The Wild Fern: Seventeen Stars Out of Five

Fans of The Dave know that I tend to be fairly binary with my reviews-- things are either "the best in the world" or "the worst thing ever" and that may be because I don't have a very good memory; I tend to live inside each moment, like an incredibly focused Buddhist yogi, discarding the past and ignoring the future . . . but despite this ability/impairment, I'm asking you to take this review very very seriously: if you ever find yourself in Vermont, on Route 100, a bit north of Killington Mountain, then you need to visit The Wild Fern and you need to eat whatever the owner/cook/waitress/hostess Heather has prepared for the day-- if you catch breakfast, it might be the best bagel you've ever tasted (with local eggs and bacon) or a delicate and airy New Orleans style donut with Nutella-- and if you go for dinner, then you need to try everything: the burger (local beef, homemade English muffin, Vermont cheese) is juicy and delicious; the pizza is fantastic; and the roast pork and sauerkraut is one of the best things I've ever eaten (and I hate roast pork and sauerkraut!) but the food is only half the deal; there's usually live music (Heather's boyfriend is local musician Rick Redington and she plays the bass in his band-- Redington performed when we ate dinner there, he's an incredible guitarist/singer and seems like a very nice guy) and the place has some sort of local post-hippie vibe that's only possible in a rural place that's still spitting distance to civilization (The Wild Fern is in the middle of nowhere, but it's still only thirty minutes from the semi-bustle of Rutland) and while there's not much seating-- the place is a shack-- Heather will take your order, tell you her life story, lend you her vintage Guild guitar (if I could always play a guitar while I while I waited for my food, I'd never complain about slow service) and explain just how she makes her amazing food (and as an added perk, the "Luv Bus" is parked in the lot outside-- it's the touring bus for Rock Redington & The Luv and it's the perfect finishing touch of verisimilitude for the scene).

11/10/2009

The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil doesn't just allude to This is Spinal Tap, it is This is Spinal Tap, except that it's "real," or sort of real, because obviously director Sacha Gervasi is as much paying homage to the greatest of mockumentaries as he is telling the story of an absurd (but well regarded in the industry) heavy metal band . . . and if you are a fan of Spinal Tap, then the film becomes weirder and weirder as the scenes grow more literally parallel-- and some are obviously constructed this way: such as the montage of ridiculous Anvil album covers and the knob in the studio that goes to 11, but when the two founding members of Anvil!, who were childhood friends, nostalgically hum the riffs to "Thumb Hang," one of the first songs they wrote together, and the scene happens in a deli, you can't help but think of Michael McKeon and Christopher Guest riffing on "All the Way Home" and it just keeps getting more and more like Spinal Tap-- there is a scene at Stonehenge and a disastrous tour and the drummer's name happens to be Robb Reiner, until, finally, in the last scene (which I won't spoil) you wonder if the whole thing is an elaborate joke-- but apparently it isn't, so sometimes life mimics art, and sometimes art mimics life, and sometimes I think I've seen Spinal Tap more times than is good for me.

Does This Guy Look 80% Bald?

I'm wading through The Best American Science Writing of 2010 and overarching theme of the collection is this: things are complicated . . . and in Steven Pinker's essay "My Genome, My Self," this slowly becomes apparent, as he analyzes the "genetic report card" he received from the personal genetic sequencing company 23andMe-- some of his genes validate reality: he has the gene for blue eyes and he actually has blue eyes . . . some don't: he has genes that make it highly likely that he will be bald, but he sports a billowing Jew-fro . . . some point at his heritage (Askenazi Jew) and some point towards percentages: the reports says he has a 12 percent chance of getting prostrate cancer . . . but most of what he had sequenced, like the genes for height, which is highly heritable, will barely have any effect (the dozen genes for height only account for 2% of the variation of height among humans-- the rest of the difference is caused by unknown factors) and may mean nothing in his life or everything, depending on all the other genes that weren't sequences, any unusual genes he has that are extremely rare, factors in the environment, and random mutation and affect-- and when Pinker philosophizes on why there is so much variety in humanity because of all these factors, when evolution doesn't require this much uniqueness for survival, he brings up the fact that if there's too much of any one type of personality, then there is a benefit to being different-- if everyone is nice, then it pays to be mean, but once there are enough mean people, they counter-act each other and it is the band of communal folks that will survive-- and he uses a proverb to remind us of the value of variety in a species: "The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

