most common birthday
a cow orker claimed that the most common birthday was October5. Ask.yahoo.com confirmed this.
Very Easy Baseball Trivia
By what criteria have the 2008 MLB playoff teams been ranked in the lists below (and what would the relevant raw numbers be)? [This becomes easier still when you look at the subtle differences between the lists.]
1. Rays
2. Brewers
3. Dodgers
4. Phillies
5. Cubs
6t. Angels
6t. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1. Rays
2. Cubs
3. Brewers
4. Dodgers
5. Phillies
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1t. Brewers
1t. Rays
3. Cubs
4. Phillies
5. Dodgers
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
Margot at the Wedding
WTF?
Who decided it was a good idea to make an entire movie about people saying inappropriate (or gratuitously hurtful, or both) things to family members and operating at the emotional level of toddlers?
Was I supposed to notice character development somewhere in the snide comments and accusatory remarks? Was I supposed to identify with even one of the characters?
Mullet of the Day
I had this on as background music, and then for some reason I actually looked at the video.
While we're here, I should watch/listen to this once a year. It's a nice tribute; it holds up well and isn't not over-the-top.
Many of you saw it live; I didn't because the holders of the remote control opted for a special presentation of Fear Factor. (How were we to know the quality of what we'd miss?)
Disagreeable Supreme Court Decisions
How can any educated person not think of Dred Scott and Plessy as Supreme Court decisions with which one disagrees? (I suppose it's possible that one doesn't think of them since neither has any precedent value now; and I suppose it's possible that one would implicitly think of only 20th century and beyond.)
Kelo is an obvious 21st century choice, plus I imagine most people disagree with either Bowers v. Hardwick or Lawrence v. Texas.
This Is The Kind of Thinking That Drives People Crazy
But... tell me how this is wrong:
A hedge-fund reader emails: "Reid, Schumer, and Pelosi are widely assumed to be stoking a financial Reichstag fire that would be a win-win for the permanent government. Conventional wisdom holds that economic chaos benefits the "out" presidential party, of course. Destruction of private wealth increases dependency on the central government. And a humbled private sector makes spinning the regulatory ratchet that much easier. Cynical, shameless, and in plain sight."
--Instapundit
A bunch of politicians want to implement a draconian/idiotic bailout -- that incidentally helps them quite a bit both in affixing blame to the other party AND in giving them a breathtaking amount of power come January 2009. Ostensibly they're "fixing" the economy, but nearly everything they say [by inciting panic*] or do [by intertwining Uncle Sam with the market] should identifiably have the opposite effect.
*- Charles Schumer only killed one bank. Did Harry Reid decide he had to up the ante and kill off an entire industry?
Look, I know full well that the dominant memes are that Republicans Are Evil, and in particular that it was somehow the GOP that caused people to sign up for mortgages that, if they had one lick of sense, they'd realize they couldn't afford unless the housing market kept going up forever.
But for all the economic wrongs the GOP supposedly committed over these past few years, none of them involved spending my money against my will, and certainly none of them rose to the level of wishcasting economic ruin for political gain.
At Least Now The Problem Should Be Obvious Enough
(This still doesn't mean that an out-of-nowhere $700B taxpayer outlay with no oversight is anywhere near the right solution, but at least the problem is easier to understand.)
The State of California asks the Treasury Dept. for a loan, because the amount of credit they need just isn't available on the open market.
As mentioned in the parenthetical above, I'm still deeply skeptical that the best (or even most direct) solution to a liquidity crunch is for taxpayers to put up some arbitrary chosen value on hard-to-value assets.
Nothing New To Report
I think even under normal circumstances I would have noticed the similarity between this story and this story.
Meanwhile, you all know we named our cat after this guy, right?
Respect His Authority
This probably wouldn't look as good as it could have with any real effort, but anyway, Radley Balko has pointed out that every David Brooks column can be summarized by the sentence "What we need in this situation is authority."
Eh, Go Broncos
Raiders owner Al Davis just did to Lane Kiffin pretty much the same thing he did to Mike Shanahan, only with a lot less money at stake and (as far as I remember) without the gratuitously nasty press conference.
This in a nutshell is why no matter how bad the Raiders get, and no matter how many of their fans deserve better, the franchise itself richly deserves a million times worse, until the day Mr. Davis departs this mortal coil.
This* is also why I shouldn't mind so much (nor be so surprised) that Shanahan can at times be a ripe bastard. He came from the NFL equivalent of a broken home.
*- well, that and the back-to-back Super Bowl wins at the end of Elway's career