I'm looking forward to "The Ten." Radosh calls it "a smart comedy about dumb comedy" that will "bomb[] in the theaters because the jokes will be way too obscure for the masses (both in terms of references and sensibility)." My kind of blurb. [Radosh; IMDB]

It's interesting how so many movies I like are just absolutely buried by their movie studio: "Idiocracy" and "Children of Men" just in the last year. (Throw in "Brazil" for a full-fledged studio-buried-dystopia film festival.) Slim and I also liked the black comedy "Pretty Persuasion," which critics just loathed, and disappeared from the theaters with next to no publicity. Netflix saves many of these movies.

A shanda fer die goyim.

Wikipedia Brown (via Volokh).

Retconning "Star Wars" (via Cowen).

I only eat out once a week, if that, these days, so I haven't been out as much, but I do have a couple of ratifications of Tyler Cowen endorsements:

Kotobuki (MacArthur Blvd.) is $1/piece sushi. They don't take reservations, and they don't have a wide selection, and I don't buy into Tyler's assertion that this is the best sushi in town, but I will say that it's good enough to be the best sushi value in the city, and perhaps the Eastern seaboard. I'd certainly rather go here than Kaz Sushi Bistro; I still prefer the much more expensive Sushi Taro, but Slim keeps getting sick every time we go there.

When I was in college, friends would take me for sushi. I was okay with it, but I didn't understand the enthusiasm for sushi—until I got to Los Angeles and discovered the difference between really good sushi and the run-of-the-mill stuff.

I had another revelation yesterday. A good college friend had an Indian girlfriend, and took me out when a Waltham restaurant started offering Southern Indian. Dosas, iddly, uttapam: it was okay, but I didn't get what he found exciting about it. Now I do: Saravana Palace (Fairfax) is quite phenomenal, by far the best Southern Indian and the best vegetarian restaurant I've ever been to. (Though I have not yet been to Udupi Palace in Takoma Park.) Everything from the dosas to the warm gulabjamun was impeccable. The menu is huge, and the weekend buffet offered a sampling of a couple of dozen of the items, plus seven chutneys for make-your-own dal papri and bhel puri. To top it all off, it's ridiculously cheap: only $9.95. Amazingly, this is right across from the Wegman's, it just got named to the Washingtonian Top 100 (and with three stars, no less), and yet Slim and I were the only non-Indians in there. People are missing out. We loved our meal, and didn't even have the paneer makhini or channa batura that Washingtonian raved about.

We craved Ethiopian another night, but couldn't find parking at Abiti. It was a cold night, so for some reason Adams-Morgan offered more parking, and we made our way to Meskerem, which is competent and enjoyable, but not as good as Abiti—though the service is certainly much better and quicker at Meskerem.

Between my continued visits to the personal trainer, and Slim's 11-pound weight-loss, I can now hypothetically bench-press Slim. I say hypothetically, because I haven't been allowed to empirically test the proposition.

I think Five Guys is much better than In-n-Out.

We're a year late to this party, but Slim and I are enjoying the DVD of the "How I Met Your Mother" sitcom, an increasingly successful Friendsian fantasy about five Manhattan professional twentysomethings with no discernible source of income but a 3000-sq. ft. apartment (albeit one with a single tiny bathroom) and lots of money for $10 martinis. We're sixteen episodes into it. Supporting players Neil Patrick Harris and Allyson Hannigan are excellent and funny—almost too good, because they end up being light years ahead of the other cast members. But, oy, the show is flawed, which makes me worry for its long-term success.

1) The framing device—the lead character, Ted, explaining to his bored children in 2030 his dating adventures in 2005—isn't just creepy, it's, well, really poorly thought out. Suspense is destroyed. We know from the first episode that Ted won't end up with "Aunt Robin"; thus it's hard to care about the Ross-and-Racheling the two are going through (about three Friends seasons worth in the first sixteen episodes). We haven't met "the mother" yet, but when we do, all the suspense and will-they or won't-they of the relationship will be similarly destroyed: there certainly can't be any tension over whether they will have children.

