"What are you listening to?" has become a question that can be answered by data.

1. Sleater-Kinney
2. REM
3. The Smiths
4. Cocteau Twins
5. Mountain Goats
6. Fatboy Slim
7. Snow Patrol
8. Liz Phair
9. Talking Heads
10. The White Stripes

Talking Heads and Snow Patrol are artificially low because I've been listening to their CDs in the car, leaving them uncounted by the iPod; The Shins might break onto the list by the same account. (I haven't been happy with the results of plugging the iPod into the tape player; my Prius is too quiet, so I hear the grinding of the tape player.) I'm surprised five recent bands made it into my top ten, not counting Liz Phair as recent—sorry, Liz. I had thought my musical tastes had frozen in 1995. Then again, a lot of my 1990s CDs still haven't made it onto my iPod yet, but that's a revealed preference I suppose. David Lowery would be on the list if one combines Camper van Beethoven and Cracker, and recent Cracker isn't all that distinguishable from CvB.

Mountain Goats in town Tuesday.

iPod your car.

iPod thefts up.

The Econoclast calls this a sort of Priceline for homework help. I wonder how much they pay tutors?

An embarrassing number of expensive restaurants this week.

1. Cascade Cafe, National Gallery of Art. A poorly-run cafeteria with surly service ("Remind you of the Soviet Union?" I asked), wildly expensive prices (something like $9 for a soggy Vietnamese summer roll where the mint had been omitted), poorly designed lines where there's no place to rest cafeteria trays while you pay, and mediocre food. My second time here, and my second time where I promise never to come back. A quarter of the way through our meal, we looked at each other, said "Why are we continuing to eat this?" and agreed to wait a few hours to go to...

2. Oceanaire, F St. between 12th and 13th. I just don't go here often enough. I feel in touch with my roots eating the little herring tidbits before the meal. Of course, that's defeated by the treyf crabcakes, but the Washingtonian magazine, which had a ridiculously huge article on crabcakes this month, is just crazy in failing to recognize these as the best in town: jumbo lump crab, very little filler. I don't even like crab that much; I'm regularly disappointed when I order it elsewhere. I was happy with my glass of Riesling. My friend's halibut was excellent; I was looking forward to the sablefish, since my only experience with sable had been smoked in delis, but found it disappointingly uninteresting. We ended up trading dishes.

3. Georgia Brown's, 15th between Eye and K. I had perlau, an interesting Carolina variant on jambalaya: very meaty, with much high-quality creepy-crawly seafood, but didn't quite have the kick of jambalaya. I don't understand the appeal of parsley, and I certainly don't understand the appeal of making it the dominant herb in a dish. Huge plate loaded with food: I couldn't finish my lunch-sized portion.

4. Equinox, Connecticut between H and Eye. My first time here, because it's so hard to get seated without reservations well in advance, and I wasn't that impressed. The crabcakes didn't measure up to Oceanaire; the overwhelming ingredient seemed to be capers. The beef main course was alright, but nothing that made me want to come back. Excellent dessert, but too many places in town do excellent desserts. The service was comically rude.

5. As Dave, Shani, and I sat at the Gallery Place Mall, I pointed to a "Coming Soon" sign: "There's a restaurant I'm not going to eat at." For if ever there's a restaurant guaranteed to be mediocre at best, it's a restaurant at the Gallery Place Mall with the name "Miso Hungry." Also coming soon: "Thai Chili," where the featured attraction appears to be karaoke.

Verdict: I liked more than I feared I would, but didn't love. The love story between Arthur and Trillian was necessary to give the picaresque an arc, but the two don't interact enough for it to work, and Arthur's character is never the master of his own fate. This was somewhat true in the books, too, but it somehow bothered me less there. A number of scenes suffered from flabby editing. Some slapstick didn't work. I liked Rockwell's Zaphod, and Mos Def was acceptable as Ford Prefect. The Jim Henson puppets were quite nice. Adams was a writer who had problems with endings, and the movie does the same. Matt identifies other problems.

Pitch-perfect was Alan Rickman as Marvin. It's a shame that Alan Rickman is behind a nauseating British play (via Frum) lionizing Rachel Corrie and demonizing Israel: I'm going to have to stop liking him, plus it reminds me of the pervasive anti-Semitism that has previously made me reluctant to visit Europe. As the Jerusalem Post points out, no one in Britain cares about the death of another Rachel, 16-year-old Rachel Thaler, a British citizen killed in a Jerusalem pizza parlor by a suicide bomber who might very well have gotten his weapons from the smuggling tunnels Rachel Corrie attempted to protect.

I'm about to refinance at a 5.25% interest rate (3.675% after tax), but Tyler Cowen and his commenters unnerve me. I figure a trackback will provoke Alex or Tyler or some other budding economist into responding.

Here's my very real dilemma. I bought a condo I love before the bubble. I now have substantial capital gains, and my after-tax housing cost is $1.50/sq.ft./month (vs. $2/sq.ft./mo. for not-quite-comparable rentals in comparable neighborhoods) plus the opportunity cost of having equity tied up in real estate instead of the stock market—though my equity in my real estate has returned a hell of a lot more than my equity in the stock market, where I'm down over 7% in four months. So do I cash out my capital gains to a greater fool and rent (with a likely decline in my standard of living plus the disutility of leaving a condo I really like, the disutility of dealing with a real estate sale, and the disutility of the aggravation of moving), or do I refi to lock in a ridiculously low interest rate that reduces my housing costs to $1.30/sq.ft./mo.—though again plus the opportunity cost in having equity tied up in something that may deflate somewhat? Does the answer change if I have a prime real estate location on top of a Metro station that will only become more valuable relative to more suburban locations as DC grows? (And perhaps even more relatively valuable as Tyler Cowen gains cadres of disciples who want to relocate to across the street from his offices?)

In the worst bubble to date, Los Angeles homes lost 21% of their value between 1989 and 1996. If that happened to me, I'd lose approximately 40% of my equity and a quarter of my net worth, but I'd still have a capital gain, though that reasoning seems to me suspiciously like the well-known gambler's fallacy of "playing with the house's money." No, if I've won $1000 in my first hour of playing blackjack, that's my money.

Adam Bonin has a perfect post about the biggest-stakes Rock-Paper-Scissors game ever, a tale complete with a precocious eleven-year-old with an innate sense of game theory.

Radley Balko has a good name for the new DC baseball stadium: "Taxpayers' Field."

Very nice summary of article on economics of the NFL draft. I'm just amazed how few sportswriters understand the concept of opportunity cost when covering a sport where a huge part of the rules is the limitations on roster construction imposed by the salary cap. Neither of the Manning brothers is ever going to win a Super Bowl, because the rest of the team can't carry the burden imposed by their big contracts. There's a Moneyball book to be written about the Patriots (though perhaps this is that book), and how they're willing to let their stars walk rather than overpay them. It helps that Belichick was an economics major.

Well, I'm getting guests before I expected, thanks to links from Professors Grace and Tabarrok. The site wasn't quite ready to be "public," which seems like a disingenuous thing to say what with it being on the Internets and everything, but, really, that's why you'll find the stylesheet changing on a regular basis. Plus I'm taking a several-week vacation in May and June that will likely keep me from posting.

How good were my seats for the Phillies game? I'm just out of the frame in this photo, standing next to the African-American woman. I was impressed with how polite Andrew Card's Secret Service detail was.

Attendance was 23,000 and change, which puts the lie to my prediction that the Nationals will hit 3 million this year. RFK just doesn't have much in the way of good seats, the cheap upper bowl seats aren't selling, and too many season-ticket holders in the best seats are law firms that will end up swallowing tickets on weekday games. (I got my tickets on StubHub, and am not going to overpay like that again; I probably could've gone to a scalper for face.)

Eat before the game; food is mediocre as well as overpriced, with little in the way of variety. There were a dozen-plus different brands of beer around at $5 to $6.50 a pour, but one has to jog the circuit of the stadium to find any particular one, and even then, the brand's kiosk may not be working. Pepsi only, so demerits for that, too. The lack of ATM machines has been reported elsewhere.

The stadium was strangely muted: not much energy from the public-address announcer or PA system: the Star Spangled Banner started almost without warning, I never heard them announce the substitution for Johnson, and the scoreboard screens were about as uninformative as I've ever seen. On the other hand, it's nice not to have blaring sound effects or organ music every five seconds. As a ballpark, RFK plays sort of like the Astrodome would have if it were outdoors and grass: cavernous. Expect lots of 3-1 games, which, when combined with the free-swinging middle of the Nats lineup, will make for quick games. Metro ran smoothly to and from the game (we left in the middle of the eighth). Lots of fans arrived late.

Baseball: uneventful. Patterson scattered nine base runners and an IBB in six-plus innings and struck out six with a mixture of speeds. A Wilkerson two-run homer after a pitcher double made the difference. Johnson had a great at bat to foul off a lot of pitches (including one off his thigh that made him leave the game two innings later) before he walked, but Vidro proceeded to GIDP, Johnson's break-up slide falling about ten feet short. Lieber not only gave up two home runs, but walked luminaries like Guillen and Castilla. I like that Robinson is willing to bat Wilkerson-Johnson 1-2 (which he doesn't always do, sometimes batting Guzman second), but was mystified that he brought the right-handed Majewski in to face Thome with two men on and two out, but it worked--that time. I love Schneider's catchers' mask.

