Category: Uncategorized

Michael Lewis was on The Daily Show this week. He has a book out called Boomerang about the global financial crisis. Essentially it is a compilation of feature articles he wrote for Vanity Fair about Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California. He also wrote The Blind Side which was made into a movie with Sandra Bullock and Moneyball, another non-fiction book turned into a movie that has just come out and stars Brad Pitt.

For each article he goes to the country and reports on what he finds out. It is a pretty funny picture of each country (I’ve read the Iceland and Greece articles so far) plus gives you a lot of details about their economic troubles. Nothing complicated or technical, but still good information, if a little superficial (which he admits). The articles are almost more of a travelogue than news article. He says about two Greek tax collectors that although they are both whistle blowers fearing for their jobs, they can’t stand each other. He writes “This, I’d be told many times by other Greeks, was very Greek.” In Greece the government workers were making 3 times the average private sector wage. However, he also points out that in the private sector most people list themselves as self-employed and report almost no income in order to avoid taxes. If the tax agency investigated, you could just bribe them to leave you alone or fight the charges in court which would take forever. Knowing the court battle would take forever, the tax agency generally would just give up.

He started the series with Iceland where he talks about these really aggressive Icelandic fishermen giving up fishing to become investment bankers and ruining the country by taking the same kinds of risks as investment bankers that they took as North Atlantic fishermen. He points out that Iceland is just this really, really sparsely populated country and everyone knows everyone else. He asks a guy if he knows Bjork. He says of course he does. Everyone knows everyone in Iceland. And the guy adds that not only is Bjork a bad singer, but so is her mother.

He has also covered Germany who loaned out most of the money and are now stuck with paying most of the bills. Ireland is another place where the speculative bubble burst in a big way. And just this month he has written about California where the people insist the government stay in operation but also keep refusing to allow the government to collect taxes.

Vanity Fair only gives you a teaser of the first article on Iceland. But I found a PDF version here and a web version on a Congressman’s website, though it is missing the last paragraph.

• Iceland Wall Street on the Tundra, April 2010
• Greece Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, October 2010
• Ireland When Irish Eyes Are Crying, March 2011
• Germany It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!, September 2011
• California California and Bust, November 2011

I was watching NBC news this week and they were saying that in the last 10 years, many people across the country now live close to a part of the 9/11 attacks. The wreckage of the twin towers has been broken up and distributed to a lot of different places, mostly fire stations. I found a website where you can track the different pieces to find the closest one and found only two anywhere nearby: one in Riverdale and one in Conyers. Neither of those is that close. Then I read on ajc.com that Dekalb County was unveiling a 9/11 memorial at their public safety headquarters in Tucker today at 8AM. Well, I wasn’t going to get up that early, but I did want to go by and see it, especially because it also includes a piece of the 9/11 wreckage. Not a big piece, the thing I saw said it was 18 inches long. It isn’t marked as being 9/11 wreckage, but it is there in front of the statue of a phoenix wing (most might think it is an eagle wing), and it is nice that you can touch it. It had some blue painters tape on it for some reason (could it be just the base of the rod that hasn’t been installed yet?). There were a handful of people there and there seemed to be a steady flow of people coming by.

This is a trip through Wikipedia I took recently. Earlier in the week I was in Wilmington for a Peace Corps reunion and as we were driving by the airport, one of my friends asked me to look up the symbol for the Wilmington airport, which it turns out is ILM. He was wondering where that came from. The article didn’t say (I suspect WIL was already taken, so they took the ILM from Wilmington), but had some other neat facts like the airport is a backup emergency landing strip for the space shuttle if something happened during launch. Originally the space shuttle needed 10,000 feet to land, but they improved the brakes and only needed 7,500 feet, which allowed ILM to become a backup.

The article said that at one time the airport had been named Blumenthal Field for Arthur Blementhal. His article said he was an All American football player from Princeton and the first person from North Carolina to die in World War I when the plane he was flying for the French was shot down by German planes. For this he received his second Croix de Guerre. So I looked that up and it turns out the “War Cross” is a medal given to foreigners who distinguish themselves fighting for the French. A list of notable recipients of the Croix de Guerre included Cher Ami, a British homing pigeon in World War I used by American troops. So I had to click on that and read the story of the Lost Battalion in World War I, about five hundred men who had been cut off from their lines during the battle of Verdun and were being attacked by both the Germans and the allies and had no way of calling for help except by sending messages by homing pigeon. They released two pigeons who were picked off by the Germans, but the third, nicknamed Cher Ami, made it through despite also being shot, and eventually the Lost Battalion was saved (or about half of them, the rest were captured or killed). Once I read that article, I think I remember reading a story about Cher Ami in grade school.

The other day at lunch we were talking about the Pledge of Allegiance for some reason and wondering when it was written. I thought it was written in the 1800’s. So I looked it up on my iPod’s copy of Wikipedia. I was barely right: it was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. The article has a good history of the Pledge. It has been revised several times since. In 1923, they added “of the United States” apparently so immigrants would know they were pledging to our flag and not their old flag. Still not specific enough, I guess, they added “of America” the following year. I guess there was a lot of confusion about which United States people were pledging their allegiance. It wasn’t until 1954 that “under God” was added.

Anyway, the thing that really cracked me up was reading about a salute that was added to the Pledge by Bellamy himself, called the Bellamy salute or just the “flag salute.” He thought people should stretch out their right hand upwards towards the flag with their palm down as they began reciting the Pledge. This continued to be practiced until 1939 when President Roosevelt decided it looked entirely too much like a Hitler salute and instructed people to put their right hand over their heart instead.

NBC News has had a couple of stories about “Carmageddon” which is a nickname given to the closing of the I-405 Highway in Los Angeles. I wanted to see how long they would be closing the interstate, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and wound up on the I-405 page, which told they are only closing it for a weekend which doesn’t seem that bad to me. In the article is an old picture of two of the engineers on the project. What I knew was very unusual about the picture was that it was so old and that there were two women engineers involved, including the designer of the bridge (the other unusual thing is that the engineers are given any credit at all for the highway appearing).

I honestly don’t think Georgia had any women bridge engineers until the 1980’s. So this was pretty impressive, especially because this was a pretty major project, using complicated designs with primitive computers, and in one of the country’s worst seismic zones. I wanted to see if I could find out anything else about the bridge engineer in the picture, Marilyn Reece (on the left, in the white coat). A Google search quickly found her obituary from 2004 in the Los Angeles Times. They had a great write-up about this pioneer who was the first female civil engineer to become a Professional Engineer in California. They said she became an engineer because she liked math and didn’t want to be a teacher.