The Real Charlie

Son of the Commandments

 

I mentioned on Facebook last night that February 9th was the 25th anniversary of my becoming a bar mitzvah - a son of the commandments. A few of my junior high school classmates who were there commented (both remembered the caricaturist at the party, a detail I had actually forgotten). I gave a d'var Torah last week on my bar mitzvah portion from twenty five years ago (Parshat Yitro, for those who care) and got to reread it again in some detail. I know that as portions go I lucked out, seeing as the Ten Commandments are revealed in Yitro, and I surely did better than one friend of mine who was saddled with Parshat Metzorah, the laws of shunning the leper.

One thing that occurred to me looking back at my bar mitzvah, and reflecting on life in general as I complete my 38th year, was the ultimate influence my bar mitzvah had on my career. At the suggestion of my parents, I did not get many bar mitzvah gifts (I can actually remember them all: a copy of Bartlett's Quotations, a calculator, three shares of Polaroid stock and a trip to see the Normandy invasion beaches, the last of those gifts was from my parents). Most of my guests gave donations to the local hospital and my synagogue. For years random kids from school would tell me that they saw my name on a door at the hospital (there was a plaque in the post surgical wing) and I was always sort of proud of that. I suspect that my guests were fairly generous.

I've been a development professional for thirteen years now and it has only just now dawned on me that perhaps this was foreshadowing of my life to come. I am certainly not the most observant Jew around, there is a long list of commandments that I break by accident or design (I am always pleasant to lepers, for example), but the commandment to do tzedakah, to give charity and to thus make the world a better place, that is at the very core of so much of my life. And honestly, I enjoy it so much. So I did start to become the man I am now twenty five years ago. And I suspect that I still have at least another quarter century of work to do to become the son of the commandments that I really should be, and could be.

I will also note for the record, regarding the photo above, that I no longer own a camel hair jacket, but will still happily stand in front of a nice modern painting and lecture all and sundry on all and sundry.

Who Gets To Allocate Whose Assets

I've been thinking about asset allocation funds recently. For those unfamiliar, these are mutual funds (or separately managed accounts) that let the manager move with full discretion or within some range between equities, fixed income securities, cash and sometimes other assets.

I use one of these funds in a retirement account and, all things being equal, it has done well over a few tough up and down years. It has outperformed one account where I set the allocation among four managers (one bonds, one domestic equities, one international equities and global equities). Another account that I manage myself as well among a selection of funds performed much better than the asset allocation manager.

I'm at a point where I can allocate some capital again in a few different places and keep wondering whether I should pick a set of funds and allocate myself, or pick one (or more) asset allocation funds and let someone else do the driving. There is a strong temptation to do the latter, and rely on the manager to be nimble, to use tools not so accessible to me (shorting, currency trading) to gain some alpha, etc.

And yet with an actively managed asset allocation fund I really need to make sure that the manager and I see pretty eye to eye. I'm pretty bearish right now, interested in buying if (big if) I can find value, but frustrated by the ultra-low returns on my cash. Not a lot of managers are willing to sit on 25-35% cash waiting for another buying opportunity. On the other hand, my buy discipline is lousy, mostly because I get nervous and under buy, but also because I get busy with my real job.

I don't pretend to have a solution to my conundrum yet but figure I'm better off posting about it and getting something up on this woebegone old blog of mine. And if anyone has any ideas, by all means comment.

Typhus and the Mumps

No, don't worry, I don't have either. But good old Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report has news on both of these diseases, in a nice break from "all flu all the time."

Murine typhus: a nasty flea-borne disease, usually treatable with antibiotics, related to but different than epidemic typhus, which is lice borne, and was what killed Anne Frank. This outbreak is from Austin, Texas, where people caught it from cats that caught it from opossums. Beware the marsupial!

Mumps: an outbreak of an old scourge that is becoming more common because of people not getting the full MMR series for their kids. The neat feature of this particular mumps outbreak: it occurred among an unnamed Orthodox Jewish community and its spread basically maps out Orthodox life in the northeast: brought to camp in the Catskills by a kid from the UK, spread to Borough Park, Monsey, Kiryas Joel and Ocean County, NJ (Lakewood) once camp was over and school started, then to Quebec over Sukkot.

MMWR always leaves us with a moral or two, in this case I suggest, once more, that you and your kids get shots, and that you stay away from opossums. The overriding moral, as always, is that MMWR is a fine example of our tax dollars at work. And I mean that in all sincereity, sarcastic libertarian though I may be.

Explain My Commute To Me

Back to an old theme here, namely traffic and commuting. I normally take the Worcester-Framingham Line into South Station, and it is mostly OK - usually around fine minutes late getting into town, usually on time getting home. Today I got a text message (the T will send you texts if your train is having issues) that the line was having delays due to weather related issues - specifically, wet leaves on the tracks. Seriously. So I drove.

I was prepared for delays on the Pike due to glare or extra traffic due to people diverted from the train (which ended up with 60 minute delays and cancelations), but the Pike was pretty average - the usual slow spots, nothing crazy. Downtown, however, was another matter. It took me 45 minutes to get from the Pike exit at South Station to the corner of Purchase Street and Oliver Street. That is basically a few blocks. No accident, no closed lane, but lots of gridlock and road rage. I contributed more than my share of the last item.

I am mystified by this and have two theories. One, could the traffic lights have been off due to the time change, and they were acting like it was 9:15 instead of 8:15? Two, could the drivers have been off because of the time change, and they were acting like idiots? Any traffic theoreticians out there? Anyone else sit on Atlantic Avenue in Boston for way too long this morning and have their own idea? I'm thinking of walking tomorrow...

