Category: Lopsided Observations

Not all observations are worth noting.

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Margin Call

Steve Hoy and Paul Dodd by Rich Stim 1969
Steve Hoy and Paul Dodd by Rich Stim 1969

Steve Hoy called this morning from South Carolina wondering what I thought about the market. Steve has a good bit of his investments in margin accounts and he is always getting calls from his broker. This morning he felt like he was backed into a corner with his Washington Mutual holding. He sold 500 shares at $9 a share while I was on the phone with him. If he didn’t, he feared he would lose it all. And of course as soon as he confirmed the sale he said, “I probably just sold at the bottom”. I don’t understand the strategy of margin accounts and I am the last person to ask for financial advice but it was good to hear his voice.

Steve is worried that the credit crisis will force people to put more on their charge cards and then eventually default on their credit card bills which will collapse the already weakened financial institutions. Steve said he had no confidence in Bush and he laid out his own plan to bail out the market. It was something like lowering the interest rates to 5% and back that with federally insured bonds which would allow people to refinance their homes so their payments were more in line with the value of their home.

Steve was business major at Indiana University when I met him. Maybe he will lay out his plan here in a comment because I have surely mangled the translation.

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Beware Of The Dog

Mary Alice with Sybil
Mary Alice with Sybil

We scanned some film for a 4D Advertising job a while back and I threw a couple of our own slides in the batch. This is a pretty wild shot of Peggi’s mom and her dog, Sybil. I used to love getting that little dog wound up.

Peggi and I set up a DVD player for my parents last night so they can watch movies on their new TV. My father was telling us how their neighbor, who just moved to San Francisco to “get well”, told them that they were the best thing that ever happened to him. This guy lived alone and wore paths in the carpet with his obsessive compulsive pacing. They are repairing the floors now and the house is up for sale. My mother is already worried that the next neighbor may have a dog. They live near the park in Brighton and have been chased out of there by dogs. And my mother was out front last summer, talking to a neighbor, when a teenage dog-sitter walked by with a Rottweiler on a leash. The Rottweiler broke free and and made a beeline for another neighbor’s small dog. My mom and her friend watched in horror as the Rottweiler killed the other dog.

The FedEx guy was out in front of our house today with a package of work from Lowel when he called us to ask if it was safe to get out of his truck. We told him that the “Beware of Dog” sign came with the house.

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Convert or Die (Convertir o Morir)

Bullfight in Bilbao 2006, photo by Paul Dodd
Bullfight in Bilbao 2006, photo by Paul Dodd

I was raised Catholic and like they say,”Once a Catholic, always a Catholic”. I can’t help that. And I love Spain. I love the food, the scenery, the Golden Age of Spanish art. I cheer for Spain in the Copa Del Mundo. I even like the pageantry of bullfighting.

So we watched part of PBS’s “Secret Files of the Inquisition” last night and they were profiling Jacque Fournier who left detailed records of his efforts to purify the Pyrenees. He was a bishop in the early 1300’s in what is now part of France and he was determined to eliminate the Cathars who believed the material world was evil and consequently could not accept Jesus in human form. This documentary depicted the Cathars as about as dangerous as aging hippies. Fournier was rewarded for his efforts by being anointed Pope Benedict XII and the Vatican kept his records secret for 700 years. Of course Ferdinand and Isabel (los Reyes Católicos) finished the job in Columbus’ day and Spain was left with very few Jews or Muslims.

I was falling asleep when they talked about Fournier as Pope so I googled his name this morning and found this entry in the “Catholic Encyclopedia“.

“His natural obesity, too, stimulated caricature and undeserved criticism. But history offers a vindication and testifies that, though he failed to cope successfully with the political difficulties to which he fell heir, his piety, virtue, and pacific spirit, his justice, rectitude, and firmness in ruling, his zeal for doctrinal and moral reform, and his integrity of character were above reproach.”

This is probably similar to how history will rewrite Bush’s legacy.

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Bleeding Heart

Peggi had a dream about Hillary last night. They were at a Kmart and Hillary was speaking to a small crowd. Peggi was feeling really sorry for her and hugged her. Hillary asked Peggi if she had voted for her. Peggi hesitated and then said, “Yes”, even though she hadn’t.

Hillary Clinton in Rochester New York
Hillary Clinton in Rochester New York


I took this shot of Hillary when she was campaigning for her first senate race.

