May 16, 2005

The Girl Child requests clarification

No time today to give the full update on the D.C. trip (it is now 2:15 and I have been flat out running since 8:30) but I did want to quickly memorialize the conversation I had last evening with the Girl Child (remember, only 4 years old) as we were preparing to go out for an after dinner family walk:

GC: Pappa, are you ready to go?

Me: Not quite. Just give me a second to check the score on the Yankees game.

GC: What, are you going to sit there all night?

Me: Yes. Exactly. I am going to sit here all night.

GC: Mamma! Is that [short pause] appropriate for Pappa to sit there all night?

Her mother opined that it wasn't and I was summarily evicted from the living room. On the plus side, it was a beautiful night for a walk.

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May 12, 2005

Sure is quiet around here, huh?

Yup.

*dropping stone down well of posts to hear a far away splashing noise*

Well, ain't going to get any better until next week. I was in Philly all day yesterday on meetings. Saw none of the fair city except the windowless conference room and the taxi to and from the train station. Today, after a whirlwind of activity, I am off to Washington D.C. where I am leading a small group of friends (about 15) on a fun filled tour of the City. I will report back on some of the more interesting details upon my return, but, it will involve a private tour of the Supreme Court.

So, gotta hustle outta here.

Speak to you soon!

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May 10, 2005

If you can read this . . .

If you are reading this, chances are that you are not Guatemalan. Or, at least, that you did not spend your formative years in Guatemala. What do I mean by this? Simple. Guatemala has a huge literacy problem. We witnessed it first hand on the plane coming home. To give credit where credit is due, my wife picked up on it first and clued me in.

A substantial number of people boarding the plane to NY in Guatemala City could not read their boarding passes. The crew, knowing this, had to tell them where they were sitting by either leading the passengers to their seats, almost taking them by their hands, or by pointing to exactly which seat they had. One of the crew confirmed to my wife that a lot of people boarding in Guatemala could not read and needed the crew to fill out all of their immigration and customs forms. The crew did say that some of the passengers asked them to do it out of laziness and not because they couldn't read, but still. The crew came from El Salvador, by the way.

Can you imagine what that must be like? Navigating the rocks and shoals of modern life without being able to make sense of the world around you? Or, maybe you compensate, like where one sense gets stronger when another when gets weaker. Beats me. But to be deprived of reading poetry.

The literacy rates are very poor, according to the research I've done. Actually, one UNESCO graph is particularly interesting because it casts the information in the form of illiteracy percentages. If you click on the link, you will see that almost 4 out of every 10 Guatemalan women are illiterate and about 2.5 out of every 10 men are illiterate. Those numbers tower over all of the other countries UNESCO includes in their graph.

One aspect of the literacy problem fairly leaps off the page: the disparity between literacy rates for men and for women. This suggests that women have much more restricted access to formal education than the men do. It also suggests that women have it much tougher in general in Guatemalan society. Or, at least, maybe they do. I don't really know enough to fully draw that last conclusion. But is does suggest that, ipso facto, fewer opportunities exist for women as we in the developed world understand those opportunities.

No matter how you look at it, it's a total mess.

Still, I don't want to leave this topic with the implication that there is no hope. Since 1980, some 25 years ago, the rate of adult illiteracy has dropped from 47% of the population to 29.5%. That suggests hope, right?

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The Girl Child contemplates the pool

The Girl Child and I were standing at her grandparents' pool, looking at it, after we agreed to go swimming. Concerned by the possibility that the water was chilly, we were standing there, waiting for the other one to go first, to take the first toe step, then knee step, then tushie step until you hit the tummy step. She was wearing her little water wings and waiting to get in so I could throw her, and I mean throw her, in the air. While waiting, we had the following conversation:

Me: Do you want me to go get you the inflatible ring?

GC: The ring? That, I could do without.

She's been spending too much time with my father.

And while I remember, the Boy Child graced us with what might just pass for a sentence:

Opp, go, bil [yes, mostly he speaks Norwegian]

Thus telling my wife that he wanted to be picked up and he wanted to go out for a ride in the car. It appears he may be putting the whole language thing together. Which is nice.

