Events

Parker got a chance to explore Oakwood Park today, the first sunny day we've had since we got here a week ago. The park is huge—I would guess about 75 hectares—and Parker (with help) ran around the whole thing: He also did exceptionally well on come-sit drills, leading me to the conclusion that he knows when I have treats. Of course, so does everyone else, like this beautiful Rhodesian ridgeback who kept sticking her nose into my treat pocket: Parker is now sleeping, which I hope lasts through the first...

Krugman has a good summary: [T]he belief that lower wages would raise overall employment rests on a fallacy of composition. In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary. Here’s how the fallacy works: if some subset of the work force accepts lower wages, it can gain jobs. If workers in the widget industry take a pay cut, this will lead to lower prices of widgets relative to other things, so people will buy more widgets, hence more...

In this case, "town" has a State Capitol building: Parker seemed to enjoy the Oakwood neighborhood just east of the state government complex, too.

Even Parker has a level of dignity beneath which he will not sink. This, however, is still above that line:

Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt writes this week about the history and future of the American Drive-Thru: But despite the Stakhanovite quotas being met by the Bluetoothed cadres across the land, all is not well with the drive-through. The facilities saw a 4 percent drop in business in 2008 due to the recession. And—more threatening still—a number of communities have recently passed anti-idling ordinances, some of which implicate even the fastest drive-through windows. ... Meanwhile, people who would...

Want frequent-flyer miles? Try this: At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off. Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments...

A bunch of people went over to Ruckus Pizza on Wednesday for their weekly trivia contest. I do much better at College Bowl-type quizzes, and this one was all pop culture, but that didn't diminish the company and the pizza. All good. The second round featured advertising slogans. See if you can find one product for which all these slogans work beautifully: "The quicker picker-upper" Two for me, none for you Get up to four hours longer Makes mouth happy Stress stinks, ____ works Any time's a good time for...

I tried to get out ahead of the weather on Tuesday, but it found me. The trip started out at just past 7am with the car in this condition: By mid-Indiana Parker had had enough: And on the arrival end, the residents have still not fully accepted their houseguest: Parker and the cats have had words. Barks, growls, and hisses, actually. We're still trying to get them to stay in the same room together without either freaking out. This means, in practice, one of us coaxing the cats from behind the sofa while...

Via Strange Maps comes a field outside Minden, Neb., shaped like...well, like Nebraska: Strange Maps writes: Is Nebraska Field a coincidence, then? When not being centrally irrigated, each of the mile-by-mile blocks is often divided into smaller fields, mostly rectangular but not really symmetrical. That sort of describes the shape of Nebraska – but still, chances of a field mimicking it so perfectly seem very remote indeed. Nebraska is rectangular in an oblong sort of way, with straight borders...

We got to Raleigh in one piece through a billion liters of rain, it seemed. Then this morning we got right back in the car to rescue one of our hosts after her radiator blew a hose: We also got out of Chicago just ahead of the bone-chilling cold and snow that has started to make living there a true test of character. I love Chicago, but you know, sometimes, it's not bad to skip out for a little while.