Year: 2000

Of the dining room table with flaps that fold up and allow the dishes to be washed in place, I wrote: “Sound impractical? What if the dishes were glued to the table, so they didn’t move as the soapy jet stream hit them, or need to be re-centered once clean? This gets better all the time.”

To which Jeff responds: “No, this is getting worse. You should’ve stuck with the reloadable dishwasher-cabinets idea. How am I going to eat off of dishes stuck to the table? What if I want to spin my dish to get at the particular food on the other side? Or, suppose I want to share something with my wife (suppose I had a wife)? If that doesn’t stop you from creating this ridiculous invention, consider what happens if one piece gets a chip or breaks or something — do you have to replace the entire thing? (What, you may ask, might break immovable dishes? Wait until my future alleged wife and I have children — I’m sure they’ll find a way.) As for me, I’ll stick with individual, modular, and replaceable parts (spoken like a true engineer, eh?). If I want new dishes, I just replace them, not my entire house.”

All great ideas meet resistance at first.

Robert Doucette: “These folding table/dishwasher stories have been reminding me of a lame joke I read in my youth (remember Boy’s Life?). I’ve been holding off on this joke for quite some time, but maybe if I tell it we can discuss something else for awhile — maybe something about money. Hell, I’d prefer one of your Ostrich recipes over another week of dishwasher stories.

“It seems there were two mountain men. Today these would be members of some wacko militia or a pair of Unabombers (Duobombers?), but in my carefree youth, mountain men were quaint characters who lived in Montana & West Virginia, but mostly inhabited these lame stories. Well, these mountain men got a letter that their citified cousins were coming to visit. Not wanting to spend more time than necessary with the cousins, they devised a plan.

“Two weeks later the cousins arrived. The mountain men — let’s call them Zeke and Josiah — welcomed their cousins and soon they were all sitting down to a fine mountain meal of grilled trout with a wild raspberry glaze. (Generally, mountain men dined on roots and road kill, but I’m trying to go against type, here).

“During the meal, the city cousins were surprised to find their plates were nailed to the table (ok, see, I am leading us back to the dishwasher stories). After the meal, they volunteered to wash the dishes, and asked about the nailed down plates. Josiah (or maybe Zeke) said not to bother and opened the door and called for his hounds. Suddenly, three or four large dogs ran into the house, jumped on the table and licked all of the plates clean. (Now you see why I don’t like being reminded of this story.) Then Zeke said, ‘That’s how we wash the dishes here in th’ mount’ns,’ slipping into mountain patois.

“Well, the city cousins suddenly remembered a stockholder meeting they had to attend and packed their bags and left. Once they were out of sight, Josiah turned to Zeke and said, ‘Well, Zeke, y’know it took us only a couple weeks to teach the dogs to do that, but it’s gonna take months to teach ’em not to.’

“Now, Andy, I know plenty of other crappy stories like that, so stick to money and don’t make me tell you anymore of them.”

I give! I give!

This is column #1098, and it occurs to me that you may actually have missed a few.

For the first few years, they appeared on the site of a deep-discount broker called Ceres (which was soon renamed Ameritrade).

Here — in the spirit of summer re-runs — is the very first one, from four and a half years ago. I’m not putting it up there with the original Seinfeld episode or anything. But here it is.

#

Welcome to my “daily comment.” The ground rules Ceres and I have agreed to are simple. I can write whatever I want, ranging from a sentence to an epic, and nothing is off limits.

I can even say things like, “Don’t trade stocks yourself – for most people, it’s smarter to invest through no-load mutual funds.” Which it is. (Not that this has ever stopped me from testing my hand against the pros.)

Most days, I’ll presumably write something vaguely related to money, since money is much on my mind. But don’t be amazed by a political screed or two, or a recipe for low-fat lunch. (OK, here it is: take one low-fat Bilinksi chicken sausage, microwave 90 seconds, place across a slice of low-fat bread, drown in ketchup, envelope in your fist, and eat, being careful not to bite off a finger in your enthusiasm – it’s that good.)

