At the moment, this is my favorite domain name on the Internet. If you've read anything besides a cereal box in the past five years, fill this out and you'll get personalized recommendations in return. It may take a few weeks to hear back, though, because the other end of the equation is a human being who is probably busy reading cereal boxes and doing other things.
Brother Tom + Nara Shoji
Young Tom is getting married. The wedding ceremony will take place at the District of Columbia War Memorial on Saturday, April 4, 2009 (five weeks from today). Nara and Tom, I'll make sure to remove the traffic cone prior to the ceremony. Free of charge. Here is a better photo of the venue.
The BBC has a children's show with a host who is disabled. Her name is Cerrie Burnell and she has one and a half arms. Her right arm stops just below the elbow. I have no idea if it was amputated or if she was born that way. Not that it matters but I figured you might be curious.
Anyway, the BBC has received complaints about her presence. One father reportedly whined that her "being on the show forced him to have conversations with his child about disabilities."
I don't have kids, but I'm fairly certain that somewhere along the way you're going to have many conversations with your children, plenty of them far more uncomfortable than, "I'm sorry, kiddo, but you're blessed."
Despite being nonexistent, my official blog policy states that, immediately following blog posts about murder, I must follow-up with something positive: like four strips of bacon.
Golden Coffee; Nob Hill, San Francisco: Two slices of toast, two eggs, hash browns and four strips of bacon, plus coffee and free refills, all for the gloriously recession-proof price of $6.89 (after tax but before tip).
This place is awesome. Oh, and they also serve Chinese food after 11:00 a.m.
Directly eight blocks south of my apartment, six people were murdered on Monday night in the Tenderloin. I had no idea until today. I am not at all surprised. In May of 2007, I created a public Google map outlining crime in the same area and a call I made to 911 that was ignored.
Fortunately for me, my specific block is quite safe, perched near the top of Nob Hill, and as I've blogged here before: Drug addicts don't climb hills. They just don't do it. That's one of those specific pieces of information you never learn until you live somewhere. I never thought about until I lived near the top of a huge hill that features junkies at its bottom.
I walk down the hill almost daily, usually en route to my friend Andrew's condo on Mission street. I've told him many times that the walk from my place to his feels like the runway to Hell. After getting robbed on Mission street in early January, I will no longer make the walk at night. On Obama's inauguration day, I saw people on said runway sporting Obama hats, shirts and smiles. The next day, I saw the same people injecting needles into the skin under their fingernails. No more Obama shirts, no more smiles.
One of my specialties is corporate communications during crises and issues. I worked with Bridgestone-Firestone during its unfortunate and deadly tire recall, and with Levi Strauss & Co. when it closed domestic textile plants, including its famed and former Valencia Street plant.
Sometimes companies can predict crises and issues; other times they cannot. Obviously the former is easier to handle, which is why E*Trade's bungling of today's news is so disappointing: E*Trade has decided to liquidate its funds, forcing customers to sell its funds by March 27, 2009.
In addition to crises-and-issues communications, I also have experience with financial-services communications. I used to ghostwrite for executives at Charles Schwab, where I learned just enough to be dangerous, and just enough to know that E*Trade's move today leaves many investors with more questions than answers.
What could E*Trade have done better?
E*Trade is making this move to raise capital, which ostensibly will help the company. But how will the company help investors deal with the tax implications and other related issues? With the funds near all-time lows, capital-gains taxes should not be an issue, but how will newbie investors manage capital-loss deductions, which are capped at $3,000 year? When I asked an E*Trade representative if losses beyond $3,000 could be carried over, he suggested I hire a tax attorney.
LESSON LEARNED #1: If you are inconveniencing your customers, and doing so at considerable benefit for the company, your response to customer questions should not be, "Hey, why don't you spend some money and have someone else figure it out." Be prepared to help your customers if you're forcing them into action.
Or what about wash sales? Do those apply? Can investors reinvest back in a similar Vanguard fund without being penalized? I have no idea. If wash sales are applicable, then it seems to me that customers are forced to either wait for 30 days and miss a potential positive bump in the market, or change investment strategies to avoid IRS penalties. Neither are good options.
LESSON LEARNED #2: If by forcing your customers into action, you are exposing them to future risk, be prepared to support them, or at the very least, give them the heads up.
Even if wash sales are not applicable (perhaps the IRS has loopholes that take into account forced liquidations?) investors will be forced to pay capital-gains taxes on the gains that get them back to even, so to speak. For example, if you're down $20,000 now, but rebound, then you have to pay taxes on that $20,000 rebound. If there had been no forced liquidation, and you rebounded, there would be no capital-gains taxes because you'd be back to square one, nothing more and nothing less. Yeah, there are capital-loss deductions that would precede those capital-gains taxes, but it's not clear to me whether you can roll those over year after year --- in this case you would need seven years of rollovers to reach $20,000 --- and even if you can roll it over for that long, that's seven years of extra headaches and time spent by investors.
LESSON LEARNED #3: If you are inconveniencing customers, you should apologize. At least once. Nowhere in E*Trade's email, which was signed by Elizabeth Gottfried, president of E*Trade Funds, was there an apology. Instead, she writes:
"Please be assured that this decision has nothing at all to do with the financial health of E*Trade Financial, which has been, and continues to be, very well capitalized by every applicable regulatory standard."I'm glad you're doing well, Elizabeth/E*Trade, but some of your customers are struggling, even more so thanks to this move. How about a little help next time?
Seven weeks ago, on Blogimore Ravens, my other blog, I blasted the Baltimore Sun for its "greedy and short-sighted" approach to managing its own blogs.
Ravens blogger Derek (B'More Birds' Nest) and I were both featured in the original Sun article that prompted my reply. In response to my response, Derek emailed me a few questions, which I will answer here instead of on Blogimore because I can't imagine many Ravens fans care about the business of blogging.
First, what general issues do you have with the way MSM outlets, such as the Sun, handle blogs? You described them as "greedy and short-sighted." Please elaborate.
The Sun did not link to any of the blogs that it mentioned, which is considered poor taste in the blogosphere but technically OK assuming you're not stealing said bloggers' content.
(Ed. note: The Sun eventually included links, but only after my post called them out.)
Unfortunately, the Sun was stealing content. For example, they syndicated my post in its entirety. That's not poor taste. That's copyright infringement. It's stealing. Frankly I don't really care that the Sun did it to me, but that's because I'm not in blogging to make money. My sites are ad-free and I don't care if I ever make a dime. I write my blogs to document my history and occasionally entertain a small, loyal fanbase. That's it.
But most bloggers do want to make at least a little money from blogging. And when the Sun steals content, they're potentially damaging your Google PageRank and SEO (search-engine optimization). Search-engine algorithms penalize websites that feature duplicate content, so you're getting dinged when the Sun steals your content because Google knows that the content can't be original to both sites. The Sun can afford this "ding" more than you because it's a larger site, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if search algorithms think it's their content and not yours.
You're getting some feel-good recognition with your face and name in the paper, but you're not getting the PageRank benefit of a link, and potentially you're getting penalized for them stealing your content.
How were these misguided views of the Sun on display, specifically, in the article they did on my site?
The Sun enjoys the benefits of your content two-fold: 1) search benefits of having your content and 2) the brand benefits of appearing to have 'looked out for' the quote-unquote little guy. Look at one of the comments left on my original post [sic]:
"That conversation sucked the life out of me thus leaving me emotionally drained and depressed. It took something fun like bloggin about the ravens and receiving recognition. Into something far too serious for me."So not only do they screw you over, but they look good doing it. And all of a sudden we're the bad guys. Or me. Whatever. Personally, I don't really care, but I know a lot of bloggers are looking to make a little money, and when the Sun does what they did, they are cheating you and stealing money out of your pocket. Granted, not a lot, but I am a man of principle. I am also a man who enjoys four strips of bacon whenever possible.
