Calorie Restriction, where the most ardent followers plan their meals such that dinner is precisely 639 calories. "Dietary sudoku" sounds right. The WSJ ($) also -heh- weighs in. Update: also today's The New York Times.

I'm sentimental about October 29, and Slim and I went to a fun Decemberists concert: 110-minute set, lots of audience participation and chatter from the band, more instruments than you could shake a stick at, plus they played "Losing My Religion""We Go Down Together." We showed up 90 minutes after the doors opened, gravitated to a surprisingly good untaken vantage point at the 9:30 so the short Slim would have a chance to see the stage, and happily ran into our friend Rebekah, who had long ago discovered the spot for her concert-going. The band was on KCRW a few months ago.

The lost script for Aaron Sorkin's pilot about a baseball team.

Roger Friedman is reporting that Studio 60, with its 7.7M viewers, less than 60% of its Heroes lead-in, is due to be cancelled. I keep saying to myself that the show has to get better, but it repeatedly fails to do so, and the fact that Amanda Peet's pregnancy is going to get written into the show doesn't look promising. I never would have expected 30 Rock to be the better show, but Alec Baldwin is accomplishing that single-handedly.

Will I help or hurt S.D. Fla. U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta's political career if I mention the time we ran into Alec Baldwin outside a Los Angeles oxygen bar and Baldwin complimented his tie? (Congratulations to Alex on his recent swearing in. That's the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice you're looking at there if a Democratic president doesn't beat the GOP to it.)

I saw a preview of this with Shani Thursday night. I'm a big Emma Thompson fan, Will Farrell movies are a guilty pleasure, Dustin Hoffman mails in an enjoyable reprise of his "Huckabees" performance, the plot (of a real-life person who's hearing his life narrated by a novelist) is promising given my taste for that sort of Charlie-Kaufmanesque plot, and the trailer is great. Yet I was vaguely dissatisfied. The trailer is too good: if you've seen the 2:36 trailer, you've seen 80-90% of the good moments of the movie (depriving you of any enjoyable surprises), and the rest is so much filler, including an unconvincing love story, and a sentimental cop-out of an ending that smacks of focus group interference. It would have been much better as a ten-minute sketch.

My first "Rule of Law" column is in today's Wall Street Journal. If it's behind a subscription wall now, it should be on the AEI site early next week.

Philip Morris v. Williams is an important Supreme Court case being argued Tuesday. I spoke at an American Constitution Society press briefing at the National Press Club and wrote on op-ed on the subject; the former has web video available.

ATLA launched its first public attack on me. I discuss it on Point of Law.

"The Yearbook 2006 project chronicles the interrupted senior year of the Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans. Benjamin Franklin was the best high school in New Orleans and represents possibly the most diverse school economically, racially, geographically and ethnically in the city. The school closed on August 28th. It did not reopen until January 17. The senior class was scattered throughout the country, and had vastly different experiences that reflect the trials, tribulations and triumphs of their city as a whole." Also: USA Today.

Raise the gas tax. Except $1/gallon phased in over ten years is probably too little. I'd also be inclined to offset the revenues with dollar-for-dollar income-tax cuts, but at least someone's raising the possibility. But I don't understand the politicians who simultaneously complain about carbon emissions and high gas prices.

What's most fascinating is that Snape is almost completely unaware of the collar. He regularly walks into doorframes, and figures out the correct angle of attack for his food bowl less than 20% of the time. One wonders how animals managed to handle protective collars in the wild.

A must-read: How to Make Wealth by Paul Graham (via VP). Many, many great insights:

I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.

What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It's just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth.

...

Few technologies have one clear inventor. So as a rule, if you know the "inventor" of something (the telephone, the assembly line, the airplane, the light bulb, the transistor) it is because their company made money from it, and the company's PR people worked hard to spread the story. If you don't know who invented something (the automobile, the television, the computer, the jet engine, the laser), it's because other companies made all the money.

...

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

...

Understanding this may help to answer an important question: why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Once you're allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it. The resulting technological growth translates not only into wealth but into military power. The theory that led to the stealth plane was developed by a Soviet mathematician. But because the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn't have hardware capable of executing the calculations fast enough to design an actual airplane.

In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don't let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

Amy Carter turns 39 today. Her brother Jack's Nevada campaign for Senate is doing so poorly that I hadn't even heard of it until today.

I don't know whether to ask for an Aeron chair for my home office or go for broke and ask for Gob Bluth's Segway (via Marcotte).

