Joe the plumber is not representative

Oct 16, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

Of course, people are gullible, and the McCain campaign is seizing on that gullibility. But let’s get the facts straight here. From today’s Times: 

According to figures compiled by the Small Business Administration, there are fewer than six million small businesses that actually have payrolls. The rest are so-called nonemployer firms that report income from hobbies or freelance work done by their registered owners, earning as little as $1,000 a year.

So are there “millions more like Joe the Plumber,” as Mr. McCain contended? Probably not. Mr. Obama may well have been correct when he stated that “98 percent of small businesses make less than $250,000.”

Of these, according to a calculation by the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center, fewer than 700,000 taxpayers would have to pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s plan. But even some of these are not small-business owners in the traditional sense; they include lawyers, accountants and investors in real estate, all of them with incomes that put them in the top tax brackets.

Earth From Above coming to New York

Oct 9, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s exhibit Earth from Above is coming to New York in May 2009. I saw the exhibit in Paris in 2000, and can’t wait to see it again.

Sosolimited remixes the presidential debates

Oct 7, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

Sosolimited has been performing live visual remixes of the presidential debates. Today’s takes place at the Art Directors Club in New York. Tickets are still available.

Calling California expats to vote by mail

Oct 7, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

If you’re a California resident living somewhere else or even a California resident who, for whatever reason, can’t vote in-person on November 2—vote from your couch, your office, wherever—please vote by mail. The deadline for your request to be received is October 28. So, hurry!

Yes We Can

Oct 4, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

Foreign policy for the next four years

Oct 3, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

I still can’t believe Sarah Palin is running for second-in-command after her display of foreign policy credentials and her inability to name any Supreme Court cases during her interview with Katie Couric. Meanwhile, I’m still hoping that Richard Holbrooke will be our next Secretary of State.

Sarah Palin won’t say genocide

Oct 3, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

Three very brief observations from last night’s debate: 

1. Sarah Palin apparently winked during some of her responses. Seriously, what is the woman thinking?
2. Joe Biden strongly advocated intervention in Sudan. However, Palin a) lied about her support for the divestment of Alaska’s Sudan-related investments and b) did not use the word genocide to describe what is, plainly, genocide. I was disappointed that Gwen Ifill didn’t press the candidates on this issue. 
3. Joe Biden’s description of his family history towards the end of the debate. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but one day later, it’s sticking with me as a raw, unscripted, and completely moving moment from an evening often filled with attacks and boring talking points and transparent evasion of questions. This, more than Palin’s “white flag or surrender” or Biden’s attack on McCain’s Iraq policy, is what I remember from the debate. 

Today in the Times

Mar 16, 2008 By Ricky in General Comments Off

As is the Sunday ritual, I went through the New York Times today and noted the following:

• Apparently, the B52s stay at the Bowery Hotel, the same hotel where I stayed during BEA last year. My room won points for being relatively quiet, having an iPod dock, and having MSG, which, by pure coincidence, happened to be showing an excellent game from the 2003 ALCS during the last night of my stay. Its being a two-minute walk from the Whole Foods on Houston didn’t hurt either.

• Matt Bai has two stories in the paper. One is in the Magazine on Obama’s surprising success in racially homogenous states and his failure in diverse ones. The other contrasts the advertising-influenced of David Axelrod with the poll-driven nature of Mark Penn. (Note: I’ve met both Penn and Bai as part of my work, but, alas, not Axelrod.)

• n+1 editor and Harvard alum Keith Gessen has the back page essay in the Book Review this week, which covers a few books about the struggle for college admissions. Of particular interest is The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue by David Samuels. I remember being fascinated by this story when it broke a few years back, probably because of its Gatsbyesque nature. I mean, how can you not be impressed by a guy who, at nearly 30, fakes his way into Princeton. And what could possibly be a better story for criticizing the whole college admissions game in the first place? Which reminds me of an op-ed piece that ran in the Times last weekend. Mark Leyner wrote a wonderful criticism of all the unjustified column space that’s lately been given to stories about literary hoaxes. The piece takes the form of a news story about the discovery that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is actually a work of nonfiction. I’ve long argued that it doesn’t make much of a difference to me whether a work is classified as fiction or nonfiction. After all, I’m judging the work that a writer has produced, not her life. (But you say, “Her work was her life.”)

• Finally, the paper ran a story about Samantha Power in which she’s quoted as having foreshadowed her own political demise as an advisor to the Obama campaign. The article tends toward gossip at times, but I found Power’s prescience to be disarming. But then again, I’m a fan looking for the positive.

After Ms. Power joined the Obama campaign, as an unpaid part-time adviser on foreign policy, people who knew her wondered — and worried — whether a person who is so naked about her passions could survive in the political world, where tact and coolness usually trump spontaneity.

Ms. Power herself worried. “That’s the one thing that terrifies me: that I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate,” she told The Chronicle of Higher Education last year.

