John & Belle Have A Blog

In Other Thrilling House News

Since I had kind of a windfall recently I decided to do three things: pay off my credit cards; get LASIK for John, and build a house for our maid Tena on the land she owns in the Philippines. Today I waited in a looong line at DBS bank to do a telegraphic transfer to Allied Bank, Mangaldan Branch. (I could have waited in a different, shorter line, but I didn't know that.) Everyone in Singapore needs to get even numbers of fresh, clean bills to put in the hong bao or red packets given out to various people during Chinese New Year. As a result, the sound in the bank was an extraordinary, crisp, swish-swish-swish magnified many times, as ten tellers counted out cash cash cash. A sound like that is liable to put thoughts of bank robbery into a girl, but there was a serious looking young man with a gun there to ensure cooler heads prevailed.

Tena has owned the property for some time; when her father died the land was divided into three plots, one for each daughter (there were no sons.) The whole piece is pretty small, about the size of my mom's yard in Takoma Park (she has a big yard, though). There are two houses on it now, one that her mother lives in (technically Elsa's), which is nice enough, and one for her sister Cora. This one has the dirt floors which made such an impression on Zoe. (You can read more about our trip in 2006 here, here, and here.)

Tena paid to fence in all three houses, which has slightly mitigated the fact that her sisters are jealous, and annoyed that she isn't hiring her layabout brothers-in-law to do the work (I have to say I was totally with her on that one). Well, she's hired a real contractor and instructed him to employ them as part of the crew, which, at one point they were refusing to do out of pique, but I think they've come around. It's just going to be a simple four-room house (plus bathroom), with a wet kitchen outside as well as a "dry" kitchen inside. She's having wardrobe/storage cabinets and kitchen cabinets built in by the contractor, which is not the usual thing to do there, but she has been inspired by various places here in Singapore. Corrugated tin roof, masonry walls, tile floor; pretty much the usual thing.

The girls and I are going to visit the Philippines again with Tena--and, hopefully, my mom!!!--in May, so we can see the splendor for ourselves. Tena says she wants to put a plaque outside with my name on it, but I told her we should put "Henrietta Waring", my grandmother's name. She was a kind person and a great employer, and helped her maid Annie Washington build a house in Savannah that's still in their family, flanked by her grandchildren's houses. My brother Ben is visiting both their graves in Bonaventure this weekend, and leaving flowers for me.

Codex Nuttall Sunday

I took The Codex Nuttall off the shelf to give it another look. (Obviously I'm trying to figure out whether 8-Deer was a liberal or a conservative.) Don't happen to be familiar? Check out this site. Zoë asked me to explain what was with this strange comic book. I did my best. Zoë ended up deciding that Zoëland should have its own non-alphabetic script. For example, here is how you write 'Zoë' in Zoëlandish ideographs (pictowossnames).

Z ebra + O ctopus + E lephant = Zoë.

Alternatively, you can do a quick sketch of a plant to = life = zoo = Zoë. Very neat.

My favorite character in the Codex? There's this one yuca (hill). He's obviously a total slacker who needs to be given his own comic strip or, possibly, walk-on in a Simpsons episode:

The scan is from the Dover Books edition of the Codex Nuttall [amazon]. That means it's a reproduction of the famous 1902 facsimile. Not strictly a reproduction of the original, produced around 1000 AD. Still, it's nuts to think that someone was drawing like Matt Groening in the year 1000.

Mei Mei Gives Me Whatfor

Mei Mei and I are really bonding over the whole Looney Tunes thing - which is gratifying, because she still can't draw worth a darn. (But she sings like a bird.) We were watching "Devil May Hare", the first Tasmanian Devil short. I don't think the Devil is anyone's favorite character. Eh. But this one has one great line. Bugs has tricked him into 'digging for groundhogs'. Meanwhile, Bugs is throwing dirt on top. And, finally, a lily. And - voila! - 'That's that.' Except the Devil is standing right behind him.

"Whatfor you bury me in the cold, cold ground?"

Mei Mei was in tears and made me rewind to hear that part again. Then, sitting on my shoulders on the way to the store, she leaned over, gave me the eye, and said in a deep, high-pitched voice: "Whatfor you bury me in the cold, cold ground?"

I Bet I Could Afford a BIG House in Detroit

Lately I've been reading the Irvine Housing Blog a lot, which is grimly fascinating. (Interesting that they have too-bearish trolls, who say "that place is only worth $170,000!" when there's pretty much no way the place will go that low absent heavy artillery fire, but few or no "real estate is actually undervalued!" trolls. I think there was more realtor heckling in the early days of the blog.)

Along the same lines, look at this LA house (in Atwater, which I know nothing about other than that it is next to Silverlake, and I gather less desirable) on Craigslist. It is being offered for rent at $2600 per month, and for sale at...$650,000!! The online mortgage calculator I tried gives me a monthly cost of about $5,000 for that price, including a low tax but nothing for repairs/maintenance. Unclear how much the initial downpayment was meant to be in that scenario; strangely the online mortgage calculators don't seem to have a box for that information. Surely it's very relevant to the costs?

