#mt. vernon square

[eopederson]

Shop window, near Peabody Institute, Mt. Vernon Square area, Baltimore, 2014.

[sabistarphotos]

March 25, 2022

Washington, DC

[poxei]

so i was in DC this weekend. eating breakfast at a restaurant between L and 7th NW. and i see goku and cardcaptor sakura leap out a car. then eleven genshin impact characters trot across the road. then tanjiru from demon slayer bumps into our table and my dad asks if he’s filipino harry potter. i find out that otakon is being held in the convention center at mt vernon square. and this was yesterday and you were there and i missed it. fuck

FILIPINO HARRY POTTER.!>! ALSO NOOOOO you were so close yet so far away..... I'll definitely try again for next year because this was a good con and the food in DC is good, but who knows if I'll get in because it's lottery :')

sorry I didn't really advertise that I'd be at Otakon... I just assumed people who planned to attend would see my name in the con's Artist Alley directory if they care enough about artists to check, or see it in my Twitter display name, but maybe there are people like you who didn't even know that a con is happening huh T_T

[tahitiwoke]

@newsworth “It was him,” Chris fixated on the Rorschach pattern of blood and bone, what wasn’t crushed of the skull. Very little was left of the mirror on the wall. The glass which didn’t shatter and tangle itself into the killing wound, fell around the body, almost like a fairy circle. “The death threats. He said it right to me, right here. He said,” His back straightened and he spoke with cold objectivity, as though he was still addressing the press corps. “I’m going to strip that self righteous bitch of all the laurels she ever tricked this country into putting on her neck. I’m not going to stop until she comes begging me to pardon her, on her knees.” His face feels hot. He turns to Phil then, and they share the same dead look of disgust as they had the first time they heard these words read aloud by Claire’s head of security. “And I will enjoy fucking her—“ The vulgarity trips his tongue but only for a moment, because see’s Coulson’s face turn to one of understanding. “Fucking her dead mouth with the barrel of my .22, after I put a bullet in her head and finish what was started in Dallas.” He clears his throat and turns back to the body of Senator Cassidy. “So. I made a choice.”

phil remembers hating her.

you don't scare me. and i happen to think, at least some of the time -- you're full of shit. he remembers the burning humiliation of being forced into agreeing to be frank's whipping boy, and acting as though it was the greatest favour she could have done for him. he remembers hating her smug smile and cruel glare and how every word that slithered out of her mouth was the call of the snake, take a bite, see how good it tastes.

( i was one of the most powerful people in the american government; even the cia was kissing my ass. he had to sell his apartment, for god sake, the humiliating kiss goodbye to his eight million dollar penthouse in favour of a boxed up townhouse on the shittier side of logan circle that's had scaffolding around it for nine months. he's still trying to get the roof leak fixed. he fucking hates d.c.)

even now it's there, somewhere under his skin, like an ulcer that might heal if he would just leave it alone but the taste and shape is all different -- he hates to leave her, hates the scars on her mind and body, hates the airplane crash of frank which marks the open field of her heart. he hates her mother.

he knows how to hate. he's really very good at it.

another thing he's good at: covering up murders.

very purposefully, he will not let his mind linger on the visceral images chris has planted in his head. fucking her dead mouth. it clashes too brightly, too delicately, too easily with the image he has of her on her knees, or crawling up the bed to him, and that old familiar roll of nauseas comes rearing up in a jack knife. he won't vomit, but he wants to; phil breathes deep. turns to chris.

" how long between this and calling me has it been? " for long moment, it's like chris has only just realised he's there -- but the answer comes and it's short enough, fast enough, that phil has a pretty decent window before he has to think about coagulation. time to get to work. he looks back down at the body -- the fat fuck won't be too hard to move and there's no way he isn't packing that .22 somewhere in his desk. suicide is so easy to fake, it almost makes him sad.

