Take me out to the ballgame...

For all their modernity and the fact that most say they don't relate to history and what came before, the Americans really do.  They love memorials, remembrances of things and times past (think Jamestown) and of course they love their traditional sports which is completely encompassed by their passion for baseball.

Ridiculous of course.  The game makes no sense at all.  You could go an entire game with no runs at all if the pitchers are on form.  And to think they laugh at cricket where you could go for 5 days and get a draw!  Well you could do the same at baseball and still be at 0-0.

Wrigleyville outside the stadium

I am impressed with the fielding though.  Those guys are fit, great catchers and they can throw the ball like nobody's business.

The batters I think have the raw deal.  They have a round bat to start with which shatters on almost any random occasion when ball very rarely makes contact with bat.  They have to stand (and not move their feet) when someone 30 yards away hurls the ball at him (aka his head) at something over 100 mph.  They aren't allowed to play and miss more than 3 times.  They aren't allowed to wait and see ... again for more than 3 times.  They can't have a thrash and get an outside edge ... you guessed it more than 3 times.  In short they have to get things together very quickly and then hit the ball in the middle of the bat and send it 400 feet into the crowd otherwise the out fielders pick them off.

Unsurprising when you look at their statistics... and yes the crowd does really follow all this very closely.  Our near neighbor followed every pitch and kept detailed statistics for every Cubs player (she said she does this on the TV at home too).  Talk about dedicated!  Her son, a spotty teenager even went and got autographs.  Who does that these days?

But we wanted to watch a Cubs game.  They aren't that good but they are one of the old teams and still have their old ground.  They last won the World Series in 1908 so haven't tasted success for years.  My neighbour said they are 'still rebuilding'.

Check out the ivy covered walls

The ground still has ivy covered walls with a local rule that if the ball gets caught in the ivy (meaning the out fielder can't get it out and throw it back), there's an automatic double -- translation:  the batter gets to go to 2nd base without fear of being thrown out.  Nice tradition.  I tried explaining the oak tree within the boundary counting 5 at Canterbury to my neighbour but don't think she completely got what I was trying to tell her.

However scandal abounds as the Cubs announced that particular day that they wanted to modernize the stadium to add new towers etc.  Their neighbors in Wrigleyville (its called Wrigley Field after their owners the chewing gum people) have built structures on top of their houses which they rent out to fans who can't get tickets in the ground.  These are very solid and high structures and the houses pay 17% of their takings already to the Cubs and have told them they will sue if the plans go ahead.

The amazing structure overlooking Wrigley Field

A solution is being sought!

But the game was fun.  The Cubs sprang into a 2-0 lead and the gradually gave it all back until the 3rd or 4th innings when the collapse happened.

It was the key man, the pitcher.  He can win a game or lose it and the pressure on him must be immense.  Particularly when he has thrown 2 strikes and 3 balls on 2 consecutive occasions to batters who he has then walked and is faced with a 3rd occasion with the same count.  Made me think of my softball days when on one memorable occasion the captain/pitcher walked 7 consecutive batters in the same way and in the course of 1 innings went through the entire batting line up one and a half times. We lost that game by the mercy rule and I think the captain never played again.

Well the pitcher walked that 3rd batter and of course the worst thing possible then happened and by the time everyone drew breath, the Atlanta Braves had racked up 6 runs in just that one innings.  The pitcher was relieved (but none after were much better) and the Cubs ended up losing 11-6.

We went by subway.  It took 15 minutes there as we didn't know the way and 10 minutes back.  Brilliant!

And getting back to my original point about tradition, why is there a 7th innings stretch and a rendition of "Take me out to the Ball Park" on a wurlitzer that everyone in the park sings along to with immense fervor?

Well I don't know for sure, but I like it!

"Just why do you call these high buildings skyscrapers?"

Imagine if you can a swamp peopled by 300 hardy souls wondering why they were there and you have Chicago (or the land of the smelly onions in the local native American tongue) in 1830 or thereabouts.  Hard to think that 30 years later there would be 300,000 inhabitants, in 1900 over a million and today nearly 10 million.  Why?  The swamp hasn't gone away...

