Northbound

I had to ask my wife this question, because it was bugging me no end, and she knows these kinds of things because she works for a big heartless corporation, and since I work for a tiny federally-funded non-profit, I have no idea about financial stuff. 

Here’s what I found out.  It turns out that subprime lending has little to do with the prime interest rate.  “Subprime” means basically that you have a low credit score.  A “prime” customer in the loan market is someone who has a high credit score.  If you are “subprime”, that just means that your score is too low to get the “prime” interest rate. 

Since I’m an ordinary person who doesn’t know anything about financial jargon, I thought that “subprime” loans meant loans with interest rates below the prime interest rate.  Because, you know, that would make sense.  But, in fact, “subprime” loans are made at well above the prime interest rate to people with lousy credit scores.  Lenders like Ameriprise (former naming-rights owners of Rangers Ballpark in Arlington) are in trouble because they lent a lot of money to people with bad credit, and those people are defaulting, which means Ameriprise is getting screwed.  They are “subprime lenders” because they lent to people with below-prime credit records, not because they’re lending money at below-prime interest rates.

The word “prime” means the same thing in both contexts.  It means the best.  But the “prime interest rate” isn’t actually your best interest rate, it means what you lend to “prime” borrowers.  Anyone who is not a “prime” borrower is “subprime”, and that’s where the name comes from.

Of course, I have some loans out on Prosper, which makes me a subprime lender, too.  I’m as surprised as you are.

So there you have it.  Subprime lenders lend money at interest rates above the prime interest rate.  Weird, right?

I almost never talk about my professional life, such as it is, on this blog — for the obvious reason.  And I won’t tell the particulars about this story – you’ll see why – but it’s a good story.

So I get an e-mail a few months back inviting me to speak at this conference.  It’s an educational conference, a good-sized one, with concurrent sessions going on, and they wanted people in my area of expertise to speak.  I sent in an idea for a presentation, and they accepted it.  I researched the issue I was talking about, worked up a PowerPoint, packed up my handouts and evaluation forms in my laptop case and headed to the conference site.

I got there a bit early.  My session was the first one after lunch, so there wasn’t anyone around.  I set up my laptop, connected it to the projector, and stacked my handouts on the center table.  I was supposed to start at 1:10.  At 1:05, I was alone in the room.

I stuck my head out the door.  There were lots of people walking by; they’d gotten back from lunch.  Someone walked up to the door.  “You got your laptop set up OK?” he asked.  I told him I did.  He went to another room.

I went back inside.  Still nobody there.  I waited.  It was 1:15.  Someone walked in, wearing a denim shirt with the conference logo.

“I’m just here to take pictures,” he said.

“Of what?” I asked.  “There ain’t nobody here.”

I doublechecked.  I had the right date.  I had the right room.  But there wasn’t anyone there to hear my presentation.

This has happened before.  I had three people show up at a computer lab session I did for a conference in Vancouver.  And there was a reason for that — the computer lab was six blocks away from the hotel where the conference was.  And I had a presentation the next day (at the hotel) that was packed.  I had three people show up for a presentation I did at a conference in Orlando (four, if you count my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time).  But that was okay, too – anyone who goes to a Thursday-Friday-Saturday conference in Orlando and doesn’t skip the Saturday sessions to go to the parks has more moral fiber than I do.

I’ve had people leave my presentations in the middle of them.  I’ve had people fall asleep.  But somebody’s always shown up, every time.  Not this time.

You know you’ve been watching too many Law & Order reruns when you read a story like this and wonder how Dick Wolf is going to pin this crime on a billionaire real estate developer or a Kennedy scion.

I just love these New York Times stories about the barbecue scene in Manhattan:

New York’s barbecue scene may be missing a lot of things — like dirt roads and screen doors and decades of deep-seated tradition — but love for barbecue in the city is strong. And in the past couple of years the product has caught up to the passion. Restaurants that hobbled out of the gate have hit their strides. The best pits in and around the city have gotten better.

Of course, places that have dirt roads and screen doors don’t have opera companies and easy access to Starbucks.  So there’s that.  One criticism, though, is completely right-on:

That doesn’t mean you can walk into any haunt with a neon pig outside and expect smoked bliss from every corner of the menu. An awful lot of stuff around town still has no right calling itself barbecue, though the ratio has improved considerably. Some places dabble in too many styles. Out there where barbecue comes from, that doesn’t happen: the top places in Texas don’t dress up their pork shoulder in Carolina drag, and no one in Memphis is trying to outgun Texans at their own game.

This is sort of a generic problem Up North; the places that do barbecue try to do Kansas City and Memphis and Austin and Georgia, all at the same time, and it can get a bit messy.  It’s good, mind you — not as good as the real sabor autentico, but it ain’t bad.

 Two main quarrels with the article.  First, it highlights a place called R.U.B. in Chelsea which I haven’t gone to – they got into a copyright snit with our local place in Jersey, the “R.U.B. Hut”, which was forced to change its name to the “G.R.U.B. Hut.”  Second — this is just unbelievable:

Over a dinner of three of those meaty whole racks of lamb (that four of us came within two ribs of finishing), a friend related a story of visiting Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Tex., one of the high holy shrines of Texas barbecue. He tried to describe the vibe in the room while he was eating: a low, throbbing, violent, ready-to-rumble hum that he felt and felt part of. (As he’s a long-haired Southern boy with a peacenik streak, he didn’t indulge it.)

