award tour

In the latest issue of Vanity Fair there is an excerpt from Anderson Cooper’s new book Dispatches from the Edge. With a title like that (plus the fact that he’s 40 and writing a “memoir”), I would probably dismiss this book out of hand. But the excerpt was pretty interesting as it flips between living in clusterfuck that was New Orleans post-Katrina, and telling the story of his brother who committed suicide.

But what makes this excerpt truly notable is the following anecdote. Here’s the setup: Cooper is in a bar in New Orleans a couple weeks after Katrina hits. Most of the people there are media types, law enforcement, and other government people…

The Scientologists are here, too. Kirstie Alley arrived with a bunch of them, and John Travolta is around as well. No one beats Steven Seagal, though. He’s not here with any group. I saw him late one night dressed in a cop uniform, out on patrol with some deputies from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office. He’s been going out with their SWAT team. We talk a bit, and when he leaves he puts his palms together in front of his face and bows briefly. Then he hops in a cop car and speeds off.

“Seagal’s tight with the sheriff in Jefferson,” a New Orleans cop tells me later. “There’s a bar where a lot of cops hang out, and I remember a couple years ago Seagal comes in with those guys and takes out a framed 8-by-10 photo of himself and fucking hangs it on the wall.”

“Get out of here,” I say. “No way.”

“I shit you not,” he says. “As soon as he left, a couple of us took out our pistols and shot it. Blew the fucking thing off the wall. One bullet actually went right through and hit a car-rental place next door.”

A week ago I came across an interesting post which compared google’s arrogant and secretive demeanour to the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. The fund, which imploded, lost over $4 billion in 4 months.

I found this posting pretty interesting as I’m actually a (tiny) shareholder of GOOG and, oddly enough, just finished reading the definitive book on LTCM entitled When Genius Failed. I first heard about the book while reading Smartest Guys in the Room. It turns out that every trader at Enron was required to read the book which details how greed and arrogance took down a hedge fund which employed couple noble laureates (one from Hamilton, Ontario of all places) along with the living legend of wall street, John Meriwether.

Meriwether was a bond trader in the 80s with Salomon Brothers and is a hero in the wall street classic Liar’s Poker. The book gets it’s title from a form of poker that uses the serial numbers on $1 US bills and for which Meriwether was considered the grand champion. According to the book (and wall street lore), one day Salomon’s CEO John Gutfreund came up to Meriwether and said “one game. one million. no tears”.

For [Meriwether], there was no upside. If he won, he upset Gutfreund. No good came of this. But if he lost, he was out of pocket a million bucks. This was worse than upsetting the boss. Although Meriwether was by far the better player of the game, in a single hand anything could happen. Luck could very well determine the outcome. Meriwether spent his entire day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn’t about to accept this one.

“No, John” he said. “if we’re going to play for those kind of numbers. I’d rather play for real money. Ten million dollars. No tears”.

Gutfreund just told him he was crazy and walked away.

A couple months back I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary about the downfall of Enron based on a book of the same title. After watching the movie, I decided to check out the book. One of the amazing things about the Enron story is how every facet of the company had lost its scruples. So much so that a 2 hour long movie had to leave out huge chunks of the book. The book, which runs over 400 pages, details incident after incident and is a testament to theft. First you take an inch, then you take a mile (or in Enron’s case, a couple thousand miles). The book is both entertaining and thorough, which is a noteworthy considering it tries to explain the mundane accounting details and the never-ending list of insanities Enron contrived. (more…)

Read an interesting profile of Malcolm Gladwell in the nytimes this weekend. Gladwell, the author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point”, adds some pretty interesting ancedotes about his writings. I’ve yet to read any of his books but I’ve always enjoyed his material in the New Yorker (which is all archived on gladwell.com). Oddly enough, his dad was a Waterloo prof and he talks about he was politically conservative as a teenager (since there was no way to be radically left of Trudeau). He also mentions how he changes his mind on a lot of things once he has more information on a given topic. That might explain how a former conservative can be found utterting stuff like this:

I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it’s just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don’t believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We’re pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other, and it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical.