"We saw a lot of road kill and thought of you." —my sister
For more information on oil prices, click here. Podcasts of My Intro Economics lectures (in .wma format) For my 2005 Radio Economics MP3 podcasts, go to the bottom of the page that lists the lecture podcasts.
Canada
United States
Israel
My email address: [email protected] My 2005 post about the housing crisis, before it happened, is here.
Robertson-head screws. I had never seen them in the US. They are clearly superior to anything else, and why they haven't been adopted in the US is a big puzzle (and, no, please don't invoke network effects; the costs of change are minor relative to the benefits. Screwdriver bits are cheap.).
That paragraph in the posting prompted some discussion in the comments section.
Wouldn't you know it. Yesterday I was helping my son, Adam Smith Palmer (who lives in Texas), assemble a tumbling composter and sure as shootin', the screws included with the product were combination slot-Robertson screws. He had a couple of those neato screwdriver combos from Home Hardware in Canada, which include Robertson bits (of course) and made the job MUCH easier.
The odds-makers I'm seeing on Yahoo sports say Denver by 2 points. My friend, Ted Frank, says that he can get Seattle +3, and he is quite convinced that taking Seattle +3 would be a great bet.
I disagree. I think Denver will win by more than 3, and certainly by more than 2.
But given my record, and given Ted's knowledge, you might be wise to bet against my pick this season.
A little over five and a half years ago, I posted a photo of my granddaughter, who was then just a few months old. The photo emphasized her nostrils, which appeared to be heart-shaped. See this. Here is the original photo:
A year or so later, her parents sent us this photo. It looks as if she still had heart-shaped nostrils, but it's a little hard to tell. :-)
So during my current visit I took another photo of her nostrils (with her permission) which I am posting here (also with her permission).
My younger son, Adam Smith Palmer, and I took a few runs at tying the Eldredge Knot in some neckties while I have been visiting him in Houston. Here are a couple of our recent results.
A couple of notes about the knot.
It doesn't looks so good or work so well with button-down collars.
We found that starting with the fat end about 4 inches above the belt seems about right.
It is important to get the centre dimple set correctly from the beginning.
It is not possible to tighten the knot easily after it is all tied. It is much better to tighten it as you go along.
When I first tried the knot, I quit halfway through. That knot, which is probably called a half-Eldredge, is quite decent-looking, as you can see from this (posted by a friend on Facebook)
I rather like the knot with a slightly thicker material, which shows off the lines a bit more.
But I still should work on getting the latter parts of the knot lined up better. More like this:
Addendum: Note that I have finally learned the correct spelling of the name of the knot: it is an Eldredge Knot.
In most red Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Grenache noir is the most common variety, although some producers use a higher proportion of Mourvèdre. Grenache produces a sweet juice that can have almost a jam-like consistency when very ripe. Syrah is typically blended to provide color and spice, while Mourvèdre can add elegance and structure to the wine.[7] Some estates produce varietal (100%) Grenache noir, while a few producers insist on using at least a token amount of all thirteen originally permitted varieties in their blend.
To be honest, I knew there were different "brands" of Chateauneuf-du-Pape but had had very little experience with them. We knew we liked the one that comes in a dusty, crooked bottle:
and so our memories and recollections of having drunk that brand were our standard for comparison. We knew we wouldn't want to try all seven bottles and then leave a bunch of them unfinished, so we settled on trying these four, all in the $30 -$37 price range at the local gubmnt monopoly [aka LCBO].
The results?
We were all unimpressed, compared with our recollections of the one in the crooked bottle. They seemed to have too much tannin and have weird overtones.
There were four of us involved in the tasting. We didn't spit between tastings; we didn't cleanse our palettes either. We just tasted four in a row (blind taste testing, details available upon request maybe). And then tasted them again.
One of our guests strongly preferred the Clos du Calvaire (on the far left)
One of our guests slightly preferred the Mommessin (second from the left)
Ms Eclectic and I slightly preferred the Chateau Simian (second from the right)
But overall, based on our imperfect recollections, we all preferred the stuff in the cool (i.e. crooked and dusty) bottle. How very sophomoric of us (!?)
I wonder if they'd be better if we cellared them for a year or two.
