I love classic photos, and I’m a huge fan of the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. So imagine my joy when I found this Flickr set: Classics in Lego. I think my favorite is the recreation of Capa’s Death of a Loyalist Soldier (original here).
For anyone who hasn’t been following the wide world of opera (sit still, this is interesting!), you might have missed the news about The New York Metropolitan Opera’s troubles with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Tristan has long had a troubled history with it being proclaimed as “unplayable” by Parisian and Viennese orchestras, and finally being premiered in Munich by the great conductor Hans von Bülow (whose wife Wagner was secretly shacking up with at the time).
However the Met’s troubles have reached a whole new level of weird. Their production, completed on Friday, ran correctly only once prompting many to wonder if the entire opera was cursed. To start, tenor Ben Heppner, who was to play the role of Tristan, had to leave after only a few rehearsals. New York doctors initially told him he had a stomach virus, but after returning to Canada for a few days to recover, Heppner’s condition substantially worsened. It wasn’t until seeing a doctor in Toronto that he learned he in fact had an abdominal abscess that required immediate surgery.
Heppner was replaced with John Mac Master, but after suffering from both illness and rejection by critics, he left after one performance. Mac Master was replaced by Gary Lehman, but during the middle of Lehman’s first performance, soprano Deborah Voigt, playing the role of Isolde, fell ill and was replaced by Janice Baird.
Then it got really weird. Voigt returned for her next performance, but Lehman fell from the stage into the prompter’s box after a portion of the set on which he was lying malfunctioned and broke loose. The performance was halted as Lehman was examined by a doctor, and then resumed with Lehman finishing out the rest of the opera.
On Saturday March 22, the Met brought on Robert Dean Smith for his Met premiere. This also happened to be the Saturday matinée performance, meaning it was broadcast worldwide live on the radio and shown in HD in movie theaters around the country. For perhaps the first time, the show went off without a hitch. Reviewers found Smith’s voice a little soft compared to Voigt’s, but for the most part everyone was happy the performance actually worked.
Then it all went to hell again. For the next show, Ben Heppner (remember him? the original tenor) returned…and Deborah Voigt once again fell ill. Like before, she was replaced by Janice Baird, who by now is probably turning out to be a darn good Isolde.
Then, for the last performance, it all worked out. Heppner performed on the stage with Voigt, and for the first time out of six performances, the opera was performed as intended. Ok, so one soprano in a secondary role was sick, but the rest of it came off spectacularly, finally.
Here’s some listening: Isolde’s wonderful finale scene of the opera is here on Youtube, as performed by Waltraud Meier at the Teatro alla Scala. She is singing over the death of Tristan, hallucinating that he is really still alive. Translation here.
One Random Link for everyone: PSDTuts is a remarkable site filled with Photoshop tutorials. Each tutorial is very readable and helps you go from start to finish in creating a professional looking graphic. The site is designed for people who have intermediate Photoshop expertise (can create layers, choose colors, find tools, adjust settings, use filters, etc), but who need help creating more interesting effects or designs. If you’ve ever asked “how did they draw that?” this is the place to find out. Good example: creating Transparent Glass Lettering.
Well Brian Firestone, I guess you win. You’re getting $10 a share instead of $2. Better now?
Quick question: why do so many advertisers not close caption their TV ads? While eating in a noisy restaurant the other day, I noticed the ubiquitous TV-tuned-to-ESPN had been muted with the captioning turned on. While the broadcast was close captioned, probably only about 30% of the ads were.
For advertisers, the economics of actually close captioning an ad should be a total no brainer! It’s a 30 second static piece of footage that may only rarely change between markets. It can’t be that expensive to get someone to type a page or two of text into the captioning system! Yet the number of people who are watching who would still see your ad, either because they are deaf or because they happen to be watching in bars or restaurants, is probably quite large.
Unless someone can tell me why these economics don’t add up, I’m inclined to believe it’s pure laziness; and that’s a total shame. For the amount of money spent on making an ad campaign, it strikes me as incredibly odd that nobody thinks of the strategy behind captioning it.
And if that’s not convincing, think of it this way. People who are watching TV and reading your ad are guaranteed to be paying attention to it! While their numbers are few, their attention is assured. Reach out to them!
The weather in Texas can be undeniably weird, but this week it actually rained dirt. On Tuesday, ash from wildfires in Mexico blew north, met up with a cold front, and fell from the sky as big ugly brown raindrops leaving behind mud covered cars, windows, and buildings. The car washes are doing a big business and the lines have all been insanely long.
Pictures of the grunge on my poor Audi (click for larger):
I’m wondering if I should be on the lookout for pestilence, locusts, and darkness.
Yesterday I wrote about the Bear Stearns meltdown and I mentioned how they were felled by Repurchase Agreements or “repos.” I wanted to elaborate really quickly on what these are and why they are important.
Repos get used for a lot of purposes, but in summary they are short term loans. For banks, they’re useful because they let a bank tie their capital against very short terms securities that produce interest. This way, spare capital is put to use while still being accessible when needed.
For example, let’s say you put some money in a savings account with your local bank. Your bank may not have a use for that capital right away, so rather than have it languish while producing no return, your bank will repo the funds to someone else in exchange for some kind of collateral. A day later, a longer term loan may come through the bank that requires funding; so the bank will reclaim the capital from the repo along with a small amount of interest and then lend the funds to the third party.
Repos are important because they let banks, hedge funds, and corporations tie up their short term capital in interest producing securities. For many organizations, it’s normal that they may have excess cash one day and insufficient cash the next day, while on average they are cash positive. Repos provide a convenient way of managing that up and down flow while usually snagging some extra interest.
The repo market is hugely critical to the normal operations of a good chunk of the global economy, and letting Bear fail would have had a terrible effect on repo trading. At the very least, it would have made it tougher to reclaim capital from Bear’s counterparties, stalling many global banks and companies. At the worst it would have ground the global repo market to a halt, slaughtering a number of other banks and corporations in the process.
For anyone who follows the financial press, the meltdown at Bear Stearns shouldn’t be news. On Sunday, JPMorgan Chase stepped in and purchased the beleaguered investment bank for $2 a share, or $236 million, after acting as an intermediary to a Federal Reserve bailout on Friday. JPMorgan’s actions brought to mind the Banking Panic of 1907, when the real John Pierpont Morgan stepped in and calmed the financial markets after the collapse of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. The price paid for Bear Stearns was a bit of a shock to everyone, especially since their share price closed at $30 at the end of trading on Friday. In all honesty, when I first read the news I thought the reporter had accidentally left off a 0 and that the deal was actually $20 a share.
So how could a bank go from having a share price of $170 a share to $2 a share in the matter of a few months? Well, the answers are complicated. Bear had a lot of exposure to the mortgage market in a number of its businesses, and last summer the company bailed out two of its subprime mortgage hedge funds. The storm that followed grew, combined with some others, and eventually became the mortgage mess we have today.
What brought down Bear Stearns yesterday, however, was something else entirely. Bear frequently participates in a certain kind of transaction called a Repurchase Agreement or “repo” for short. This is essentially a type of short-term loan where two people (called a counterparties), one with cash and the other with assets, get together and swap. The asset holder takes the cash and extends their assets as collateral for the deal. These kinds of arrangements can be very short (overnight) or somewhat long (a couple of years), but by and large they are meant to be very liquid transactions. The cash holders are usually large money market funds, hedge funds, or corporations; while the asset holders can be just about everything from governments with bonds to other corporations to mortgage companies.
Bear Stearns was both a repo borrower and a repo lender, but they were more of one than the other. The difference between their borrowing and lending was $74.5 billion, with more borrowing than lending. That’s quite the substantial sum but not necessarily bad. Bear’s real problem was a lack of faith in their assets: mortgage securities. Over the past several weeks, the markets for these assets have simply stopped moving, meaning that in many cases buying and selling them is very difficult.
For Bear Stearns, the problem was simply that some of their creditors wanted repayment on their repos (they wanted their money they had lent to Bear back), but Bear was unable to find enough liquidity in the market using its large portfolio of mortgage securities. In other words, Bear couldn’t find enough money through additional repos and nobody would buy their mortgage securities outright. Other creditors, sensing trouble, began piling on and trying to get their money back as well. Since Bear Stearns had $75 billion more borrowed than lent, they were ultimately screwed without extra financing.
Obviously, this carries greater implications for the market than just mortgages. Repos are incredibly common, and a breakdown in that market would have created repercussions that extended all over the place. Ordinary investors would have seen their money market accounts mysteriously shrink while major corporations would begin running out of cash and face liquidity issues. When the Fed said it wanted to prevent financial panic from spreading, they damn well meant it.
A few other tidbits:
Update: The Wall Street Journal has a nice run down of the events of the weekend.
Update 2: Brian Firestone responds and he has some great thoughts!
Blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble paid a visit to Rackspace today to see what was happening with technology in San Antonio and to hang out with the company. He seemed to like the place and he had some pretty glowing stuff to say about what we were doing. After having a look at our new building, interviewing a lot of people here, and getting to know the business, he did an hour long Q&A session. A few notes:
All in all, Robert Scoble gave a great session, and I’m really glad he had the opportunity to visit and talk with us.
While it’s on my sidebar, I really want to point out the Silicon Alley Insider; a blog run by one time securities analyst now banned from Wall Street for life Henry Blodget. He made some bad calls during the dot-com era, but Wall Street’s government mandated loss is our gain - SAI is an outstanding wealth of technology business analysis. Blodget’s post titled Hulu: Great Product, Still Screwed is a perfect example that captures the unsettling economic problems facing NBC and News Corp’s soon to be released online video service. (Disclosure: I posted a comment on the Hulu post).
While Blodget’s thoughts are well reasoned, I should also add some positive perspective. I have a beta membership to Hulu and I have to say the service is outstanding. The video quality is great, the ads aren’t terribly intrusive, and the interface is decent. My biggest complaint is that searching for videos is more challenging than I would prefer, especially for shows like Saturday Night Live where there are literally hundreds of clips available. Still, as far as legal online video goes, Hulu is the best thing going right now and leaves iTunes in the dust by virtue of being 100% free.
Which leads me to my next question about why I would even want to own a TV. With so much quality media online, does the traditional TV even matter anymore? I, for one, am not planning on buying an HDTV any time soon, and might even take the opportunity to just throw away my old TV when the digital switch happens next year. What are your TV plans (there’s a poll here if you don’t see it in your RSS reader):
Your TV plans for the next year?
Total Voters: 6
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