The Real Charlie

I Don't Have a Category for Needless Bragging

So I just went through underwriting for a new life insurance policy and discovered that I am not merely preferred non-smoker, but super preferred non-smoker. My agent tells me that this means I can fly. As in, flap my wings and hang out with the nuthatches. It saves me about 20% per year on my premiums ("it" being my underwriting class, not flying with the nuthatches).

My beloved wife on the other hand is merely a preferred non-smoker. And you know that I am gloating about this, but hoping that this blog post doesn't bring the evil eye or some other sort of hex upon me.

Changes

I made a few changes to the left amidst the "Blogs of Note." I deleted a few that I had gotten less interested in and added two new ones:

The Swellesley Report is a nice summary of what's up in my little corner of suburbia, from the local papers, town hall and general word on the street. It's no Universal Hub, but then again what is?

Star Spangled Haggis is a delight. Sincere, snarky, loving, irreverent. I don't agree with her politics, but otherwise I love it. And as a bonus, her daughter "Bambina" is a pal of Roxanne's from the tot biz.

I am also contemplating changes on the investment front. I think that we are facing a recession next year. Not a big one, not a deep one, but one nonetheless. The housing slump is biting hard now, and dragging the consumer-driven parts of the economy down with it. Capital is still tight for corporate borrowers. Every indicator I see looks bad. Not awful, not disastrous, just bad. So I am hunkering down a bit, and considering a few moves.

One of my fixed income managers is not doing so hot. They manage tax exempt long bonds (25-30 year maturities), A and AA credits. I might liquidate, give some cash to my other fixed income manager (3-7 year maturities, AAA, tax-exempt but with authority to rotate into treasuries if the value is good), build a small "real return" position (probably in TIPS or something TIPS-based) and finally commit to an "alternative investment" fund (probably Diamond Hill Long-Short).

I also want to add to my cash cushion, probably by buying some CDs or T-bills. By the middle of next year or so, there may be some equity buying opportunities. During the 2000-2002 downturn I had a lot of free cash and picked up a nice set of iShares, Apache and ExxonMobil at a fraction of what they are, and some other nice buys. I'd like to be in a position to bargain hunt again. For that, I need to raise some more cash now.

The final thing I am considering is some form of tactical asset allocation. I have seen this really help returns in some endowment contexts and in my own retirement fund. What you do is pick a manger with a global, wide ranging authority and put 10% or so of the portfolio in their hands. Their ability to move more quickly than you can helps out in some turbulent situations, and when trends are just starting to form. I have had Blackrock Global Allocation in my IRA for a while, and it has been super. I might add more to that position, or look at a more fixed income focused tactical fund. I'll keep you posted.

Now if I can just keep my name out of the Globe for a few weeks...

Letter About The Letter About My Letter

Yup, it continues, in today's Boston Globe. Read it here. This is starting to be sort of funny. I'd suggest that I opened up a Pandora's Box here, except that Ms. Beckham was the one who opened it with her silly column oh so many weeks ago.

Hope that you, the reading public, had a fine Thanksgiving. Ours was okay, a bit too much family togetherness but fine overall. We are glad to be home. I'll post more later in the week, as I have some investment ideas to hash out "aloud," as it were. No Auschwitz talk, I promise.

Letter About My Letter, and Shoes

Today's Boston Globe had  a letter to the editor in response to my letter to the editor. The letter is well-written and reasonable, and of course I sympathize with the author's interest in making sure that the story of the Polish people's suffering under the Germans is not forgotten or brushed aside. I sent her a polite and complimentary reply. Really, I can't disagree with anything she said.

In other news, I bought two pairs of shoes today. The last time I went shoe shopping I went solo and picked out a pair of shoes at Nordstrom only for Abby to thoroughly reject them. Today I brought the whole gang to the shoe store for review and approval of my footwear. Abby and Roxanne both approved, Stella was uninterested and now I have some new shoes. Hopefully, Abby can feel free to stop ragging on me for the pair I liked at Nordstrom. Hmmph.

