Patriot

Pictured : general sentiment after the long haul.  At least the Shakespeares carry their own bags.

In 1990, 11.1 million Americans had passports, according to the US State Department, or about 4% of the population (I recall an investment banker at First Boston in a panic because he had to go to Mexico for a deal and did not have his documents).  Now, 109.8 million have a pp, or 34% of US citizens (I got mine in 1980).  The change, of course, for security : Americans scrutinised by USA Patriot Act signed into law by el presidente in 2001 in response to 911.  It allows roving wiretaps, searches of business records (including libraries) and doing surveillance of "lone wolves" - individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups. The irony : the Patriot Act led by the Republicans who otherwise want Big Government off our backs.

So I am not surprised then, passing through US Customs, to find a digital hand scanner (this has been a feature, along with cameras, since 2008). I ask the agent who gets finger printed ? and , for now, it is foreign nationals.  Soon, though, it will be any one using an airport : in fact, this would occur now but there is not the budget to tag and track every American. I note that this is an invasion of privacy and the agent replies happily: "only if you are a bad guy."

USA Patriot Act acronym : Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001

We connect in Dallas. Madeleine: "Gosh, I've never been to Texas before."

America Here We Come

We depart Terminal 5 this morning which now seems like last month after a 14 hour flight to Denver connecting via Dallas.  Eitan and Madeleine bloat on media including "Puss in Boots" (Eitan), "Sherlock Homes" (Madeleine), Simpsons (both) , Lion King (both), Premiere League football highlights (Eitan) and other in-flight crapola (Me, I read "War And Peace." No kidding - I really am ).

Me: "Good news, guys, they are going to let you on the plane." 

Eitan: "Yessss!"

Me: "You know, Madeleine, if they find a knife or a gun when you are going through security they lock you in that room over there, sometimes for three or four weeks."

Madeleine: "Really? Mom, is dad joking?"

Sonnet:

Me: "I never joke about security."

Madeleine: "Now I know you are joking."

Me to security guard, winking: "Do you lock kids up in that room for three or four weeks if you find a knife or a gun in their bag?"

Security officer: "Yes siree. We take passenger safety seriously here young lady. I would hate to see you in that room for a while . ."

Me: "See?"

Madeleine: "Oh my God."

Good Bye Rusty+Girls

I take Rusty to the kennel, feeling guilty, as we depart for Colorado tomorrow.  Rusty is all, like, "woof, woof, woof" and I am sure he knows he is being dished off.  Maggie, for instance, gets first class treatment and travels with my mom whenever she flies, like this week, when we will see them in the Rockies.

I drive Eitan, Jack and Joe to football practise. Me: "So who do all the boys fancy?"
Eitan: "Dad!"
Joe: "J - everybody fancies her."
Jack: "In my class, it's A."
Joe: "They all fancy her. But she is really annoying. And she stinks."
Me: "She stinks?"
Joe: "Yeah."
Me:
Joe: "Like perfume. And I have to sit next to her all the time."
Jack: "Ha ha!"
Eitan:
Me: "So what do you boys do if you fancy a girl?"
Joe: "Well, everybody knows it.  Like S, he fancies J 95% and B 80%."
Me: "That doesn't even add up. It must be the addition of L'Amour."
Eitan:
Me:  "Do your palms get all sweaty and you break out into a terrible rash?"
Eitan: "It's not like we're teen-agers or anything."

Eitan and I watch Mission Impossible III; Tom Cruise kisses a women and takes off her blouse:
Eitan: "Arggh, Uggg!"
Me: "Turn away! Turn away!"
Eitan: "Why do they always have to do that?"

Post Practice

I pick up Madeleine from swim practise, pictured, while Eitan jumps in for his two hour work out. It is all about the logistics : Madeleine and Zara get a ride to the pool from Zara's au pair; an hour later, Eitan and I pick up Georgia (Zara's sister) and I drop them off while collecting Madeleine and Zara for their return home. Thalia (Georgia's mom) picks up Georgia and Eitan after their session finished.