You can tell the network suits were bothered by the whole telling-the-story-to-children thing, too.

In the first few episodes, the kids realistically sit on the couch bored in the beginning, middle, and end of the episode, as they sit through another lecture from dad about the lessons of his dating life. Which isn't all that funny, disrupts the pacing from the main plotlines, and, plus, sends the message "This is boring."

You can see the note sent: make the kids more enthusiastic. A few episodes in, they're grinning like banshees, and the kids aren't good enough actors to pull it off.

In the latest batch of episodes we've seen, the kids are absent entirely, though the framing device remains as a voiceover. I have to think they'll abandon it at the beginning of one season or another without any explanation. (And an IMDB check inadvertently shows that Bob Saget, who plays the older Ted, isn't in every episode, which makes me think I'm right. I guess I'll see.)

2) I won't complain too much about silly plotlines that require characters or outsiders to behave unrealistically: "I ruined an $8000 dress that I wasn't supposed to wear!" is just part of the sitcom genre.

3) Slim complains about the wardrobe in the show. I tend not to notice these things so much, though one episode featured the character of Robin in a formal dress that was a size too small on her while everyone gushed about what a perfect dress it was for her, and since then, her wardrobe has been distractingly ill-fitting.

4) Neil Patrick Harris's character, Barney: in some episodes Barney is a brilliant Yuppie mash-up of the Fonz and Sgt. Bilko. Other episodes, Barney is a WASPy and skinny George Costanza. Both are hilariously funny cartoons, and the best part of the show, but they're not the same character.

5) The Ted character himself is grating at times, but the show is getting around this in the most recent episodes we've watched by having the other characters more aggressively point this out.

Of course, with the occasional exception of an Arrested Development that is running from the gate, sitcoms often take some time to find themselves: early Seinfeld episodes are a different animal from the show at its peak; Family Ties was planned as a starring vehicle for Meredith Baxter-Birney; The Simpsons didn't figure out right away that Homer was its star, and early episodes were considerably slower-paced and more conventional than it was at its peak; and The Office (American version) didn't figure out right away that it was more than a carbon copy of its British counterpart. And who remembers Ross's monkey and son? Certainly not Ross in the last few seasons of Friends.

All of this commentary is without reading various blog entries by Throwing Things and Sepinwall about the show (which I'll catch up on somewhere down in the future), so I hope I'm not duplicating their work independently; their obvious love for the show is what prompted us to Netflix the disk.

"[The] Point of Law diarist [sic] is an AEI fellow, and not to be trusted on the ideological spin given to the facts." — Adam Bonin, 18 January 2007

Testing the YouTube embed feature with a commercial I ran across that I'd've wanted to email Slim—except that the stupid page title gives away the punchline. When we see a child in the store like this, I turn to her and say, "Let's have only six kids," and she responds by not talking to me for several hours.

I've loved those Lexus commercials that conclude "I used to have to parallel park by myself." Alas, Calvin Trillin (via Throwing Things) reports that it isn't all that:

The Advanced Parking Guidance System works only if the spot is six and a half feet longer than the car — the sort of spot, in other words, that the average Manhattan parker comes upon about once every 14 or 15 years. The only parker who might need help from a guidance system to get into such a spot is a parker who is driving himself home from rotator cuff surgery. For Lexus to offer a self-parking system for a spot that size is the equivalent of some high-end kitchen-equipment manufacturer offering a self-carving system that only works on meatloaf.

I wonder if that's a liability thing: this Lexus commercial shows the car parking in a much tighter space—which would imply consumer fraud class action possibilities.

Update: My father sends along this CNBC video of a Lexus being used to (sort of) park in a smaller space, so who knows why Trillin says what he says.