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My Front Porch

We didn’t get out for a walk yesterday until the sun was setting. It had been a crystal clear day and the snow was shiny. We were supposed to get three inches on Friday and a then a couple, possibly more Lake Effect snow, on Saturday. Well we live by the lake and we didn’t get any. So we walked in the woods rather than skiing. We headed up into Spring Valley and saw some footprints. We are usually the only ones up here We smelled deer and then saw some. We smelled deer again but couldn’t see them because it was just about dark. A animal, bigger than a squirrel but not as big as a possum slithered up a tree in front of us. We headed down in the valley and the near full moon was casting stark shadows in the snow.

Larry Towell, The Pear, Lambton County, Ontario, Canada. 1983
Larry Towell, The Pear, Lambton County, Ontario, Canada. 1983

Back home we changed clothes and drove over to the George Eastman House for an opening of “Larry Towell: The World From My Front Porch”. I had never heard of him but I liked his photo of the three Amish guys in the paper. His photos are stunning. Whether Towell is framing Mennonites, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, Katrina, destruction or rural Ontario, Canada his shots tell big, cinema graphic stories. It is tough enough taking in a show with the distractions of an opening but the show itself has included distractions like old magazines, posters, kids drawings and concrete blocks. And on top of that there were plaques with incidental information mounted near the photos and lit like they were the main attraction and electric red title type on the green and blue grey walls. Let me look at these beautiful photos for crying out loud. We plan to revisit this show.

At least we found the show. On Friday we went out to see Jim Mott’s painting show downtown. We got an email earlier in the day about the show at the Bausch & Lomb building. We were there at seven and we could not get in the building. Jim is a Rochester artist who moves his front porch around the country and paints what he sees. He trades paintings for hospitality and was featured on the Today show.

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You Spelled Marketing Wrong

I called Jerome’s Ignition Service yesterday to make an appointment to get the oil changed in our Element. Igor answered the phone and let me pick a time that was good for me. I used to just drop the car off and walk back home but we moved so I sit and wait for them to service it. I read an article in Time about the Arctic ice cap melting and how it will open up shorter international shipping routes and then I did some work on my laptop. Ted was working on his computer and Alan was smoking cigarettes and paying bills. He put a stamp on an envelope to NY State for taxes but forgot to include the check. Ted opened the envelope to confirm it. They finished my oil change and I was paying my bill but we had to wait for a junk fax to come in before the printer could release my receipt. I told Ted that we threw our fax machine away and do most of that sort of thing by email. He said he would too if he knew how.

Jerome’s is the best. Sparky recommended these guys and we have been going there for twenty years. Sitting here with pictures of vintage cars on the wall, I was struck by how much these guys have had to keep up with over the years. I was probably more sympathetic because I had been wrestling with with my own web 2.0 issues. I’ve been trying to find a free, customizable RSS to HTML script for a website we’re working on.

Ted suggested I go to Sofia Collision to see what they thought about the damage to our car from the lady that backed into us. The owner, Steve, asked me how fussy I was. I said, “not very”. He estimated the damage at $400 and suggested I call the woman and settle for $200 cash and then not replace the part. I asked him what he got out of it and he said, “Well, that’s what I would do”. I plan to give her a call and see what happens.

I got back to 4D and Peggi told me a guy had called and asked to speak with the sales department. Peggi said, “You can talk to me”. The guy got pissed and told her he was going to give us some business but he wasn’t going to now. Then the creep emails us this message. “My partner and I called you this morning to inquire about your services and you were extremely rude and did not want to speak with us. We were interested in getting business cards, a logo designed, marketing materials, and possibly a website. I just wanted to let you know that we will not be interested in speaking with you again.”

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Just Bead It

Northway Motel
Northway Motel

We got a late start and left Rochester around noon on Peggi’s birthday. We stopped at Starbucks to pick up a paper and a woman backed into our car. We drove east to Syracuse and then up Route 81 to Watertown before turning right on Route 3. This road crosses the northern Adirondack Mountains and takes you by some of its highest peaks. There was about two feet of snow up here and the scenery was spectacular. We pulled into Lake Placid around sundown and found a motel at the eastern edge of town with reasonable rates and still within walking distance of town.