Sonnet: "Has anybody fed the dog?"
Me: "No. Madeleine feed the dog."
Madeleine: "Why should I do that?"
Me: "Feed the dog and I will give you the thing I got you in Paris."
Madeleine: "Are you lying?"
Me: "No."
Madeleine: "So you are not  lying?"
Me: "No I am not lying."
Madeleine: "So this is not a gamble?"
Me:
Sonnet: "Good word."

Blue

Me: "What's in your pocket?"
Madeleine: "Um, nothing."
Me: "Come on, let me see it."
Madeleine: "It's nothing . . "
Me: "Out, please."
Madeleine pulls a roll of "Butter Candies" from her pocket: "I wasn't going to show you because it was a surprise."
Me: "Oh, really now?"
Madeleine: "Yes, Dad. I was going to surprise you with a gift."
Me: "Do you think I was born yesterday?"

Later. Me: "What's in your mouth?"
Madeleine: "Mffmmm."
Me: "You have a Butter Candy in your mouth. You are so busted."
Madeleine:  "I wasn't trying to hide it or anything."
Me: "Oh?"
Madeleine: "You never believe me when I tell you anything."
Me: "I always believe you, just not everything you tell me."
Madeleine: "What's that supposed to mean?"
Me: "Spit it out please."
Madeleine: "You are so mean."

Place de la Concorde

Out of picture: the crescent moon+Venus and Mercury - the only lights in a sky otherwise drowned out by Paris.

Girlz

Madeleine and I contemplate the future , which is in our face at the Kingston mall.

And some food for thought : The number of teenagers living in Britain will decline by 10% over the next decade. By 2017 there will 4.9million of them, down from 5.4M today, according to the Office of National Statistics.  The fall due to the so-called 'baby slump' which occurred from the 1970s , when women began having far fewer children (and far more fun).  Compared with the baby boom of the 1960s, birth-rates have steadily fallen thanks to the pill and family planning.  This impacts everything from education to retail.  Sonnet and I are happy to make a contribution.

When the Shakespeares younger, I had them evenly scared of teen-agers : "Look!" I would say. "Teen-agers in their natural habitat. Smoking cigarettes and holding hands."  We would peek through the curtains and thank goodness we did not have them in our house. This about the time I told Eitan and Madeleine that , when a fellow falls in love , his hands turn sweaty, he cannot think straight, and he starts babbling like an idiot .  Both kids horrified by the prospect of love : they, then, ensemble : "La la lala la la la la llllaaaa."

Shop 'Til U Drop

Madeleine and I have a day together which means, after the dog-walk, I am pre-occupied with the wi-fi and other home-tech CRAP that I would rather NOT be doing on the NICEST day of the year so far.  At noon I give up on the Edimax range extender to wash the conservatory windows and lay chores on the Shakespeares.  So far, it's bleak. Sonnet escapes to the V and A to process an acquisition : "lots of random little things" (she tells me now).

The afternoon turns for the better, as it always does on a Saturday in spring, and I take Eitan to Nadine and Kate's joint-birthday party at Kingston bowling. Post drop, Madeleine and I shop for Uncle Marcus' April wedding. We start at the old stalwart Marks & Spencer which is, like, endless Dockers. We then hit the High Street : Gap, Northface, Apple .. I suggest green trousers ("No way Dad! Mom would kill me") and here we are at Uniqlo for Dad, who flirts with the cashier with a nice smile, red-dyed hair and a dinosaur tattoo on her arm that looks like the Loch Ness monster ("I also have one on my ankle and other places" she tells me - "other places" left unsaid)

The great thing about shopping with  Madeleine is that she shops for boy clothes. We aim for the same stores. She has terrific style, too, and, on her recommendation, I get a new pair of trainers. Sweet.

Any Given Morning

Emily

Emily, pictured, is in Eitan's class and the smartest kid in her year. She might be the smartest 6th grader I have ever met.  Emily accepted to every secondary school she applied to and will attend Lady Eleanor Holles, which is next to the Hampton School so she and Eitan will take the coach together. I tell her "no funny business" which makes her squirm, poor dear.

Madeleine has Zac over for a play date. They do what all boys love to do : try to catch frogs in the backyard pond, have a water-fight and, now, they are at Helen and Martin's jumping on the trampoline.

V. Collis

Eitan's primary plays Collis on the home pitch in the borough school semi-finals. We lose 7-3 to a superior team.  Coach hoping we would meet Collis in the finals as SM the second best team in Richmond.

Eitan, this morning: "It smells like America."
Me: "What does that mean?"
Eitan: "I don't know. It just does."

Mal Boeuf

God bless McDonald's.  God bless America. 

Last year, McDonald's had its strongest comparable store sales in the US since '06 and it plans to invest $2.9 billion in 2012 to open another 1,300 stores including 250 across Europe and France.  This data remarkable when once considers 2004 : Jim Cantalupo, the CEO, died of a heart attack 16 months in the job. Seven months later, his successor, Charlie Bell diagnosed with cancer and resigned. Then there was the film Super Size Me which showed the dire effects of eating at, well, McDonald's.

Super Size probably the best thing to happen to McDonald's, which went into overdrive to upgrade the quality of the dining experience, including the food, while bringing "value-meals" to recession-hit eaters : it introduced a dollar-menu.   The combination a winner, too, and the 33,510 restaurants made $27 billion of turnover in 2011, up from $19 billion in 2004 (Burger King, by comparison, was $2.3B in 2011 and $1.8B in 2004). In February, McDonald's had its 106th consecutive moth of positive same-store sales growth in the USA.

Of course McD's success comes at a cost: obesity rates for children and Hispanics, where McDonald's focuses its marketing, have risen disproportionately since '06 according to Corporate Accountability Intl. Photo from the www.

"When your stores are generating that much money, the question is how do you keep growing?"
--Draren Tristano, restaurant consulting firm Technomic

Self Portrait XXIV

Madeleine: "There's a kid in our class. And he had a heart operation. And they sowed his heart together with cow skin."
Me: "Oh?"
Madeleine: "I think so."
Me: "There are a lot of people who need hearts, you know.  For an operation."
Madeleine: "Do you mean if you are, like, 70, and going to die in three weeks, they can take your heart?"
Me: "I think doctors are more interested in younger donors.  Did you know that I am a heart donor? "
Madeleine: "Really?"
Me: "Yes. I filled out the donor papers so, if I die, and somebody needs my heart, they can take it."
Madeleine: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Well, assume that I am at an intersection waiting to cross the street and a helicoptor comes landing down and - whack! - one of the blades lops off my skull and my brains spill out."
Madeleiene: "That would never happen, Dad."
Me: "I'm just saying. So, there I am, brains and blood everywhere, so the ambulance arrives and cuts out my heart."
Madeleine: "Would they really do that?"
Me: "Yep."
Madeleine: "Even if you are still alive?"
Me: "Of course not. That's why they have a mallet. Every ambulance has one, you know."
Madeleine: "Now I know you are joking."
Me: "No, way. You have to be dead if they are going to take your heart. So they wack your head a couple times with the mallet. To make sure you are dead."
Madeleine: "Could they get in trouble? I mean, if you are still alive?"
Me: "Only if there is a law suit.  When the lawyers get involved there is always trouble."
Madeleine: "Can helicopters really land in the street ?"

Shard

The Shard nearly complete. Omnipresent.

I am at the far edge of the City for a meeting with an asset manager who may sell us some venture assets cheap. The 12th floor view uninterrupted five-miles to Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs and the Olympic Development Center in northeast London.  This area got shallacked by the Germans, aiming for the docks, during the Second World War; afterwards, it became a wasteland, deprived of transportation links and home to new ethnic arrivals looking to build a new life for their families. Now, areas like Shoreditch and Hockney, have become la mode complete with gays and dance clubs and trendy restaurants .. . bowling lanes.  A vibrant start-up tech community has grown from the area's dot-com 'new media' roots and Google opened up a tech centre in 'Silicon Roundabout' near  Old Street just last week.

Overheard between two schleppers in the City:  
"I've got a bit of an interesting day today. I'm going to prepare a 'what if' scenario and the Big Boss isn't going to like it."

The Real Mitt Romney

Kreos

My friends from Industry Ventures in town for Kreos Ventures AGM - Kreos is a venture-debt firm that is now a "growth debt to high-growth companies" since nobody in Europe wants to invest in European venture anymore.  The keynote given by an older dude that I have known for some time whose presentation a bunch of cartoons describing how terrible private equity is , which manages to bore and insult everybody at the same time - no small feat. He  manages assets for wealthy individuals and families and, if he took questions, I would ask : why are you here ?

Otherwise it is a happy gathering at Sommerset House overlooking the Thames on a gorgeous early-spring morning, everything shiny.  This is one of my favorite places in London.  Sommerset House once home to the Admiralty (Churchill) and the Inland Revenue and Registrar offices before somebody realised the building too beautiful for admin.  The Courdault Art Institute here, too, which brought Sonnet and us to London, and home of one of the most efficient collections of impressionist paintings anywhere : Modigliani, Monet, Manet, Gaugin, Pissaro, van Gogh, Sauret , Degas .. .  today I see an exhibition of neo-platicists Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson : only 20 paintings in two galleries but, oh, so perfect to capture them at their creative peak during the Second World War.

At Kreos I bump into George, an investor in Ezoka, and we catch up on old times and people. George founded Intel Capital then opened Benchmark's European offices when I met him.  Today he invests in clean energy on behalf of Europe's largest family.  Back in the heady false dawn of the Internet, George and I drank martinis at Dukes, out to conquer the world.

Rusty At Work

I take the pooch to work. Rusty generally pretty good, too, mostly keeping to himself and not jumping on the tenants. We usually go for a lunch-time run along the Thames : good for the dog, good for me.  I begin southside - there is a well-used towpath - by Barnes , then St Paul's and the Hammersmith Bridge, my favourite, which I cross and return north side for a five-mile loop. Rusty off-lead for a third of the time which gives him a chance to chase squirrels. Now he naps.

San Fran - Madeleine Dishes

San Francisco - fog free! - from an oblique-angle in 2004.  Image from the Space Imaging and NASA Earth Observatory.

Madeleine refuses to finish dinner and so we stair at each other across the table.  No desert, Sonnet-made chocolate chip cookies+vanilla ice cream, unless she eats her rice and chick peas (she glares at me).  I helpfully remind the girl that she had plenty of room for the ice cream truck (she uses her fork to spread some chicken across her plate).  Lying back in her chair, big sigh : "I'm done." When this don't fly it's both elbows on table and the scratch of cutlery on plate. Poke, poke, poke.  "You know, Dad, you always spend time on your computer and never with us" but I know her game: she aims to distract from the subject-to-hand. "Are you going to make me eat the bones or what?" Finally, I compromise: three bites but I am the judge re size. She measures each to the acceptable limit, Dear Reader, and quickly fills her mouth before I require more. Then bolts.

"As The Mugger Strikes"

Me, at a payphone outside 552 Riverside Drive, the day I move into the apartment I will soon share with Sonnet, our first together+Dominique the cat.  Sonnet relocates to New York that winter so we are not apart while I am at Columbia Business School.  Photo taken by Adam August 28, 1995.

Me: "Don't you feel great after swimming practise?"
Madeleine: "Yeah. I am going to have a nap."
Me: "You know, another thing - exercise makes you smarter."
Madeleine: "Really?"
Me: "What happens when you swim?"
Madeleine: "You get stronger? You get in shape?"
Me: "Yes, but what does your heart do?"
Madeleine: "It beats really fast."
Me: "And what does it pump?"
Madeleine: "Blood."
Me: "And what's in the blood?"
Madeleine: "Oxygen."
Me: "And where does it go?"
Madeleine: "Your brain?"
Me: "Excellent. So your brain gets more oxygen, which helps you learn stuff."
Madeleine: "Did you know that you can eat brains? It does not even upset your stomach."
Me: "Good to know, thanks dear."

Swing