I recently saw a link to a collection of town signs that are/were, to say the least, unusual. One that caught my eye was this one, for the town of Nevada, Iowa:
Yes there really is a town in Iowa called Nevada. However, it is pronounced 'ne VAY dah'. It's about 10 miles east of Ames, Iowa, where I did my graduate work, and it is also the county seat. Way back, it also was the only place in the county where one could buy wine or liquor [at the gubmnt-run liquor store].
One of the signs that is not on the list (but should be) is for Northfield, Minnesota, home of both St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges. Their sign:
According to surveys reported in The Atlantic, 23% of the surveyed adults in the US did not read a single book last year.
Without question, the American bookworm is a rarer species than two or three decades ago, when we didn't enjoy today's abundance of highly distracting gadgets. In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year (13 percent said they'd read more than 50!). Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark.
The article tries to downplay the influence of TV and the internet, but I don't see why. I know many, many young adults who don't read books. They read a lot, online, but they don't read books. Alas, in some instances, not even their assigned textbooks.
And given the wealth of material available for information and entertainment (and, yes, education) via other media, I will be surprised if the number who read books doesn't continue to decline.
We're on our way to Houston, where our younger son (Adam Smith Palmer) and his family live. We're looking forward to seeing them again. And we are really going to appreciate the warm(er) weather. It's about +5F going up to +8F with windchills below zero F here. There it is +46 going up to +54F with forecasts for pleasant +66F this weekend.
Blogging and social media actively may slack off a bit while I'm away.
2. They are behaving towards you exactly as they always have, yet you somehow feel strangely guilty.
3. Something has changed in the wind.
4. You mention them in a Tweet, and they do not “favorite” it. Instead, they “favourite” it on Secret Canadian Twitter where you cannot see it and experience the associated sense of goodwill.
5. Your weekly batch of homemade cookies only came with chocolate chips, instead of both chocolate and butterscotch, like normal.
6. They apologize to you for something unrelated.
7. They do not make sure your hearts line up when you hug.
8. They do not email to remind you about your parents’ wedding anniversary. They merely bcc: you on their own congratulatory email to your parents.
9. They reply to your emails with only one smiley face.
10. They smile politely and say “It’s certainly possible” or worse, “I can see that.”
11. Tells you less frequently, perhaps only on a daily basis, how much your friendship means to them.
12. The Canadian originally types ‘this is disappointing,’ then wakes up at three am to change it to ‘this is disappointing! Oh, well.’
13. They share an article on Facebook by someone they know you do not like.
14. When you mention a book you loved as a child but could never remember the title of offhandedly in a conversation, they do not track it down and buy it for you, but merely tell you the name.
I thought the question was dumb. But I was disappointed in the answer. I cannot fathom Justin Bieber's popularity nor can I understand why a 19-year-old tennis star would say he would be her dream date.
But Canadian Eugenie Bouchard did just that.
Maybe it's just that I'm from a different generation?
Anyway, here's hoping that from now on when she is asked personal questions like that, she'll just say, "That's too personal to answer."
I have long questioned gubmnt policies requiring the use of ethanol. They do little more than increase the demand for corn, driving up the incomes of corn farmers and driving up the price of corn for consumers all over the world. Furthermore, ethanol is downright harmful to the environment and possibly harmful to some internal combustion engines. From a recent entry at Snopes:
At the end of 2013, the EPA announced it was reducing the amount of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline in 2014 (in part because the overall demand for gasoline in the U.S. has dropped), requiring transportation fuel companies to blend 15.21 billiongallons of ethanol into the nation's fuel supply in 2014, down from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013. Critics of the EPA's blending requirements pointed out that the announcement came just four days after the Associated Press published a lengthy investigative article documenting substantial environmental harms caused by ethanol which concluded that "The ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than government admits today":
Ethanol mandates have spurred farmers to grow corn on relatively unproductive land that remained undeveloped prior to the mandate, the Associated Press observed.
“Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama's watch. Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive," the Associated Press reported.
“The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact."
But this next bit is what prompted this posting. Here is a photo from a collection sent me by Marc that shows a gas station selling gasoline with 10% corn alcohol back in the 1940s (?).
The density of PM2.5 was about 350 to 500 micrograms Thursday midmorning, though the air started to clear in the afternoon. It had reached as high as 671 at 4 a.m. at a monitoring post at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. That is about 26 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organization, and was the highest reading since January 2013. ...