Its all about economics, the railways, cattle, the civil war and then an unfortunate drunken accident that took place in 1870 and sparked the fire that burned the wooden city that used to be Chicago almost totally to the ground.

So in order: (1) economics -- made total sense for the city that was pretty much on the western border of the USA in 1830 to control farming and the cattle industry that spread all over; (2) railways -- in the 1840's Chicago became a railway hub, actually the major railway hub.  Still is. (3) cattle -- well people have to eat and the herds ended up in Chicago, courtesy of the railways.  (4) civil war -- Chicago was a Union city so supplied the Yankees with railways, food and all those blue collar manufacturing items needed to conduct a large scale war.  That's what Chicago did and still does.  (5) fire -- well this is interesting as in 1870 a drunken man 'attacked' a domestic animal in a way that hasn't stood the test of time (but the imagination does shudder) and the animal kicked over a lamp that sparked a fire that spread throughout the entire city.  Well it was at the end of a hot dry summer where there was no rain for weeks and everything dried out completely just waiting for that spark.  When it came it burned a mile to the lake and then turned north and burned a further 3 miles along the lake.  One-third of the city was destroyed... except for the industrial logistics that made Chicago the essential crossroads, namely the railway, the meat packing section and all the grain infrastructure.

So having beaten St. Louis into 2nd place as a result of the Civil War, Chicago wasn't in the mood to lose out because of a freak accident.  They threw money and effort at the city but discovered that what survived actually prevented the city from spreading out like it should have.  So with the limited space they had, they had to go up.

Two of the early buildings

Virtually every architect worth his or her salt rolled into Chicago and the first new buildings happened immediately... while the ashes were still warm according to the docent (a snazzy word for guide) of the Chicago Architectural Foundation whose tours we went on (one walking, the other on a boat).  This was utterly compelling and fascinating to see how a city literally rose Phoenix like from the ashes.  Who wouldn't want to be involved in this?  Certainly not the building industry for workers and sub-contractors also piled into Chicago which became the fastest growing city of all time anywhere period.

The amazing Public Library, the biggest in the world

The first skyscraper took flight in 1885 and as technology moved on to steel girders from concrete load bearing walls and columns, so the skyscrapers went ever higher.

The art deco CME monster building with Cires, the goddess of grain standing 32 feet tall on top of the building

The Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) was the highest building at 104 storeys with the John Hancock Tower close behind at 94 storeys.  They've been overtaken now but they are still monster buildings.

The Willis Tower standing tall

But its not their size that amazes, its their beauty.  Back in the 1920's when building was the most intense, owners took the view that for the time, effort and money you could have the building you want but also a beautiful one.  The difference between an ugly building and a beautiful one wasn't that much more effort or money.  So they tried to outdo one another, the result being a spectacular array of magnificent buildings that really should be seen.

From the 94th floor of the Hancock Building

A guy I met at CFA told me about the architectural society tours being spectacular and he was right, they were.

Love the car park!

Trouble was it rained cats and dogs on both tours we went on.

I'm still sniffling now!

Moving on...

We had a spare day after CFA grading finished and decided to go tubing on the James River near Spottsdale, some 20 miles south of Charlottesville.  CFA had organized a wine tasting at a Virginia winery called Veritas (actually pretty decent whites and reds) so we needed to go in the morning.

The place itself was in the middle of absolutely nowhere and was one of only 2 still surviving manual ferries in the USA.  The James River at that point is about 50 yards across and 4 foot deep (very low for the time of year) but it is still in service but only at weekends.

The James River Runners company that operates the canoeing, kayaking and tubing from the Hatton Ferry location worked out of a shack that looked like a shack except that it was probably the family home as well.

They seemed professional enough and gave us the safety features talk and ran through a host of things and then we hopped into the van, a 1970's Econoline with doors that didn't really close driven by a guy called Judd who'd just spent 4 and a half years in the military and needed to 'de-stress some' before figuring out what we wanted to do for a career.  Given where the US military has been operating, I imagine he had seen some tough times.

He drove us 3 miles up river and dropped us off by the side of the river and said we should walk out beyond the really shallow water into the faster moving water in the middle of the stream and then hurled out a couple of inner tubes and drove off.

So much for modern technology!

They really were just truck inner tubes.

