Monday, April 18, 2011

Dogs I've known: Solly the Pup

Solly the Pup

Some years back I spent a happy couple of months training to be an outdoor survival instructor on a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland. The arrival of our group triggered the longest spell of fair weather anyone could remember, and the superstitious locals were somewhat reluctant to let us go. It was a beautiful spot, the Guinness was symphonic (and three quid a pint, even then) and the natives had eccentricity to spare. We were led, in a loose sense, by a dynamic but somewhat idiosyncratic former SAS guy. He had the right idea in wanting to make money by teaching survival skills to businessmen, but the wrong one about pretty well everything else. Still, he knew his onions when it came to living off the land, and under his errratic leadership an exciting time was had by all.
Among our brave band we counted Solly, without doubt the thickest dog in all natural history. Solly was an Alsatian, more or less, and about six months old. To say Solly was good natured would be a triumph of understatement. He lived solely to serve humanity, though unfortunately in the role of jester rather than anything useful. He was built like an overweight giraffe, and whenever he got excited control over his legs seemed to pass to an alien consciousness that hadn’t quite got the hang of working them. I got my first demonstration of his faithful, undying devotion to anyone at all while we were waiting at the ferry pier. “Watch this,” grinned our boss, and set off down the wooden jetty at a sprint. Game for any lark, Solly bounded along beside him, barking like a lunatic. A foot from the end, the callous human stopped dead. Solly’s spaghetti legs weren’t up to sudden halts, however, and he sailed in a graceful arc sixteen feet down into the frigid Irish Sea. Yells of encouragement brought him paddling frantically ashore, where he cowered shivering and whining on the beach. “Come on Solly!” yelled the boss, and ran off down the jetty once more. Sure enough, with a joyful yelp, the hapless mutt charged off after his beloved master – and straight into the drink again. “You’re a GOOD BOY!” chortled his tormentor, as the pathetic animal dragged himself back out of the sea, “Thick as a short plank, but a good boy!” Solly’s sodden tail wagged with delight.
For a survival training ground, the island was notably short on wild sources of nutrition. The sheep were off limits, for eating at least (they make great sleeping companions –  quiet at the back), and there wasn’t a lot in the way of leafy vegetation to be found on a seven-mile rock whose summit was encrusted in salt from massive Atlantic gales that drove sea spray clean over it. Rabbits, however, abounded, and when we inexplicably tired of eating raw limpets (hint: swallow early, as the more you chew, the bigger they get), we’d try to secure one of our floppy-eared chums for the pot. If you have a dog, of course, rabbit hunting is a piece of cake. Unless it was Solly. Often as we came down off the hill in the evening dusk, we could see rabbits dotting the turf below us like little dinner nuggets. Solly was dog enough that his ears would prick up at the sight, his tail would stick out like a lance and off he’d go, bounding downhill like an avenging Fury. The bunnies would watch him from the corners of their soft, doe-like eyes, poised at the critical moment to simultaneously scatter in random directions. Solly’s brain was an early 4-bit job, slightly brighter than a door chime but not as complex as, say, a programmable toaster. Too much input would freeze it, automatically applying the brakes to any moving limbs. Multiple vectors were more than this primitive device could handle, and faced with ten fleeing rabbits it simply shut down. Solly was no better at stopping on a hillside than on a pier, however, and it could take thirty feet for him to bring all his underpinnings under control, by which time the rabbits were safely in the hedges, blowing raspberries and sticking fingers up at their gormless nemesis.
One fateful evening, Solly made a major evolutionary leap. The rabbits exploded in all directions as usual, but in one of those monkey-with-a-typewriter moments, Solly actually latched onto one and kept after it. His quarry streaked down hill like a brick down a well, but for once Solly’s legs were on speaking terms with each other and he gained steadily like a heat-seeking missile. Astounded, we cheered him on.
Had there been any data-retention device between Solly’s ears, two pieces of information might have popped onto the screen and prevented what happened next. The first is the difference in mass between a small, cuddly rabbit and a dog who never refused anything from a can (even lapping up some unguarded brown paint on one memorable occasion). Brer Rabbit is built for speed and agility, and his svelte chassis permits lightning-fast turns. Solly, on the other hand, was a thing of berserk energy and momentum, both of which were now present in far greater amounts than he could handle. Botany not being his long suit either, he had no inkling why canny Irish farmers since days of yore have planted gorse hedges at the edge of their fields. Sheep, as anyone who has had one (oh stop it) knows, will eat most things found in nature, but gorse hedges are off the menu due to their batteries of lethal thorns.
Hurtling after his prey like a furry comet, Solly clearly had the scent of victory in his nostrils. The rabbit, however, had other ideas. A foot from the hedge, it hung a left as sharply as if demonstrating a geometry problem. Solly barely had time to register this unsportsmanlike ploy before he was engulfed in a green hell. It took us a good ten minutes to extract him, perforated and whimpering, while every rabbit from there to Dublin wet itself laughing.
I’ve met some memorably odd dogs in my life (Clive was another; I’ll tell you about him anon) but Solly holds a special place in my heart. His intellect-to-mass ratio was no better than that of some corals, but for sheer devotion he took the ribbon. I often wonder what became of him.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

