Sporcle is a lot cooler than it sounds.

My new favorite game website: Sporcle. The site features tons of quizzes along the lines of "Name all the countries in Europe" or "Name the book based on the antagonist." Be very careful about when you start playing, though, because it quickly sucks you in for long periods of time.

(We have really fallen off the blogging. This post is just under a month after the last post. I would love it if we could all start this up again.)

Awful Tattoos.

These are two of the worst tattoos I have ever seen, and they are both on the same person: White-supremacist MMA fighter Melvin Costa. [Amazingly there exists no Wikipedia page for this guy, so I just stuck in a link to a random blog post about his tattoos.]

The First Thanksgiving.

A hilarious reenactment of the first Thanksgiving that includes references to small-pox-covered blankets, the Pequot War, and King Philip's War:

A Talented Actress

Taking advantage of coincidence, porn star Lisa Ann has played both Sarah Palin and Tina Fey in pornographic parodies of, respectively, Sarah Palin's life and 30 Rock. Check out the hilarious trailers below .

Who's Nailin' Paylin? (This trailer is completely safe for work.)


30 Rock: A XXX Parody (This trailer is less safe for work due to a few women in skimpy clothing and some swearing.)

Who knew they could get weirder?

The Decemberists are turning The Hazards of Love, their most recent album, into a super-trippy animated film. This should be interesting:

The Wire

A video of someone's choices for the 100 greatest quotes from The Wire. Oh how I miss some of these characters.

"American Soldier"

Ian Fisher, a high-school senior who decided to enter the army after graduation, allowed a reporter and a photographer from The Denver Post to follow him from the time of his enlistment through his return from deployment. The multimedia series, which includes an in-depth article, photographs, and videos, can be found here. A nice selection of the photographs can be found here.

[NSFW!] Problems with the plumbing.

Two vagina-related points today:

1. Humans have apparently long had a fear of vaginas with teeth (vagina dentata). Someone recently decided to take that fear to the next level by making a horror movie entitled Teeth about a girl who regularly uses her vagina-teeth to bite off body parts.
2. The more horrifying story: "My vagina fell out." Apparently female genital prolapse "is characterized by a portion of the vaginal canal protruding from the opening of the vagina." In other words, an innie becomes an outie, as seen below. I would not wish this on anyone.
   

Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

1M Frames Per Second

The video is very long, and I recommend you skip to random points throughout it, as the type of bullet and the material being impacted are changed. The end features cutouts of animals being hit with barrages of bullets.

Pretty charts. Ugly news.

A few pretty and devastating graphs.

First: Percentage job loss from peak during post WWII recessions (Calculated Risk):

Second: year-over-year delinquency rate changes, where red indicates an increased rate and green indicates a decreased rate (New York Federal Reserve):

Third: the current delinquency rate as of the second quarter of 2009, where a darker color indicates a higher rate (ibid):

Internet Meme Timeline

The title is self-explanatory. Be careful: this site can waste all of your time if you let it.

"How to Write Well"

[Note: everything in the post except for this note, including the title, is taken directly from Greg Mankiw's Blog. Rather than linking to it I figure it is easier for me to just copy the text and cite the source. For those of you outside of the world of economics, Mankiw (sometimes referred to as variations on N. Gregory Mankiw) is a famous economist who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush 43 from 2003 to 2005 and teaches at Harvard. The original post can be found here.]

When I was CEA chair, I sent the following guidelines to my staff as they started drafting the Economic Report of the President. A friend recently emailed me a copy, and I thought I would share them with blog readers. They are good rules of thumb, especially for economists writing for a general audience.

ERP Writing Guidelines

• Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
• Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
• The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
• Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
• Use adverbs sparingly.
• Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.
• Never make up your own acronyms.
• Avoid unnecessary words. For instance, in most cases, change
  o “in order to” to “to”
  o “whether or not” to “whether”
  o “is equal to” to “equals”
• Avoid “of course, “clearly,” and “obviously.” Clearly, if something is obvious, that fact will, of course, be obvious to the reader.
• The word “very” is very often very unnecessary.
• Keep your writing self-contained. Frequent references to other works, or to things that have come before or will come later, can be distracting.
• Put details and digressions in footnotes. Then delete the footnotes.
• To mere mortals, a graphic metaphor, a compelling anecdote, or a striking fact is worth a thousand articles in Econometrica.
• Keep your writing personal. Remind readers how economics affects their lives.
• Remember two basic rules of economic usage:
  o “Long run” (without a hyphen) is a noun. “Long-run” (with a hyphen) is an adjective. Same with “short(-)run.”
  o “Saving” (without a terminal s) is a flow. “Savings” (with a terminal s) is a stock.
• Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
• Keep it simple. Think of your reader as being your college roommate who majored in English literature. Assume he has never taken an economics course, or if he did, he used the wrong textbook.