There is no such thing as an eco-friendly product.
There are eco-friendlier products and environmentally friendlier products, but there is no such thing as an eco-friendly product. The production of all consumer goods, even "eco-friendly" ones, require energy and resources than drain and damage the environment.
So if you're in the checkout line at Whole Foods, and you see an organic-cotton baby t-shirt, and you buy it because it's "good" for the environment and your best friend's newborn would look so cute in it, you're not doing the environment any favors. Buying that product is not "good" for the environment. It's simply less damaging than other options.
Does that mean I don't think people should buy stuff? Of course not. In fact, I'm about to rent a Hummer and drive it around the block for six hours straight. But people should be aware that better options are not categorically or inherently good ones.
"Eco-friendly" instead "eco-friendlier" is the greatest marketing coup of the past decade. Following in its footsteps are carbon credits. There is no guarantee that said credits will mitigate anything in the future, and regardless they won't undo even a single carbon footprint. Imagine if a husband beat his wife but said it was OK because he also donated money to a women's shelter?
Bay to Breakers is a San Francisco tradition currently under fire.
Don't be turned off by the "footrace" part, unless of course you enjoy running seven and a half miles through a hilly city that features more microclimates than you have applications on your iPhone. Most people who go to Bay to Breakers walk, and most of them are there for the costumes and floats and nudity and beer and peaceful reveling, and did I mention the costumes and floats and nudity and beer?
But apparently the city has decided to ban the floats and nudity and beer!
You might as well throw out the tradition altogether, because all your left with at that point is exercise, and do you really think 80,000 people are going to drag their a$$es out of bed on a Sunday morning for exercise?
Today there was an event at City Hall protesting the City's parental ambitions. The event was organized, in part, by my friend Broke-A$$ Stuart, so I stopped by with my buddy Andrew and we said hello. On the way, we ran into San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom, so I took a photo.
I believe the city has already backtracked on some of the bans, and chances are they'll bow down completely before the third Sunday in May, which is when the event takes place each year. Unlike Halloween in the Castro, Bay to Breakers is almost entirely peaceful, far more peaceful than, say, Critical Mass, which I attended once and will probably never attend again, due to the fact that too many of the cyclists are aggressive and holier-than-thou in their attitudes toward drivers, and also far too willing to disrupt traffic and create dangerous situations and start fights with potentially confused motorists, who may or may not know why 10,000 people are riding their bikes directly through rush-hour traffic on a Friday afternoon in downtown San Francisco.
First things first: X-Rays today showed that my bones are aligned "perfectly," and my prognosis is good. I will have the pins removed next Tuesday. Now onto two of the interesting things I heard today at the hospital. Actually, I heard them en route to the hospital, riding shotgun in Natalie's oh-so-classic-and-killer Dodge Intrepid.
Thank you for driving me to the hospital, Natalie!
Natalie and I were listening to NPR. Normally I don't listen to NPR because it makes me nauseous. Not the content or political leanings, per se, but something about the way it sounds. It's very Pavlovian and strange and it dates back to childhood. Let me explain. My dad used to listen to All Things Considered in the car when my brothers and I were young. Whenever it came on the radio, I immediately felt carsick. I have no idea why. There's just something about the way NPR sounds that makes me feel queasy, even today and definitely back then. I think I once read a story about a woman who had a seizure whenever she heard a particular person's voice on TV or the radio. I can't remember if said story was fact or fiction, but my best guess is that it was from a medical-mysteries book that I remember reading years ago, especially strange that I remember because it was probably twenty years ago that I read it. I remember a story from that book about a man whose hands inexplicably turned blue. Nobody could figure out why. Eventually someone realized it was dye from a pair of his gloves. But that's not important. What's important is that today Natalie and I listened to NPR, and I'm still alive to blog about it.
