Here's a thought: in 5 hours and 15 minutes, my portfolio will be breaking even, YTD (Year to Date).

It's all in the spin.

As a parting gift for 2008, I present to you, reader, The Periodic Table of Awesoments.

(Personally, I think it should just be called The Periodic Table of Awesome, and that #5 should be replaced with Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Drink, but that's just me.)

My 2008

So as 2008 winds down, I'm left wondering, how will it be remembered? In some ways it was monumental, in others, not a lot happened.

It will most certainly be remembered for the election. A huge pivotal point for the world, whose new most powerful person would have been not even allowed to vote a few generations ago, and could have even been owned as property a few generations before that. This may be the first time in millennia that the most powerful person in the world was black, and it was all decided in 2008 (though the transition won't happen for a few weeks). I still remember watching the returns from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary like it was yesterday (January 3rd and 8th, 2008).

2008 will also be remembered for China's reemergence. After centuries of diminishing self-imposed isolation, China finally pulled back a curtain--not an iron one, but a cultural one at least--and hosted the world this summer when they put on the Olympic games. The opening ceremony was a beautiful work of art of unprecedented magnitude, and as much as HALF the world's population saw at least some part of it. China and the world welcomed each other back as billions of people participated in some small way.

To me, and to many current and former Philadelphians, 2008 will be remembered as the year our city once again became a world champion, as the Philadelphia Phillies won baseball's World Series. Ending a city-wide drought of 100 consecutive major sports seasons without a championship, in a way our city too stepped back onto the world stage (or at least the national one). Pride of Philadelphians grew in many forms this year, as 2008 was also the first year of Mayor Michael Nutter's first term. In a city in constant need of a miracle, this year may be seen the same way Rendell's first term was seen: the beginning of an answer to collective prayers. Already half the battle may have been won, as even in the face of a hobbled economy and potentially crippling deficits on the horizon, Philadelphians are certainly more hopeful and optimistic than they were a year ago.

Surely 2008 will be remembered for the collapse of the financial system and the havoc created by short-sighted, short-term incentives. Entire schools of economic thought may grow out of the events of this year (which one could argue started in August of 2007). It would be nice if the crisis were remembered as a footnote to the Age of Obama, but I think it will unfortunately stand on its own in the eyes of history.

What else will 2008 be remembered for?

(If you were planning on making history worthy of the list, you've got 15 hours. Good luck.)

Harper's Magazine has compiled a list of statistics (though most of them not the kind you typically see statisticians worrying about) that are supposed to represent the Bush era. Though one-sided and decidedly anti-Bush, it does give the reader a lot to think about. And it makes me a little hopeful about the next administration; even your average Chicago politician can't be this bad. And I think Obama's a good deal better than your average Chicago politician.

The list can be found here:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/0082319

(PS - It's from the January, 2009 issue...so you're looking into the future.)

My CIA Tactic

When it comes to the battle for public support in this country, the CIA is in the difficult position of having their successes private and classified, and some of their failures public and well-known. They generally do great work, and make mistakes like any group of humans would doing complicated tasks with incomplete information, but generally speaking, we're talking about a group of dedicated individuals who have given up any possibility of public glory to protect what they believe in.

That said, here's an amusing human interest story about a successful CIA tactic. The story was written by the Washington Post and has been cited by Reuters, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal (among other news outlets covering the Post's coverage). Apparently, Viagra is a fantastic item to have in your pocket when bartering with warlords. It's a rare commodity that can't be easily bought, traded for, or stolen in rural Afghanistan, and it provides a benefit to the Warlord that doesn't tag him as an informer (as a sudden windfall of visible wealth would). It's also completely non-dangerous to American operatives (not necessarily the case with money or weapons).

I think this is a fairly ingenious solution, and a great example of how differing interests and utility functions can result in a HUGELY beneficial trade. The Warlord gets something that seems like magic, and gives up virtually nothing. All he has to do is tell some American some of the things he's seen and heard and let American operatives walk through his land. It costs him nothing but a little bit of his time. From the perspective of the CIA, they get hugely valuable intelligence and access to passages and alternative routes through a hostile country. These things save American lives, and help the CIA do their job much more effectively. In return, they give up some pills that cost less than the price of a one-way airplane ticket to the country in which they're negotiating. Both sides get something hugely valuable and give up something negligible. This kind of extremely productive trade is so fundamental that it's the first step in both the study of economics and the evolution of economies.

