Galapagos and Southward

We took a trip to Galapagos, a trip that a recommend to everybody to try at least once in their life. There is more than enough written about the place that I don't have to, but there is something notable about actually experiencing an animal-rich environment where there were no major top predator land animals. As a consequence the animals are so tame you can walk up to them and grab them. Which you are not supposed to do. So you take photographs instead.

The area is highly protected and therefore you take a tour; it is next to impossible to receive permits to allow your private yacht access to the Galapagos. The selection of tour organizer is therefore important. You also really need to know what you want from a guide and be unafraid of hiring your own despite whatever your tour group might offer.

Several islands have airfields capable of handling a private jet, having been built to support the World War II effort. Some people are surprised to hear that the Galapagos is not deserted and in fact boasts a population of several tens of thousands of native inhabitants. Thus you can also fly in on a commercial jet from various Ecuadorian mainland cities. Either way you are greeted by signs that insist that you should not contribute to child prostitution, which I found odd.

The fascination of the Galapagos is that its remoteness and geologically young age created a distinctive laboratory for evolution. The unique flora and fauna there provide a compelling demonstration of the power of evolution to drive species into ecological niches. Unfortunately our ship was itself a demonstration of evolution in action as well; our fellow tourists adequately demonstrated how homo sapiens technological control over their evolutionary destiny has driven most of us into the niche of thoughtless, witless, pointless consumers. It was clear to me that the tour guides should have offered to guide for free but assessed a dollar for every stupid or repetitive question. Their gross receipts would have soared.

But the trip was worth it nonetheless.

From there we flew into Punta Arenas and managed to travel to Tierra del Fuego, hopping tiny underserviced airports such as Ushuaia Airport. As I have blogged before, the general area is breathtaking. We covered Torres del Paine National Park, Lake Pehoe, Nordenskhold, Laguna Amarga, and the amazing bonai forests of Quebrada de la Feria. We helicoptered to Cape Horn and viewed the angry waters of Drake's Sea and Shackleton's Endurance.

Jenny and I found peace and amazing inspiration on this trip, not to speak of the prodigious amount of learning from our guides. Galapagos provided the natural wonders and South America the physical ones. Definitely a trip to remember.

I almost forgot, this is also the first trip where I brought a real camera, a Nikon D80. Don't expect many photographs; the equipment is a real pain to carry around. But high quality digital photography is great when you are willing and able to carry the equipment to support it. Jenny has more mileage from her point and shoot digicam, but will admit that some of my Nikon shots were better.

I have since switched the Nikon for a Canon EOS 1D Mark III. The only thing I preferred about the Nikon was the extremely sophisticated flash system. Otherwise the Canon has been superior.

Work and Life Balance

Some people may not realize that Jenny and I spend almost a third of our time away from each other. Our work schedules do not mix.

But we have adapted. These days it seems like a nearly ideal situation, although our perceptions may change in the future.

What our current mode enables are highly concentrated segments of time where we are very focused on one thing. Unlike the days of most people, we do not have to switch between work mode, spouse mode, recreation mode, friends mode, and home mode every few hours. Rather, we do it in several day to several week increments.

This really allows us sufficient time to get into a groove on a given activity.

For example, a highly concentrated seven day interval of 24 by 7 work is very productive. During that time I eat, sleep, and breathe work. During the day I will meet people. During the evening I will have business meetings. During the night I will read or write business-related reports, research and similar items. I am not watching movies (or television), reading recreational books, or meeting non-work friends. My time is totally dedicated to work. Consequently I am so focused that I find my ability to comprehend and make decisions seems to be several times more efficient.

This also applies to recreation. When Jenny and I take a week-long vacation we will dedicate our time totally to Peau, each other and ourselves. The level of relaxation, comfort, and tuning into each other is something we cannot replicate in a single evening after dinner or a weekend fling. And we find it fun to plan out these week long excursions, to develop themes or knowledge or skills.

At any given week it does not seem like we have a work-life balance at all. Spending 20 hours a day at work geeking out with work reports and never going out socially would seem like the classic work-a-holic unbalanced lifestyle. Yet when averaged over a quarter it turns out I have done less time working than most of my working peers. Yet usually I have accomplished more.

True, we have the luxury of tailoring the rest of our lives around this kind of scheduling, such as my work support staff or even our relationship activities. But I really enjoy this way of dividing up time.

There is nothing like monomaniacal immersion to clear and focus the mind for love, work, play, and so many other things (other than sleep!)

Books to Read

Here are some interesting relationship books to read. No, they are not the typical relationship books nor are they self-help books; I am rarely writing about a typical approach nor do I really care to help you, my dear readers!

Instead these are books that outline some underlying research that Jenny and I found useful in the construction of our relationship principles. It may seem like a strange assortment of books, but we have found them useful:

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, a book citing some of the scientific studies that indicate the limitations of our ability to imagine, predict, and remember, and how this strongly undermines our struggle to be happy. The Amazon link includes an interesting review by Malcolm Gladwell. We found this helpful in understanding why we instinctually strive to undermine our rational relationship frameworks. It helped create sensors to warn us when we are falling into destructive patterns and ways to tempt us away from them.

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida, a book that illustrates how we fail to think rationally even when we think we are, and how such tendencies can be exploited by advertising, media, and other persons. In order to understand how to build a reliable and robust relationship it is important to understand the failure modes of the individuals in the relationship. Knowing these patterns tends to move us away from blame and toward constructive remedies.

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, by Temple Grandin and Sean Barron, actually a book  written to help people with autism or Asperger syndrome but illuminating what most of us take for granted in the expectations in relationships. By forcing us not to assume, we can construct some new sensors, effectors and interaction patterns based on these simple underlying interaction rules.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Stanley Milgrim. A more updated view on the newer and more well known Stanford Prison Experiment and its context in the Abu Ghraib incidents is in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, but I found the latter book to have more grandstanding. Useful to understand some of the roots of misbehavior: authority, assumption, privacy, and so on. I have directly or indirectly referenced such warning indicia in earlier posts concerning the challenges to fidelity.

Sometimes the underlying research citations are more illuminating, but higher level thematic guide such as these can be a good place to start for those who are serious about thinking about their relationships. I will add to this as I recall other texts we found useful.

Three's a Crowd?

