SOME OBSERVATIONS TRANSCEND POLITICS.  Rebelpleb cross-posted to Common Dreams some observations about what makes for a successful school.

To be sure, teachers deserve higher salaries – on the order of 1000% raises – but if you asked teachers what they wish for, higher salaries would be the last thing they would mention. They would tell you that they want: 

• smaller class sizes, so that they can give more individual attention to their students and have fewer papers to grade, so that they can devote enough time to give students thorough feedback and assistance to help them learn
• more preparation time, so that they can devise creative and interesting lessons to enable students to learn and be engaged
• more autonomy, so that they can help students think critically instead of forcing the students to engage in rote memorization for standardized tests
• more support from school staff, so they can teach rather than having to do much administrative and bureaucratic work that is not connected to educating their students
• more social supports for students so they can devote their time to learning more effectively
• more time for their students to engage in art, music, and physical education
• and did I mention smaller class sizes?

Everything on this wish list relates directly to better education. While we spend money on new technologies and gadgets for classrooms, new books and learning programs which enrich the pocketbooks of corporations, we do nothing to enrich classrooms in the ways that teachers and students need most.

These observations generalize to the universities as well, where technology fads and administrative interference get in the way of teaching and scholarship.  The proper social supports might be subject to debate, and the nature of unproductive assessment and testing might be different.  But the misplaced enthusiasm of observers who see increased student credit hours per faculty member as enhanced productivity is the nub of the problem.

One quarter of our children live in poverty. We have a crisis of unemployment, joblessness, hunger, and homelessness that worsens by the day and deeply affects all of our school-age children. In addition, we have a cultural crisis in which superficiality and the spectacle of entertainment are revered beyond any moral and civic responsibilities to each other and to our communities. We have a crisis of technophilia, in which we are addicted to television, computers, iPads, iPhones, smartphones, etc., and lack important engagements in interpersonal conversation and true emotional attachment. And we have a crisis of society, in which the corporation has taken over all aspects of our lives, including our educational systems. Our schools have been reconstructed to train mind-numbed automaton serfs for the benefit of their corporate overseers.

Those mind-numbed serfs will be the undoing of those corporate overseers (what good is an employee who can't find the bathroom without a study guide?)  The preceding sentences, however, focus on the inability, whatever the cause might be, of the schools to develop the habits of industry; habits that are, in any event, rendered anachronistic by the superficial vulgar culture.  (Never mind the insurrections across North Africa or the breakdown of Japan, Inc.; a new Survivor is to make its premiere.)

Many poor students have obligations and burdens beyond their control which impede their abilities to devote themselves to their educations. To address the educational needs of these children, their social and economic needs must be dealt with first, and this larger, societal issue cannot be adequately addressed by teachers, though many try to do so.

But there is also another fact that most teachers will never speak of publicly – students are not all perfect angels, not by a long shot. Though I hate to rely on TV as a model, the show “Supernanny” depicts how poorly some children are parented and how spoiled and entitled so many children are now more than ever. These same children who throw endless temper tantrums, speak back to adults, and obtain everything they want in every way they want it are the children that teachers are supposed to manage and educate every day. Rather than support the authority of the teacher when problems arise, parents of these children back up their offspring and complain to administrators about teachers, rather than confront the control their own children exert over them.

The essayist suggests that the perceived advantages of charter and private schools in educating youngsters is an artifact of three things: smaller class sizes, fewer classes per faculty member, and students with more cultural capital. The generalizations to higher education are straightforward.

HOW LEGENDS BEGIN.  Voluntary Xchange finds an anticipated Beatles Mockumentary. "I didn’t know Scottie Pippen and his homies won the Super Bowl at Shea Stadium in 1965."   Lose enough of the content, and put the information you do have together incorrectly, and that's what you get.

Something similar appears to have happened under Grand Central Terminal, where the Daily Mail foreign service claims to have found President Roosevelt's private train.  A closer inspection of the picture suggests a New York Central baggage car that got pushed out of the way under the Waldorf-Astoria and subsequently proved to be too expensive to haul away for scrap.  But don't let that get in the way of a good story.

His presidency began in 1932 at the height of the depression with nearly a quarter of the working population jobless and two million homeless.