On the theory that we should start with something simple, like cash, today’s “comment” is an ode to automated teller machines.

Some people still don’t like using them, but for most of us it’s hard to remember that just 20 years ago ATMs barely existed – and were met with considerable animosity when they were. Even the press was dubious. “People will never trust them,” was the general reaction. Not me. I love machines, am only so-so with humans, and hate standing in line. So I was an “early adopter.”

But what I learned 20 years later – last weekend, in fact – is how one big New York bank, Chemical, decided to overcome resistance and build usership. A massive educational ad campaign? Nah. Supposedly, according to a friend who used to work there, Chemical simply programmed the machines to occasionally dispense extra cash. Knowing New Yorkers, Chemical knew word would spread. (Remember, back then people counted their cash-machine cash very carefully, to be sure they got what they were supposed to. So if they got an extra $10 or $20, they noticed.)

I can’t say for sure Chemical actually went through with this. Nor what proportion of honest souls, if any, actually turned in their surplus cash (sounds like a college psychology course experiment, no?). But compared with the cost of a major New York City ad campaign, dispensing a few thousand extra twenties is a bargain.

If any of you are working to introduce “digital cash” to a skeptical universe, perhaps there’s a marketing lesson here somewhere. If you need guinea pigs to ply with extra digicash, please include me in the beta test.

#

[Programming note: Tonight’s Frasier is the one where he’s booked as a TV talk show host. Rerun. In tonight’s Just Shoot Me, Finch encounters his ex-wife at Nina’s “sexaholics” meeting. Rerun. Tonight’s E.R. is the one where Dr. Corday’s domineering mother comes to visit. Rerun.]

Satellites are so powerful they can now read license plate numbers on the ground. Soon they will be reading lips. The ultimate voice recognition.

On this first day of summer, this has given me an idea.

You know how, in The World According to Garp, John Irving warns his young son to be wary of The Undertoad whenever he goes swimming? His parents have told him to watch out for the undertow and, mishearing, he has come to imagine it as a giant, slimy menace.

The undertow is real! Ocean currents are real!

One minute, you’re in shallow water by the shore, the next minute you’re floating just beneath the horizon, toward the Galapagos. With enough food and water — none — for maybe a day and a half. Your cell phone, even if it were not back on your towel along with your summer reading, is even more useless than it is in that blind spot on the Triborough Bridge.

But imagine a system of satellites so numerous and powerful a decade or two from now that they form the Geodesic Oversight Dome (G.O.D.).

There you are, in terrible trouble, knowing nothing of computers and satellites, thinking only of sharks and thirst and sunburn. (“I told you to put on sunscreen,” are the first words you can hear your mother saying if you ever actually somehow make it back to shore.) You have tried paddling with your hands, kicking with your feet. But the current is too strong, and you are now entirely alone, bobbing out of sight of land.

Done for.

You look up to the sky and mouth, silently, “Oh, please, God. Help me.” You make all sorts of promises to be good (“no more day trading, I promise!”). Only this time, where it would once have been touch and go whether help would arrive, the Geodesic Oversight Dome efficiently reads your lips, sends a signal to a Coast Guard computer, and forty minutes later you are back on the beach calling your broker.

Could this be the secret plan Craig McCaw has in mind?

Gennady — who sent in that joke about Meyerowitz, who lost $500 at poker and dropped dead — also sent me this:

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:

“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”

One student replied:

“You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”

While the answer was original, it so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.

The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.

For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn’t make up his mind which to use.

On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:

“Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.”

“Or, if the sun is shining, you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper’s shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.”

“But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 Pi Sq Root (l / g).”

“Or, if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, one could walk up the staircase and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths and then add them up.”

“If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.”

“But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor’s door and say to him ‘If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you will tell me the height of this skyscraper’.”

