Future, Forwards, Kittens, Swaps, How Many Were Going to St. Ives?

There was a discussion on huffpo live the other week about futures and "the futurization of swaps" [scary! buy another AR-15!]. The panel was good but from the comments and questions it's clear there is a ton of confusion around basic concepts and terminology.


Derivatives
A nebulous term that pretty much covers any financial instrument (think "tradeable") whose value is derived from something else (an "underlying"). Yeah, I know, that's not particularly helpful. It's easier to understand by example. If I buy a truckload of corn from you, that's not a derivative. If you and I agree that I will buy corn from you exactly one year from now for a specific price, that's a derivative. If you buy stock, that's not a derivative. If you buy a simple option on stock, that's a derivative. Derivatives can be really simple and straightforward, like those examples, or they can be so complex that almost no one, including the people pricing and trading them, can understand them. Blanket claims about derivatives being destructive or evil should be avoided. Warren Buffet had a quote about derivatives being "weapons of financial mass destruction" that gets universally misunderstood and overused. He wasn't talking about stock options or currency forwards.

Swaps
Speaking of misunderstood and overused, how 'bout those "swaps"? This word gets used interchangeably, as if interest rate swaps, fx swaps, asset swaps, credit default swaps, and so on were all the same thing. They're not.

First, let's make up a new type of swap: The NBA Scoring Rate Swap, the "SRS". This will be based on two numbers: one is a fixed number that we simply set and agree on, the other is a variable number based on real-world observations. The difference between the fixed number and the observed/variable number will be used to see who pays whom what. In our SRS, we'll say that the variable number is the number of points scored by a particular NBA team in each game. The fixed number can be anything we want. So maybe you're interested in an SRS on the New York Knicks. We'll set the fixed scoring rate at 100 points per game. The variable scoring rate will be however many points the Knicks score in each game. Suppose you're the client and I'm the dealer and you come to me wanting to enter into an SRS agreement on the Knicks. You can either "pay" the fixed number and thus "receive" the variable number, or vice versa. I'm a dealer, I don't really care. But if you want the SRS based on a specific fixed number, I'll price it up based on my forecasting models for how many points per game the Knicks are going to score, and depending on the difference between that and our agreed fixed points per game, there might be a fee involved in entering into this deal.

So anyway, say you want to pay me a fixed scoring rate of 100 points per game, and receive from me however many points the Knicks actually score in each game, and we agree that each point is worth $1. My models forecast that the Knicks will score 99 points per game, so I think I'm likely to make money from this and thus we enter this agreement at no charge to you. So how does this work? Well, in game 1 of the season the Knicks score 104 points, so I pay you $4. Prior to game 1 we knew that you'd pay me $100 regardless, and I'd have to pay you $1/point once the game was over and the variable number for that game became known. To not be tedious we net the numbers and exchange only the difference. In game 2, the Knicks score 100 points and no money changes hands. In game 3 the Knicks only score 88 points so you pay me $12. And so on for the entire season.

So we entered into an agreement such that each Knicks game would end up generating a cash flow between the two of us, and that cash flow would be based on the difference between the points they score in each game and 100. Why would you want to do this? I have no idea, and as a dealer I don't really care. My *sales* staff might care. They might come up with a variety of reasons why you should want to do this. Maybe you run a taco stand and have a promotion to give away some food whenever the Knicks score more than 100 points in a game so want to hedge your losses. Or maybe you have a view that the Knicks will score better than everyone expects and want to try to make some money from this view. Doesn't really matter.

So that's a pretty simple swap and we can probably agree that doesn't seem particularly nefarious. We might touch on this example later as we look into collateral, but for now let's talk about some real swaps.

FX swaps: "FX" stands for "foreign exchange" and means currencies. [Possibly a topic for another post, but I think the notion of exchange rates and how they are "set" via the workings of a free market is completely baffling to a large number of people.] And FX swap is exchanging currencies now(ish) and later exchanging them back (more or less). I'll buy some ££ from you this week, paying you in $$, and 3 months from now I'll sell you back ££ and you'll give me $$. Why we'd do this and how we determine the exchange rates doesn't really matter, the point is that basic FX Swaps are simple things and even Warren Buffet doesn't lose any sleep over them.