In such difficult times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not want anybody to know of his own problems and arranged to journey in and out of New York via Grand Central in a personal armoured train.

'The platform is directly under the Waldorf Astoria and after Roosevelt's 6000 horse powered diesel train would pull up on the tracks it would let his personal car out of the side,' said Dan Brucker, 52, spokesperson for Metro North, the company that runs Grand Central Terminal.

'The car would then drive off the dark and secret platform into an elevator which would take it directly into the Waldorf Astoria garage.

'This served to protect Roosevelt's safety and protect his disability through polio from the public at large.'

The train is still visible in the poorly light disused platform, a remnant of a different time in American history, when industrial icons like locomotives ruled the land.

Mr Brucker once showed a number of O Scalers through Grand Central Terminal, and he's too well informed about his terminal to be spreading disinformation, although he might have given his British guests too much information in too big a hurry for them to digest it all.

First, Mr Roosevelt would not have had a 6,000 horsepower diesel train.  It is true that a three-unit, 6,000 horsepower diesel locomotive, the first Alco PA-1, did make its debut on the Waldorf-Astoria siding (not in the ballroom, is there no end to some train nuts' imagination?), but that was in 1946, after the war.  The Presidential train might have used the Waldorf-Astoria siding, and the special Presidential car with hand controls might have been brought along.  But the special armored official car Ferdinand Magellan, used by Mr Roosevelt after 1942 and more famously by President Truman (and President Reagan had it restored to service for a 1984 whistle stop campaign), is in preservation (but not open to the public) in Florida.

The abandoned presidential train is the less titillating legend about the Grand Central Terminal plant.  There's also the battery room in the sub-basement.

During the war, it was not Roosevelt's train which concerned Hitler but the immense power grid under Grand Central, which to this day powers the transportation of more than one million people per week up and down American's East Coast.

Constructed as part of the redesigned terminal in 1913, this colossal top-secret area ten storeys deep - known as M42 - was left off all blueprints for the station and its existence was only officially acknowledged by the station owners in the late 1980's

Accessible via a lift that is almost 100 years old, M42 is still one of the most closely guarded areas.

'The exact location of M42 is still classified information,' said Mr Brucker.

It's so classified that a Mail reporter visited it, and, in July of 2001, Mr Brucker showed it to the visiting O Scalers.

Knife switches for the old batteries and rotary converters.
The converters have since been replaced with solid-state rectifiers.

An early twentieth-century control panel.

It's possible that Hitler wanted this substation put out of business, although a news report that suggests he wanted to learn about the Manhattan Project (an extremely closely held codeword) as well as about disrupting U.S. railroads is doubtful. Some German spies did land at Bar Harbor.  The target most ferroequinologists recognize is The Pennsylvania Railroad's crossing of the Alleghenies, a complex more difficult to conceal.

The sub-basement of Grand Central might have been a closely guarded secret (apart from railroad employees and ferroequinologists.)  Hollywood knew about it all the same.

Lex Luthor's hideout is behind that door.

BARBARIANS IN THE BRACKETS.  Capitol One confirms that its plundering hordes set loose at various tourist destinations are Visigoths, and their latest quest is to make fun of sports reporting.

Perhaps they can teach the fans some better chants.  Fans at some basketball games are prone to yell Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooh for the duration of a possession, or sometimes for the entire series between television stoppages.  At other games, it's more of an Oh-uh-uh-uh-Oh-oh, doesn't sound like a rain dance or like a prayer for deliverance, but it doesn't sound particularly informed either.

I MUST BE COMPLICIT IN OPPRESSING THE MASSES.  If time permits, I treat my last full day in London as a shopping trip:  Ian Allan near Waterloo, Fortnum and Mason for tea, Davidoff for cigars, perhaps a quick train ride to Oxford for Blackwells and an early dinner.

Britain's left would prefer I not shop in Piccadilly.

Daily Mail photograph.

In the Colonies, a tea merchant collecting taxes inspires a revolution. In the Old Country, a tea merchant avoiding taxes becomes an excuse to abuse shoppers for eating salmon sandwiches. Progress of two centuries?

POSITIVE ECONOMICS.  The Law of Demand predicts that people will substitute toward cheaper goods.  It's not a prescription, but it works well as an hypothesis.  (Via Instapundit.)