OK they did have the company's name stenciled on the side but that was it as far as an operator's manual was concerned.

But really it was dead easy.  Once you got down the steep muddy bank you wandered out into the middle of the river and jumped on.

It was actually refreshing to not have waivers and procedures designed to keep you from doing something stupid to yourself and just jump on and float.

This we did and it did take 2 and a half hours to get back having negotiated a couple of gentle rapids and with the only nuisance being when you ploughed into a rock where the water was more shallow.

Great fun and a lovely way to de-stress.  Maybe Judd should do it once in a while.

The final cocktail in Virginia: Cosmo and Pisco Sour... guess who's who's

**

The only other hassle was getting up at 4 am this morning only to find the plane missing a part and so unable to fly meaning that we jumped in a taxi with 2 others and drove to Washington Reagan airport to catch a plane to Chicago where we arrived around 1 pm, just in time for deep dish pizza at Giordano's followed by a nice Martini at the Peninsula Hotel nearby.

The Pentagon from the air

Chicago's sky line

Giordano's Chicago deep dish styled pizza -- apparently dreamed up by grandma 200 years ago and brought to Chicago because there weren't any decent pizzas to be found.  This was a small but still monstrously heavy pizza pie of dreams.  Really nice too!

Not really that bad a day after all!

Backwards and Forwards

Turning the clock back isn't always easy.  Things aren't the same either for you or for others both of whom remember things differently and have moved on in sometimes unpredictable directions.  Take CFA Grading for example, I have my memories ... which have proven to be thoroughly faulty as it happens, and so do others.

The 2014 grader in Virginia

Simply because I was no longer involved, CFA did not pine and go into terminal decline, they moved on... and I think if pressed CFA may say "Who?" when asked if they missed me.

But some things are the same.  First of all being the exam date of the first Saturday in June.  This is totally directed by the academics who originally came up with the notion of the CFA -- their school year ends at the end of May so it makes supreme sense to keep things rolling with a new project picking up when their full time day job finished for the year.

It couldn't have been practitioners as 30th June after the year end is the most important reporting season -- half year results, quarter end reviews and strategy outlooks, client meetings.  The list is endless.  No practitioner would dream of doing the exam then -- a month earlier or later, maybe.  That's also why practitioners are few and far between when it comes to the 2-week cycle known as senior grading.  They just cannot get away... I described this to people who asked as 'life getting in the way'.  Business, family commitments, you name it.  All those things take precedence and so it is that practitioners take more of a back seat in the CFA process.

This can be seen from the movers and shakers in the organization too.  Most come from an academic background or from one that has seen them cease being practitioners for some reason or other.  The result is organizationally the process runs frighteningly smoothly ... far better than it would were it left to practitioners who'd miss out much of the monumental detail required!

Taking a step back, when I acquired my CFA in 1989, practitioners in London and New York would smile and say "very nice" when talking about the qualification.  Nobody I met in London when I worked at investment banks had a CFA, most hadn't a clue what it was until I explained.  Those I spoke with in New York were polite but that was about it.  Neither needed CFA until the dot com crash of 2000 when for almost the first time regulation kicked in.

I'd moved to Bermuda from London in 1988 to be the banking supervisor (the only one), head of the Bermuda stock exchange and a host of other impressively titled roles that in reality paid not much more than lip service to what they suggested.  I took CFA because my colleague (later business partner) introduced me to it and I had lots of time free to take another technical qualification -- my White Sail levels 1 and 2 didn't quite cut it on the CV!  It was tough and worth it, I thought.

So I started grading in the early 1990's (I don't exactly remember which year) as CFA wanted to internationalize (and Bermuda was one of the few places to pick up on it) and I was interested.  In my first year I was earmarked to grade a question on deferred tax the recommended answer for which was simply totally wrong.  I was a tax guy at the time and on my team was another similar tax guy who re-wrote the answer.  For my sins I was asked to lead the Curriculum for this section of the qualification which I did for a couple of years before finding it and the whole grading process too intrusive in my new business life as a practitioner... hence my 17 or 18 year gap.

