August 2007Anything I might have cared to say about the distinguished- and empahatically hetero- Senator from Idaho was published years ago.
on
| § 1
Back on May 21, 2007, I saw an article that I almost, almost thought worthy enough of derision that it justified a post. For reasons that now escape me, I decided otherwise at the time. However, as sometimes occurs, it's again become current, so I'll revisit.
This, from the Austin American Statesman:
A panic attack move into private equity?
By Robert Elder | Monday, May 21, 2007, 02:07 PMWriting in the May 18 issue of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, Dallas investor and state of Texas pension official Frederick “Shad” Rowe tees off on the leaders of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas pension fund.
Rowe examines the Texas teacher fund’s recently announced plans to move massive amounts of its holdings into private equity and out of publicly traded stocks. The strategy strikes him as the investment equivalent of a panic attack.
(Rowe notes that the Texas Pension Review board, which he chairs, has no authority over TRS investment strategy and that he’s writing as a private citizen.)
Rowe writes that the teacher fund is trying to juice returns by moving into so-called alternative investments (hedge funds, buyout firms, hard assets such as timber, toll roads) a little late in the game. Maybe even just in time for the private equity bubble to pop and the very stocks the teacher fund is selling to rise in value.
Please ignore for a moment the fact that private equity and hedge funds are not the same thing - Rowe's core point, I think, was that high return comes with high risk. Big shock, that. But it appeared, in May, not to have occurred to the managers of TRS. I don't know whether TRS had gotten around to the absurd reallocation plans they announced at the time, increasing allotment to alternative investments from 3% to 35%. But Mr Rowe had the opportunity to weigh in again on the subject in a story from today's WSJ (subscription):
Pension Managers Rethink
Their Love of Hedge Funds
By CRAIG KARMIN
August 27, 2007; Page C1Many public pension funds in recent years have become eager to invest in hedge funds. Now, some are getting cold feet.
Pension-fund managers from Louisiana to Ohio are saying they may slow their push into these funds after the recent losses suffered at big hedge funds -- including ones run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and AQR Capital Management -- have reinforced some of the risks.
Indeed, one critic suggests that pensions would be foolish to keep pursuing hedge funds. "It's like planning a vacation to an exotic land, and finding out that there's an outbreak of bubonic plague," says Frederick Rowe, chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which provides oversight of Texas public pension funds.
I'm not certain which is more admirable - consistency, correctness, or the fact he avoided doing an overt Icky Shuffle and rubbing their nose in it. But in any event, Mr Rowe was stating the obvious back in May, all the while not claiming there was anything inherently wrong with hedge funds or their doppelgangers in the alternative investment universe, just that the TRS was clearly not thinking things through in their sudden mania for the flavor of the month.
Good for him, and, I guess, good for the teachers covered by the TRS. I have no dog in the race, but I hope the managers of the TRS paid attention back in May, for the sake of their beneficiaries.
on
| § 0
Gad, I hate to seem to mimic the style of the "lovely and talented" John Edwards' campaign, but my reaction to this morning's news that Alberto Gonzales is resigning (WSJ - subscription) was, roughly, "What took so long?".
No shock, but he's being run out of town on a rail. Not alone among those with an opinion on the matter, I only think it's a shame that he's being run out for all the wrong reasons. The US Attorney firings? Pfft. Not a big deal - he, and the White House, have been well within bounds on the firings themselves, as previously discussed. Severe missteps, such as the McNulty Memorandum, should be considered embarrassments to him and the department, but are just horrifically bad administration, not criminal acts. As also previously discussed, his timid, goofy, and cackhanded defense of his boss, his office, and himself has been so inept that it's been embarrassing to watch.
Never one to favor viewing people humiliating themselves (and thus, my aversion to most forms of reality TV), it's been a cringeworthy handful of months, and the ordeal will soon be over.
Based on the WSJ story linked above and other sources, it seems there's a race to the bottom of the barrel in search of his replacement. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff? What an awful choice he'd be, and not just because he looks like a character who could have played alongside Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. He's not obviously competent, and while that would make him a perfect stand-in for Gonzales, it would seem that now, in the last 17 months of the Bush administration, they ought to attempt to at least raise their game at the Justice Department.
Chertoff, far more so than the other choices mentioned in the WSJ article (Mueller, Johnson), strikes me a choice only slightly better than dragging Harriet Miers back out of mothballs and propping her up for yet another position beyond her scope.