Individuals Tending Towards Savagery Is A Great Name For A Punk-Rock Band

 Sentence of Dave has often discussed risk assessment . . .  it's difficult to decide what to worry about in a world where so much unfiltered information is so readily accessible . . . and so I will place you on the horns of another anxiety-filled dilemma: should you worry more about Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, a radical Mexican anti-technology group that praises the writings of Ted Kaczynski and recently bombed two Mexican nano-technology professors at the Monterrey Technological Institute, or should you worry about their prediction: that nanotechnology research will result in the creation of nano-cyborgs, which will be able to self-replicate automatically without the help of humans and eventually form an exponentially increasing "gray-goo" that will smother all life on earth?

A Really LONG Sentence About a Really BIG SHORT

I just finished the new Michael Lewis book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and I've probably got a three day window to explain what a "synthetic sub-prime mortgage bond-backed C.D.O." is-- but I guarantee no one will ask me this (thus the purpose of the blog) and I can also explain tranches (both senior and mezzanine) and credit default swaps and the corruption in the AAA ratings of these bonds and lots of other good stuff . . . I had to read many paragraphs two or three times, but Lewis intersperses financial analysis with the story of a group of investors that were "in the know" and it's these characters that propel the plot of the book: caustic and gritty insider Steve Eisman-- who was on a mission to get back at all the people who foisted the terrible no-doc sub-prime mortgages on the working poor--and the one eyed medical doctor with Asperger's, Dr. Steve Burry, who became obsessed with sub-prime mortgage bonds and CDO's and actually read the prospectuses and realized that the whole trillion dollar house of cards was bound to collapse, even if the housing market didn't fall, even if it just stopped rising as quickly as it did in the years past, and then there's the "garage band" hedge fund started by Jamie Mai and Charles Hedley to short the housing bond market, and that helps explain just how difficult it is for regular people to invest in the same markets that the big brokerages firms are controlling; I've read a few good books on this theme, including House of Cards and The Black Swan (and also Michael Lewis's last collection of essays Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity) but this new book really explains the exponential nature of this dilemma . . . we all know some wacky mortgages were issued (and some with good intentions, the initial reason for a greater variety of mortgage types was to allow people with weaker credit to purchase homes, in the hopes that they would then be able to save money in the form of real estate) and I think everyone knows now that the bonds that were based on slices of these mortgages failed, but Lewis really gets into how CDO's multiplied these loans exponentially into more and more nested products which only contained more of themselves, and how the ratings agencies saw this as "diversification" even though many of these funds contained pieces of each other and even though they were ALL based on the price of housing (unlike earlier derivatives, which were based on a wide variety of weird loans: credit cards, airplane leases, etc.) and he explained just how opaque this market was, and how "inside" and how difficult it was to even obtain the shorts (the credit default swaps) on these products, and how even after housing prices started to fall and everyone was defaulting on their mortgages, the insurance on these CDO's still didn't sky-rocket in price because the funds were being propped up even though the reality beneath them was caving in-- and it makes you feel really out of the loop as a regular person, even rich people didn't have access to these markets (but we all had access to the information!) and the ending is sad in a way, because everyone involved in the crash walked away with money, even the investors who went long with the sub-prime loans, everyone got paid and the government bailed out the banks and brokerages (except Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers) and though we, the people, couldn't get in on the party, we will pay for the clean-up (at least with the oil spill, though we are paying for the clean-up, we've been in on the party, driving around like lunatics all our life).