putative.com

Maude Flanders capped with cause?

This, I did not know. I thought the killing of the Maude was just a bit of Simpsons non sequitur, but no. Check it out, learned while reading about the current contract dispute:

Producers did kill off Maude Flanders' character -- she was hit by a T-shirt shot from a gun and fell from a stadium grandstand -- when actress Maggie Roswell demanded more money in 1999. Yet it's highly unlikely that 20th Century Fox would seek to replace the lead roles, because new voices would seem jarring to fans.

Springy buffalo, springy bunny, snowbound

I just found this photo, from the trip that Hidey and I took up to northern Illinois on the train. These two animals live on a playground in Zion, Illinois (originally founded by John Alexander Dowie, a.k.a Elijah the Restorer).

Google Search: grits with goat cheese

Wahoo! So who searched for that? Did you try it? Did it work? There's a surprising number of good savory grit combinations. My Missouran aunt, for example, favors the crude but effective cheddar and bacon. (In other weird referrer-stat news, Jessica Lynch's tits continue as a persistent meme. How can that be? In better news, searches for interactive elctoral maps are likewise on the rise.)

Memo to God

Please, God, speaketh unto your trees: Enough with all the tree sex already. I am going to die from the not-breathing.

My personal economist on neoclassicism and externalities

For the record, I'm going to ignore Ben's request that I call him my "consultant" instead of my personal economist, which went in part, "... it's not like there are any Depeche Mode songs about economists." Because now I'm hoping there might someday be a Depeche Mode song about economists.

Anywho, read his recent good post on externalities, which is more interesting than perhaps it sounds and starts something like this:

So the biggest problem with the neoclassical view espoused by so many conservatives is that it forgets about externalities. This is huge.

An externality is the effect you have on others that doesn't directly affect you. When you drive, every pedestrian has a little more trouble breathing. When you eat a hamburger, a cow had to be killed. When you wear a low-cut dress, the boys who pass you on the street feel a little bit better. [I swear, every econ class I've ever had used an example about cute girls.] That sort of thing.

From the economist side of things, there is no real solution to the externality problem, in the sense that it's supremely difficult to work out what the optimal behavior is, and how you should go about getting people to engage in that behavior. Basically, if an agent can do something that benefits it but causes a negative externality on others, then you're guaranteed that the agent will do too much (a suboptimal amount) of that activity.

Which is where government comes in. A good law curtails those activities which have negative externalities and thus makes the world a better place. Y'know: don't litter because it's easy for you but makes other people's lives worse; don't drive drunk because it's easy for you but makes other people's lives worse...

The post then goes on to discuss governmental oversight of optimal boobie display and the immeasurability of how kids are harmed by married gays. Speaking of, the Stranger's recent stunt was for Dan Savage and Amy Jenniges to go get a totally gay marriage license. According to BC, yr pal Kurt B. Reighley was supposed to play at the reception at the newly remodeled Timberline. He backed out, though, a few days before, citing their strange new ban on playing hip-hop music. Wha? Does anybody know more about this? Is that city related? And who decides what is hip hop? If a lot of young black males show up at an Accordion-Off, does polka become hip hop?

Is there anything Libertarians can't do?

Neat, neat, neat:

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood—their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

Clever, and scary, and not really too surprising. Why do I keep feeling like we'll look back back someday and say, "You know, we really should have listened to them there Libertarians."

Fake helicopter circles fake hospital for six hours

So the big news over the weekend in my neighborhood was the incessant noisy choppering of a fake medivac helicopter:

On Sunday, Touchstone was shooting an ABC pilot across the street at the KOMO 4 building, which will apparently double for a "teaching trauma hospital." The public notice they sent out was strangely overspecific that way, and also described how the helicopters would "approach from the north at approximately 6 a.m." Like we were supposed to take cover? Fortunately, Heidi and I were up at her brother's place Sunday morning--the two helicopters (the fake-real one with the actors and the real-real one with the camera) kept going till noon, "periodically refueling in Seattle Center's northwest parking lot."

I think I'm an even bigger fan now of having a helipad 100 yards straight out my window. But I'm always hoping that I'll look out one day and see the KIRO 7 chopper landing, with KIRO 7 marines rappelling down, dropping flash grenades and laying down small-arms fire. Take that KOMO 4! Bet you never saw *that* coming!

Everyone should have their own private economist

I mentioned an NYT article to Ben yesterday, "A Heretical View of File Sharing", about a new study that found music downloads have no impact on CD sales, saying in part...

"The single-bullet theory employed by the R.I.A.A. has always been considered by anyone with even a modicum of economic knowledge to be pretty ambitious as spin," said Joe Fleischer, the head of sales and marketing for BigChampagne, a company that tracks music downloads and is used by some record companies to measure the popularity of songs for marketing purposes.

Well, Ben, of course--because he's my own private economist--went and vetted the whole damn thing! You, sir, rock. Read his analysis, especially the editorial comment (e.g., "[I]ndie music gets good publicity from free downloads, even if acts which appear on the Superbowl have no particular need for grassroots publicity. Thus, I would expect that downloads help sales of small acts but hurt sales of big acts....").

Since when did all school buses say First Student or Laidlaw on the side?

Have they all been outsourced or something? They used to always have the school district name, so when you were a kid and they rolled by you could say, "Oh, great, Puyallup--what a bunch of hicks" or "Oh, great, Mercer Island--what a bunch of snobs." Or, "Oh, great, Bremerton... they, uh... they live near a nuclear submarine. *That's* stupid." This just occurred to me while watching field-trip buses coming into Seattle Center. So many buses go by w/o a proper insulting now.

"Wrong woman hurt in 'rape fantasy' tryst"

I think we need more dinosaurs walking around eating people. Things are apparently getting too boring for some people here on Earth.