Change Audi A4 B6 ignition coils yourself

Feb 10, 2008 By Ricky in General Comments Off

If you have a B6 platform Audi A4 like I do, you’ve probably experienced the failure of an ignition coil while driving. You know the feeling—you suddenly lose power, the car shakes when you accelerate, and the check engine light flashes. This has happened to me three times in the past five months, including one on the Golden Gate Bridge in December. It happened to me again last Friday on my way to work. And, although it’s no fun and potentially dangerous to be driving when a coil fails, replacing it is a snap. All you need to do is remove the engine cover to access the coils. The only frustrating part is that, unless you have a VAG-COM or some other way to read the CEL code, you’ll need to find the bad coil by replacing one at a time and starting the car until the CEL disappears. Nonetheless, the whole thing can be done in about five minutes, and you’ll save time and about $150 in so-called “labor” costs at the dealer. Honestly, I’m not sure how such a quick procedure can cost so much, but the dealers will get away with what they can. Changing an ignition coil on this car is far easier than changing a headlight or windshield wiper blades. You can buy the coils here for about $30 each.

Giants Super Bowl parade

Feb 10, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

I made it back to New York last Tuesday morning and caught the end of the Giants Super Bowl victory parade down Broadway. Overheard afterwards on the street was a man asking a police officer, “Officer, do you know at which bar in the City I can find the cheapest beer?”

My favorite things

Feb 10, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

Well, actually, these are Kate and Andy Spade’s favorite things. I recently discovered the “Things We Love” page on KateSpade.info, which contains everything from Moleskine notebooks to the band Architecture in Helsinki to red velvet cake. Of particular interest to me were the French sweets at Laduree and this set of Pantone pens made by Pentel. If anyone knows where to find these pens, let me know!

And, as you may be aware, I’ve long kept a page here on this site of things I recommend.

Shout Out Louds and Impossible

Jan 13, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

I have been listening often to “Impossible” by Shout Out Louds over the past few weeks. Emotionally, it touches similar territory as David Gray’s “Shine,” though on a different level. Anyhow, the point is that right around the four-minute mark of “Impossible,” the song seems to be winding down, but then it returns when you least expected it—just when you thought it was over, it isn’t. I could get into the way that the formal break here in the song echoes its content and question whether you can actually separate form from content, etc., etc., but I’ll leave it at that.

Lorrie Moore on Hillary Clinton

Jan 13, 2008 By Ricky in General No Comments

In this weekend’s New York Times, one of my favorite writers, Lorrie Moore, dismisses Hillary Clinton’s appeal as a woman in the 2008 election cycle, asking: “Does her being a woman make her a special case? Does gender confer meaning on her candidacy? In my opinion, it is a little late in the day to become sentimental about a woman running for president.”

Moore continues:

Boys are faring worse [than girls] — and the time for symbols and leaders they can connect with beneficially should be now and should be theirs. Hillary Clinton’s gender does not rescue society from that — instead she serves as a kind of nostalgia for a time when it might have. Only her policies are what matter now, and here — despite some squabbling and bad advice that has caused her to “go negative” — the Democrats largely agree. But inspiration is essential for living, and Mr. Obama holds the greater fascination for our children.

Mr. Obama came of age as a black man in America. He does not need (as he has done) to invoke his grandfather’s life in colonial Kenya to prove or authenticate his understanding of race. His sturdiness is equal to Mrs. Clinton’s, his plans as precise and humane. But unlike her, he is original and of the moment. He embodies, at the deepest levels, the bringing together of separate worlds. The sexes have always lived together, but the races have not. His candidacy is minted profoundly in that expropriated word “change.”

The amateur athlete

Nov 11, 2007 By Ricky in General No Comments

When I interviewed Moneyball author Michael Lewis back in September, he mentioned a piece he was working on, which argued thatt college football players should be paid for they create a product that generates a significant amount of revenue for their universities. Growing up, I had a somewhat romatic notion of the amateur athlete who works on and displays his skills, untained by commercial interests. Of course, commercial interests are all over collegiate sports, so why not just call a spade a spade? Lewis writes in today’s New York Times:

College football’s best trick play is its pretense that it has nothing to do with money, that it’s simply an extension of the university’s mission to educate its students. Were the public to view college football as mainly a business, it might start asking questions. For instance: why are these enterprises that have nothing to do with education and everything to do with profits exempt from paying taxes? Or why don’t they pay their employees?

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

But between buyer and seller sits the National Collegiate Athletic Association, to ensure that the universities it polices keep all the money for themselves — to make sure that the rich white folk do not slip so much as a free chicken sandwich under the table to the poor black kids. The poor black kids put up with it because they find it all but impossible to pursue N.F.L. careers unless they play at least three years in college. Less than one percent actually sign professional football contracts and, of those, an infinitesimal fraction ever make serious money. But their hope is eternal, and their ignorance exploitable.

The development round

Oct 21, 2007 By Ricky in General No Comments

The New York Times has an editorial today about the 2001 Doha talks and the commitment to making it easier for poor countries to have access to global markets to sell their goods. However, as the Times notes:

The package for the poorest should be improved. At the very least, the duty- and quota-free access to markets in industrial countries should be extended to cover more of the poor countries’ most competitive exports, starting with textiles. Middle-income countries should also offer equivalent open access for exports from the least developed. And rich countries should tightly limit any exceptional subsidies and protections for agricultural products, like sugar and cotton, that poor countries can export.