In the meantime regulation had picked up.  I'd been involved in introducing Basle I to Bermuda in 1988 (we're now up to at least Basle III for banks) which was a quantum step up in regulation from pretty much laissez faire to at least forcing banks to say exactly what they were doing.  Some of it wasn't pretty.  But that didn't happen to the investment industry until the next catastrophe ... which came in 2000 with the dot com crash.

People remember that the dot com crash was terrible for markets but forget that it was actually only a market correction.  The underlying economy wasn't touched at all.  In fact it did just fine and with Fed Chairman Greenspan cutting interest rates to 1% soon thereafter it became even better than fine.

Add fine to even better and you get the heady cocktail that led to the asset bubbles before the much, much worse crash of 2007-8 that sparked the Great Recession.

And all the while the investment regulators were looking around for an organization to be a leader in investment industry self regulation and CFA was able to hold up its hand and say 'look at us, we've been doing this for years'.  Talk about right place, right time.

So now industry regulations talk about 'fit and proper persons' with CFA specifically in mind.  No longer does London and New York smile patronizingly at CFA, CFA are the people that protect them and deal at a high level with regulators on behalf of the industry as a whole.  No practitioner wants to do that so is quite happy to let CFA do it for them.

And with that delegation went an awful lot of responsibility and positioning.  CFA now speaks for the industry.

If you look globally you can see a slightly different theme.

Other countries were seen as far behind the London/New York axis and saw CFA as the way to elevate their qualifications and move their own countries into the limelight.  CFA is the path to success outside London and New York.  It is not something you just have to tick off like a university degree in business and potentially a MBA, it is an end in itself.  So practitioners in other countries embrace CFA thoroughly and completely, in a way that practitioners still really do not in London/New York.

You can see it in the composition of the graders; North American graders are mainly educators or retired practitioners, other countries' graders are mainly practitioners.  There's lots of them too -- more than 50% of candidates are outside North America with the number of graders being pretty much equally represented these days.

In my first year, I was one of only 2 non-North American graders.

The 1993 grader in Virginia ... incidentally the Rotunda at the University of Virginia is currently going through another series of renovations, this time in 2014

Also the hospitality suites only open from 6 pm to 10 pm, in my days...

... On the trail of the lonesome pine.

I had a day off from CFA grading, in fact three.  On the first we watched 2 World Cup football matches which took most of the day, on the second we went to Jamestown and on the third we felt we had to be active and do something vigorous.

In the past we'd been up to the Blue Ridge Mountains nearby and hiked up and down many times.  We never found the lonesome pine that Laurel & Hardy sang about --which to me is simply an excuse to attach this wonderful clip of the funniest guys on the planet.  Just listen and watch and try not to smile.  I can't.  I think they are wonderful!

So we watched the Wimbledon men's singles final between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, a magnificent 5 set, 4 hour edge of your seat thriller that the 55 minute women's singles final the day before simply was not. What a game but after the Joker finally edged out Feds we decided to go for a hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains, some 45 minutes due west of Charlottesville in the Shenandoah National Park.

Virginia in the summer is hot, very hot and it never ceases to amaze me that this state is the place where most US Civil War battles took place.  In the summer.  In the never ending wildernesses that are the forests all over the state.  It is hot, really hot and those guys wore big, thick heavy clothes and tramped all over the place before and after the fighting.  How on earth did they do that?

By contrast I wore shorts and a dry fit shirt with my walking shoes and sweated buckets carrying my less than 10 pound back pack.  Mind you it was the 3.4 mile Riprap Trail that we walked!

Part of the Appalachian Trail

Lovely it was too.  The trail wasn't too bad, the ups and downs evened out (of course) and we didn't feel the slightest bit offended when a young lady trail runner ran past us at an amazing lick.  I was picking my way carefully over the rocks and tree spurs but she just licked on by!  Most impressive particularly when you consider that our trail was an out and back trail with the round trip being an even more impressive 9.8 mile loop.

The views were lovely.

To round things off on the way out we even got to see a black bear, or at least I think it was a black bear.  It was certainly a bear that was black but I don't know if the local varietals are considered to be Black or Brown.

Yogi

I called him Yogi (of course) and he seemed entirely unconcerned with the tourists (including us) who'd stopped by the side of the road watching and taking picture after picture.  Yogi kept on munching whatever he was munching quite happily it seemed to me.