In any case, looks like there's still plenty of adjusting to do. We're considering moving back to the states in June 2009, hence the interest. You might think I have better things to do than try to find comparable properties on the rent/sale pages of LA and DC Craigslist and compare their monthly costs, but you would be wrong, because I'm sick. I mean, I'm physically ill; I don't think my morbid preoccupation with falling house prices is that bad. There are going to be lots of financially strapped people in this mess, but things are really looking up for first-time homebuyers.

UPDATE: I imagine things are also looking up for people who bought their house some time ago, have lots of equity in it due to price increases and never having taken out a home equity line of credit, and can now re-finance at super-low rates. (Wonders whether anyone is actually in this position...) Hey, mom, what's your interest rate?

And catch the gray men when they/Dive from the fourteenth floor

Sooo, how 'bout those financial markets, eh? I don't hold with any of that fancy market timing, but I'm feeling happy about all those stocks I sold to buy bonds earlier this month. Actually I am always bearish about the market in a way that's too thoroughgoing to be helpful, like when I was railing against the internet stock bubble back in the day. I was "right" in the sense that it was unsustainable, but if I were actually managing money at the time I would have been creamed shorting everything in the world about a year and a half early. When my banker said in November that the risk of a total meltdown and recession were already priced into financial stocks I laughed, hollowly. Could the US really head into a protracted recession? I say yes, but I always say that.

Detroit is Beautiful?

Click through and read this amazing design guide to Detroit, from design*sponge (it's a general guide with food, things to see, and much more than just design stores). The person who wrote the guide has a blog with photos of Detroit. I have never seen anything like it--all these spectacular abandoned buildings. Who abandons a skyscraper? Or a Grand Central Station? This one of the cars parked under a coffered ceiling from a former movie palace is blowing my mind, but the whole "Detroit is beautiful" Flickr set is worth seeing. I had a good friend move to Detroit, and I was expecting to hear about all the cool things she had hunted up there but..she sort of hated it. Nothing nearby to eat but food of the wings/pizza/chinese food hut variety DC people know and love. This guy is making a good case for it!

Mei Mei Contra Anton Ego

I got a copy of Ratatouille - haven't actually managed to watch yet, except a little. Zoë is mortally afraid to watch it, because she knows there is quite a bit of 'arguing', which she can't bear to watch. Mei Mei is more brave, but only held out until the French granny puts on the scary gas-mask. Then we had to skip ahead to the point where 'he cooks'.

When Anton Ego makes his first appearance and says something like, 'I do not believe that anyone can cook', Mei Mei looked properly shocked, looked at me and declared: "He is WRONG!"

Avian Autoiconicity in "Tweety's S.O.S"

Pursuant of our ocular theme hereabouts.

So I'm watching "Tweety's S.O.S." with Zoë and Mei-Mei. You remember. Sylvester paints a Tweety on Granny's cheaters so she'll think he's still in his cage.

Mei-Mei: That's not a very good Tweety.

Zoë: It only has to be good enough to fool Granny.

Mei-Mei: The real Tweety looks like Tweety.

Yes, pace Hegel, nothing resembles itself as much as itself. This theme is eloquently developed in the Prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment.

Do you think there's a pun on 'O'? The 'O' not just as exclamation but as the name of a shape (like the lens of Granny's cheater): round stage or rounded arch to be the Muse. Obviously, the person who looks most like Harry is Harry (cf. Tweety). So the best performance of the play was the one put on in a Kingdom, with the real King Henry. Just as, in a cartoon, the person who most resembles Tweety is Tweety, not the product of Sylvester's lukewarm Muse.

Slicing Up Eyeballs - Ah-ha-ha-ha!

So Belle gave me rather a nice B-day present, which I only just collected: Lasik eye-surgery. Singapore is a great place to get it. High quality. A lot cheaper than stateside. (Though still not cheap, of course.)

Goodbye glasses I've worn since 7th grade. I had the surgery on Friday. Took 20 minutes, felt uncomfortable but not painful. (It isn't nice to feel strong pressure on your eye for 20 seconds, combined with odd visual effects. In my case, a distinct sense that I was looking at tall, grey walls.) And I walked out, wearing Ray Bans and holding my wife's hand. Very light sensitive but already able to see basically ok. Saturday they said there seemed to be no problems. Very clean cut. I'm seeing lots of halos, which is normal - unfortunately sometimes normal for a couple months, assuming I am not one of the unlucky ones who gets to see them forever. (What does it look like? In Photoshop, turn the lightsource into a selection. Layer style. Outer glow. Opacity: 80. Noise: 70. Set to softer. Spread: 50. Size. 7 pixels. Add a bit of jitter. They are fading about a pixel a day.)