In the far northeastern city of Harbin, some monitoring sites reported PM 2.5 rates of up to 1,000 micrograms in October, when the winter heating season kicked off. In December, dirty air gripped the coastal city of Shanghai and its neighbouring provinces for days, with the density of PM 2.5 exceeding 600.
So why the subject line for this post? It comes from an answer Canada's Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, gave when asked which country other than Canada he admires most:
You know, there’s a level of of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest…we need to start investing in solar.’ I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted that I find quite interesting.
Yup, forget about human freedom. Forget about human rights. He most admires a country where leaders can make and enforce quick decisions, even though the evidence, on the very grounds he admires, is that they suck at it.
Talk about hubris, arrogance, and elitist interventionism. And he will likely be Canada's next Prime Minister.
At the centre-top of the Congressional emblem, above that eagle, is a Jewish Star of David. Now, this obviously plays to the theme, common among anti-Semites around the world, that the U.S. Congress is essentially a puppet of the Jewish people.
Obama is literally and figuratively chained back from properly reaching out to Iran by the Jews.
The Israeli flag has a Star of David in it, of course. But if the cartoonist, and the editorial team of The Economist that approved it, had wanted to emphasise Israel rather than the the broader global Jewish community, they could have easily had the cartoonist put in the image of the Israeli flag. No problem at all from a technical point of view.
That would still have been bigotry -- the notion that Israel runs American politics is an obvious form of neo-anti-Semitism.
But this is the old fashioned stuff. It's the kind of thing that appeared in The Protocols of Zion. It's the kind of thing the Nazis used. It's the kind of thing bigots -- including in the Western-funded Palestinian authority -- use all the time.
The Jews run the world: or at least its most powerful nation. That's the message The Economistconveys. Sometimes the term anti-Semitism is over-used. Sometimes it is under-used. This time there's no doubt at all what is going on.
One really wonders how they're going to get out of this. And one wonders even more what is going so badly wrong at The Economist that it was allowed to happen in the first place.
So far in the playoffs my record is 2-5-1 against the odds (about as good as the Sunderland Black Cats in the EPL this year, who are 4W, 12L, and 6D).
New England at Denver; Spread says Denver by 5.5. Last week the NE Economists did better than expected and Denver was worse than expected. Take NE plus the points.
San Francisco at Seattle; Spread says Seattle by 3.5. Seattle has looked good throughout the season, but San Francisco has had two clear wins on the road during the playoffs. Is SF on a roll, or will they be worn out and overwhelmed in the Seattle stadium? Take SF plus the points.
Actually, now that I think about it, I've just taken the visitors in both games to win or to lose less than would be predicted by the spread. I think I'm picking with my heart.
If you think the word "apartheid" applies to how Israelis treat non-Jews, Arabs, or Palestinians, take the quiz here. For each question also ask how you think it might have been answered under similar circumstances in apartheid South Africa. Also ask how you think the questions might be answered in Iran or Yemen or Saudi Arabia.
Say what you will about the Israeli occupation, but the South Africa analogy is false. The word "apartheid" isn't accurate, but it is emotional and inflammatory....
[T]ry to imagine the condition of blacks in South Africa, the victims of apartheid, in each of the settings in the quiz.
Israel isn't a perfect country. Criticism of Israel is legitimate, and Israelis themselves do it every day. But as the quiz reveals... whatever Israel is, it isn't an apartheid state.
We purportedly have a freely floating exchange rate in Canada. And this exchange rate has floated downward considerably over the past six months. Here is one chart showing the trend over time. This graph shows the inverse, namely that the Canadian price of a US dollar has markedly increased recently:
I have several superficial, ad hoc observations about this phenomenon.
The usual: unless and until prices adjust to account for the changing exchange rate, this change helps exporters and hurts importers (including retailers and consumers), ceteris paribus.
Interest rates in the US have edged upward, and the Bank of Canada has signaled that it will likely try to keep interest rates lower. To the extent that financial capital flows back and forth in nanoseconds, relatively higher interest rates in the US may have reduced the demand for the Canuck buck (and increased the demand for the US dollar) somewhat.
The price of gold has continued to plummet. But prices of other heavily traded resources have not. The drop in the US price of a loonie (or the rise in the Cdn$ price of a US $) probably has little to do with what is happening in the commodities markets.