Does anyone think I'd be good at writing sketch comedy?

It's Erev Christmas tonight, so to all my Christian readers, Merry Christmas.

Also: Happy Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, Jew Movie and Chinese Food Day, and Festivus.

Happy Hanukkah to my readers.

I went back to my family's house for candlelighting and Eagles watching tonight. During the game, DeluxX, itching to spend a gift card he received, said "I'm sick of TV. Let's go shopping." I'm not saying he's a woman, but what dude wants to turn off football to go shopping?

Sheba one-upped him though. After DeluxX confused an Inuit villager with a Chinese villager in a Burger King commercial, and was informed out loud for all to hear by me, that Inuits lived in Alaska, Sheba said "I guess every non-American looks the same to him." Though you wouldn't be able to tell from listening to their Governor talk, Alaskans are in fact Americans.

My Cash

I just read a stupid article about good and bad places to hide massive amounts of cash you have lying around the house. Bad is in a purse or under the mattress. Good is in a fake electrical outlet or a tennis ball you've cut open, put money into, resealed, and stuck in a can with 2 other tennis balls. Seemingly good, but bad because of movies and the number of websites recommending it, is a secret hiding place in a toilet tank.

My problem with this isn't that it's obvious, but it's also wrong. You know what the best place to hide lots of excess cash is? A BANK. Or a money market fund that only invests in US Treasury securities, or another money market fund participating in the fed's money market insurance program. Even if you're worried about your bank, your deposits are insured by the federal government up to $250,000 right now. Anyone who for some reason feels the need to hide MORE cash than that, can just get a bank account at another bank, and stash another $250,000 there! It's not that complicated! Also, you know what you usually get with all the options I just mentioned (you know, besides massively better security)? INTEREST.

That's right, people will pay you for your deposits (kind of like, you know, a LOAN to a bank or the federal government, guaranteed by the best credit on Earth). Now, I'm not an expert in banking, but to the guy who's hiding massive amounts of cash in a tennis ball or toilet tank, I can confidently say that there are people who will pay you for the privilege of keeping your money SAFER than you ever could at home.

And, once again, to all you fearful, blog-surfing, cash-hoarding, burgeoning economics students: the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT will personally guarantee the safety of the money you deposit or "loan" in all of the cases I mentioned above. And yes, they're a better bet than a tennis ball.

My Library Idea

As many people know, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has proposed, among MANY other things, closing down 11 branches of Philly's Free Library system. This is in the face of huge current and looming budget deficits, projected to exceed a billion dollars in the next five years.

Mayor Nutter has always been a HUGE supporter of libraries, so I have no doubt he deems them necessary, but he's still taking a lot of heat for this particular part of his cost-cutting/revenue-increasing proposal. He's especially taking heat for removing reliable, free access to the internet from poor neighborhoods, and people are (correctly) making the argument that the elimination of modern libraries makes the digital divide harder to overcome. Furthermore, people use library computers to do everything from attaining some technological literacy to searching for jobs.

What's interesting is that most of the arguments against the library closures are about the computers, not the books (Nutter has said he will increase bookmobile service to neighborhoods losing libraries, though bookmobiles, while better than nothing, are more suited for sparse rural areas than dense urban ones in my opinion). I'm wondering if there isn't another halfway compromise the city could make:

Free internet cafes. What if the library opened up a branch with NO BOOKS? What if there were smaller branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia that were essentially public internet cafes? They would be smaller and less expensive to run, and still provide what seems to me to be the majority of the benefits that protesters are worried about losing in these branch closings.

Now, I'm a big fan of books too, but during what must be a relentlessly pragmatic period (in a city that already has more libraries per capita than almost any other major American city, by the way), maybe library-based free internet cafes (heck, you don't even need the cafe part) would work well as a compromise.

Thoughts?

My Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy

For those of you who don't know, the US Armed Forces have a "don't ask don't tell" policy regarding homosexuals serving in the various branches. This means they can serve, as long as they don't tell anyone they're homosexuals. If they're openly gay, they can't serve in the military. That's current policy.

It's taken a lot of heat (and it's in the news as the Obama administration might eventually try to change it). Sure, allowing gays to serve openly would be a mild disruption, but so was allowing blacks and women to serve in any capacity. OK, so the military isn't an agent for social change, but that doesn't mean it can't keep up with the times and contemporary values. Yes, the military is a conservative institution, but you can't use that as a cloak for being intolerant. And why does being gay mean you can't control yourself?

Well, let me ask my readers this: does having separate male and female facilities make sense? If the rational, tolerant and enlightened answer is yes, then I submit it may be rational, tolerant and enlightened to not let gays serve in the military at all. This may be a shocking statement coming from a guy with a gay best friend, but hear me out--it's not prejudice. IF we accept that coed everything is unacceptable in the military, the question is, why? Presumably because you don't want certain shared facilities among people who could possibly be sexually attracted to each other. It would cause problems beyond what letting blacks in the military caused. Not just a disruption you get used to, but a permanent tension and distraction among soldiers (after all, how many young men and women in good health and of fighting age get used to people their sexually attracted to enough that they can treat them as members of the opposite gender invariably without hesitation? We wouldn't last very long as a species if that happened). With letting women serve, there was a simple solution: separate facilities. But with homosexuals, it presents a problem. With 2 separate facilities, you can have all the straight men in one area and all the straight women in another without risking a sexual attraction. BUT, once you start dealing with homosexuals instead of heterosexuals, you can never have more than TWO PEOPLE in a room without someone falling into another person's gender preference.

So by saying gays should serve openly--or at all--we're not just saying that homosexuals are every bit as restrained and professional as heterosexuals (I don't think many people would have a problem with that, and people could get over their discomfort with homosexuality in general), we're also saying that homosexuals are MORE restrained and professional than heterosexuals, a position for which there is no evidence.

So I say, if we let gays serve openly in the military, and I'm not necessarily against it, why not allow coed everything? If it's OK for two homosexuals of the same gender to shower together, why not a straight man and a woman? Or are there more double standards than we want to admit in our push for equality everywhere?

Here's a fun and easy logic game based on elementary geometric topology. I thought my readers might enjoy it:

http://www.freeworldgroup.com/games6/gameindex/lilly-hop.htm

It's no Hyperframe, though. For those of you who haven't beaten all 40 levels of Hyperframe, go do it now. It's amazingly fun, and I'm fairly sure people who beat it are smarter afterwards. I know I felt smarter:

http://www.addictinggames.com/hyperframe.html

My New Treat

And now for something completely different:

http://foodproof.com/photos/full/bacon-cheese-roll-1290

[This has to be the least healthy and least kosher thing ever invented.]

My Elephant Watching

A seriously flawed study recently came out, which, despite not being well done, nevertheless came out with some shocking results. Elephants in zoos live DRAMATICALLY shorter lives than elephants completely in the wild or in large parks. Now, the study has enough problems with it that you can't really assign specific causality, but just the average lives of the elephants say it all. Both African and Asian elephants live less than 20 years on average in zoos and over 40 years on average in the wild. I think we can assign SOME causality to the zoos, even if we can't identify the specific mechanism.

[Note: I know correlation doesn't mean causality. If A and B are correlated, and it's not a coincidence, then either A causes B, B causes A or C causes B and A. In this case it's too prevalent and stark to be a coincidence. I don't see how living shorter lives would cause an elephant to be in a zoo, except the thin argument that years ago the elephants captured for zoos were the least healthy and therefore the most easily captured. That argument has some validity, but it wouldn't more than HALVE the lifespan. Finally, given that the populations studied had oceans between them, it's hard to believe C is causing both A and B, and even if it is something like the weather, our putting the animals in zoos is exposing them to whatever "C" is.]

This raises a tough question: what do we do with the information? There's a good argument to be made that not keeping elephants in zoos endangers the whole species. Elephants aren't exactly numerous, and animals get much more sympathetic treatment from private groups and governments alike when people can SEE the animals. The ability of humans to observe an animal is the second best way to preserve a species (the best way being to eat enough of the animal to encourage farmers to create giant herds of it, but as much as I want to eat an elephant, there probably aren't enough right now for that to work, so we're left with preserving visitation rights). Human compassion often stems from personal experience, and elephants need people to see them and admire them in order to save them. But we more than halve the lives of every animal we make easily available to the public. So do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? And who are we to decide which of the few get shafted? Most zoo elephants are born in zoos, so I guess that's a convenient filter, but we're creating a subspecies of unhealthy short-lived versions of African and Asian elephants.

And I guess a final point is that elephants aren't humans and have very few rights in this country, but since we're talking about zoos in many countries and over long periods of time, I want to talk about it philosophically and on principle only. So what do we do with the elephants? Cripple dozens or hundreds to aide thousands? Let them all go free? Try to fix the problem and not allow elephants in certain zoos that can't meet their needs while insisting the ones that keep them take steps to replicate conditions proven to keep them alive longer? I favor further study and a middle-of-the-road solution. But maybe that's because I'm a sissy on the issue, or because I don't know enough, or because I'm falling into the trap of seeing two seemingly good opposing arguments and assuming the truth lies somewhere in the middle (a HUGE human flaw if you ask me, though not a bad way to manage the risk of unbridled stupidity).

All I know is that it seems wrong to essentially torture or cripple or harm animals for our own viewing pleasure.

My Line

Every Senator has traded a vote on one thing for a vote on another thing.

Plenty of people have offered political support in exchange for at least being put on the short list for jobs.

Campaign contributions give you access, put a politician in your network, and can lead to sympathetic hearings on issues, or even jobs (especially in the case of the Bush administration).

Where's the line? Putting a Senate seat on eBay certainly is over it, which is more or less what Governor Blagojevich of Illinois did, but how much worse is it than what happens in politics every day?

I think the worst part is the circumvention of the democratic process. All public officials have the public trust to act on behalf of their constituents, and they almost invariably look out for their own interests. But what we're looking at in Illinois was more than failing to fairly represent the electorate, this was failing to faithfully ACT as the electorate. The Governor is supposed to singlehandedly choose a Senator to replace President-elect Obama, and he does with the appointment the same thing a Congressman might do with a vote he didn't care much about: see what he can get for it. That crossed a line, but what line? Where is it? I'm having trouble identifying it.

It also makes me wonder, is the law a little bit to blame? When the President makes a big appointment, the Senate* has to confirm the choice. Maybe these appointments should be state-legislature confirmable? I'm not excusing what he did, and I consider this an egregious breach of public trust, but shouldn't this have been predictable? Why think that in this one case a politician would rise to the occasion and faithfully execute his responsibility on behalf of those he serves? Politicians are ALWAYS trying to get something for what they do, which is what makes a lot of them good politicians. The great ones trade for stuff their constituents need; the corrupt ones trade for stuff for them. Most politicians, I suspect, fall somewhere in between. But given the huge conflict of interest the Illinois governor gets when a Senator vacates his seat (and that one state is hardly alone in this respect), shouldn't there be some safeguards? If not a special election, then at least an election among the state house and senate? Or at the VERY least, a confirmation process to prevent cronyism?

Again, I'm not excusing what he did, but the system isn't entirely blameless. It creates bad incentive structures, and who knows how many times this has already happened, undetected. Governor Blagojevich was especially stupid to make a move like this while he was already under scrutiny for corruption. But what about the governors who aren't under such scrutiny? State legislatures all over the country should move to reform these rules, to prevent something like this from happening again.

My Review of Obama's Economic Team

[So I haven't been able to come up with anything new on the x^x = y^y problem. I'm still stuck at an infinite number of pairs--with an unknown number of rational pairs--made up of one number between 0 and 1/e and another between 1/e and 1. Haven't found any more other than my original 1/2 and 1/4.

My thoughts have been turning back to politics, lately, and I thought I'd answer a common question I've been getting.]

A lot of people have been asking me what I think of Obama's economic team. I'm going to give him pretty high marks. I already think Bernanke is a pretty good person to have as Fed Chair (which is good, because he'll be around for a while).

I think Geithner is EXACTLY what we need at Treasury Secretary, and he would have been one of my top choices (if not my top choice). I think Paulson has been limited in his abilities to help the country weather the crisis, because he's so much of a practitioner. He's a finance guy more than an economist, and he's essentially using a toolbag of applied economics based on assumptions that turned out not to be quite true. As a result he's been not-quite-right every step of the way. Geithner, if anything, has the opposite problem. The only thing he's lacking is high level experience with a financial services company. And I'm not sure that's a weakness right now.

Volcker is a strong choice, and Obama created a position for which he'll be especially well suited. He's too old to run a big department, and he's not a PhD economist (his doctorates are honorary). But he's an experienced former Fed Chairman with a lot of wisdom to provide to a relatively young team of geniuses, and his voice will be an important one. Furthermore, he has international street cred the likes of which no twenty people in the Bush adminsitration have put together. His actions under President Reagan (he essentially made "Reaganomics" work by keeping his word in the face of political and popular pressure to do otherwise) brought credibility both to himself and the U.S. Central Bank.

I'm also going to stick up for Larry Summers here. The former president of Harvard University got into trouble when he made some observations about the differences in men and women in the sciences. You know what? It doesn't matter. Also, he was grossly misrepresented. I'm going to stick up for him in two ways: as an economist, and in his argument about men and women. That's right, I'm throwing my hat in the ring on the side of Dr. Summers in the gender debate. And here's why: all he did was suggest that men might have a higher standard deviation of IQs than women. IQ measures a particular type of intelligence that makes one suited for math and science. I believe women, on average, are smarter than men, in almost every respect. Your average woman is smarter than your average men. But there's a lot more variation in the men. Meaning on the tails of the distribution, you see more men. Most of the dumbest people in the world are men, but at the same time, most of the people most capable of doing math and physics are also men. It's just the way the distributions break out. We're not talking about all men and all women here, Dr. Summers was talking about tenured Ivy League scientists and their peers, basically, some of the smartest people in the world. Women on average can be better at science, but at the very top you see more men, because there's a larger variation in their intelligence. OK? All the data actually suggest he UNDERSTATED the effect, so lay off him.

And finally, from what I gather he's a skilled evidence-based economist with a disposition many of the top theoretical economists in politics seem to be lacking. So he gets a spot on the team, and I'm happy about it. If you don't like what he had to say about women in the sciences, well, that's just hard cheese. Suck it up, because it doesn't affect his ability to make policy recommendations. Jefferson fathered illegitimate children with a woman he legally owned; Churchill was a raging alcoholic; Ty Cobb and Henry Ford were horrible human beings who hated Jews; and for all you know, Jesus was racist. It didn't affect any of their exemplary job performances, and I'm not condemning Dr. Summers for making an impolitic observation.

And the rest of Obama's economic team seems pretty good, though I don't have anything I need to get off my chest about anyone else. My only worry about the team comes in the form a book title about the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund started by some of the smartest laureates ever to win a nobel prize in economics: "When Genius Failed." But if the economic team manages to conduct regular reality checks, as well as keep in mind fundmantals like supply and demand and basic incentive structures (the lack of attention paid to those two things probably did more than anything else to facilitate our current crisis), they should do just fine. It's certainly the best economic team any President has assembled in my lifetime. Maybe even since the days of Alexander Hamilton.

Some updates: Rhyno, a quite successful math major, is correct. I did make an assumption of continuity, which, though warranted, is easily demonstrated through proof of differentiability. Thank you for adding to the proofiness of my proof (with a vocabulary like mine, I'm gonna be the next Colbert).

And thank you, Katharine, for pointing out the VERY interesting fact that the minimum value for f(x) = x^x (between x=0 and x=1) occurs at x = 1/e. I wonder why that is. How did you figure that out?

I'm starting to wonder, even if there are infinite pairs of x and y such that x^x = y^y and x=/=y, how many of those pairs are rational? Is there a finite number of rational values for which it holds true? What is that number? How does one find them?

My Math Puzzle Update

So I think I've proven that there are an infinite number of pairs of values for which x^x = y^y such that x =/= y. I haven't taken a math class since 12th grade, and I haven't taken a good one since 10th, so bear with me as I'll have to be more imprecise than I'd like. The proof goes something like this:
f(x) = x^x
as x --> 0, f(x) --> 1 (from the lower side)
as x --> 1, f(x) --> 1 (from the lower side)
Therefore, there must be some minimum value of f(x) in between x=0 and x=1
[Editor's Note: I think that value occurs somewhere within a thousandth of x = 0.368]
The curve of f(x) = x^x must be at least somewhat bowl-shaped in between x=0 and x=1
[Editor's Note: I graphed it in Excel, below, y-axis is x^x, x-axis is just x]
So imagine drawing a horizontal line at f(x) = 1 and sweeping it down. You would pass through literally an infinite number of f(x) values that could be produced by 2 values of x.

OK, so now that I've proven there are lots more of those numbers, a few questions remain: what are they? How do we find them? What else do they have in common? What else makes them interesting?

I'll do more work on it later; I'm hoping I'll be back at my desk at work tomorrow (which means sleep for now). Good luck, fellow nerds!

PS - If this turns out to be a thing, I reserve naming rights. Don't worry, I'll pick something totally awesome for it.

My Air Force One

So I'm on my third consecutive sick day right now, and I've had a lot of time to do nothing. I'm now caught up on all the TV shows I like, plus, with the exception of 3 episodes, I went through the entire series of Entourage (to date) on the recommendation of DeluxX.

I also finally got to see Air Force One, the 1997 Harrison Ford thriller that my parents wouldn't let me see when it came out. It felt good. Take that, Mom! Only took me 11 years to thwart that particular "no."

I now have the syndrome Jim Gaffigan identified in his comedy, in which I just saw a movie everyone else I know (with any interest in it) saw years ago. "But I wanna talk about it now!" Thank you, blogosphere!

President Marshall is totally badass. And it got me thinking, how would other presidents, real and fictional, perform in the situation? First thing I did was start with George Washington. Then I realized his first reaction would have been, "Why am I in a giant metal box and what's with all these bright things that have no fire?" THEN I decided to NOT start with George Washington.

I don't think W would do too well in a hijacking. He'd just take the escape pod. That said, no one in their right mind would hijack W's plane to get a general released from another country's prison. World leaders don't really care what he has to say.

That said, it does beg the question: why bother hijacking Air Force One in the first place? It's much easier to break a guy out of any jail in the world than to hijack Air Force One. Seriously, the 10 most secure prisons in the world combined wouldn't come close to the security that surrounds the President of the United States (I'm talking about quality and difficulty to penetrate, not number of guards or total firepower).

OK, so acknowledging the movie plot is pretty stupid, I went from the current president to my favorite fictional president, President Bartlet from the West Wing. It wasn't a hard leap since they shared so many cast members (CIA Agent Eric Frost/National Security Advisor; Judge Evelyn Baker Lang/Vice President; Senator Hunt/AG; even that guy trying to write a constitution/that thug hijacker). I'm a huge fan of economists, but I don't think even Jed Bartlet would have done much good on that plane. That said, he had a much smarter staff and more capable security.

Speaking of West Wing parallels, it was interesting the way both that series and the movie dealt with the question of how to make federal decisions without an alive but absent president.

I think maybe Obama would have done the worst in that situation, but mostly by virtue of the fact that he has no military experience and has TWO young daughters, which means the hijackers could...hm...I was about to say "shoot one and still have a hostage" (in comparison to President Marshall who, in the movie, has only one daughter)...but then I thought to myself "Wow, if I blog that, will the CIA or NSA or FBI come knocking? Will it be seen as a threat against the president-elect and be investigated by the secret service? Will it prevent me from ever getting a job with the federal government?" I think I'd be in the clear, mostly because nobody actually READS this blog, but at the same time I think it's a sad state of affairs for free speech when I have to worry about such things while writing a hypothetical in which I compare how real and fictional presidents would fare if inserted into a horrible movie plot (by which I mean the plot was horrible and full of holes, I actually liked the movie).

Speaking of horrible plot points, though, how dumb do you have to be to give a press conference announcing that Air Force One has been hijacked? Back to the West Wing for a minute, they didn't even let a peep slip to the public when the landing gear indicator light went out on Air Force One, which is much closer to how anyone with a brain would actually behave in the real world. You don't ANNOUNCE to an entire world full of enemies that the president's plane has been hijacked, refuse to answer any questions about him except to say "he's still president" (but obviously not present), and then walk off. Seriously, if the people who run White Houses actually think at that level, I'd be a shoe-in for Obama's Communications Director (if the feds are reading, I'm available if you want to offer me a job as a senior counselor to the president).

Finally, I don't think I'd do very will in such a situation, personally. But that's mostly because I get motion sick.

Well, glad I got that off my chest. What did people do when they wanted to talk about a movie everyone else had seen years ago before there was blogging?