More odds and ends: my favorite reading chair is in pressing need of reupholstery. The patch of sunlight on the right arm sort-of hides a nasty wear, from which stuffing threatens to emerge. I shall miss this gay, Bermuda-colored pattern. But not the French nails.

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rooting for the Republican Party in this year’s American presidential race? It would seem so. Units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps — the muscle behind the Iranian president’s mountebankery — harassed a convoy of American warships in the Straits of Hormuz, the bottleneck at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It was a classic case of playing chicken by rattling sabres, but an American destroyer, the Hooper, came very, very close to firing upon one of the Iranian speedboats. It’s all very reminiscent of the Agadir Crisis of 1911. Well, not really — but you know what I mean. (Here is the somewhat hastily-filed story by Thom Shanker and Brian Knowlton.

Almost as old as the Agadir Crisis, attorney Martin Lipton, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, appears to have been dishing out advice more suited to the run-up to World War I than to our better-ventilated times. The ageing mergers-and-acquisitions consigliere has even become the butt, according to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s column in today’s Times, of one of those Wall Street jokes.

The joke on Wall Street is that companies that hire Mr. Lipton eventually outperform their peers in the stock market because their entrenched C.E.O.’s end up getting fired. Call it the Marty Index.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 10:59 am. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.