Question: can a city make itself less a terrorist target by lobbying for higher air fares?

FAKE EDUCATION.  A professor at Adirondack Community challenges the austerity measures, or faddishness, or what have you, at the Albany campus of the State University of New York.

How can UAlbany justify "educational" priorities that put working- and middle-class students at a clear disadvantage in relation to the affluent who attend private universities?

The article provokes a wisecrack from University Diaries, who has covered Albany's descent into madness, in the form of a rewritten headline.  EDUCATING DRUNK, UNCRITICAL HALF-LITERATES BY DESIGN.

Perhaps Albany's model is ZooConn or ZooMass, and becoming a sub-prime party school before the championship basketball team takes shape is a tweak to the model.  That model, however, makes University Diaries base at George Washington a more secure place of employment.  George Washington have had some success emulating the price structure and admissions profile of the Ivies; and as long as the Ivies choose not to increase the sizes of their entering classes and faculties, and as long as the land-grants and mid-majors starve the academic units to fight the athletic arms races, the young people with less by way of money or connections or on occasion test scores are consigned to the academic gulags.

Or not, if the reaction of some test-prep students to a thought question has any extrapolative value.

Last Saturday, the College Board served up a mega-curveball for high school students across America: it asked them to write an essay about reality television.

Chortle.

[Do] "people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?"

Definitely not what kids who have spent countless hours brushing up on their Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens had expected.

These are the kids that are too busy studying, playing soccer, or taking piano lessons in the hopes of receiving an acceptance letter to a great college — they don’t have the time to watch or interest in the comings-and-goings of Jersey Shore’s Snooki and The Situation. These are, not surprisingly, the same kids who are complaining of the question’s ‘unfairness’ – many of whom have lamented on online forums such as College Confidential that they don’t watch any television, let alone reality shows.

One could ask whether Shakespeare's writing for the groundlings, or the Tabard Inn's enjoyment of bawdy content, or Dickens exaggerating the social contrasts, was beneficial or harmful.  The question isn't about the content of Jersey Shore at all.  As Professor Newmark observes, "Consistent with what I see in my teaching: too many kids today equate education solely with memorization."

The Forbes essayist offers the trenchant observation for the day: working life is often an open-book essay exam, with no study guide and no assigned book.

My bosses have never asked, nor have they cared, about my SAT scores. In my limited experience of the working world, you get things done well or you don’t. You aren’t always served up a fastball down the pike, and you don’t always knock it out of the park. Things aren’t black and white, right or wrong. You get an assignment and you often stumble through it, feeling ill-prepared at best, incompetent at worst – even with a degree from a prestigious university. There’s no quantitative measurement of your success; success is defined as your ability to perform the task at hand to the best of your ability. For some, this lack of structure is exhilarating. For others, terrifying.

The question asks rigid test-takers to simply adjust, a skill that’s necessary, I’ve found, for post-grad life. What are you going to do when your boss tells you that you need to do something that’s completely out of your comfort zone? Something you’ve never done before and haven’t learned in a classroom? The real world comes without an instruction manual, without a step-by-step guidebook like the illustrated directions that come with Ikea furniture. 

The default-by-test-prep protest offers students at Albany, and the land-grants, mid-majors, and party schools more generally, an opportunity for their opportunity to perform at that task.  It's up to the administrators and faculty at those institutions to so equip their students.

BUDGETS BUSTED, BRACKETS NOT SO MUCH.  Phil Miller at The Sports Economist recommends an ESPN database that allows readers to determine the level of internal subsidy by universities to intercollegiate sports.

The Hall of Shame, or Bottom Ten, or Champion Rent-Seekers come, overwhelmingly, from the mid-major programs.  Four institutions (Eastern, Central, and Western Michigan; and Buffalo) represent the Mid-American.  Conference USA provides another three.  I don't follow the basketball tournament closely enough to speak to the other conferences; in both national basketball tournaments the Mid-American representative has been one-and-done, bay-bee, while Butler, once Northern Illinois's rival in the Mid-Continent Conference, is once again making a final four run in the men's tournament.  Northern Illinois just committed $1.5 million to hire Tom Izzo's senior assistant to fix the basketball program.