Recently Jenny has brought up the notion of a threesome. She has become what is called “bi-curious.” This is at the exploration stage, and she has not committed to actually trying it yet. But she brings it up from time to time, sometimes in a light jest, and sometimes in a “what if I wanted to, how would we…” kind of discussion, you know, purely hypothetical logistics.

It could also be a perversion test for me.

I once wrote that a bisexual girlfriend was an attribute that I preferred. But although there are still aspects of this that interest me and have in the past interested me, yes, in a prurient way!, I find that the whole prospect in a life-long mate is quite different. It triggers an interesting mix of feelings in me.

Does it destabilize our Peau, our relationship, our manifestation of love and trust?

Jenny has similar questions. If not for this mutual uncertainty we whould have long since tried to satisfy Jenny’s curiousity, and doubtless this posting would be bursting to the seams with hot and heavy bisexual action. Or maybe that is nothing more than a typical fantasy of mine!

But if I had to take a bet, I believe it will happen at some point in the next few years. I would guess that we will choose a person or provider unknown to both of us and probably in a foreign country. Somebody and somewhere where there is little risk of establishing a relationship.

But I have misgivings. Why?

Lord of the Rings, on Stage

A short post: Jenny and I went to see Lord of the Rings in London, a musical. Do not go with the Jackson movie in mind; but if you have an open mind and an interest in the books you will find it worthwhile.

Condensing the story into the length of a single play is, of course, a challenge doomed to failure. But keeping such constraints and the musical medium in mind, it was not as bad as I had feared. The stagecraft and constumes are well planned, creative, and have visual and auditory impact superbly tailored to the medium. I am told that the story went under revision since its opening to decidedly mixed reviews in Toronto.

Probably the closest other play that comes to mind is Lion King.

Cars

Given I now have a place to live, a few actually, I was once again in the market for an automobile.

I have kept an automobile in storage with my sister, to the delight of her husband. It is a high performance sports car in the $250k range. I may have driven it a few hundred miles in the last few years. My brother in law might have driven it a few thousand miles. It was a good deal for him. They do not charge me storage fees.

I have had a new model on order. It arrives later this month. It will be my 4th car of that Italian brand, so I suppose I should say that I like the car. There was a nice set of factory-sponsored events in different cities worldwide where they debuted the car. Jenny and I attended one. It was grand in a horrible way, and utterly boring to boot. But the cars were lovely and the wine was great.

I have had the usual assortment of high end cars back when I had a garage sufficient to the task: over the last decade I've entertained a brace of Porsches and Ferraris, a Lamborghini, a couple of Mercedes, and a few very special cars. None were very practical especially after I left the country. The depreciation was also, for the most part, pretty horrible, and I do not have the preservationist interests of a collector.

The problem is that Jenny and I will be living in large cities, which are not the best places for a high performance sports car, even the most practical member of that class, the Porsche Turbo or GT3. Although in Asia I have seen Ferraris in the cities, it looks like a real pain to drive them around at the off and on ten KPH maximum speed you see in traffic, while inhaling the pungent, unfiltered exhaust of hundreds of high pollution cars, most of which have their tailpipes at the level of your nose.

So I thought of a sedan. Something that could be amenable to a chauffer or self-driving. These days there are very fast saloons available for purchase. The merely fast saloons include the typical names: Aston Martin, Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Bentley and so on. Then there are the insanely fast saloons, of which I feel the Mercedes S65 AMG is the defining example given the constraints.

Meanwhile Jenny has her heart set on a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, which we test drove last year. It's a ridiculous car, but she enjoys the high driving position, especially as more and more SUVs dominate the roads. Apparently outside of the US and Europe, the Cayenne is the brand leader for Porsche. And there is a new model now...

Choices, choices...

IQ, Wealth, and Misleading Science

A longitudinal study on 7,403 persons run from 1979 until 2004 has failed to correlate intelligence to wealth, although it confirmed a correlation to income found in a variety of other studies (e.g. Brown and Reynolds, “A Model of IQ, Occupation and Earnings,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 65, No. 5, Dec., 1975, pp. 1002-1007, and many others).

The sample population for this study came from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth managed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor. The measure of wealth had to do with a variety of personal financial indicators such total wealth, income, and hardships such as credit card debt. The measure of intelligence was the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

All three of these parameters have come under considerable scrutiny, in particular after the release of the very contentious Libertarian book, Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which at best served as a warning as to how poor statistics could be used in a non-peer-reviewed forum to mislead a large audience because their logic can be reduced nicely into a media-sized logical-sounding soundbite. (Other examples of this sort include The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich, as well as books like The Silent Spring or, in all likelihood, An Inconvenient Truth; all examples of well-meaning authors reporting second-hand poor science to make an otherwise important point. Too bad the poor science has often misled humanity into solutions that end up causing more human suffering than the problem at hand.)

But all those caveats aside, I do not find this latest result at all surprising, although by its small sample size it does not cover the extremely wealthy nor extremely intelligent. Of the very wealthy self-made people I find above average intelligence, but if I were to sweep in a lot of n-th generation wealth, this would drop toward the mean. Contrary to Murray (Bell Curve) I tend to see wealth as far more heritable a property than intelligence. Conversely I see many highly intelligent persons who do not focus on wealth, seeing instead other areas that merit their considerable attentions from which their intellects receive generous non-financial rewards. Those who do focus on wealth seem to do reasonably well, but this is always adjusted against fortune and opportunity which are unpredictable. Much like the tricky statistical observation that you have to look at the probabilities that people do not share a birthday when measuring the likelihood that two people in a group do share a birthday, proper statistics must measure what leaks out of the closed population.

You just cannot discount luck away from any hoard of vast wealth. Remember I am talking about the extremes here.

This reminds of me of any number of examples of “hanging out” with the super-intelligent crowd and having to conceal wealth so as not to create a knee-jerk negative social reaction, or likewise with the super-wealthy and the need to conceal intelligence. Weird how those barriers can arise.

Oops, sorry, was that arrogant? ;-)

In the more normative case there is good reason to pursue education and knowledge; these are not the same as intelligence and have a strong correlation to improved success when compared to the alternatives. But beware of linearly extrapolating to the very ends of the bell curve.

