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The advance estimate of real GDP growth rate for the 3rd quarter of 2007 has come in at 3.9%.
This grades out as a B on my preferred GDP grading scale, and as an A on a grading scale that college students would be comfortable with.
That makes for 6 months in a row of solidly above average growth.
Ron Silver has started a blog called Silver Bullet as part of PajamasMedia.
Silver is the exception in Hollywood. He may not be conservative or a staunch Bush supporter, but he has been outspoken with his view that a lot of what passes for deep thinking in the legacy media is little better dangerous platitudes amplified in an echo chamber.
He opened by explaining that Chris Matthews behavior about Myanmar tipped him over the edge, and tossed off this pithy quote:
Why does he only play Hardball with views he despises and play hearts with those who agree with him?
It's an odd, but good idea, and one that was apparently a long time in coming: there is actually a place where they let bodies decay on purpose so they can figure out what they look like at various vintages for use in criminal investigations.
N.B. Office-safe, but pretty gross.
What else would you call it when the wife of the outgoing president is "elected" to be the next president?
The other day I noted a major new security that is exploiting e-mailed PDF files.
I blamed Adobe for this and advocated switching to a PDF viewer other than Acrobat.
It turns out the flaw is within Windows, it is just being exploited through PDF files. This means that there are other filetypes that could pose a hazard, although since you have to actively open a file before infection occurs, it's hard to think of other software with the market penetration of PDF. Microsoft has not yet been able to fix the problem.
There are other reasons to switch from Acrobat - such as the other programs being much faster - so I stand by my recommendation.
Harry Lee passed away last month.
He was sheriff - for 27 years - of the parish that is half of the New Orleans metropolitan area.
I speculate that he had a higher positive to negative impression ratio than any politician in New Orleans in the last generation. He had some faults, but I think everyone knew where he stood, and knew that he wouldn't screw something up when he got involved.
He was one of those people who was larger than life: a hugely fat son of Chinese immigrants, who pulled no punches, and became a relatively honest lawman in a congenitally dishonest state.
When he came on the TV, you watched: what can you say about someone who offers to solve the cities nutria problem for less than a buck a piece if he can let his sharpshooters out at night?
Here are the obituaries from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
One of my earliest posts here at voluntaryXchange was about a site that claimed that autism may be a genetic remnant of interbreeding between homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens sapiens (us). It seemed speculative, but well thought out.
Now, this past week we have reports that a mutation found in a particular gene that isn't shared by modern humans would plausibly lead to red hair and fair skin in neanderthals (see FuturePundit too).
So, I went back to that site. There I found the cover picture I remember - of the red-headed neanderthal boy - from 3 years before this most recent discovery. There's also a section on the high correlation of, and hypothesized relationship of red hair to autism.
Maybe they're on to something ...
Bobby Jindal is the new governor of Louisiana. Does this offer the state a new hope? Gosh I hope so.
This unlikeliest of all Deep South politicians, a squeaky-clean Gen-X son of Indian immigrants, a policy wonk and Catholic convert who, as a child, adopted a nickname from a "Brady Bunch" character, just got himself elected.
I lived in Louisiana for almost 9 years. Prime early career years, mostly as a DINK, mostly in the city.
I hate it. I can deny being a native faster than anyone. How else would the vXboy have picked something like this up to tell his teacher: "I love my sister, but I can't marry her, unless we move to Louisiana."
I also love it. We've imported a lot of positive Louisiana tidbits into our remote section of Utah: the alligator stepping stones in the front garden, the purple, green and gold shirts (and even a cummerbund), all the free advertising for our local creole restaurant, and so on.
In fact, I think my relationship with Louisiana is a lot more conflicted than most of my relationships with people.
And ... casual discussion with just about anyone who used to live in Louisiana reveals that they feel the same way. Rod Dreher says it better than I can:
... It's been 15 years since I left the Bayou.
... A well-known New Orleans journalist ... said that he loved the city dearly but couldn't raise his children in a town that cherished parades more than libraries. Framed that way, you can understand why so many Louisianians choose to expatriate, but never quite get over leaving.
You notice something, though, when Louisianians meet in exile. Everybody misses home and will take any opportunity to talk about it. ... Friends ... thought my stories about [Louisiana] revealed me to be a pathological liar
One of the first things we did in the days after we fled Louisiana was write down all the crazy stories we could think of on 3 by 5 cards. We quickly filled a shoebox with them.
Louisiana makes a lot more sense if you read the beloved picaresque "A Confederacy of Dunces" as an exercise in literary naturalism. There's simply no place like Louisiana. You will not find more generous and life-loving people anywhere, and Lord knows, you won't eat or drink better. It's hard to get over that. But you do, mostly. Last Sunday, I ran into a couple I know at a Krispy Kreme shop here in Dallas. We got to talking about the Jindal victory, and the wife, a non-native who had fallen in love with Louisiana as a Tulane student, said warmly that she'd love to move back. The husband gave her a look that telegraphed, "Yes, we all would, dear, but come on."
... Moving home rarely crosses the minds of us expatriates. Louisiana is a great place to be from, but the sense of fatalism that pervades life there casts doubt on whether it will some day be great place to be. In Louisiana, to be educated is to love the state and hate the state -- and, for many, to leave it.
Here's the thing about Bobby Jindal: He didn't leave for good. He came home. With his Ivy League and Oxbridge education and his startling smarts, he could have gone anywhere and nobody back home would have blamed him. In fact, he is the epitome of the kind of Louisianian who emigrates to Dallas, Atlanta and points beyond ...
But he didn't. The guy actually seemed to think he could make a difference in Louisiana. He got involved in government at age 24 and stuck with it ...
... I think he's going to write the next great Louisiana story. Maybe just this once, it's not going to be a farce.
Read the whole thing in the October 26 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
Here's something you don't read every day: an op-ed piece in the legacy media about the joys of taking up smoking in middle age.
I don't pretend to be a connoisseur, having only begun smoking a couple weeks ago ...
... A friend in Shanghai gave me the perfect excuse to start smoking. China has become so polluted, he told me, that it's better to breathe through a cigarette filter than just take in the air on its own. ... Well into middle age, I figured that it was probably a good time to take up the smoking habit. The result? I enjoy it so much that I don't know why I didn't take it up earlier.
I will admit to an occasional ... not a longing ... but an interest ... in smoking a hand-rolled Golden Virginia again.
Read Hugo Restall's whole piece in the October 26 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
Yoonew is a new site where you can trade futures on tickets for sporting events.
This is a variation on an old Las Vegas sports book idea: allowing people to place small bets with high payoffs for outcomes fairly far out in the future. You know: put down $5 today on whether or not your team will make it to the Super Bowl.
In Yoonew's case, you're not gambling in the Las Vegas sense though.
Instead, you buy a future on ticket to an event. A future is a contract to deliver or receive an item on a particular date in the future.
Why do this at all? Well ... right now ... if you think the Colts have a chance of repeating their trip to the Super Bowl, you can buy a future on a ticket on the 50 yard line for just under $800. If they don't make it, you lose the money. If they do, you get a ticket that might cost you a few thousand dollars from a scalper for the price of the future. Or, if you prefer to play the field, you can pick up futures on teams like the Bills, Jets and Falcons for under $20. You can also get futures on less desirable seats in the stadium.
Right now they are limited to NFL tickets, with the Super Bowl being where most of the action is.
Readers with good memories may remember that voluntaryXchange posted about futures for sports tickets way back in January 2006.
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