Rebuilding NIU’s men’s basketball program will require extensive work. The Huskies are coming off five consecutive 20-loss seasons. They haven’t been in the NCAA tournament since 1996.

He can’t do anything about that yet. The season doesn’t start for another seven months. Until then, [Mark] Montgomery said one of his top priorities is reconnecting with the Huskies’ fan base, many of whom grew discontent [c.q.] with the program before former coach Ricardo Patton was fired March 9.

To do that, Montgomery, who signed a five-year, $1.5 million ($300,000-a-year) contract with NIU, said he will speak at town halls and conduct summer camps. He said he will reach out to university fraternities, sororities and other campus clubs. His goal is to be as visible as possible.

The students are currently paying for the right not to attend the basketball and football games, and they'll pay more for that right next year; perhaps a stronger basketball program or football's efforts to become the next Boise State might provide the proper play value.  (Or not.)  The same day that headquarters announced its latest attempt to strengthen basketball, the Board of Trustees contemplated another year of doing more with less.  Deep in the report is a remark by university president John Peters, who notes that state employees have had their salaries docked for their contributions to the state pension system lockbox; the legislators, however, have opted not to appropriate the matching funds for their part of the bargain.  Makes those paternalistic arguments against private retirement accounts less compelling, doesn't it?

FASTER, PLEASE.  The restoration of the Alton Route continues.

Illinois has reached an agreement with Union Pacific for the next phase of upgrades to the Chicago-St. Louis rail corridor used by Amtrak Lincoln Service trains and the Texas Eagle. This phase includes $685 million of work between Lincoln and Dwight, Ill., and between Alton, Ill., and the Mississippi River near St. Louis.


Upgrades for faster speeds between Chicago and St. Louis began a decade ago, but the pace sped up last fall with the acquisition of a federal grant through the high speed rail program. Last year’s work focused on the line between Alton and Lincoln, Ill. The work lined up for this year extends the upgrades in both directions. The work will eventually enable 110-mph passenger train speeds, in an effort to reduce city-to-city travel times to around 4 hours.


In an effort to give track workers unimpeded access to the line, Amtrak is diverting trains 21 and 22, the Texas Eagle, during three periods this spring. The trains will run over Union Pacific’s ex-Chicago & Eastern Illinois trackage via Findlay, Ill., April 2-9, April 16-24, and May 1-9.

Those reroutes suggest the Lincoln Service trains connecting Chicago, Bloomington, Springfield, and St. Louis will be annulled or replaced in part by buses. Such a development wiped out a planned spring break trip to the Lincoln Presidential Library. Fortunately, the special exhibit dealing with Mr Lincoln's Cabinet will remain until August.

Some Illinois officials are enthusiastic, others less so.

"The governors of these other states that have given up their money can stand by and wave at our trains when they go by. We’re going to move people, we’re going to freight, we’re going to set a standard for America. It starts right here in Chicago," [Democratic Senator Richard] Durbin said.


But not everybody in Illinois is gung-ho about fast trains. Freshman Congressman Joe Walsh said the government can’t afford to spend the money and he doubted their cost effectiveness because Americans love their cars. He said governors like Scott in Florida had the right idea by giving up federal money for rail projects.


"I respect the governors who have done that, that clearly is not what Pat Quinn is about," Walsh, whose district is in northern Illinois.


Illinois’ other senator, Republican U.S. Mark Kirk, supports high speed rail including federal funding and believes it should be a private-public partnership so that trains move with the speed and reliability to serve consumers who would otherwise would fly, Kirk spokesman Lance Trover said.


When high-speed trains are eventually traveling up to 110 mph, the trip between St. Louis and Chicago could be cut by 90minutes to less than four hours.

That car-love the right honorable gentleman refers to might not be so attractive in the face of five bucks a gallon to fuel up the land-yacht.  You'll pay more for the privilege of being fondled by airport security and waiting half an hour to be seated in your aluminum sardine can, which you'll then have to wait for half an hour to disembark through one door.  Even a conventional train looks good compared to that.

U.S. airlines have raised fares at least six times this year as they try to offset rising jet fuel costs. The last attempt failed when other airlines decided not to follow American Airlines when it raised prices earlier this month, also by $10 per round trip. Cheap seats will be harder to find this year, said Rick Seaney, chief executive officer of travel website FareCompare.com.