Lake Placid is a cute little town and they know it. The Winter Olympics were held here in 1980 and facilities for for all those wacky events are still standing. Canadian tour buses clog the streets. People walk around with their ski passes on. We had to wait for a seat at the Great Adirondack Steak & Seafood Restaurant and it was worth the wait. They brew their own beer so we had pint in the bar and watched a skiing show on their tubeless TV. We walked back to our motel behind three twenty year old underdressed girls who were smoking and laughing. We walked by shops with names like “Body & Sole”, “Cuppa Joe”, “Just Bead It”, “Pasta La Vista” and “Bowlwinkles”. We curled up in our room with our library books, Stephen King’s “Duma Key” and a book on Arthur Dove.

Pete and Shelley House
Pete and Shelley House

We drove on to Pete and Shelley’s in the morning and went out skiing as soon as we got there. There were beaver tracks in the snow as we crossed the frozen marsh behind their house and headed up into the woods. It was absolutely beautiful. I wasn’t worried about freezing up here but I was worried about our new laptop freezing, so I didn’t bring it. We sat around the fire, talked, drank a bottle of their homemade dandelion wine and slept like babies.

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Dead Zone

Paul and Shelley by creek in Adirondacks
Paul and Shelley by creek in Adirondacks

We are headed up to the Adirondacks for a few days to visit our friends Pete and Shelley. We have a habit of going up there every year around this time to hang out and celebrate Peggi’s birthday. We usually hike or ski and this year Shelley told us to bring our skates. They have a marsh out behind their new home. We are hoping for snow. They don’t have a phone up there so we’re taking our chances. The winter here in Rochester has been sort of sad. January was seven degrees above normal on average and we have only been skiing once since Christmas.

There have quite a few letters to the editor of our local paper about the so called dead zone on the Northway, or Route 87, the highway that connects New york City and Montreal. There is a stretch where there are no cell towers and a few stranded drivers, trapped in a storm, have died there in the last few years. So some people have been demanding that the state build towers. Pete and Shelley did not move here to be connected. They are off the grid, the power grid, the water grid and the phone grid.

Happy Birthday Peggi! I will not be entering posts here for a few days.

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Some Kind Of Loop

We saw a show of Haitian Voodoo Art at the Fowler Museum in LA a few years ago and they were playing some pretty cool music while we wandered around the show. We stopped in the gift shop to buy the CD and the two elderly women working in there were trying to ring someone up. They were both huddled over the cash register computer and they explained that they were caught in “some kind of loop” and would be unable to cash us out. That phrase has stuck with us and comes to mind pretty frequently.

We have “The Incredibles” at the top of our NetFlix list and we received an email that said it would be here Tuesday. On Wednesday morning we got an email from NetFlix that said they had received “The Incredibles”. The mailman may have watched the movie but we never got it. Peggi called NetFlix and they described it as some sort of loop. They apologized and said they would send us the next movie on our list, which was “Kundun”, immediately. They made it sound like they were going to hand deliver it. In today’s mail we got “Kundun” and “The Incredibles”. We are on the plan that gives us one movie at a time but we may be one up on them now.

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Trade Secrets TM

Martin Edic emailed me an idea for my blog and I’m thinking, “Does it look like I’m desperate for ideas?”. He saw that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, described as the spiritual leader to the Beatles, not to mention Mia Farrow who I had a crush on, had passed away at 91. I had told Martin a long time ago that I thought I had the same same mantra as Peggi. Peggi and I signed up to learn transcendental meditation back in our Bloomington, Indiana days. It cost twenty five dollars or something and we were each given a mantra that we were supposed to keep secret. I suspected that Peggi had the same one and asked her a few questions about hers. I came away from that conversation thinking that we did share the same magic word and I guess I told Martin about this.

I have since learned that our mantras are different but they may share some of the same properties. This may be the TM formula. My word really does have some magical qualities. It has three syllables. The first is only one letter, a vowel. The second is three letters and begins with the same vowel but it is pronounced differently. The third syllable is two letters, first a consonant which happens to be the same as the last letter of the second consonant but the two consonants are pronounced differently.

I’m not going to give away my word but if I tried to construct a new word with his formula it would look something like this. ooarri. It looks ridiculous. No wonder you are supposed to keep it secret.

