On The Turning Away

Red Sox’s World Series sweep maybe a yawner for those who looked for drama in October, but it makes room for other affairs, in the financial and political worlds. Yesterday saw the other shoe drop at the Thundering Herd, while the chattering class was charmed by Biden’s mockery of Rudy speak: “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Speaking of Dems, yesterday’s debate offered “by far the liveliest exchanges among the Democratic candidates”, that is, the six other candidates heaped criticism on Sen. Clinton. For his part, Sen. Obama’s “underwhelmed” performance disappoints many a supporter. He did say, however, he’d be Mitt Romney if he were to don a Halloween costume.
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Recently we learned that couple friends of ours share a common trait with Lynne Cheney, aka Mrs Darth Vader: they are all Drudge aficionados. In a clear sign of Drudge Report becoming a worldwide phenom, this week both the NYT (on the left) and London’s Telegraph (on the right) ran pieces on the reclusive and notorious mastermind behind the hugely popular news site.

The enduring power of the Drudge Report, which mixes original reporting with links to newspaper, Internet or television reports far and wide, led Salon.com, a liberal online magazine, to declare that 2008 the first “Matt Drudge primary”.
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While the latest Facebook affinity group, “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert”, is growing at a staggering rate, the race to grab a piece of the social networking site du jour is heating up between archrivals Microsoft and Google.

More is seen at stake for the world’s biggest tech company, still smarting from the ignominious defeat by the search giant for AOL couple years ago. Hundreds of millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue aside, it’s deja vu all over again if Google beats Microsoft to the deal punch.

While immeasurably hot, Facebook’s revenues in 2007 are estimated at only $100m, mostly from selling ad space, with tiny profits. Critics also point to the limitations for social networks beyond a certain size, namely, one big “social graph” will not be able to “replicate” the millions of networks that exist offline.
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Who said, even serious politics often devolves into theater of the absurd. In a decidedly anti-climactic coming of age of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert - every bit a mock nincompoop right-wing pundit as he’s on his eponymous show - appeared on Tim Russert’s Meet the Press yesterday.

After all, hot on the heels of promoting his what promises to be a best-seller, “I Am America (And So Can You)“, came the “distinguished gentleman from Comedy Central” throwing his mock hat into the proverbial ring.

Colbert was up against Senator John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on “Fox News Sunday and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on CBS “Face the Nation”. While the ratings are not in, judging from the buzz, Colbert’s “15 minutes” of fame Sunday morning debut is a hallmark in the media-political complex, as it “is not a dream” and better yet, as he gently warned the audience, “you are not going to wake up from this.”
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This week, C-Span broadcast President Hu Jintao’s speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s five-yearly Congress, in its Foreign Legislature program. It’s also worth mentioning the sheer number of foreign reporters - 1,133, no less - or one for every two party delegates, who descended on Beijing to cover the Congress. It’s a sign of coming of age for the Chinese leadership, given not long ago party delegates had to play hide-and-seek with foreign media.

The foreign press were blessed with “glorious blue skies” and the usual traffic snarls. However, if Forbes is any guide, foreign correspondents were fed with more than a dollop of news: group presentations by local delegates and Q&A on the spot, group interviews of party delegates in the business faction (such as Zhang Ruimin, founder and CEO of Haier Group), real-time broadcast of speeches delivered by party heavyweights (such as President Hu Jintao) with English translation, let alone free coffee and snacks and a 24-hour cafeteria.
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Another day, another update on the attention-grabbing sexual harassment suit by former trader Andrew Tong against SAC Capital. CNBC reported today that EEOC is “ramping up its inquiry into” the accusations that include the sensational “female hormones” and a sexual assault where Tong “claims to have been tied up” by his then boss and start trader Ping Jiang.

“EEOC investigators have recently taken the unusual step of doing an
“on site” interview of Jiang at SAC’s New York City headquarters where
he works. Such interviews rarely take place at company locations,
say people with knowledge of the EEOC’s activities.”

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Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

- Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged.

You can always count on NYPost to bring you the latest scandal du jour. “Two in the Sac“, about a “scurrilous” lawsuit by an ex-trader, Andrew Tong, against Stevie Cohen’s SAC Capital, sends Wall Street into a tailspin. First reported by CNBC yesterday afternoon, the suit alleged “sexual harassment” by the married trader’s superior - Ping Jiang, a star trader and a neighbor of Yoko Ono - that ultimately resulted in an affair between the two men.

It has all the elements of a New York drama of money and intrigue: top secretive hedge fund, bizarre claim of estrogen hormones, and a salacious homoerotic affair. At the center of the complaint is an alleged “training program of strict confidentiality”, ostensibly for “the elimination of Tong’s alleged personality flaws”. Details from court documents include Tong’s wearing “certain kinds of clothing at work” as a result of taking illicit female hormones, at the urge of his boss.
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It seems the Quiet American is back in vogue. In a speech in August, President Bush seized Graham Greene’s 1955 classic to draw dubious parallels between the catastrophic Vietnam conflicts and Iraq war, espousing the idea of U.S. naïveté “on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq”.

This week, NYT uberpundit Tom “flat” Friedman adds a seasonal twist to Greene’s eponymous character, calling the today’s college students “Generation Q” for they are “quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad”. But he concedes they are in dire need of radical ideas and political activism.

If anything, Bush’s invocation of The Quiet American was as much a travesty of Graham Greene’s novel as Friedman’s spin is. Last spring a much publicized report on the upsurge of narcissism called for urgent “remedies” to the epidemic of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, resulting from the “self-esteem movement” in the 1980s, among college students.
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Walking up Columbus Ave the other day, we noticed the closure of Hunan Park, an unassuming place that served somewhat bland Chinese. Nearby, the demise of Aegean, a Greek restaurant, was more conspicuous in the summer. And a popular Malaysian eatery across the street also decamped. Are Greek and pan-Asian/Chinese out of favor or what?

The subject of changing palates came up when we shot the breeze with friends recently. One of our pet peeves has been the growing number of Thai eateries in the city, against the backdrop of ever dwindling presence of Chinese restaurants. It’s no seismic shift, as our friends reassured us. After all, Thai cuisine, to most people, is nothing more than spicy Chinese food.
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