Nine-handed. Early position raises $4 BB to $10. Two folds, one caller, and I call with two black tens. Two more callers, and the big blind raises to $40, about a fourth of his stack. Original raiser calls with almost all of his stack. First caller calls. I don't have pot odds to play this hand any more, and should have folded, but, mistakenly hoping to isolate AK, I raise to $100. Folds to the big blind, who re-raises all in. Early position calls all in. Caller calls all-in, with slightly more than big blind, and now I'm pot-committed and in trouble. Around the table, it's KK, AA, AJs, and my TT, no one improves, AA takes a big main pot, KK takes a big side pot for a profit, and I take the tiny $10 second side pot vs. AJs.

Later, I got out of position with top pair against a set against the same player, and decided to bluff at the pot on the river with wishful thinking that he was on a draw, and he takes $170 from me, when his smooth call of a significant bet on the flop should have set off alarm bells.

Later, I play J9s from the blind in an unraised seven-way pot. Flop comes JJ5 rainbow, I bet $5, get three callers. Turn is Q, I bet $15 (enough to chase out the backdoor flush draws) everyone folds to fellow across the table who raises to $50. Now, he bluffs a lot, but I should have read this for what it was and got away from the hand; instead, I put him all in, and lose to AJ after a blank on the river.

Another big blind hand, this time in Omaha/8, of JT86, and I get a miracle flop of Q97 rainbow, giving me, oh, twenty outs to hit a straight. I bet out, get five callers. Sure enough, the turn is T, I bet out, the low-chasers fold, one caller, and then a generally sound player raises. I have him on KJ, decide I'm drawing dead and don't want to put another $16-$24 in the pot over two rounds of betting, and fold. Turns out he had the same J8 with a flush draw. Oh well. Still probably the right decision, given the risks of redraws and drawing dead.

Tilting later that evening, I'm in middle position with one limper ahead of me. I pot-raise to $18 with A5o. Cut-off raises to $50 and has a deep stack; I put him (and correctly, I think) on a hand that has me dominated or with only one live card. I can't play this hand without hitting two pair, trip 5s, or a straight on the flop, so I correctly fold, $18 too late.

When I was short-stacked, I had a lucky hand where I raised all-in with A9s a limper slow-playing QQ and spiked an A on the flop.

I had a lucky hand where I had two players all in where I had AQ vs. TT vs. T9. On the flop, however, the case ten showed up (JT6), but I got the four-outer on the river.

I had another lucky hand where I called a regular bluffer's big under-the-gun pre-flop bet from the cut-off with JT. The flop comes AT9 two-suited, and he overbets the $40 pot all in for $105. I call immediately, quite confident from my read that he doesn't have the ace. He doesn't, but he has QT. Fortunately, the 9 pairs on the river, and we chop the pot.

In short, I was lucky to only lose $200-$300 from my mistakes. Otherwise, I played pretty well, and ended up with a profit for the night; I had a nice hand where I flopped the nut flush playing AdQd in an unraised eight-way pot from the small blind, and a lower flush put me all in thinking I was on a draw. But I have to be dissatisfied overall.

Hurricane Katrina love ends badly.

Update: more details in today's Times-Picayune, which I still mentally call the Tipsy from the days when it was the Times-Picayune States-Item.

Ten years ago, every Monday, I'd be at the Old Ebbitt Express for lunch or dinner because of their weekly pasta roma special. Do they still have it? Heck if I know—I don't work in the building any more, they only do lunches now, and I haven't had occasion to be back. This recipe, though it's from the decidedly middlebrow Rachel Ray, seems like a good approximation to what I'd order if one adds sun-dried tomatoes and then one adds parmesan and cracked black pepper after serving.

I wonder if I can talk Slim into three trips to New York to see The Coast of Utopia. Part One is in previews now.

One of the apartments destroyed by Cory Lidle's plane was owned by the woman mauled by the Macy's Cat-in-the-Hat Thanksgiving Day float.

It's distressing how many of my favorite flavors—Southern Pecan Pie, Vanilla Chocolate Chunk, Bovinity Divinity, Cool Britannia, Chocolate Raspberry Truffle, even Rainforest Crunch—are in the Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard. On the other hand, I won't miss Lemon Peppermint Carob Chip, which I can't admit ever seeing.

Separately, Jon Entine on the plight of the newest Ben & Jerry's franchisees.

Travelling to the Gocta waterfall and Huelap in Peru.

When I'm making my breakfast smoothie, I serenade Slim by unrecognizably singing "Flax!" Which is actually well before her time. Which is just as well anyway.

Eerily, the New York Times interviewed Cory Lidle about piloting safety a month ago.

Is there a zombie flash mob in your hometown?