What he does in the woods of course remains a secret!

It all started here

Work with me here.  Imagine you are an English merchant sick to death of the damned Dutch or the Portuguese or those bloody Musselmans selling you pepper, spices and that damned sweet smelling and tasting tobacco for a king's ransom.  You're pretty miffed, I can tell you.

And you speak with your friends and business associates pointing out that everyone else seems to be bloody well going everywhere finding things, colonizing places and generally sourcing all the stuff you want for a whole lot less money... and in the process earning a bucket load of ducats for themselves and you ask yourself one question:

"Why is it that the Hanseatic League is doing so well?"

Answers to the question may come in such as the Dutch are good and energetic sailors and get everywhere.  But they may equally come in as being that they have the support of the Dutch crown who has blessed their endeavors and enabled them to go forth and do business (which of course includes kicking the Portuguese out of pretty much all their colonies in the east) across the seas wherever they may find it.

So why doesn't our queen, then king allow us to do the same thing?

Well in 1606 King James I of include (and VI of Scotland) did just that when petitioned by the Virginia Company.  Adventurers such as Drake and Raleigh had scouted the American coast and found the waterway currently known as Chesapeake Bay and suggested that as it was a major waterway, it may be the way through to the Indies in the far east that the Portuguese had found a century earlier.

It was also a foreign colony and a potential use of some of the surplus manpower left over from a century of foreign wars.

And it was between the Spanish to the south and the French in the north.

So it was on 20 December 1606 a fleet of 3 ships left England for the Americas intent being to take 2 months in the journey, sufficient to arrive in Virginia at planting season to enable the first colonists to survive the first likely terrible winter.

Immediately they hit a storm in the English Channel delaying the fleet for 5 weeks so that they struck land in the Canary Islands in February 1607 and the various island specks in their southerly route through the Caribbean in March and April 1607.  

The southerly route

They finally arrived off Virginia in April 1607 and opened the classified letter from HQ which would give them their final instructions:

1) Explore the Chesapeake Bay as a potential waterway through to the east indies.

2) Set up a colony such as to avoid contact with the Spanish, Dutch and French.

After discovering that the Chesapeake Bay was NOT the way through to the Indies, the party decided to work on Plan B -- a settlement.  They chose it based on their experiences: near water, easily defensible on as many sides as possible, deep water harbor.

The ships that made the journey

This meant in the salt water of Chesapeake Bay, a problem that was was not immediately appreciated as the first discovery was that there were no natives, hostile or otherwise around, which was considered to be a good thing.

Issues immediately arose when natives showed up to trade.  They realized the English had superior technology in so many different areas and were willing to trade food and other necessities.  However cultural differences soon arose which turned to violence exacerbated when the English discovered just why the natives weren't located anywhere near the first settlement that they'd named Jamestown after the King, which were:

1) there was no drinking water

2) there was little food

3) there were loads and loads of disease carrying bugs

The natives had arrived 16,000+ years previously so had had plenty of time to get acclimated to the area but the English had arrived with only their England knowledge and experiences to go on... which proved to be actually of little use.

Within a year 1/2 of the original party were dead of (1) poor water related disease, (2) heatstroke, (3) starvation or (4) arrow wounds ... with #4 being a far distant #4.

If it wasn't so tragic it would be funny.  The tour guide we had reminded us that the English settlers arrived with linen and wool clothing for the summer season when the Indians went around in loin cloths.  They did coat themselves in bear grease to not only ward off the nasty bugs but also which acted as a sunscreen.  The settlers sweated and struggled ... and died in droves.

This carried on for the next 10 years with the new settlement being wholly dependent on resupply from England -- including Sir George Somers who'd rebuilt his fleet in the winter of 1609 in Bermuda and sailed to Jamestown in 1610.  He and Sir Thomas Gates reinforced Fort James along lines designed in England's failed attempts to settle Ireland in the late 1500's but who also gave up on the settlement and had actually embarked everyone on ships abandoning the colony when yet another supply fleet this time led by Lord de la Warr, the new Governor and major shareholder of the Virginia Company, who turned them around and led them back.

Fort James today... in a bit better condition.  This is the 1610 rendition.

