What are the odds that two bloggers would be at the same Christopher Hitchens talk? Pretty good, as it turns out. (I can't recognize if that's my lecture companions in this photo, who were waiting for me outside when I had actually arrived in the auditorium first.) From my front-row perch, I could smell the alcohol on Hitch's breath, and he and Wheen polished off a bottle of wine between them during the proceedings. Hitchens was still in fine form: "Faith is the most overrated of the virtues—after patience." Hitchens paraphrasing Karzai: "You fools! You just burned down the library of Jalalabad with 200 copies of the Koran in it!" (Repeating from this article, of course.) And his mildly misogynistic take on Mother Teresa: "To say contraception is the greatest threat to world peace is the hysterical ravings of a crazed virgin." As State notes, the audience questioning was devoted to Iraq. Francis Wheen served as moderator, and his book on "mumbo-jumbo" seems like it would be entertaining. We didn't stick around for autographs. I was impressed with myself that I had purchased the fifteen-pound "Love, Poverty, and War," for ten pounds until I checked my Amazon wish-list and discovered that it was available for $11 in my home country. Katie Newmark suggests that I've received additional utility from the earlier purchase, but I can't say that my internal discount rate is that high.

Kevin got knocked out of the poker tournament shortly after I left Friday night.

I tried again Saturday night at the 110-pound tournament, with 64 players and a top prize of 2000 pounds, but never really got the cards. I saw three showdowns in three hours; I doubled up when I hit a set with my 44, won the blinds once with a pre-flop raise, won another hand after the flop checked through with an aggressive bet on the turn after a blank hit, then bled chips when I got good starting hands that missed the flop and left me with no outs to play aggressively, forcing me to fold early: AKhearts and an all-club flop won by Q9s against a player with top pair, that sort of thing. I fold AQs on the river to a bet on a T9886 board. I went all in with ATo from the big blind against a 2xBB bet from the button and a call from the small blind, and tied with another ATo, and that split pot was my last profit of the night. I open-pot-raise with 98s two off the button, the button calls, the flop misses me, and I fold to a bet. Down to a 6xBB stack, I have K8s in the big blind, the cut-off raises to 3xBB, the small blind calls all in. The Tube will stop running soon, so I go all in—my utility is worse off getting knocked out at 12:10 then at 11:45. As it turns out, I was better off calling and betting the AK5 flop; the cut-off had QQ, calls my all-in bet, and hits his set on the turn. Even a second king on the river doesn't help me, though it would've beat the A7s small blind.

Back at Abbey Road. I saw my cousin again at the British Library, and visited the Science Museum, where they had a working Babbage Difference Engine, made in 1991 using nineteenth-century technology. Nifty, that, as were displays on topology and fairly esoteric stuff that I don't normally associate with museums. An exhibit on arithmetic teaching devices through the ages included a 1979 "Little Professor", which was an 11th-birthday present for me. It probably cost $40 at the time, and was both larger than and a thousandth as powerful as my iPod. I got suckered into paying eight pounds for the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" exhibit, forgetting that I didn't really like the movie that much. Life-sized Vogons reciting poetry and Sam Rockwell's wardrobe if you're into that sort of thing; the occasional plaque making a half-hearted attempt to connect movie events with real-life scientific issues.

Otherwise, did lots of neighborhood exploring and walking; my blisters have blisters, and one of my toes has turned an interesting color. Notes:

• The Sherlock Holmes statue on Baker Street has the engraved possessive "its" misspelled with an apostrophe.
• Cirocco wanted postcards, and I've been appalled at the low quality of what's out there. Picadilly Circus has sophisticated LCD advertising that's reminiscent of "Blade Runner," and all the postcards are of the decade-old neon.
• I've been entertained by the restaurants proclaiming to be American. The "Old Orleans" offers fajitas and quesadillas, but not gumbo. Another more upscale place was advertising "Boston roast salmon." I suppose Australians feel the same way when seeing an Outback Steakhouse; I didn't check the Australian-themed restaurant for whether it had similar misplaced menu items.
• My father asked for Horlicks malted powder, so I went to the O2 center on Finchley, where there's a giant supermarket. The mall is mostly restaurants, so the Sainsbury grocery and the multiplex are clearly the anchors of the shopping complex—and I discovered that my dawdling at the bookstore meant that I couldn't get into the grocery at 5:10 because it closed at 5!? Who closes a grocery at 5? The British do, and that's why they've lost their empire, I tell you. I found it at a smaller grocery that kept more reasonable hours, plus I purchased him the competing brands of Milo and Malteser in case they more closely approximated his platonic ideal of a malt mix. (Horlicks is actually available in an Indian grocery in Herndon, and probably also at the British shops in Clarendon by me and Santa Monica by my brother, so this was a bit of a fool's errand, but I had wanted to see a full-scale British supermarket.)
• I had thought all the NY Yankees baseball caps I saw were being worn by Americans, but I've heard enough British accents to know that it's just a trendy thing to wear here.
• No really exceptional meals. I tried the Yo! Sushi chain, because the idea of chain sushi served on moving conveyer belts appealed to me. It was better than American supermarket sushi, but not that special, and it occurred to me too late that 4 pm was a bad time to be eating conveyer belt sushi. Plus they charged a pound for tap water, the bastages. They offered a duck hand-roll, but the meat was dry and disappointing. Pappadum Cafe was an Indian buffet north of Russell Square that was hit-and-miss. American buffets are "All You Can Eat," while the British ones are the more polite "All You Care To Eat." I did have the 3-pound curry from a hole-in-the-wall in Waterloo so that I could say I've had that experience.
• There is a Lee Ho Fook in Soho, and it does serve beef chow mein, but I foolishly failed to pick up a menu.
• Eric and I stepped into a betting parlour to see if we could wager money on Paris getting the 2012 Olympics, but the attendant had no idea what we were talking about. We did see people betting on fictional CG animated horse races, which is an impressive level of addiction. I'm surprised they didn't have a guy there taking bets on "What number am I thinking?"
• When I returned to St. John's Wood Saturday, there was a huge crowd for a cricket match. A correspondent recommended the cricket experience to me, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, perhaps from too much exposure to the Monty Python version of cricket. I do want to thank all those who wrote in with suggestions, and am sorry that I didn't find the time to take up most of them.

Light on the tourism the last couple of days. The original plan was to go off to Paris or some other European city when Eric returned to New York, but I liked London so much I decided to stick around. London hasn't really returned the favor.