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Slow Kids

My brother John stopped by yesterday with his laptop. He was looking for a few Photoshop tips. He makes beautiful furniture and sends out printed sheets with new pieces to his gallery reps and clients. We sat in the living room by the new coffee table that he made for us over the summer. It is thirteen inches high and has two levels for art books. He made it out of the redwood that was used on our old deck.
He told me he was really slow. He had just been to a design trade show in Miami that is is attended by the rich and famous. He did really well there last year but didn’t sell a thing this year. The other vendors were all slow as well. I was able to spend so much time with him because 4D is slow. This is something you don’t usually admit when you are in business. The perception is not good. But this is what blogs are for.

I had a fire going in our new insert and I told him about the plans we had to brick in the rest of old fireplace in. Actually we weren’t going to do it. My brother Fran, the mason, was going to do it. He does brick fireplaces, great room walls and interior work as well as brick fronts and commercial work. He has two crews and has been extremely busy during the housing boom but that has come to a standstill. He is slow and worried about keeping his guys working. It dawned on me that three of the seven Dodd siblings work for themselves and we are all slow.

John suggested building a brick inset for firewood next to our insert and he left us with a nice sketch. If you know anyone who needs some furniture, a fireplace or a website you can comment below.

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Obsessive Documentation

Rich Stim Copyright Test
Rich Stim Copyright Test

I carry my camera in my pocket and grab shots everywhere. I take photos on the street, at concerts and even the TV set. I have some some photos of yesterday’s Super Bowl and I have a great shot of Bush announcing “Shock and Awe” on CNN. I don’t think much about the legal issues of this activity but Rich Stim does. Rich says that future sites will be able to block screenshots. He didn’t say anything about photographing the web page. I took the photo above of his screenshot.

I have a 2 gig Sony Memory Stick Pro card that just quit on me. I can’t see any of the photos on it or even re-format it. I know it’s not the camera because the small card that came with the camera still works. I called Sony and they told me that because it was a few months more than a year old it was not covered by warranty. They offered to sell me a refurbished one for $39. And why do you think they have a supply of refurbished memory sticks? I told the woman at the call center that I was going to switch to Canon. She thanked me for calling Sony.

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Showroom Dummies

Larissa Cleveland photo
Larissa Cleveland photo

My hat goes off to whoever the person was that rekindled the First Friday gallery night concept. We did four last night and had a good time running into people and art. Peggi planned our route before we left the house so we knocked them off like the Griswalds in “European Vacation”. We started at the Hungerford Building with a video installation by Michael Frank. Turns out we were the video installation. The little peepholes that we at first thought were the art turned out to be cameras pointed at us. Too bad we had just finished dinner because there was a nice little spread courtesy of Palermo’s Market on Culver.

Painting by Juliana Furlong Williams
Painting by Juliana Furlong Williams

Next stop was Booksmart Studio, the nicest gallery place in town, for Larissa Cleveland’s photos of mannequins. The one above reminds me of someone who comes in and cleans our house every once in a while. On to the VSW Print Loft Gallery for an invitational photo exhibition. I got the impression that they were Visual Studies students that were invited. Our last stop was Rochester Contemporary. We did the logo for this place. Tanyo Smolinsky had some really beautiful ink, wax crayon and pencil work in the lab space but that wasn’t the main show. Michael Rogers and Jack Wax were. Bleu Cease, the gallery director, was on crutches after falling while snowboarding. We said hi to Anne Havens and wandered upstairs to the artist’s spaces where we saw this beautiful painting by Julianna Furlong Williams.

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Big Wood and Brush

Gene Marshall Song Poems
Gene Marshall Song Poems

“Big wood and brush. Big wood and brush. Do you know the difference between big wood and brush?”, “Jimmy Carter Says Yes!”, “Little Love Bug”. These songs, from a cassette tape that Chris Zajkowski from the Squires of the Subterrain gave us, have been stuck in our heads for twenty years. And we don’t even have a tape player anymore. The cassette was a collection of song poems, hand labeled, “Beat Of The Traps”, and I think he got it from someone in NRBQ. The songs were lyrics by anonymous people put to music by studios that advertised in the back of magazines. A couple hundred bucks and you had a box of 45’s with your song on it.

Our friend and neighbor, Monica, had just returned from Paris and so we had her and Rick over for dinner last night. We made barley mushroom soup from the Moosewood cookbook, chicken marinated in a lime juice vinaigrette and a green salad. Rick made a no cholesterol angel food cake for dessert and we ate that while watching “Off The Charts, The Song Poem Story”.