Also odd, there were several names in the version of the WSJ story made available this morning (the link above is to a front-page version in tomorrow's print edition, but earlier today it was the breaking news version). Louis Freeh and Ted Olson were both mentioned, and either of them strikes me as a potentially apt choice, so it comes as no shock to find them no longer on the list, as reported by the WSJ. The IHT version of the story, available here, retains mention of Olson, but also omits Freeh.
Like Rove's resignation, the Democrats seem to have plans to continue their chase, harrying him as best they can in search of crimes not committed. Life would, I think, be far easier for the Dems if they just took what Bushies hand them on a silver platter (incompetence, ham-fistedness, PR stone-deafness) and ran with it, rather than inventing new crusades on which to wander. But that's just me.
on
| § 0
As we await... and wait... and wait... the arrival of our characteristically stubborn firstborn, who is holding onto his cushy life in the womb like the last Japanese regular fiercely defending his little patch of Iwo Jima in late 1948, refusing to accept that history has moved on, I finally convinced my patient and loving wife to show me how to make the ethnic food of her Pennsylvania hill-country home.
Possum.
Naw, I'm just shining you on. Up in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, in the countless factory towns that line the Allegheny and the Kiskemin...Kiske... the Kiskesomethiwhatsit River, everyone eats pierogi. Originally brought to the area by the Slavic, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants of the early part of the last century, they have since transcended ethnicity to become the soul food of the region. Well, them and the cabbage-and-noodle dish known as haluski, but that's a recipe for another day.
Sadly, with the passing of all the grandmothers born before the war, good pierogi is increasingly hard to find. These days, their daughters and granddaughters have jobs, and the old parish kitchens where women would gather every Friday to gossip and make pierogi have all but vanished. It's a dying art in a dying region.
And so, a nice project for a rainy afternoon: Pierogi. (Makes about 6 dozen dumplings)
BY HAND:
Place flour in a large bowl and whisk in the salt. Add eggs and water and butter and mix until rough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead just until all ingredients are combined and homogeneous, and the dough is smooth and silky - about 3-5 minutes. Do not over-miz as this dough needs to be plastic (extensible), not elastic (will snap back).
BY MIXER: Alternatively, combine all ingredients in bowl of stand mixer. Mix with paddle attachment until roughly mixed, and then switch to the dough hook and mix on low speed for no more than 2-3 minutes or until dough is homogeneous, smooth, and silky. Do not over-mix as this dough needs to be plastic (extensible), not elastic (will snap back).
BOTH METHODS: Make and cool your fillings as the dough rests, or have them prepared and ready.
Roll out the dough in batches, taking about a baseball sized lump at a time. Roll each iteration on a lightly floured surface until it is approximately 1/8 inch thick. Using a large biscuit cutter or the end of a large (20 oz) tomato can (or a 14 oz can if you desire, though this smaller size is more difficult to work with), cut out rounds from the dough. You may re-roll any scraps once only, before they get too dry and too tough to use.
(Although it is surely heresy to say so, I strongly recommend you buy some frozen commercial pierogi (for example Mrs T's) if you need to be reminded of the proper shape, size, and thickness. Homemade tend to turn out a bit thicker, which is not a bad thing at all, but you want to avoid making your dumplings too doughy.)
Depending on the size of cutter you use, place between 2 teaspoons and 1 heaping tablespoon of filling at the center of a round of dough - enough for a nice bite of filling. Fold the round over and crimp edge to create a sealed half-moon. You may use a moistened finger on the inside edge of the pierogi if you've having trouble getting them to seal. Optionally, you may crimp each sealed edge with a fork to make them look pretty. There should be about 1/3 inch to 1/2 inch of crimped edge when you're done, to ensure a good seal.
Place individually on lightly floured wax paper on baking sheets, making sure the pierogis do not touch. As you fill each pan, lightly flour the tops of the pierogis and cover the sheet pan with plastic wrap.
Cook fresh in boiling water until the pierogis float.
Alternatively, place each pan of pierogis in the freezer for at least 45 minutes before removing in layers separated by wax paper to labelled freezer bags or containers. I like to freeze in batches of a dozen.
Cook frozen pierogis in boiling water for about 5 minutes or until they float.
Serve tossed with onions sautéed in butter until soft, salt and pepper. Sour cream and applesauce are essential accoutrements to most traditional variations. The squash and pea versions proposed above would be nice with a lamb or pork roast. The cheese and berry versions are unsurpassed drunk food, especially if you happen to have a deep fryer in your home.
on
| § 2
Every so occasionally, an Onion post strikes my funny bone, and if I'm lacking the time to actually write something, I'll toss out a "FakeBlogging" entry, like this one, to memorialize the chuckle. In fact, I created the "FakeBlogging" category specifically to hold my Onion links.