I had a two-night gap where I needed a new hotel, so I made the mistake of using Orbitz.com to find one. Aha! A three-star hotel with a private toilet, £45/night, albeit on the other side of town. The £30/person double Eric and I stayed in was perfectly fine, so how could the £45 single be worse? I decided that taking a bus would be easier than lugging luggage through the Tube; perhaps it was, but it was an hour-long journey. The hotel got its payment in cash in advance, at which point I discovered that this was not a three-star hotel. You know, I can deal with a tv without a remote control. It's alright that I have no dresser. I'm not thrilled with threadbare carpet or walls, or the mildewed wall near the in-room sink, but I'll deal. That there's a huge crack in the ceiling that implies that Clouseau and Cato are going to come crashing through any minute, ok, it hasn't fallen in yet, and probably won't for the seven hours a night I'm sleeping there. The lack of a private toilet, when I gave up staying at £20 hotels with shared toilets, however, bothers me, especially when there's no light and no toilet paper, and there are weird bugs on the floor. (There's an art to finding pleasant and well-maintained public toilets, however, and I'm sufficiently well-versed in this that the only real loss is the cash.) I e-mail Orbitz, which refuses to handle the matter over e-mail, and asks me to call a 1-800 number not accessible from Europe. Thirty-six hours later, no resolution. [Update, May 29: still no word from Orbitz.] Guess which Internet travel service I'll probably never use again. I got home last night to discover that I'm not just a block away from the underground, but my window is just above the tracks, though the Tube stops running at 1.

Kevin and I are at a poker tournament now. Or, rather, Kevin is; I lost with KK again by failing to raise pre-flop and letting K2s catch up. This is Kevin's first day of tournaments, and he's taking to it quite quickly; it'll be interesting to see if he places in the money.

But between the poker loss and a very very bad shoe in a casino today, I've lost the blackjack and poker profits, probably down a total of five or ten pounds overall.

In Las Vegas, the dealer checks for blackjack before there's any action. In Europe, players act before the dealer checks for blackjack. This actually makes a difference: I split 8s versus an ace, which one is supposed to do in America, where, if one is given the option, it means that there is no chance of blackjack. In Europe, however, that means putting money on the table that may be dead if the dealer paints the ace. I remembered this mathematical principle too late, and felt cursed the rest of the way, quitting when I was even for the trip.

The highlight of the tourism was going to see Christopher Hitchens speak at the University College. More on this another day, as my time is expiring on this pound's worth of Internet.

and their history.

Via the interesting Lifehacker blog (which is a 21st-century Hints from Heloise), tips for getting good customer support. On the other hand, lies Verizon DSL support has told.

...Michael Jackson was cool?

Katie Newmark links to a fascinating interview with the poor soul tasked with translating IACS, with all of its unique slang and neologisms, into English.

A great, great book on this subject, especially in the context of poetry, which often has the additional constraints of rhyme and meter, is Douglas Hofstadter's underrated "Le Ton Beau de Marot." On the web is this interesting amateur review from a Brit who notes the irony of the difficulties of translation from American English to British English just within this (itself untranslatable) book.

I had it made clear to me how much translation is about culture as well as language from the very first sentence: "Picture Holden Caulfield all grown up, now a university professor, writing a book about translation." Holden who? I read on, hoping for clues, until I got to "This sounds like poor, poor Salinger." Aha — Salinger — so it's a literary reference then — presumably Catcher in the Rye? Pull a reference book off the shelf — yes, Caulfield is the protagonist. Apparently, Catcher in the Rye is deeply part of American culture, one of those books nearly every American has read; but it's not part of my, British, culture. I'm vaguely aware it's about American teenage angst, but that's all. So the very first sentence doesn't translate for me!

We started the day at Leadenhall Market, the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter series. Architecturally interesting, but the shops didn't appeal. I picked up a UK-only sci-fi book for a friend at a nearby Waterstone's and we headed west to Bond Street for a jaunt to the Wallace Collection. Wallace, was the illegitimate heir of a line of wealthy Brits who liked collecting 18th-century French art. It's a beautiful house, and a wonderful armour and arms collection (though it felt redundant with the one I saw in the Tower of London). But the art seemed mostly second-rate, aside from a Rembrandt and some Rubens and Van Dyks, and extravagant Louis XVI-era ceramic inkwells and toiletry sets for wig-powdering bring out my inner Jacobin. ("Don't tell AEI that," said Eric.) The free tour was banal and gossipy; I abandoned it a half-hour before Eric.

The afternoon was given to a matinee of "The Philadelphia Story," at the Old Vic. It's a beautiful theatre, and a great play, but Kevin Spacey isn't Cary Grant, and Elizabeth Jennifer Ehle isn't Katharine Hepburn, and the spectre of the two earlier greats overshadowed the performance. Plus, the awkwardness of seeing British actors inconsistently attempt American accents.

We rushed across town to Gutshot for a successful poker tournament, and, after determining that Ruth and Kevin had already eaten, went back to Cafe Spice Nemaste for another Indian feast. Appetizers: an interesting prawn-and-crab samosa with a marvelous chili sauce; a good, if overpriced, bhelpoori; and a good tandoori beef dish with pepper spicing. We ordered the mixed grill again for the main course, which was exquisite again, and a chicken dish called "frango." I associate Frango with Marshall Fields chocolate mints, but this was a Goan peppery dish; again, the chicken was cooked perfectly, and the sauce was good, if not up to the quality of the tandoori. Dessert was bebinca, a pastry the menu claimed took six hours to make, but somehow came out tasting like kosher-for-Pesach sponge cake. With luck, I'll make it to CSN a third time Friday.

On the way back, we caught the closing moments of the European League finals from the window of a pub; if I had known it would be a six-goal game, I might have insisted we watch the whole thing, but we caught the drama of the penalty shootout and Liverpool victory from 3-nil down.

I finally had fish-and-chips Tuesday night at Seashell (Marlyebone) with Eric and a Stanford B-School friend of his. Okay, it was a fancy sit-down place, and I had plaice (flounder?) instead of cod, but it was good, if wildly overpriced, stuff, and it was a little unappetizing to get halfway through my beer to discover plastic-wrapper detritus stuck to the inside of my stein.

Another hot-water datapoint: a television commercial featuring an older British housewife talking about her need for a "cuppa" during the day, and showing off her "space-age kettle." She then proceeds to set the temperature of her water to 85 Celsius, or 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

Eric and I decided to go to the £15 tournament at Gutshot, a poker-themed pub and Internet cafe last night.

Three tables, named Moneymaker, Ferguson, and Raymer. I'm at the Ferguson table. I decide that there's no profit in letting anyone know that Greg Raymer effectively paid for my trip to London. Eric brings me a cold draught Foster's from the bar—how did I go 36 years without ever having a Foster's? Good beer, that.

I started off poorly; I lost a third of my chips with ATo v a small stack's AQ. I had to play tight because a large stack to my left was regularly raising and re-raising all in. Far too often. I noticed that sometimes he'd push all his chips in, and then quickly look away to his left. A guilty tell? Oh, why did I sell my Caro book instead of memorize it? I raised with T9o in the hopes my previous tight play would reward me with the blinds here, but the big stack reraised all in and looked away to the left. T9o isn't a great hand, but I had pot odds against anything other than an overpair and called. Oops: he showed JJ. I administered a bad beat and stayed alive when I got a ten on the flop and a nine on the turn and he didn't improve.

I picked up another chunk of chips when my KQ spiked a K on the flop and QQ and a garbage hand had to fold to my bet.