Interest Rate Swaps: a basic interest rate swap (IRS) is similar to our SRS, above. One side pays or receives based on a fixed interest rate while the other side receives or pays based on a variable ("floating") interest rate. Anyone who has looked at mortgages should be able to understand this. Maybe you want to exchange the uncertainty of variable cash payments for something fixed. These can be pretty straightforward and not very evil. Variations, on the other hand, can be fiendishly complex, especially when various types of interest rate instruments are "structured" into a single complicated deal.

While basic interest rate swaps can be pretty easy to describe and understand, they can still cause trouble if entered into by people who don't fully grasp the ramifications of the agreement. Many of them last for many years and are sometime regretted. In the US, municipalities are allowed to enter into agreements that, probably sensibly, local governments in other countries (e.g. UK) are prohibited from. Interest rate swaps can be made arbitrarily complex and terms can be obfuscated and dealers can "mis-sell" them. Local governments and unsophisticated business entering into complex deals with investment banks are kind of like a gambling neophyte stumbling into a smokey back room at an illegal club and misinterpreting the welcoming smiles of the poker players around the table as friendliness. There's been no shortage of irresponsible behaviour around all sides of that table.

Credit Default Swaps: now we're talking. I don't know why these are called "swaps". Here's the simplest way to understand them: they are default insurance. If you buy "protection" in the form of a Credit Default Swap (CDS), you are buying insurance to pay you in the event of a company defaulting on its debt obligations. This makes a tremendous amount of sense if you have actually lent that company some money (by buying its bonds, say), in which case, you have an insurable interest. Suppose you have no insurable interest in that company. Why are you allowed to buy insurance on it without an insurable interest? I have no idea. You are not allowed to buy home insurance on your neighbour's home, for hopefully obvious reasons. Suppose an employee of yours takes out a big car loan. Should you be allowed to buy insurance such that if he misses a loan payment you make some money? Welcome to the world of CDSs. So these are pretty simple conceptually but very strange in practice. And I hope it's clear that there's a pretty big difference between a CDS, an IRS, an FX Swap, and an SRS such that using a blanket term "Swaps" when trying to have a meaningful discussion about, say, industry reform, can be counterproductive.


So what's all this about "futurization" and exchanges and such?
Let's forget about swaps for a moment and look at some more terminology.

Futures & Forwards
If you and I agree that 6 months from now I will buy 100 gallons of frozen orange juice concentrate from you for $1000, that's a forward. If we did that on an exchange, we'd call it a future. When we're talking about futures, we're using shorthand for a whole bunch of features that come with something being a "future" rather than a bespoke "over the counter" [OTC] agreement. Being a future implies the product is regulated, standardized, and is valued (maybe) and margined (definitely) differently. More on that in a minute.

Collateral
Suppose we've done the Knicks Scoring Rate Swap above and, shortly after agreeing on the deal, the top 3 scorers on the Knicks all get lost for the season to injury and the coach announces a new "defense first" philosophy. Looks like their scoring will go way down, and you'll potentially be owing me a lot of money. My calculation of the theoretical value of the deal now shows it is worth much more to me, but I'm worried about actually realizing all that profit. So I ask you to post collateral with me. This is pretty similar to a loan, in that I think you owe me a lot of theoretical money in the future, so have effectively extended credit to you, and want you to post collateral with me as a bit of protection. Suppose further that 2 weeks into the season the remaining good scorer on the Knicks is traded for a defensive specialist. I think the value of the deal is even more in my favor, and I calculate the difference in collateral I think you should post to me, and politely tell you about it (margin call!).

This could have easily gone the other way -- with the Knicks dumping all their defensive players, hiring a "shoot early and often" coach -- in which case you would want collateral from me. If I'm a big SRS dealer and you're a small client, I would never want to have to post collateral to you but would require it from you. So you don't have any way to mitigate the risk of dealing with me as a counterparty but hey, I'm a big bank, what's the worst that can happen? If by contract or regulation we each have to post collateral to each other this is a "bilateral" agreement. This is much more common now than it was six years ago, as you might guess.