So what is left as a possible explanation?
Steve Polos took over as Governor of the Bank of Canada last spring. Steve has a long history of trying to help exporters (he was head of the Export Bank before becoming Governor), and it is quite clear that one way to help exporters is to depreciate the domestic currency (see this very clear piece by Scott Sumner).
I have read absolutely nothing indicating that there is a formal Bank of Canada policy to slightly depreciate the Canadian dollar. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if it is happening, especially since the change seems to have caught many people by surprise. And if we are experiencing a dirty float, so much for "forward guidance".
Addendum: I realize it doesn't have to be an explicit dirty float (i.e. direct interventions in the foreign exchange markets) to get this result. Just announcing that we're going to keep doing whatever is necessary to keep interest rates low while interest rates are rising in the US will have the same effect. It won't look exactly like a dirty float, but it will have the same effect.
I'm not a big wine connoisseur. I'm more of a "Wine CommonSewer", the moniker of one of my FaceBook friends. But gradually I have progressed beyond Mateus in my wine drinking.
For the most part, I opt for light, dry white wines [generally Pinot Grigio, but some Sauvignon Blanc falls into this category]. I like some reds, too, but many of the shirazes have too much tannin for my tastes. Ms Eclectic, on the other hand, has always favoured reds, but again not those with too much tannin.
Over the years, we have come to realize that we both really enjoy Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a red Bordeaux wine.
So last week we went to the LCBO [i.e. the gubmnt monopoly liquor store] and bought one of every type of Chateauneuf-du-Pape we could find. We walked out considerably poorer but with these seven bottles:
I have no idea how we will compare them [possibly two different blind taste testings?] but the attempt will surely be enjoyable.
Update: Skip writes that Chateauneuf-du-Pape is from the Rhone, not Bourdeaux region. That just shows how little I know. It was in the Bourdeaux section at the LCBO, though.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I have become intrigued by the Eldridge knot for neckties. My first attempt at tying the knot (with the help of my son, David Ricardo Palmer) was with a bizarre Christmas necktie:
Unfortunately, I have few, if any, neckties in my still too-large collection of ties that would show off the Eldridge know effectively.
So, off to Goodwill, where I bought two neckties that do the job nicely. I still need to work on perfecting the knot, but it is impressively unique. Here's my second attempt:
One of the articles I read about the Eldridge knot suggested using a tie that has a different pattern for the narrow end vs the wide end. So that was what I tried with this attempt:
The odd thing about this knot is that it is tied using the narrow end of the necktie, and there is only one end hanging down from the neck.
I still need practice with it, obviously, but I'm still intrigued by it.
Some years ago, when I was explaining to a class of introductory economics students that a rise in the minimum wage would reduce the quantity demanded of unskilled labour, one student said, "But my sociology prof says this is wrong. He says it will still take the same number of people to flip burgers no matter what."
I pointed out that capital-labour substitution doesn't have to take place at a fast-food emporium. Instead, the rise in the minimum wage would make quick-frozen mass-produced meals in large grocery stores more attractive, leading to less demand for fast food from places like McDonald's or Burger King, ceteris paribus.
I also pointed out that technology, even in the fast-food industry, has changed with more capital substituting for labour. Increasingly food is being prepared in an industrial setting with large amounts of capital and substantial economies of scale. In economics jargon, the production function for fast-food is not fixed-co-efficients.
Robot hamburger factory makes 360 Gourmet Burgers every hour for gourmet burgers at fast food prices - meanwhile fast food human workers demonstrate for higher wages ...
It does everything employees can do except better:
* it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
* their next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem.
* Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices.
* it’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
The labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.
They will launch the first restaurant chain that profitably sells gourmet hamburgers at fast food prices.
Their current device can pay for itself in less than one year, making equipment sales a second path for Momentum Machines.
I don't know. But according to this map, last year Atlas moving company moved more people out every province than they moved into it (exception NB where the totals were equal, and NF, where the difference was small).
At the same time, though, it looks as if the total inbound moves across all the US states out-numbered the outbound moves.
So, was all that difference due to people moving from Canada to the US? And if so, why? I mean, after all, the US didn't seem like all that promising a place to move last year. And did Saskatchewan and Alberta really have net out-migration?