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May 09, 2005

Back from Guatemala

I am back from Guatemala, arriving home at a little after 1:00 this morning. I lack the coherence to give a full and reflective report, so, instead, I'm going to sort of sum up in a series of stand alone vignettes and random thoughts:

*They should just admit that the country is humid and that central air conditioning is helpful.

*I'm sure I've said this before, but Guatemala is an exciting, vibrant, lovely, dirty, sometimes scary place, filled with kind and gentle people who carry lots of guns, all the time, all over the place.

*Driving behind a pickup truck in which six National Policemen were sitting in the open bed of the truck, on the walls of the bed, was scary enough but when one of them started playing with his Uzi, I wanted to throw myself over the children and close my eyes. All we needed was a pothole. Big sigh of relief when they turned off the road.

*The National Zoo in Guatemala City is a friendly place and we were there on a day when the place was filled with children from outside the city. They were mostly indigenous peoples and we dressed, many of them, in traditional clothes. They were flat out fascinated by my blond haired blue eyes kids and spent a lot of time looking at them and talking about them. The Girl Child became uncomfortable with being stared at for so long and by so many. The Boy Child was oblivious. My mother in law explained that these children had probably never seen anyone who looked like my children.

*Marimba, when played for the locals and not the tourists, can be a lot of fun. It must have something to do with the vibe of the people listening and dancing to it.

*I know I've written about fruit in Guatemala before, but it is so damn good. We also had some other cool things:

pacaya: A vegetable, the initial blossom of a variety of date palm tree; has a slight bitter taste. Used in salads; deep fried in egg batter or served in a tomato based sauce. Most appreciated by Guatemalans and Salvadorians. Consumed year round in particular during Holy Week and November 1 (All Souls/Dia de los Difuntos).

and

Huiquil (which I am spelling wrong and which we had in a soup.

*More later on a couple of other topics from the trip.

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May 06, 2005

How do you feed the children?

The newspaper headline this morning here in Guatemala City was stark: 50% of Guatemalan Children Are Chronically Malnourished. It came with a helpful photograph of three small children sitting by the side of the road eating some meager looking tortillas. The poverty in Guatemala is breathtaking, as I'm sure poverty is anywhere. But when you put that statistic to it, it becomes much smaller and more immediate, the scope of the poverty, that is. Poverty becomes a hungry child, it's really that simple.

The consequences, it seems to me, are much graver than simply a child without enough to eat, a child who goes to bed hungry. Chronic malnutrition will stunt brain growth and will make it easier for disease to grab ahold. The malnourished child today, assuming he lives, will be the burden to society later, unable to earn more than a subsistence wage, if that. This seems fairly obvious. Solve the hunger problem and you give society as a whole a fighting chance.

The problem is that I don't see it changing in the near future.

Pity the hungry children in Guatemala. They deserve at least that.

I feel totally helpless.

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May 05, 2005

Lessons learned in transit today

Sure is beautiful here in Guatemala today. The kids are out in the pool, splashing their grandparents and enjoying themselves immensely. So I decided to make myself scarce for a moment to give them all some time alone and what better way to occupy myself than sharing some of my newly learned lessons.

*Waking children up at 4:00 a.m. to go to the airport is an exercise fraught with hazard.

*Thanks to the nice Transportation Security Agency lady I now know that when zipping the suitcase closed, do it in such a way that the zipper pulls are as far from the handle as you can possibly place them. This deters thieves in the baggage handling area from doing a quick unzip and stick hand in move. She explained that if they have to search for the zippers, they are more likely to just move on the next bag. Now that the bags have to be unlocked, this is just damn good advice. I think of it as a reward for being nice to people and chatting. I bet a lot of people don't chat with this lady and therefore don't get this safety tip.