#1) $40,000 ruby in Malawi, Africa: In January of 2007, I started sponsoring a child in Africa. Malawi specifically. His name is Idi. He's 10 years old and is quiet. He's also poorer than you could possibly imagine and probably more polite than all of us combined. Excerpts from Idi's most recent letter [Jan. 14 2009]:
"Dear Dewey, Thanks very much for your letter. I always enjoy your letters. I am very sorry to know you lost your job... I am still working very hard in my education... Pass my greetings to your family and friends. Love from, Idi."Anyway, someone in Malawi unearthed a five-carat rare ruby, and according to the NPR story, the rock is now for sale at the bargain price of $40,000.
Last week I purchased "Infinite Jest," perhaps the defining work of author David Foster Wallace. Or so I've been told. I've never read it. My copy of the book is 1,079 pages long, and approximately 100 of those are footnotes. Not exactly your average piece of fiction. I started it last night, after a week of watching it stare back at me from the bookshelf: intimidating and unwieldy (quite literally).
Before I mustered up the courage for "Infinite Jest," I tackled the following two books, both easier, or at least shorter:
"Complicity," by Iain Banks: First published in 1993, this book has not aged terribly well. Mostly because the protagonist is addicted to computer games, and anything technical, while advanced in the book, is of course outdated to the reader. The plot itself is OK, I suppose, but conceptually it's nothing new: Journalist writes stories; psycho, inspired by the journalist, kills people and frames journalist; psycho turns out to be someone close to the journalist. Yawn.
"Mother Night," by Kurt Vonnegut: I first read this book about eight or ten years ago before reading it again two nights ago. Vonnegut was the best in the business, a true genius and everyday kinda guy. With the exception of one or two Vonnegut books that were lent to friends and never returned, I own a copy of everything he's ever published, but they do me no good sitting on the shelf. I think I may read each of his books once more, and then give them away or trade 'em in at one of the 8,000 or so used bookstores here in San Francisco.
I'll let you know what I think of "Infinite Jest," which I suspect will take a few weeks to finish.
Today I started physical therapy. The busted hand looks terrible but is healing nicely. There is a small chance I will have the pins removed in six days; however, chances are I'll have them for another three weeks, at which point I'll be that much closer to 100 percent.
That = ???
Three books that I read this past week.
"Terrorist," by John Updike: Meh. I enjoyed the ending and not much else.
"A Thousand Acres," by Jane Smiley: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Or that I enjoyed it at all. It's about three sisters who find themselves in a spat over their father's land. Et cetera, et cetera.
"The Unlikely Spy," by Daniel Silva: I did not expect to read 720 pages in one day, but it was pouring rain and the WWII plot moved quickly.
I was back at San Francisco General Hospital today for my post-op surgical appointment. It was my first visit since surgery eight days ago, and it was my fifth visit in the past four weeks. I am growing tired of the place just as I'm being told to get used to it. Apparently I'll be there two to three times per week for the next eight weeks.
I no longer do the double-take at the hospital when I see prisoners in ankle chains and handcuffs, receiving treatment, donning sporty orange jumpsuits and orange slip-on Vans, accompanied by an overweight police officer packing heat. It all comes with the territory at a public hospital, I suppose. As does, at times, the overpowering smell of marijuana. Of course you're not allowed to smoke anything in the hospital, not even so much as a candy cigarette, but many of the patients there are prescribed medical marijuana, and it's their pockets that smell. Or so the janitor told me. Seriously. Today it smelled like a college dorm room after Finals. It also smelled that way on the bus en route to the hospital this morning. Not yet nine in the morning and there was a homeless person at the back of the bus, already lighting up. On the bus. Who will be the Rosa Parks of homeless people and light up at the front of the bus?
My surgeon was equally attractive as the last time I saw her, and also equally married, I noticed. Her colleague told me that my surgery went well. Not great, I guess, but good enough. The finger will probably never be 100 percent again, but I should be able to do everything I did before, perhaps with some (minor) adjustments. I may lose some range of motion and develop arthritis, but the doctor assures me that in the long run I'll have no problem typing 80 words per minute again. I'm not really that worried about arthritis: Haven't you seen those commercials with the old people who play softball?! Aleve fixes all of their problems! And if that doesn't work, who says a middle-aged white guy can't be the next Rosa Parks?