So getting back to futures: when you trade a future you have to post collateral based on an initial margin calculation and then you pay or receive funds every single day based on the new value of the thing you've traded. (Valuing by observed traded prices is called "marking to market". Valuing by whatever method you invent is "marking to model".) So if we've entered 6-month frozen orange juice concentrate futures contract each of us will pay or receive based on the price fluctuations daily. The price could fluctuate massively but since we settle up each day, rather than at the end, the risk of not getting settlement (all the things ultimately owed) is greatly mitigated.

Exchanges
If we do "exchange clearing" or settle via "clearinghouses", what this means is that a central body -- exchange/clearinghouse -- becomes the counterparty. If you do the initial trade on an exchange, rather than over-the-counter, settling this way is part of the bargain. But it is possible -- and in the future will be increasingly mandatory -- to do a trade over the counter but then move ("novate") the trade to a clearinghouse to deal with the rest of the life of that trade as far as settlement is concerned. What this really means is that you no longer care who you did the trade with, the central body becomes your counterparty. If First Bank of Rufus goes bankrupt you don't care, the exchange still makes good on the money owed to you for the rest of the life of the SRS or the Frozen Orange Juice Concentrate Future or whatever other things we'd traded but moved onto the exchange for settling.

So rather than having to manage counterparty risk and collateral agreements with every single entity you trade with, an advantage of the exchange model is that you really only face off with 1 -- the exchange.

So what's "futurization" then?
Well, there are a couple aspects. One is simply requiring clearinghouses to deal with settlement. The other is going farther and requiring standardization of instruments so the traded instruments are more fungible and observable.

One More Word On Collateral
This post has really gotten out of hand and is most likely incomprehensible because I can't be bothered to edit or rewrite it, but one important thing to understand about collateral: different collateral has different "quality". If you get a collateralized loan at your bank the bank will discount ("haircut") the value of what you're signing over to them as collateral. If you use your car, they might discount 50% vs. blue book value. Your house might be discounted much less. Your beer can collection much more. The entity effectively extending credit can be as flexible as they want on what they take as collateral, but they discount based on quality.

Unfortunately, exchanges are going the way of accepting only very high quality collateral rather than simply accepting a range of quality and haircutting appropriately (we're talking bonds here mostly, not cars, jewelry, or houses). This demand for high-quality collateral has some bad effects -- actually increases systemic risk and decreases transparency, but that's a topic for another day.

Basic Cheese Sauce

Very simple. So far, works great with cheddar or parmesan. No reason other cheeses wouldn't work. No need to use a melting-friendly cheese (neither good cheddar nor parmesan melt particularly well). Basically just a bechamel with cheese added at the end.

30g butter
30g flour
salt & pepper
500ml whole milk
100g cheese

melt butter
stir in flour and cook a bit over low heat
[optional] heat up the milk in the microwave until hot
whisk hot milk into butter & flour, off of heat
put back on heat and stir until boiling and thickened
take off heat, add cheese, stir gently until smooth and creamy

add the salt & pepper at any step in which you remember to do so, but keep in mind some cheeses can be quite salty so it's fine to save it for the end
can put it on low heat during the cheese melting stage if needed, but don't boil it once the cheese has gone in
shredding the cheese works better than dicing

The Gooben! (Geuben?)

New Year's Day main course: goose-breast reubens. Goose breasts were soaked in a heartily spiced brine for 12 hours, dried overnight, then hot-smoked for a few hours before chilling for a few days. Then shaved in the slicer, fried with black pepper, and heaped onto grilled homemade caraway rye, with melted swiss, sauerkraut, and a homemade dressing (mayo, worcestershire, hot sauce, minced red bell pepper, minced onion, dash of ketchup, sweet pickle relish, freshly grated horseradish root).