The other night at a cancer fund raiser there was spirited discussion about recent results linking vaginal and oral sex partners to increased incidences of esophogal cancers, lending credence to the HPV infection route for such cancers. I continue to find it amazing how much the media, in its benign desire to simplify messages for their audience, ends up distorting the public view of statistical results. Even the press coverage on the HPV vaccination contraversies is full of statistical misunderstandings.

Could these memes be part of a new evolutionary IQ test that will push us to the next stage of evolution?

Or more importantly, how this will affect the oral sex availability in the provider market?

;-)

West Coast Host

I hosted Mark again, alternating back to the West Coast.

First we met in Los Angeles.

As part of my host duties I arranged some entertainment for him. As you may recall from a previous post, Mark had been appreciative of the eye candy but disappointed in the skills level of the previous American arrangements when compared to the skills available in Asia.

My difficulty in arrangements was compounded by the fact that these days many of the top Internet-accessible providers have become more security conscious. This is entirely defensible — it's a harsh world out there, and certain activities even among consenting adults could be considered illegal in the United States due to confusions over orthogonal monetary transactions. So it is important to be conservative. But it does mean that arranging company for an unreferencable foreigner such as Mark can become quite challenging.

But with persistence, doable.

I arranged a woman who had adult entertainment credentials and the benefit of excellent on-line reviews. (I have written previously on the oddity of provider reviews.) More importantly, she had some, um, previous background in Asia. The adult media entertainer isn't my kind of thing, per se, but I figured if 1:1 skills were not going to be the main selling point I might has well go with looks and experience with male sex fantasies. She was a knockout blonde and had three hours to make Mark happy. Apparently Mark was pleased; any deficit in skills was more than made up by enthusiasm, a clever mind and, just maybe, the notion he was with an adult starlet. And she was quite gorgeous.

We then headed up to the Bay Area for an overnight. We had some business and he had a meeting with a friend, Tom, and a golf game.

For a change in experience I arranged a lovely coed, Sally, who was an economics major in one of the better University of California schools not in the Bay Area. She met us in San Jose and supplied Mark quality company and a golf partner. Tom had brought his own companion from Asia, Mia. That is fairly common; in fact we did something that for our Whistler party.

Oops, timeout. I just checked and noticed that I did not post about the Whistler experience in the old blog, probably because the writing time overlapped with the time I was getting heavily involved with Jenny. Short version:

---

The trip was a four-person six-day ski trip to Whistler: Lau, Mark, Park and myself. We rented a very large five bedroom ski-in/ski-out home sitting off of Blackcomb (my preferred mountain,) but I was completely unable to arrange female company of adequate quality. So after two days of poor company Park made a few phone calls and flew in six women from overseas.

As I said, apparently this is not uncommon. These days I often am propositioned with this in Asia -- women who, knowing I am “attached,” will remind me that they have an up to date passport with the appropriate visas. It seems strange to treat female companionship like takeout pizza, but I suppose since it is voluntary and enjoyed on all sides, why not?

Some day I should blog that story. It is far more complicated than I can give justice here, since Park tried to convince me to bring Jenny...

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Ok, back to the story in California: I do not play golf, so Mark, Sally, Tom and Mia made a handsome golf foursome. I went to other meetings.

Tom was the CEO of a successful Asian business that had just cut a major contract with an international sports figure the previous day. He was riding high on this success. He was a long-time friend of Michael and Mark, and this was to be my formal introduction to him.

All six of us took the short jet hop back to Santa Monica airport, checked into what Mark called “The Pretty Woman hotel” for the benefit of Mia. She was not impressed when (The Artist previously formerly known as Prince and now again known as) Prince walked by with his entourage, but was absolutely ga-ga when she spied some strapping young male actor who I did not recognize. Generational difficulties, you know.

Then it was dinner at Cut.

A few words about Cut: I am not ordinarily a fan of Wolfgang Puck restaurants. But I am a fan of Wagyu Kobe beef. The real stuff, not the largely inferior cross-bred American Style Kobe beef product.

Wagyu Kobe is a particular breed of Wagyu beef (Tajima-ushi) given regular massages and a diet of select grains which leads to intense marbling and a great flavor. It has a higher amount of monounsaturated fats and is therefore likely to be healthier for you than beef that appears to have less fat content but has more bad fat. Wagyu Kobe beef is only surpassed by Matsusaka beef, which is cut only from female cows kept on an exercise regimen, fed tofu, wheat and beer, and massaged with a strong liquor rubbed into their hide.

The fetishistic breeding and care of these cattle is in part due to Japanese culture and in part due to their mountainous geography which encouraged small populations of cattle and experimentation with breeding and feed. A feudal fad for beef around 1900 created a bubble economy in Japan for exotic breeds of imported animals for breeding purposes which burst in 1910, but left behind knowledge, training, and a population of animals genetically bred to produce the tastiest, healthiest beef in the world.

Well, outside of Japan there aren't many great places to get great Wagyu, but Cut does a competent job. Some Asians prefer the less fatty hybrid Wagyu when they come to America; since they are so used to the amazing beef available in Asia they want a change. But I recommend Cut as a place you can try the outrageously expensive Wagyu beef in the US. They don't have a huge selection of Kobe beef, and in particular I have never seen the Matsusaka beef, but it's worth a try. Especially if somebody else is paying.

Cut also has a reasonably good wine list.

Sally loved it.

Worth mentioning: there was an interesting thing I arranged at Cut. In order to provide a conversation starter, I had asked a recognizable actress (a friend of a friend) to show up at Cut, greet my table, give me a kiss, accept a business package “for Skippy, who is really looking forward to this deal,” and then leave.

It did start some conversation.

Sally loved that, too.

After Cut it was off to a room salon. We revisited Garam, a good salon in Los Angeles. It is a relatively fancy place and looks more like a mansion than a typical room salon (unfortunately it changed ownership and is scheduled to close within the next few weeks). We had reserved their large room which had a fancy chandelier and fireplace, invited three hostesses mostly to keep Sally and Mia company and talked business and other stuff. Of course from time to time one or more guys or gals would sing, and in the course of the evening we put away several bottles of Johnny Walker Blue.

Per tradition Mark was hosting the room salon, as he was the senior person introducing us. And this was the customary social way for me to get acquainted with Tom. I'm glad I don't have too many friends who subscribe to this custom.

Eventually Tom and Mark invited all the other available hostesses in, after other customers had left, and at some point there were over a dozen gals in the room. I suppose Mark had to tip them all.

