I'm very glad I started watching House this season, and then caught up through the DVDs; if I had started any other time, I would have been utterly fed up with the low quality of the episodes in the middle of Season 3, but knowing how good the Season 4 stuff is, I'm sticking with it.

"Control Tower" column in The Stranger (Seattle):

Marriage-wise, [Lori] Gottlieb has shot herself in the foot with this piece. No one is going to marry her after reading her litany of bitterness and desperation. How could you possibly feel loved by her? And besides, even if she convinced you—somehow—that she truly loved you, everyone at your wedding would be thinking, "So, this is the loser she settled for, huh?"

I'm not sure that's right; certainly Gottlieb has closed the door for herself with a large number of men, but, if Gottlieb is sincere in her new utility curve, there's a different set of men who would find the businesslike approach Gottlieb suggests attractive. Of course, the premise is questionable; this is a pessimistic woman for whom the grass is always greener on the other side, and once she finds her Mr. Good-Enough, I strongly suspect we'll be seeing a mea culpa essay in the February 2014 Atlantic about Gottlieb's divorce from him.

Update: I don't think "sincere" is the right word above, because I think Gottlieb is at least superficially sincere and certainly not deliberately lying about her preferences. The proper phrase is perhaps "accurately self-aware," as I suspect she is confusing her preferences with her meta-preferences, i.e., her preferences about preferences.

Writing about John Edwards's trial record.

Erin Brockovich, the real-life character who brings fictional lawsuits, thinks my criticism of her trolling for clients in Avandia lawsuits is "shameful". She should know from shameless.

I was very amused by Brockovich's remark "It is no coincidence that thousands on Avandia now have heart attacks." Really? Thousands of people who saw Erin Brockovich in the theaters have had heart attacks, and many others have had strokes. Some even contracted cancer! Coincidence, or has Ms. Brockovich put movie royalties ahead of safety? (x-posted from Overlawyered)

Though I am on the FTC "Do Not Call" list, this group called me at 6:06 PM on February 18 offering to "lower my interest rate" on my credit cards. But they didn't know my name, so they're clearly just autodialing everyone without regard.

The people who have acutally purchased something from PDM don't seem too happy, either. The problem with consumer class action law, however, is that it is used to blackmail legitimate businesses with deep pockets, rather than protect consumers from these sort of illegitimate businesses.

The call I got was from 231-224-2058, which leads to a recording.

The caller said he was in Bedford, Texas, which would correspond to the Google address for the place:

3307 Huntington Dr
Colleyville, TX 76034
(817) 354-5478

Web research shows a number of 888-288-8013 if you wish to complain with calling long-distance.

Any Virginia attorneys out there who want to bring an action on my behalf for $1500 plus attorneys' fees under the Virginia Telephone Privacy Protection Act, drop me a note.

In the American:

Neumann and Kenny came up with a strategy to capture the value in this pattern. Consider the day on which [Jim] Cramer recommends Stock A (Wednesday in the example above) as Day 0. The authors say you should sell Stock A short when it opens on Day 1 and cover your short at the closing bell on Day 1. [...]

Following such a strategy for 127 recommendations studied between July 27, 2005, and September 9, 2005, would have produced a profit of $861.32 on an investment of $10,000. That’s an 8.6 percent gain in just six weeks, which, when annualized, comes to about 70 percent. The gain does not include trans­action costs.

Yeah, not including transactions costs makes a big difference. Add in $10/trade for 254 trades, and that is a $1700 loss on an investment of $10,000. And that is before one accounts for the bid-ask spread.

Better answer: if Jim Cramer recommends a stock you want to buy, wait until Day 2 to buy it so the market shakes off the artificial boost he gives it at the beginning of Day 1. No promises that is a winning strategy either.