Latest BC column now online here.

We knew it was bad but did we know it was this bad?

At the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he’d have agents go to the various stashes — a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam’s former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch — withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he’d withdrawn. Bremer’s office “acknowledged not having any supporting documentation” for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870 magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly noted, “suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash.”

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. “Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?” asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. “But that’s exactly what our government did.”

and

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the “entrepreneurship” of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent “three sleepless nights” putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking “like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later.” The two simply “presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract.”

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport ­security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad’s airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, “I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog.” When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and “refuse to sniff the vehicles” — as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax­payers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. “Yes — $100 bills in plastic wrap,” Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. “We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while.”

The Custer Battles show only ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA officials — a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair’s phony invoicing. “It was the worst case of fraud I’ve ever seen, hands down,” says Grayson. “But it’s also got to be the first instance in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence of the crime.”

But even being the clumsiest war profit­eers of all time was not enough to bring swift justice upon the heads of Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles — and this is where the story of America’s reconstruction effort gets really interesting. The Bush administration not only refused to prosecute the pair — it actually tried to stop a lawsuit filed against the contractors by whistle-blowers hoping to recover the stolen money.

Full article here.

Here is the full text of a letter in the current issue of HK Magazine:

I’m all for former security chief Regina Ip if she were to run for the Legco by-election. Mrs. Ip has been my idol since 2003 – we might have hated her introduction of Article 23 but at least she stood up for her boss. She’s a good spirit and a good role model for Hong Kong people. We need actual intellectual stimulation in this otherwise super-dull society.

So you hated Article 23 but think she should be a leader because she blindly followed someone else’s orders. (To be fair, the writer may have written a longer letter that made more sense and it might have been edited down to just the above. He might have referenced her paper on democracy or perhaps her latest hair style.)

Of course, by that logic, probably the US – where the majority now vote based on sound bites and image and debate on actual issues is a thing of the past – may not be ready for democracy either.

While I’m coping with this hard disk mess (thanks for that tip on Drobo, anon, looks interesting), various distractions of one type or another ….

* September 5 – Apple’s “special event” during which they are expected to announce new iPods. Various shots purported to be the next generation Nano have appeared on the different gadget blogs but that’s not of any interest to me. I’m hoping for a 6th gen iPod and that it will have the same large touchscreen as the iPhone.

* Finished off the first season of 30 Rock. That show just seemed to continually improve throughout the season. Now I’m watching Damages but not sure why. I probably should be paying attention to Mad Men or Masters of Science Fiction instead.

Also finally catching up with Two and a Half Men, as previously mentioned. If you’ve never seen it, here’s the deal.

You’ve got Charlie Sheen as a guy who makes a great living writing TV jingles. He lives in a beach house in Malibu and lives a life of one night stands with beautiful women.

In moves his brother, Jon Cryer, a nerdy chiropractor, wound up a bit too tight, tossed out by his wife who may or may not be in the process of becoming a lesbian. Cryer has weekend custody of his 10 year old kid (who, thankfully, always acts like a 10 year old kid, not some super precocious TV kid).

Then there’s their mother, played by the great Holland Taylor. And their housekeeper, played by the equally great Conchata Ferrell. And a woman who lives down the beach who slept with Charlie once and has been stalking him ever since. And a succession of beautiful women for Sheen.

Basically it’s the Odd Couple updated to the 00s. My favorite bit is an episode in which Sheen explains that when someone tells him they want something, his standard answer is “I understand,” which people interpret as yes, but which really means “I understand that’s what you want, doesn’t mean I feel like doing it.” I’m gonna start using that.

And one episode had Megan Fox running around in tight little shorts and a bikini. Cannot complain about that.

* In other TV news, Entourage wraps up its season in another week or two. And the week after that is the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yeah!

* Finally watched Spider-man 3 last night. As comic book movies go, I wasn’t expecting to like it at all and wound up not loving the film but enjoying it more than I expected and staying awake through the whole thing. But let’s face it, Bruce Campbell’s brief role runs away with the entire film; they could have done two hours in that restaurant and I wouldn’t have minded. Too bad I hear he’s not interested in the Bubba Ho-tep sequel.

* 2 or 3 times a week I have lunch at East End Brewery. So the whole staff knows me there. I can smoke, read the paper, chill for an hour or so. I enjoy it. They’ve had a revolving succession of waitresses. Mostly Filipino. Mostly average in looks, but always nice. I haven’t shaved in about a week. Yesterday one of the newer waitresses came up to me and said, “excuse me sir, can I touch?” and started running her fingers across my cheek. I did not mind this at all.

* Senator Larry Craig. How do the Republicans manage to do this so consistently? A family values man who has voted against every gay rights provision that’s come his way gets arrested for soliciting gay sex in a toilet, PLEADS GUILTY, and now is trying to back his way out of that one. A Senator, an educated man who is supposed to be expert in our legal system, says his only mistake was pleading guilty, that he thought that would make it go away? And we’re supposed to buy that?

The best bit is that he started off a press conference this week by saying, “Thank you all very much for coming out today.”

* As you may have already noted, Hilly Krystal died yesterday, less than a year after the closing of his club. The founder and owner of CBGB’s in New York, his bar provided a green field for groups like Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, Ramones, Patti Smith and so many, many others to start, play, develop their sounds, revolutionize popular music.

I only met him a few times, back in the early 80s when I was managing a few bands that never went anywhere. The routine was always the same – I’d go down to the Bowery, play him a cassette and as long as it didn’t suck he’d take out the schedule there and then and schedule a slot for the band. In my dealings with him he was always straight up, honest, no bullshit.

* Check out this jacket:

It has 39 pockets. It has a “Personal Area Network” (so that cables for things like headphones are already wired throughout the jacket. Normally US$250, right now US$200. Ultimate geek and yet, in the photo at least, it doesn’t look at all geeky.

Great. Just fucking great.

So I spend from Friday through Wednesday copying files from DVD-Rs onto the Maxtor drive. I followed the advice of a commenter and disabled caching, “optimized for quick removal.”

And then tonight, while in the middle of copying yet another disk, the computer decides to reboot.

Yes. That’s right. The computer reboots. I check the drive. First, chkdsk bombs out. Then I look at disk properties and it tells me that there are 292 gigs of data on the drive. Then I look in file explorer and it can only see approximately 32 gigs of the data.

Yes, the indexes are corrupted again.

Yes, in terms of what the drive can “see” it is back at exactly the same place it was on Friday when I started restoring data again.

This never fucking happens on the Stardom box. It has now happened three times on the Maxtor box.

At this point I am thinking about buying another Stardom box, cracking open the Maxtor box and removing the drives and putting them into the other box.

The emails I received from Seagate tech support were absolutely useless. I called their support hotline in the US (using Skype), after 15 minutes got connected to their support desk in India and the guy spent more time trying to correctly spell my name and email address than in offering solutions for the problem – to whit, send the drive to Seagate data recovery, they will recover the data, return the drive, I should reformat the drive and start again. Why does this keep happening? Um, er, uh, reformat the drive and start again?

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An article in the NY Times on some of the great places to get fried clams in the US. “To many New Englanders the humble clam, which stars in chowders, clambakes and clam cakes, reaches its quintessence when coated and fried.”

When I lived in the US, frozen fried clams were my I’m-too-lazy-to-cook foods, always kept a bunch of boxes of them in the freezer.

In HK, in 10 years I have never found this on the menu in any restaurant here and have never spotted the frozen variety in any supermarket.

Just like I’ve never been able to find chicken fried steak here.

My life is so tragic.

The same woman was the inspiration to the lyrics of these two songs:

Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me

I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe her now

and

I tried to give you consolation
When your old man had let you down.
Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Turned my whole world upside down.

Layla, you’ve got me on my knees.
Layla, I’m begging, darling please.
Layla, darling won’t you ease my worried mind.

Yes, that’s right, Pattie Boyd, who was married to George Harrison and then left him and married his best friend, Eric Clapton.

Boyd’s written her autobiography, Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me. The NY Times review isn’t too complimentary of her (ghostwriter’s) bland style but says it does contain some good insights into her relationships.

I think I’ll wait until October, when Eric Clapton’s autobiography, intriguingly titled Clapton: The Autobiography, is published. The Publishers Weekly summary at Amazon says:

Readers hoping for sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll won’t be disappointed by the legendary guitarist’s autobiography. As he retraces every step of his career, from the early stints with the Yardbirds and Cream to his solo successes, Clapton also devotes copious detail to his drug and alcohol addictions, particularly how they intersected with his romantic obsession with Pattie Boyd.

I remember working backstage at a Clapton show in Boston circa 1974. His dressing room was stocked with cases – CASES – of booze. And once he hit the stage, we figured he wouldn’t notice if just a little bit went missing …..

And Keef’s autobiography isn’t that far off, in the cosmic scheme of things.

I get about 50 spam emails a day at work, another 100+ per day across my various email accounts. Some are trying to sell me stuff. Some are hoping to install viruses on my PC.

!Do you want rolex or other brander watch under 250?

accelerate there’s a fairly wide range of normal pen_is sizes

are you confident in bed?

are you insecure?

are you kidding me?

can you imagine that you are healthy?

can you tell me what’s wrong, and how we can fix it?

customers alert, new pharma site is realized!

dude don’t send that stuff to my home email

dude your gonna get caught, lol

thanks you, we accepted your business loan request

how did you get that on film, man?

I just started dating a guy I like but his pecker is on the small side

Last chance to supercharge your performance

LOL, dude what are you doing

YourPenis 3-inches longer and thicker, girl will love you fly

man, who filmed this thing?

My boyfriend’s penis is too big for my mouth

oh man your nutz

readable top stories for the tag “p_enis” voted on by you!

ROTFLMAO, who is that your with?

I want sale you Rolex Sold Out

Thanks, 4 girls from our site want to meet you

truly the ultimate guide to p en_is size

and on and on and on, day after day after motherfucking day.

I’m tired of living all alone
yeah, nobody ever calls me on the phone
But when, ah, things start getting bad, ah
I just play my music louder

I can’t stand it anymore more
I can’t stand it anymore more
I can’t stand it anymore more
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, oh
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, no
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, oh
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it
I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it

Last night had one of those dinners that was just perfect. A business associate in town who always takes me to some fabulous places when I visit him. So I brought him to Toscana at the Ritz Carlton. In my 10 years here, I’d never eaten there, and time is running out on this building, so while it’s not quite now or never, the clock is ticking.

The room itself is a large room, classically decorated, making you feel as if you’re in a dining room in Italy. Despite the size of the room, the tables are widely spaced, so even full, it’s quiet, peaceful, leave the world outside the door.

The menu – doesn’t happen to me very often but this was one of those occasions where everything on the menu was my favorite. I was killing myself trying to make any decision because I wanted it all. We put ourselves in the hands of the maitre d’.

The amuse was simple, a perfect tiny tomato and some cheese, which went well with a couple of glasses of Veuve.

My friend and I ordered the same starter, which was actually from the pasta list rather than the starters, an amazingly good spaghettini with crab and tomato. The pasta was perfectly al dente. A bottle of French chardonnay went so nicely with this.

For the main course, my friend had to order the veal chop as soon as he heard it was Dutch veal. In my case, I hadn’t had steak since before my operation and figured it was time – U.S. sirloin, with a sauce that included anchovies and olives, if memory serves, some whipped something, some baby asparagus. Together with a bottle of shiraz, at this point my memory starts fading and the details are weak.

They brought out a small dessert platter for us, 8 small bites. This included a thank you card – white chocolate inscribed with dark chocolate, thanking me by name for coming there.

Since I didn’t see the wine list (my friend is expert, I’m not) or the final bill, I can only guess at the cost – I’m thinking somewhere in the $3-4,000 range for the two of us. Well worth it.

I guess the building will be torn down in another year or so. The Ritz will move over to the ICC when it opens. Another landmark HK building will be gone. Another office tower will go up in its place.

I still miss the old Hilton Hotel, replaced by the soulless Cheung Kong Centre. And that revolving restaurant at the top of the old Furama was a great place to bring tourists, now it’s that ugly AIG building.

Do you remember the past, Dr. Memory? Do you remember the future? Why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air?

Well, it seems like both of the programs I was trying last night would work. But Virtual Lab has this obscene pricing – US$40 to recover 100 meg or unlimited for US$200, whereas R-Studio was US$50 for unlimited recovery on NTFS drives. It took 14 hours to scan the drive and now it’s cranking through restoring files.

I stayed up late, watching some of the bonus features on the Inland Empire disc – considering that Mulholland Drive didn’t even have chapter stops or a trailer on it, the second disc on Inland Empire has some really wonderful stuff. I’m not really sure how much insight I’m gaining into the film itself but learning a lot about Lynch.

Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive remain two of my favorite films, the first for the Roy Orbison song and Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance, the second for the way the final third of the film just falls off the edge of the earth and takes place in a completely different time space continuum.

Well, other critics have noted that Inland Empire is 3 hours of stuff like the final third of Mulholland. To me it seems like 5 completely different films that have been randomly cut together. Some of them star the same actors, one is filmed in Poland and in the Polish language. And then there is the room with the giant rabbits in suits (voiced by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, among others) and its sitcom laugh track.

This was shot on digital video over three years. Actors never knew which scene came before the one they were filming or what would come after. They had no context into which to place their performances.

How does this all come together? How is one supposed to make any sense of it all? I don’t know. But as always, the images Lynch puts on screen are so compelling that I never felt like giving up on the film. And Laura Dern’s performance is jaw-dropping in its courage. Seeing as how this film does not have major studio backing and made about 37 cents at the box office, I don’t expect to see her name on Oscar night, but she certainly deserves it.

After that, after dealing with the complexity of that film and the anguish and suspense of restoring my hard disk, I wanted something relatively brainless. And so I watched several episodes of a sitcom called Two and A Half Men. And I was surprised to find that it’s actually very funny in spots. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that a friend from my early days, Eddie Gorodetsky, is one of the writers and producers.

One of Eddie’s credits is not in the imdb listing linked above. Many, many years ago, for some bizarre reason, Joe Franklin decided to devote an entire episode of his show to the J. Geils Band. They told Franklin that they were going to quit music and become entymologists and then brought out their guru, Eddie, and told Franklin that he was Professor Igor O’Detsky (get it?). He then riffed on bugs for 5 minutes while Franklin sat there speechless. I think I have this lying around on VHS somewhere.

Slept until 1, walked the dogs, probably go out for dinner somewhere after the dogs get their dinner and 6 PM walk.