Making the USA look great.

As you may or may not know, Iceland is one of few places in the world that has made the USA look financially responsible and risk-averse during the turmoil of the last few years. Basically, Iceland privatized and monetized its fishing industry in the 1970s, and the new-found free time allowed the country to turn into "[...] a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s." Unfortunately, this led many (extremely overconfident) Icelandic men to jump into finance with no training or experience; hilarity ensued, if hilarity can be equated to financial and economic ruin.

I recommend reading this (admittedly lengthy) article by Michael Lewis, written for the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair: "Wall Street on the Tundra." Aside from describing the logic behind the rise and fall of Icelandic financiers and banks, this article supplies what I always desire in travel writing: a picture not only of the beautiful scenery and buildings of a country, but also of the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the population.

Send rescue!

Below is a video that includes the 911 call made by a police officer who confiscated some marijuana and baked brownies with his wife. After eating the brownies, the cop calls 911 because he and his wife think they have overdosed and are dead ("Time is moving really really really really slowly"). Highly entertaining, though it makes me question how well police are educated about the illegal substances from which they supposedly 'protect' the general public.

"Who Gains from President Obama's Stimulus Package...And How Much?"

I recommend everyone at least read this summary of a recent publication by two economists at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (summary taken from this website):

"In this Special Report, Levy scholars Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Kijong Kim provide a preliminary assessment of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a package of transfers and tax cuts that is expected to provide relief to low-income and vulnerable households especially hurt by the economic crisis, while at the same time supporting aggregate demand. By the administration’s estimate, ARRA will create or save approximately three and a half million jobs by the end of 2010; while the ameliorating impact of the stimulus plan on the employment situation is surely welcome, say the authors, the government could have achieved far more at the same cost by skewing the stimulus package toward outlays rather than tax cuts. Their analysis points toward the necessity for a comprehensive employment strategy that goes well beyond ARRA. The need for public provisioning of various sorts—ranging from early childhood education centers to public health facilities to the “greening” of public transportation—coupled with the severe underutilization of labor, naturally suggests an expanded role for public employment as a desirable ingredient in any alternative strategy."

If you are interested in reading the complete article (only four-and-a-half pages), it can be directly downloaded here.

The world is ending!

The world seems to be going completely crazy, as evidenced by the following:

Reason 1: GMail is experiencing a complete outage, including POP and IMAP servers. Fucking weak.

Reason 2: Alberto Gonzales agrees with the investigation into abuse of prisoners by US personnel.

Reason 3: I was accepted into The New School's MS in Economics program.

Water slide.

This is a video Katie emailed to some people. I just uploaded it to YouTube and am posting the link. Enjoy.

The more things change...

I think all of you will be glad to know that The South is still The South. Yesterday in Marion, Alabama two families escalated their years-old feud into "'[...] a full-scale riot [...]'" involving up to 150 people (though other reports put this number closer to 300) and leading to eight arrests and two hospitalizations. The major source of the feud is unknown, but the the day of the riot two members of the involved families were arrested at the local high school for fighting. After these arrests, family members followed the police to city hall, where the riot erupted. According to a police sergeant, people were "'throwing jack irons, throwing tire irons, anything they could get their hands on.'" Maybe the funniest line of the AP blurb: " The town's police chief was hit in the head with a crowbar but was OK."

The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons would be proud, though none were killed in Marion.

Apple versus Microsoft.

I can't sleep, so naturally I am splitting time between television and videos on the Internet. I laughed out loud quite a few times watching this ad for a new smartphone that "runs Windows Vista and connects to the Internet through AOL!":


In the interest of a small amount of fairness: