an observation of tempo from the 1960s

There are several songs by Otis Redding that are part of the air of culture; sitting on the dock of the bay is probably the most recognizable, but also i can't turn you loose, security, and a slew of others. These songs have been covered a lot, put in tv shows, etc.. it feels like I heard a lot of these as a kid while watching Moonlighting or Murphy Brown with my mom.

In any case, when you listen to the original versions of these songs they feel much slower than you might expect.

The same phenomenon can be seen in the movie Bullitt. The movie is filled with long, slow scenes that I'm sure felt different to watch in 1968 than today. The slow pace draws you into the movie in a more pronounced way.  Is there an inflation of tempo that takes place over time?

the girl vp's guide to hunting and fishing

From an e-mail from my Mom:

McCain chose a woman as his vice-president. She's only 44 & hunting/fishing are her hobbies.

(cmd-t nytimes.com ...)

The woman who hunts and fishes: Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska.

the shaper of things

^^^^ Diem Chau makes nice things.

she has a chicken in the icebox

Currents: Ingmar Ingrid Bergman in Notorious and chicken and mushroom marsala - mmm delicious.

real life wit corner: great books and the good book

The witty part of a brunch story I told a couple of weeks ago:

[..] and the fellow I bought the sofa from was a seminary student, from Tennessee no less.  He was finishing a phd program to be a Episcopal minister.  His bookshelves had Shakespeare, Montaigne; really no different from an English major's aside from the large, nicely bound bible.  Instead of a Great Books program, its more of a Good Book program.

Oh don't smirk that is *wit*.  Leonard can testify.

innovations in parenting

A great father story heard on Thursday night:

There was someone I knew in college who, when she was a toddler and whenever she would do something off the wall or say something that made no sense, ie "it rains when the clouds just cant hold it in anymore and really really have to go", on these occasions her Dad would give her $1.  

He apparently carried around dollars just to do this (and did it a lot).  Then Dad would explain to any curious onlookers why he was giving his kid a dollar for doing or saying weird things; ie not conforming to systems of behavior, language, being her true self and all that.

Now its fine to do this with a toddler, but her Dad still does it whenever he comes to visit her.  I mean come on, she's in grad school now.  

(paraphrased)

the proper president for troubled times

alive with pleasure!  

obama knows how to navigate all kinds of systems, even aquatic.

via hendrik hertzberg's blog

new words corner: spasmodic sartorial flipperoos

sartorial - relating to clothes or tailoring (latin 'sartor': tailor)

spasmodic - occurring in brief bursts (cf. fitzgerald, he used it often)

flipperoos - changes of opinion in a politician (cf. here)

cf. - compare with (latin 'confer': compare) 

^^^^ i always thought this was "comes from"

perpetual childhood: summer camp

^^^^ from a piece in Times a few weeks back.

There is a snarky and intellectual critique of the photo at No Caption Needed - an excerpt:

The caption reads, “Just before the official start of visiting day, parents try to get their daughters’ attention as they stand on the side, surrounded by numerous gifts that await the campers.” I like the way the photographer captures the parents as they might appear to children. (Animals at the zoo might have a similar experience.) The spectators are put on display, and despite their size they remain distant while signaling more than can be taken in. The dads appear either stern or clueless while the moms seem to be over-the-top emotional. In either case they are likely to be a load, so the gifts had better be good.

This is all to say that if the photo is any indicator, the kids are going to spite these parents by dressing how parents used to dress. Those untucked shirts and capri shorts will lead to pleated pants and skirts of rebellion.

The kids will probably be all about setting boundaries, too. These moms need to chill.

the bawdy wit of lewis h. lapham

The ever salty Lewis H. Lapham has an essay on Tim Russert in the current Harpers that is more than worth your time.  

