Want a job?

Want an appointment with the new Administration? Here’s the instructions for completing the background information [pdf]. Take a look at Section VIII. Or Section II, Questions 12, 13 and 14.

(Much of this questionnaire applies to non-political, career executive positions too.)

The End of Wall Street’s Boom

The wonderful writer, author among other things of Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis revisits Wall Street. A short excerpt from this fascinating piece:

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

Your 15 minutes are up

The Governor of Alaska appears to have issues with closure.

November 12th ought to be a national holiday

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on this date in 1815.

Today is also the birthday

… of Wallace Shawn. The actor-playwright is 65. Inconceivable!

He’s the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn, and he’s become well known as a character actor in Hollywood movies such as The Princess Bride (1987) and Clueless (1995). Most people don’t know that he’s also an avant-garde playwright. When he got out of college, a lot of his friends took jobs writing for his father’s magazine, but Shawn supported his playwriting by working as a photocopy clerk. He then got the idea of selling stock in himself, and managed to raise $2,500 from investors, which helped him write his first plays. To this day, he sends all those early investors a small annual check. His early plays were not successes. During his first play, the audience actually shouted for the actors to shut up. But he finally had a breakthrough when he wrote and starred in the movie My Dinner with Andre (1981), which consists entirely of Shawn and the theater director Andre Gregory talking over dinner, but it became a cult classic.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

… of Brian Hyland. The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini singer is 65.

… of Booker T. Jones. The organist is 64. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Between 1963 and 1968, Booker T. and the MGs appeared on more than 600 Stax/Volt recordings, including classics by such artists as Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and William Bell. As a result of Stax’s affiliation with Atlantic Records, the group also worked with Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Albert King. Moreover, Booker T. and the MGs were a successful recording group in their own right, cutting ten albums and fourteen instrumental hits, including “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High,” “Time Is Tight” and “Soul-Limbo.”

… of Neil Young. He’s 63. Again, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Neil Young is one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters and performers. In a career that extends back to his mid-Sixties roots as a coffeehouse folkie in his native Canada, this principled and unpredictable maverick has pursued an often winding course across the rock and roll landscape. He’s been a cult hero, a chart-topping rock star, and all things in-between, remaining true to his restless muse all the while. At various times, Young has delved into folk, country, garage-rock and grunge. His biggest album, Harvest (1972) , apotheosized the laid-back singer/songwriter genre he helped invent. By contrast, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Young’s second-best seller, was a loud, brawling masterpiece whose title track, an homage to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, contained the oft-quoted line “Better to burn out than it is to rust.”

… of journalist and author Tracy Kidder, also 63. Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine (1981).

… of Megan Mullally. She’s 50.

… of Nadia Comaneci. The perfect 10 is 47.

… of Anne Hathaway, all of 26.

Oscar winner Grace Kelly was born 79 years ago today. Her oscar was for best performance by an actress in The Country Girl (1954).

Arches National Park (Utah)

… was redesignated from national monument to national park on this date in 1971.

For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.

The ease and relative freedom of this lovely job at Arches follow from the comparative absence of the motorized tourists, who stay away by the millions. And they stay away because of the unpaved entrance road, the unflushable toilets in the campgrounds, and the fact that most of them have never even heard of Arches National Monument.
…

The Master Plan has been fulfilled. Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year, the “visitation,” as they call it, mounts ever upward [769,672 visitors in 2003].
…

Progress has come at last to Arches, after a million years of neglect. Industrial Tourism has arrived.

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

NewMexiKen photo, 2003

American Indian tribal names

The names by which most ‘tribes’ are generally known are usually not those which they use for themselves: often they are derived from the more-or-less disparaging terms their neighbors used to describe them to early European traders and explorers. (For a rough equivalent, imagine visitors from another planet arriving in England, asking who lived across the channel, and being given the answer ‘Bloody Frogs’.)

From The Earth Shall Weep by James Wilson

How to Fix a Flat

NewMexiKen ebbs and flows about Tom Friedman’s books and columns but this morning he hits one out of the park on the auto industry. He begins:

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

But go read the whole thing — and be sure to read it to the end.

This year’s realignment election of the century

NewMexiKen can remember going to a Poli Sci class the morning after LBJ’s landslide against Goldwater in 1964 and hearing the professor tell us how it was the end of the Republican Party. With that hindsight, I have found the talk about this year’s realignment and the end of the Republican Party pretty amusing.

Every Saturday’s big game has to be the biggest game ever. Every election where one party replaces the other has to be the end of the losing party.

Nate Silver has somewhat the same reaction.

Best line of the day, so far

“I wandered into a shopping mall last week to buy a white dress shirt and everything was on sale. They would have sold me an escalator if I could have hauled it away.”

Functional Ambivalent

You should read Tom’s whole post.