The problem with the Onion, recognized and reported by others smarter and more widely read than I, is that most of the time, the entire punchline can be communicated simply via the article headline. For me, that's not so much a problem, because the text is generally also both juvenile & funny, and doesn't detract from whatever the headline was. I might be alone in that view, however.
To allow our readers to form their own impressions on that crucial question, should they care to, I present several items linked or relinked from today's Onion daily email:
Forgive me for thinking that, however insensitive, these are funny.
on
| § 0
"Investment Strategies in a World Where Time Travel is Possible"
It's got aliens, it's got time travel, it's got the possibility of end of days. What's not to like?
on
| § 0
The other day, I detailed my son's incisive reasoning in regard to human-robot relations. Today, he made his Dad proud once more. We were down in the basement, playing around a bit, when John had a new idea for a game:
Dad, you be the cops, and I'll be the Blues Brothers.
My heart just leapt. Then, not fifteen minutes later, he picked up a stick, handed it to me, and told me:
Let's fight. You bring a sword, and I'll bring a gun.
Such strong tactical awareness in a child not even four and a half years old.
on
| § 3
My son turned to me, and said, "Let me tell you the rules about robots." Enumerating them with his fingers, he laid them out for me:
- Don't burn yourself
- Keep telling them what to do
- Stay smarter than the robots
My son has come up with a new three rules for robots. And you know, I think they are a vast improvement on Asimov's original Robotic Laws.
[wik] Later in the trip, he added a fourth law:
- Don't let the robots into the woods, they might break themselves
on
| § 1
Apparently Messrs Siegfried and Roy have decided to publicly own what has been blatantly obvious to everyone but Siegfried and Roy for years.
Note the word "schwul", which made this Minister laugh out loud when he read it.
[wik] Which is funny because the adjective "schwul" means "queer" or "humid"; and the adjective "hitze" means "hot" in both the ambient-temperature sense and the libidinous sense. And when I saw the article, I remembered one time rappin' to some fly madchens at this little dive I frequented... I was talking about the weather; they were hearing about what a flaming homo I was.
on
| § 2
Oops. Did I say that out loud?
I'm sorry, but I always thought of Jenna Bush as the fat twin, not the blond twin. I don't know why, but I've only been able to remember how to tell the twins apart by their relative chunkiness to one another rather than by hair color. Of course, one day I noticed that one is weaselly-faced like her father and the other one has that weird wicked stepmother face where she's seemingly friendly, but going to slit your throat. Oh. I guess I haven't told you guys that white people kind of scare me sometimes because they look like reptiles. (I must have watched V on tv too much as a kid.) Mrs. Shrub distinctly lacks an upper lip which is what makes me think that about her. But I digress.
At any rate, the fat one is getting married to the scion of a prominent Virginia Republican family. Whoopdeedoo. Not sure why CNN is posting it as breaking news, but I do like the stupid haircut that boy has at a black tie affair. It's awful and Karl Rove should have done something about it. I am sure SOMEONE at the White House could point that boy to a decent hairdresser of Pennsylvania Avenue. Shit, I know a few people who can do a bang up fade with a pair of clippers for free. As always, I'm glad to oblige with a weed wacker. As I once told another fat twin, "Moppy hair only looked good on the Beatles, now get a haircut."
on
| § 12
Color me giddy. Henry Rollins does an interview with Mother Jones.
I fucking love the guy. No, I can't stand the unibrow or the massive SEARCH AND DESTROY tattoo on the back. I tend to prefer my men clean and slightly pretty. But HOLY COW. I can still hear Salt on a Slug and Family Man in my head at the mention of his name.
Strangely I just saw Johnny Mnemonic the other day and I had the pleasure of Mr. Rollins' company onscreen. I thought he and Ice T were good in that film. You can see Ice T just starting to get the hang of acting.
Good stuff. Entertain yourselves, no don't get mad at me for reading Mother Jones. I was following a link about credit card use in the US and stumbled upon the article. And I'm still looking for the damned credit card article for my other blog.
on
| § 0
The code gnomes are once again hard at work. So far, there have been three incarnations of the Ministry - an early, and staggeringly ugly blogspot version where we were known as Johnny Two-Cents; our first Perfidy branded site that ran on pMachine, and the one that you are looking at right now, running Expression Engine. When we began considering relocating our hosting (as the ever-helpful Kathy Kinsley is now far too busy to devote much time to web-hosting) we also began to think that maybe a redesign was in order as well.