*There was an adhesive fake fly on the urinal wall in JFK, Terminal 4. I read that a Dutch company (and I read this years ago but I think it was in the NY Times) figured out that if you put the fly there, guys will aim at it and thus the amount of spillage on the floor is reduced by some percentage. As I perversely refused to pee on the fly today, I learned that I would have hated to be the guy responsible for measuring the amount of urine on the floor of the un-flied urinal v. the flied urinal. Some jobs, I realized, I would not be happy having.

*Finally, it's really kind of fun typing on a Norwegian keyboard. It has all these cool letters built right in: Ø; Æ; and, Å. That said, the Norwegian spell check will not be very helpful in checking this post. Win some, lose some.

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May 04, 2005

Nothing is easy when you're four

I've never really thought that my daughter was given to melodrama, but last night we had the following conversation after I put her to bed, late, and after I had read her three, long stories.

GC: Pappa, nothing in my life is going right!

Me: [actually a little alarmed to hear a 4 year old say that] Why do you say that, Peanut?

GC: Because I never get to have 4 stories!

Oh, the humanity!

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When it rains, etc.

This is shaping up to be a very bad year, demands of practice wise. This week alone:

*I am preparing a major adversary proceeding complaint arising out of a bankruptcy as special counsel to the trustee in bankruptcy;

*I have been approached by another lawyer, a friend from the train, who wants to refer me a potentially huge case involving really arcane issues of property law -- she said, and I thought this was nice, that she's tried to explain this case to three or four other lawyers and so far I'm the only one who has been able to follow the bouncing ball; and,

*I believe that I will be retained today in a piece of international litigation that will make every other case I've ever worked on in my whole life look like a rounding error and has the potential to consume me like a monster.

The rest of the year is suddenly looking like it's going to be exceptionally busy.

Oh, and I'm supposed to go to Guatemala again tomorrow on the dawn patrol flight for the weekend. Expect blogging to go real light for the next couple of days.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go call some economists. I also need to consider having my head examined.

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It's all in the way you tell it

So, there I was, sweating away this morning in the gym and half-listening to CNN when they did a really interesting interview with an automotive industry analyst who was brought on to talk about the stark drop off in sales at General Motors. She was quite good, actually, explaining that what has the Street so freaked out is that the drop in sales was mostly in the SUV market, where GM makes all their money. If Americans are not buying the big Suburbans than GM ain't making no money, Well, she said it better. Then she was asked about whether union deals were hurting GM and whether GM was really spending too much on healthcare.

And this is where it got interesting for me. The analyst said that $1200 out of every car sold is used to pay for health care costs. Ok, well, that seems like a lot but I have no way of knowing. How do I put that in context? How many workers does that $1200 pay for? How many retirees? How many families? In short, how many people are covered by that?

Well, she went on to put in context for me. And this is what I mean when I say that it's all in the way you tell it, all in the way you present information. Telling me $1200 per car really tells me nothing. But tell me:

General Motors spent more on health care last year than they did on steel

and you've smacked me upside the head and caught my attention. She felt that for a manufacturing company, this wasn't very good.

Can you imagine that? Is GM a manufacturing company or a social welfare state? Let's see if we can figure that out a little.

GM, according to their annual report for 2004, had net sales and revenue of $193.5 billion. GM seems to divide themselves into auto making and finance/insurance divisions for revenue purposes. That's our first hint that GM may not be just a manufacturing company -- they have a f/i division big enough to warrant a separate discussion in the annual report. Automotive still is the biggest, earning $161.5 billion of the $193.5 and f/i earning some $32 billion. But I do note that only f/i earned a profit -- some $2.9 billion. Unfortunately, I lack the time to probe further and I cannot seem to isolate how much GM spent on steel last year or even what the costs were associated with the automotive divisions. Not a shock, really, when you're dealing with a company that size.

But still, more on health care than on steel. Stunning, isn't it?

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May 03, 2005

Welsh Rap Review: QRed

QRed was kind enough to email me one of his recent compositions: "Fuck with QRed". It's off his most recent album, 'Survivor Series', out now on Progenitor Inc., done with him and Hos, his deejay. QRed describes his song as a "straight up battle tune". I describe it as hot, with rousing beats, big old bass and drum line, and excellent lyrics. It's got something to it, something I am having problems articulating here but it sort of reminded me of some of the tunes from Apache Indian, like "Make Way for the Indian", if you can remember that song.

