If I had 12,000 Euros...

...I'd be bidding on an authentic Enigma machine and wondering if Rudolf von Hackleheber had ever used it. (Via BoingBoing.)

Kneel before Caesar!

Because you demanded it, here is everything you ever wanted to know about the Caeser's salad, including things you didn't know you needed to know.

In the last two decades, the simple combination of romaine lettuce, creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese has:

· Become America's most popular main-dish salad, showing up virtually everywhere from fast-food chains to white-tablecloth restaurants to the takeout counter in the supermarket.

· Dramatically altered the lettuce industry as the demand for romaine has skyrocketed.

· Turned the chicken-topped Caesar into the chicken item most frequently found on restaurant menus -- more often than wings or even that perennial kid favorite, chicken fingers.

And still we want more.

Better living through market inefficiencies

I'm not much of a basketball fan, but I was entertained by this Slate article about how George Mason has built its basketball team and economics department using the same techniques:

GMU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different. Its basketball team and academic programs began with the (correct) assumption that they couldn't hope to compete against the top schools in their fields—say, Harvard Law School or the Duke Blue Devils—by directly imitating their methods. GMU lacks the resources and reputation to recruit McDonald's All-Americans or Alan Dershowitzes. So instead, GMU has hunted for inefficiencies in its markets. Coach Jim Larranaga follows the Moneyball model of recruitment: hunting for the undervalued players—the ones who everyone else thought were too short, too thin, or too fat—and then building them into a team. In its astonishing defeat of UConn, GMU's players were giving away 4 inches at nearly every position.

Picking undervalued players wouldn't be possible if the market for jocks worked perfectly. In an efficient market, jocks—like stocks—should be valued no more nor no less than what they are actually worth. So, why isn't the market efficient?

One reason is that coaches who take chances on oddball players risk making themselves look foolish. A coach who goes after the same jock that everyone else wants, or an investment analyst who picks the same stock that everyone else recommends, at least can't be made to look worse than average. Herd behavior means that unpopular opportunities remain unexploited. An unusual coach who's willing to look unfashionable with the in-crowd has a chance to excel.

This is also the idea behind GMU's free-market-oriented economics department. The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it? GMU knew it couldn't afford to be a first-class MIT and didn't want to be a second-class MIT, so successive chairs of the department, backed by entrepreneurial university presidents George Johnson and Alan Merten, looked for unexploited opportunities.

James Buchanan, GMU's first Nobel Prize winner, has never had an Ivy League position and indeed he has never taught above the Mason-Dixon Line. Gordon Tullock, a potential future Nobelist, has no degree in economics and took only one class in the subject. Vernon Smith, who moved his team from the University of Arizona (again, no Harvard) to GMU in 2001, had to fight to get people to treat experimental economics as more than a cute parlor game.

This particularly entertains me since it's not that different to how I picked production staffs when I was producing theater as an undergrad. There was always gnashing of teeth among the board of the theatre club about the shortage of skilled technicians, but I always liked making offbeat choices -- particularly ones that didn't make sense unless you rethought what, say, a technical director's job really consisted of -- that usually worked out really well. And the people recruited that way were usually more likely to bring their A game, because they were so pleased to be asked to do something no one else thought they could do. Who knew I was onto something? Not me, that's for sure...

Quick politics

1. I spent the short unhappy life of Red America crashing on a deadline for school and then fighting off -- with little success -- a bug. So I've got little to add to what's already been said about it elsewhere, except that the whole miserable train wreck was like seeing every pampered, talking-point stenographing fop I've ever known implode publicly.
   
   
2. So, when do we see the ads attacking John McCain as a flip-flopper?
   
   
3. Wouldn't it be nice to have a president whose idea of humor is not making fun of other people? I've no use for the deeply Abramoffed Conrad Burns, but humor is funniest when it flows uphill.
   
   
4. Good for Utah.
   
   

Apocalypse Nigh

Just Say Julie is coming to DVD. This might be a good time to put your affairs in order, examine your relationship with the spiritual deity of your preference, and make whatever amends you feel you must.

Early Happy St. Patrick's Day

I've never been one for St. Patrick's Day, but Robby Reed's celebrating with a terrific gallery of Green Lantern art. Check it out even if you're less Irish than I am.

Putting the "duh" in Dubya

The most entertaining results of a new poll showing, like so many other recent polls, that George W. Bush is -- as he should be -- very, very unpopular are respondents' descriptions of him:

But the most compelling part of the Pew survey was when Americans were asked to describe the president in a single word. Respondents volunteered answers, and were not offered words to choose from. They had some interesting responses.

A year ago, the top three responses were "honest," "good," and "integrity," in that order. Now, the top three are "incompetent," "good," and "idiot." (A close fourth was "liar.")

For a while, I've seen and heard Bush critics asking, "When is the public going to realize how awful the president is?" I think it's fair to say, we've reached that point.

Mahna Mahna

Doo-DOO-doo-doo-doo.

Scenes from in front of the television: Beached

She Who Must Be Obeyed: Is that China Beach?

Matter-Eater Lad: That's Dana Delaney. In a swimsuit.

SWMBO: An unflattering swimsuit.

M-E: Nevertheless.

SWMBO: How old were you when this show was first on?

(M-E does math in his head)

M-E: 15, 16 tops. Do you suspect imprinting?

SWMBO: I'm just sayin'.

M-E: That ship sailed long, long before I ever watched China Beach...

DC doldrums

Looking over DC's solicitations for June, I'm struck by how little interest I have in anything that's being offered that month. The series of Superman Returns one-shots sound kind of, well, strange -- I mean, a Ma Kent special? -- and the One Year Later stuff generally leaves me cold. I have to wonder if the stilted "talking around stuff that happened in the gap" storytelling evinced in some of the previews of the first OYL books will continue for the next 12 months, as 52 runs its course, but mainly I find I've got no interest in seeing whether DC truly gets away from the bloody and nasty tone it's set for its main line since Identity Crisis. Somehow, I doubt it. And the mind boggles at collecting the forgettable (and likely forgotten) "Our Worlds At War" stunt event in an omnibus collection while Darwyn Cooke's superb New Frontier languishes in a two-volume edition (though I'm hoping for an Absolute edition of that story someday!). The Steve Englehart JLA CLassified story about the Justice League Detroit -- speaking of the forgettable! -- sounds just weird enough that I'll likely read the trade paperback at Barnes & Noble some rainy weekend afternoon.

But, still, I think the only ongoing mainline DC universe comic I'll be buying after Seven Soldiers ends is Supergirl and the Legion. That and All-Star Superman are it, as far as the DC bullet goes for me. Everything else I read from DC is either Vertigo (Y) or WildStorm (Ex Machina, Astro City).

I'm not sure how I feel about that, or what it means, but there it is.

Fortunately, there are some interesting trades that are also coming out this summer, foremost among them the fourth volume of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run. Plus the Metal Men get an archive (albeit one with a truly hideous cover image) and the 1970s Justice Society finally gets collected; I note that the solicitation is for "Volume 1" and hope that we might eventually see a collection of the Len Strazewski/Mike Parobeck run.

Hoo, boy...

I can't quite believe that the syndicated Superboy TV series is coming out on DVD. The show wasn't very good to begin with, and for some reason or another it has never been shown since its original run, and really the only thing to recommend it is the presence of the lovely Stacy Haiduk, who could teach Kristen Kreuk a thing or two about being Lana Lang.

Trivia note: One of the costumes from this show is on display at the Planet Hollywood in the Gatwick Airport outside London. It was one of the things I noticed when She Who Must Be Obeyed and I ate breakfast there while waiting for our flight home from our honeymoon. The presence of the suit -- which was looking disappointingly threadbare -- should tell you all you need to know about the caliber of the memorabilia on display at that particular Planet Hollywood. Are those places even around anymore?

Battlestar Galactica

I spent the last week never getting around to a snarkish post about how the rescue mission to Caprica seemed to be the worst plan since attacking the Mayor with hummus.

After last night's season finale, I have two things to say:

1. Never mind.
2. Holy frakking CRAP!

More later.

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair hair hair...

I have been accused of having certain weaknesses when it comes to certain colors of hair. But it turns out I'm a piker compared to Superman...

Oscar grouching

Intellectually, of course, I know that the Oscar awards themselves are largely meaningless; these are the same folks who picked Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, Titanic over LA Confidential, and Lord of the Rings over Lost in Translation. And I enjoyed Crash well enough -- the decision wasn't the kind of travesty that the above awards were by any stretch of the imagination -- but I simply didn't think it was as good as Brokeback; the farther away I get from having seen Crash, the smaller it feels to me.

But, again, meaningless.

That said, here's an assortment of links that I've noted or run across in the last few days:

• This blog comment rather squarely nails the bizarre hysteria Brokeback Mountain evoked among rightwingers:
  

  ...note that it's not cowboys who are banding together to protest. You and I have both known cowboys, and though they can be reactionary, racist, and homophobic, usually they also tend to be libertarian. They might not see the movie, but its existence wouldn't bother them much, just like the existence of gay people doesn't bother them much, as long as they don't have to deal with them. The people who are getting uncomfortable are exurban, kinda wussy fundamentalists who fantasize about a masculinity they don't actually have. If you made a movie about exurban fundamentalists discovering they were gay, nobody would care because exurban fundamentalists are nobody's masculine icon.

  
  
• David Poland talks about how the Crash "upset" happened.
  
• Here's a post by screenwriter John Rogers from last month about how just plain dumb the rightwing complaints over the Oscars were this year.
  
• And, hey, wasn't it cool to see Busy Phillips -- Kim Kelly of Freaks and Geeks fame -- sitting with Michelle Williams and Heath in the front row?