My myopia was pretty severe, and I'm approaching the age where you start to have trouble reading as well. So, without this surgery I was looking down the barrel of a pair of bifocals in a few years time. There isn't any way for surgery to correct both. So they tried something that sounds a bit weird but I guess is a familiar approach for them: my dominant eye is the left. I need to be able to read, so they made that my reading eye. It doesn't have perfect distance vision as a result of correcting for the close-in stuff. The right eye, by contrast, now has great distance vision but blurry reading vision. Supposedly my brain will learn to deal with this and I'll get close enough to the best of both. For now, it's not entirely satisfactory. But pretty good. If I decide I don't like it, I can get the left re-corrected to match the right and a pair of reading glasses to go with. But then I'll be one of those old men who has to put on his glasses to read stuff on the side of the package in the supermarket.

Maybe I could get a monacle. Or rather: two monacles. A left eye monacle for seeing perfectly in the distance. A right eye monacle for perfect reading. Wear them both on chains and use at need.

One weird thing is that I now can't really focus sharply on anything closer than about 6 inches. Which used to be practically the only range that was totally sharp. Not such a big deal. You aren't supposed to read stuff six inches away, but it's confusing to bring stuff close in and have it swim away.

Belle says my big green eyes are my best facial feature. I can't say that the competition is so stiff. But they are very large and green eyes, mine are. Long hidden and shrunken behind little lenses. (Contacts never worked for me.) Zoë has represented daddy's new handsomeness for your viewing pleasure.

The camera says they look more like this. That is: not green. But actually they are green in most lights.

Fixing the Internets

I noticed a problem on Slate.

Identity Crisis: There's Something Pathetic and Embarassing About Our Obsession With Barack Obama's Race By Christopher Hitchens

There, all fixed!

Also, Poor People Are Fat

It's perhaps silly for me, in particular, to accuse other people of being a tad oblivious of their own privilege. Nonetheless...

Megan McArdle objects to the accuracy of a privilege checklist on the grounds that it mistakenly regards going on cruises as a sign of privilege when cruises are, in fact, somewhat gauche. Likewise, having a TV in one's own room is chalked up on the privilege side, while all right-thinking people know that a child's room is meant to be filled with Newbery-award-winning books that will make them cry bitter, meaningful tears all over their Choate applications. And she's right! Cruises are somewhat gauche! I personally disapprove of TVs of any sort in bedrooms! Still, it's hard to get away from the idea that she is missing the point. Once you've gotten to the level at which this objection is germane you have skipped right to the top and are now slicing the very top segment increasingly fine. It strikes me as unlikely that the Indiana State students are really going to be misled by this in any significant way. Oh, shit, that was a totally elitist thing to say, wasn't it.

UPDATE: I've been trying to put my finger on the strangeness. Her objection seems on its face to be: I am obviously a child of privilege but this fact won't be accurately captured by this test, therefore it's worthless. And yet libertarians never admit this sort of thing normally, so it seems to boil down to: there's no such thing as privilege, and even if there were, it would be a good thing, because what these pointy-headed professors regard as 'privilege' is actually hard work and sober-minded choices about what family to be born into. Also, I learned to read when I was very young, entirely on my own and without any assistance from my parents or their cultural milieu. If the children of the poor would take more initiative they too could go to college and be annoyed by soft-headed leftists. God, aren't they so annoying!!

Skewered

John and I went to Nanbantei of Tokyo this evening. It's part of a very small chain with an outlet in San Francisco, which used to be a favorite special night out spot for us when we lived in the Bay area. (Other locations are Hong Kong, LA, Manila, Seoul, and Copenhagen.) It's just as tasty as I remembered, and I don't know why we haven't been to the Singapore one in ages. It's a yakitori place, similar in form to a sushi joint, where instead of a sushi chef presiding over a bar there are two men carefully cooking skewers over a coal-fired grill, while the strongest oven hood in the world whirs above them. Their main job seems to be to stand there flicking salt at the roasting foods in a thorough but delicate way, and thoughtfully prodding and flipping the lamb-chops. The well-known principle that wrapping things in bacon makes them better definitely applies here, with perhaps the best being the asparagus. The very-fresh salmon wrapped in bacon was delicious as well, with tiny cubes of butter placed on the top as it was taken off the grill. Yum! It's quite close to our new house, so we'll certainly be going more often.

Don't Bogle That Joint

Happy New Year, everybody! I hope it's a healthy and prosperous one. I have been reading about investment strategies lately. I always inclined to say that Vanguard-type, low-cost index funds were where it's at, but I hadn't looked into it all that closely. Having done so, I really don't understand why anyone does anything else. (Let's not get into a pointless argument here in which someone points out that if everyone had an index fund, there'd be no market, etc. Let's stipulate that by 'everyone' I mean 'everyone with a lick of sense and there's still going to be a bunch of suckers/self-deluding hopers pricing things for us.') Really, WTF. Does everyone just have an inflated sense of their own ability to pick stocks, or to pick someone to pick stocks for them. or to pick an investment adviser to...etc.? Tables showing the returns for the average higher-cost, actively managed funds vs the index fund are really painfully brutal to look at, and that's often before subtracting the tax hit created by turnover in the stocks. And how can the costs in money market funds and bond funds vary so much, when the underlying product is basically identical? Some people be getting ripped off, is all I can say to that.