Take a gander at ESPN's rankings of the best Football states. Can't say I'm surprised to see Texas sitting on top. Indiana finished a respectable #20. Top 15 below, and full list over here.

1. Texas
2. California
3. Florida
4. Pennsylvania
5. Ohio
6. Georgia
7. Michigan
8. Louisiana
9. New Jersey
10. Wisconsin
11. Illinois
12. Alabama
13. Virginia
14. North Carolina
15. Missouri

Furthermore, can you believe that there are now national rankings for High School Football? Is it necessary to put national emphasis on very local teams? How can they even arrive at reasonably balanced rankings when most teams in the Top 10, 20 even 200 will rarely play one another?
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Macky is back, though likely in small doses. Thanks for holding down the fort, Saxy. First order of business: this gun. It's called the DREAD and it appears to represent one of the more significant advances in small arms technology in the last 100 years. We're talking 120,000 (thousand!) rounds per minute! My calculator tells me that's 2000 rounds per second. On top of that, there is no recoil, muzzle flash or other side effects found in conventional small weapons. I'm not big on guns, but this thing is a pretty incredible piece of science.

Here's a little YouTube-ige. This short is great because it plays out like one of those film strips you used to watch back in elementary school. Remember film strips?


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I gather it's rather fashionable (and, not a bad idea to boot) to give the gift of vicarious charity (you know, where money goes to the needy on the gift receipient's behalf) to friends whom you are not particularly close to. My friend points me to this website with gifts of this kind, but with a development aid and novelty flavor. My favorite, which sounds like a gag gift at Spencer's in the mall:

Prize bull semen, single delivery - £10
In Africa, areas devastated by conflict find cattle breeds weakened. The prime requirement in the development of stronger and more productive milkers is a prize bull. £1,200 buys a hunk of beefcake with the ability to service thousands of cows (often personally). Maintain his peak performance with feed for six months. At £10 a shot, his semen, delivered to the farmer, is a gift loaded with potential.

Well, it turns out to be a rather reasonable need that's being filled there. This approach to charity, methinks, is a good one. One bypasses the mundane obligatory nature of charitable giving and augments it with originality, which ultimately is kinda the point behind giving a gift.

The kicker is, this company is endorsed by Twiggy. Yes, that Twiggy.

This also reminds me of the fundamental problem in development aid: the top-down approach. William Easterly (channeling Peter Bauer) understands that the problems of a developing country will only be properly understood by those on the ground. Thus, these kinds of gifts probably aren't found in a government manual or a UN development report, but instead mostly come from the NGOs that fulfill the orders.
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Inspired by Saturday Night Live's latest "digital short" phenom (is this a once a year thing?), I've put together some of multi-host and multi-musical guest Justin Timberlake's greatest hits from the show. He has, I think it is not controversial to say, been the most consistently funny host in several seasons.

Dick in a Box








The Barry Gibb Talk Show, with guests:
1. Thomas Friedman, Sandra Day O'Connor, Jimmy Carter
2. Nancy Pelosi, Bill Richardson, Ann Coulter
3. Arianna Huffington, Cruz Bustamante, Al Franken

Punk'd

Homelessville

Omeletteville

A Message from Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson

The Leprechaun Sketch

(By the way, NBC has decided to go the other way on online content and instead make it very difficult to find their content. After all, they wouldn't want the unwashed masses to actually keep their shows on the air by getting people to watch them)
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"It didn't even taste like steak." -- Mickey Rourke. One restaurant offers a 5 oz. burger version for $62.

What will NYC's trans fat ban mean for this kind of indulgence? Will the price go to infinity?

The price, per pound, is not unrivaled. Saffron can go for as much as $2,700/pound, and Beluga caviar for $2,400. Joe Pytka, owner of Bastide in Los Angeles, once paid $35,000 for a one kilogram white truffle.

UPDATE: A man in Hong King earlier this year paid £85,000 for a 1.51kg truffle. Is this conspicuous consumption? The article indicates not as he was not trying to signal his wealth to anyone, but is genuinely obsessed with truffles. [HT: Marginal Revolution]
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Top 15 Magazines (by revenue)

1. People
2. Better Homes and Gardens
3. Time
4. Sports Illustrated
5. TV Guide
6. Parade
7. Newsweek
8. Reader's Digest
9. Good Housekeeping
10. Woman's Day
11. Cosmopolitan
12. InStyle
13. Family Circle
14. USA Weekend
15. Us Weekly

BH&G? Really? Vogue is still Conde Nast's flagship (#18). Some other surprises are AARP The Magazine (#42), Architectural Digest (#51) just edging out Playboy (#52), and overall the number of exclusively golf-focused magazines (six in the top 300).
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Has anyone else heard this term "grup"? From New York Magazine:

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.

Neko Case references also make a number of appearances.
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Reynolds continues by telling of a 2004 story in the Washington Post titled, "The Vanishing Middle-Class Job." The Post article pointed out that in 1967, nearly a quarter (22.3 percent) of households made between $35,000 and $49,999 in inflation-adjusted terms, but that that share was down to 15 percent by 2003. Reynolds notes that the same article showed that the percentage of U.S. households with a real income higher than $50,000 rose from 24.9 percent in 1967 to 44.1 percent in 2003. Moreover, the percentage with income lower than $35,000 fell from 52.8 percent to 40.9 percent. In other words, the "middle class" was shrinking because people were moving out of the Post's statically defined middle class into a higher income class.

That's from David Henderson's review of Alan Reynolds' new book, Income and Wealth, in TCSDaily.

# posted by Saxdrop @ 6:06 PM

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