Soggy on Sunday

The long-absent rain was welcome throughout the Bay Area, but it did inconvenience our turn at Sandwiches on Sunday. The picnic area in the back of the Redwood City community center was very wet. We set up tables by the overhang at the entrance to the building (closed Saturdays and Sundays).

We had prepared baked chicken, rice, and salad for 80 people, but the soggy weather had reduced the number of diners to about 50; no worries, they happily took home the leftovers. On this Thanksgiving weekend, everyone should have leftovers.

Charity Begins At Home

As parents approach the winter of their lives, their children have become adults whose trajectories are fairly clear. Of course, extremely positive and negative surprises can still occur, but most parents can tell which of of their children will be financially successful and which will likely have problems throughout their lives.

The question: how do you help the struggling ones now without being "unfair"? [Your humble observer has seen first hand how siblings have been riven by parents trying to help the poorer ones through unequal division of the estate.)

One answer: the long-term promissory note.

One creative solution is for the parents to make a loan that serves as an advance on the child’s inheritance. Even though it’s a loan, the chances are the client is never going to see that money again.

The child signs a promissory note with a low rate of interest*, and the note is due to the parents in 30 years or upon the death of the second parent, when the estate settles. Parents like this arrangement because it’s a way to give one child some money while treating all children equally in the estate. The estate split can still be equal, and the loan for the needy child gets repaid back to the parents’ estate from the child’s inheritance. The children like this approach because the money is a loan, not a handout.

*In order for the loan not to be treated as a gift and triggering a possible gift tax, the IRS publishes minimum interest rates that should be charged on the intra-family loan.

As many of us sort through the pile of pleas from charitable organizations, make sure we give a thought about how to help those closest to home.

Black Friday: A Day of Rest

The day after Thanksgiving is popularly known as Black Friday

to mark the kickoff to the Christmas shopping season. “Black” refers to stores moving from the “red” to the “black,” back when accounting records were kept by hand, and red ink indicated a loss, and black a profit.

In our household we resist the temptation to buy stuff that would never have made it to our shopping list were it not for Black Friday's incredible deals. This is not the time to buy our first gun, nor do we need another brokerage account to clutter our finances. Instead, if we're lucky enough to have a day off, Black Friday is a day of rest for our gastrointestinal system and a day of preparation for the frenetic month of December.

[Note to Christians: Advent starts this Sunday, marks the first day of the liturgical calendar, and is the busiest time of the year.]

Thanksgiving Day, Noon

4 hours in, 3 hours to go

Turkey Easy Peasy

Over the years we've experimented with various methods of cooking the Thanksgiving turkey: the paper bag, the foil wrap, the low-temperature / high-temperature switch, and stuffing or not stuffing the bird; apprehensive, we have yet to try deep-frying.

Nowadays there are also choices about the primary ingredient: farm-raised vs. wild (chart), fresh vs frozen.

We don't feel adventurous, so we'll stick with the store-bought fresh turkey and rely on brining to add flavor. On Tuesday I boiled the brine spices and vegetables and left the mixture on the stove to cool overnight. This morning the brine was poured over the 23-pound turkey, and the bucket was refrigerated for 24 hours.

Tomorrow the turkey will be rinsed, rubbed with butter, then browned on each side at 400 degrees. The oven will be dialed down to 200 degrees, where it will remain for 7 to 8 hours. Even the breast meat should turn out to be moist and tender. Easy peasy.

Quantum Biology

The 21st century has been christened the century of biology. That's a safe prediction, given the advances in chemistry, engineering, and data processing--not to mention biology--but the solution to the thorniest problems may just lie in quantum physics.

(UC-Berkeley image)

Quantum theory posits the duality of matter in particle and wave forms, describes how seemingly dissociated bodies affect each other (quantum entanglement), and disavows objective truth in favor of probabilities.

Quantum biology purports to explain puzzling phenomena, such as how plants developed high efficiencies of energy transfer in photosynthesis. Some theorists even speculate that it provides a scientific basis for consciousness. Such enthusiasm may seem far-fetched to the vast majority of people--including your humble observer--who are not quantum physicists, but as those physicists are wont to say, all things are possible.

Don't Fight It, Embrace It

If this is global warming climate change, give me more [bold added]:

A combination of cooler seas and a quiet West African monsoon season made for a less active Atlantic hurricane season, giving the South and East Coasts of the United States one of their lengthiest reprieves in history from a major hurricane, forecasters said on Monday.

"This is the longest without a major hurricane hitting the U.S. since the Civil War era," said Jeff Masters, chief meteorologist for Weather Underground.

Crimson-Colored Glasses

Harvard professor Greg Mankiw was delighted when he spotted portfolio-theory trash-talking at the Harvard-Yale football game. Sadly, the good professor is guilty of looking through crimson-colored glasses. WSJ:

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, Yale University earned a return of 20.2% on its endowment, easily topping the 15.4% gain reported by Harvard University. Yale’s performance was the best among the eight Ivy League schools, while Harvard’s was the worst.

The rout was the fourth victory in a row over Harvard for David Swensen, who manages Yale’s $23.9 billion endowment, and his eighth in the past decade.

Ultimately, however, size matters: Harvard's endowment ($36.4 billion) is still much bigger than Yale's ($23.9 billion), and the absolute rankings are unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. [Note: if both Yale and Harvard were to duplicate their respective performances in the current year--and without considering contributions, withdrawals, and expenses--Yale and Harvard's portfolio would increase by $4.8 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively. The much larger base that Harvard starts from ensures that the richest stays that way.]

Paroxysms......of Laughter

An award that no writer wants to win: the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. An example from the 2010 titlist:

"Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."

Or how about last year's winner?