" christopher, i need you to listen to me very carefully, because as of right now we're on a clock. " he waits for the urgent nod and then phil begins to unlace his shoes. " you and i are going to swap clothes. you're going to go out to my car and you're going to get me a a small black duffel that's under the trunk false shelf, in the spare wheel well. come back and take the keys. " he removes his tie and shirt and sets them very carefully on the back of a nearby chair, then unbuckles his belt. "you're going to drive my car to mt. vernon square, then go to the white house via chinatown. on the intersection of sixth street and indiana, run the red light. it hasn't been replaced yet, it takes a snapshot of the plate but not the driver. "

phil takes off his pants and sets them aside with his shoes and socks. " put those on. once you run the light, park in the garage and go to your office. when you get there, you're going to fire someone - i don't care who, i don't care how, but it's got to be fucking big. messy. draw attention. then go straight to claire and get her out of the oval, make sure every body sees her and you together. you understand? "

a shaky nod. a confused frown, like he's cataloguing it all in precise exact steps and phil is... almost proud. certianly pleased.

( in another life, chris might be another agent on his roster. a wave of nostalgia and longing comes back to him, hits him like seeing a picture of your dead mother from the eighties. he loves this. he misses this. )

phil scrolls his phone for a moment while chris changes and hits call when landing on the one he's looking for. " -- nora, honey, hi! how're you doing?... oh that's great! i'm proud of you kiddo. " chris looks at him like he's skinning a rabbit in the middle of a preschool lunch table. " -- you know, i was calling to see if could make a last minute dinner? in say..." he looks at the body, the mirror, the wall. " ... an hour? " nora, over the found, squeals and says absolutely. chris mouths an hour? " great i'll see you then. "

with his contingency in place, he waits for chris to disappear in his only slightly oversized suit and shoes, coming back with his go bag -- it's a little dusty, a little old school, but it'll do for tonight. it takes him less than forty-eight seconds to dress. not his personal best, natasha would tut, but he's out of practice. when he looks over at chris, they lock eyes and phil sees chris seeing him for the first time. " you're one sinister motherfucker, you know that? "

phil pulls his gloves a little tighter and grins. " well, that's why you called me and not the cops. what's the plan. " chris rattles it back with perfect recall and phil, satisfied, turns back to the scene. (tragic, a senator so tormented by his own malicious thoughts, takes his own life to spare the risk of actually trying to kill the president. what a sad end to a good man's life. he can almost see claire on cnn now lamenting this loss and blah, blah, blah. phil cricks his neck. )

as chris goes to leave, he stops at the door. " what do i tell her? if she asks where you are? "

there's a beat. and god, he can't help but laugh a little as he steps carefully around the glass, gloved hands slipping under the armpits of a very heavy, very dead man in the earliest stages of decomposition. " -- tell her i'm spatchcocking a chicken. "

[imjeffbell]

Metro Bike Project

I've slowly been undertaking a project where I bike back from the terminating station on every WMATA line. I thought it would be a fun way to see the area and help me come up with new bike routes. It's been good.

I used to keep a thread on Twitter where I documented each one. Given the state of that platform, I thought it might be better to document it here and update this post as I finish the last few stations.

March 29, 2023 - Branch Avenue on the Green Line

April 7, 2023 - Glenmont on the Red Line

April 16, 2023 - Ashburn on the Silver Line

Did this one with my buddies Danny, Tucker, and Nick. This was supposed to be the big one! (But then I took an indirect route back from Vienna).

April 25, 2023 - Greenbelt on the Green Line

A real doozey

July 15, 2023 - Vienna on the Orange Line

Did this one with my friend Angé. We took the scenic route.

September 10, 2023 - Ride home from Shady Grove on the Red Line

December 29, 2023 - Ride home from Downtown Largo on the Blue/Silver Line

This was a pretty lame route. Lots of fast suburban stroads. Do not recommend.

I'll update this as I finish the rest. I still have to do:

Huntington on the Yellow Line.

Franconia-Springfield on the Blue line.

New Carrolton on the Orange Line.

I guess I should do Mt Vernon Square on the yellow line?

[kevintumbles]

Opera Review: Gounod’s ‘Faust’ presented by Opera Baltimore

The Engineers Club in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon Square is one of the most beautiful, small performance halls I’ve ever seen, and how wonderfully appropriate that Opera Baltimore is housed there. This outstanding company completed their 14th season on April 30with their concert version of Gounod’s “Faust” and their lush and lavish voices have never sounded […] See original article at: https://mdtheatreguide.com/2023/05/opera-review-gounods-faust-presented-by-opera-baltimore/

[thecazagroup]

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[contac]

[tipsywench]

So here's the biggest issue with reading "Fighting Prophet" - the sources really aren't cited well at all.

So you have this quote of Sherman where he's describing his grandmother:

And in the back of the book all you really get is a list of sources for each chapter, and before that a big paragraph describing how all letters came from the letter collections in the Library of Congress

So I at first assumed maybe it was from Sherman's memoirs or John's recollections but I didn't find it in either. Then I googled a line from it and after searching through a few books I found it's actually from a letter Sherman wrote to a friend who had offered him condolences after Ellen had died. And it's a lengthy letter going into his family history.

I'm gonna paste it under here, because I actually really like it, especially when he starts writing about his mother:

Found in "The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After" on Gutenberg:

When Mrs. Sherman passed away, Doctor T. DeWitt Talmage wrote General Sherman a note of condolence, and what is perhaps one of the fullest expositions of his religious faith to which he ever gave expression came from him in a most remarkable letter, which Doctor Talmage gave to Bok.

"New York, December 12, 1886.

"My Dear Friend:

"Your most tender epistle from Mansfield, Ohio, of December 9 brought here last night by your son awakens in my brain a flood of memories. Mrs. Sherman was by nature and inheritance an Irish Catholic. Her grandfather, Hugh Boyle, was a highly educated classical scholar, whom I remember well,—married the half sister of the mother of James G. Blaine at Brownsville, Pa., settled in our native town Lancaster, Fairfield County, Ohio, and became the Clerk of the County Court. He had two daughters, Maria and Susan. Maria became the wife of Thomas Ewing, about 1819, and was the mother of my wife, Ellen Boyle Ewing. She was so staunch to what she believed the true Faith that I am sure that though she loved her children better than herself, she would have seen them die with less pang, than to depart from the "Faith." Mr. Ewing was a great big man, an intellectual giant, and looked down on religion as something domestic, something consoling which ought to be encouraged; and to him it made little difference whether the religion was Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Catholic, provided the acts were 'half as good' as their professions.

"In 1829 my father, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio, died at Lebanon away from home, leaving his widow, Mary Hoyt of Norwalk, Conn. (sister to Charles and James Hoyt of Brooklyn) with a frame house in Lancaster, an income of $200 a year and eleven as hungry, rough, and uncouth children as ever existed on earth. But father had been kind, generous, manly with a big heart; and when it ceased to beat friends turned up—Our Uncle Stoddard took Charles, the oldest; W. I. married the next, Elisabeth (still living); Amelia was soon married to a merchant in Mansfield, McCorab; I, the third son, was adopted by Thomas Ewing, a neighbor, and John fell to his namesake in Mt. Vernon, a merchant.

"Surely 'Man proposes and God disposes.' I could fill a hundred pages, but will not bore you. A half century has passed and you, a Protestant minister, write me a kind, affectionate letter about my Catholic wife from Mansfield, one of my family homes, where my mother, Mary Hoyt, died, and where our Grandmother, Betsey Stoddard, lies buried. Oh, what a flood of memories come up at the name of Betsey Stoddard,—daughter of the Revd. Mr. Stoddard, who preached three times every Sunday, and as often in between as he could cajole a congregation at ancient Woodbury, Conn.,—who came down from Mansfield to Lancaster, three days' hard journey to regulate the family of her son Judge Sherman, whose gentle wife was as afraid of Grandma as any of us boys. She never spared the rod or broom, but she had more square solid sense to the yard than any woman I ever saw. From her Charles, John, and I inherit what little sense we possess.

"Lancaster, Fairfield County, was our paternal home, Mansfield that of Grandmother Stoddard and her daughter, Betsey Parker. There Charles and John settled, and when in 1846 I went to California Mother also went there, and there died in 1851.

"When a boy, once a year I had to drive my mother in an old 'dandy wagon' on her annual visit. The distance was 75 miles, further than Omaha is from San Francisco. We always took three days and stopped at every house to gossip with the woman folks, and dispense medicines and syrups to the sick, for in those days all had the chills or ague. If I could I would not awaken Grandmother Betsey Stoddard because she would be horrified at the backsliding of the servants of Christ,—but oh! how I would like to take my mother, Mary Hoyt, in a railroad car out to California, to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, among the vineyards of grapes, the groves of oranges, lemons and pomegranates. How clearly recurs to me the memory of her exclamation when I told her I had been ordered around Cape Horn to California. Her idea was about as definite as mine or yours as to, Where is Stanley? but she saw me return with some nuggets to make her life more comfortable.

"She was a strong Presbyterian to the end, but she loved my Ellen, and the love was mutual. All my children have inherited their mother's faith, and she would have given anything if I would have simply said Amen; but it is simply impossible.

"But I am sure that you know that the God who created the minnow, and who has moulded the rose and carnation, given each its sweet fragrance, will provide for those mortal men who strive to do right in the world which he himself has stocked with birds, animals, and men;—at all events, I will trust Him with absolute confidence.

"With great respect and affection,

"Yours truly,

"W. T. Sherman."

[ishtarverse]

The Talk

Daily Poet - April 2 - Visual Collage/Juxtaposing Unlikely Images

I waited on the green, iron-wrought bench stained with dry pigeon droppings shifting this way and that to save my magenta pencil shirtdress a size that barely fit even five pounds lighter the grime of Mt. Vernon Square between my sandal soles and toes. That moment felt like a razor’s edge, a quantum puzzle to open the door to unending light labyrinthine artifact discovery or to close it like a book in the Peabody or Enoch Pratt Free Library, and let the sparkling dust settle.

[pbandjesse]

Happy Halloween! I had such a great day. I am tired but I am in a great mood and I feel really happy. I hope I can hold onto this feeling.

I couldn't fall asleep last night. My back hurt a lot and I was just tossing and turning forever. But I did sleep. I woke up around 9 and tried to not feel like crap. I got up and shook it off and got washed and was very excited for my costume.

James wore their little doctor costume and I had to cut out the gems for my tears. I loved my makeup. I was super proud. I was super excited that we were doing a couple's costume. Ive never done that with anyone except Jess so I was really happy.

But it isn't just Halloween!! It is also sweetP birthday!! We kept screeching that at him. And giving him cheese and other treats. He got lots of love and we played fetch for like an hour on and off at the end of the day. Best little boy.

Once we had our costumes on though we wanted to get out into the world. The big plan for the day was do to photos of our costumes, then go have lunch, and go help at the theater and see the show.

So off we went. I had a great time taking pictures. I had worn a sweater under my jacket but it was warmer outside then it had been inside the apartment so I would take that off pretty fast. We found some dying sunflowers to take my portrait in and then we went to Mt Vernon square to take pictures near the marble. We had lots of laughs. But it was a little to bright in my eyes so we didn't get as many pictures as I hoped but I still love the ones we did.

A few people got really excited about our costumes. I was a little sad no one else was really dressed up. But a few people's faces completely lit up when they saw us and I loved that.

We made a stop at the Monument to see James's uncle and dad. They gave us candy bags for wearing costumes. It was a very fun day.

I was getting a little worn out though. Mostly because I had had no food or anything yet. So after some googling we decided to go to Soups On.

We got soup and a sandwich to share. We sat up in the window cove they have and shared the pictures we took and it was just really nice being together and eating soup and bread. We had popped into the convenience store to get me a fountain soda because they don't have them at Soups on. Which is their only negative to me. But I was pleased to have my soda and my soup and my fiance

It was still more then an hour before we had to be at the theater to check vaccine cards so we walked home to drop off the leftovers from lunch and so I could change my shoes. We drove back to the theater (which is literally one block from the place we ate lunch so it would feel silly to walk there again). And it was fun!

It was a lot less people then the other night. But it was all good. I had a nice time being out there and people watching. When we had almost everyone on the list there I went inside to tell Alex at the desk as much and someone was speaking not super nice to her about the program being digital. And I just shut her down with a "we will think about it for next time". I did not appreciate how she was speaking to Alex and honestly she ran out of there at the end of the show so I dont think this was her thing. She was sort of unpleasant.

I got to meet the actors again. I really loved their show last time so I was looking forward to it. The group is called Happenstance and they are a vaudeville inspired clown/mime troup and it was so fun to watch. There was some audience participation, lots of jokes and music and fun. It was a tiny crowd but they were all so lively that it was a blast. My face hurt a little from smiling.

We headed home after that though and got home around 430. We put on comfy clothes. And watched the trick or treaters outside. James made us flat bread pizzas and then I went to lay in bed and watch tiktoks for a while.

But as the sun went down we put on The Rocky Horror Picure Show and it was fun watching that and singing together. Though they say in the movie t takes place in late November so its really a Thanksgiving movie and not a Halloween one. But it was really fun and I felt good.

James got on a call to play a game with friends and I took a bath. Exfoliated everywhere because my psoriasis is hurting and it helps for putting medication on. And put my jams on again.

And now I am ready to sleep. I just fixed up my nail polish but its basically dry now. I am happy.

Tomorrow is November! And there is much to do. I have to make a bunch of bear bodies this week and I have styling and chores to do. And I work at the museum and at camp! So send us good thoughts. Happy birthday sweetP! Happy Halloween! Goodnight everyone!!

[eopederson]

Window, Building on Mt. Vernon Square, Baltimore, 2015.

[nickdewolfarchive]

Boston, Massachusetts 1957

Louisburg Square and Mt. Vernon Street

Photograph by Nick DeWolf https://www.flickr.com/photos/dboo/3161733668

#boston #beaconhill #streetphotography #photography #film #blackandwhite #1950s

[eopederson45]

Washington Monument, Mt. Vernon Square, Baltimore, 1976.

[avanneman]

Carriage House Days

Just off the corner of Connecticut and N Streets in Washington, DC is a reasonably imposing red-brick urban mini-mansion, which, a small plaque informs you, once belonged to General Henry Robert, who, you probably don’t know, wrote Robert’s Rules of Order. But back in 1975 when I worked there as a file clerk, we called it “the Carriage House,” because of the large room in the basement which indeed had once been a carriage house.

Like everyone else in the Carriage House, I worked on the “White & Case Case” for the law firm of Arnold & Porter, started in the late forties by two New Deal alumni, Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas, who were then joined by another New Dealer, Paul Porter. Fortas was appointed to the Supreme Court by his very good friend Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately but inadvertently all but ruined Fortas’ life by seeking to elevate him to Chief Justice, leading to a number of scandals that both prevented Fortas from getting the job and, later, forced him to resign from the Court altogether, which might not have happened if Fortas hadn’t been Jewish, and would have been the nation’s first Jewish Chief Justice.

This was all ancient history by the time my association with the firm—mute, inglorious, and brief—began. Thurman and Abe’s original idea, it seems, was to found an early version of a “boutique” law firm, handling just a few “interesting” cases. Unsurprisingly, that strategy fell by the wayside as Washington boomed. The firm was originally housed in a number of the row houses on N Street, most spectacularly by an impressive mansion on the corner of N and 19th that had been owned by Teddy Roosevelt when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the McKinley Administration. However, by the time I arrived at the Carriage House, most of the senior staff were housed in the I.A.M Building, a Washington, DC sized “skyscraper” on the corner of N and Connecticut, owned by the International Association of Machinists, whose president, William “Wimpy” Wimpisinger, was regarded by some as the most “dangerous” labor leader in America, though if Wimpy ever did anything dangerous, I never heard about it.