Tom Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia" has apparently increased sales of Isaiah Berlin's previously-out-of-print "Russian Thinkers" more than 50-fold. (via Marcotte)

...is that one is competing with those who are not. Unhappy with our previous cat-mauling commercial maid service, we started negotiations with a highly-recommended husband-and-wife maid team to replace them. But those fell through when I announced that Slim and I would need to comply with federal requirements for taxation and I-9 paperwork. Perhaps this offended them (I certainly felt awkward about the racist implications of asking for the I-9), or perhaps I avoided being Zoe Bairded at some future date, but it's at least as likely that they didn't want to have to deal with losing 20-35% of their income to taxes when there were others who would pay them under the table.

The place where I had lunch almost every day for over three years isn't what it used to be.

Article about Madison High School in Brooklyn, which has three alumni as sitting senators, plus:

"When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was at Madison [High School] — of course, you're quite familiar with the look that she cultivates — would you believe that she was cheerleader?" said Steve Slavin, a 1959 Madison graduate, referring to the now-bookish-looking Supreme Court justice.

Sandy Roche, class of 1950, couldn't believe it. That is, until she cracked the spine of her old yearbook.

"It says she was twirler, so I guess she was a cheerleader. Oh my goodness," said Roche who knew Ginsburg, also class of 1950, by her nickname, Kiki. Roche and others from her time remembered Ginsburg as "very popular and attractive."

(Assignment for David Lat: Find that yearbook photo!)

As befitting my status as a second-string talking head, I'm stepping in for Steven Hantler at the Washington Legal Foundation's Media Nosh on legal reform Thursday morning. There will be a webcast.

Arkansas Rep. Dan Greenberg defends HB1035 to the Arkansas Times. [Arkansas News; KTHV; North Little Rock Times]

Alan Sepinwall reports that Aaron Sorkin is unhappy with this LA Times article. That "Employee of the Month Celebrates the Comedy of Studio 60" in LA show sounds fun. In a meta sense. More here. And Mickey Kaus reminds us of the original TWOP-predecessor controversy (over the Emmy for this episode) that led to the Lemon-Lyman West Wing episode.

The Patriots-Colts game is scheduled to start at 6:30 pm. I set the HDTV to record it, and I start watching the recording at 8 pm or so. This permits me to fast-forward past the parts where announcers are talking about nothing or the fifteenth iteration of the same Wendy's commercial or the halftime show, which just isn't interesting when there aren't highlights from other games. Fast-forwarding is far from perfect with the shoddy Scientific Atlanta DVR—there's a delay as it thinks about the process both in the beginning and the end, and I missed more than a few downs—but my TiVo doesn't record HD.

So I'm about a quarter behind when, at 10 pm, the recorder decides that the game is over and decides to take me out of the middle of the program I'm watching, and, without any sort of spoiler alert or warning, instead displays the picture for the current game at the current score, with about two minutes left. Aside from the fact that the suspense is ruined for watching the fourth quarter that I missed, the Comcast DVR has no way to easily fast-forward through three and a half hours of football, so I just delete the recording and watch the last two minutes of the game.

This is just ludicrous. TiVo (1) permits one to fast-forward in fifteen minute intervals, and (2) is intelligent enough not to turn off a recording that you're in the middle of watching just because it's finished recording. These are not complicated concepts. And if Scientific Atlanta can't master basic usability, why can't Comcast provide their subscribers with a TiVo system?

Via Kirkendall, the Houston Chronicle profiles Trey Wilson, the Bellaire High graduate who played Nathan Arizona in the great "Raising Arizona." Wilson, who had other character-actor roles, would've been one of the greats in the Coen Brothers troupe, but died suddenly of an arterial vascular malformation in his brain at the age of 40. Albert Finney took the role he would have had in "Miller's Crossing."

Video of David Foster Wallace on prepositions and good and evil.

How Borat was written. Not mentioned: how the WGA nomination is meant to raise public awareness of WGA claims to the right to have reality television shows subject to WGA union rules. (Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if it reduces the incentive to use reality tv instead of scripted comedies and drama.)

Relatedly: Baron Cohen thanks, inter alia, the writers. And a YouTube of a post-Globes conference.

"Alert reader T." strikes again.

The original Truck-O-Saurus (warning: noisy link).

How does a "balance tank" allow one to make a wet edge pool? I suppose if I actually saw one close up rather than in a dramatic photo, the illusion would be broken.

Related: the detail of the $40,000/night Hefner suite at the Palms where Britney and her nice Jewish K-Fed-alike stayed, and its pool overlooking the Strip.

One reason I use Schwab for my investing.

Sports never loses its capacity to surprise. I can't stand hockey, but the final thirty seconds of this game are pretty remarkable (via C. Newmark).

...just got a Dell computer, but doesn't know his own e-mail address, and keeps signing me up for stuff, including stuff that I'm not sure he'd want others to know he's signing up for. Perhaps I'll give him a phone call.

1. Before expenses, I came out ahead over $5500 on the gaming end of matters in under 48 hours of Las Vegas; Slim picked up $700 on her own, though much of that was spent on an Escada for the AEI formal. At $3k a day between the two of us, that works out to a million dollars a year. A shame that wouldn't be sustainable: we had above-average luck on the blackjack tables, and, while I'm a decent poker player, there are only twenty hours of stretches a week when I would find certain poker rooms to have a profitable mix of tourists and professionals. Plus, I'd really get sick of playing poker if I were doing it full time.

1a. When I lived in Los Angeles, and played limit poker, waking up early Sunday morning was a good way to make some money; not only was there no traffic on the way to the poker rooms, but there were a lot of people who had been playing all night and were now stuck and on tilt. This strategem does not work for no-limit poker, where the people who have been playing all night are the ones good enough not to have gone broke yet. Fortunately, this lesson only cost me a $500 buy-in before I realized my mistake and found something else to do. The better time to go is when the football games are on, and the other players are watching the plasma screens concentrating on tracking the sports bets they don't have any control over, rather than the poker game they can conceivably influence.

2. One side effect of feeling that flush with money coming in at a millionaires' rate is a willingness to spend. Much to my surprise, my first $130 bottle of wine was not a disappointment. And it did make the food taste better, and, at Aureole (Mandalay Bay), the food is excellent to begin with. A seared truffle-encrusted scallop was perfect; Slim's squab with foie gras was marvelously matched; I had bass with wild mushrooms, two things I'm not especially fond of on their own, but the quality of the ingredients made the dish. Even small touches, like the light lobster bisque amuse bouche, the freshly baked rolls, and the desserts (cheese plate for me, grape tart for Slim), were excellent. The service was impeccable, other than the waiter hanging over my shoulder as I tried to experiment with the gimmicky electronic-tablet-and-stylus that substituted for a wine list. (That appealed to my inner gadget-head, but the execution made it less desireable than a big book—though perhaps the advantage is the instantly updated menus. Maybe they even take advantage of the software to price discriminate on weekends; Maestro in DC also price discriminates on weekends, but it comes across as clumsy in their printed menus.) Not sure if it measures up to our meal at Taillevent, but it was close, and certainly cheaper than the latter.

3. We enjoyed Craftsteak, but perhaps not the chef's tasting menu as much as the a la carte we ordered the previous year. The MGM Grand buffet was mediocre; even with it being comped, it wasn't worth it.

4. Did you know that if you take a cell-phone photo with really bad lighting and contrast, it looks like I have hair? Of course, Philip Welch's analysis is probably the correct one.

5. Separately, Slim and I can confirm that, contrary to one's expectations, Ms. Mackie Paisley Passey actually looks hotter in real life than in her professional photo. Las Vegas seems like the perfect environment for her, though she's still figuring out traffic patterns.