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel prize for Physics.

A great Dane indeed, and I have two things to say about this. OK, three.

First, I love this story — as who could not. Thank you, Gennady.

Second, if you get to New York, see the wonderful hit play, Copenhagen, your enjoyment of which will even be heightened a notch now that you know Niels Bohr. (It will help to know Werner Heisenberg, also — read the Playbill or a review of the play before the lights go dim.)

Third, it is such a good story, it occurred to me that Gennady hadn’t written it.

Not that Gennady couldn’t have written it. Gennady is one smart cookie. But it read too polished to be something Gennady was just taking a few minutes to recall for me from his University days.

When queried on the source, Gennady shrugged (or I imagine he shrugged) and e-plied — as so many of us have in this situation — “I don’t know; someone sent it to me.”

This left me with two troubling questions. First, could I pass it on to you without crediting the author? And second — was it even true? (Not that knowing the source would make it true; but when you know the source, or the alleged source, at least you have a way to begin to assess it.)

As to the first qualm, if the author ever surfaces, I would be eager to set the record straight and give him or her credit. Even half my monthly pay for writing this column. Or a barometer.

As to the second — is the story true — well, who knows? (One of you may, which is the great thing about an interactive column.)

I raise all this because I have a suggestion. Remember my suggestion for moving e-mail postscripts before the signature (making them Pre Signatorums)? That has, you will agree, spread throughout cyberspace, transforming the culture and sparing the world untold loss and disharmony. (Prior to the Pre Signatorum, people were routinely failing to scroll down past the signature and thus missing crucial postscripts, on the order of, “PS – I’m kidding.” Or, “PS – If the 3,800 cartons can’t arrive in Akron by the 28th, then ship them to Canton instead.”)

OK, this suggestion is even bigger. Namely: whenever you get something clever that is passed on but unsigned — like Niels Bohr, above — ask the sender to ask whoever sent it to him to find out the source.

You will not, likely, find the source this way. But fairly soon, if this becomes Internetiquette, we will become more source-conscious and stop chopping them off when we forward e-mail. Those who initiate these little gems will either get the credit they deserve or, if they choose not to take credit, perhaps tell us why they have worked so hard to create something anonymously.

Fair enough?

“So it is written, so let it be done.” — Yul Brynner

David D’Antonio: “As I’m sure others will tell you, its a mean trick to have ‘fake’ links. Both of the ‘here‘s in your final sentence Thursday weren’t links, they were in fact, just blue-colored words! Bad author, no biscuit!”

George: “The other day you wrote a bit about Thor, the Viking who stood around 53rd Street. I also remember seeing him quite a few times on 6th Ave. He was actually known as Moondog and his real name was Louis Hardin. He passed away last year. here’s part of the obit from The New York Times.”

By GLENN COLLINS

The gaunt, blind musician known as Moondog, who was celebrated among New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious and extravagantly garbed street performer but who went on to win acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty, died Wednesday in a hospital in Munster, Germany. He was 83.

Day in and day out, the man who was originally named Louis T. Hardin was as taciturn and unchanging a landmark of the midtown Manhattan streetscape as the George M. Cohan statue in Duffy Square. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, Hardin stood at attention like a sentinel on Avenue of the Americas around 54th Street.

No matter the weather, he invariably dressed in a homemade robe, sandals, a flowing cape and a horned Viking helmet, the tangible expression of what he referred to as his “Nordic philosophy.” At his side he clutched a long spear of his own manufacture.

Most of the passers-by who dismissed him as “the Viking of Sixth Avenue,” offering him contributions and buying copies of his music and poetry, were unaware that he had recorded his music on the CBS, Prestige, Epic, Angel and Mars labels. Hardin’s jazz-accented compositions, generally scored for small wind and percussion ensembles, often achieved a flowing, tonal symphonic style. One of his songs, “All Is Loneliness,” became a hit when recorded by Janis Joplin.