The world’s greatest gadget

Sep 19, 2007 By Ricky in General No Comments

Anthony Lane has a story in this week’s New Yorker about the almost century-long fascination with and fanaticism about Leica cameras and lenses. Like Lane, I share a huge reverence for these things. I think a Leica camera may well be the best, most beautifully made object in the world. Lane writes:

Many people would disagree. Bugatti fans, for instance, would direct your attention to the Type 57 Atlantic, the only car I know that appears to have been designed by masseuses. Personally, I would consider it a privilege to die at the wheel of a Lamborghini Miura—not difficult, when you’re nudging a hundred and seventy m.p.h. and waving at passersby. But automobiles need gas, whereas the truest mechanisms run on nothing but themselves. What is required is a machine constructed with such skill that it renders every user—from the pro to the banana-fingered fumbler—more skillful as a result. We need it to refine and lubricate, rather than block or coarsen, our means of engagement with the world: we want to look not just at it, however admiringly, but through it. In that case, we need a Leica.

My dad was, among other things, a photographer and so I grew up around cameras—Mamiyas, twin lens Rolleiflexes, Canons—but didn’t use a Leica until I lived in New York four years ago, and it truly is different from any other camera I have encountered. It is, like Lane suggests, a way of seeing the world.

Lane continues:

There, if anywhere, is the Leica motto: watch and wait. If you were a predator, the moment—not just for Cartier-Bresson, but for all photographers—became that much more decisive in 1954. “Clairvoyance” means “clear sight,” and when Leica launched the M3 that year, the clarity was a coup de foudre; even now, when you look through a used M3, the world before you is brighter and crisper than seems feasible. You half expect to feel the crunch of autumn leaves beneath your feet. A Leica viewfinder resembles no other, because of the frame lines: thin white strips, parallel to each side of the frame, which show you the borders of the photograph that you are set to take—not merely the lie of the land within the shot, but also what is happening, or about to happen, just outside. This is a matter of millimetres, but to Leica fans it is sacred, because it allows them to plan and imagine a photograph as an act of storytelling—an instant grabbed at will from a continuum. If you want a slice of life, why not see the loaf?

Why I no longer love Stanford Shopping Center

May 27, 2007 By Ricky in General 1 Comment

I used to big a big fan of Stanford Shopping Center going the 1980s. I love the outdoor atmosphere and the selection of shops, which, though not great, is certainly better than most malls. I’m disappointed that some of my old favorite stores are no longer there: Hear Music, Phileas Fogg’s Travel Shop, EB Games, and a sports bookstore whose name I forget. But there are some new, good stores too like Rugby by Ralph Lauren.

I remember the Banana Republic there before the Gap bought it and it looked like a Jeep had crashed into the storefront. That was my favorite store when I was a kid just because of its facade. Speaking of car crashes, that’s exactly why I am no longer a fan of Stanford Shopping Center: This Sunday while I was parked near Max’s, someone hit my car’s rear bumper, valence and left fender causing easily $3,000+ in damage. This person did not leave a note. Leaving a note is something that people really should do if they hit someone else’s car while it’s parked. In fact, I remember hearing that it’s the law to do so.

Things like this have happened to me in the past, and I made sure to park all the way out along Sand Hill, next to a tree on the right and a couple empty spots on the left. I pulled into the middle of the spot and then readjusted, moving my car all the way to the right of the spot—next to the tree—so a car parking on my left wouldn’t hit mine. And yet. It happened anyway.

I called the Palo Alto police to file a police report, but they refused to send an officer because Stanford is on private property. The woman at the police department directed me to Stanford Shopping Center’s private security department.

I went to the directory in the middle of the shopping center and called the security number. The woman who answered the phone there said they would send an officer over. When the officer arrived, he said that he would not be able to issue me a report and that Stanford did not have security tapes that I could see. I didn’t expect there to be a videotape of the incident involving my car because I parked so far away. However, what disappointed me tremendously is that the security officer said that I would need have the court subpoena them if I wanted to obtain access to any sort of report on the incident. Of course, these sorts of reports are generally useful for insurance purposes, but the security service at Stanford proved to be entirely useless. I understand that these people are trying to protect Stanford, but to do so at the great expense and frustration of their customers seems to me self-destructive.

This is one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve had anywhere, especially since I now need to have two of the largest pieces on my Audi repainted, and we all know that once you get something repainted, especially on a German car, it never looks quite the same. I will probably still shop at Stanford, just not as frequently and without any enjoyment, but I certainly won’t be driving there.

If you were at Stanford Shopping Center on Sunday, May 27, 2007, and you happen to have seen the car that hit my silver 2002 Audi A4, please email me. Judging by the paint transfer, it looks like the car that hit me was white. For the other auto detailing enthusiasts out there, I did try to take out the scratches on the bumper with SSR 2.5 and a white pad on my Porter Cable, but wasn’t able to minimize the scratches at all. So, it looks like I’ll be making a trip to the body shop soon.

Here’s a picture of the damage: