April 2004 Archives
Crappy financial journalism
A couple of news stories today piqued my interest with unsourced statements about financial markets which didn't make a lot of sense to me. First of all there was a column by Ed Dravo in Slate, which said that
When an asset manager begins to beat his peers by a large margin, pension trustees actually withdraw money from the hot-performing manager. Individual investors, by contrast, pour their money into those same asset managers. History shows today's high-performing funds are tomorrow's laggards, so individual investors are choosing investments that are likely to disappoint.
I agree that individual investors tend to put their money into hot-performing funds, but that's about all I agree with. Is there any evidence at all that if pension trustees are lucky or smart enough to find an asset manager who starts doing really well, they then take their money away from him? I can just about imagine a situation where no one manager is allowed more than a certain percentage of total assets, and that if he's doing really well, he might start exceeding that percentage and triggering withdrawals. But I can't imagine that trustees, having found a successful manager, will then give up on him just as he starts outperforming.
Furthermore, I really don't think that "history shows today's high-performing funds are tomorrow's laggards". When a rather obnoxious man at Citibank tried to sell me some mutual funds once, based on their outperformance, I actually spent quite a bit of time researching this issue. Companies like Morningstar generally group funds into quintiles: the top 20%, the next 20%, and so on. And there is in fact a certain amount of correlation between past performance and future performance. Not a lot, but a little. Funds in the bottom quintile will tend to underperform in the future, funds in the fourth quintile will underperform but not quite as badly, and funds in the top three quintiles are all roughly equally likely to outperform in the future.
This is actually the opposite of what Dravo is implying, which is that funds in the top quintile are the most likely to underperform in future – and I certainly found no evidence of that. I know there's a lot of sleaziness among financial advisors, but I don't think that so many of them would push funds based on their Morningstar ratings if past performance was actually negatively correlated to future performance.
If you were to be charitable, you might say that financial markets are cyclical, and if one asset class has done well for a while (technology stocks, say, or emerging-market bonds, or small-cap manufacturers) then it stands to reason that it might slow down in future and some other asset class – invested in by some other mutual fund – will be the new place to be. But that's not what Dravo was saying, and in any case you're just as likely to move from today's high-performing asset class to tomorrow's low-performing asset class as you are to make the perfect leap from outperformer to outperformer just as the former has stopped rising and the latter has just started. Rather than try to execute that kind of acrobatic act, better you just stick with what's working, I think – even Dravo, later on, points out that people who trade more, lose more.
Meanwhile, the BBC picks up on the story of Google's IPO:
Dutch auctions and other supposedly open IPO forms are blamed for the extraordinary price swings seen in the early days after some high-profile flotations.
Some analysts say they also tend to underprice shares, leading to insufficient returns for the issuer.
This is the point at which Jon Stewart, of The Daily Show, would rub his eyes in a comical manner and do one of his patented "wha????" expressions.
Dutch auctions, of course, are designed precisely to avoid extraordinary price swings in the aftermarket – people pay exactly what they want to pay, without investment banks second-guessing them or trying to underprice the shares so that there are lots of juicy immediate profits for their favoured clients.
And while some Wall Street types do have an argument that Dutch auctions overprice shares (see the quote from the FT on this blog), I have yet to see any reason why they should underprice them. After all, the stock market is essentially one big continuous Dutch auction: sellers sell their stock to the person who will pay them the highest price. And the stock market seems to work a lot more efficiently than IPOs normally do.
Think about it for a minute: if institutional investors are willing to pay more than retail investors, then the institutions will end up owning most of the shares, at a reasonable market price. If, on the other hand, retail investors are willing to pay more than institutional investors, then most of the Google shares will end up in individual hands, and when those people come to sell, they might have to take a loss in the secondary market. In other words, the IPO would have been overpriced, not underpriced. It really is hard to imagine how a Dutch auction could underprice shares – or even to think of what kind of "analyst" would ever say such a thing.
Now I'm willing to admit that I might be wrong here – would anybody like to come to the defense either of Mr Dravo or of the BBC?
Posted by Felix at 18:13 EST | Comments (8)
Japan
After spending two and a half weeks wandering around Japan, I am, naturally, an acknowledged expert on all things Japanese. Not. All the same, working the "fresh pair of eyes" principle to its bones, I've decided to list here some of the things which struck me about the country. Anybody who actually knows what they're talking about is more than welcome to correct me in the comments. So, in no particular order:
Japanese men could be the best-dressed men in the world. Remember when you found out that Paul Smith had, like, 400 stores in Japan and couldn't send enough of his clothes there? And when you thought that was just one of those weird things like David Hasselhoff being big in Germany? Wrong. It's because Japanese men are incredibly well dressed. Hop on the Tokyo underground, and most of the men will be wearing suits, and nearly all those will be super-nattily dressed, with impeccably tailored shirts, ties, and suits. From afar, it's easy to stereotype the gaggle of Japanese businessmen in their identical dark suits; look a bit closer, and you'll find they're not nearly as dull as you might think.
In fact, more broadly, average is much better in Japan than it is anywhere else. Yes, Japan is an expensive country, especially if you're spending depreciated dollars: a t-shirt at Aizu Wakamatsu castle, for instance, can cost ¥7,200. But, most of the time, you still get value for your money. The cheapest lunch in town might be a ¥750 bowl of noodles, but what noodles they'll be! And although the fruit is insanely expensive, it's also insanely delicious. Also, lunch dishes are enormous, surprisingly enough. I was expecting tiny portions of everything in Japan, but the ramen and the sake, for starters, come in huge portions: three sake cups, and you're definitely drunk. (Coffee is an exception: if you want much of it, you have to go to Starbucks.) Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be any concept of "bargain basement" or "cheap and nasty" in Japan: if they're going to do something, they're going to do it right, and charge accordingly.
For instance, not only does everybody have a mobile phone, but everybody
has a cameraphone. And uses it. I've already blogged
the sight of thousands of people celebrating the cherry blossoms in Ueno Park
by taking photos of them with their cameraphones, but it wasn't just in Tokyo.
Everywhere you go in the country, people are taking photos of each other with
their phones, or else simply capturing the tourist sights. Conventional cameras
are barely to be seen any more.
I rented a mobile phone
for while I was in Japan, and the experience was wonderfully smooth and easy:
I got the number in advance, it was waiting for me in Tokyo, it worked everywhere
(even on the Tokyo subway) – such a contrast from the nightmares I always
have when I try to use my pay-as-you-go phone in England.
Even though mobile phones are ubiquitous, however, you never hear them
ring. Phones are clearly made for messaging other people first and
foremost: the vast majority of phone use is people staring down at their handsets,
either reading or tapping out a message. It's much less common to see someone
walking down the street talking on their phone. In fact, I've heard
(and have no idea whether or not it's true) that in some circles it's considered
rude to call someone out of the blue: the done thing is to message them first,
asking if now might be a convenient time to ring them.
That said, the Japanese will message the whole time. In fact, personal computers
are much less common in Japan than they are in the west precisely because they're
not needed for the killer app of email. I swear I saw one guy riding his bicycle,
messaging a friend with one hand, and holding an umbrella over his head with
the other. How he was steering I'm still not entirely sure.
It's worth noting here that in Japan, bicycles are a bit like mobile
phones: familiar objects used in a unique manner. For one thing, they're
ridden on the sidewalk, rather than the road. Which is great for cars, who don't
need to worry about running over cyclists, but not so great for pedestrians.
Personally, if I moved to Japan and bought a bicycle, I'd go doolally crawling
down the sidewalk at about a third of my natural speed, dodging peds. But the
Japanese seem to consider a bike to be something which naturally goes at maybe
half or a third of the speed of the average bike in New York.
The vast majority of bikes, too, are crappy old things, which are so inherently
undesirable that they're either left out on the street completely unlocked,
or else are secured with only the flimsiest of locks which wouldn't deter any
self-respecting bicycle thief for a second. Seeing dozens of bikes lined up
outside a subway station with nary a lock between them is to feel automatic
nostalgia for the white bicycles experiment in Amsterdam in the 60s.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Japanese seem uniquely willing to pay insane prices for certain items. The difference in handbag costs between Tokyo and Paris or Milan is well known, and probably explains why Prada's second global epicenter was built in the fashionable Aoyama district. But there are fashionistas all over the world who will shell out large sums for Prada gear. What I'm talking about are the ¥11,000 musk melons in the food courts of all the big Tokyo department stores, which look to the naked eye for all the world like your common-or-garden cantaloupe. Or the ¥400,000 per person that salarymen spend on geisha-hosted evenings in Kyoto. Or the ¥1 million bowl that I saw for sale in a ceramics shop in Kanazawa: very simple, maybe four inches high, brand new, with a nice white glaze. The sort of thing where if you saw it at a flea market you'd pay a couple of bucks for it, and if you were told it was made by a famous Japanese ceramicist you might think it was worth a couple of hundred.
The really crazy thing is that most of this stuff, even at the very high end, is paid for in cash. The Japanese are famous for the amount of cash that they carry on them, as well as for their honesty: stories are legion of wallets containing seven-figure sums (in yen, but still) being left on the train and returned, with all cash intact, to their owners at the lost and found. More generally, Japan is surely the safest place I've ever been. I didn't think twice about leaving my bags – even containing passports and stuff – in unlocked rooms, especially after seeing all those unlocked bicycles on the street in Tokyo. And when one of the people we met explained that she used to live in Sao Paulo but wouldn't go back there because it was too dangerous, I understood completely. While I generally scoff at such an attitude in westerners, there really is a huge gulf between safety and security in Japan and Brazil – one which most Japanese people might well feel problems trying to bridge.
Talking of culture gaps, I made the compulsory Lost In Translation pilgramage to the Park Hyatt Tokyo to have a Suntory whisky, and it turns out that the 17-year-old Hibiki – the one Bill Murray shills in the film – is surprsingly excellent. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that this particular Japanese whisky is the best blended whisky I've ever tasted. Caveat: I'm not a great fan of blended whisky, and haven't tasted all that much of it. In any case, the 17-year-old is not even anywhere near the top of the range: in fact, it's at the bottom of the Hibiki ladder, and I assume that the 30-year-old, at ¥80,000 a bottle, is significantly better. (The 35-year-old, at ¥1 million a bottle, I assume is some kind of collector's item.) Of course, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to find out: even the 17-year-old was ¥2,300 a glass at the Park Hyatt.
If you want to see a real waste of money, however, all you need to do is go travelling around the country by shinkansen – the fabled bullet train. For while most Japanese architecture is pretty samey, the train stations, even in minor, off-the-beaten-track cities, are ridiculously over-the-top. I'm sure it's all part of the various economic stimulus programmes that successive Japanese governments have embarked upon over the years, combined with pork-barrel spending on important political constituencies. But the result is that Japan has reinvented the art of turning the local train station into the proud heart of any city – something I had thought a relic of the Victorian era. Kyoto station is a minor city unto itself, and Niigata station is easily the grandest thing for miles around. In Tokyo, not much can be done to the old train station, a rather charming brick building opposite the Imperial Palace, but they have built the absolutely stunning Tokyo International Forum right next door.
But in a way it's easy to see why this should be the case: the Japanese are justly proud of their trains. The shinkansen, with its slogan "Ambitious Japan", is something any country would love. Just look at the numbers: the Acela Express does the 190 miles between Boston and New York in 205 minutes, while the Eurostar does the 213 miles between Paris and London in 195 minutes. The shinkansen does the 229 miles between Tokyo and Kyoto in 142 minutes. It's an incredibly smooth, silent (at least for those inside the train) and efficient ride, on tracks dedicated to bullet trains and bullet trains only. On a lot of the trains, passengers sit five across – something I haven't seen on any other trains – in seats which rotate in seconds to face the opposite direction, meaning that there's no laborious turning of trains around at termini, and no one ever needs to face backwards while travelling.
And once you get off the shinkansen main line, the lower-level trains are just
as efficient, and some are even more comfortable. The basic seats in the "Sonic"
class trains in Kyushu, for instance, put the first-class accommodations anywhere
else to shame. What's more, you don't need to worry about missing your stop,
since the trains literally run like clockwork: I actually set my watch by our
arrival at a station once. Just get off the train at whatever time it's due
to arrive at your destination, and you'll be in the right place. It's not just
the trains, either: there was no trouble catching the 12:45 train from Aso after
taking a bus to the station which was scheduled to arrive at 12:40. Everything
in Japan, it seems, runs like clockwork.
Japan's trains are so well run, in fact, that there are even private
train lines all over the country which, I assume, make a decent profit
for their owners. It's a bit of a pain if you're travelling on a Japan Rail
pass, but it's still very impressive: I assumed that any system as large as
Japan's trains must lose an absolute fortune every year. If private owners can
compete, however, then maybe not.
The rail system in Japan does wonders for national productivity, and they're
still building it out: the latest stretch of shinkansen track, in southern Kyushu,
has only just opened. Other sources of national pride, however, can only be
a drain on productivity. One of the most obvious is rice. Wherever you go
in Japan, no matter how valuable the land, you're never very far from a rice
paddy. The rice is farmed at huge expense: even with 490%
tariffs on imported rice, US producers (not even, say, Indonesians) can
still sell their product at prices 20% cheaper than medium-grade Japanese rice
and half that of top-grade Japanese rice.
Rice is, of course, the true staple of Japanese cuisine, and the Japanese can
taste subtleties I'm sure most of us would never dream existed. But the amount
of effort which goes in to the crop is truly astounding, for negligible economic
benefit.
One of the more interesting sources of Japanese pride is how expensive the country is: as I understand it, a staple of Japanese television programmes is people touring the rest of the world and marvelling at how cheap everything is. The fact that things cost much more in Japan than they do elsewhere does not seem to indicate inefficiency so much as national superiority.
By far the most unproductive source of Japanese national pride, however, is
not rice, but kanji. In fact, Japanese orthography in general is a complete
nightmare, where certain words can be "spelled" in any one
of half a dozen different ways, using three different scripts – four,
if you include romaji, the transliteration of Japanese words into our alphabet.
Japanese kids learn 500 different kanji characters per year, every year they're
in school, and then, if they're keen, go on to learn even more after they graduate.
As Jack Halpern says,
"because of the large number of orthographic variants and easily confused
homophones, the Japanese writing system is an order of magnitude more complex
than any other major language, including Chinese."
What this means in practice is vast amounts of effort within the Japanese educational
system being put towards learning something of steadily diminishing use. New
kanji, as I understand it, are not being coined, and most new words are simply
borrowed from the English or some other foreign language and written down in
a more-or-less unpredictable way in katakana, one of those three scripts. Yet
despite the fact that people use less and less kanji, as references to mobile
phones outnumber references to whatever it was that Chinese people cared about
a millennium or so ago, everybody in Japan still needs to go through the laborious
and mind-numbing process of learning an entire ideographic system.
In fact, once you start looking for them, anachronisms are everywhere in Japan, and I'm not talking about the geishas in Kyoto, although they do still exist. Street addresses, for example, don't exist: rather than naming streets, the Japanese name blocks and districts, and even people who have lived in a city all their lives normally need to ask for directions a couple of times at the nearest police box before they can find a new place. And there's the rather disconcerting (to put it mildly) way in which large numbers of Japanese women – including some youngsters in their 20s – seem to engineer their lower limbs so that they walk in an extremely artificial knock-kneed fashion. They're incapable of running, but it seems to be considered attractive.
Independent women seem to have a hard time of things in general in Japan: chauvinism runs rampant everywhere you look. The sheer number of hostess bars in any major city boggles the mind: far from being the seedy kind of places they'd be in the west, they seem to be the natural place for a group of salarymen to go after work. (But not their female colleagues, of course.) The average man's idea of an ideal woman is far more subservient than in the west, it would seem, and I was told that if a Japanese woman is serious about having a career, she must basically give up any hope of ever finding a husband – just because very few Japanese men in Japan would ever consider marrying such a person. Some Japanese men who lived abroad for some time might, but they're, well, abroad. Even in 21st century youth culture, the cute-schoolgirl look and its variants seems to remain by far the most popular look among girls, while miniskirts are shorter in Japan, on average, than I've seen anywhere else – and not in a postmodern "empowering" way, either.
But at least there are looks for young people in Japan. Urban tribes are alive and well in major Japanese cities, despite having pretty much died out in the west. The Japanese are the true heirs of the mods and the rockers, the punks and the hillbillies. The kids in western cities are depressingly similar most of the time, dressing to all intents and purposes alike, and no new fashion tribe has emerged in over two decades. In Japan, however, youthful self-identification through sartorial extremism is alive and well.
Maybe it's because society as a whole presents more to rebel against in Japan.
When the Sex Pistols released "God Save The Queen", it was a revolutionary
and shocking act. Nowadays, we live in a much more anything-goes culture, and
the world is basically being run by people who turned 18 somewhere between 1968
and 1977. They're not going to be too shocked by seeing a man walk down the
street wearing lots of makeup. In Japan, on the other hand, society
as a whole remains extremely homogenous, and not-standing-out is a
very important part of being Japanese. One of the reasons I think that kanji
is going to stay around for a long time yet is precisely because it helps serve
the purpose of keeping the gaijin out of Japanese society – and one thing
that seems to be usual among foreigners who spend a lot of time in Japan is
a feeling that they're never really going to be welcomed into society.