American cars and trains

From a letter to the UK, some years back:

My neighbor was fixing his motor this morning. It’s a 1973 Ford LTD; 18 feet long, almost three tons but only two doors (each, though, as long as some cars). Seats like armchairs in a Piccadilly club, column shift, copious swathes of maroon velvet and acres of fake wood printed directly onto metal. This, he tells me, is the small version with the 385-inch motor; there was a 440, and the police got a version with, wait for it, 600 cubes. 
He was replacing the front ball joints, and when I peered into the cavernous hole left by removing the wheel the whole setup from which the hub dangled looked less substantial than that of a Mini. The worryingly small disc was backed by tiny, spindly little arms that must flap and flex like asparagus under any sort of lively driving. Ford exhibited a touching faith in the quality of their components by securing the ball joints not with bolts but with huge rivets that have to be ground off to release the hub. 
"It’s a great car," he asserted, "I can go a whole week on a tank of gas." He works three miles away; the tank holds about 30 gallons. Go figure, as they say here. I rented a Chevy Suburban not long back, a 5.7-liter beast like an overweight Range Rover. Aware of their dreadful reputation as guzzlers, and knowing that we were going to Washington DC and back, I took it into a gas station and blithely said "Fill ‘er up." We were still sat there 15 minutes later – the damn thing had a 42-gallon tank. Despite the primordial pushrod V8, the aerodynamics of a block of flats and several hours at a steady 75, I couldn’t empty it.
I thought of you when I was up at the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum a few weeks back; hall after hall of behemoths, including that electric thing designed by Raymond Loewy that looks like an art deco mantel clock and is made entirely from aluminum, and a really weird steam locomotive with vertical cylinders clinging to its flank like sucking piglets and driving a huge flywheel, whence the urge is transmitted to all 10 wheels (including the tender) by shafts and bevel gears. More than one can see in a day, and a vast 2-10-0 chuffing up and down outside, departing every hour to haul a train of ancient cars through the bewilderingly pretty Amish countryside.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Earthquakes in Japan: old friends


On January 17, 1995, I was awoken in my apartment to the east of Osaka by a sensation familiar to all long-term residents of Japan – the rhythmic rocking of the entire building. “A big one,” I remarked, as pots and pans clattered to the kitchen floor and the water in the bathtub sloshed over the sides. The swaying lasted about a minute, but the power stayed on and the sturdy concrete structure soon settled back down with only a few small cracks visible. It was only when I arrived at work to find my office trashed and saw the vast palls of smoke climbing into the skies over Kobe to the west that I realized that something catastrophic had occurred.
The following day, I was dispatched by my employer to find out what had happened various friends and colleagues. With a bundle of plastic sheets and supplies strapped behind me, I set off on my motorcycle.
Among the places on my rounds that harrowing day was the small natural history museum in the grounds of the Kaisei Hospital, run for fifty years by Dr. Norio Kikuchi. Happily he had survived, as had the building, and we sat together for a while on the nearby sea wall before surveying the damage together.
As a young medical intern in the years immediately after World War II, Dr. Kikuchi and his friends regularly toured the Amami Islands in a truck, stopping at each village to set up a clinic. Scattered in the East China Sea, far to the south of Japan’s mainland, the islands were among Japan’s poorest and most remote places. Their people lived mainly by fishing and subsistence farming, and outside the small towns there were no medical facilities at all. The young doctors from the mainland brought basic checks and care and were made welcome by everyone. After the day’s last clinic they would stretch a sheet over the side of the truck and show movies – the only ones many of the islanders ever saw, and vividly remembered even today by many in their eighties and nineties.
In the faded pictures displayed on his museum wall, Dr. Kikuchi is a tanned young man on a great adventure, in a time when the whole country was living from day to day in rubble and chaos. Now we sat in silence as he smoked his inevitable cigarette and gazed at the shore. “It’s a mess in there,” he remarked with a wry smile, “I’ll show you.”
The shutter over the main door rattled up, and immediately I could see what had happened inside. As the building lurched, all the cabinets had detached from the walls and fallen forward, their drawers sliding out as they toppled. Thousands of specimens lay scattered, strewn in a great flood across the floor and up against the glass door. Their boxes had opened, and the labels had fluttered out to cover every surface like thick snow. Dr. Kikuchi grimaced, then clapped me on the back. “Well, at least we’ve got something to do now!” he grinned.
Time and again in the weeks that followed, I remembered his words. In the wreckage of the city, where eight-story buildings had toppled onto their sides and railroad tracks lay twisted like uncoiled rope, people worked in a way I had never seen before. With incredible speed they cleared pathways through the devastation, searched the ruins for survivors and bodies and began the seemingly insurmountable task of restoring their homes. With the fires extinguished and the main roads clear, survivors returned to salvage what they could from the mounds of debris. All around them, a massive effort was under way to bring back electricity, water and transport. Crews from the utility companies toiled alongside local government workers, police and construction teams in a massive, coordinated effort to push back the mess and put the whole city right. To a nation that travels by train, the reopening of the first line through the city just days later had immense significance. Within a month, all four main lines were running again; by year’s end new buildings were rising all around, and many of those displaced were already contemplating the day when they would return to their neighborhoods.
Everyone I knew back then had the same attitude in the days and weeks that followed the quake. They took this mighty sucker-punch that had caught them in their beds, and stood right back up again. With all their wrenching loss and bereavement, they still bowed to each other as they met, and smiled as they traded experiences and advice. Even in the first terrible hours, as transport systems failed and victims struggled to escape, there was no mass panic or lawlessness, and a few incidents apart, police reported no looting or theft. Later investigations revealed that some structures had failed because they had been built in breach of codes or with corners cut for financial gain, but those are crimes of a different kind. In Kobe in 1995, the ordinary Japanese people showed the world who they are, and why they have always prevailed in the face of repeated disaster. Amidst the vast destruction and horror this week has brought, they are showing it again – the same small bows, the same wry smiles and the readiness to accept that now, once again, they have something to do.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Why houses are getting cheaper