Wow were they good. Goose is beefy to start with, lovely grass-fed birds they are. The slightly cured and smoked goose breast had a lovely deep burgundy coloring and an aromatic smokiness reminiscent of pastrami. This really came out as it heated on the griddle with butter and black pepper, the edges crisping up baconly. I'm almost getting hungry again.

Holiday Menu for the end of 2012

Growing up, we evolved a family tradition of having roast turkey etc on Christmas Eve, and going out for Chinese food on Christmas day. Now that I'm an adult with children of my own, we've evolved a tradition of having the big holiday dinner on Boxing Day. On Christmas day we eat chocolates from the stockings until we all feel sick and no one wants a big meal after that.

We've been doing goose at Christmas for quite a few years now. The first time we went crazy with a roast goose with two different kinds of stuffing (actual stuffing, one type in the body, another in the neck). In recent years the goose dinner was scaled back to just be roast breast on the bone, with the legs going into a confit, to be used many months later. This year we're changing the menu again.

Boxing Day: smoked turkey, chestnut dressing, green bean casserole, garlic cheddar mash
New Year's Day: goose breast reubens

Picked up a turkey and two geese from the butcher and spent a lot of time yesterday doing prep work. First, the turkey: removed the legs, back, and wings. The breast on the bone went into a brine. Boxing Day will see the brined breast and the unbrined legs visit the inside of the smoker for many hours. I roasted the back and wings and then made stock from them, which will go into the roasted chestnut stuffing later, topped up as needed from the strategic reserve of turkey stock in the freezer.

Next came the two geese. Geese have bone structures very differnt from chicken, and also have a thick layer of fat under the thick skin, which makes it less simple to break down than a chicken or a turkey. A sharp, flexible boning knife helps a lot. I removed the legs, cut out breast filets, and then trimmed off all the remaining fat. The fat all got rendered for use later to confit the legs. The breast filets will go into a brine on Christmas Day, then will get smoked on Boxing Day, along with the turkey. The legs have been thoroughly pasted with salt, garlic, bay leaves, and fresh thyme. They will relax under the salt rub for a couple days, then get poached in the rendered goose fat Christmas night. On Boxing Day they'll go into a jar.

A plus of all the prepwork was freeing up enough space in the fridge to get all the other supplies tucked in there. Unfortunately it's been too warm to use the outdoor porch area as an external storage for the perishables. But I did manage to get everything in. I have a paralyzing fear of running ou tof butter, so there's plenty of that. And green beans and mushrooms and milk etc. etc. etc. I wish I knew why I'd ordered 1.4 kg of cheddar cheese. I assume it seemed like a good idea at the time.

With the turkey stock on the stovetop and the rub for the confit flying about the butcher block, the house smells of bay leaf with some thyme in addition to the fir tree in the front room. Must be the holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving, Please Make Stock

The thought of eleventy jillion roast turkey carcasses getting tossed just kills me. Turkey stock is liquid gold. I don't know why turkey makes for such good stock, but it does. At a minimum, just break up the carcass and any leftover turkey you're not going to eat and simmer it in water for a while then strain out and discard the solids. What's left is better than any canned stock. Reduce if it's too watery. Don't add salt until you get it the concentration you want. Better still if you have bay leaves, onions, celery, carrots. To be on message, you can even call it "bone broth" [took me a long time to figure out wtf "bone broth" is supposed to be]. Seriously, turkey stock is easy and wonderful. Any amount is worth it.

Innumeracy & Clumsy Copy

I saw a nonsensical claim at the end of a MoneyWeek article published today, claiming,

Here’s another shocker of a stat for you -  courtesy of Ecclesiastical Investment. North America has 6% of the world’s population. But thanks to the fact that so many of its residents are fat, it has 34% of the world’s body mass.

You don't need charts or population figures or weight figures to figure out how ridiculous this claim is. How much does the average North American need to weigh relative to the average non-North-American such that the claim is true? Let's say X is the average weight of a non north american and Y is the average weight of a north american. Time to break out some pre-teen math skills:

.06Y = (.94X + .06Y)(.34)

Y = 8.07X

So, for it to be true that 6% of the population accounts for 34% of total mass, that 6% needs an average weight per person more than 8 times that of the average of the remaining 94%.

MoneyWeek must be just [mis-]repeating this. I googled and found the original source, in pubmed, freetext here. So here's the actual sentence --

North America has 6% of the world population but 34% of biomass due to obesity.

-- which is not the same as the one above. It's awkwardly worded, but what they mean is not 34% of the world's body mass, but 34% of biomass due to obesity. They calculated how much extra human biomass exists due to obesity then attributed 34% of this extra amount to North Americans. So an altogether different claim. What a relief.

The Power of Names

We're looking at a bit of genealogy as an interesting angle to a history project my youngest is working on. I don't take genealogy that seriously although it's really big business in much of the US I think. Still, it's kind of fun.

We've got one of his ancestral lines traced back to 1610 (yeah, England, and in 1635 got on a boat to what would later be the USA). This was the 12th previous generation for. Meaning that this pilgrim was one of approximately 4096 of his Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandparents. Yes, a direct descendent of up to 4096 ancestors of that generation. Might be less because at some point "inbreeding" is inevitable. Otherwise he would have over 68 billion ancestors even prior to rolling the family history all the way back to BC.

Even back to only 1610, there are thus (we'll assume) 4096 distinct paths my little guy can trace up to an ancestor. Each one just as big an impact on how he got here as any other. That's a lot of research. Even more importantly, it becomes impossible to explain that in any kind of cohesive narrative. It's natural to want to tease out a narrative, or a manageable set of narratives, for how you got here.

In comes the power of names. They carry more weight than they should, because they give us some context -- a defined thread to hang a narrative off of. Most people I think wander a few generations up a full tree then research single-name threads much beyond that. (Carried by the men in our cultures. An unfortunate side-effect as you get farther back in time is the bias that the women were kind of bystanders to history, that the family was propelled forward by the men, an artifact of chasing a male-based naming convention backwards up the tree.)

One of his Great Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandparents was a Fooshe. But he won't naturally think of himself as a Fooshe even though she contributed as much to his arrival as did her husband (via whom the name was transmitted) or any of the 126 other ancestors of that generation. Again, that seems perfectly natural as I can't hold thousands of narratives together in my head. I have to pick a few to follow and craft stories out of.

Now if I only had a comprehensive set of information at my fingertips for every single one of the ancestors going back 12 or 20 generations, that would be a cool thing to browse, given a good navigational tool. Trying to assemble that manually would be quite an effort. This is where genealogy enthusiasts really help. Just wait, and my 10 million closest distant cousins will mostly fill out the tree for me.

Kidneys, Devilled Lazy American Style, & Goostrami

The other day my butcher was so pleased to see me he gave me a couple lamb's kidneys for free after I'd gotten done picking out a couple chickens, a few beef short ribs, and some sausage. So what do you do with a couple of small kidneys? I wanted devilled kidneys but was too lazy to get the 6-7 ingredients ready to go, even if I had all of them, which I didn't. If you don't have everything ready to go you end up overcooking the kidneys and feeling unhappy with the result. After browning the kidneys, you work quickly, adding individually and stirring and reducing a bunch of things along the lines of sherry, vinegar, redcurrant jelly, worcestershire, mustard, cayenne, double cream. Much better to get someone else to do this. So I opted for Buffalo-style. A basic Buffalo wings "sauce" is nearly equal parts butter and cayenne(ish) hot sauce -- tabasco or frank's, e.g. I cut up and fried the kidney pieces in some butter, pulled them out of the pan, put in a very healthy slug of frank's hot sauce, stirred to combine, added the kidney back in, tossed with the sauce in the pan, and plated with a small handful of sliced green onions on top. Quick, simple, and tasty. Celery or shallot would have also worked fine I think.