In any event, I liked the tune very much and, on that basis, would absolutely recommend the album. I'll get back to you if QRed gives me touring dates and information.

For further information, I direct you to QRed's websites: DRMSolutions and LifePlusRecordings.

Cheers, QRed and thanks for the tracks!

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Behind the Curtain: Arthur Ferguson

I came across, in my wanderings, the following extract which I copied and pasted from I don't recall where but which inspired me to do another Behind the Curtain post:

In 1924, a Scottish conman by the name of Arthur Ferguson succeeded in extracting from a wealthy American businessman a down payment of £6,000 on Nelson's Column. Ferguson had met his victim in Trafalgar Square and convinced him that it was being sold to reduce the national debt and that he was the estate agent charged with effecting the top-secret sale. Emboldened by his crime, Ferguson went on to con other tourists out of a £1,000 downpayment on Big Ben and a £2,000 deposit for Buckingham Palace, before heading for America, where he was caught trying to sell the Statue of Liberty to an Australian tourist.

The information on Ferguson is scant, unfortunately. In fact, I suppose I can't really do a Behind the Curtain Post for him considering the paucity of material.

I found this as an aside in an essay about another conman, although it appears to have been cribbed without attribution from the FreeDictionary:

It finally dawned on Ferguson that America was indeed the land of opportunity, and so he emigrated there in 1925. He sold the White House to a rancher on the installment plan for yearly payments of $100,000 USD, and tried to sell the Statue of Liberty to a visiting Australian, who went to the police. The authorities had been looking for the mysterious salesman of public landmarks, and Ferguson went to jail, to be released in 1930. He profitably continued his trade in Los Angeles until his death in 1938.

Even if this is not really a Behind the Curtain post, I don't know what else to call it and I would have really enjoyed meeting this fellow. Although I'd have left my wallet at home.

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The Arcades

One wonderful thing about London is the many arcades. The shopping arcade is, as you might guess from the name, a series of arches, roofed, with shops in the spaces between the arches. In many ways, they were the first shopping malls, providing covered spaces for upscale merchants to appeal to the monied classes. Here are some of my favorites. They are glorious looking spaces. We'll start with the more obscure Albermarle Arcade:

abermarlearcade1.JPG

abermarlearcade2.JPG


Another arcade, off Piccadilly:

2005_0322Image0020.JPG


And, finally, the Burlington Arcade front facade:

2005_0322Image0049.JPG

And a close up:

2005_0322Image0050.JPG

These were the height of fashion when they were built. The first shopping malls in London!

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May 02, 2005

Signs of the times

I saw one of the following signs, read about the second one, and was sent the third by a friend from New Orleans. The creativity that goes into these things is quite something.

The First Sign. Spotted while driving in the Bronx yesterday right next to Yankee Stadium, stopped in traffic:

Why Lie?
I Want A Beer!

And yes, people were indeed giving the thirsty guy money.

Second Sign. Read about this morning in the Metropolitan Diary:

Ninjas killed my family. Need money for kung fu lessons.

No word on whether he was getting any closer to his revenge.

Finally, a picture sent to me by a buddy who was in New Orleans and came across this fellow with this sign:

bum.jpg

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May 01, 2005

Today's Lesson: How to deal with a troll

Today's lesson of how to deal with a troll is brought to you courtesy of Linda, who demonstrates the proper way to heat the poker before applying it to the troll. It was a thing of beauty. And remember, a thing of beauty is a joy forever!

Posted by: Random Penseur at 12:10 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Georgian Lights

Today's architectural element picture from London are these beautiful Georgian lights. Note the cones hanging off of them, they were used to extinguish the torches needed to light the lamps.

2005_0322Image0023.JPG

Let's also throw in a Georgian fan light window to go along with it:

2005_0322Image0076.JPG

Posted by: Random Penseur at 12:05 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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