Another Letter to the Editor, and My Old Roommate

So my letter to the editor that I discussed in my last post here got generally good feedback -  a few comments here and a few at work, and one weird phone call that started out nice but turned a little nasty. I found out from one of my clients late in the week that, at least in some editions of the Boston Globe, the original writer apologized for her error (read the last sentance of this column).

Actually, I have had two letters to the published this fall. The other involved this article, a profile of my college roommate, Jonathon Keats. Jonathon is a conceptual artist, based in San Francisco. He is a very clever, smart and bold guy. You can see some of what he has been up to at the gallery he work with, but it is all sort of hard to explain. Some of us suspect that Jonathon's entire time at Amherst was itself an exercise in performance art, as my friend Adam and I allude to here, my other letter to the editor. The article that prompted the "throw bricks here" sign, if I recall correctly, was an written attack on Amherst's rather pathetic (at the time) Hillel (one of the many enjoyable parts of being Jonathon's friend and roommate was observing the shock expressed by so many upon discovering that this red headed preppy, complete with penny loafers, seersucker suits and a closet full of khakis and oxfords, was Jewish). He and I were basically excommunicated for that column (he for writing it, me for agreeing with it).

Jonathon introduced me to good beer, the city of San Francisco, Louis Armstrong, sushi and many other good things, and mixed some of the strongest drinks I have ever had the pleasure to enjoy. He and I have not been in touch a lot the past few years, but I admire his chutzpah and energy, and enjoyed needling him from afar. If you see this post, Jonathon, here's to you, or as we used to say, to our deaths!   

Letter to the Editor

Remember this post from last week? I was so irritated by the article that I wrote a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe. They ran it today, much to my surprise and delight. You can find it here , complete with my heretofore undisclosed full name and town. So now you know: this blog is produced by Charles S. Glassenberg, aka Charlie, aka Big Daddy, in beautiful Wellesley, Massachusetts.

The Globe ran virtually the entire letter that I sent, the one editorial addition improved it and they even used my middle initial, which I insist on. I hope that my letter makes some readers think, and Ms. Beckham as well.

I am taking over-under on number of hate mails, hate emails and hate posts I get for my letter.

The Missing Word

I originally posted a short and funny post about buying soap at BJ's and how another blogger, like my wife, admitted to buying way too much Dove soap. But I deleted it after I read this assinine article in today's Boston Globe. In it Beverly Beckham, a columnist who mostly trades in pathetic stories about how various friends and friends of friends endure tragedies of the cliche variety, trots out every cliche about the Holocaust and Auschwitz known to journalism. But I read her article twice, and there is a word missing. A word so necessary to an article about Auschwitz that it's absence suggests ignorance either willful or deeply incompetent.

That word is Jew.

This writer describes Auschwitz and the mass murder undertaken there and never mentions Jews. Let me be clear. The Germans, under the Nazi regime, murdered all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds. But the mass murder of Jews was a special project at the very heart of the Nazi military and political program in the 1930s and 1940s. Auschwitz was built, expanded and maintained for the primary purpose of murdering Jews, which its operators did with incredible effectiveness and brutality. It is the largest crime scene in Europe, and the largest Jewish burial place in the world. Beckham glosses this over and ignores the Jewish victims of Auschwitz.

Later in the article she mentions Daniel Pearl. I've seen the same video. Before the murderers of Al-Qaeda slaughter him like a goat, he says, at their direction, "I am a Jew." Beckham omits this fact, which connects Mr. Pearl to the unnumbered Mr. and Mrs. and Miss and Master Pearls of Auschwitz. She de-judaizes his murder, and theirs.  She plays into the hands of the worst sorts of anti-semites. This disgusts me.

The majority of the people murdered at Auschwitz would have proclaimed, "I am a Jew." Daniel Pearl proclaimed, "I am a Jew" before he was decapitated by the moral heirs of the killers at Auschwitz. I proclaim, I am a Jew, and this essay injures me at the very core of my being.