Or is Atlas just an unusual moving company that doesn't reflect general tendencies?
In many ways I'm a traditionalist, and this becomes clear at Christmas time. We put up a smaller tree than we used to have, and so we have given away many of our Christmas decorations. But we have kept some, too, including some that have been in the family for several generations.
I realized as I was putting things away this year, that we wrap the ornaments in the same tissue that they were wrapped in nearly 50 years ago.
Notice the coloured Kleenex and the patterned Kleenex, both of which caused problems with sewage disposal systems and the environment and were subsequently banned. These must be long-forgotten relics by now!
And the box? Another blast from the past, nearly 50 years old. It's from Marshall Field & Company, acquired when I lived in Chicago in the mid-1960s:
There are so many determinants of employment, unemployment, and labour force participation, that we should be wary of ANY promises made by politicians about jobs, credit for job growth, or blame for job losses.
Mike Moffat has it right here, where he takes on the London Mayor, who made outlandish promises about job growth for the London economy. Mike said similar things about job promises put forward by Tim "Who Dat?" [Mike's euphemism] yesterday.
[T]here is only so much municipal politicians can do to create employment. We give these guys far too much credit when things are going well and far too much blame when they are not. The data tells [sic] a compelling story that the London economy is heavily struggling. It is unfortunate the Mayor has to wear that, given that it almost certainly has nothing to do with him. That being said, no one forced him to make a 10,000 jobs pledge - that was a decision he made on his own.
[Note: Mike was a student in my honours intermediate microtheory course some years ago.]
I was really taken with the ridges of snow that we saw last week.
Clearly I need to be more careful before using my camera. Those grey spots are not on the lens but are on the LCD screen. Repair folks tell me the only thing to do about the grey spots is to bang the camera. So I need to look before I go out into the sun (where I cannot see the screen very well in the glare of the sun) and make sure the LCD receptor is clear.
There are rumours, possibly in the long-shot category, that Apple will finally be bringing out a phablet: a smartphone that is larger than any they currently produce but smaller than even the iPad mini. In other words, one suspects that competition in the smartphone market from Nexus/Google, LG, and Samsung, all of whom produce larger phones than the iPhone, is sufficiently eroding Apple's sales that Apple has to acknowledge (and produce for) this sizeable niche in the market. From the Christian Science Monitor:
[A]ccording to the Chinese news site Huanqiu, Apple is at work on its first-ever phablet – a handheld device that splits the difference between a small tablet and a large smart phone. Huanqiu (big hat tip to the team at BGR) alleges that the Apple phablets would debut in May, months before the launch of the next iPhone, and would feature an A8 processor and a 5-inch-plus display. (For comparison's sake, the iPhone 5S has a 4-inch display, while the iPad Mini, the smallest Apple tablet, has a 7.9-inch display.)
...Especially in Asia, where the phablet market is up 600 percent from the same time last year, plus-sized smart phones are incredibly popular. A range of companies, from Asus to Nokia, offer phablets. Bob O’Donnell, the founder of Technalysis Research, recently estimated, in an interview with Forbes, that 175 million phablets will be sold worldwide in 2014.
That's the kind of demand, presumably, that Apple would like to exploit. ....
On Friday, Target Corp. said poor sales at its Canadian stores will have a bigger impact on fourth-quarter results than it originally expected. The discount retailer said it had to slash prices to clear out unsold merchandise and that hurt gross margins.
It now anticipates a deeper loss of about 45 cents US per share for the quarter, more than the loss of 22 cents to 32 cents US it had previously projected.
Target operates 124 locations across the country, but the discount chic chain has said that its hyped foray into Canada has had rocky start as it faced high expansion costs and worse than expected sales. Some common complaints have ranged from near-empty shelves to prices notably higher than at its U.S. locations.
No matter what rationalizations are offered, the simple reason Target is in trouble is that when you walk into and through one of their stores, you're turned off. The selection is limited, the prices aren't all that great, and there's a general feeling of malaise.
I had hoped that when Target took over many of the Zeller's outlets in Canada and then took SO long renovating the facilities, Target would provide a reasonable and viable alternative to Walmart, Canadian Tire, and Superstore. It hasn't. And it will take considerable work and effort on their part to overcome these impressions that apparently many, many Canadian shoppers have of Target.
Take the “quenelle”, a gesture widely considered to be an inversion of the salute with which Germans once expressed devotion to their Führer, made popular today in France by the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala and copied by many of his supporters including the West Bromwich Albion footballer Nicolas Anelka. ... – Anelka recently made a show of giving this salute while playing against West Ham, but was quick to deny that anti-Semitism had anything to do with it. He did it for Dieudonné, he said.
Why it was necessary to show solidarity with a French comedian at Upton Park, Anelka has yet to explain. Respect? The admiration that a person who uses his body feels for a person who uses his mind? I won many a game of ping-pong while reading English at Cambridge, but I have to tell you I never once felt the urge to touch my right shoulder with my left hand as a mark of my admiration for F R Leavis.
But more to the point,
As for the quenelle itself, both M’bala M’bala and Anelka have some explaining to do. If it isn’t anti-Semitic, then how come its adherents perform it grinning outside Jewish shops and museums, in front of synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials, outside Jewish schools including the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse where, in 2012, a gunman shot dead three Jewish children and a teacher, in front of posters of Anne Frank and, should there still be ambiguity, on the railway track leading into Auschwitz? Auschwitz, Mr Anelka. That’s not a football team.
Of those who allow themselves to be photographed being Nazis without uniforms, or are only too happy to post photographs they took themselves, some will doubtless be more foolish than malignant. I don’t mean foolish in the sense of having no idea what they’re doing – that excuse won’t wash for any of them: this isn’t just an expression of Jew-hating, it’s a celebration of Jew-hating’s history – but foolish in that they think expressing Nazi sympathies on a selfie isn’t all that big a deal.
Some (Nicolas Anelka, Tony Parker) have given Dieudonné's reverse Nazi salute, known as the "quenelle," the benefit of the doubt, saying that in their eyes it was a gesture of defiance against the establishment. Should we give them the benefit of the doubt?
Tony Parker, yes. The incident occurred five years ago, and he has explained himself. Anelka is a different matter. He knows that in giving the quenelle he is supporting an agitator whose intention, at bottom, is to stick his salute, and I quote, "up the ass of Zionism." He knows that for Dieudonné and his accomplice, Alain Soral, "anti-establishment" means "the Jews who run the world." And he knows that in supporting that, he is promoting the oldest anti-Semitic clichés, which are also the most inflammatory. England's Football Association doesn't really have a choice. Either it comes down hard on the "anti-establishment" billionaire, or once again we will see, as we did in the 2000s, an epidemic of Nazi slogans and gestures in English football stadiums.
I have some very serious questions about two different ads that I have been seeing regularly on television.
The Mountain Dew ad is back --- the one in which some lucky young guy is hung on a cable and gets to smash, head-first, into a gigantic balloon persumably full of Mountain Dew. First, given the chance, I would absolutely do this. But here's the question: How many takes do you think there were? Different camera angles, different shapes of the "balloon" after it was let go, different splash patterns, etc. How many times did that guy get to do that?
The Home Depot appliances ad. A woman sits in the kitchen and whines to her husband that their new stove and microwave don't match their fridge so obviously they need to buy a new fridge now. What buncha doinks! Why didn't they buy a stove and microwave to match the fridge? I'll bet they got financing at 25%/yr from their local friendly bank, too.
I went 1-3 last weekend. And it's not clear I'll do any better this weekend, but here goes (note that the spread I use is the one from the Yahoo Sports app):
Colts at the Patriots/Economists; Spread is Patriots by 7.5; I think the NE Economists have been mighty lucky in many games, so I'll take the Colts plus the points.
Saints at Seahawks: Spread is Seattle by 8; This one is tough. Seattle has generally been strong, and New Orleans looked good on the road last weekend. Since the spread is 8, I'll take the Saints plus the spread.
49ers at Panthers: I've seen odds ranging from 1.5 on either side at various times, but as of this writing, it looks as if the odds say "Pick". Ok. I'll pick the 49ers.
Chargers at Broncos: Spread is Denver by 9.5. SD is good, but not good enough to come even that close. Broncos -9.5.
"I really enjoy your site, and I'm planning to assign your blog to my students. I love to find "real world" examples to supplement the text, and your blog is terrific for that. Thanks for writing it!" -- J.A.B.