6. I much prefer the Wynn to the MGM Grand. Whatever benefit the latter might have for having cheaper rooms is almost entirely overridden by the fact that they wanted to charge us $70/day to use the tiny gym. That reflects congestion pricing, to be sure, but it's not like the Grand isn't the most cavernous hotel in Las Vegas to begin with and couldn't spare a few extra square feet to build a gym large enough to house the needs of its occupants. MGM Mirage doesn't seem to have their act together in many ways: they never assigned us a casino host; we had $8000 on the table betting purple and black at the utterly empty New York New York high limit table, and no one came over to recruit us; Mandalay Bay has really run downhill since they took it over; and the comps the Grand offers are awfully flimsy compared to what I was able to get five or six years ago when I played much smaller stakes.

7. There are no more single-deck blackjack games on the Las Vegas strip. There's something they call blackjack, and is played with a single-deck, but pays 6:5 for blackjacks. People were playing this game. You may sic the Compulsive Gamblers Anonymous on me if you catch me sitting down at it.

8. For some reason, people in Las Vegas like to guess your background. A cab driver thought I was a fellow aboriginal American; a street hustler for time-share resorts pegged Slim as a Texan; an Israeli blackjack dealer correctly identified me as a Jewish attorney.

Whee! I'm flying on Ted Airlines as we speak. But Friday Ted has sent a post into the future for you, the loyal blog readership.

How far will an Internet meme spread? Let's see.

Instructions:

i. Let Set A = the set of people who you consider to be one of your "exes."

ii. Let Set B = the set of people who are exes of the people in Set A.

iii. Let Set C = the three most famous people in Set B besides yourself.

iv. List the members of Set C. NB that they need not be people you ever met, nor need have preceded you.

v. Tag five people.

My list (fame judged by Wikipedia or IMDB entries):
1) Congressman Brad Sherman.
2) Actor Taylor Nichols.
3) The crazy anti-Semitic weirdo who invented the word "weblog."

I suppose older people are more likely to be famous.

These early tags are important. Let's see how far the meme can spread.

I tag Jacqueline, Esquiver,Rondi, Jeremy Blachman, and Ann Althouse.

Attention to my former regular chess opponent James Gilbert, Benjamin Franklin High School Class of 1987 (New Orleans), later of University of Alabama: I am looking for you. If you are him or know his whereabouts, please email me.

Japan not impressed by iPhone. They already have better technology. [LA Times]

Tyler Cowen is very impressed with Mumbai-mean-streets novel Sacred Games. [MR; NYT]

"What I'm saying to you, [is] that we need more troops on the ground." -- Nancy Pelosi, "Meet the Press," May 2004 [OpinionJournal]

Over at Throwing Things, "Isaac Spaceman" and I have been discussing Howard Stern and the entertainment industry. Adam Bonin started off by suggesting that Paul Giamatti, who had a tiny role in the Howard Stern movie "Private Parts" was now a bigger name than Stern. Poor timing, given that just hours later, Stern received an $83 million bonus from his satellite radio employer.

Me: If I were Paul Giamatti, I'd certainly trade my paycheck for a tenth of Stern's. Stern's brilliance was recognizing that he could use technology to effectively price-discriminate based on the intensity of his fan base, and it's not at all a bad business model to cut your audience down 90% if you can extract 80 times as much revenue per capita from the rest. And I say that as someone who'd have to be paid to sit through a Stern show.

IS: Ted -- I've thought that about music for a long time, and I don't understand why the industry doesn't do it. I also think that's where television is going once on-demand is completely functional. Arrested Development could work in a world where all TV is pay-to-play; you'd just charge three times as much for 1/3 of the viewers. It obviously works in the DVD aftermarket.

Me: It does work that way in music -- that's why we have concerts with $100 tickets and overpriced shirts. On an even more extreme scale, numerous musicians do perform at parties and bar mitzvahs for the fabulously wealthy for six-digit fees.

But you have to build up the mass popularity first, or you can't attract the small subset of the audience with intense preferences. The Mountain Goats came to DC, and they could barely fill a small room with $15 tickets.

Howard Stern could do it because he built the big audience in free radio first *and* had a subset of that audience that had an intensity of preference willing to pay a lot of money *and* the technology was available *and* there was competition for content to fit competing technologies such that Stern could extract most of the rents. Bob Edwards isn't getting rich from switching to satellite radio.

That's even harder to do in television; no star or brand is big enough to attract the audience on spec, and once you have the big audience, your network has rights of first refusal that keeps you from going elsewhere. (And the economics prefers the big audience, because that attracts the syndication paycheck and DVD sales down the line.)

Showtime couldn't (or wouldn't) bring enough money to the table to make Arrested Development continue, even with the promise of DVD revenue, because there wasn't that original fan base. Same thing with Firefly, where the movie barely broke even after DVD sales. Maybe Star Trek:TOS in the late 1970s could have made it happen if the technology was there to support it, but I can't imagine another television show with the intensity of fan base as Howard Stern's radio show. Okay, wrestling and UFC, but wrestling and UFC already work on a pay-per-view model.

As if to confirm my analysis of the music industry, the LA Times reports today that George Michael made $4 million for a 75-minute personal concert for a Russian magnate, among other rock stars making small fortunes for short private shows. So I guess I should have said "seven-digit"; even Hall & Oates make six digits. The claim is that rock stars decided it was okay to sell out like this when Bob Dylan took the plunge.

Early NYT iPhone review. Assuming that it's called iPhone, of course.

Heh: "Since monkeys may likely draw attention, the handler will be escorted to the physical inspection area where a table is available for the monkey to sit on. Only the handler will touch or interact with the monkey." (via Defamer)

Dubai: Las Vegas without the fun. [Slate]

In late August/early September, I considered buying stock in Markel Corporation (MKL). I waited for a price of $350, but it never quite got that low, and I didn't want to buy as it kept going up past $380. Four months later, now it's over $480. If it becomes the next Berkshire, and I didn't buy over a 5% difference in price, I'm really going to kick myself. (I did, on the other hand, use that money to buy Berkshire itself with its B-series trading at 310, now at 360+.)

I took profits on half of my Carmax (KMX), whose run-up had taken it to an uncomfortably undiverse 30%+ of my portfolio, and used some of the proceeds to buy shares of AES. I was promptly rewarded by Hugo Chavez confiscating their Venezuelan properties. One would have thought the market already accounted for that in the stock price, but apparently not, and I took a hit.

Similarly, Apple stock goes up $10 just about every MacWorld, even when they're not announcing something as cool as the iPhone. One would expect people to buy before MacWorld, rather than as they're hearing about Jobs's speech, but that somehow never happens. This implies that, should something happen to Warren Buffett's health, Berkshire stock will drop precipitously, even though his death is fairly certain at some point, and that should already be priced into the stock.

David Petraeus has an impressive biography.

A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (via MR). [Princeton U. Press]

Side-note: My Lord, the Barnes & Noble web-site is poorly designed. But their gift cards aren't good on Amazon.

Walter Mossberg doesn't like the crappy Comcast DVR either. Gregg Easterbrook writes:

Video input note: TMQ gets, and likes, Comcast Digital, but the converters malfunction so often the Comcast guy is practically a family member. Wall Street Journal chip-universe columnist Walt Mossberg, perhaps the most influential writer on personal tech, devoted an entire column last week to complaining that his Motorola-built Comcast DVR digital box was driving him crazy. You'd think the CEO of Comcast would come to Mossberg's home and personally install a replacement!

I thought Comcast and TiVo inked a deal: why can't I get a TiVo Series3 from Comcast?

If I have a good week in Las Vegas, I may just splurge on the WeaKnees version. I wonder if I can get a former roommate discount.

Berton Roueche, apparently the inspiration for many "House" scripts, wrote in the 1960s of a family who poisoned themselves from grafting a tomato plant onto jimson weed in an attempt to engineer a year-round tomato. [MeFi; Dartmouth Medicine; CHEMED-L]

Tomacco in Wikipedia.

Here's an interesting clip of an unedited Daily Show interview: Jason Jones was taking on Carl Monday, the Marvin Zindler of Cleveland, part of a bit intended to make fun of this story, which pretty much stands on its own. Jones isn't the sharpest of the Daily Show interviewers and Monday is probably quicker on his feet than a lot of interview subjects, but it's still interesting to see how much must have ended up on the cutting room floor—in this case, all of it.

I'm just entertained that every time MoveOn has plans to picket my workplace, it's scheduled to rain like the dickens.

	November 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	-2.4%	10.8%	10.3%	12.9%
S&P 500	1.9%	14.2%	14.2%	13.2%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	4.8%	5.3%

	December 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	6.0%	17.5%	17.5%	15.2%
S&P 500	1.4%	15.8%	15.8%	13.4%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	5.3%	5.3%

New investments: Wal-Mart $45 call (WWTAI) @ $6.70; UTI @ $19.375; CAB @ $25.21.

Sold: OSTK @ $14.81

Overstock killed my November, and was a drag on the year, and, like Blockbuster, I seem to have sold it near the bottom. I got back into the Wal-Mart calls just as it had bad news that drove down the option, though it started to recover in the last week. But a good December, led by Carmax, pushed me back ahead of the S&P, if not by a lot.

It was a volatile year: three swings of at least 20%.

My hold of Carmax was the best investment of the year, a near-double that almost compensated for stupid decisions with Overstock and Blockbuster. My return for the year would have been 9% higher if I hadn't given up on Blockbuster, and another 10% or so higher if I had avoided Overstock. I suppose I need to avoid turnaround companies where I'm not happy with the product or service, even if I think the stock is underpriced: Pier One and 1-800-Flowers, which I still hold, were losses for the year, too. (On the other hand, I made some good money with Six Flags, though that I held on to a little too long.) Hasbro, Berkshire, Nationwide, Safeco, Discover, and short-term shorts in asbestos stocks produced some good profits.

I need to re-evaluate my cost of capital, since I can now pay off my mortgage entirely.

2007 is off to a rollicking start, already more than 2 points ahead of the S&P.

1. So I'm in the Harris Teeter, staring at the frozen fish, when I get the very first "Excuse me. Are you Ted Frank?" in my adult life. (Getting recognized at Brandeis in the days when I was simultaneously one of the most popular and unpopular students on campus doesn't count.) Apologies to the person who recognized me as my surprised flusteryness may have inadvertently come off as aloof rudeness. But it's pleasing to hear that someone at least claims to read Overlawyered first thing in the morning and use it as a homepage to jump to other websites.

2. Slim on her gift-box from Amazon: "It's a pot. Which is fine, because it's a good pot, which means we can get rid of some of our old crappy pots. By which I mean your pots."

3. I'm told that my ex-wife has announced that she is nine weeks pregnant, which will increase Canadian taxpayers' burden ever so incrementally much at the margin.

Ongoing in the popular "Dogs will eat you if they get the chance" series:

Alex Sanchez told NBC4 he had to climb the tree to escape the dog, which attacked four of his friends. He said he wasn't hurt, but one of his friends was mauled.

"The dog just kept biting him and biting him constantly," Sanchez said. "It bit him on the shoulder and on the leg and bit him hard, like everywhere."

Officers first hit the dog with a Taser, but it didn't faze the 6-old-month female. A police officer then shot the dog, ending the attack and the dog's life.

From Don Boudreaux, an open letter to Lou Dobbs.

I'd snark at this WaPo story on websites where fans can shop for the clothes and wares of tv characters, but Slim looks really hawt in her Veronica Mars shiny puffer jacket.