So... today's photos. I took photos to distract my nausea.
I was not expecting there to be pins sticking out of my finger. I was told the pins would be inside the finger, not outside of and through the finger. Fortunately I was warned before the cast, splint and gauze were removed. I'm not going to lie. It made me queasy at first to look at it. But I have no choice but to get used to it, so I took some pictures and convinced myself that it wasn't weird. Of course, when people see it in public, they are kind enough to remind me that it is not normal.
Ever since the injury, I have found myself to be a magnet for weirdos. Strangers and junkies and dealers and sketchy people approach me constantly. Some trying to sell me every painkiller ostensibly known to man, others just generally making me frightened and uncomfortable. I've never been one to shy away from going to quote-unquote bad neighborhoods, but with this busted hand I feel defenseless and find myself not walking anywhere alone after dark. Hopefully when I regain use of my hand, I'll stop being such a wimp. I'm not actually worried about getting hurt again, I'm more worried about losing another iPhone. Too expensive. Getting jumped once was enough, thank you very much.
But, seriously, a message to San Francisco's crackheads, drunks and dealers: Please, please, please just go away and/or leave me alone. I don't want your "OCs" (OxyContin) and I'm not impressed when you recite random Latin phrases and block the sidewalk when I try to pass.
Side note: I read five books in the past two weeks. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.
Kurt Vonnegut: "A Man Without A Country"
Sometimes I tell people that I have read everything ever published by Kurt Vonnegut. This is mostly true? Mostly true? OK, it is lie. I purchased "A Man Without A Country" before Kurt's death and "Armageddon In Retrospect" when it was published posthumously, but I never wanted to read them, and until recently I had not read either of them. I had already read everything else by Vonnegut --- novels and short stories and collections and even public speeches, plus that M.I.T. speech that he never actually gave --- and I knew that when I read these two, that would be it. Forever. Nothing else to read. My favorite writer dead in a tangible way. So I've had them on my bookshelf collecting dust, the allure and appeal in a way more enjoyable than the words themselves. At least that's what I tell myself. But last week I broke down and read "A Man Without A Country," which, duh, was excellent. I didn't want to read it, but I had been in bed for two days after surgery. I felt terrible. I needed to read it. Kurt Vonnegut, you were awesome.
Antonio J. Mendez: "The Master Of Disguise"
Former CIA Director Robert Gates writes, "Put aside spy novels that bear no resemblance to reality --- here is a gripping portrayal of the real world of intelligence by a man who was really there." To be honest, this book, a memoir from Mendez, was not too far from the espionage fiction that I've read. In fact, it reinforced, to me, the fact that some novelists do their homework. Mendez was the mastermind behind freeing six hostages during the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980. America's role in the rescue wasn't made public until many years later. At the time, Canada took credit (for safety reasons, I think). It's a quick and informative read with a tolerable dash of ego.
Stella Rimington: "Secret Asset"
I was floored to learn that Rimington was employed for 30 years as a British spy. Not only was she a spy, but she was Director General of MI5. What?!! This book read like it as written by a novice. Someone, either Mendez or Rimington, ain't telling the truth about espionage; either that or the CIA is more advanced than its British counterparts. Rimington's book read like most British mysteries: Instead of action followed by action and action, it's a cup of tea followed by action followed by a pint at the pub. Do't by this unless you're like me, a fiend for espionage literature.
Philip Roth: "American Pastoral"
Deeply moving. Tremendous characterization. Beautiful writing. Pulitzer Prize. Sloooooow plot. If you read this book, though, you'll never forget the Swede. The same way you'll never forget Miles Roby after you've read "Empire Falls," and for what it's worth, I hope I read this post in twenty years with no recollection of either Miles Roby or the Swede.
Tom Robbins: "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates"
Tom Robbins, you are a weird dude and a great storyteller. Thank you for that.
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