A subtly bawdy excerpt from Elegy for a Rubber Stamp:

With the butter Russert was a master craftsman, his specialty the mixing of it with just the right drizzle of salt. The weekend videotapes, presumably intended to display Russert at the top of his game, deconstructed the recipe. To an important personage Russert asked one or two faintly impertinent questions, usually about a subject of little or no concern to anybody outside the rope lines around official Washington; sometimes he discovered a contradiction between a recently issued press release and one that was distributed by the same politician some months or years previously. No matter with which spoon Russert stirred the butter, the reply was of no interest to him, not worth his notice or further comment. He had sprinkled his trademark salt, his work was done. The important personage was free to choose from a menu offering three forms of response—silence, spin, rancid lie. If silence, Russert moved on to another topic; if spin, he nodded wisely; if rancid lie, he swallowed it. The highlight reels for the most part show him in the act of swallowing.

Ahem.  The essay rings dissonant against the backdrop of media affection and widespread friendly feeling towards Tim Russert from a few months ago, but Lapham reserves his harshest vitriol for broadcast political journalism in the main. 

Its probably going too far to sack Tim Russert for all the woes of pundit timidity. He did *try* to ask real questions on the show; albeit never getting a real answer in any of my viewings. 

Interviews with politicians are pretty much impossible to bear with any significant level of attention.  Guarded language abounds.  It hurts to be lied to, of course, and I suspect there is a subtle hurt that happens too when we watch a journalist accept a rancid lie or equivocal and evasive response from someone in power.  Thus we watch with our guard up and attention lowered, in order to limit this hurt.

David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on John McCain several years back that touched on this issue.

chessmaster got an AK

winning with the kalashnikov

what else i talk about when i talk about running

Other possible titles for the new Murakami book that come to mind after reading:

what i talk about when i talk about smoking
what i talk about when i talk about listening to Otis Redding
what i talk about when i talk about opening one of the first jazz clubs in Tokyo

the role of the american artist

From a review of the 2008 Whitney Biennial in Paper Monument:

[..] and that's when we saw the Gap T-shirts by famous artists. Although they weren’t in the Biennial, officially, we certainly saw in them an indication of the state of American art: Here, you guys make the T-shirts.

roustabout investment corner: GDOCF spreadsheets

I put together some worksheets to project out the Golden Ocean dividend for the next 3 years.

2008: xls | pdf
2009: xls | pdf
2010: xls | pdf

These projections make assumptions about spot and long-term contract rates, as I could only find documentation on specific contract rates for a handful of their ships. These sheets don't attempt to project asset sales; the sale of newbuild contracts (a great deal of which has taken place already) could add to the dividend. The worksheets also don't include any of the newbuilding boats as generating revenue, aside from some scratch numbers at the bottom.

The other huge assumption is for operating expenses - $560M for all years. This is a rough guess based on expenditures listed in the 2007 presentation.

Tree counting could help make these projections more accurate - but I need to find a source of fixture information that goes back farther than 3 months.

Dividend projections for FY2008-2010: $2.10, $1.55, $0.71

The Q1 2008 dividend was $0.55 including asset sales, or $2.20 if you project it out for the full year, which makes me feel this projection might have some legs.

Given that there should be a number of new boats in service at Golden Ocean by 2010, adding somewhere in the neighborhood of $200M-$300M to the bottom line each year, I actually wouldn't expect anything under $1 for the dividend per annum, even if dry-bulk shipping rates are cut in half.

This is all to say that at the current price you should get your entire investment back within ~3 years followed by a sustainable $0.25 dividend every 3 months (ie a quarter every quarter) --

There is large insider buying as of mid July.

a lot of reading, running, and rousting about.

The truth is I am procrastinating work on an important project.

A lot can happen in this life, especially nothing, says Michel Houellebecq. While this might be true to a point, I do feel that we don't ever actually permit ourselves the luxury of doing *absolutely* nothing. Our unconscious won't let it happen. What happens instead is we do things that put us down a road, any road; one that might be away from or closer towards whatever we might have in mind consciously to-do.

Once you've traveled a set of roads and gotten somewhere, it all looks much easier.  Of course this could also just be a bit of unconscious trickery, too.

On the plus side of all this procrastination:

• 8 minute miles (!)
  
• lots of fiction read and absorbed
  
• some useful knowledge about the shipping and deepwater oil industries

On the negative side, seriously, its an important project.  Camus would not approve.