Sierra Nevada Torpedo - Lost and Found

Just a short post tonight, I am really trying to get this blog alive again so I am aiming to increase posting volume even if the posts are short and not entirely incisive.

When we were visiting Washington DC in April I picked up a six pack of Sierra Nevada Torpedo as my hotel room beer for the visit (as in the beer I drank in the hotel room in the evening after the kids went to bed and we were stuck in for the night.) Wow. Crisp, complex hop flavor, bitter but not astringent, just delicious. Subsequently, I was utterly unable to find any Sierra Nevada Torpedo in Boston. Ever. Not even a bottle.

On Saturday I was delighted to find the beer in stock at Marty's in Newton. I grabbed several six packs. The beer manager looked at me, somewhat balefully. "You're cleaning me out," he said, reporting that these six packs were hard to get in stock in any quantity. He promised more in the near future.

If you are of an ale-drinking inclination I recommend Sierra Nevada Torpedo highly. And if you ever drank a beer that you'd like to drink again, and haven't been able to find, you might want to follow my lead and keep looking at one of your favorite local purveyors, or several of them.

Another reason not to snack between meals.

In my last post I noted that MMWR was very swine flu focused, but still mixing it up with some other interesting and, let's be honest, weird and entertaining content. This week they lead with a scary (to this dad) article about swine flu deaths among young children, and then follow it up with this absolute, all time classic. It opens strong:

"On April 8, 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) notified officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) in California about a group of preschool teachers with nausea, dizziness, headache, and numbness and tingling of fingertips after consumption of brownies purchased 3 days before from a sidewalk vendor."

As soon as you see brownies you know where this is headed:

"This report summarizes the results of that investigation, which detected cannabinoids in a recovered sample of the brownies."

That's right: someone bought treats on the street and inadvertently (one hopes) dosed their fellow nursery school teachers via good ole fashioned pot brownies. No one got too sick, one person spit out the brownie because it tasted "unusual," and, not surprisingly, "[t]he sidewalk vendor has not been located to date."

Obviously there are lessons here, namely that street vendors should not spike the merchandise and that, for so many reasons, it can pay to skip the random snacks out at work. MMWR is good for those lessons, as valuable personal hygiene and health habits are reinforced and both the menace of the natural world and the folly of mankind are writ large. And let me close by reminding you, on behalf of the CDC, to never eat a dead whale that you find on the beach.

Various Updates on All and Sundry

Time to catch up on things here at the old blog, much neglected now that I am a Facebooker. I'm noticing my Facebook updates getting a bit too wordy, which probably means I need the longer format of the blog again. Can I shoot to be on here once or twice a week? I should try.

1. The chickens were a lot of fun. Roxanne helped me put them into their coop at night, and Stella joined me to let them out in the morning. They liked eating yogurt and tearing up my lawn. But over two weeks, I got precisely zero eggs. I suspect that my neighborhood was not fancy enough for these birds, used to life in swanky Weston, Massachusetts. I saw some chickens at another house last week and it made me miss my poultry.
2. The new home office is coming along very slowly. Much more cleaning out is needed, especially of books. I need to get rid of a lot of books, and am actually considering bringing a box of them to work, letting colleagues take what they want, and then giving the rest to the town library for their book sale. Downside: my colleagues will see some of the crap that I read. Can I say that all the bad and obscure military history books were Abby's?
3. MMWR is very focused on the Swine Flu (or novel H1N1 influenza as they call it) but still occasionally shares some information on more esoteric sources of human death and injury. Like farmers getting killed by their own cows. And people giving themselves hepatitis by taking herbal remedies for suspected parasites. Your tax dollars at work. And I mean that as a good thing.

I'll leave the assortment there for tonight. I think I owe my few remaining readers an investment update, perhaps I'll post that tomorrow night.

Real Farmer Daddy?

I don't know about Farmer Daddy, but we are hosting two nice hens in our yard for two weeks in their fancy a-frame chicken tractor. Casey the chicken guy told us not expect eggs, but we'll see how that goes. We also haven't named them yet. One is white and the other multi-colored. The multi-colored one is quite feisty and a bit dim.

As you can imagine, Roxanne and Stella are most excited about our house guests.

My mother's family is from Colchester, Connecticut, once a hotbed of Jewish chicken farming in America. So I guess I'm back to my roots, in a strange sort of way. Updates as events warrant here and on facebook.

Cleaning Out

So Abby and I have created a new office in our house, in the otherwise disused formal living room, and we are slowly cleaning out the former office, soon to be a true guestroom. As part of this ongoing effort we are cleaning out the guestroom, especially the great heaps of paper and ephemera that have accumulated over the past five years. Tonight I packed up a big box of college-era memorabilia destined for the basement that included the following treasures of the past:

• set lists from four Superchunk shows
• set lists from my radio show
• transcripts from college and graduate school, including my one F ever
• many party posters and invitations
• freshman facebooks from 1993-1994
• letters (on paper!) from friends studying abroad
• letters from my mentors, mostly full of sage advice, some of which I even took
• photos of Amherst buried in deep snow from the frigid winter of 1993-199

A few things have been deemed too precious for the basement: my school photo IDs from seventh grade through graduate school, a folder full of letters that my father sent my every week (and that included a $20 bill to boot) from 1990-1996 and a set of emails that I printed out years ago that include Abby and I scheduling our first date!

I completed these tasks and then discovered an email from an old lost friend in my inbox. The nostalgia is thick around these parts this week, I tell you.

Slightly Famous

Check it out, my house and the artwork of the lovely and talented Abby are on the Cookie magazine blog here. The article has a few mistakes (like the spelling of our name...) but it's fun to see our abode and our stuff online.