That's the same American Airlines that once, famously, attempted to entice Braniff to match its price increases in Texas. Good old dominant strategy strikes again!

CUTTING CORNERS.  Once upon a time, Bruce Pearl took a Wisconsin-Milwaukee basketball team to the national tournament, then parlayed it (despite denials at the time) into an appointment at Tennessee, where the men's team is not the best winter ticket on campus, that has now ended badly.  The separation bonus (golden parachute, if you will) he took might be a performance-bond-in-advance to the next basketball coach.

Labor Attorney David Burkhalter says a financial agreement like this one is not uncommon, and likely included several stipulations.  He speculated it might free both sides from being sued, and require Bruce Pearl to reveal any further NCAA violations and cooperate with any investigation.

"A prudent employer typically would want to have peace with the separating employee. You have to pay to get that, you have to pay consideration. You do not want to run the risk of being involved in litigation down the road, you want to have a smooth transition, you want to make sure that Coach Pearl fully cooperates with the university going forward. You want to make sure, again, that there's been a full disclosure of any and all violations, and that will be spelled out in the document," said Burkhalter.

Burkhalter also says what happens now could affect the basketball program in the future.   The next potential coach may look at how the university treated Pearl when he was let go before deciding to take the job.

Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports suggests that Bruce Pearl is collateral damage of Ohio State's tchotchkes for tattoos scandal, but the secondary explosions might yet take out Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel.

It took the Tressel fiasco for Tennessee to realize the NCAA was going to devastate its basketball program if Bruce Pearl were still the coach. Even with blindly loyal Volunteers fans gathering in support of their ethically bankrupt coach, Tennessee did the right thing on Monday by firing Pearl -- but don't give the school much credit. It did everything wrong, from start to finish, until stumbling onto the only resolution acceptable: firing a coach who would dare try to cover up NCAA violations.

Now the focus falls to Ohio State, and public perception will weigh heavily on the Buckeyes. For the second time, Tennessee has set the bar for responding to an ethically empty coach. The first time, Tennessee went for the in-season suspension. The SEC sat down Pearl for eight games, and that was good enough for Tennessee. And so it was good enough for Ohio State, which sat down its own ethically empty coach, Jim Tressel, for the first two games of the 2011 season.

Two games became five games after the Buckeyes gauged public perception, which bordered on ridicule, and accepted Tressel's offer to increase his own suspension. Which I don't believe for a second, by the way. Tressel lied to his own boss, but I'm supposed to believe he's telling the truth about his five-game suspension? Not gonna happen.

But now, here's what happened: Tennessee raised the bar from suspension to dismissal. Tennessee learned from Jim Tressel that its coach had to be fired.

To be continued ...  (There is a face-saving out for Ohio State.  A previous football coach was dismissed for failure to beat Wisconsin.)

WHEN ACCESS AND RETENTION BECOME ENDS IN THEMSELVES.  A York University graduate assistant posted too much information on Facebook.

The comments, now removed, said: “My student’s papers are making me dumber, so very stupid; by the minute. Please, make them, stop. They are infecting me with there huge and apparent stupidity, and I fear they will start to effect in my opinion the way I myself right papers (sic).”

That says more about the poster than it does about the students.

The university's response says more about the university.

"It’s a much wider and more systemic problem of respect on campus, and in many ways it just reflects the same attitude and comments many tenured faculty and senior administrators encourage," says [Hans] Rollmann, a PhD student in women’s studies who is in his second year of being a tutorial assistant in social science.

"That’s the exact thing we hear from tenured faculty, from department heads, from deans, from senior administrators, it’s this … continuous disparaging attitude toward undergraduates on campus," says Rollmann.

Perhaps that's Canada, and perhaps York exists primarily as a graduate and research department. If so, that's a tremendous waste, as there ought to be some spark in each undergraduate, whether or not that spark is an interest in the professor's or graduate assistant's field of study.  Division of labor is a source of prosperity, and the point of group requirements, or of a core curriculum, is to allow each student an opportunity to discover a comparative advantage, whether that's in culture studies or herpetology or complex analysis.  (Bracketology and ferroequinology are probably better left to recreation time.)