Since the clubs close at 2 AM in Los Angeles, about a dozen of us moved over to a host bar, which is a place where the staff are all good looking Asian men instead of women. These places usually open around 2 AM since their main clientele are the hostesses coming off work at 2 AM. (It's an interesting flow of cash from businessmen that are older men, to hostesses who are young women, to hosts who are young men.) Presumably they are all unlicensed and illegal since the city mandates a last call for alcohol before 2 AM. But we had fun there until past 5 AM.

The next day we went to Aroma Resort for a sauna, hot and cold plunge pools, and very competent massages. Mine was from an older lady who was a China-born Korean. A lot of the conversation revolved around the Virginia Tech massacre.

And after that we repaired to the hotel for a farewell round. And the hosting was over.

Summary of the night?

1. Companionship: $7000
2. Transportation:  $6000
3. Dinner: $2000
4. Host bar: $3000
5. Business contact: Priceless.

(Hey, at least I can collect American Express points for these jaunts. I think I have six million of them. Too bad there is rarely anything worthwhile to spend them on.)

What about Jenny? I call or message to her regularly throughout the evening. While there are other women, I talk to her or leave a voicemail usually hourly, and at least every two hours. That is our protocol. More about this protocol and its history will become clear as I blog more about my temptations. So while at the room salon I called her hourly, which led to no small amount of ribbing from Mark and Tom about my tight leash. But I could tell they were jealous!

Mark is planning on buying a home in California, after which I will no longer be responsible for hosting him. He was very grateful for the gesture, as he always is, and his ability to influence deals for me continues to be important. It is possible I spend $100k of expenses on Mark per year (although it may be only half that much), but that is still less than 0.1% of the deal value he brings.

Sometimes I reflect on how oddly and irrationally parts of the business world work — we are embedded in a large economic machine of rules and capitalist rationales, and yet human behavior remains the fulcrum of so much leverage. Any investment analysis that discounts the individuals' returns from their human needs, wants, and desires seems intrinsically bankrupt. Rational actors and economic returns are, to a degree, a convenient fiction. It makes me wonder: over time, will the relentless progress of the economic machinery win, and will it thereby force rationality and metric-driven economics? Or will the human factor eternally perpetuate inefficiencies, corruption — remaining the business world's inconvenient truth — but also leading to individual rewards and joy?

Who knows. I was just the West Coast Host.

Ankles and Cosmetic Surgery

Here's a short observation.

In a world full of cosmetic surgery, I now believe the most indicative part of a woman's body is her ankles.

A shapely ankle to date has been an accurate indicator of my preferred body type and also happens to be relatively difficult to surgically alter. This is followed closely by the bone structure of the feet and hands, in conjunction with toes and fingers.

The telling indicator used to be the midriff, but the number of technological approaches to solve the midriff problem are now legion, and it is difficult to approach sufficiently closely (or to remove the prerequisite clothing) to see the scars. The graceful curve of the neck line also fell prey to advances in surgical techniques and the rise of relevant capital spending.

Likewise calves used to be a good indicator, but, alas, even that has been conquered through the surgical severing of certain leg nerves which cause the atrophy of chunky calves.

Presumably alteration of bone structure is in the near future, with some combination of chemical or electrical stimulation or attenuation of bone growth. Or perhaps a microsurgical technique that will just go in there and hack up those bones.

I find myself often divided about cosmetic surgery.  The research indicates that it has psychological benefits, but perhaps we are trading an individual's benefit  in psychological health at the expense of a society's expense in sociological health. Of course this happens all the time and is always the right economic bet. But that doesn't make it comforting to me. Jenny comes from a culture that has embraced cosmetic surgery of all kinds, yet has not done any herself, and in fact generally eschews cosmetics. Passing the age of 30, however, gives rise to her subtly setting my expectations that there may be some cosmetic techniques particularly in the area of skin treatments and wrinkle removal that are in her future.

My perspective is that such treatments, if used judiciously and with the appropriate skepticism, are really more for her well-being than for mine or that of our relationship. But in a blog about the challenges of monogamy I should not discount the contribution of her maintaining her appearance to maintaining my interest.

Remembering Tokyo

Back in November 2004 I did a risky thing with a courtesan I call Sanura: we playacted our way through a series of business meetings. In retrospect the entire notion seems insane, but at the time it was a lot of fun. The nadir of the experience was mind fucking Bob and Doug, two associates of a finance demigod I called The Man.

Wouldn't you know it, later on I end up partnering with The Man on a set of projects, handing over virtually all my Asia business dealings. When I last wrote about this, there had been no repercussion from my little trick with his associates, but I knew he was curious.

In the last year The Man has raised Big Money for projects, and by Big Money I mean a number followed by enough zeros to overflow a calculator. Hey, he's The Man! In order to manage this expansion of capital The Man suggested we hire Doug to manage our Asia operations out of Hong Kong, and Bob to manage out of London. (Doug had been bored out of his investment bank position shortly after the first time I had met him.) I was very hesitant. I mean, I really fucked with Bob and Doug, and the questions they might have might be, um, embarrassing. The Man suggested other country heads as well, but those names don't hold this special attention for me. He also strongly recommended I make an offer to Doug as soon as possible, before he took one of many offers from hedge funds.

I've profiled Doug before, there's no doubt he has qualifications. He also went through a kind of karmic remorse that I have commonly found in successful investment bankers who don't go on to run investment banks, and fund managers: they harbor a semi-secret dream to go do something useful and real and cash constrained, like a startup, almost as if they feel guilty about the zillions of dollars they have made from clients for adding little or no real value. I tell you, when they get deep into drink, you'll hear a lot of this from these big shot deal guys, lamenting their true socio-economic contribution while they jealously eye the struggling entrepreneur -- of course from their position of considerable liquidity! Of course they rarely actually take the cut in compensation to do a startup, and when they do, they rarely succeed. Doug went this route for a short time and had small successes but was hunting for some big game that was NOT a rehash of the work he had already mastered. He seemed very interested and motivated in partnering with The Man again. And hiring qualified and motivated people is always a key to success.

So I guess I had to meet Bob and Doug again, two and a half years later, and again in Tokyo.