I open-raised with A7s from the cut-off, and the button, a passive player (and also the only woman in the 23-person tournament) cold-called. Flop is rags, check, check. I bet all-in on the blank turn and picked up another nice pot.

We're now down to the final nine, top four get paid. Eric's survived, also. There's a giant stack at the table with half the chips, but he's bleeding chips by regularly challenging all-ins and losing two-thirds of the time. No one challenges my AKs minimum raise under the gun, and I pick up the blinds, but I'm only at 7xBB or so, so when the big stack steals my big blind, and then also raises my KQo small blind with a 2xBB bet, I reraise all in. He has A7o, unfortunately, but I double up when a king hits.

I stay out of the way as the big stack jousts with other players, and we're down to seven. A small stack in early position raises all-in about 3xBB my blind and it's folded around to me. I have A5o, and he's looking uncomfortable, so I make the marginal call, announcing, "I'm going to hate myself for this." He has KQo, and this time the ace wins, and we're down to six.

The formerly giant stack cripples himself in another race of a hand, and I now have the second-largest stack, only a few chips behind the largest stack. The cut-off raises all in with a small stack, I call with QJs and a medium stack, and the formerly giant stack, in the big blind, also goes all in, and I call that small raise. The big blind has AJ, the cutoff has A8. The flop is JT6; the turn is a 9, which means that I have 10 outs for the side pot and 7 for the main pot, and the 8 does come on the river, giving me the straight, and putting me in the money, as well as giving me the largest stack. The giant stack is out of the tournament and out of the money, when he pretty much had at least second place locked up.

Eric is the small stack, and his QJ all in loses to an AK. He finishes fourth, for £30. I have just under half of the chips.

Three-handed, the player on my right is the second-largest stack; on the button, he says "Call... raise!" and is held to the call. I raise all in from the small blind with AQs. Big blind folds, and so does the dealer after figuring that I have him covered, and I increase my lead.

We go around one and I lose my blinds, which are large enough now that a round of this is a sixth of my stack; the small stack doubles up once through the second-largest stack, but is still a small stack.

I'm the big blind. Dealer, a small, but growing, stack, raises all in. Small blind, the second-largest stack, re-raises all in, and I show my A8o before folding it. The smaller stack is knocked out, and we're heads up. Now that I'm the small stack, I offer a generous deal of £45/£20, which is refused.

First hand, I raise with 75o, and win the big blind.

Second hand, he calls, I raise to 3xBB with QJo, and he re-raises all in, and I have the pot-odds to call the AKs that he actually has. King on the flop, no improvement for me, and I finish second for an £85 prize, and a £70 profit. Final results should be posted later today have been posted.

How could I forget to mention that I went to the Globe Theatre Sunday to see "The Tempest"? The Globe is a reconstruction of the Shakespearean-era original; Eric and I got £5 standing-room tickets, and were fortunate to arrive early enough to get a position leaning against the front of the stage. A fascinating space, and one really got a sense of what it must've been like to see Shakespeare in the original; the slapstick, for example, could play as slapstick. The production took the interesting tack of using just three (male) actors to play all the roles, and then combined these acrobatics with modern dance from three women wearing leather jackets and jeans. The dancers' roles varied from symbolizing scene changes, to performing costume changes for the actors, to performing a symbolic props. A remarkable feat all around, performed without an intermission. The direction took advantage of the space, actors interacting with the crowd in front of them.

Last night, I confirmed that British pizza tastes about as one would expect British pizza to taste.

Today: a trip to the Royal Court of Justice, an impressive edifice with miles of corridors. In Courtroom 6, we took in a half-hour of procedural wrangling in the criminal appeal R. v. Khan. Could the defense attorney call as a witness a juror who, at one point, claimed that he had been intimidated by the victim's family, then recanted? The procedural answer is simple in America: a collateral attack through seeking a writ of habeas corpus. It wasn't clear to me whether the difficulty in Britain was a function of a failing of the rules or of the defense attorney. We left after he clumsily cited to a case for an obvious point that wasn't of much help to his argument. But: wigs, "M'lord," and a defendant in an actual dock.

We then visited the John Soane Museum. Soane was an architect who married wealthy, collected accordingly, and then converted his house into a museum for the collection. Other than the Hogarth paintings (which reminded one of a centuries-old version of one of the early issues of Mad magazine), not much special about the collection, though it was charming to see an 18th century museum preserved as such, organized more like the wall of a Bennigan's than a modern-day museum.

I commend the London Walks tours to visitors; the ninety-minute stroll through Westminster was entertaining and educational.

Other rushed observations, as I have an 8:30 dinner I need to get to:

• I don't think I made it clear how good Cafe Spice Namaste was. The tandoori dishes included duck and venison, and the duck might even outshine my favorite Thai duck in the DC area. The lamb curry was a bit disappointing, but only in the sense that it was nowhere near as special as the rest of the meal.
• There's an ice cream dish here called a "99 Flake." Noone sells it for .99 though.
• Things you won't see in America: slot machines (called "fruit machines" here) next to bumper cars (which, of course, have the steering wheel on the right) in a shop called Funland. Another thing you won't see in America: a Simpsons slot machine. I lost 50 pence in it before deciding not to make further investments to learn whether the actors gave their voices to the venture. It might well not be an officially endorsed product.
• After a frightening stretch where I was down 300 pounds and needed to borrow money to split a third ace, I won another 95 pounds playing blackjack. I had fun adding and taking away bets so that the superstitious Asian players at the table would be upset because I "made a box" with only five bets on the table instead of the auspicious six.

Even at a pound an hour (thank you, 61 Charing Cross Road), I can't spend too much time blogging, but I did want to check in. Eric arrived Saturday, and we've been sharing a 60-pound room in King's Cross. There's been a lot of walking. Tourism has included another stint at the British Museum; the Caravaggio exhibit at the National Gallery; the Tate Modern; a discovery that the Saatchi Gallery (beautiful space, ugly paintings) is more expensive than St. Paul's; the Somerset House and Courtauld Gallery; Fleet Street; Samuel Johnson's House and associated tourist traps; the Millennium Bridge; and probably more that I'm forgetting. The Courtauld Gallery was a real highlight; I don't understand why it isn't featured more prominently in the guidebooks. I might have missed it entirely if not for Eric.

Food: I've decided that the safest bet for ethnic food in London is Ethiopian/Eritrean/East-African restaurants, because there's a sufficient population to support the dining, but no incentive to make the food blander, because Brits would be frightened of even bland African food. Addis in King's Cross is competent Ethiopian food; Zigni in Islington is an Eritrean buffet that looks indistinguishable from an Ethiopian buffet. The Saturday-afternoon Borough Market was a wonderful experience: scallops fresh from the shell, ostrich steak-and-onion sandwiches, chorizo sandwiches, lots of samples. After too many pasties, I discovered that the Eat sandwich shop sells a nice chorizo-and-red-and-yellow-pepper baguette that looks to be a better lunchtime option.

The best meal so far in London was today's lunch at Cafe Spice Namaste' (east of Tower Hill). It's much like Heritage India in DC, only higher quality. It was the best tandoori I ever had, if also by far the most expensive. Dessert was a black-pepper ice cream, which worked nicely conceptually, though the ice cream wasn't up to, say, Ben & Jerry standards. Still, I don't understand why more restaurants don't try to mix the spicy and the sweet in a dessert.

Elsewhere, I picked up 110 pounds at blackjack at another dismal casino outside the British Museum, and dropped 15 pounds in a Monday evening poker tournament in Clerkenhall (losing hand was KK v ATo; I raised pre-flop to 2xBB; button raises all-in, I call; sometimes, aces spike on the river).

Via Tabarrok, the Self-Referential Aptitude Test. Check out Marginal Revolution for good Star Wars analysis.

At about the 1:30 mark, my friend Dan is interviewed skipping work to see the Sith. I probably won't catch it until the 1st. Shani and Dave have already opined that it's devoid of goodness, a bad sign; I had hopes for this one, though it does appear Lucas has written himself into a corner.

It's raining fairly heavily right now, which means public transportation instead of walking, which means waiting until 930 to buy my day pass to avoid the rush-hour surcharge. So: time for blogging.

Tourism catalog: Natural History Museum, Brompton Oratory, Harrod's, south end of Hyde Park, British Library (and my second cousin Henry), Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, British Museum, Walks.com tour of The City (including the Monument; an inn that figured in the Pickwick Papers; tales of the 1665 Plague, the 1666 Fire, and the Blitz; remains of the Mithra Temple; the Lord Mayor, complete in sash; the Guildhall), duck into St. Paul's as far as one could go without paying 8 pounds, architectural exploration of The City (1 Poultry, the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England building, the Gherkin, the Lloyd's Building, a Sephardic synagogue that was closed for Thursday), and the Tower of London.

Miscellaneous observations:

• Brits are sufficiently mature that evolution is not controversial here. The Natural History Museum is unapologetic about the ape-man link, Darwin is on the ten-pound bill, and Microsoft is running an ad campaign based on a not very funny joke about evolution.
• The Dodi and Di memorial in the Harrod's basement is perhaps the tackiest thing I've seen in my life.
• I don't know if the Egyptian theme in Harrod's dates from Art Deco days or from the current owner, but its supposed glamour reminded me of nothing more than the Luxor—a fine example (albeit a non-actionable one) of trade dress dilution if ever there was one.
• Harrod's started as a grocer. It's as if there were a Sutton Place Gourmet on the ground floor of a Neiman Marcus, except a Sutton Place gourmet with a lot of Indian entrees sold by the hectagram. I splurged on a fourteen-pound macaroni and cheese at the upscale food court there for the experience of doing so, but won't do that again.
• Pasties aren't all that. And while there's Indian food everywhere (including "Tandoori-flavored Doritos"), it's shockingly bland. I asked for medium spicy at one restaurant, and quickly learned that it was the equivalent of the American extra-mild; the mild saag paneer Ruth ordered had no picante heat at all.
• Cadbury's hot chocolate machines have a readout for the current serving temperature. Every machine I've seen so far: 92 degrees Celsius, or about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I better not hear anyone claim that Stella Liebeck's McDonald's 190-degree coffee was somehow unusual.
• The Evening Standard was kind enough to provide a gigantic headline "NEW BID TO CURB GREEDY LAWYERS" that shall go on the door to my office.
• My team won a hard-fought Trivial Pursuit match when, on the final question, I had an unconscious recollection that Sherlock Holmes's home county was Yorkshire. How did I know that? I'm not sure if I even knew that Yorkshire was a county.
• In the British edition of "Geographic Trivial Pursuit," "Europe" is the hardest category because half the questions involve obscure British celebrity/football/cricket trivia.
• The map-books point out a "Holocaust Memorial Garden" in Hyde Park, but, though there's a nice brook there, there's no sign identifying it one way or the other.
• I won 100 pounds at blackjack in under thirty minutes, but it was a rather dismal casino. Or, perhaps, I just have shorter patience for the fundamental unfairness when the woman next to me, after refusing to hit 15 vs. 8 (after thinking about it for ages) or double ten vs. 7, then sucks up consecutive five-pound blackjacks that she then takes even money on. Plus, no no-smoking tables. Either way, I left quickly. I proceeded to lose five pounds at video poker in the video-game arcade next door.
• I bought a suit for 150 pounds.

The New York Times' Jennifer 8. Lee invented the neologism "man date" in a typical trend-spotting New York Times story (i.e., I know two or three friends or friends of friends who have the same problem, so it must be of national import). It refers to the supposed discomfort of two male friends who have an outing that could be perceived as a gay date, not that there's anything wrong with that. So, it's worth noting that, on May 8, Fred and I went to dinner at Hamburger Mary's, then went to the theatre, and then walked together to Dupont Circle. If that's not being secure in my heterosexuality, what is?

Also: my referrer logs tell me Ms. Lee is one of this blog's regular readers thanks to her self-Technorati-ing (a concept calling for a New York Times trend-spotting article if ever there was one—call me for a quote, Jennifer!), here's the chance for my readers to express other grievances or welcome notes in the comments. Such as: how come we never got invited to these rollicking lawsuit-inducing parties we read about on Wonkette?

Other people sneer at Lee's numeric middle name, but I think it's cool. Poor Theodore D. Frank has been asking the ABA for over a year to stop sending me his mail, and a Jennifer Lee has got to have that problem twenty-fold. Any kids I have are going to get a middle name like Zev or Quentin or Zoe.

Two more datapoints on British escalators: (1) "Walk on the left, stand on the right" isn't just tradition, it's absolutely encouraged by signs. In DC, while people will walk on the left until blocked by tourists, the official policy of Metro is that walking on the (90-ft-a-minute) escalators is forbidden. (2) Private escalators move about as fast as the Underground escalators.

Tourism today: a trip to Green Park, walk past the Victoria Monument and camp out in front of Buckingham for the changing of the guard. Unfortunately, though guidebooks said 11:30, it wasn't until noon. But getting there early was absolutely necessary to get the prime viewing spot I had; I took a lot of photos for tourists who couldn't reach the front, but I didn't bring my own camera. Americans there were thrilled to hear another American voice; a group of U-Louisville students, there on a partially-campus-funded trip for their British History class, called it a "normal" voice, causing me to wince. I knew that the Changing of the Guard is anti-climactic, but I really wasn't impressed: the marching doesn't compare to similar efforts from, say, the Red Army; the soldiers aren't anywhere near as stoic as the stereotype; and all the pomp and circumstance of the tradition is somewhat defeated when the musical ceremony's first song is "When The Saints Go Marching In" followed by a Bee-Gees cover, at which point I decided that two hours of standing by the Buckingham Palace gates were enough.

I walked through the gorgeous St. James Park—friendly ducks, geese, and pelicans (as well as parasitical pigeons). From there, to the War Cabinet Room, which came highly recommended by the WWII buffs at my old law firm. That exhibit was fairly low key, but the new Churchill Museum (included on for the ten-pound admissions fee) was really something. I was entranced for two hours there on the narrow topic of Churchill's life and times, and could easily have spent more had I not felt a need to keep moving in my limited time in London.

The one thing that bothered me was a questionable insertion of political messages into the Museum. There's a gigantic interactive computer display of the ninety years of Churchill's life, with sixteen or more input terminals where one can pull up files, photos, letters, from a calendar interface; it includes important events in history that may not have affected Churchill directly, like the sinking of the Lusitania or the introduction of the first laundromat in Britain in 1949. If someone operating the 1945 screen picks the right date in August, everybody's screen goes white with a flash, and we're interrupted to be told about the death toll from Hiroshima. I somehow suspect that there isn't anything there about the Nanking Massacre, however (though I didn't check the 1937 pages, but, then, my browsing was interrupted three times by Hiroshima, and never by Nanking).

There's a similar blindness in pamphlets handed out about background issues that museum-goers are presumed to be unfamiliar with. The communism and Cold War pamphlets have a lot about Karl Marx's ideals, Western fears of Soviet ambition, and Joseph McCarthy (!) but nothing about the millions of people murdered by Soviet and Chinese and Korean and Cuban communism, one sentence that only hints at these countries' subjugation of their neighbors, and one sentence that only hints at Soviet efforts to subvert Western European democracy, simultaneously minimizing it by identifying a high-ranking spy as a scandal. Criminy, Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain."

By the time I got out, it was raining. I walked over to Downing Street, which is now fenced off even more than Pennsylvania Avenue is; No. 10 (I hear Blair lives in No. 11 these days) wasn't even visible from the cross-road, and once upon a time the guidebooks described it as the sort of place that wasn't even identifiable except for a single bobby standing watch. I walked to Trafalgar Square (Have I mentioned how impressive the Nelson Column is? The Brits know how to do memorials.), hopped an Underground to Waterloo, wandered the train station for a while (scene: advertisement claiming that six train workers a day are assaulted while doing their jobs, and promising prosecution for such actions; Britain seems more violent than America in some ways; it seems unimaginable that there are 2000 assaults on Amtrak, NY, Chicago, LA, and DC subway workers a year, much less while on the job), decided not to brave the rain to find the Saatchi Gallery, and took a bus to Picadilly Circus, where I explored the Trocadero Mall. Many more football video games available in Britain than in the US, and some of them look particularly high quality, not that I'm going to spend thirty pounds (plus, perhaps, five pounds VAT) to find out.

Food: Marks & Spencer operates a chain of mini-yuppie-groceries with impressive selections of prepared foods, a much higher quality and variety of prepared entrees than in the US. I was tempted to purchase chicken tikka masala in the sort of a microwavable bowl I normally associate with Chef Boyardee, but settled for a brunch of an excellent baked cheese roll. (Mild culture shock observation: checkout girl concluding transaction with "Here you go" rather than "Have a nice day.") Dinner was at McDonald's: after stopping in to see what they call a quarter-pounder, how could I pass up the 99-pence curry chicken sandwich? It tasted precisely like one would expect a 99-pence curry chicken sandwich from McDonald's: a McChicken sandwich with a very mild curry sauce instead of mayonnaise. I presume that experience with the IRA is why one can't find a trash can in the Waterloo McDonald's, which just shows that US hasn't quite yet experienced terrorism to its fullest extent.

Speaking of which, I listened to the entirety of the 11 September 1940 radio broadcast of Churchill. The Blitz had killed thousands of British civillians; an invasion seemed imminent. We think of Churchill as a great orator because of some incredibly memorable turns of phrase at a critical juncture in history, but, over the course of a full speech in a trying circumstance, I think Bush compares surprisingly favorably. There was an interesting exhibit showing how Churchill was the subject of some fairly intense criticism, with the sort of insults regularly lodged at Bush: arrogant, liar, extremist. (And Churchill was a poor student with a famous father, too, though he made a national name for himself in his twenties.) Let's hope for the sake of Western democracy that history judges Bush to be more like Churchill than like Alcibiades.

Here I am in London, with my friend Ruth and her boyfriend Kevin, sitting at a window overlooking the Abbey Road zebra crossing. (No, they didn't see The Amazing Race contestants come through.)

Lots to talk about; I couldn't stop the wonderment the whole time, ride from the ride from the airport, where my instinct was to get into the wrong side of the Mini Mayfair. My first bobby! My first encounter with British ATMs! My first experience getting mysterious change! My first tube ride! My first "mind the gap" announcement! My first double-decker bus! My first time almost getting creamed because I looked left instead of right for cars while crossing the street! My first holding up a supermarket line because I couldn't figure out which coin was a 50p! My first dirty look because I went up a stairway on the right instead of the left!

The trip to Heathrow was somewhat more problematic. I had been booked on a one-stop flight through Kennedy, except American Airlines couldn't get me to Kennedy because of mechanical problems with the flight. Their solution was to fly me through LaGuardia, whereupon I would retrieve my luggage and take a cab to Kennedy. "You can catch the 9:30 instead of the 8." "No, I can't. Put me on the next flight." (Sure enough, I didn't get to Kennedy until 9:20.) "How am I going to get to Kennedy?" "We'll give you a voucher. Here, take all this paperwork and run to the USAir counter, because the flight leaves in half an hour." I had already waited an hour in line because American went long stretches without having a single attendant behind the counter; the line grew to 45 people from the 5 or 6 when I got there. USAir is having trouble processing all the refugees, but they send me to security with fifteen minutes to spare—whereupon I, along with six other refugees, were singled out for special scrutiny for buying a last minute ticket out of Reagan National. After the strip search, I made it onto the flight with two or three minutes to spare, whereupon I discovered that American hadn't given me a voucher after all. Not that it mattered: Yellow Cabs in New York don't take American vouchers. A European and I went to the JFK manager to get reimbursement. "I can't reimburse you. You chose to fly to LaGuardia, so it's your responsibility to get yourself to Kennedy." "I didn't choose; that's what your people told me to do." "This is a USAir flight." "You booked me on a USAir flight!" "I didn't book you anywhere. You have to call customer service." Ok, I'll call customer service, and send them a $33 cab bill, but I'm not flying American any time soon if I can help it.

All the government signs in London are in Gill Sans (which, if your computer is set up correctly, is the same typeface used in this blog), and private advertisers choose the same typeface, perhaps to give themselves a certain authenticity. I like the typeface, so it's a happy feeling. All these other symbols of a society that's just a little bit different from ours: signs that say "WAY OUT" instead of "EXIT"; "TO LET" instead of "FOR LEASE"; gambling shops that are almost as common as Starbucks; television advertising involving an unhooked bra.

Prices are unreal; the raw numbers are about the same, sometimes a little higher, but a pound is worth $1.87 these days, so everything is really twice as expensive. Ruth recommends a particular brand of ice cream in the Tesco Express (I always go to a supermarket in a new town to explore the zeitgeist), but I can't bring myself to spend $8 on a pint. Hey, gas is 2.40, doesn't seem that much higher—except that's pounds, not dollars, and liters, not gallons. Combined with the five pound congestion charge (soon to be eight) and it's amazing that you see any cars at all.

Nice examples of how the compensation culture is different in the UK than the US; not only will they sell you a Mini Mayfair, which is even smaller than the small Mini Cooper, but you can drive around the city in something called a "SmartCar," an even teenier two-seater akin to the one Sam Lowry drove in Brazil. The Ford Pinto cases show that you could never sell something like that in the US without being socked with punitive damages. Also, the escalators in the Underground move easily twice as fast as the ones in the DC Metro. I doubt that London has a worse safety record; people are just more careful, because they know they can't blame someone else if they hurt themselves. I wouldn't trade the American way for the British way, but we could learn a thing or two.

Scenes: a Bangladeshi street-fair on Brick Lane; a wan political rally at Trafalgar Square; a bus ride up Oxford Street; a reasonable and excellent Ethiopian restaurant, Abyssinia in Cricklewood. A mediocre and un-magnetic breakdancer drawing a crowd of 300-500 or so outside Covent Garden; the US could clearly export some of its lesser street performers and make both countries better off. Doing a start from seeing my ex-wife twenty feet away in the Covent Garden crowd for the first time in five years, until I realize that it's just a spitting image of her who's four inches taller. More interesting tourism starts tomorrow.

I'm off to Europe for the rest of May. Can't promise that I'll be live-blogging the trip, so this site will probably be fairly barren for a few weeks.

Best's R.J. Lehmann wonders if I've become a market anarchist. (No.)

E.L. Eversman praises my use of the term "scofflaw," but very little else.

Why aren't you regularly reading my brother's blog? It's much more entertaining than this one.

Mannequin Pis (Olney). Widely regarded as the best Belgian restaurant in the area, but this, I now know, presupposes a fairly wide definition of "area." Leaving Arlington at 6:50 to make a 7:30 dinner, I got there at 7:50. It's not much quicker later at night—it's nowhere near a highway, and requires a bit of navigation of surface streets, plus there's no way to make a left-turn into the strip mall that it's in. The place is known for its mussels, but no one in the group got those; but the rump steak, bison, and chicken were all superb. The frites were a bit of a let-down; I had high expectations after going to Belgian frites shops in LA and NY, but these didn't seem distinguishable from any above-average shoestring fries. Good service, great selection of Belgian beers.

Old Siam (8th St. SE). Competent Thai food, willing to provide some degree of heat in the spicy food. I'd eat here again if I had occasion to be in the neighborhood (and there are Thai restaurants in my neighborhood I won't say that about it), but there are too many better Thai restaurants in the area for this to be worth a special trip.

Sangam (Ballston, in the Comfort Inn on Glebe Road). I'm a sucker for an $8.95 Indian buffet. I like this place better than the popular and well-known Delhi Dhaba, but I think that's just a function of my severe distaste for styrofoam, so I can't really recommend it. The butter chicken was watery, the chili chicken's jalapenos overwhelmed the rest of the dish, the tandoori is unexciting, and the naan was doughy (I view that as a feature, rather than a bug, but I imagine most others differ). A decent saag paneer is occasionally there, though it wasn't when I last went. The chicken itself was tasty, which isn't always the case in an Indian restaurant. The restaurant has been through a couple of iterations (the new neon "pizza" sign is disquieting), but the service there is consistently, er, leisurely at best.

Via Kim, this restaurant children's menu poses the following quandary:

TWENTY - ELEVEN = 99 HOW?

Trademark lawyers, disregard the unlicensed endorsement of Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Porky and Bugs.

Katie Newmark assigned me homework reading on IACS, to wit, three essays on related subjects, including a Terrence Moore essay called Heather's Compromise that I just know will provoke reactions from my female readers. Surely there's a happy (and feminist-enlightened) medium between "barbarianism" and a return to 1940s courtship rituals. (Speaking of 1940s courtship rituals, I think the other Moore essay has an idealized nostalgia for how generations of men past treated women and war; cf. Heller's "Catch-22" for one satiric look at the Greatest Generation better than any Wolfe novel.) And it surely isn't the case that women universally want a return to "chivalric/romantic" courtship strategies. The proposition that women "do not get involved in sexual relationships based upon the pleasure principle" should provoke some controversy, too.

The Peter Berkowitz review makes the case for the Wolfe novel.

From OpinionJournal:

"I start my pitch with 'vampires in Alaska,' " said Bob Schultz, a writer in Los Angeles and Ithaca, N.Y. "Usually, I get a raised eyebrow. Then I say, 'six months of darkness.' Then I give them the title, 'Frostbite.' That usually gets them to ask for the screenplay."

If you like the business side of show business, see also the Query Letters I Love blog.

Evan Schaeffer interviews me, and his blog-commenters dispute my assertion that consumers should be allowed to make their own economic decisions.

Professor John Palmer flatters me.

Katie Newmark and I argue whether "Say Anything" is a chick flick.

Dylan (who's three days from graduating law school, and then he'll be sorry), Tom, and Daniel blogroll me.

The larch. The larch. (via Terablog)

Via Eric, funny New York Times story. Jennifer 8. Lee is wrong that the lottery was fortunate that all six numbers didn't hit: had there been a complete match, the lottery would have been able to split the main prize 110 ways, and wouldn't have had to dip into its reserves.

There are other famous examples of lottery coincidences. On November 12, 2001, Flight 587 crashed, and so many people played that lottery number that when "587" hit, the winning prize was $16 instead of $500. The second-best strategy for playing the lottery is to pick numbers no one else will pick (e.g., above 31 in games like Powerball to avoid people playing birthday combinations) so you don't have to split a prize if you win; the best strategy is not to play at all, since the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.

Via Kim, the only thing wrong with this New Pornographers' free MP3 is that it's too short and I have to play it twice in a row. Form a line.

C. writes:

I don't think your CRADLE-ROBBED date today scheduled a rescue phone call, or it would have been something where she had to leave right away, no?

Probably right. I'm sure it was simply karma for a decade of dinners and concerts and trips cancelled for last-minute litigation emergencies.

June flight reservation made for Seattle, as the Ted Frank Unemployed Tour continues.

Since I've already been asking complete strangers, I'll ask readers in anticipation of the dozen or so hits I'll get tomorrow from Evan and in anticipation of my trip: what are the must-see/must-do/must-eat experiences in London and Paris?

My general rule of thumb is to date women born during the Johnson or Nixon administrations, with one notable disaster of an exception from the Ford administration. Twice, I dated women born in the Carter administration, but I thought the age difference was too unreasonable; my father thought I was crazy that I was insufficiently attracted to keep dating one exceptionally good-looking Upland woman commuting to USC. She went off to date an even older Munger Tolles litigation partner before marrying a CIO, perhaps providing another data point for some friends' hypotheses that I'm too picky.

I'd been jdate hot-listed by a 23-year-old. With me on vacation, and her on a day off, a day trip to the museums seemed to be a fairly costless riskless sociological experiment. I don't have any new data, however, on whether a Reagan-administration baby is a plausible dating candidate such that I'm inclined to break my rule in the future. We had just parked when she got a cell-phone call at 10 am on the dot requiring her to take a 12-12 shift at her unspeakably secret defense-contractor job, and we turned around after jogging through a few rooms at the National Gallery.

This is a completely unrelated link, I'm sure.

What to do with the rest of the day? I'm not sure I'm going to last to July 1 with this unemployment thing. There had been a discussion of BBQ at and after Tyler Cowen's lecture the other week, and someone recommended Willard's Real Pit BBQ in Chantilly. Am I crazy enough to undertake a 53-mile round-trip just to try a BBQ restaurant for lunch when I have the day off?

You don't know me very well if that's a controversial question.

Willard's is in perhaps one of the most desolate strip-malls one has ever seen, just a row of affectless stores rising out of the concrete in a flat and empty area by a busy road. A nice Proustian olfactory memory of Texas hits one upon entering, though the place also offers KC burnt ends, various "pulled" dishes, and an array of homemade hot sauces. I think my BBQ palate has been desensitized from 17 years in Boston, Chicago, NY, DC, and LA, but I did like the place, even somewhat better than I like Capital Q downtown. Excellent sausage, fairly good brisket and burnt ends, acceptable sauce that was a bit too sweet. Side dishes were uneventful, and the cornbread was far too dry. Reasonably priced: $14.90 for a three-meat platter with two sides, cornbread, and a drink, with leftovers for another meal, plus they have more plausible lunch options if one is not following the Cowen rule of always over-ordering. Next time, I just order meat in bulk, but I'm leaving for Europe in a few days, and need to empty my fridge. Unlike a certain Thai restaurant, I'm not sure it's worth the drive since I usually make it back to Texas once or twice a year anyway, and there's absolutely nothing else in the area (other than the new air-space museum); worth the side trip if I was already going to Dulles and wasn't in the mood for Thai.

In Atlanta airport. (via Cowen)

p. 290: "Edgar's attempts at campus vernacular were inevitably embarrassing."

You know how in every bad 1980s comedy, the end credits featured some variant on the joke "Hey! Tim Conway is doing that crazy rap music!" That's about the verisimilitude of Wolfe's rendition of rap lyrics.

Still, I'm halfway through "I Am Charlotte Simmons," and I'm enjoying it nevertheless.

Update, 10:30: I know I'm six months late, and I'll have to reread the reviews, but I don't understand why so many people hated this book. No, it wasn't the dazzling tapestry of "Bonfire of the Vanities," and, as noted above, there were a number of clunkers that an editor should've caught (such as the scene supposedly set in the "30-story atrium" in Washington, DC), but it hung together much more satisfyingly than "A Man in Full" did. Even the infamous sex scene wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as promised. The satire of campus politics was a nice undercurrent. The book held my attention for a full day of reading, and not many novelists have that power. Ok, there wasn't a single sympathetic character (the "intellectuals" were merely pretentious—but what 20-year-old wasn't?), but since when was that a requirement? (I do agree with Shani's assessment, communicated to me in a November e-mail that I assiduously avoided reading until now, that Charlotte's post-formal self-pity dragged down the book.) I didn't find Charlotte's naivete as implausible as some reviewers did.

Spoiler: I had read the story going in the direction of Adam self-destructively taking down Jojo, as his mother before him, so the ending surprised me in that sense; it is, perhaps, the saddest of all possible endings for Charlotte, but I'm not sure that it isn't a good metaphor for the social pressures that cause some women to bypass intellectual achivement. Perhaps others can comment on that.

Maybe I should've taken Shani's advice and read the Guardian's digested version, which is actually about as good a 200-word summary as one could have. The British cover of the book also seems more appropriate than the American cover. Another link: Slate book club.

Puzzle. I have to say I have no evidence that this puzzle has a solution. The first two moves are forced, which should make it easier, but.

I was walking home from a dinner party last night, and passed three women leaving the Clarendon Ballroom.

"Do you have the time?" one asked.
"11:30— no, 11:45."
"Thank you. Let me give you my card," she continued. "Have you ever had a psychic reading?"
"Shouldn't you already know?" I said, walking away.

Ok, I said "No, thank you," but I thought of the other line five minutes later.

Bobby Van's, 15th between H and Eye. My first time here, I had a flawless porterhouse that was the best in town; this time, I was persuaded to share another one at my firm's good-bye lunch, but it wasn't quite up to the previous standard. I'm probably going to stick with Ray's The Steaks from hereon out. The company was good.

Hamburger Mary's, 14th and Rhode Island. As $9 burgers go, the "Queen Mary" was excellent, plus the campy gay atmosphere was fun, with the check served in a ruby-red high-heeled shoe. The French fries were uninteresting, and I wasn't thrilled about the smoke from the bar wafting into the non-smoking section. Probably won't be back; too many other interesting things to try if I'm in that neighborhood, and if I'm going to have a burger, I'd rather go to Five Guys.

What with them losing millions of dollars of business to a fraud scheme, I felt a moral obligation to partake an extra meal or three at Wendy's (K between Connecticut and 18th; Lee Highway). The side-Caesar salad is a spectacular bargain at 99 cents, and may end up comprising a weekly meal in my new frugal budget. The Mediterranean chicken salad is both less of a bargain at $4.80 after tax, and worse, less tasty; the chicken was dried out, the dressing was too sweet, and I never understood the appeal of cherry tomatoes. Plus, I had forgotten how abysmal the service is at the Arlington Wendy's on Lee Highway. After three minutes without the line moving, I got back into my car, ordered through the drive-thru, and went back into the restaurant, probably saving myself five minutes.

There are reports that my favorite playwright, Tom Stoppard, fine-tuned the dialogue for Episode III.

Stoppard also worked on two of my favorite movies, Brazil and Shakespeare in Love.

Jim Lindgren reviews Travesties, perhaps my favorite play, at the Court Theater; I saw the same play in the same theater twice in 1995. Joyce's broad Irish accent in the play is a reflection on the unreliable narrator.

Ok, you can guess how the story will end, but it's still worth telling:

At a recent parents' meeting at the progressive Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, two fathers of young daughters introduced themselves and learned, remarkably, that both of their fathers had been born in the same small Ukrainian town.

The Heschel parents, an American and an Israeli, realized that, since there was only a single Nazi transport from the town, both of their fathers were undoubtedly on the same train bound for an extermination camp in October 1942. The American told of his then 19-year-old father, who escaped by jumping through a plank he had dislodged from above a window in the car. His father, telling the story, always added that, before he jumped, he pushed a boy up and out through that loosened plank.

The Israeli instantly knew who the boy was, for his own father had always told of how there was an opening too high for him to reach—he was then age 11—and of how an older boy lifted him up and pushed him out. The two boys never saw each other again, but each, miraculously, survived the war by hiding in Ukrainian farms and forests. Now their children, so far in time and space from these events, came to learn that their daughters are in the same class.

It's far from clear to me that the University of Minnesota got it wrong in titling a pathway "Scholars Walk" rather than "Scholars' Walk." But I am sure that the AP got it wrong by suggesting "Scholar's Walk" as an option. (via Newmark père)

How did I miss this muck-raking story about Jdate from last August? Also: not that you're surprised, but those women in the jdate ads aren't real.

Photos of toy cars in parking spaces (via Radosh).

Also: Mad Ape Den, a blog limited to words of three letters or less (via Stachiew).

Dating turn-off #173: getting an e-mail asking me if a jdate profile "peaks my interest."

The other side of Bob Saget (link will die soon) (lots of naughty language) (via Romenesko).

I'm not sure my "contact" form is working. If you've tried to send me e-mail and have gotten no response, please leave a comment here.

This recipe (via Taylor) looks suspiciously like the Marcos green sauce, rather than the Ninfa's green sauce, but it's a recipe I'm going to have to try since green sauce is not available in this area and, besides, my teenage palate was crazy enough to prefer Marcos. Can I just say I've been craving green sauce for a decade?

New Yorker article.

Studio Theatre presentation opens May 4.

Ricky Jay as Eddie Sawyer on Deadwood; IMDB entry.

Best "reality" game show ever. So who was right, Rob or Amber, about the yield decision?

Yielding Uchenna & Joyce may've put Meredith & Gretchen in the final three, which you have to think increases one's expected winnings by about $160,000.

On the other hand, Ron & Kelly did a good job of frittering away their airport advantage with the poor decision to take a cab in a bad-traffic city, and probably ended up a good 90-120 minutes behind. Will that extra half hour from the yield allow Rombuh to avoid a bunch in the final leg and take a commanding lead from the opening clue, as almost happened in TAR6? If so, they may have fortuitously made the right decision. Plus, there's some benefit in guaranteeing the first-to-the-mat prize.

Did Meredith & Gretchen ever make a single correct decision the entire race? Why did they think they could out-brawn Uchenna & Joyce at the detour? I'm surprised that more teams in previous editions haven't used the strategy of carrying along a weak team like Meredith & Gretchen to ensure stronger teams were eliminated.

Via Bonin, Steve Colbert is getting his own show, doing the same shtick he does on the Daily Show.

The Daily Show works because Stewart plays himself and has a rotating cast of characters doing their own thing; it allows the group to mix speeds, and there's a lot of filler with the celebrity interviews at the end of the program, with the occasional dose of spinach. Taking one of the shtick pieces, and making it a full four-times-a-week half-hour show, well, that's going to work about as well as taking any one-joke three-minute sketch and expanding it to two hours a week. Or, perhaps more precisely, two hours and twelve minutes, because the Daily Show is still going to be doing its share of the same thing. Perhaps they're giving Colbert a supporting cast of people to avoid this problem, but then you end up with a B-list Daily Show with a less magnetic host. Stewart has an exec producer credit, so this strikes me as the sort of tv deal executives make when they wish to give additional money to a performer who's making them happy, and don't much care if the resulting show fails. If it succeeds, Comedy Central is happy; if it tanks, they've built good will with Stewart, and they're still happy.

Create your own personalized map of the USA. (via Friedman)

Utah was a touch-and-go for a connecting flight in September 1998, so I don't know I should count it. Kentucky and Arkansas I drove through as a passenger in 1975, and haven't been back since. I was thisclose to being scheduled to attend a deposition in Fargo last year; not sure how I'm going to have an excuse to visit North Dakota otherwise. That Florida gap in my record is admittedly odd. Seven of these states were visited solely for purposes of litigation.

If you think I had an ego before I got the new job, wait 'til you see what I have planned for overlawyered (sorta via Grace).

"Nogroski said he will revisit his research and present additional otters-related data Thursday." (via Shani and Dave)

Brandeis University's effect on Bruce Springsteen.

It's Tyler Cowen's second anniversary, which is probably why he didn't post that he gave a scintillating Bradley Lecture at AEI tonight, touching on everything from the economics of BBQ to the effect of the Internet on militant Islam. It was old hat for his regular blog-readers. Chris DeMuth was kind enough to invite me to join Tyler, his charming wife, and several scholars and employees for dinner, where the conversation continued for another hour. After over a year of corresponding with Tyler in the same city, it was great to finally meet him. Did I mention I was going to like working at AEI? And I discovered a sauvignon blanc that I like, not that you should trust my wine palate. And a local BBQ recommendation I'll have to try. Good times.

The good news: Tyler endorsed my decision to refinance instead of sell and rent. I'll sleep better.

So was Brian driving a new Prius in Sunday's Family Guy, or what? American Dad didn't stand out for me, but we'll see if it improves.

Also, while it's trendy to sneer at the more recent episodes, I think it's fair to say that the Simpsons are back.

This invitation includes latitude and longitude, but fails to mention altitude, which will only lead to tears when people start materializing under and above ground. (via Bonin)

ObFuturama Quote: "You musn't interfere with the past! Don't do anything that affects anything! Unless it turns out you were supposed to do it, in which case, for the love of God, don't not do it!"

Whatever happened to Chandra Levy?

I'm rationally ignorant of the methodology and rules behind BlogShares, which seems to be some sort of rotisserie baseball for weblogs, but now that I'm getting hits from there, I'm amused that it's a GMU economist who's predicting that he can make a killing buying shares of my blog low, perhaps anticipating that this weblog will somehow become wildly popular. Such a vote of faith! Imagine how disappointed Kevin will be when he realizes that the majority of my 20 hits a day are from my parents. Or maybe I'll have something else on which I can compete with my brother, whose blog has only partially recovered from an Enron-like plummet. And we're both behind a blog that doesn't exist any more.

"School mistakes huge burrito for weapon, goes into lockdown" (via Kim).

It's regularly said that GM can't compete because of its health-care costs. Here's the WSJ version repeated by Postrel:

Wonder why GM invests just enough in new product to keep the game going, not enough to make its cars really sought after? Because the extra capital that would have to be invested goes instead to doling out gold-plated health care—no copays, no deductibles—to workers and to plumping up their pension fund, which two years ago required the largest corporate debt offering in history to top off.

This makes no sense to me. GM has to pay its health-care costs whether or not it invests in Zeta. If Zeta is a means to a profitable new line of cars, why wouldn't it be a good investment decision regardless of whether the company as a whole is profitable? If it's because the marginal health-care costs of Zeta workers makes the difference between profitability and the lack of profitability, why not build the Zeta cars in Mexico?

I see baseball teams use this reasoning all the time: "The Texas Rangers can't afford pitching because of Alex Rodriguez's salary." No, there's no salary cap, and you're paying ARod whether or not you pay for pitching: if it's profitable to pay for pitching, the Rangers should do it.

From the April 1955 Atlantic: "Studebaker's designer and stylist expresses his irrepressible opinion of the American automobile today, and of what it may be fifty years hence." Surprisingly reasonable and accurate. Subscription required, but if you're not subscribing to the Atlantic, you should be. (via Postrel)