“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands—only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”

Literary Review editor Jonathan Beckman has some suggestions, such as "just make sense" and "don’t get carried away by metaphor."

Your humble correspondent has more prosaic advice: if you can't do it well, best not to do it at all, or as my old English teacher used to say about the comma, when in doubt, leave it out.

Entitled to do So

The crowd at the Honolulu airport was very heavy last Tuesday. After checking the luggage, one must enter the TSA line which stretched well out the door.

A Hawaiian Airlines representative saw me leaning on a cane, and escorted me to the front of the line. I appreciated the consideration because the leg was getting sore; nevertheless I did feel a twinge of guilt for not waiting my turn.

Could this trip's accident have foreshadowed a not-so-distant future of infirmity, disability placards, and loss of independence? Being able to cut to the front of the line is a seductive pleasure, and I hope that I never ever feel that I'm entitled to do so.

Leapfrogging the Staircase

The problems of the hard-core homeless are many, inter-related and very expensive to fix. Current solutions experience a high rate of failure [bold added]:

Most of the long-term homeless are mentally ill, alcoholic or drug-addicted, often all three. The standard way to help them has long been the “staircase” approach: requiring them to quit drink and drugs before shepherding them through emergency shelters and temporary lodging until they are deemed ready to be housed. But many refuse to sign up. Those who do often fall off the wagon. Typically, fewer than half make it all the way to a (usually subsidised) permanent home.

A new, controversial solution has shown a much higher success rate:

Pathways to Housing gave rough sleepers furnished flats in poor districts. Medical care, treatment for addiction and help in learning to cook, pay bills and so on were offered, but not required. After five years 88% remained housed.

Leapfrogging "rough sleepers" into permanent housing seems to motivate them to stay off the streets. And it saves the taxpayers money:

Denver, Colorado, reckons each of its 300 “heaviest utilisers” costs taxpayers $37,000 a year and that putting them straight into housing with intensive support from social workers would cost less than half as much. Calgary, the first Canadian city to use a housing-first approach, saw average annual savings of more than $30,000 per person from housing its most acute cases.

Of course, the principal objection is not economic but moral. The homeless whose behavior is the worst get the biggest reward, i.e., free housing with no conditions.

We just have to get past our middle-class morality!

Never Been Stronger

Yana, Terri, and deliveryman

The church had filled eight (8) food boxes each with the requested 15 items, and, with a week to go before Thanksgiving, I returned to the Bay Area in time to deliver them to CALL Primrose.

When I walked through the door at the Burlingame office, I was greeted by a familiar face. Yana A., who had been an IT specialist at our former employer, was now volunteering at the call center. Yana introduced me to new Director Terri Boesch; Mary Watt had retired in May.

CALL Primrose has been providing food, emergency financial assistance and other services to Peninsula families since 1983. Unfortunately, business has never been stronger.

The Pilots Who Changed Yamamoto's Mind

Florence and James Ho

With a few hours to kill before our flight we stopped at Hilo Hattie's and encountered local historian James Ho. He was promoting his book-with-the-longish-title Seven Unsung Hero Fighter Pilots Who Saved This Day - December 7th, 1941. We listened politely, not only because we respect our elders but because we wouldn't want any rude behavior reported back to people we know in common.

Everyone who has a basic familiarity with World War II knows how on December 7, 1941 the Japanese destroyed the ships at Pearl Harbor and the combat planes at Hickam and Wheeler Fields in Central Oahu. Less well known are the 12 P-40 fighter planes in North Oahu and the pilots who counter-attacked. From the book by James Ho:

The twelve P-40 fighter planes stationed at Kawailoa Airfield [near Haleiwa on the North Shore] were untouched by the Japanese war planes. Evidently the Japanese espionage agents failed to inform its military about this airfield....[T]his airbase runway was built with the help of my classmates and me, many of whom were Japanese-Americans--whose parents were Japan citizens.

Flying high above the Japanese formation with the sun in back of them, the P-40's dove right through the first squadron of enemy Japanese planes and shot down six planes. As they dived through the Japanese formation and climbed up and under the next Japanese formation with their machine guns blazing, another six enemy Japanese planes were destroyed.

The actions by these pilots averted a second attack that could have crippled America's ability to prosecute the Pacific war [bold added]:

Supreme Commander Yamamoto, upon hearing about the air attack upon his returning aircrafts and the loss of so many [20 in total] planes in such a short time was convinced that the American carriers had returned to Pearl Harbor. Therefore, he gave the command to abort his original orders to rearm and refuel the returning aircrafts and issued a new order to withdraw.

These actions by seven pilots, one of whom lost his life that day, likely changed the course of history.

Next Year We'll Start on the Closet

Destined for strangers who can use them

Continuing the organizing project that had started in September, I helped Mom sort through some of her clothes. (The task would have been better suited to a daughter, but after five tries my parents quit trying to have one.)

Most items were in very good condition, and some still had their tags. We kept everything that Mom thought she had a possibility of wearing, and my sister-in-law took the rest to a homeless shelter where she volunteers. When I come back next year, we'll start on the closet.

I Found the Room

The building where we were married 39 years ago looks much the same though most of the people are different. The rector has changed at least seven times; most priests come from the Mainland, and it's rare for someone who's not born here--and his or her spouse--to embrace a long-term commitment to the Islands. Restless rectors are not a reflection on this particular church; the phenomenon is common to religious organizations in Hawaii. If they want stability, it's usually best to hire a local boy or girl.

As a reward for chauffeuring her to church, my relative treated me to lunch at Big City Diner, where I scarfed down the kimchi fried rice. I didn't think that I could finish the generous serving, but it had been eight years since my last plate, and somehow I found the room.