On the other hand, perhaps we're seeing frustration with the fruit of access for its own sake; with doing the work the high schools, nay, the middle schools, should be doing;  with the disengaged and uninterested students dragging everybody else down.  The original poster might have, in a clumsy way, been venting about the very spelling errors that provoked the post.

FROM THE RUINS OF THE NORTH STAR CONFERENCE.  Years ago, DePaul, Northern Illinois, and Wisconsin-Green Bay sparred for the women's basketball title in the North Star Conference, which for a while included Marquette and Notre Dame.  DePaul, Marquette, and Notre Dame left, ultimately to play in the Holy Roman Empire, er, Big East.  The North Star reorganized as the Mid-Continent Conference (legally, I think it was the Association of Mid-Continental Universities) and Northern Illinois and Green Bay took turns hosting the conference championship (and in one year, both teams received a national tournament bid.)  Northern Illinois, primarily for its football program, rejoined the Mid-American Conference, while Green Bay and much of the rest of the Mid-Continent became the Horizon League, so called because Green Bay is over the horizon from the rest of that conference, something that makes a tight tournament game a pleasurable challenge.

Finally the Phoenix, which has defeated opponents by an average of 23 points this season, turned back Little Rock, 59-55, to advance to Tuesday's second-round game against Michigan State.

It's not quite "we play Horizon games just for practice" but read on.

"After the first five minutes, when we were a little tight and not used to playing, we realized we were in a fight and wanted to enjoy the fight," Green Bay sophomore guard Adrian Ritchie said.

Added coach Matt Bollant: "You want other teams to step up and make plays and have to earn it. The heart is what makes it great, so as a coaching staff, you can't tell your players that and then shy away from the competition or not enjoy the competition."

Green Bay is in another tight one with Michigan State this evening, which ESPN are unaccountably not sending me, in order that I can see putative favorite Baylor beating up on West Virginia.

A Mid-Con legacy team making the round of sixteen against a Big 12 Ten team appeals.

SECOND SECTION.  Green Bay hang on against Michigan State, face Baylor next.  Tough night for former Northern Illinois assistant Sue Semrau and Florida State, with Georgia coming from behind with three seconds remaining, in a nearly empty Auburn gym.  Topic drift: what's Georgia doing using The Battle Hymn of the Republic as pep song, and as alma mater?

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF ITS TIME?  Destination: Freedom discovers a new high speed rail initiative.

Two enterprising Chicago high-speed rail advocates are announcing formation of a project to build a 220 mph line connecting Chicago to New York, and other cities located on the Northeast Corridor.

Long-time rail advocates Mike Lee and Charles Paidock are recruiting individuals from across the transportation community to develop plans, specifications, and secure private/public funding for this project.  While they are supportive of associations that foster passenger train travel, or short local high-speed lines within a state, the two prefer to focus instead on getting down to building a real railroad in the way that hasn’t been seen in a over a hundred years.

Charles Paidock said:  “Putting little high-speed lines here and there is ok, but all you’re actually doing is just putting in another commuter line, and improving public transit.  And I’ve seen all sorts of plans for regional networks, but nobody except us apparently has a map of the United States.  It only makes sense to have a route connecting these two major metropolitan areas.”

The construction of a railroad from New York, to Pittsburgh, and then on to Chicago was actually proposed in 1907.  Approval was granted for construction, but there was an economic panic later that year, and the start of World War I made financing the project doubtful, so it never was built.  The two largest railroads in the United States at the time, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, later ran competing passenger trains along different routes between New York and Chicago, attracting sizeable numbers of passengers, until the advent of superhighways and airlines.

The New York and Chicago Railroad appears to be a legitimate suggestion (a legitimate business enterprise would be another matter), and its organizers recognize that the idea is, oh, 100 years old.

Chicago-New York Electric Air Line.
Image from New York and Chicago history page.

We've seen the Air Line before. The current plan envisions a railroad that calls at Cleveland and Pittsburgh along the way, rather than seeking the most direct course.

The organizers will have a table at Chicago Union Station on National Train Day, May 7.

CONNECTICUT?  TENNESSEE?  Pretenders.

University of Wisconsin photograph.

Four national titles in the past six years, and in the eleven years of the women's hockey tournament, the champion has always come from the Western Collegiate Hockey Association.