The US housing market remains a sick puppy, lying in its basket and flippering feebly at human approach. Out here in Greater Suburbia, there are any number of clearly irresistible houses that have been for sale since about the thirteenth century. Anyone who can get a mortgage has their pick of a des. res. with all the amenities and a desperate seller.
So old Joe down the block, a 50-plus-year resident, went to the stars last Christmas. Joe's house was admittedly no great prize as he left it. He had last redecorated in about 1975, and the place sported a legendary guy basement full of a long lifetime's plunder from his place of employment, the Pennsylvania Railroad (When I first met him, ten years ago, he proudly boasted that he was still using up his vast stock of PR toilet paper. He retired in 1985). Rusting metal, bizarre home-made wiring and lots of water leaks dripping in the gloom meant you had keep your hands to yourself. Still, once his nephew had cleaned it all out, it wasn't a bad little house. It sold this spring to a very nice Mexican family, for roughly what it would have cost in 1980.
Looking around the ol' neighborhood (try Zillow.com), most other joints that have changed hands in the last year have sold for about 40% less than they would had the market remained even flat after 2007.
The big question then, pop pickers: is this a temporary lull, with the Good Times just waiting at the gate to scamper back in when the sun comes out, or a permanent re-setting of the market? The latter, in my opinion. Here's a bit of Captain Economics 101:
Any kid of ten (I have one around here somewhere) can tell you that growth-based economics is a crock. Even two percent growth, compounded, requires that your economy double in size within a lifetime - something that cannot happen unless you start out a lot poorer than we are. Once all the conquerable lands with natural resources and inadequately armed people are invaded and civilized, the only way this model continues to work is if we get to hit the re-set button every few decades. Traditionally, this was done by holding a World War; the victors got to drive the losers' economies for a while, and could thus rig things like exchange rates and trade agreements in their own favor. Presto: boom times for the winners, gradual recovery for the losers, nothing to worry about for, oh, a good 50 years.
The last time we got to do this was in 1945, and now time's up. The golden glow of WWII has long since faded, but no-one's had the nerve to start WWIII and the economy has thus been bleating for a major re-set lo these 20 years past. Seeing as we can't get it together to hold another round of global mayhem, however, various parts of it are going ahead and re-setting themselves.
Of the $220,000 average price of a house in my neighborhood four years ago, I'd say that about $40,000 was nominal value (also known in the trade as "trying it on"). That's the difference between replacement cost (which your insurance company uses to calculate your policy) and the selling cost. To buy a house like mine in outer Detroit would cost about $25,000; in Palo Alto, about $450,000. For the same house. The replacement value in both places would be similar. As you can see, Detroit features negative nominal value - houses sell for less than they cost to build, which is why no-one is building any - while in La-la Land there's almost no connection between what something is worth and what you have to pay.
A healthy housing market is one in which nominal value is no more than a certain fraction of replacement value, and I'm proud to say that my neighborhood qualifies. Which is why houses do actually sell here, and yet don't even a mile or two away, where nominal value makes up over 30% of the asking price.
Look for the housing market to start moving again when houses sell for a figure that is closer than telescope distance to their actual value. Californians - don't hold your breath...

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Starting the Pole Star

Away we go.
This is the opening message from the Captain, here at the Pole Star. This blog is about life on earth, with no particular focus at first. Read along as things progress, and as the man said: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".