yuan, what the hell is it called again? (Answer: cherimoya)

The Fauna of California, Continued

Birds


Winnie!

The Fauna of California

Yuan: my host, cook and navigator for much of the journey


Stephanie laughing after wine, nuts


Visiting Lisa in prison


Stacey is about to get smacked


My verdict on Bjorn's ice cream: delicious, not at all like a woman's bathroom


Rosemary


It appears that baboons are good with babies, specifically Isabella.


Isabella, and one of her ancestors named Jon

A Salute to a Near-Genius

The robber pepper sprayed the armoured car guard on September 30 outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, grabbed a bag of money and ran towards a tributary of the Skykomish River where he was seen floating off on a tube.

More hilarity.

Standing on dead horses

One more from the archives

Alberta is also thankful for

the relatively small size of this recent space rock.



As a teenager, I once had the pleasure of sailing around Cape Cod aboard a schooner. One night, while I was on bow duty, I saw a falling star that completely lit up the night sky and left a glowing trail that lasted for a couple of seconds. That was the most spectacular natural event I have ever seen.

I am thankful for

near misses by space rocks.

The below object flew through the atmosphere in 1972. This footage was taken by a tourist in Grand Teton National Park.



Now, if only people would stop attacking one another ... has anyone looked into this problem?

Please allow me a moment of self-congratulation.

I made chowder today. A pound and a half of cod and a can (sorry!) of lump crabmeat went into this concoction. There was also a bacon sighting.

It is delicious. I should sell this stuff. The business plan: supply the customers with on-demand hot chowder through underground pipelines. Citibank will provide the seed funding of 1 billion dollars. I will go public within a year, before the company develops any meaningful financial history.

Dick Cavett, Ladies and Gentlemen

From "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla."

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

There Will Be No Severance for the Undead

Photo credit: Tim, the guy who wanted also to take a picture of his junk

A Have-Not Wordle

By Wordle

"Drunken sailor with Warren Buffett's credit card"

I love reading The Epicurean Dealmaker because of passages like the below. The context is the suspected flameout of Harvard's once-swinging endowment, and emphasis is mine.

Last year, on the occasion of a reunion visit to the leafy groves of my own alma mater, I was dismayed to discover that practically all of the verdant green expanses of my salad days (perfect for snoozing over a physics textbook on a sunny day) were no more. There was almost no plot of grassy space left on campus that had not been filled with the hulking form of yet another architectural monument to the pride and vanity of some self-fellating panjandrum.

Ha, ha. Haha. Hehe.

Related: my somewhat humbler alma mater reports a somewhat humbler loss.

AIG: Not Funny.

Naked Capitalism gets indignant at the latest (but not guaranteed to be the last) stage in AIG's fleecing of America.

Let us recall that AIG was rescued a day after The Man allowed Lehman to flame out spectacularly into bankruptcy. How the hell does AIG still have any leverage to demand anything? We should all be pissed.

Why You Suck, and Why I Don't Care

Dear reader, before you get your panties all up in a knot, you don't suck (for the most part), and I do care.

To wit: I recently started looking at some analytics about the traffic on this humble journal.

[Let me tell you, I spent a good half-hour when trying to select the goddamn category for the blog. "Absolute Truth" was not among the available choices, so I went with "Misc," though I think that belittles the absolute seriousness with which I post my musings. Ok, fine, not really. I would have selected "Senseless Drivel," which is perhaps the most accurate label.]

Anyway. It turns out people read this stuff more than I thought. This is hardly an achievement, since I expected three hits on a good month, but whatever. And while I cannot really be sure, you seem to represent a diverse cross-section of my known world; my original intuition turns out to have been correct.

That's a little embarassing, because I often write stuff under the assumption that I am the only person who will care to read it. But really, what do I have to hide? I harbor no profound mysteries. I do sometimes emit some embarassing sappiness, but I ask you to please overlook these moments, and I will continue to stick to my original pledge of writing anything I want.

But I will be careful to avoid implicating anyone else in this embarassment. That is: if you object to any personal appearances here -- photographic, typographic and otherwise -- let me know, and I will get rid of it pronto. My bad.