So here is the scene:

I have been in Tokyo with Jenny for several days. We have a favorite sushi chef we always visit atop the Tokyo Opera City Tower. We have a favorite park where we like to run around on the play structures, to the amusement of children and their guardians alike. We have a favorite karaoke place where private rooms range in eclectic style from a dancing pole and bunk beds, to a twelve person hot tub. The world's largest city has a never-ending diversity of clubs, restaurants, and other venues, and the fetishist culture offers so much to see, if not experience. Service is almost always superb in that Japanese way, and luxury is uniquely both common and unobtrusive. I'm not sure I fully grok Tokyo, but I enjoy it.

The setting has moved from the Grand Hyatt and Park Hyatt to the Mandarin Oriental.

Allow me a short note on this hotel: I only like half the hotels in the Mandarin Oriental group, although none of them are terrible. While the concierges, bell and wait staff at the Tokyo Mandarin Oriental were excellent, I have to say the food, suites and spa didn't measure up to the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, or, say, the Mandarin Oriental's own Landmark or renovated eponymous hotel in Hong Kong.

Back to the story: I should mention that at the point of this meeting Bob and Doug are both already hired. They went through an extensive interview process at our home office. Bob has been working as the head of operations in Asia for several months already and is preparing for a London office. Doug is scheduled to start up in the summer, after he dispenses with a few personal issues involving women who he does not intend to bring with him to Hong Kong. So I am not really interviewing them, per se, I am welcoming them.

I am meeting Bob and Doug over a late dinner at Sense, the Chinese restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental. Tomorrow they will conduct me to a meeting with the president of one of Japan's largest securities companies. After that Jenny and I will part ways; she will be taking care of some of her business while I will head to China to take care of some of mine. We will meet back up about a week later for a trip to South America.

Earlier today Jenny and I had three hours of treatment at the Spa at the Mandarin Oriental in their couple’s suite. The treatments were excellent, with two lovely and well-trained therapists, but the couple’s suite was disappointing when compared to the Landmark in Hong Kong. The suite at the Landmark was designed for fooling around, and the spa gave you ample time -- and even a bed, sauna, jetted pool, and chaise -- in which to do so. The equivalent suite at the Mandarin Oriental was always chaperoned.Yes, there can be too much good service.

We made up for this; the time after the spa appointment and before my dinner was occupied with a two hour, mind-blowing lovemaking session in the suite. Synchronization and body and breath control really work together to great effect. I have experienced tantric providers the world over, and although good experiences they were almost always short of fantastic. But the craft Jenny and I have developed under the guidance of her tutor, well, that had been really elevating things to a new level.

Needless to say, between the two sessions, I was relaxed.

A fifteen-minute nap and a shower later, Jenny is ordering room service while I have greeted Bob and Doug at Sense. We are seated on two sides of a table that abuts the 37th floor view. Doug is seated at one end, and then myself and Bob. So I am flanked.

Dinner conversation starts out slow, like a rusty wheel bearing. A spot of alcohol serves as social lubricant. As the tasting menu progresses we predictably warm up. We share status and plans, ideas and visions. But from time to time there are these odd, pregnant pauses. There is clearly something on their minds.

At a point after a few bottles of wine have been consumed, Doug breaks one of these pregnant pauses with, "Sig, you have to tell me," and while eyeing Bob continues, "who was that Sanura gal?"

It turns out that Bob, since joining the organization, has been discreetly trying to figure out where she fit. Although Sanura and I had created an email address for her at the home office as well as business cards, she did not appear on any organizational charts, nor did anybody seem to know of any female staff I had hired from George Soros.

They had asked The Man, who basically brushed them off saying it wasn’t important.

I chide them for their inability to execute this bit of diligence and ask them to share their theories. I pose it as a challenge. Doug hypothesizes she is a hidden protege. Bob thinks she is a contractor used for special projects. But I know they are thinking something else. I can tell. So I call bullshit. I tell them they have to justify their hypothesis and that those were unsupported. I berate them for poor thinking and question whether they were hiring errors.

My challenge cannot go unanswered. Their manhood called into question, they throw caution to the wind and reveal that their real theory is that I have a hidden fund of "at least $100 million," and that Sanura both manages the fund and is my secret mistress.

Privately I am fascinated that these very intelligent and worldly men cannot seem to even theorize that Sanura is not financially sophisticated at all, and that they would recognizer her as a junior peer, a sole fund manager. Was Sanura’s play acting so convincing? Or is there really no difference between play acting and being a truly capable financier? Maybe there is less difference between a former banker and a former provider. Food for thought.

I test this. They are utterly convinced that she had financial acumen, that she slept with me, and that I kept her hidden from my principal organization. Everything else is triangulated around those data points.

I am sorry, Sanura, if you are reading this because I know you loved maintaining this fiction, but I told them the truth. Part of me wishes you were there to see the reaction because it was beautiful to behold. Two men who probably have backslapped each other countless times for how they tricked others into lucrative financial instruments were themselves punk'd by a young, leggy, financially-naive provider.

They took it well. In fact at a follow up meeting Doug confessed that he would really like to meet Sanura again, professionally. I told him I had lost contact with her.

I know Bob and Doug now have a unique memory of Tokyo, the two days they were punk'd by Sigmund Fuller and an escort, and how it led to their investment of time and money in a multibillion dollar enterprise.

Now that's a provider that was worth the money!

Excuses and More Excuses

I have received dozens of emails berating me for failing to write about sex and monogamy. Here are my lame excuses.

1. It is a very complicated topic. I have many posts that I have started, but have not posted because I believe they fail to capture the real feel of the situations. There are many nuances in love and relationships that make their context more difficult to describe than simpler sex.

2. It is a very complicated topic, part II. Many of the insights I have been developing are really about sharing life, and not about love per se. The interplay between emotion, relationships, money, social interactions, and activities is again difficult to capture.

3. Privacy is challenging. This blog is a work of fiction. It is based on fact, but I change several aspects to enhance privacy. There is no real privacy in the world today, but this illusion is important. The complexities noted above often conspire to make it very difficult to capture the idea and yet maintain any level of anonymity because changing any given fact alters the balance and feel of the rest.

4. Lacking motivation. Receiving correspondance does increase my motivation, but writing is most often a way to manage a tension or issue. My life is remarkably lacking tensions right now. When I was seeking sex and relationships in my previous blog there was plenty of interesting tensions. I was intrincially dissatisfied despite my apparent material and social success and wealth, and clearly searching for something. While I am still a seeker, it is not dissatisfaction that motivates but rather protection of my existing happiness. It is somehow quite different.