Some time after 1PM Eastern, I'll be on "The Buzz" on WBAL-1090-AM (Baltimore), discussing the $217M stroke verdict, which I discussed on Overlawyered Oct. 5 and Oct. 7.

When I have more free time, the Smithsonian has some cool culinary-arts events.

Ghin Na Ree (North Arlington) - Most Thai places in the DC area pump their dishes full of sugar; this isn't a problem at Ghin Na Ree, where the emphasis is where it should be, on the spice. Lunch is a great bargain here: tea, a spring roll, a spicy chicken soup, and an entree for $6. I like this place quite a bit, more than any other Thai place in a 3-mile radius, especially for the price-point, but Slim found her pork with pepper and cilantro too peppery for her tastes, and thought my drunken noodles too spicy as well, so I probably won't be back.

Pines of Florence (Virginia Square) - Meh Italian.

El Ranchero (Ballston) - Meh Mexican, with indifferent service to boot.

Tortilla Coast (Capitol Hill) - Slim and I have had trouble finding good Tex-Mex in the DC area. This place, founded by people associated with Ninfa's, should hypothetically fit the bill, but it's hit-and-miss. The salsa is perhaps the best in town, but the chips are greasy; the queso is good, but the guacamole is mediocre; the flautas are excellent, but the enchiladas are bland and uninteresting. The fajitas aren't special. Parking's difficult, too, though it is close to an Orange-line metro stop. It's sad that South Austin Grill is still my Tex-Mex of choice in town (though El Paso in Ballston has better fajitas), since if it were in Houston, it would go out of business quickly.

Slim and I returned to Abiti (U Street area), and found it as tasty as ever. I think I'm too old to ever order kitfo again (though it was quite good), and Slim's doro watt was excellent. The shiro, which we loved first time around, was even better when we took it home and let it sit for another day for leftovers.

Ray's the Steaks (Roslyn/Courthouse) - The place has gotten more eccentric than ever: it doesn't take reservations now, and doesn't open when it says it opens, making people wait unnecessarily; any of the three are normally deal-breakers for me, but the food is so good and relatively reasonably priced. Slim concurred this time, ending up with the majority of my scallops appetizer though I warned her in advance that the scallops were spectacular at Ray's. My only beef, as it were, is that the punnish "black and blue" sauce for steaks tends to overwhelm the meat with its strong cheese. I'm looking forward to trying the Silver Spring branch of Ray's some time in 2007.

Bob Astles, who apparently is the basis for the fictionalized "The Last King of Scotland."

It's been getting good reviews, but Slim and I didn't like it so much. OK, Forest Whitaker's performance is very good.

But the story: again, it's the "Forrest Gump" approach to history, where a fictional character finds himself swept up in and influencing events. This becomes somewhat offensive when it's a white protagonist in Africa; the movie assumes that we cannot possibly identify with African victims; while there is a harrowing torture scene, we never see an African being tortured.

Scottish Dr. Garrigan is a political naif who is swept up in the excitement of the coup, charmed by Amin into joining his inner circle. To make this palatable, historical events are swept into an arc, and Garraghan escapes when he is improbably tortured and left alone in the midst of the 1976 Entebbe hostage situation. The movie implies that Garrigan tells the world of the true nature of Amin and that this redeems him for the three or so deaths he's directly or indirectly responsible for, a total that includes Amin's wife, Kay. Of course, the illiterate Amin took power in 1971, expelled the Asians in 1972 because of a "dream," had executed thousands in his first year of power, and never had the world's imprimatur; in 1975, he sentenced the British university lecturer Denis Hills to death for comments in a book critical of him. "State terrorism was evidenced in a series of spectacular incidents; for example, High Court Judge Benedicto Kiwanuka, former head of government and leader of the banned DP, was seized directly from his courtroom. Like many other victims, he was forced to remove his shoes and then bundled into the trunk of a car, never to be seen alive again. Whether calculated or not, the symbolism of a pair of shoes by the roadside to mark the passing of a human life was a bizarre yet piercing form of state terrorism." While Amin was a showman, a real Garrigan never could have been so naive as to not realize he was abetting a cruel tyrant.

Garrigan is acted upon more than acting; he never learns Amin's cruelty, only has it described to him by a British spy. Again, this is a tale that would've been more interesting if it had been historically accurate; it did whet my appetite to see the 1974 French documentary.

Separately: The movie has Amin releasing all "non-Zionist" hostages. Let the record reflect that non-Israeli Jews were not released at Entebbe, and had to be rescued by the Israeli military; an elderly British Jewish woman left behind was murdered.

Separately: Amin claimed to have fathered 32 children. Whatever happened to them?

