Thanks for yuor business!

Well to best eon House todoy

• I'm not just a NW30, but I'm also a "country beige." Also, it's amazing what a professional can do with the 2 p.m. version of my 5 o'clock shadow and a can of spray-paint.
• Trader Joe's comes to Manhattan.
• Hermione drinking beer.
• 26 more episodes of Arrested Development?
• Microsoft redesigns the iPod (via Volokh)

It's a miracle! Thank you, Saint Alex!

February isn't quite as good as it looks. I would have had a small loss for the month if it wasn't for a very profitable short-term short I held for five days at the beginning of the month when I detected that mainstream press coverage for an event I was following wasn't consistent with what the specialty press and blogs were reporting, and that the market was following what was in Reuters and AP. I didn't quite catch the high and the low, but I am not disappointed with the result.

Biggest drag on the portfolio was, you guessed it, Blockbuster. Eastman Kodak finally showed signs of life (but is one of my smaller investments), Carmax had a small pop, Six Flags started to, er, flag, Hasbro went down, and everything else sort of went sideways, slightly up or down.

Top 5 holdings:
1. Commerce Bancorp (CBH)
2. Carmax (KMX)
3. Wal-Mart (WMT)
4. Pier One (PIR)
5. Blockbuster (BBI)

Biggest unrealized capital gains
1. Six Flags (PKS)
2. CBH
3. KMX
4. PIR
5. Hasbro (HAS)

Please don't remind me that I sold 80% of my PKS at $7.45 (just in time to declare those gains on my taxes last year) so I could invest in a Wal-Mart stock that has gone sideways.

Biggest unrealized capital losses
1. BBI
2. 1-800 Flowers (FLWS)
3. Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY)
4. Eastman Kodak (EK)
5. That is all.

BMY and EK are about break-even once dividends are included, though break-even is still a loss because of opportunity cost issues. After two consecutive less-than-satisfactory customer-service experiences with FLWS, I'm going to dump the stock at the first reasonable opportunity. I keep threatening to do the same with BBI, but fear the volatile possibility of it popping to 6 or 7 the minute I do.

Some collecting groups have created unstated policies. The 650-member National Milk Glass Collectors Society — a group devoted to opaque glass — holds an annual auction. When the rare young person shows up to bid on an item, older collectors lower their hands. "We back off and let the young person buy it. We want them to add to their collections," says Bart Gardner, the group's past president.

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, 64, has collected the last editions of 79 daily newspapers that closed down since 1963. His adult children don't want the old newspapers, which fill a closet. "The only kind of paper my family wants is greenbacks and stock certificates," he says.

He hasn't been able to find a university to take his collection, either. And now he's under the gun to get rid of it. He is about to marry his third wife, who is 27 years old, and in the prenuptial agreement, there's a clause that he must dispose of the collection by Dec. 31. She wants to store her shoes in that closet.

"At least I can wear my shoes," says his fiancée, Jennifer Graham. "He never reads those papers, and besides, he likes how I look in my shoes."

“Let me tell you why you’re such a difficult match,” Warren said, facing me on one of his bright floral sofas. He started running down the backbone of eHarmony’s predictive model of broad-based compatibility, the so-called twenty-nine dimensions (things like curiosity, humor, passion, intellect), and explaining why I and my prospective match were such outliers.

“I could take the nine million people on our site and show you dimension by dimension how we’d lose people for you,” he began. “Just on IQ alone—people with an IQ lower than 120, say. Okay, we’ve eliminated people who are not intellectually adequate. We could do the same for people who aren’t creative enough, or don’t have your brilliant sense of humor. See, when you get on the tails of these dimensions, it’s really hard to match you. You’re too bright. You’re too thoughtful. The biggest thing you’ve got to do when you’re gifted like you are is to be patient.”

If intelligence has a bell-curve distribution, and intellectual compatibility requires a mate's intelligence to be within a range of +/- n standard deviations from one's own, then the person who's three or four standard deviations from the mean has a much smaller pool than the person who's near the mean. You can perhaps disagree with the premises (if n is large enough, the effect disappears), but the math is inexorable.

Jack Abramoff is married
with five children. He started
the Tora School of Greater
Washington in 1992, (grades
K-6) and Eshkol Academy
in 2000 (grades 7-12). In
2001 he joined Greenberg,
Traurig LLP, where he
is the senior director of
government affairs and head
of the lobby division. He
writes that he only has fond
memories of Brandeis. "It
was a great experience and
I learned a lot!"