Floating Off the Page

I sometimes feel I’m cheating when I read the quirky human-interest stories in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. Those stories aren’t the reason why the Journal exists, after all. They’re just a sop to English majors like me who get tired of reading about GDP and inverted yield curves.

But how many yield-curve stories would still be fresh and readable forty years after they’re published, or even forty days? The pieces collected in Floating Off the Page still live, and some are forty years old, or older. Short, varied, and entertaining, they make perfect reading for hot summer days when the attention span is limited.

A surprising number of the columns are about animals. There’s one about people who get high by licking toads, one about people who put their dogs and cats on a vegan diet, and one about a guy who turns roadkill into recipes like “groundhog baked in sour cream, spiced mustard and a bit of rosemary.” There’s the New York City truck that picks up dead horses, sea lions, and bison, a man paid by the FDA to sniff fish all day, and the cannon that shoots dead chickens at the windshields of aircraft. There is also a heartbreaking story about the struggle to save sea otters oiled by the Exxon Valdez.

Some of these pieces actually have something to with business (though frequently coupled with animals). We find out about copyright enforcers who have cracked down on Girl Scout singalongs, about a Chinese restaurant that cornered the market on rat recipes, about a Scotsman who makes stainless steel braces for sheep, and about a maker of prison underwear whose business became much more profitable when he started turning the underwear scraps into gun-cleaning patches. Enjoy!

Hitch-22

If I’d known how interesting Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 was going to be, I would have lined up an assignment to write a full-length review before it appeared. For blogging purposes, there is so much here that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I had read some of Hitchens’ columns in The Nation before he broke with the magazine, and his support for the Iraq war made me regard him as one of those liberals who lose their grip on reality for no apparent reason. Still, to see him speak on TV, or especially in debate, was to be impressed with his focus, erudition, and combativeness. Having read his book, I can see that the erudition was honed by an Oxford education and the combativeness by a youth spent as a Trotskyist rabblerouser.

A long time ago I overheard someone ask a young activist what party he belonged to, and he replied, “I’m a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.” It hadn’t quite sunk into my brain before that “left” and “right” are not the only ways to organize one’s political life. Hitchens’ political instincts, like those of that activist, have more to do with human rights than party platforms. Whether or not you agree with him that it was our job to overthrow Saddam Hussein, this belief is consistent with his previous positions, and based on extensive experience as a reporter around the world. (Photos show him not only in Iraq but in Kurdistan, Cyprus, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Uganda, Venezuela, Romania, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and the Western Sahara.)

Hitchens says he discovered only while on the tour for this book that he had esophageal cancer, the ailment that killed his father. But reading “Prologue with Premonitions,” which introduces this book, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have a strong sense that something wasn’t right. It begins as Hitchens picks up a copy of the National Portrait Gallery’s magazine Face to Face and sees a 1979 photo of himself with Martin Amis, captioned “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He moves on to thoughts of T.S. Eliot, Julian Barnes’ book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and to this thought:

When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps “too soon.” Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too “late.”

Well, Hitch-22 wasn’t conceived or written too late, because—well, here it is. I hope that the author, too, will be around for many more years to goad, infuriate, and stimulate his readers and listeners. 

Water lilies

Here are a couple of the water lilies in bloom yesterday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

“Men will travel to the Nile to see the lotus flower, who have never seen in their glory the lotuses of their native streams.” (Thoreau)

Bill Gross on investing

In my thinking about investments, I’ve tended to give short shrift to bonds. When I can invest, I try to do it for the long haul, and over most periods of ten years or longer, stocks tend to trounce bonds. (Right now is an exception, when the average annual S&P 500 return for the ten years that ended on June 30 actually stands at -1.59%.)

Bonds seemed incredibly complicated compared to stocks, and because they were subject to some of the same risks (like higher interest rates) it didn’t seem worth the trouble to figure them out. Peter Lynch and other investment gurus appeared to have no use for them either.

But in an effort to give the bond approach a fair chance, I recently read Everything You’ve Heard About Investing is Wrong!, a 1997 book by Bill Gross of PIMCO, who is accurately described on the cover as “the Peter Lynch of bonds.” (I figured out—fortunately before I bought both books—that Bill Gross on Investing is just the paperback version of the same book.)

Like his letters to PIMCO shareholders, Gross’s book is marked by offbeat analogies and some fresh insights. In 1997 as in 2010, Gross expected an era of low growth and low investment returns—at least in the “secular period,” or three to five years out.

Today he and co-CIO Mohamed El-Erian call this “the new normal.” Back then Gross called it the era of 6%, or the Butler Creek era, after a meandering stream of his childhood.

Gross admits (though not until page 133) that “stocks are definitely the best bet for the long haul,” but because not everyone has the stomach to invest exclusively for the long haul, he suggests measures such as investing in longer-term bonds, foreign bonds, corporate and mortgage bonds (because the risk of prepayment was low at the time), and the inflation-indexed bonds (now called TIPS) that were about to be introduced.

Everything You’ve Heard includes many nuggets of practical advice. Gross, for instance, reveals how his company eked out a little extra return on its cash, by buying “near cash” in the form of short-term callable corporate bonds. And despite some conservative talk about moral decay and how “JFK was no friend of mine,” he also makes this surprisingly progressive suggestion:

The only real government solution that incorporates the positives of a free-market economy while alleviating the plight of the bifurcated have-nots of our society would be to eliminate the taxes of all Americans earning less than, say, $25,000 a year. What could be simpler or more efficient and better rectify, in one giant step, the decline of the after-tax wages of the lower half of American society? Forget about a capital gains reduction; stockholders have more than their fair share already.

Brooklyn Bridge Park

On my morning walks over the Brooklyn Bridge, I’ve noticed that the Brooklyn Bridge Park has been expanding southward, to the piers beyond Bargemusic and the faux lighthouse with the ice cream parlor inside.

I checked it out the weekend before last, on what Thoreau would call a mizzling day, and found that the park seems bigger when you’re in it. As you can see, there are wild roses and a nice view of the bridge. What you can’t see is how artfully the park is landscaped, and that the developers are planting spartina grass along the shore to create a salt marsh.