In a month where my third-largest position, Blockbuster, became my fifth-largest position after it plummeted 25%, where natural catastrophe wiped out the city where I went to high school, I should be ecstatic that my portfolio as a whole went up 6.9% for the month, vs. -1.2% for the S&P 500. For the calendar year 2005 to date, numbers are 13.5% vs. 0.7%. For the last twelve months, 24.5% vs. 10.4%. Who wants to hire me to manage their hedge fund?

Six Flags and E-Loan each had tender offers with a sizable premium, and CarMax and Aon each had one-day pops of over 10% on good earnings reports. For all of these stocks, my position was significantly in the red at one time or the other, so it's nice to see that I'm being rewarded for overcoming my bad habit of losing confidence in my investment decisions when the market doesn't immediately cooperate. (I had the same problem when I played Strat-O-Matic, and traded Sammy Sosa for next to nothing the spring before he hit 66 home runs.) BBI has gone from my most profitable stock to my least profitable in the last few months, but that's just a reason to add to the position, which I'll do in a few weeks in September when I sell some of my other holdings that hit the one-year mark.

Similarly, the Oakland A's, who Steven "Freakonomics" Levitt was gloating about back in April, are now at the top of their division. Levitt hasn't retracted his claim that Billy Beane is nothing but hype.

"Marshall Law declared" was the headline on the Times-Picayune web site, along with "The Times-Picayune is evacuating it's New Orleans building" and the spelling errors just make it all the sadder. The Superdome is increasingly unpleasant. I read reports that the giant oaks that lined my streetcar route commute to high school are mostly felled by the winds; the East Bank (and perhaps the West, as well) is underwater; bridges destroyed; looters acting with impunity; the entire power grid will need to be rebuilt. It's hard to imagine modern analogues: 1906 San Francisco or 1871 Chicago are the closest American ones I can think of.

I thought I knew every squirrelly thing about paradoxes and the Constitution, most of them having to do with the Electoral College, but I learned a new one tonight: the Alabama paradox, which is named for the potential 1880 victim of the mathematical quirk whereby some apportionment methods may, in some circumstances, result in a state losing representation even as the number of total representatives increase. There's also the population paradox, whereby a state with a higher population growth rate can lose representatives to a state with a lower population growth rate, again because of rounding issues. This page has some javascript examples.

Link.

The New York Times covers the spaghetti monster, though if they were going to pick one of the two criticisms Radosh made about their coverage to correct, it should've been the other one.

...attendee Christina Kahrl gets ink in Washington City Paper, which in turn gets her mentioned in Wonkette, the Huffington Post, Romenesko, and Editor & Publisher.

I've been reading lots of books over the last three months—The Corrections; Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; Love, Poverty & War; The Devil in the White City; The Paradox of Choice; Mutants; V for Vendetta (ok, that's a comic book (and I can hear my brother yell "graphic novel")); lots of legal books; etc. The original plan was to write a post about each book, but there were too many times when that felt like doing an eighth-grade book report instead of fun. It would be the height of OCD to force myself to do the book report. I just wanted to note this because I noted someone googling me, and then selecting the "Books" portion, and it makes it seem like I've read two books in four months.

Too, I want to add something to the discussion if I'm going to write about a book. I thought The Paradox of Choice was hooey where it wasn't obvious, but Virginia Postrel already demolished it in Reason, and I don't have too much to add.

Except that the biggest anxiety-provoking choice the modern person faces is the choice of a mate: it's not just the marriage-related choices an already paired-off two need to make, as Schwartz lists on 37-39, but the very "who"ness of the choice, and Schwartz doesn't even discuss this. Forty to fifty years ago, one's choices were limited to people near your age group you already knew; and because people paired up and married quickly and young, there wasn't a lot of time for dilly-dallying before your universe of choices would quickly dissipate.

Today, the Internet creates all sorts of possibilities and choice-complicating options. Even before the Web, I met three women through Usenet and mailing lists, including my first wife. Match.com has virtually no search options, which means you're picking based on someone's face, age, and geography, and little else, but it worked for my friends Dan and Moira. One can seek to narrow the choices: jdate for Jews and Judeophiles, The Right Stuff for a cut at relatively educated people, the thinly populated political match websites. Speed-dating, which crams several dates in in a couple of hours. For those who have no intention of ever dealing with a confirmation hearing, there's Jacqueline Passey's approach. It's not as if any of these methods are confidence-building. Jdate has produced false positives and negatives: all sorts of dismal first dates, while I met someone at a party that I ended up dating for ten months (if mostly non-consecutively over two years) who was also on jdate with a profile I never would've bothered writing to. (Speaking of which: I need to be more glass-half-full, because it's surely good news when the 29-year-old sixth-grade teacher who had contacted me through jdate cancels our Sunday brunch date because she claims she feels she's still dealing with the fallout of the breakup with her unemployed-alcoholic-ex-felon-still-on-probation-ex-boyfriend.)

If Schwartz is to be taken seriously, we should return to the days of arranged marriages, which the vast majority of us would find unpalatable. One quickly sees why Schwartz avoided the question entirely in writing his polemic.

(Compare also this sequence: Lori Gottlieb on satisficing (last paragraph) (1998); Po Bronson on Lori Gottlieb's satisficing (2002); Lori Gottlieb satisfices (2005).)

...not to let Professor Palmer clean my house.

I know I haven't been posting much lately here, but if you're looking for a blog, you should be reading my favorite non-legal blog, Marginal Revolution, daily for nifty tidbits like this one:

Total tsunami foreign aid from the U.S.: $908 million

U.S. tariff revenue from Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, and Indonesia: $1.87 billion

Plus a very sensible analysis of the Apple-giveaway-disaster in Richmond. The government there wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money by not selling the machines on Ebay or using a real market mechanism, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars of resident time that could've been better spent on volunteer work than waiting in line, and taxpayers will probably be hit when the lawsuits from the injured start rolling in.

Speaking of lawsuits, it's amazing how much working on consumer fraud class action lawsuits changes your way of thinking. Why, just the other day, I bought a variety six-pack of sugar-free Jello that was labelled "Lemon-Lime/Orange," but it had four green cups and only two orange cups. Failure to disclose! Consumer fraud! I just need a Nobel Prize-winning expert to proclaim that I've been damaged several dollars in my expected consumer surplus, multiplied over millions of cups sold, ask for punitive damages, find a judge willing to certify the class, and I have myself a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Ridiculous, to be sure, but no more so than the one that awarded $10 billion over Philip Morris's light cigarettes.

As it turns out, the lemon-lime Jello is pretty tasty, so I'm not going to complain, but such forbearance will surely keep me from being wealthy enough to hold Mark Lanier-style Christmas parties.

In case you're not keeping up with me on Overlawyered and Point of Law (and why not?), I was in National Review this week, and National Journal a couple of weeks ago.

Or not, if it's Anton Chekhov (hat tip to S.W.).

WaPo interviews AEI's chef and reports on several other thinktank eating arrangements (via KN).

is that my copy of Gershon Legman has apparently gone up in value from $18 to $125-$250, according to Amazon. We're talking Supreme Court Justice bobblehead territory.

Amber Taylor thinks I'm, like, really really old, but have a totally awesome-cool car.

Rondi Adamson gives me a random shout-out.

Article III Groupie, Jacqueline Passey, Fred, and David Nieporent blogroll me.

A random observation from the comment boards on another blog. One toes the line. One does not "tow the line." Grr.

I'm very pleased with this line, and just knew that Legal Affairs would pick it for a soundbite:

We're not talking about a sacrosanct legacy for which General Grant fought; we're debating a malleable judicial rule that's younger than two of the stars of "Desperate Housewives."

Bruck saved his best post of the debate for last, and it'll come up Friday morning.

Not in my building—three 1115 sq. ft. units sold in May and June for 10-13% more than identical units sold in December and January.

Life imitates Futurama. The robot doesn't look quite as impressive close up (cf. the Uncanny Valley, discussed here), but we seem to be much further along than I would've thought. (Post title clip)