Poor old Thor. Amazing! I had no idea!

Live long enough, as they say, and all shall be revealed. (Especially when you have as eclectic and astute a readership as mine.)

Esther: “Enough fluff. How about a stock tip?”

Oh, gosh, another stock tip. Don’t you know you are supposed to put $250 a month into each of three index funds for the rest of your life and just leave it at that? Don’t you listen? Well, here is one I bought because, as usual, someone much smarter than me, who’s looked at it much more closely than I have, thinks it will do very well over the next couple of years: McKesson (MCK).

Due to technically difficulties (my not having written it), today’s column will be posted tomorrow.

Gray Chang: “Regarding Aaron’s message regarding the mechanics of voting for multiple candidates, he (and maybe you) would be interested in what is called “approval voting,” in which you can vote for as many candidates as you like. The candidate who receives the most votes is the winner. There are many advantages and no disadvantages of this system. Here is one of several web sites on this topic.”

Nathan: “Some more info on voting theory. Summary: no perfect voting system exists, but the “one person, one vote” system is not the best.”

. . . And now, switching gears . . .

Gennady: “Six Jewish gentlemen were playing poker in the condo clubhouse when Meyerowitz loses $500 on a single hand, clutches his chest and drops dead at the table. Showing respect for their fallen comrade, the other five complete their playing time standing up.

“Finkelstein looks around and asks ‘Now, who is going to tell the wife?’

“They draw straws. Goldberg, who is always a loser, picks the short one. They tell him to be discreet, be gentle, don’t make a bad situation any worse than it is. ‘Gentlemen! Discreet? Discretion is my middle name, leave it to me.’

“Goldberg schleps over to the Meyerowitz apartment, knocks on the door. The wife answers and asks what he wants.

“Goldberg declares, ‘Your husband just lost $500.’

“She hollers, ‘TELL HIM HE SHOULD DROP DEAD!’

“Goldberg says, ‘I’ll tell him.'”

Click here to repeat the same story with Irish names and accent (read by Frank McCourt); here for Italian (read by a Soprano).

Mike Wallin: “Ralph Nader is an idiot but I hope you are right that he could cause a GOP victory and 3-4 more Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court.”

Aaron: “I have always found it irksome and sad when someone tells me I’m ‘wasting my vote’ when I vote for the candidate I would like to see win the election. The two party system is so limiting. I believe that having more (viable) parties would promote a healthier government in which minority viewpoints would get more consideration. But how do you get more parties off the ground if people are told not to waste their votes? The problem here really is with the voting system. When you go to vote, you should be able to stipulate a list of preferences. For example my vote would be 1) Ralph Nader 2) Al Gore. If Ralph didn’t get enough votes to win, then my vote would switch to Gore. This would allow people to vote their conscience/heart, but allow for the pragmatic fallback as well.

Greg Barnes: “This will probably be an e-mail worth ignoring. But perchance you could help. I have a decent cushion of savings, but I’m not rich. One of my best friends the other day showed me a $7,000 Rolex he recently got. My jaw dropped. He said, though, he didn’t pay $7,000 for it. He paid $1,000 for it. (It’s not stolen merchandise, either, believe it or not. And it’s not second-hand).

“He has a cousin, retired wealthy in his 40’s, who made his wealth dealing in Asian trade, including with one fellow who has the biggest Rolex dealership in Asia. This dealer likes to stay in this cousin’s good graces. So he gives him good deals on Rolexes (the cousin has a Presidential Rolex, retailing for $30,000). My friend said this dealer himself may actually have taken a loss with this $7,000/$1,000 watch, but likes to please his cousin.

“My friend said he could probably get ME a $7000 Rolex for $1,000!

“A $1,000 on a watch is a bit much. But on one that retails for $7,000, not necessarily. And I love a bargain! But it IS an indulgence. Oh, God, I’m feeling dizzy!

“Assuming all this is legitimate, and the Rolex isn’t fake (I know it wouldn’t be, since I know the people very well) — would YOU go for this $7,000 watch for $1,000?”

Sure. And sell it on eBay.

Someone named Thor sent me this. The only other Thor I know was Thor the Nordoom, who used to stand his 7-foot frame out by the Donnell Library around 53rd Street, and such other urban haunts, wearing a Viking costume and handing out some kind of literature that proclaimed him to be, in fact, Thor the Nordoom. (Well, he didn’t exactly hand it out; he had it in a sort of wooden pouch on his belt, as I recall, by his hoof.) Beware.

“This virus works on the honor system,” Thor writes:

Please delete all the files on your hard disk,
then forward this message to everyone you know.
Thank you for your cooperation.

On a separate topic, 2 million people are supposedly shopping on a thing called Spree.com. Supposedly, when you click there and sign up and start buying stuff, you will get refund checks within a week or two — and I will get a piece too (because I have secretly embedded my ID in that hyperlink). Supposedly, when you refer friends of your own to this, you, too will start getting checks for their purchases.

This will make us all rich beyond imagining.

Of course, if each of their 2 million shoppers gets them five more who get them five more who get them five more, that’s 250 million shoppers right there . . . and two more levels takes it to every human on the planet.

But I don’t care. Sign up. Let’s all get rich together.

I used to think of Nader as a hero. I marveled at his courage in taking on the auto industry on safety issues. I was thrilled to see my dad, who ran an ad agency, do the first full-page ads, pro-bono, to launch Nader’s Public Citizen and his Congress Project. I have those ads framed in my office. I was over the moon when Nader gave a blurb for my 1982 expose of the insurance industry. As Rachel Carson’s A Silent Spring launched the environmental movement, so Unsafe at Any Speed launched consumerism. We consumers have a lot to thank Ralph Nader for.

And yet it turns out to my great dismay, there is another side to Ralph Nader. I could write 10,000 words about this — and did, not so long ago, under the headline “Ralph Nader Is a Big Fat Idiot.” In the one area I have come to know in painstaking detail — your overpriced, rotten automobile insurance — Nader has been anything but the consumer’s friend. For more than three decades, Consumers Union has been crying out for meaningful reform. Nader has been without question the lynchpin in preventing it.

We all want heroes. It was very discouraging for me to see how much harm Nader had — inadvertently, I’m sure — caused drivers and accident victims. And how stubbornly he refused even to discuss it, even to answer mail about it.

But that was nothing compared with what he is doing now. He’s running for President, and his candidacy could actually siphon off enough votes to throw the White House to the Republicans. Which means a conservative Supreme Court for the next 25 years. (On “Meet the Press,” George W. singled out Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia as the two Justices he most admired. If elected, he would likely get three or very possibly four appointments to the Court in his first term.)

Few things could be worse for the little guy Nader claims to represent. And yet I am assured by a mutual friend that he’s in the race to stay, consequences be damned. “The Democrats could use a four-year cold shower,” he told Tim Russert during his own “Meet the Press” interview. And if it’s a 25-year cold shower because of the Court, and young women go back to having coat-hanger abortions, well, Russert didn’t ask, but that doesn’t seem to deter Nader either.

The NRA rejoices! The gun-show loophole will stay open after all! The tobacco industry exhales a sigh of relief. Finally, a president who can work with Jesse Helms. McDonald’s is thrilled. No more minimum wage hikes (never shoulda been raised from $4.25 to $5.15 in the first place)! Steve Forbes beams. A well-deserved multi-million dollar cut in his annual tax bill. The Big Three cheer. That silliness about cleaner air and global warming can be put behind us. Banks and insurance companies relax. Scrutiny of abusive credit card practices and redlining gets put on the back burner. Big campaign contributors exult. Campaign finance reform is dead.

Ralph Nader has ridden to their rescue.

What must he — and his supporters — be thinking?!