The unfinished posts really do real with complex issues that are difficult to describe compactly, as well as being moving targets of my own opinion. The topics include my observations on:

1. Wealthy couples who are exceedingly unhappy;
2. Humanity's apparent inability to deal with surplus, especially in relationships;
3. Social responsibility in the context of responsibility to a committed relationship;
4. Worth, self-worth and the role of partnership;
5. Building versus Salvage, two different models of efforts in a relationship;
6. Death, Divorce, Depression and Disillusionment; and
7. Planning for Monogamy.

I referred to some of these topics as conversations I have been having with Jenny. Perhaps I need a ghost writer...

I'll be Home for Christmas

Last Christmas was a real doozy. The union of our various families has been a rocky process indeed.

Jenny and I were apart for over a week between Thanksgiving and Christmas while I hung out with a few billionaires trying to save the world. Needless to say, we didn't. After that, full of the optimism that drove me to try so many startups, I once again had planned a full slate of family holiday activities.

This time rather than flying hither and yon to butter up the families in every possible combination, I decided to bring the families together in a venue that enabled them to hang out with each other or to avoid each other, each according to their own desire. The trick was to find a place that offered enough space for the relatives and their emotional baggage. The eventual solution came down to an island or a cruise. The presence of a casino and 24x7 food on the cruise sealed the decision, although personally I would have preferred the island.

Easier to bury the bodies, you know.

Gradually the number of family members interested in the cruise increased until the attendee list stood at fifty people. When it came to relatives, nothing was too good for Sigmund Fuller's wallet. (Of course in reality all of the twenty-odd staterooms were arranged in late summer, but please continue to allow me some artistic license.)

Family members seemed to fall in to several categories:

The Gamblers spent most of their time in the casino, bleeding both money and embellished stories of the occasional success that fueled their irrational behavior.

The Children ran around like headless chickens until they ran out of energy, and which time they miraculously transformed into the wailing hellspawn of banshees... Keep in mind that not all members of The Children group were minors.

Then there were the Floaters, so called by me because I truly hoped for their sake that they could survive in sea water without the aid of floatation devices.

Of course one unifying principle, adopted over the last year by all the adults, was the Principle of Disdain, which was to look upon other families with Disdain, just on Principle. This caused no end of friction which in theory could have surfaced issues to discuss and resolve, but in fact only fed private rantings and the worst sort of clique behaviors.

Jenny and I went with the best of intentions, cheerful and optimistic and definitely consensus building and ready to work out issues.

After a few days the lifeboats were looking real good.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Really there was some improvement over last year. For example last years most common comment was along the lines of, "why on earth are you going to marry [him or her]". This year the favorite complaint was, "when will you set the date for God's sake?," rapidly followed by a muttered, "God, I hate [his or her] family." And I count that as significant progress toward accepting the inevitable.

Now if only they could get along with each other.

Bottom line? No deaths, no missing body parts, only minor injuries to pride.

Next year: a private island. Will it be Lost, or Gilligan's Island?

Turning on Jenny

Over a year ago I gave a speech in a foreign country at a national convention. I took Jenny to the convention where they were kind enough to give her a front row seat.

It was one of those talks where I hit it out the park and there was a standing ovation. Everybody was very pleased since I was considered a risky speaker, and audience members even lined up for my autograph.

When we got back to the hotel Jenny jumped me and screwed the living daylights out of me.

During a pause in the proceedings, Jenny confessed that she was surprised by how turned on she was by my speech. I chalked this up to one of many things I don't understand about women, but actually kind of do. Meaning that I can justify the behavior from an evolutionary and psychological perspective, and I certainly enjoy it!, but dont' really understand it. Maybe this is why some girls become groupies for rock stars or actors. It's obvious it isn't always because they are good looking -- the women are affiliating with popularity and power, not always physical characteristics.

And I've written before about some of this effect, but it is interesting to see it in my monogamous mate. Jenny shows no deep affinity for male movie stars, sports stars or the like, but seems to have displaced all of this on me.

I'm not complaining.

But let's review some of what appears to turn on Jenny, besides the ordinary suspects:

1. When I give a speech that sways the audience.
2. When I am with beautiful other women.
3. When I describe what I forcefully will do to her in an upcoming lovemaking scenario.
4. When I masturbate on the webcam.

Is there a common theme? Maybe I am overreaching, but I think it is about when I am in a position of power. Power over others. Power over her. Power over myself. These expressions of power make Jenny wet with desire. Really wet.

But even beyond that, these are scenarios which also reflect well on her power stemming from her ownership over my loyalty. My power over the audience, over her sexual submission, or my orgasms accrue to her power over the world as well.

I am not advocating the pure power viewpoint of human relationships, or going the route of Camille Paglia on the issue, but in much of pop psychology one does find truths.

How about the other way?

When I see similar competencies in Jenny, I am proud, but rarely sexually turned on. Her general power does not provoke a sexual reaction in me. In fact, I am more sexually turned on by the same aforementioned scenarios when she is there. In fact when she is not present, power does not do much of anything for me. But it is the reflection of my power in my lover that really gets me going.

I need that mirror.

I need Jenny.

Catching Up... Again

Here are some very short catch up posts. I may edit this as I remember more of what I've been forgetting to post.

---

I went to two events hosted by Xenii in Hollywood. It is an interesting concept. Apparently private parties have far fewer restrictions on them in the United States, and outfits like Xenii have become popular with the Hollywood crowd. It was still typical Hollywood, though.

While I was in LA I visited a very nice room salon called Garam with some business associates. It's a strictly no hanky panky place, but it is popular with Korean actors and singers. The girls there aren't as high end as the nicest places in Asia, but it is in the United States. Some of them even speak English fluently. Unfortunately in LA everything closes by 2 AM. More about this will appear in a future Temptation Avoided posting.

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Jenny and I have been training with her sex trainer for several months off and on. It is fascinating and deserves a more complete post. So far I would say the main point to it all is focus. By having focus around a few things, certain rhythms and patterns, breathing, and different kinds of touch (pressures, strokes, taps, tugs), things can become very erotic. Having several hour long sessions focused on just one thing at a time is a kind of practice that creates a palette of sexual synergies. Then much of sex becomes a mutual recognition of these colors on the palette with which you can express yourself and work with the expression of your partner. It is very interesting and creative. I don't know why we do not study the sex act more. The feeling is something that really does require incredible intimacy and is difficult to imagine working well with intermittently-met sex providers. We think we have at least another year of regular training to go.