The charming Gene Marshall, who claims to have cranked out 10,000 songs, was responsible for “Big Wood and Brush” and “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” and he stole the show. He dominates his band and bulldozes arrangements on the fly while “sight singing” lyrics that have just been put in front of him. Improvisation is one thing but watching him try to keep a straight face and get through these songs in one take was thrilling.

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Big TV

The local paper interviewed people about what they planned to do with their rebate checks and this one guy said he was going to buy a big screen TV. The question is, “Is now the time to buy one, before the Super Bowl, or will there be even better prices after the game?”

My father asked if I would go along with him and my mom to look at TVs because their picture tube is going. They have one of those wooden cabinets with doors that close. Their screen is 29 inches now so the salesman at Charlotte Appliance told us that the 32 inch sets would actually be smaller than what they are used with the new aspect ratio. So he recommended the next size up, a 40 inch set, and they had three Sony’s to choose from. We liked the 1080p resolution but we weren’t ready to buy.

Charlotte Appliance is in an old theatre so they have all these rooms on different levels. On the way out we looked at the big Lazy Boy style chairs in the furniture section and this one was so huge we just started laughing. I hopped up in it and my feet were well off the ground. All three us of could have fit in this chair. It was kind of like those Monster Trucks.

Next stop was Rowe Photographic. They had the same set for $100 less and they would match Circuit City or Best Buy but the sale prices only lasts until February 1st. My father went home and cut out some newspaper so it was the size of the new TV and he hung it on the front of their old cabinet. My mother thinks it is way to big for their living room. My father is ready for the big screen experience. It is a standstill.

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Preparation ADAS

We recently watched Julie Christi in “Away from Her” and last night we saw local boy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, in “The Savages” so we’ve got picture of what it will be like if Peggi or I lose it before we kick it. I don’t remember a soundtrack in the austere “Away From Here” but “The Savages” opened with a beautiful Peggy Lee song (I Don’t Want To Play In Your Yard) and closed with a beautiful Velvet Underground song (I’m Stickin’ With You). I guess dementia won’t be so bad if the soundtrack is good.

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Body Parts Found In Chicago

Watkins & The Rapiers performing live at WXXI
Watkins & The Rapiers performing live on WXXI’s Sound Stage

We went to the old Rohrbach’s location in the basement of the German House in Rochester’s South Wedge last night. Watkins & The Rapiers were playing there surrounded by TV sets tuned to various stations. “Body Parts Found In Chicago” was displayed the the bottom of the screen on Fox News. I couldn’t tell what we were looking at. We went out with our neighbor, Rick, and he ordered a pitcher of beer. We ran into Bob Mahoney and Jan Marshall and had a nice time chatting while the Regan brothers sang their super catchy songs and select covers like Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” and Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. I slept like a baby and woke up with “Even on Christmas Day He Wore Black” stuck in my head. Peggi said she was singing “Mighty Nice of you to Treat Colorblind This Way” and they didn’t even do that one.

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Five Letters – First & Last The Same

Peggi Fournier in 4D Advertising offices
Peggi Fournier in 4D Advertising offices

Peggi didn’t know I was taking this photo until she turned around. (see Steve’s comment below) She was battling the Flash encoder in order to post a movie on the Kazoo site. The five gallon water container shown here is empty. It’s the last one we will ever drink from. In fact I’m going to throw the whole dispenser out. It looks ridiculous anyway. We have had bottled water delivered for years and now we read that the plastic leaches hormones. I was wondering why I was hitting so many home runs lately. Good thing 4D doesn’t have a drug testing policy. I always suspected we would be better off drinking tap water.

New Xerox Logo

Xerox moved their corporate headquarters out of town but they are still one of Rochester’s biggest employers. The word “Xerox” was formerly synonymous with a “copy” but they don’t even make copiers anymore. Does Kodak even make film anymore? And how about the fact that both of these Rochester companies have names that begin and end with the same consonant? Kodak was first so I guess that makes Xerox the “copy” cats. And then along comes Lowel where our buddy, Duane Sherwood works.

When Xerox announced their new logo, a spokesman was quoted as saying that it was a “significant multimillion-dollar marketing investment.” Multimillion for this? Why didn’t they hire 4D? We would have done this job for $5000. And that would have included five rounds of revisions, online/telephone review and the provision that we not be included in any of their committee meetings. We would have saved them $4,995,000.

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