By 1618 the Virginia Company was dissolved by the Crown who took possession in the King's name and following a major native rebellion in 1622, the settlement was finally firmly established.  

By 1699 settlement had spread inland and the colony's capital was moved to Williamsburg so Jamestown returned to being a backwater, an irrelevant one at that, and reverted to farm fields.  

Nicotiana plants ... did I mention that this was the early settlement's only cash crop?  The tobacco was tart and stingy not like that perfumed, sweet mush from the Musselmans.  It became a global best seller... and the only crop grown in Virginia other than for immediate subsistence.

It was 300 years later that archaeologists found the original outlines of the original settlement and the discovery centre in Jamestown Settlement was established.  As they correctly say:

"On May 16th, 1607 at a spot about a mile from where you are standing now, a group of 104 colonists disembarked from 3 small sailing ships to establish the first permanent English establishment in North America.  This settlement called Jamestown is where the United States of America really began.  The founding of Jamestown sparked a series of cultural encounters that helped shape our nation and the world."

Like I said before, forget Columbus.  This is how it all began.

Shame it all ended for the British some 170 years later about a 40 minute drive from Jamestown at a small, insignificant fishing village called Yorktown.

This was great.  Go there.

We were there!

Bermuda connections

Everyone in Bermuda knows that discovery happened by accident in 1609 when Admiral Sir George Somers commanding HMS Sea Venture ploughed into a reef off what is now commonly known as the Club Med beach in St. George's.  It happened during a tempest -- actually THE Tempest as recorded by Shakespeare -- so you can't really blame him, but it is the details I find fascinating.

And by the way this is not a blog about Bermuda.  It is a blog about the founding of America.

Forget Christopher Columbus.  He never landed in the US.  His discovery launched the Spanish American colonies not the lower 48.

The Portuguese started it.  Trade with the east has been going on forever.  Europe had acquired the taste for silks and spices, but they were so expensive.  And the trade was controlled by the Muslims and their Venetian lackeys.  During our 2011 trip to Kotor in Montenegro Ali and I discovered that that port was the end of the Silk Road, being a very deep water port and one substantially controlled by Venice.

So having dispelled the flat earth theory and managed the first circumnavigation of the world, the Portuguese also discovered you could go straight to the place of production and cut out all those pesky non-Catholic middle men.

So they did.  Then it was the Spanish to South America and the French to Canada.

The English however were still struggling with the end of the Reformation and the religious struggles that followed.  Elizabeth I would have liked to do something but was limited to allowing privateers like Drake and Frobisher to become a nuisance to the Spanish.  In the process they gained valuable geographical information and Sir Walter Raleigh named the part of the American coastline between the Spanish in the south and French in the north Virginia, in honour of the queen.

Her cousin James became King in 1603 joining the crowns of England and Scotland in the process settling a number of issues: he was Protestant so that was that; James was also practical so stopped persecuting Catholics; he also had sons so the dynasty was secure; and he made peace with Spain so that worry was over too.  But he was also concerned that the never ending troubles had created a surplus of men that needed something to do.

It was also around this time that the merchant class was starting to gain a voice and that voice said let's look overseas before everything is gone.

It was also the beginning of joint stock companies -- precursor to today's companies.  It was a way to raise capital from a variety of people, some active investors, some passive.  The East India Company started then as did the Virginia Company.  King James granted a royal charter giving exclusivity and the planning began.

When you learn about the mishaps and the near disasters that ensued, you may be tempted to think that a bunch of gnarly sailors and adventurers simply hopped onto a ship and rolled up in Virginia and set up.  Not a bit of it.  The planning went on for more than a year.  One of those hardy first batch, the renowned Captain John Smith, left little money but a dozen volumes of notes, diaries and books detailing the immense amount of work that went into that planning.

An actor portraying Captain John Smith's landing at Jamestown in May 1607... 400 years later in 2007 when the Queen attended too

Bottom line though is they also had no real idea where they would end up, what or who they would face, and what they really needed to do to make it all work.

History shows that they did but it's the journey that is the fascinating bit.

It all happened in Jamestown, Virginia.  About 2 hours down the road from Charlottesville on the I64.  Viv and I went there yesterday.