In the past 24 hours, around 15 people from 4 different countries have peeked at various parts of the Have-Not Journal. I find this absolutely amazing. It also does not reflect well on your social lives, but really, who am I to meddle?

Mostly I just want to thank anyone who finds this stuff readable, let alone interesting. You rule, and I care deeply. Keep reading. Really.

Cider Donut Porn

Donuts from the Tree-Licious Orchards stand at the Greenmarket (Fridays at Union Square, and Sundays at 77th and Columbus). For the record, I prefer the non-sugared kind. But they only had these today, and we all need a little suga every once in a while, no?

No Father to His Style

Rest in peace, O.D.B.

Protect Ya Neck

For the most part, I do not understand the motivations of others, and I cannot divine their intentions.

Given this lack of transparency, I find it useful to live by default on the defensive, as advised by the timeless words of the Wu: "Protect ya neck."

But no one can keep this up permanently. Occasionally, you (the rhetorical "you," which implies "I") must drop your ("my") guard. Sometimes, you don't even have a choice. The smell of a certain acquaintance fills you with euphoria? You are in deep fucking trouble. Cash no longer rules everything around you; rose-colored daydreams do. You believe now that it can indeed be so simple, then. Ya neck is wide open. And despite this, you yearn to be in this state of mind.

Watch ya ("ma") step, kid.

Bulls, Bears, and Tapeworms

In a brilliant post, Steve Waldman bitch-slapped the entire finance system and exposed it for what it is:

By a financial system, I don't mean the tottering cartel of banks and insurers loudly sucking newly printed cash into "collateral postings" and "deleveragings" and other meaningless nonactivities. That is no financial system at all. It is an ecology of intestines and tapeworms, tubes through which dollars flow and are skimmed en route to destinations about which the tripe-creatures have little interest or concern.

Boo-yah! There is more:

Right now, banks don't even bother to sell themselves to savers on the basis of their superior acumen in choosing real investments ... We have methodically erased information about real-world activities from the financial decision-making process. We've created an intrafinancial mandarin class, treated as experts, entrusted with wealth, but lacking knowledge of anything other than the arcane wheels and gears of finance, as if the finance exists apart from the workaday world of producing and consuming, serving and being served.

To my admittedly green ears, it sounds as though Waldman is advocating a system that routes capital based on fundamental analysis, and steers clear of securitizing, structuring, deriving, blowing lines off the bosoms of hookers, et cetera. While I could not agree more with this, I think there must have been some incentive for the so-called 'real economy' to reward the financiers hansomely for diving into these convoluted "nonactivities." Until we can correct these incentives, perhaps the finance system as we know it will dive right back into another self-generated bubble that manifests itself in penthouse apartments, yachts and awful art before bursting into another deep recession.

It seems that even the 'real economy' has its hand deep in the same cookie jar. There is real demand for these supposedly "value-added" layers of financial sorcery. Companies, financial and otherwise, want to distill the real world down to packets of market risk, credit risk, interest rate exposure, or whatever. If all these instruments worked as advertised, I supposed we would not be in the situation that we are in now; we may blame the crisis on the simple ineptitude of the financial engineers who conceived of these things, and argue that the premium commanded by these products are just overpriced.

But that is perhaps not the point. By convincing ourselves that such abstractions actually facilitate the means of production and distribution, we have buried our heads in mathematical models and forgotten to look out the window at the world. I am not sure how we should arrive at a brave new world of finance, in which the reasonably paid financial professionals are out in the field and smelling the earth a la Maximus the Gladiator before laying down their humbly leveraged capital, and companies manage their exposures with down-and-dirty activities rather than buying and selling contracts that promise (honest! for real!) to eliminate this risk or that. But I sure am rooting for it.

Letchworth, Again

We spent the entire weekend in an abandoned village once occupied by the "feeble-minded."


Pipes, wall


Pipes, window


One gigantic mess


Cafeteria


Skylights


Making a face under a pale blue sky


Basement


Self portrait in a ruined cellar


Curtains


Sunlit hallway