* Idi Amin obituary [The Guardian]
* Idi Amin profile [moreoreless.com]
* Entebbe raid [Palestinefacts.org]
* Uganda [Library of Congress]

Adam Bonin has a good round-up of R.W. Apple links, but misses his 2005 sojourn through my neck of the woods, which, unfortunately, sticks to the relatively obvious places, misses some hidden gems, and spends a paragraph talking about banh mi without ever using those two words. Haandi used to be a favorite of mine nine years ago when I didn't have a car and its Bethesda branch was one of the few Indian restaurants that was Metro-accessible, but I doubt I'd put it in my top five area Indian restaurants today. Apple does sound like someone I would've enjoyed breaking bread with.

What exactly is one supposed to be measuring with the six-inch abstinence ruler? There are various punchlines one can associate with the abstinence mood pencil, too. (Via Throckmorton)

Delicious Library should start working on Mr. Horlick's idea immediately.

W$J "The Commitment Conundrum":

[Stephanie] Schiller says her search for a mate has so far been treacherous and exhausting. She recently met someone she really liked, but it didn't end well. "I felt like this guy was the only good guy on the planet," she says. But on their second date he confessed he still loved his ex-girlfriend. Ms. Schiller started crying.

	September 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	9.6%	8.9%	6.6%	13.1%
S&P 500	2.6%	8.5%	10.8%	11.6%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	3.9%	5.3%

My dividend schedule is such that every third month isn't quite as profitable as the others, yet I still had one of my best months ever.

New investments: Berkshire-Hathaway (BRKB); 3M (MMM); Atheros Communications (ATHR); Wal-Mart call option $45 exp. Jan. 08 (WWTAI)

Sold: Brocade @ $6.30 (oops); reduced position in OSTK @ $20.04

Quick flip: small profit on Altria calls

My first venture into options has been successful; I bought Wal-Mart leaps at $5.90, and they finished the month above 8, though slipped today in response to poor September sales; I expect a rebound, but have a stop in to take profits if they keep going down.

With 5.5% CDs available, I'm changing my cost of capital for the next six months to reflect this.

The BRKB investment is psychologically alarming, because it's startling to see one's stock move $22 in a day until one realizes that's on a base of over $3000. CBH, KMX, FLWS, HAS, all did exceptionally well. PIR popped a lot from its sub-6 low, making me regret not doubling down after a 50% drop, and it's up further today after a CEO resignation.

One of the things that bugged me about "The West Wing" was that the characters from week to week were just vessels for dialogue; there are five staffers with a portfolio of everything (though titles and resumes with much less experience), and it hurt the verisimilitude. "Studio 60" has the same problem, but worse. What exactly is Danny bringing to the show if Matt is doing all the writing? I understand the dramatic purpose of Ricky and Ron, so I'm willing to suspend the disbelief that the network won't eat a "$30,000/episode" contract when that's a catering rounding error, but it makes no sense for their characters to be in a meeting discussing focus-group results. (And how does Whitford get the controversial focus-group question into the survey without anyone knowing, or laying the blame on him when it gets contentious?) D.L. Hughley is supposed to be one of the "Big Three" who's too big a star for the network to control, and has been on the show for at least four years, so why is his presence on the news broadcast sketch such a career-maker for him? And if Amanda Peet is the president of the network, what exactly is Steven Weber? I'll just wince without comment at the idea that Matt is saving the show with "Pimp my Trike" and Nicholas Cage imitations and Gilbert & Sullivan cold opens, or that anyone really cares about the long-ago marriage of a network executive. (Remember the Ohlmeyer sex scandal? I didn't think so.)

Anyone other than Aaron Sorkin, and I would've lost patience by now. That and the Whitford/Perry interplay is keeping me watching the show, but not for much longer, especially with the return of Veronica Mars tomorrow night.

Update: Sepinwall's analysis (this week and last week) is quite good.

I wasted far too much time on Usenet in law school, and waste far too much time in blog comment-sections today, but here's an entertaining exchange with a guest-blogger on Is That Legal?

Professor Bruce Bowden and I have the same problem with watching Law & Order.

My real estate agent left me a houseplant as a gift when I moved into my condo. It wasn't the prettiest thing, and I didn't take particularly good care of it (it was never repotted in its short life), but, where two-week business trips taking depositions in Tulsa and 300-billable-hour months where the plant went lengthy stretches without water didn't kill it, a month with a couple of cats gnawing at the plant sure looked to doom it. The plant was unceremoniously dumped Saturday in the course of house-cleaning while I wasn't looking. (I had given permission for it to be disappeared days earlier, and I imagine there was impatience with my passive-aggressive failure to take Old Yeller out to be shot.)