John & Belle Have A Blog

Happy Birthday Violet!

Weeel, we're improving-ish. It was Violet's 4th birthday on the 22nd, and although this may linger in my bitter memory as the year we put a "4" candle on a pink frosted doughnut from the grocery store, she actually had a fine time and enjoyed lying around on her little water-filled fever cooling mat and watching Barbie Mariposa. The touch and go question has been whether she'll be well enough for her party Saturday and I think she will. I had to do some work today setting up photo shoots at my house for Singapore Home and Décor magazine, and I wanted to cancel it because I'm so sick but I already had to reschedule once with them because Violet was in the hospital, so I just gutted it out and it was OK. If I can just get through the birthday party itself then I can relax. And then...something? I know we're going to get a lot better than this. I've been enjoying the work for the magazine as a "stylist" where I basically do crafty stuff and arrange it attractively. I'll tell you more about it when I feel better.

Words Fail Me

Well, this is so boring and pitiful that I haven't even wanted to post on our blog, but anyway. Zoë got better and went to school 2 days last week, while Violet rocked one solid week of school for the first time in like 3 months. We went over to a friend's house and had dinner Friday, hung out, the girls got to play with my friend's kids' hamsters and see them roll around in the plastic rolly balls (always fun.) Isn't it nice to see Violet up and about! we said, hubristically, imagining her febrile activity was jolly good health. Why not decide to beat the sea with flails while we were at it! Then when I got in the cab to go home and put her on my lap I thought...it felt like she had a fever. Because she did! 103 wonderful degrees of fun! So we were going to take her to the doctor the next morning but by the time we got up here fever was in the danger zone of 104+ so we took her to the ER. Nothing wrong in the UTI front, she's just got a bad cold, basically, which I do too. We've been sponging with water, and waking up every six hours to take ibuprofen, and blah blah blah. Violet's birthday is tomorrow, but her party isn't until next Saturday. If she's too sick to have a party I actually am going to cry, with real tears and everything. The theme of her party this year is Minuscule, a French show about bugs which everyone should watch. It's like silent film, there's no words, only sounds effects, and beautiful animation that combines digital effects with real photos. The flash-based (yet non-terrible!) site looks different in the day than at night and changes with the seasons. There are a few videos on the site, you should watch them. Also, I changed gears a while ago to make this a more family-friendly blog, cursing-wise, but I'd just like to say, what the fucking fuck?

That Last Step Is...

Zoë's doing OK-ish, although I'm having trouble getting her to take her antibiotics. This is only natural since the granules have persistently refused to melt in the water and thus it is like drinking wet sand. I would probably barf that up too.

Moving on to more pleasant topics, you should look at this amazing house in California (watch the slideshow). I really want a walnut ceiling now. Lots of beautiful houses in Bali have, like this one, a pool right in the middle of them, or sliding doors that open onto a pool. It does look beautiful, but isn't it the worst drowning hazard ever? Can you be certain no one with a toddler or small child is ever going to visit you, ever? Even drunk adults might fall in there with bad results, seems to me.

I am Tired

This week we decided to mix it up a bit, so Zoë has had a horrible flu-like thing and 40C fever. Lots of sponging with lukewarm water and being bothered by imaginary bugs. She seems better today. Violet was well enough to go to a birthday party today for her best friend at school, Nora. It was at a stable in Pasir Ris park where you can ride ponies, although Violet felt too shy to ride a pony. She mostly just sat in Daddy's lap; she's still not her bouncy self. I would like my children to both be well enough to attend school for an entire week, both of them. Is that so fucking much to ask?

I'm getting cranky, or some combination of cranky and really worried and upset. I had to go to the doctor myself (naturally) and he was like, you seem a bit stressed. Hmmm, ya think? Our new-ish local doctor is really sweet and  old, with a charming bedside manner, wild eyebrows, and a yellowed diploma from the University of Malaya. He reminds me of my pediatrician when I was a kid, Dr. King. His home/office was right on one of the squares in Savannah, I think maybe the one on Habersham and East President, a brick house with stairs up to the front door. He had been a colleague of my grandfather Dr. A.J. Waring Jr. He had a big...well, glass menagerie, I guess you'd call it. Sometimes he would give us an animal if we were very good, like a little glass zebra with clear glass legs that were shaped like swirls of cake frosting. Here in Singapore they give the children sweets, and I know a Danish mom who complains about it because it's not healthy. I guess I don't care.

Who the hell is Marlena?

Obviously I should know what this is about, but I don't. (From the comments: "all of the john/belle moments are so adorable! that kinda makes me sad because i never had that kind of connection with my own dad. but this is a really good clip of all three of them.")

90% Interest Rates Draw Lenders

This is an interesting article in the NYT about a microfinance lender in Mexico that is a for-profit, publicly traded company. You always hear in discussions of charity microlending that the default rates are incredibly low. Special measures are taken, such as lending almost exclusively to women and having the women form groups whose loans (and defaults) are pooled. And obviously, the transaction costs on making many small loans would have to be much higher than fewer, bigger loans. Nonetheless, I always wondered why the market didn't attract for-profit lenders, if the repayment rates were really so good.

Well, in this case it has. The non-profit lenders, and the man who came up with the idea, economist Muhammad Yunus, are opposed to the encroaches of for-profit companies that will be run for the benefit of their investors. As long as the for-profit lenders don't get the government to lean on their idealistic competitors it seems to me it would be all to the good--the funds of "ethical" investors can be put to work in underserved markets, and the original, non-profit orgs should be able to offer better rates in areas where they compete.

As I typed this entry, I wondered, do these organizations ever get protested against on gender fairness grounds? "You dickheads will just drink up the money" isn't a very conciliatory response, even if it's well-founded...Desultory googling yields this possible link between access to microfinance and becoming the victim of domestic violence for women in Bangladesh, but that wasn't exactly what I was thinking of. Except insofar as I was thinking about dickheads. The microfinance discrimination far exceeds anything like variable rates for car insurance; from everything I've read they just basically don't loan money to men. This may not result in serious injustice to the male would-be entrepreneurs as a class if men have access to traditional sources of credit closed to women in a society, but it could still be pretty unfair in any given case. It strikes me that the sort of people who would strongly object to this are the same people who would laud accurate, dispassionate risk assessment in other financial areas, but making up imaginary political opponents with contradictory views is unseemly, so I'll stop there.

UPDATE: mere seconds later, I am moved to ask, day-um, what's in that cheese? That looks gooood.  Mmm, mysterious queso.

Basic Architecture

Zoë did this one freehand, using only a ruler. And a book about Greek architecture.

Speaking of basic architecture: I'm finally getting around to installing Leopard on our desktop iMac. Here's the thing. I actually tried it once and it encountered some problem, causing it to eject the disc summarily at a certain point. Somewhat nervouse-making, when one might be betwixt and between systems. But maybe our machine isn't meant to take it. Our specs are as follows:

Machine Name:    iMac G5
Machine Model:    PowerMac8,1
CPU Type:    PowerPC G5  (3.0)
Number Of CPUs:    1
CPU Speed:    1.8 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU):    512 KB
Memory:    1 GB
Bus Speed:    600 MHz

I would have thought a G5 with 1.8 GHz processing speed was good enough. Supposedly you only need G4 and 800+Mhz. But maybe the Bus speed is too slow. I dunno. Should I just try again?

Will a machine like this run slow on Leopard. It runs just fine with what we've got. Maybe I don't even need the upgrade. What do you think?

Would The Architect of Glass-Steagall Please Come On Down

Nice to see the Washington Post offer a little straight talk about America's most mavericky, mavericking maverick ever and his array of contradictory (yet evil!) economic advisers:

One of them helped deregulate the financial services industries in the 1990s, and now sits in the corporate suites of Swiss banking giant UBS, which yesterday announced $19 billion in investment losses tied to the crumbling U.S. real estate market. The other pushed one of the most aggressive and controversial mergers of the technology boom, then was sacked by the disenchanted board of Hewlett-Packard.

Former senator Phil Gramm, with his aw-shucks Texas drawl, may at first blush have little in common with Carly Fiorina, the telegenic former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. But they share a bond: Both are leading economic advisers of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and both have reputations as the kind of aggressive capitalists that may be sliding from favor as the nation's economy edges toward recession....

The spiraling crisis in the credit and housing markets has kept Gramm in focus, fairly or not. His employer, UBS, revealed yesterday that investment losses tied to the U.S. housing market reached $37 billion over the last six months. For the last three months, UBS posted a $12 billion loss.

Gramm, UBS's vice chairman, said yesterday he was "totally unaware" of his bank's massive holdings of securities tied to subprime mortgages, but, he added, "I'm confident we'll recover."

OK, a) it seems one could be either totally unaware of the state of the bank's balance sheet, or justly confident in its solvency, but surely not both. B), could we please make a national agreement to stop pretending that people's southern or Texan accents mean they're some sort of bumpkin naïf likely to be scared by the horseless streetcars and complex derivative swaps of the big city? FFS.

We're Home!!

Violet is doing better and we are back home. Yay us. Maybe next week she can even go to school! Zoë missed us, as it was the longest time she's gone without Mei Mei ever (I did go to the states for Thanksgiving last year leaving them both behind, a cruel maneuver in exchange for which I am taking them to East Hampton in July.) I am still very queasy, which is a strangely present-to-consciousness annoyance. Now I can get back to life's simple pleasures, like making fun of Jonah Goldberg. A reader asks, "What works of [Eric Voegelin's] did you reference for your article? Or, what works would you recommend as a starting point?" Goldberg backpedals furiously:

Me: First, I should be very clear: I am not an expert on Voegelin. I have not read most of his writings. For they are numerous and often very, very, difficult.  I have read a bunch of the stuff that I found I had to read for my book. But rather than suggest this or that book or essay, I think a great and very useful place to start would be Michael Federici's excellent book Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order (published by the indispensable ISI books). It is very accessible while at the same time being faithful to Voegelin's work — as best I can tell at least. It even has a glossary of Voegelin's most important-yet-esoteric terms. It made reading the primary sources a lot easier, for me at least.

I bet it made "reading the primary sources" a lot easier.