---

I have been to China several times, both meeting with government officials and corporate officials. I found a pocket of North Koreans there. Apparently they are vetted by the government, permitted to work in China, and forced to give a percentage of their wages back to the North Korean government. I met some academics and a former North Korean ambassador to China, and we went to a North Korean drinking establishment. There were many women there, and at the end of the night you had the option to take any number of them back to your hotel. I did not take this option, but it makes me wonder why this would be interesting when the men are usually so drunk they can hardly walk.

In China sex is amazingly easy to find. In fact there are listings of thousands of women on the Internet, complete with standardized details with which you can search to your heart's delight.

---

Jenny and I had another Christmas from hell, over forty relatives on a boat cruising in Mexico for about two weeks. I was ready to chew my leg off and swim for shore. In the westerly direction!

To make up for that trip, Jenny and I had an amazing adventure in Remota Patagonia and Torres del Paine National Park. I have a half-finished post on this. There are bonsai forests, mountains, lakes, glaciers... the diversity of the land was breathtaking. It was very romantic in a wild, untamed sort of way.

---

I recently purchased enormous amounts of lingerie and sexy clubwear. Although I have always made some investment in high end lingerie, this is more trashy stuff. Jenny and I are going through a fantasy phase, I think. I will always remember our crew trying to stuff Andiamo's largest suitcase, which is very very large, into a relatively small helicopter flying to an island where we were going to spend four days. The suitcase was full of nothing but sexy outfits and toys. About 40 hours later I found myself tied to a chair, straining mightily while watching Jenny demonstrate certain things to me, but that's another story...

---

You should read this book on rational thinking. Really.

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida, at Amazon.

And this book on irrational behaviors published in 1841!

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, at Amazon.

---

Jenny and my conversations have been dominated by the following topics:

1. Human inability to deal with surplus. Related to "how to make money a tool rather than a burden."
   
2. Monogamy, and what does "forever" mean? With our Talmudic approach to love, an on-going topic of study.
   
3. Building versus Salvage in relationships. When do we go from one to the other, and how to remain excited about that.
   
4. Death, divorce, depression and disillusionment. We have had several divorces and deaths in the extended family.

---

We did our first quarterly distribution from our Marriage Fund, which is a kind of structured finance trust we call "Peau". We originally were not going to distribute until after year five of marriage, but decided to start the clock January 2007.

---

And I think that's most of the catch up stuff. Longer posts are still in the queue, but you're probably tired of hearing that by now.

Amy Returns

Although I have other topics about which I should post, a few recent events have elbowed their way to the head of the queue. The return of Amy is one such event.

You may recall that Amy was a recent experience that battered my resolve with short term temptations. One of the key issues with Amy was that she appeared to be a more conventionally ideal mate for me than Jenny: her language skills, intellectual interests, social circles, experiences, and business acumen were more compatible to my world. At twenty-four her youth and beauty, her self-actualized accomplishments, and her aggressive rationality were impressive by any standard, and frankly beyond Jenny's attributes in those particular areas.

Amy had received a job offer from the fantastically accomplished Clovis, who was clearly impressed with her. And she had turned him down flat, electing instead to continue to travel as a free spirit and build upon her real estate holdings. I'm afraid that Clovis and her grandfather "Duke" viewed Amy's refusal to be bridled in a steady position as an unfavorable side effect of my poor treatment of her at Clovis' estate. They might be correct, but more likely they were giving me too much credit.

Although I had rejected Amy in a most heinous and ungentlemanly manner, Amy continued to try to make contact, to try to unravel the rationale behind my behavior. Emails and messages went unanswered. From time to time Amy sent me unsolicited photographs of herself in various locales with short, innocuous messages such as "Hi", and "I'm still here!" After about a dozen such unanswered messages I asked her to stop and there was no possibility nor desire for a relationship. The text messages, thankfully, ended.

After a recent tour of Eastern Europe, Amy sent me a message noting that she would be stopping in the US on her way to her first solo trip to Asia. She was generally unfamiliar with Asia and was asking for suggestions for places to go, stay, eat, and see. Jenny advised me not to answer. I took this advice and did not.

Not too much later I attended a private client services dinner event for a major US bank, to listen to the global wisdom of a former government and private industry economist. Little did I know that that her grandfather and I were both clients of the same bank though not the same private banker. Yes, sometimes the privacy in private client services can be inconvenient!

Lo and behold, Duke had brought Amy to introduce her to the bankers because she had just signed up as a client! While I was certain that her self-created net worth was insufficient to qualify, I assume that some combination of her relationship to Duke and the likelihood of a future inheritance gave some flexibility to otherwise stiff private client service rules.

I ignominiously tried to escape by way of a back door, but Amy saw me first. Her greetings were attention getting and crystal clear, making it difficult for me to depart in a dignified manner. My banker, Ana, learned that Amy and I had met in London, and then earned my undying enmity by rearranging seating so we shared a table.

During dinner Amy was forced to brief the entire table on her new life plan, although she was clearly aiming her narrative at me. She was planning to monetize her real estate holdings, aggregating them with some of her father's holdings and using structured finance for slight leverage, and then invest in REIT's and natural resource MLP's. Her move to more passive management would enable her to go to law school. She had taken the LSAT a month or so ago and scored 173 (which, judging from the response at the table, must be a very good score), and now was strongly focused on adding business law to her engineering background. Her top choice was Stanford. Of course the table was highly complimentary of her entrepreneurship and independence, and not a few comments were made about how similar we were.

Unlike the last meeting with Amy, I felt very little temptation over dinner. I must have been, as they say in the United States, over her. I truly did admire Amy and her accomplishments, though. I was thinking about how she would make somebody an amazing mate -- grace, beauty, drive, intellect, and rationality.

And these thoughts made me wonder about why Jenny and I were a good couple, especially when so many people around us thought we were ill-matched. But more on that later... here's where the story starts to get interesting.

After dinner Amy tried to corner me alone. Ultimately she suggested we share a ride to her hotel, after she cleverly got rid of her grandfather and was therefore without a ride. I suggested that Ana obtain a car for her, which she gladly did. Amy then dropped all pretense and, quite bluntly, told me that she wanted to have a conversation with me, and she would hound me to the ends of the Earth if I did not agree to meet for at least a half hour. So I agreed to have tea at a small cafe nearby.

Wow, did it go downhill from there.

Amy started talking about how lonely her life was. How her life was without love, and how even sex was an act of only temporary joy and no meaning. Over and over her theme was her solitude, her need for affection, and her feelings of loneliness.

And then she said that she wanted to be with me. She told me that she loved me.

Whoa. We hardly knew each other!

And then it became clear. Unlike the last time, there was no slow motion moment. There was no deep life implications to be evaluated and no directions chosen. In an instant Amy had turned herself into a portrait of a sad, lost, self-actualized soul, no longer the target of my lust, but the object of my pity.

I know Amy's solitude: much of my life was alone, without parents or mentors, without love or guidance. I know Amy's self-made loneliness: the nights I would cry out for love I would follow with days where I would arrogantly reject it as a weakness.

And I know the danger of Amy's iconoclastic pride. When I was young I fancied myself an unchained element, a whirlwind of force that was unbridled and unbroken. But this was a youthful deception, defining myself through opposition to measurable societal norms, an act which only empowered society to control my actions even more by defining the very boundaries outside of which I made my life. Which of us was fenced in and fenced out?

No, I understood this loneliness and the pride-driven manic-depression that could drive one to excessive achievement or to the final ruin. But I also understood that this was something every person has to solve within themselves.

And thus it ends. I left Amy composing herself after crying again. I left her as alone as when I met her. But I also left her with one piece of advice for people like her, and people like me:

Never love somebody until you are strong.

I hope it will help her.

It is not intended as a message of cruelty. Nor is it a sophomoric Ayn Rand-ism. There are certain personalities that by their nature will be a foundation upon which people will build their lives. Such people have a responsibility to become strong before they invite people to build upon their foundation. Some will make themselves strong. Many will fail and will be forever broken. But I believe it is an intensely personal journey. It is the nature of the beast that drives such people that taking help at their moment of weakness forever undermines the strength of their foundation, because most of that strength comes from that most wicked of the deadly sins: Pride.

Amy has enormous potential, if she can make it. I hope she can.

But it will be without me.

Events

We all know that marketing is a huge business. The focus on raising our base instincts for competition, material ownership, and desire into economic transactions is the most successful marriage of science and art in history.

I watch almost no television. Like smoking, all my exposure is second hand, seeing it out of the corner of my eye in a public venue or at somebody else's home. Display surfaces I have in plenty, but they carry content that I control.

High end goods are rarely marketed on television anyhow. Perhaps recognizing that the distribution channel caters to a lower common denominator, high end marketing happens in different ways.

One of them is The Event.

Events are over the top affairs designed to attract a high end crowd and their hangers-on. Sometimes they are public events, but more often these days they are private events with a semi-public face. The key is to create buzz and an envious desire for affiliation with a new product and its fans. Whether it is to introduce a new champagne, a new fashion line, a new face, or a new car, high end marketing concentrates its dollars on events.

And why not? For a few million you can buy a broad demographic ad campaign, or a tiring spectrum of narrow channels such as specialty magazines where you must compete with hundreds of other ad pages. Or you can throw one hell of a party. Celebrities, a famous band, high end food and wine, over the top decor, beautiful wait staff and, of course, exclusivity... all are possible at a well-managed event.

I wrote earlier about the RED Armani event during London's Fashion Week. NYC Fashion Week followed, more of the same. Ferrari had the roll out of their 599 GTB, a throwback to their elegant Pininfarina designs but with definitely modern underpinnings. (We attended it for a brief half hour, just enough time to cruise through the aperitif menu and avoid any car crazy people I knew.) There was even an exclusive event for swim suits earlier in the year where they built an indoor tropical beach. It is very clear Jenny or I could spend our entire lifetimes going from event to event, maybe two or three times a week, collecting freebies, avoiding cameras, and wolfing down wines, champagne and canapes. And then partying afterwards.

What a life. It makes me feel sorry for Paris Hilton. She never had a chance to build a moral resistance, did she?

No, cancel that. I don't feel sorry for her at all.

This reminds me that the best event Jenny and I attended in the past twelve months was the Adult Video News (AVN) exposition which generally runs concurrently with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). My theory is that the two shows run together to cater to the Asian businessmen who can use CES to justify a visit to Las Vegas and then fill their digital cameras with photographs of mostly naked women from AVN. I kid you not, at least 75% of the people lined up for snapshots with porn stars were Asian males in business suits.

Yes, I understand that AVN is not really a high end event. But it is a niche event of sorts. It has a public side where fans come to worship their starlet of choice, and an industry side where starlets come to talk shop and redistribute genetic material.

Fortunately while I was with Jenny no starlet recognized me from my previous Las Vegas escapade and there were no personal offers for genetic exchange. (Jenny, of course, knows about that event, but it wouldn't help to be dramatically reminded of it.)

There were a few exhibits relevant to our Xanadu pleasure room, but for the most part it was ogling the starlets and the crowds around them. I had scored tickets to the actual awards ceremony which was a fun event. Our table had a high silicone to brains ratio and a low signal to noise ratio.

Interestingly, something about the show atmosphere made Jenny partly excited and partly jealous. There is no polite way to say it, so pardon my language when I say, Jenny fucked my brains out that night and through the next morning. Well, she did.

Like I said: the best event we attended in the past year.

Our Most Extravagant Crazy Dinner

I was invited to a crazy dinner in Bangkok at the Lebua Hotel the day before yesterday from which I am only just now recovering, whereas Jenny claims she will need to redouble her workouts for another month to recover.

Six chefs who each have eighteen Michelin stars between them (there, I made the math easy!) prepared over a dozen courses paired with wines. The entire meal was ridiculously over the top... I had never seen so much truffle on a plate, and there was also Kobe beef, Beluga caviar which I believe is still unavailable in the US, and some amazing and overrated wines. The bill? By my reckoning (and inexact grasp of current exchange rates), over $20,000 US. Jenny and I should have shared a setting, it was that much food.

Yes, that was off-topic, but I will get to the more relevant postings later, including the Thailand trip, as well as New York, London, and other points. After I recuperate.