Researching newspapers for Overlawyered, I often come across fascinating stuff that could relate into a lawsuit later, but not yet. Today's gruesome accident: experienced skydiver jumps from plane, somehow collides with plane wing at 600 feet to have legs sheared off at knees, dies after safely landing. Press doesn't mention where the legs landed, which was the question I had. Press coverage of the accident here and here. Then, looking for more (such as this thread), I found this site cataloging skydiving fatalities, which shows that even tremendously experienced divers make some bad mistakes.

Entertaining: "Oops, I Did It Again" in 1920s megaphone-style, which is just perfect until they re-enact the ending dialogue (via Class Maledictorian). Boing Boing says this is done by a German named Max Raabe, for whom this is a full-time gimmick.

I spent much of Sunday at the National Gallery. My knowledge of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was limited to his height and a handful of his more famous works, so the exhibit there was interesting. Toulouse-Lautrec died at 36 of syphillis and alcoholism, which qualifies him for my next "When he was your age" birthday, such as "When Lord Byron was your age, he'd been dead for a year." (Though Byron also died at 36, now that I look it up; I somehow thought he died sooner.) Someone else has a much more comprehensive list for this game. Given how Monet and Picasso developed in their later careers, it would've been interesting to see what a post-WWI Toulouse-Lautrec would've done. Or maybe not; his contemporary Van Gogh had a full-fledged shift in style in the 1880s, and he died at 37, whereas Toulouse-Lautrec never really developed in the same way.

I found the exhibit more interesting for what it said about late-19th century life in France. Such as a 4' x 6' lithograph ad for Sardines by contemporary Henri Gustave Jossot that shows that using famous artists and famous faces to advertise is hardly a recent innovation--but I doubt Sarah Bernhardt or Aristide Bruant were paid for the use of their images.

Similarly, Toulouse-Lautrec's late 1890s series of circus paintings are fascinating just because they show how little the popular conception of a circus has changed in a century.

The piece I liked best was Steinlen's kitschy Apotheosis of Cats, a giant mural that hung in the Chat Noir--and it was funny to see that "Black Cat" was considered a cool name for a club in the nineteenth century.

The Gilbert Stuart exhibit had its moments, too. Stuart's portraits of Washington became sufficiently famous in his own lifetime that he made a good living painting slapdash $500 knock-offs of his own work where he didn't bother to get the perspective right. I found the exhibit frustrating; there were portraits of people sufficiently famous at the time to retain Stuart, but the listing gave only the sketchiest biographical details. I mean, come on, there's got to be something interesting about the marriage between Jerome Bonaparte and American Eliza Patterson that Napoleon had it annulled. (And sure enough, there is: who knew that a Teddy Roosevelt attorney general was the grandnephew of Napoleon?) I hadn't seen Stuart's "Medallion" portrait of Jefferson before; for those used to the one on the nickel or the $2 bill, it was something to see Jefferson in profile. I need to take a daytrip to Monticello.

There was also a Rembrandt exhibit. Did his Dutch artist contemporaries realize that Rembrandt was playing chess while they were still playing checkers? The difference in understanding lighting is just amazing.

Walking back to the car, my Russian friend and I ran across the Alexandrov Red Army Choir setting up on the Mall, and stuck around for the first hour of their concert. "Watch how they march," she said, "I was at the Iwo Jima memorial and was amazed at what Americans do in comparison." The flag honor guard marched across the stage in the Red Army fashion you may recall from May Day parades where Brezhnev would watch over them, arms swinging, high-kicking. "I think it's just because it's the marching you grew up with," I said. The blue in the Red Army's Russian flag was either faded or, simply put, Russians don't care about color consistency in their flags the way Americans do. I gather Americans are relatively flag-obsessed. It was pretty dramatic to see several dozen Red Army members, in full regalia, singing the Star Spangled Banner with the capitol dome in view. If I described this 2005 scene to someone in 1985, it would've seemed like science fiction or, worse, a bad Patrick Swayze movie. Other culture shock: seeing a dozen Red Army soldiers, again in full dress, perform choreographed chorus-line-kick moves and barrel turns and leaping ballet twirls--it was like a scene out of Monty Python. Never fear: Cossack plie kicks were also on the agenda.

Frank Rich complains about the influence of religious people on politics. No news there. But I don't understand this cartoon. The separation of church and state will crush those that live in a Venn diagram like a Death Star trash compactor?

Watching TV Makes You Smarter (via Marcotte). Johnson misses the real reason television is more cognitively complex today, however: cable television. Forty years ago, a show with 15 million viewers would be a dreadful failure, whereas in today's fragmented market it's a hit, and there aren't many more than fifteen million viewers who will sit through the intelligent shows Johnson trumpets. There's no longer a critical need to pander to the absolute lowest common denominator, though, as Arrested Development's ratings prove, there's still some need: a brilliantly intelligent sitcom with a dozen plot arcs and no laugh track can only pull six million viewers.

Update: Alex Tabarrok has a nice summary of the article, but buys into Johnson's premise that the Flynn effect is somehow related.

I'm Ted Frank. Since July 1, 2005, I have been at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research as a resident fellow specializing in legal studies. AEI provides a more official Ted Frank biography, and my SSRN page is here. There's also a Wikipedia biography of questionable grammar, accuracy, and focus.

After graduating The Law School at The University of Chicago with high honors in 1994, I clerked for a year with Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. For the next ten years, I was at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, where I worked on a variety of matters, including rebuffing an attempt to shut down the California gubernatorial recall election over the use of punchcard ballots; handling multi-billion-dollar antitrust multi-district litigation; defending automobile and Vioxx products liability actions and various consumer class actions; and arguing in front of the Ninth Circuit on behalf of a manufacturer of bingo machines for Indian reservations. Before all of that, I graduated Brandeis University in 1991 summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics and Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, and briefly attended Bellaire High School.

I've been blogging about litigation reform issues for Walter Olson's Overlawyered website since 2003, and for (what was a joint Manhattan Institute/AEI Liability Project site from 2005 to 2007) Point of Law since 2004. I won't be talking about that here. This site is more of a narci-blog for off-the-cuff observations and for my friends and family across the country to keep track of me and my domestic partner. Instead of spamming a couple of dozen friends with a nifty link I saw, I'll post about it here. If you're not friends or family, but for some reason care about what I have to say, or what I'm reading or watching or listening to, you're welcome to join in the fun. I've testified before Congressional subcommittees; written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and National Review Online; been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, Boston Globe, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Slate.com, National Journal, Forbes, Business Week, National Review, and Weekly Standard and interviewed or spoken on BBC, ABC, C-SPAN, Bloomberg TV, NPR, Fox News, a couple of nationally syndicated talk-shows, and a bunch of local radio stations from coast to coast (and beyond, in the case of KTUU-TV-Anchorage); I also use the blog to keep track of a fraction of these appearances. The New York Times photographed me when they covered an objection I filed to a class action settlement with a contingent fee of over 3700%. Famous people who have criticized me include Rep. Barney Frank, Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Maxine Waters, and Rep. Gary Ackerman—badges of honor all. Contact me here.

The title of the blog? I like "Lagniappe," because it's a good SAT word that I learned from my days in New Orleans, and it's a fitting description of the blog: if you think my opinions on litigation reform are sufficiently interesting that you also care about my travelogues or opinions on baseball or D.C. restaurants or television, this blog is that bonus. Derek Lowe used this title way back when, but has since switched when he took the Boeing, so hopefully he won't mind.

"Ted Frank" is a surprisingly common name. Perhaps you're looking for one of my Googlegängers:

• the former partner at Arnold & Porter?
• the president and former CEO of Axentis, Inc. (photographed here)?
• the NBC executive?
• the principal of Trinity Lutheran Church and School?
• Teddy Holtz Frank, mother of two and president of Health Promotion Associates, Inc.?
• the fictional Harvard Law Exam character?
• the New York actor from Northwestern U.?
• the American University at Cairo professor?
• Rita's husband who lives in Indonesia?
• the author of the 1979 book Deutsch für Amerikaner?
• the Wisconsin construction business owner (who may or may not also be a heroic EMT)?
• the owner of the Golf Driving Range of Texas in Kennedale?
• the 1950s light-heavyweight tomato can?
• Robin Shuford's fiance?
• the California maritime lawyer who went to USF Law?
• the expert on Swedish political elections?
• the president of Mower County Pork Producers in Minnesota?
• miscellaneous crew?
• the jazz trumpeter?
• "Day Day" of the Banka Banka cattle station in the Northern Territory?
• Ted Franks, the UK KPMG associate?
• the Missouri application developer?
• the possibly fictional reclusive Arkansas heroin-addict and punk-rocker?
• a naval captain in a Tom Clancy novel?
• one of the twelve other people with the same name on Facebook?

(This post is misdated, because it's effectively serving as a FAQ that will be updated periodically.)