Most of the people in the Carriage House were young women, either paralegals or secretaries, which left me doubly the odd man out, or even trebly so, because I was quite possibly the oldest person there—of the regulars, at least—though a fortunately youthful appearance kept my presence and position there from looking as dubious as in fact it was.

I spent most of my time copying and collating documents. The enormous Xerox machines of the time could only copy a single page at a time—no automatic feeds and, of course, no automatic collating. I once spent three days assembling 50 copies of a 300-page document. Occasionally, I would read through transcripts of depositions and circle the names of "important" people whenever they appeared. One of the attorneys at many of these depositions would introduce himself at the start of each session in the following manner: "My name is Bobby Lawyer and I am an attorney."

I lived on Q Street, just a few blocks away from the Carriage House, in an efficiency I rented for $175 a month, furnished largely from what I scavenged from the street. I slept on a $50 mattress and listened to a $1200 stereo, both spread out on the floor. I sat in a worn wicker chair and ate from a worn card table, kept my books in a worn bookcase and my 100-odd jazz albums in a cardboard box.

The young women in the Carriage House who were single would often go to a bar they called “the Airplane”, located nearby on 19th St., but I was far too shy to do that. I would not have wanted to go to a “pick up” bar of any sort, and most certainly would not have wanted to go to a pick up bar frequented by women I knew at work.

However, there was a jazz club located in the basement of the town house right next to the Carriage House, “Harold’s Rogue and Jar”. I never found out what the name meant. I would go there occasionally and sit at the bar without talking to anyone. I would order a bacon cheeseburger with steak fries and a diet Coke. I can’t remember any of the names who appeared at the club, but it was serious jazz—nothing like the terrible “cool jazz” of today. The house drummer was a woman named Dottie Dodgione, who I think was the club manager as well. She was in her fifties, I would guess, with a stiff bouffant hairdo who wore pant suits, and ended each number with a furious solo. Sometimes, despite the jazz, the stress of being around so many people would get to me, and I would take my meal home, wrapped in heavy aluminum foil, and I would sit in my wicker chair and eat my rich bar food in peace and quiet and solitude.

After eight months at Arnold & Porter, I was fired, something anyone with the slightest percipience could have foreseen. Somewhere in Moby Dick Herman Melville warns sea captains not to hire “Platonists”—those with their eyes fixed only on invisible horizons—and he could have offered the same advice to law firms. But my time at the A&P was far from a complete loss. A month before I was fired, I was feeling so flush that I shopped for furniture, at Woodward & Lothrop, then DC’s largest department store. I chose a $400 sleeper sofa, blue and white plaid, a $150 butcher block table, and two Breuer chairs, which I had first seen in an optometrist’s shop and had thought were very classy. I didn’t have a credit card and didn’t know if Woodie’s would take a check, so I paid with $800 in cash, in the form of 16 fifties I had withdrawn from the bank the previous day. It was an investment that, though it might have seemed ill-timed, was in fact very much the reverse. Shortly after being fired, I started dating a young woman who would change my life significantly, a young woman who, I think, would not have dated a man who slept on a mattress on the floor and ate from a card table and a worn wicker chair.

Afterwords The rear windows of the Carriage House faced on the alley behind N Street. A “celebrity” hair dresser, whose name I never learned, parked one of three classic cars that he drove to work each day in that alley—a funereal-looking green and black pre-war Rolls Royce, a post-war Rolls that was cream with red pinstriping, and, surely the pièce de résistance, a midnight-blue coffin-nosed Cord convertible with a tan roof, its chrome supercharger exhaust pipes gleaming in the sun. I wonder how many people would drive such cars in rush-hour traffic today.

The top floor of the IAM building had both offices for Arnold & Porter and the Machinists’ Union. The A&P had lots of attractive, stylish young women who worked as secretaries and receptionists. One of them who sat at the front desk of the top floor told me how difficult it was to keep a straight face when the Machinists’ big shots came swanking in in their horrible 70s-era polyester leisure suits—mint green with white piping and matching white shoes, or what smirky journalists liked to call a “full Cleveland”, white suit, white shirt, and white shoes.

Shortly after I left the A&P, the Carriage House was commandeered by Carolyn Agger, a senior partner and Abe Fortas’ wife. Carolyn, who had been housed in the IAM building, was afraid of elevators, and wanted an office in a building with a nice staircase.

A year or so after I left, Arnold & Porter deserted N Street entirely, building the “Thurmond Arnold Building” at the corner of New Hampshire and M, but they didn’t stay there long. The firm has now merged with a New York law firm, Kaye Scholer, becoming Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, with offices all around the world. The DC office is on Massachusetts Avenue, just southeast of Mt. Vernon Square, a stretch of road that constitutes one of several “lobbyist lanes” radiating from the Capitol.

During the McCarthy years, Arnold, Fortas, & Porter defended many people accused of communism. Fortas in particular was a frequent opponent of Joe McCarthy, but the opposition to his appointment as chief justice seemed to come mostly from southern Democrats, who often saw integration as a Jewish/communist plot. When Jesse Helms (R-NC) was elected to the Senate in 1972, one of his goals was to “get” the Jews. He was a furious opponent of Israel until the Reagan years, when it was finally explained to him that you couldn’t make it to the very top in DC unless you learned to play ball with AIPAC.

The White & Case Case involved another law firm, in New York. One of its senior partners, a Mr. Eply, was facing criminal charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing him of criminal behavior based on the advice he gave to a White & Case client, Cortez Randell, a sixties wheeler and dealer who ended up doing time, though, I’m pretty sure, Eply did not. The SEC’s case against Eply was one of first impression, and naturally White & Case was willing to move heaven and earth to protect both Eply and other attorneys who might find themselves in legal peril merely for trying to turn an honest buck or two.

The story of Cortez Randell and his company, National Student Marketing, had been spectacular enough to be the subject of a book, out in paperback while the White & Case Case was still gaining momentum, called The Funny Money Game, by Andrew Tobias, perhaps not the first and certainly not the last up and coming Harvard graduate to make a name for himself by writing a book about his experiences on Wall Street under the tutelage of Mammon.

The way National Student Marketing “worked”—the reason why Cortez Randell got so rich so quickly and then imploded—was that Randell had either discovered or invented “synergy”. This meant buying out firms that provided goods or services complementary to whatever it was NSM was already selling—“better together”, one might say. But the “real” secret was that NSM didn’t buy other companies with money; it used NSM stock instead, which was better than money, because it increased in value every year.

There are lots of things wrong with this model—NSM was going to run out of “complementary” firms to buy, NSM stock was going up because the economy was expanding and all stocks were going up, not because NSM was so fabulous—but the biggest and simplest reason of all is that any financial instrument that can be better than money can also be worse than money, setting a pattern that has repeated itself a number of times since, on a scale far more spectacular than NSM’s. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, a better mousetrap, and makes a lot of money, and creates a financial instrument based on that idea—be it a simple share of stock, a mortgage-backed security, a collateralized debt obligation, or whatever—that is “better” than money, and a lot of people get rich on that financial instrument. Eventually, however, the better mousetrap, whatever it is, stops being better, and becomes the new normal. It’s lost its edge. But the people who have gotten rich off their “better than money” gimmick can’t believe that, or won’t believe that. The line that went around among the Wall Street geniuses who almost sank the world’s economy back in 2008 was that you don’t stop playing “Musical Chairs” until the music stops, even if you see the chairs disappearing. However, when the music had stopped, they started singing—and telling lies—until there were no chairs left, leaving the government to pay for all the furniture they’d destroyed.

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