The Week in Meep: Of Homecomings, Odysseus, The Big Short, and Some Excel Gifts (again)

Halfway through Lent, once again I say Rejoice! Think Pink! (I mean, rose)

Today is Laetere Sunday, where Laetere means “Rejoice!”, but in this liturgical cycle we’re on Year C, so we get Luke’s telling of the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Return!

For our recessional song at Mass today, we had the following hymn, which is set to the Passion Chorale from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion:

The University of Notre Dame (the one in Dublin, Ireland, not the one in the U.S.) used this for the processional this weekend.

Yes, I love the St. Matthew Passion, and will be posting that for Holy Week, as is my wont. Hold your horses.

Odysseus Returns

I finished reading Lattimore’s translation of The Odyssey this past week.

I’ve read The Odyssey in translation multiple times, including Alexander Pope’s version (I do not recommend, sorry).

Lattimore’s is easy to follow, but I did not like the “glossary” for the kindle version, as it added pretty much zero information. You’d be reading along, a character would be introduced by name, such as Bart, son of Homer, and Homer would be underlined. You click on that to go to the glossary, and it would say: “Father of Bart”. This did not add to one’s comprehension of the narrative, to say the least.

I prefer the Odyssey over the Iliad and the Aeneid, and no, it’s not merely because it’s less bloody. There is plenty of violence and gore in the Odyssey — far more women were explicitly killed in the Odyssey, for one. Twelve servants in Odysseus’s household were forced to clean up the gore of the suitors whom they had been cavorting with in the years of Odysseus’s absence… and then they were executed for their treasons.

And then Odysseus’s old father kills the old father of one of the suitors, later, after said old father seeks vengeance. It’s not because The Odyssey is “nicer” that I prefer it.

It’s that I prefer Odysseus, the man of many wiles. I used to call Stuart, my late husband, “my Odysseus”. But even before I met Stu, I found Odysseus inherently more interesting than Achilles or Aeneas. (or Agamemnon or Menelaus or Hector, etc.)

Penelope is more interesting than Helen or Dido.

Odysseus has a son, just newly entering manhood, Telemachos, who gets his own few hero moments.

Athena steps back at various moments and even explicitly states in the narrative at one point that she wants to allow the heroes to be heroes on their own at some points. She does put a goddess-ly shine on all the people she wants to favor at key points, but she also withdraws (and also berates).

Penelope and Odysseus, Ugo da Carpi, Italian, ca. 1520–27

I have heard arguments that the Odyssey was composed in a literate era — that is, it was composed in writing, not orally.

The Aeneid was completely composed in writing. Many elements of the Iliad indicate it came from an oral tradition — the epithets, repetitions, set pieces, etc.

While the Odyssey has the epithets (circumspect Penelope, wily Odysseus, etc.), and some repetition, there is a complexity to the narrative that indicates written composition. There are loads of flashbacks — the narrative is not linear.

The one that always gets me is when Odysseus is disguised as a hobo (ok, a destitute traveler, but let’s go with “hobo”), and his old nursemaid is asked to wash him for dinner. When she has his leg in her hands, we flashback to a time when Odysseus was a teen, on a boar hunt in a neighboring city-state, and his leg was gored by a boar, and it left a distinctive scar on him. The flashback goes into the whole story of the people Odysseus was with on the hunt, how he got hurt, how serious the wound was, how worried everybody was, but then he came home and it was okay. But also how people very close to Odysseus, especially “body servants” would recognize Odysseus this way. This is “PLOT POINT” galore.

Oh, by the way, the nursemaid notices the scar, drops his leg, and is about to yell, and Odysseus grabs her and tells her to be quiet…

….and his wife Penelope is in the same room.

….Who has no idea who the hobo is.

This would make a great dramatic moment in a movie, if filmed correctly.

Just saying.

The Big Short

I finally watched the movie.

The Rudy I’m mentioning is Rudy Eisenzopf, who is a character actor. He shows up at the very beginning of the movie, playing Lewis Ranieri.

And before you ask, yes, I read the book a long time ago, and even wrote a piece on it:

November 2011, “Making Money When Others Are Losing It: a Book review”

My favorite paragraph:

In many ways, the book represents an arms war in terms of information and it definitely challenges the concept of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). I hew to an extremely weak form of the EMH: I, Mary Pat Campbell, will not be able to outperform the market by playing in it. But Lewis gives examples of people who actually put in the work of analyzing cash flows and fundamentals—people who could see the very obvious weakness of the credit market backing a variety of consumer debt vehicles, though most especially the consumer debt vehicle yclept the subprime mortgage.

It’s my favorite because I fought with the editor to get the word “ycelpt” in there.

Look, for the Society of Actuaries newsletters, I don’t get paid anything.

So if I’m doing it for free, I had better be getting something out of it, and I want to get glee out of it.

I got glee out of putting “yclept” in there. I also got “BSDs” in there.

Another excerpt:

Yes, there are lessons of human interaction that may be of interest to the Management & Personal Development Section—you will find that many of the people who made money off of shorting the subprime market are rather abrasive and/or antisocial types. The difficulties these people had in convincing others that they were right about a credit bubble about to burst and the relative insouciance of the investment bankers rolling up the credit default swaps for those shorting the funds makes for much psychosocial rumination.

….

That said, for those who have played Tiresias, bearing bad tidings that no one wants to heed—the book gives us the realization that we can profit off of the willful stupidity of others in the financial industry. Perhaps Lewis will find this as unpalatable as the result of Liar’s Poker spurring on ever more people to seek profits through financial shenanigans.

I’m not doing this myself (I don’t have much guts for shorting anything), but others are doing it, I’m sure.

Re: the movie — I thoroughly enjoyed it, as it brought me back to that period. I was working at TIAA-CREF from 2003-2008. I knew people at Bear Stearns & Lehman Brothers. I knew people who had left TIAA to work at hedge funds who were doing all sorts of “interesting” stuff. I remember TIAA dumping its structured portfolio before the crash because of an analysis the new CRO had made… and boy would he not shut up about the losses he had prevented.

I interviewed at AIG in 2006 or 2007 (I forget), on a day when they had been on the front page of the WSJ over their deteriorating CDS/CDO positions (that they had created). I wasn’t interviewing in the financial instruments department, mind you, but I did comment on the story when I came in… and boy, did that not make a good impression. Look, it was on THE FRONT PAGE. Was I supposed to pretend I didn’t see it?

Every time I’ve ever interviewed at AIG has been a disaster, which is just as well.

The main thing I just couldn’t believe is that they made a movie about this.

And it had Christian Bale. I love his work. Going back to when he was a kid.

Old Excel Gifts

Not linking to the inspiration for this, but I thought I’d re-share a couple of Excel videos/posts I did a while back.

Because if you’re a numbers person and you want to communicate your numbers effectively, it’s good to know some techniques to do it visually.

Within the post below, there are two videos on Excel themes and templates:

But it doesn’t matter if you use Excel or not — the concept is to think about one’s color and style use.

And here is something on Tile Grid Maps:

Just thought I’d reshare.

Enjoy!