I had never made that connection: when a barbecue place proclaims that its product is good enough to make you “slap yo’ pappy” or some other hokum, it’s alluding to a visceral reaction that only truly great barbecue can elicit. I have never had ruckus-worthy barbecue at any of the places that brandished that kind of sentiment.

After we’d finished the lamb, we headed back to my friend’s room at the Mercer hotel to digest in front of a Kenneth Anger DVD. Once we were in the elevator, he confessed that he had been struck by an urge to tackle someone, anyone, when we were walking through the lobby.

Sure, it could have just been the weekend crowd at the Mercer. But I knew better, because I felt the urge, too. It was the lamb, rubbed with a simple chili-inflected and mustard-based paste, cooked to a perfect tenderness, gently flavored with smoke.

What is up with this?  You have got to be kidding me.  I’ve eaten at Kreuz Market.  I’ve never felt anything other than love — pure, sweet, smoky love for their barbecue.  I’ve never felt an undercurrent of violence there or at any other Hill Country barbecue.  The idea that barbecue leads to violence is nonsense of the worst order.  If you eat a whole rack of lamb and then go out and tackle someone in a hotel lobby, you’d have to be an idiot to blame the lamb, and an even bigger idiot to blame the barbecue.  (Anyone that doesn’t buy this notion should check out crime statistics for Lockhart and compare them to Jackson Heights.)

This is in every way inexplicable.  Barbecue brings people together.  It is something that everyone — even pointy-headed Yankee food reporters who watch esoteric short films — can enjoy and be inspired by.  It is a unifying force.  Blaming great barbecue for violent urges is wrong in every way, and the NYT would do well to apologize.

Congratulations to police and prosecutors in Duluth, Minnesota for getting a plea deal with Troy Lee Gentry:

Gentry pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in November. Under a plea deal, he agreed to forfeit the bear and the bow he used during the hunt near Sandstone. The 600-pound bear has been part of a taxidermy display at Gentry’s home in Tennessee. He was sentenced Friday.

The bear was killed in October 2004 at the 80-acre Minnesota Wildlife Connection. Owner Lee Marvin Greenly sold the bear for $4,650 and orchestrated the hunt, which Gentry videotaped and edited to make it appear the bear had been killed in a fair chase hunt, according to authorities.

This blog has nothing against hunting (although I don’t hunt) or against guns in general (although I am far too clumsy to use one safely). It has everything against poor sportsmanship, and there’s nothing less sporting than a canned hunt. (Other than, say, Terrell Owens spiking the ball on the Texas Stadium star, but that’s another story.) I would have loved to have seen Mr. Gentry behind bars for 90 days, but am pleased that he admitted his wrongdoing.

Montgomery Gentry has a song out called Some People Change about people turning their lives around and not being racists or drunks anymore. I suggest they add a new verse about not shooting animals in canned hunts.

I think you could spend a whole lot of time making fun of Peter King at Sports Illustrated for his travel notes.  I know I’ve wanted to.  I’ve tried to be nice, though, but I can’t this time.  What is he smoking?

Aggravating/Enjoyable Travel Note II

Ever been to a Bonefish Grill? I think it’s a chain. Upscale fish restaurant, one of them on Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa. The other night, SI.com’s John Donovan and I dined there. He had a Corona, the Caesar salad and a pasta dish with shrimp. I had San Pellegrino, the house salad, salmon with rice and a coffee. The bill: $46.81.

I believe that would cover the appetizers in New Jersey, maybe.

Eating in Florida sure is fun.

Oh, you gotta be kidding me.  In Jersey?  I live in Jersey.  You show me a place in Somerset County with a $20 appetizer and I’ll walk there.  Maybe La Catena is that expensive; dunno.  Never been there, and they don’t list prices.  Coccola does, and their most expensive appetizer is like $14.

Maybe – maybe – it’s more expensive up in Montclair, where King lurks.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I’ve paid a lot more to eat in Florida than I have in Central Jersey.

As an ex-Atlanta resident, I was curious as to how the accident that decimated the Bluffton University baseball team happened:

The bus exited I-75 southbound north of downtown Atlanta at about 5:30 a.m. and failed to stop at the stop sign at the top of the exit ramp.

It plunged off the bridge into the southbound lanes of the expressway, according to two drivers, whose vehicles were hit by the bus or debris falling off it.

One of the great things about Google Maps is you get to see exactly how things like this can happen.  Check it out:

You see where the white arrow is at the left center of the image, pointing east-southeast?  That’s the route that the bus took off the I-75 HOV lane.  You’re supposed to stop at the top of the ramp, yielding to traffic on Northside Drive.  And Northside Drive traffic doesn’t stop.  And if you don’t slow down — you keep barrelling on at high speed, thinking you’re on the freeway — there’s no place for you to go except sailing right off the bridge and down into traffic.

I don’t ever remember taking that exit before — not saying I never did, but I don’t remember.  (I hardly ever used the HOV lane when I lived in Atlanta, and I didn’t have to commute on any freeway.)  I don’t ever recall seeing an exit like that or remotely like that, anywhere.  Anyway, you can see why someone who was tired in a low-visibility situation could make that specific mistake.

God bless the departed, the injured, their families, and their classmates.