So, currently we are experimenting with Wordpress, which we find to be an elegant, free and easy to use bit of software. You, our public (assuming you are still there after several days of non-posting on the part of all six of our lacksidaisical Ministers - you'd think that having more ministers would result in more posts) can take a look at our evolving efforts here. Any suggestions are welcome, and should be directed to Minister Buckethead. (Email him by clicking on his name over there on the left.)
on
| § 0
The one thing that I most love about the set up of the current Perfidy is the category icons. And now, I have a ton more, of which these are a few examples:
I like to call those, respectively, "Atomic," "The History Destruct Button," "Pirates, and "President Bush's Second Term Performance."
As a side note, I think the word "Atomic" is vastly superior to its successor, "Nuclear." Nuclear does get a partial pass when used in combination with "Thermo."
on
| § 2
NASA screws pooch, hottest year in the thirties
on
| § 1
Intrepid engineers - both amateur and professional - have come up with some prototype portable laser weaponry for when the zombies come. And one of these projects is even one you can build in your own home workshop.
on
| § 0
At around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, I was Ralphie on Christmas morning discovering that he had not gotten an official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle, but instead a Barrett M82A1M .50 cal semi-automatic rifle with the lengthened accessory rail, rear grip and monopod socket. And ten boxes of ammo and a range pass.
Why was I so happy?
Because I had gotten home and after some minor difficulties gotten my precious iPhone hooked up, activated, and synced.
Thanks to existing contractual obligations, the unreasoning greed of auto mechanics and the Federal government, and a wife who despite her manifold virtue was dubious of the clear and obvious need for my iPhone purchase I was not one of the geeks who waited in line on June 29th for an opening day iPhone. Instead, I was a geek who had to wait six weeks like a sucker, while review after glorious review only whetted my appetite and turned the screws on the rack of my anticipation.
But having it in my sweaty palms, I find (almost to my surprise, despite having actually wasted a lunch hour in a pilgrimage to the local Apple store to fondle one) that the iPhone actually does live up to the hype. It is literally and figuratively the Jesus phone.
I got the 8GB version, figuring that more is better in the storage department. I loaded up almost four hundred songs, a movie, three tv shows, a complete audio book college course on the Crusades, a hundred pics of the Buckethead clan – and I still have 4.3 GB left. Plenty of storage.
As for performance, playing with the iPhone I remembered a quote I read once from Jonathan Ives, the design guru at Apple – “when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.” It is staggering, after witnessing the ease of use and careful attention to detail embodied in the iPhone, to realize that in decades of cell phone design evolution, no one had ever come within a country mile of getting it right until now. Other phones are sun-warmed piles of dung compared to the glory of this phone.
I had a decent phone – a Motorola Razr. I appreciated above all its slenderness – if I was going to carry around a phone all the time, I might as well have one that was unobtrusive. For dialing numbers and talking to people, it was certainly adequate. I could press and hold “2” to talk to Mrs. Buckethead. But if I needed to look up another number from my contacts, I was screwed. Can’t do but one thing at a time.
Adding contacts was nightmarish, typing on the tiny number pad and being prompted at each change. Using the internet was a painful and expensive joke. The only function other than talking that I used at all regularly was the calculator.
Now I realize that the Razr was not a smart phone. But friends of mine have had smart phones, and I’ve played with them, and they are pretty much just as user hostile as mine was – just user hostile over a broader range of functionality.
In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve:
In any given 24 hour period in the last decade or so, I might have used a computer to accomplish most if not all of those tasks. But forty pounds of computer equipment does not travel well, and the wireless router in my office does not reach several miles to the nearest town – let alone fit comfortably in your pocket.
The stunning thing is that all of these tasks were accomplished gracefully, easily, even joyfully. I’ve found myself just switching between applications to watch the animations. I am a techwriter by trade, so it is perhaps disturbing to realize that this thing does not need a manual. It is that intuitive – nothing is arcane, obscure or clearly not designed to be used by humans.
Which makes you want to use all the various thingies and gadgets, because they are flat out fun to use. And so well designed, that even this website looks better on the iPhone than it does on a 24” monitor on my desk. (It also makes you crave more applications.) I knew how to access and use most of the applications on my Motorola phone, I just didn’t use them because it was entirely too much of a pain in the ass to actually use them.
All other phones are broken, and this one is not. And of the two major worries that many had – the keyboard and the battery life – I have no complaints on either score. I’m already getting pretty fast on the typing, and I’m just about to recharge it for the first time.
This is one kick ass, highly enslickened, gorgeous piece of technological gimcrackery. I recommend it highly.
on
| § 7
I don't know about any of you, but I've worked with "that guy" more times than I can count.
on
| § 2