Travelling around the country, too, you see a lot of bus tours and other groups
of people – much more than you would in the west. I had thought that the
buses full of Japanese tourists in Paris and London were a function of the language
barrier, and the fact that these people were at the mercy of their tour guides
to get them around and get them food and accommodation. Not so: such tours are
equally common domestically. You also notice that there aren't big houses on
the hills or other forms of architectural ostentation: with the exception of
those train stations, most buildings in Japan are extremely similar. And just
look at the reception
that the Japanese hostages in Iraq got when they returned home: worse, it would
seem, than being kidnapped in the first place. They stood out, and so they should
be censured.
Certainly, in the cities, things are changing: they have to. But they're changing slowly, and in the countryside, it's still not uncommon to find public baths where women are barred from entering if they have any tattoos. Outside the tourist centers, things are certainly not geared up for tourists: I banged my head more times than I could possibly count, and in the countryside we gaijin got our fair share of stares from the local children. The thing which I never understood, however, was the deal with slippers. I'm fine with leaving my shoes at the door – but after doing that, I was inevitably presented with a minuscule pair of slippers to walk about in indoors. Maybe it's a bit like chopsticks and you pick it up after a while, but I simply couldn't do it: my feet were far too big, and the slippers were very uncomfortable. But if I tried just walking around in my socks, I got very disapproving stares and got pointed to a pair of slippers. Are socks just as rude as shoes? Or did these people think that they were protecting my feet from the cold floor?
And if Japanese customs make little sense, they're nothing compared to the western customs – real and imaginary – which have been imported into the country. Japanese coffee shops, for instance, primarily the ubiquitous Mister Donut, have taken to heart the idea that they should serve only cream and no milk for people who want some dairy in their morning coffee. It's an annoying custom in the west, and it's even weirder to find it in Japan. Even more bizarre is the fact that you have to make reservations to eat at KFC on Christmas Day in Japan, on the grounds that it's so popular. Apparently the Japanese think that westerners all eat fried chicken on Christmas Day, so that's what they do – in droves – themselves.
And while we're on the subject of food and drink, I think it's worth mentioning
that in rural Japan, the tap water is absolutely delicious
– the best tap water I've ever tasted. I missed switching to Volvic once
my water bottle of Aizu Tadaka tap water ran out, and the city of Kanazawa has
parlayed the quality of its water into a stranglehold on the country's gold
leaf market. Meanwhile, in Beppu, a small town with lots of hot springs in Kyushu,
they even have water taps on the train station platform so that you can have
a last taste before heading out. The guidebook calls Beppu the Las Vegas of
onsens (spas), but this is the only real similarity I saw – analagous
to the slot machines in the departure lounges at Las Vegas airport.
The flipside of the tapwater situation can be found in Tokyo, however, where
it's undrinkably disgusting. Yet the bottled-water phenomenon hasn't taken off
in Tokyo to nearly the same degree as it has in the US: it's available, but
not in large quantities, and normally only in the form of French imports, weirdly
enough.
Actually, there is another similarity between Beppu and Vegas, although it's a similarity that Beppu shares with the rest of the country. The neon signs, just about anywhere you go in Japan, are of astonishingly high quality. And more generally, the whole country is permanently brand spanking new. Things which might get replaced every five years in the west are replaced every two years in Japan – not only neon signs, but cars, too. The second-hand car market is almost nonexistent, and if your car has any kind of dents or scratches, you'll probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. Japan leads the world in gadgetry, I think, largely because the Japanese will happily upgrade to the latest and greatest model at the drop of a feather – and pay through the nose for the privilege. Go to Akihabara in Tokyo, and the sheer quantity of electronics available – from cellphone attachments to monoblock tube amplifiers – is staggering.
And in general, the Japanese seem to have a very strong propensity towards spending money – which is a subtly different thing from the fact that there are lots of expensive things in the country. Everywhere you go, for instance, you're met with admission fees – ¥700 to get into this little museum, ¥600 for a look around that castle. The pride and joy of Kanazawa is its huge and gorgeous central garden, and yet locals can't go for a walk there whenever they like: it's ¥350 to get in every time you want a look around. Even the peace museum in Hiroshima charges a nominal ¥50 admission, which can barely cover the cost of collecting it. It's as though there's some kind of shame or loss of stature to being free – major free attractions like Tate Britain, or even Central Park, for that matter, don't seem to exist in Japan.
Of course, the most typical way of spending money is to do so in a vending machine. We bought wishes from one, at a temple, food tickets from many (rather than ordering your food directly, you pay for a food ticket at a vending machine, and give that too the waitress, so she never handles the cash), and even paid for one hotel room at a vending machine which took ¥10,000 bills and spat out a ¥1,000 bill in change.
And if vending machines are everywhere in Japan, so are disembodied voices telling you everything you might conceivably want to know, and then some. There are loudspeakers on the street, in trains, in buses – even in gondolas. A voice, usually female, never seems to stop talking: where you are, what's coming up, fun facts and figures – actually, I have no idea what she was saying most of the time, since I don't speak Japanese. But the Japanese don't seem to have any problem screening it out: it's just another information flow which can be optionally accessed whenever you feel the need.
This kind of invasive and ubiquitous technology extends even to the very landscape in Japan – at one point, I even wondered if the Japanese really have any conception of natural beauty. Every last square inch of Japan has been built on or cultivated in some way, and one of the walks we took up a mountain was paved the whole way, much of it with actual stairs. In the cities, the gardens are prized for their artificiality, and there are actually very few English-style parks which are simply open space. There's certainly a certain amount of cognitive disconnect involved in standing on the top of a mountain, looking at a beautiful smoking volcano, and hearing jingles from the strip mall which was built to accommodate all the tourists who have come to look at (not climb, mind) the mountain you're standing on top of. In the thin mountain air, sound can travel an astonishingly long way.
If I take away one abiding memory of my trip to Japan, however, it will be of the people, and the many wonderful experiences I had both interacting with them and just watching them. I think everybody who's been to Japan has stories of Japanese people going above and beyond what any other person would normally do in order to help you out and make your visit as wonderful as possible – I'm no exception. Helpfulness and friendliness at an extremely high level is definitely the rule rather than the exception, and the country as a whole is a pleasure to travel in.
It's also interesting watching small children in Japan: they seem to be happier than the kids anywhere else I've been in the world. The kids always seem to be running around with enormous grins on their faces, benignly overseen by their mother and/or grandmother. I was told that children are spoiled rotten in their preschool years precisely because of the insane amount of discipline and hard work which is thrust upon them once they enter the educational system, but these kids didn't seem spoiled rotten – just happy. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that most of them grow up with parents and grandparents in the same house, I have no idea. Certainly it's another thing which makes travelling in Japan a very happy experience.
So weird, yes, and slightly alien, but a wonderful place to visit. If you haven't been, and you have some spare money (it's certainly not cheap), I can highly recommend Japan. Get away from the Tokyo-Kyoto-Nara tourist route, too: my best memories are of places like Kanazawa and Kyushu. And the language barrier really isn't all that much of a problem: for one thing, most restaurants in the country seem to have plastic food out front, complete with prices. Just point to what you want, or pick something at random: it's bound to be delicious!
Posted by Felix at 19:59 EST | Comments (5)
Immensity
I do love it here. It's so vast, so expansive, never-ending. We were talking about Space earlier, and going to the moon (was it a hoax, wasn't it? The first time I've not found myself surrounded by die-hard conspiracy theorists in a long time, on any issue that is), and the various Apollo missions and living on a space station. I wouldn't do it: I have no desire to live in a bubble in space with three other people. But people say Antarctica is the closest thing we can get to it - that it's all a test for living conditions on Mars, that Halley is more remote in the winter than the Mir space station. There is no way out.This conversation happened in a dark room, just before dinner, during our first long power cut and our generator mechanic away on his pre-winter trip. After just 10 minutes you could feel the building getting colder. It's not often that we reflect on our remoteness, that we are in fact living in a box on stilts on a moving ice shelf with a no-get-out clause until December. It's good to be reminded every now and then. But it was nice when the lights returned as well.
Anyway, it was a bit like Space today, the immensity. The evening so huge. The moon set to the west, a glowing fiery red sliver, blurry to look at, shaking in the indefinite horizon. Such a tiny sliver of a perfect crescent moon, but more on its back than we're used to, and bright, bright fiery red. I've said all these words before I know, but that's what it was. And the night sky this evening, an aurora smoking its way across the sky, green above the buildings, wisping eastwards, curling up at its edge to meet the milky way. Where does the aurora stop and the milky way begin? The milky way! Our galaxy. Scorpio scorpioning his way across the sky. So many, so so many thousands of stars, so many they look like a bright white cloud in the sky. We're on the edge of this disc of stars. And there, to the edge of the disc, are two more puffs of clouds, stars, Magellanic Clouds, two more galaxies. So clear, so unbelievable. So huge. Immense.
The sun rises late now, about 10am. I wake up and it's dark outside, dark with a bright crescent moon and stars. Then, around eight or nine, reds and oranges appear above the horizon to the east, glowing colours above the snow, the announcement of light to come. A wide stripe of red rainbow on the horizon. Hours later, the sun itself starts to peek up. The horizon on fire, weird atmospherics mean you can't distinguish between ice and sky. Sometimes ice, sometimes sky, no, that's a mirage, that's a wavy wavy line of smoke along the horizon, and there is a fireball emerging, flat and slow, to the east. So slow, you see the sun moving horizontally more than vertically. When I go outside to dig melt tank at 9am, the horizon is red with a brighter fiery region. When we finish digging at 9:30, the fireball has emerged, squashed, wavy, working her way onwards, upwards, around the circumference we are at the centre of. When I leave the Simpson platform at 10:15 (where I picked up a sledge for manhauling gas cylinders back later in the day), the sun is almost risen, much further around than before, and the sky light. By the time I reach my lab at 10:30, the sun has risen, just. The world is light and daytime has begun, at last. Only a couple more weeks before it doesn't rise at all.
During the day, we've had the most amazing sights as well. Sundogs! Halos! Rainbows and fogbows! Diamond dust in the sky. Immediately above, below and to the sides of the sun are bright patches: a sun dog. If the fog comes in, you can see this is in fact a halo all around the sun. And when the fog clears, you see the halo as a rainbow. One day, walking between science platforms, I saw a double rainbow halo, both circling around the sun. Sometimes the brightness doesn't fade between the sun in the middle and the bright spot below,- this is a sun pillar and you have to shade your eyes. I have some photos; I'll put them up when Felix gets back from Japan, but I want you to imagine it first anyway. I'd seen photos before as well but you forget that it fills the whole sky, the entire sky. And so bright! And so cold! The cold, now that is reaching new extremes now as well!
The difference between thirty above and thirty below is noticeable (yes, NY readers, we're talking centigrade!). This evening, staring at the sky, it was below minus forty. And it's just getting colder. By default I wear three hats - the outer one a 'mad bomber' made of dead rabbit and I have no qualms about it. If the hats don't cover your ears, they go white and then blister. Fingertips regularly lose feeling, and when you come inside again, the pain is incredible as they warm up. Swinging arms like a windmill, throwing all that warm blood to your extremities, works a treat.
Balaclavas are suddenly fashionable again. Well, maybe not fashionable but who gives a shit about fashion when it's below forty out there? We all look the same anyway.
Still days at -30 are seasons warmer than windy ones at -20 though. Nose tips, ear lobes, toes, fingers, we were not designed for this climate! And whatever you do, don't touch metal with your bare hands.
But it's glorious cold. As I said, a place of extremes, immensity, vastness, it all makes sense. It's bonkers. It's great. It's a million times better than living on the moon.
Posted by Rhian at 1:58 EST | Comments (3)
Holiday
A few years ago, my mum and I went to Africa. The desert, and the ocean, have called her for years. I guess Antarctica is the perfect cross between both. Anyway, we found ourselves being driven across the desert in a minivan, through safari landscape, around Namibia. It was a great trip, a great experience, and I learnt a lot then not only about the place but also about travelling. She was desperate to get behind the steering wheel, to drive across the desert, to feel the land beneath the tyres, to have some control over the journey. At the time, I was quite happy looking at the world go by through the window but it must be said that I did a lot of daydreaming as well.I think I now understand. Driving across sastrugi in a linked up skidoo pair, watching the rope connecting me to my partner up front, focussing on not tipping, not going too fast or slow, not daydreaming. Rapidly snapping out of daydreams when the rope gets caught up beneath me -- it keeps you alert. On one level, you see less -- you can't sit back and gaze about in wonder, take it all in. On another level, it keeps you focussed, it brings you closer to the landscape, you have to read the ground, follow the patterns wind makes in the ice, second guess the effect it will have on your skidoo. Put both feet down when Big Sastrugi approaches, rev before hills, swerve out of the way of the rope on downhill slopes, watch your partner, the ice, your ropes, the sledge. It forces you to interact with the scenery.
Travelling out to the campsite was quite hard work. My goggles fogged up, my feet were cold, the tip of my nose and a small patch of cheek were exposed to the air, tingling, it was uncomfortable. On the way back, nine days later, we flew. The scenery was like the moon and sandunes, vertically smaller but never-ending in the horizontal. A black and white landscape, a landscape of shadows, colour superimposed like early techniclolour movies: a red tarp over the sledge in front of me, reflected pale red on the snow, yellow skidoos, the stripes on my companions' crash helmet. Everywhere else, blacks and whites and in-betweens. Crazy atmospherics make mirages and hazes on the horizon. Features come and go and you lose all concept of perspective. Immense, continuous. Desert, ice.
We were meant to go away for four or five days, to explore crevasses, wonder at the Hinge Zone, see Antarctica. The day we left was crisp, cold and clear. So was the day we returned. All the others were white, windy and wild. We drank a lot of tea, talked a lot of shit, saw a lot of orange from the walls of the tent. Days were not very distinguishable from each other,- ah yes, the day we drank tea in your tent first and then in ours.. no, that was the day we played scrabble, not cards, no it wasn't it was the day you told us your life story. It was fantastic. I love camping at the worst of times but this was serious luxury camping. More luxurious than car camping even! We had two pyramid tents (two people per tent) that you can kneel up in comfortably and enough food and fuel to last us for two months should the need arise. A primus stove, a tilly lamp, a chimney, all inside the tent! Hanging above our heads are all our clothes, drying, and we each sleep in a down sleeping bag on a fleece liner on a sheepskin rug on a therm-a-rest on a foam pad on a wooden board and eat bacon every day! After day four we ran out of alcohol but substituted the stimulant using a precious combination of dark chocolate, coffee and tent fever, probably with a little carbon monoxide thrown in for good measure. Spirits remained high, I talked continually and they didn't kill me, they talked continually and I didn't kill them, it was great! Sometimes, perhaps when the wind picked up in the middle of the night, or you had to fight your way outside in the storm for a pee, you might suddenly reflect on how isolated it actually was, how much could go wrong, how no-one would come and get you. But not once did I feel unsafe.
Everything was either ice or steam. Burns from cold and burns from hot. Snow-melt for water, anything on the floor frozen solid. There is no in-between. I came back grinning from ear to ear, relaxed, refreshed, totally reanalysed and ready for the world! One day we did actually manage to explore a crevasse nearby. Totally bizarre,- the ice is flat, we drove over it with four skidoos. And there, where the crossed flags are, yup, there, jump up and down as hard as you can. Harder, more, okay, a little to the left maybe. Kaboom, left leg in all the way "I've found it" he climbs out grinning. Tunneling through this little entrance (all roped up of course), the ice opens out to a huge blue chapel of light. Like discovering the underwater world, or galaxies, there is another realm here you might never know existed. Next time, after winter, I might see some more of these but I don't mind if I don't: it's just good to know it's out there.
Posted by Rhian at 20:24 EST | Comments (1)
Out of Blog AutoReply
This website is going to be very quiet for most of the month of April, as Felix Salmon goes on holiday to Japan. Sorry about that. Also, for blogspam reasons, I'm not letting anybody comment on this website while I'm away.
If you need to get in touch with me, my normal email inbox is likely to fill up very quickly, so use japan@felixsalmon.com instead.
I'm also going to leave you something to keep you busy while I'm gone: I give you the synopsis, you tell me what the opera is. This is for real, and not an April's Fool. The person with the first right answer (by email, trackback, snail mail, whatever) gets a lunch at a restaurant of their choosing. It might take a while for us both to be in the same city, but I promise I will pay up eventually.
ACT I
The Old General bemoans his unrequited love for the Princess, who is in love with the Young General. He knows that because the Young General is not of noble blood, the two will never be able to marry.
The King and Queen enter, in the wake of a magnificent victory by the Young General. The King offers the Young General a reward. The Young General in response reveals his love for the Princess. Upon being denied, the Young General plots revenge.ACT II
The Young General and the Princess decide to elope to his fortress, but are interrupted by the Imperial Guard, and have to fight. During the battle, they manage to escape and reach the fortress.
ACT III
The Old General turns up at the fortress. The Young General trusts him, but the Princess doesn't. The Young General reveals his plans for revenge to the Old General, who immediately leaks them to the Royal Army. Betrayed, the Young General is doomed, and he and his beloved Princess commit suicide by poison.
Good luck – I warn you, it's not easy!
Posted by Felix at 13:10 EST | Comments (0)
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