Another culinary discovery: I took the last smoked goose breast I'd made "ham" out of using the previously mentioned duck breast ham recipe, fired up the slicer, and turned it into a mound of ruby red, finely sliced (shaved) goose breast. I also sliced up the lasted homemade bacon. Then fried up a few pieces of the bacon. Then fried up a handful of the shaved goose breast, steaming hot with crispy edges, coating liberally with freshly cracked black pepper at the end. And... it tasted kind of like pastrami. Like good pastrami. Which is not entirely surprising given that goose is much more beef-like than duck, and it was cured then smoked. Goostrami reubens?

Third Smoke PS: The Charcuterie

I have this really cool High-Powered Italian Meat Thrower. It spins up a stainless steel disc, and uses that to launch pieces of meat at high speed the length of my kitchen. Imagine a baseball pitching machine, but with meat. Anyway, a really neat side effect is that to propel the meat, it first cuts a thin slice of it. So as long as I take the necessary precautions, I can set it up and use it [in a clearly unintended way] as a slicer. It's easily powerful enough to handle things which normal consumer-grade slicers can have trouble with, such as bacon.

So I fired it up and did some slicing today. The bacon and duck breast "ham" I had in the smoker the other day. The bacon was really nice. Fried up crispy and very tasty. The duck breast exceeded expectations, and expectations were high. Intend to make both again.

Third Smoke

Fired up the smoker and tried a few more things today:

• a couple of beef short ribs
• a slab of beef (chuck, maybe)
• a smallish piece of pork belly that I'd cured for a week using the maple bacon cure from Ruhlman & Polcyn's Charcuterie
• the 3 ribs I'd trimmed off the pork belly prior to curing it
• 2 duck breasts and 2 goose breasts, cured using the "duck breast ham" cure from Charcuterie

The beef was rubbed with salt, black pepper, cayenned. The ribs got a dusting of the sweet rub I'd made for the inaugural smoking. No rub needed for the bacon or waterfowl.

All turned out well so far. The duck breast was the surprise hit -- had some warm and it was excellent. Supposedly it's better chilled and thinly sliced, so we'll see. The bacon needs to be chilled, then sliced, then fried, so verdict on that yet to come. The beef was really good. Getting closer to tackling a whole brisket.

As heavy as it is, the smoker is easy to move. This is on initial startup as it's getting up to temp. It's smokier at this stage than the photo shows. Big smoke on startup for a couple minutes but then it really settles down. The lower the temp, the more smoke, although even at lowish cooking temps of around 100C or so, it's not that smokey. Smells nice.

duck, duck, goose [goose]

oh yeah, the beef! & a sweet potato I threw in there the last hour after pre-heating for a couple minutes in the microwave

Olympic Party's Over

The Olympics are over. Women's Modern Pentathlon, the last event, finished a while ago, and the Closing Ceremony is coming up. It's been incredible. Exceeding expectations beyond plausibility. The weather's been glorious, the performances have been spectacular, the coverage has been fantastic, the city-wide mood has ranged from cheerful to jubilant, and London put up as distinctive and supportive a show as anyone could have dreamt.

BBC v NBC
What a difference a letter makes. US coverage apparently horrific. BBC, on the other hand, broadcast every sport live in HD. Every event. Live. On the TV and on the internets. I didn't need the streaming internet because I've got a perfectly good TV but I did check it out and it worked just fine. The commentors were uniformly good. Enthusiastic homers without falling into simple-minded jingoism. Charmingly engaged. The experts they had on with them actually added to the enjoyment rather than detracted from it. American commentators who joined, such as the legendary sprinter Michael Johnson, were insightful and engaging. It's like being on the set with the British journalists adds 20 IQ points, whereas on a US sports panel everyone competes to say the dumbest and most obvious thing. This was 21st-century coverage with just the right tone. Brilliant. Live sports covered this way provided both a sense of place and a communal experience. Gold medal for the BBC.



The Weather
My current hypothesis is that LOCOG built a top-secret weather control lab and turned it over to the resurrected corpse of Nikola Tesla and the guy who came up with the idea of landing a mars probe using a rocket-powered sky crane. That is the only possible explanation for two weeks of such nice weather in England in the summer.

