It's a Girl!

Zibby and I got more great news today: the baby is still healthy. And we found out that we have a girl. Here's a few of the newest ultrasound photos:

Facial profile

Profile showing her position with legs over head

Face

Five toes

Product Safety Recalls RSS Feed

I encourage you to visit the Consumer Product Safety Commission's Web site (www.cspi.gov) and subscribe to the Commission's RSS feeds regarding product safety recalls. You can find the feeds here: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/rss.html. I've been visiting this site a lot recently for unrelated reasons, and I've been surprised by the number of consumer product recalls that are posted to the site. For example, at least 30 new recalls have been announced this month (April, 2009). They range from Specialized bicycles that were recalled because of a defective cable stop to Evenflo highchairs recalled because of choking and fall risks.

What I've realized from looking at these recall notices is that (a) we trust our lives and safety to various consumer products every day and (b) we probably never hear about recalls that affect the consumer products we own and use. Basically, unless you return the product registration card to the manufacturer or the product defect is so egregious that it makes the news, you'll never be notified that a product you own has been recalled. So please, subscribe to the CSPI's RSS feeds or to their e-mail newsletter. I promise that it won't be very long until a product is recalled that you either own or know someone who owns.

Congratulations, Alex

My friend Alex Blake ran the race to Robie Creek on Saturday. He finished 33rd out over 2000 runners. We ran together all winter until Alex shifted into a focused training schedule in late February. Here he is crossing the finish line, photos courtesy of the Idaho Statesman.

More Chicken Dinner

I omitted kudos to the Lost River men's masters 35B squad from my race report. These guys have been doing a great job of riding as a team, and they showed it again yesterday. The team dominated the pace of the race and did it perfectly. Rex lost no time to his nearest contender in the GC, and the team controlled the pack pace so that John Miller had enough breathing room to escape to a beautiful solo break away win. All in all this squad continues to show its depth, guts, and teamwork. Congratulations, guys.

Chicken Dinner Road Race Report

My goals for the Chicken Dinner Race were to ride aggressively and see if I could mix it up a little. I did ride more aggressively, but I did not mix it up--not at all. Instead I got dropped in the first serious attack. The Cat 4-5 race seems to be dominated by a small cadre of riders held together by the Broken Spoke team. These guys work together very well to break up the field with early attacks to drop off the weaklings. I don't think I'm a weakling, but my strength is more in endurance than in peak power. Until I can get my power output up to par, and without any teammates watching out for me, I just get shelled on these early attacks. Then I spend the rest of the race passing guys who wore themselves out hang on with the leaders. Today was no different, but I did finish closer to the leaders, an 8.5 minute gap rather than a 15+ minute one.

Today I kept the leaders in view for most of the race after dropping off, but could never bridge the gap. The frustrating part for me was that I could see the leaders climbing the hills, and except for that first attack, I'm 100% confident that I was climbing faster than them.

So my goal going forward is to put in focused work on building peak power. I have my heart rate monitor back in working order and set up on my bike, and I have a lactic threshold test scheduled for this Wednesday. I hope this and some sensible training will net me at least one good race this season.

Books You Can't Live Without

This list of 100 books has been going around the Internet for a while under the false premise that it is a list compiled by the BBC and that the BBC claims the average adult will have read only 6 of the 100. According to this commentator, however, the list originates with a World Book Day poll. Here's the version of the list as it appeared in the UK's Guardian newspaper. The 6 out of 100 statistic appears to be entirely apocryphal.

I've marked each books with an (x) if I've read it and with an (m) if I've seen the movie. Books marked with (x) and (m) mean I've read the book and seen the movie. I think I counted 44 x's by the time I was done. I guess I've got some reading to do.

1 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (x)(m)
2 The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (x)(m)
3 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series, JK Rowling (x)(m)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (m)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (x)
8 His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (partial x, I read vol. 1, The Golden Compass)
10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22, Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare (part x and part m)
15 Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier (m)
16 The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch, George Eliot (x)
21 Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House, Charles Dickens (m)
24 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (x)
31 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis (x, Isn't this redundant of #36, below?)
34 Emma, Jane Austen (m)
35 Persuasion, Jane Austen (m)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm, George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (started, couldn't finish)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
45 The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies, William Golding (x)
50 Atonement, Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi, Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune, Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road, Jack Kerouac (started, couldn't finish)
67 Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick, Herman Melville (started, couldn't finish)
71 Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula, Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses, James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal, Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession, AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (m)
85 Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web, EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks (x)
94 Watership Down, Richard Adams (m)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (x)
96 A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet, William Shakespeare (x, Isn't this redundant of 14, above?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (x)

A New Attitude

My third bike race of the season is coming up on Sunday. This is my first year racing, so it's also my third bike race ever. In races #1 and #2, I was very concerned about being dropped from the pack and finishing last. The result? I was so conservative that I got dropped early and raced the remaining 40 miles in no-man's land desperately trying to avoid last place. The results are on the Cat 4-5 Male pages here and here. I avoided last, but it wasn't pretty.

So for this next race, the Chicken Dinner Road Race, I've decided to stop worrying about losing. I'm just going to go out there and have fun. And now after getting dropped in two races, I know that I'd rather be in the lead group, blow up on the last lap, and not finish, than get dropped, ride in no-man's land, and finish. After all, you have to be with the lead group to even have a shot at winning.

Reading the Tea Leaves

I should probably leave opining on the stock market to the certified gurus, but the recent market surge has got me wondering if we're seeing a new bubble in financial assets. Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal have reported that the big trading banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and their partners) have begun to tap the cheap money the Fed has made available through its various new funding facilities. At the same time, the Journal has reported that bank lending to businesses and consumers has reached an all-time low. So where's all the money flooding into stocks coming from? I wonder whether the trading banks have been taking the cheap money from the Fed and using it to speculate on stocks.

Naturally all that money funneling into the market has lifted stock prices and the lift in stock prices has caused further speculation. I just don't see any other way to explain the persistent rise in the market when the economic fundamentals just aren't there: transportation, housing, employment, inventories, production, even most commodity prices--in short, all the indicators--seem to be pointing towards continued recession.

The standard analysis I keep hearing, that stocks are rallying because no investor wants to be the guy who missed the bottom of the market, could be the explanation, but I can't shake the feeling that the rally is being driven by speculative releveraging. And as we have seen, when highly leveraged gambles like this go bust, it somehow always ends up costing the government money.

As I've said, this seems to me like the only good explanation for the recent market rally, but I haven't heard any of the analysts offering a similar explanation. If you're familiar with a "real" analyst who's reading the tea leaves in the same way as me, please let me know by posting a comment to the blog entry or sending me an e-mail.

Anthony Kaim Update

Heidi reports that Anthony is doing very well, all things considered. He's through the surgeries on his jaw and spine and he's scheduled today for surgeries on his hip and pelvis. Heidi has set up a CaringBridge site for Anthony to which she's posted updates and photos: http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/anthonykaim. So this will be my last post on Anthony's recovery, at least for a while.

Please keep Anthony in your thoughts and prayers. It might not be much, but it's all we can do for him.

The Attics

I've been a little remiss for not blogging about the Attics already. The Attics are new musical group based in Brooklyn with a unique and exciting sound. To me, their music is characterized by strong melodies, intricate arrangements, complex harmonies, and restrained use of samples and other electronic effects. The Attics are my brothers Meir and Natan, Adam Wilson, Shomik Bhattacharya, and Dan Fox. An interesting biographical note is that all five of the Attics grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts--just like me. So in that sense their all my brothers.

You can listen to a few sample songs on their MySpace Music site at http://www.myspace.com/atticsnyc.

Advocation.me: Musings on law, crime, psychology, and the world

I recently discovered Cara Dearman's Advocation.me blog, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read about law, crime, and psychology. Cara's a classmate from law school, a fellow veteran of UT Law's Teaching Quizmasters program, and an overall class act. All this shows up in her blog: Cara's posts are insightful, thought-provoking, and well written. She's clearly writing about subjects that she understands and that she cares about.

In short, Advocation.me is a blog I like, and I think you will, too.

Anthony Kaim Cycling Accident

Zibby received this e-mail today from Heidi Hock-Kaim, a friend from Austin, regarding injuries sustained by her husband, Anthony Kaim, from a terrible cycling accident in Austin yesterday, Saturday April 11, 2009. In short, Anthony broke and fractured several bones but (miraculously) did not sustain brain or spinal cord damage or injury to internal organs.

As background, Anthony and I went to law school together and we rode together two to three times a week throughout our last year of school. Anthony cycled for UT as an undergrad and he showed me lots of great routes in the Austin area. In fact, Anthony's example encouraged me to get back on my bike and get into shape after taking the first two years of law school off. Somehow he managed to enter and win or place in several races in all three years of law school and win about every academic award possible at UT Law. And he's just a really humble, nice guy with a great sense of humor.

I can't come up with words to express how sad this news makes me for Anthony and Heidi or how relieved I am that his injuries are not worse.

I wish him the best for a speedy and full recovery. Heidi's e-mail follows below the line.

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Thank you all for your thoughts, prayers, calls, and messages. I apologize if we do not get back to you right away but please know that we are taking comfort in all of you.

Anthony was in a severe cycling accident on Saturday morning. From what I understand, he was riding with a group on loop 360 in Austin and he either ran over debris or hit a bump in the road, He lost control of his handlebars and ran into the cement barrier on the right which then made him jut out into traffic on the left. He was hit by a car and, no doubt, both of them were traveling at high speeds. It is a miracle that he survived.

That being said, his injuries are quite serious. Thank God he has no head or spinal cord injuries and he has been fully conscious and talking a lot (even questioning and debating the doctors & nurses). But, he has several broken ribs, a shattered pelvis, a disjointed hip (now back in place), his spine is fractured in 4 or 5 places, and his jaw is broken in 3 places. All of these will be fixed with multiple surgeries. We were told he was going to have his facial & spine surgeries today but his hemoglobin levels are pretty low and the doctors need him to be stable before they operate. He has 4 specialists working on him and he is in very good hands.

The current timeline is: possible facial surgery on Tuesday and the other surgeries following this week. He may be in the hospital for weeks with a slow recovery after.

We are at Brackenridge Hospital in the ICU. I, along with his parents & family are all here and we are hanging out in the waiting room. We are welcoming visitors but Anthony will not be able to have visitors until later this week. If you all could do me a favor and forward this to anyone I may have left off that would be most appreciated (I'm a little sleep deprived at this point)

Please keep Anthony in your prayers.

Heidi

Things I Like - April 4, 2009

Books
I don't usually read mystery novels, but I've recently read two foreign mysteries that I really enjoyed.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A fast-paced mystery novel set in Sweden. My criticism is that the novel veers off in too many directions, but the author's evident warmth, big-heartedness, and sensitivity to moral conflicts more than makes up for it. I couldn't put this book down until I finished it, but unlike so many "page-turners," this one didn't leave me feeling manipulated or disappointed.

Tom Rob Smith, Child 44. Another fast-paced mystery novel, this one is set in the Soviet Union during the end of the Stalinist regime. This book's strength is in the way the author brings you inside the paranoia of life in Moscow during the height of Stalinism, where one wrong word could land you in the Gulag and everyone was a potential informer. My criticisms of the book are that the resolution is a bit too contrived, the main character is a bit too naive to be believable, and the end is a bit too transparently set up to allow for sequels. This is a terrific one-off book, but I fear that sequels will not have the freshness and originality that helped Child 44 overcome its weaknesses.

News
I think we've all realized that we need a crash course in global financial markets to even begin to understand today's news headlines. That's why I think the writers at the New York Times, particularly Joe Nocera and Gretchen Morgensen, should win some sort of public service award. No other publication I read has done such a good job of reporting the financial news so it can be understood by ordinary readers.