The Sports & The Support
Well, I loved it. I'd gone native and fully supported TeamGB. Not that I wasn't in awe of Phelps's retirement, but the UK athletes were just wonderful. Gracious and grateful to a fault, they provided more glory and thrills than anyone had a right to expect. I watched as much as I good. Track cycling is a favorite, along with swimming of course, road cycling, bmx, mountain biking, a bit of judo (incomprehensible), fencing (likewise, even though I fenced sabre for one year in college), plenty of athletics, and many, many more. Part of the delight of the olympics should be seeing lots of sports your normally wouldn't get to see, all being delivered at world-class level. Thanks, BBC, for making that happen.

The performances were often thrilling. GB got so many more golds than anyone expected. Olympic fever? US sportswriter Bill Simmons wrote about the middle weekend in with Jess Ennis won the Heptathlon in champion's style by crushing the field in the final 800m even though she didn't need to in order to win, describing the 80,000 in the stadium as "totally, completely and irrevocably losing their shit." It's like every venue was competing to see which could produce the most deafening roar. Along with Jess, Mo Farah's two golds in the stadium were ear-bleedingly loud. The velodrome, in my vote the most spectacular of the venues, produced crushing walls of noise time after time, despite the relatively small capacity. (And if you're unmoved by Chris Hoy's final lap, ending with a guard of honour from all of British Cycling's track coaches and support team, well, I can't help you.) Not to be outdone, the Excel Centre was "bonkers" for women's boxing. Seemingly the entire cycling road time trial course was lined with several hundred thousand people. There was a big crowd for open-water swimming! And the marathon loop had spectators several deep along almost the entire course.

Many athletes, from all over, graciously sited the crowd support and enthusiasm. The UK athletes in particular were often overwhelmed. It will be hard to watch professional sports after this, played by people who take that level of support for granted.


The City
London was gorgeous. Equestrian cross country through Greenwich Park. Beach Volleyball setup on Horse Guards Parade. And the Olympic park, with wildflower gardens along the canals and river. All just beautiful. The transport worked! The tube had a couple record days. But regulars seemed to spread their day out, so the big rush hour peaks got flattened and spread out. Not everything worked. The cycle hub in Victoria Park was completely unused. I don't think it ever went above maybe 5% capacity. I don't think anyone knew about it. It would have helped to have set it up weeks in advance, not a day, and to have gotten the signage for it right, rather than wrong, and to have advertised it better. Likewise the nearby Victoria Gate was nearly completely unused, even while masses were queuing in and out of the main Stratford Gate. I suspect the other 2 Gates were little used as well. Most visitors probably didn't even know that Stratford was not the only way in or out. But given the lack of catastrophe for the transport network as a whole, this is a minor complaint. A gold medalist took the DLR! Then the US men's basketball team actually took a train, an event so astonishing even the New Yorker covered it.

The live-viewing party in Victoria Park was huge and festive. The free venue had big screens, music stage, activities, and an unabashedly cheerful vibe. I loved the snatches of music floating in the window in between events. I loved hearing a roar for Mo's winning kick in the 5000m even more. Doesn't take much to get an East London crowd to enjoy themselves even with less spectacular excuses.


And Now
The big hangover. Tomorrow: work, rain, and no olympics. I've got a couple weeks to wallow in despair before going back to the Olympic Park for the Paralympics. The echos of these past two weeks will still be knocking around amongst the walkways and wildflowers, washing over the canals and the river valley. Then more stretching of the limits of human achievement. And after that, well, a park, eventually, and that's it for a lifetime.

I've Started Smoking

Got a pellet smoker (GMG DB). Did my first cooking with it today: a chicken and a smallish pork shoulder for pulled pork. Used the same rub for both, my own cayennier variation on meathead's memphis dust. It was a big success, even with explaining to the neighbour that the garden was not burning down.

My sophisticated instrumentation arrangement.

A few hours in. Only 5 or 6 more hours to go.

Lunch: hot smoked chicken pulled off the bone and wrapped in romaine leaves.

pulled pork at the end of the day