The best in the West, the hell with the East indeed.

SIEVE!

NEITHER SCRAPPING NOR PRESERVATION IS COST EFFECTIVE.  Watercrunch goes canoeing in the backwoods of Maine and comes across the remains of the Eagle Lake and West Branch logging railroad.

These locomotives have long been known to ferroequinologists.  Getting there is not easy, particularly in winter, and scrappers salvaged the rails long ago, but not the locomotives (perhaps the locomotives had to be floated upriver?)  They were parked in the engine shed and left.

Image courtesy Maine Memory.

The engine shed burned down sometime after 1967.

THE INSTITUTIONS WE'VE DESTROYED.  Five college dropouts recently observed a twenty-year milestone.  Because these five dropped out of the University of Michigan after failing to deliver a basketball title, yet made a documentary that trash-talked other college basketball programs, timed to be released before Michigan, yet again, failed to qualify for benefitted from the power-conference favoritism of the national tournament, and antagonized Duke fans, they got another five minutes of fame.  Betsy's Page has the details, should you be interested. Sports pundit Jason Whitlock has the proper epitaph for the propaganda film.

The legacy of the Fab Five is that they were on the cutting edge of America’s unashamed embrace of style over substance.

He's unsparing. Read the whole thing. His conclusion comes only after he's laid out a strong case.

[Duke's] Coach K[rzyzewski] probably thought the same thing I thought watching the Fab Five play: They’re immature, arrogant, interested in playing for a coach they could ignore and incapable of putting together the consistent focus and effort necessary to win a conference championship.

Two teams consistently beat the Fab Five — Duke (4-0) and Indiana (4-2).

Let me translate that for you: Structured, disciplined, well-coached teams beat Michigan.

Yes, but the prison-yard game in which defensive inattention leads to highlight film material continues to get the teevee ratings, although it doesn't necessarily win titles.

THERE'S NO MONEY IN POVERTY.

Wal-Mart goes into the convenience store business, or not?

At last, Walmart is trying to find a solution for its horrendous shopping experience.

Bloomberg Businessweek says Walmart is coming out with smaller, "express" stores that are one-tenth the size of current warehouses.

Now that companies like Amazon and Overstock are making online shopping quick and painless, it makes sense for Walmart to revisit its notoriously overwhelming stores if they want to remain competitive.

Read between the lines: the article suggests even Wal-Mart's usual clientele recognizes the opportunity cost of time.

Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners in Connecticut says, “Walmart’s U.S. store fleet is designed for yesterday’s retail wars. If it wants to capture their rightful share of today’s shopping trips they have to have a smaller format. God bless supercenters, but they are not designed to get in and out of within five minutes.”

Neither are convenience stores, which suggests that getting a gallon of milk or a bag of potato chips will still be a pain, but dry goods and consumer durables, which are less-time-sensitive purchases, don't have to require a trip to a store.

Professor Newmark comments, "Adapt or die."

THE OVERSCHEDULED TEENAGER.  In a small high school, in this instance Port Wing, Wisconsin South Shore, multi-tasking can only go so far.

In a high school located on the shore of Lake Superior, where 20 of the 42 students are girls, more than half of the female student population plays basketball. Of the 11 girls on the team, nine also happen to play in the 14-piece band.

Nothing unusual about that, especially in a small school. However, last year when the school made arrangements for a band trip to Seattle, no one thought about the girls basketball championships.

The day of the regional championship - Saturday - was also the day the band left on an Amtrak train for its Seattle trip. Band members had spent much of the school year raising $900 each through spaghetti dinners, cookie sales and silent auctions. The South Shore band joined high school bands from Ely, Minn., and International Falls, Minn., to play at a university in Seattle as well as sightsee this week before returning home over the weekend.

There were enough players to win the regional, but not enough players to dress for the sectional.  The team keeps the regional trophy.  The band members made their trip.  Everything has an opportunity cost.

TEPLOPAROVOZ.  Here's a clip from what appears to be an original Soviet documentary illustrating locomotive development during the Stalin era.  It suggests that one of the early diesel locomotives, a boxcab on what looks like the running gear of a Milwaukee bi-polar, made it into preservation.

There's also footage of a test of the Stalinets TP-1 teploparovoz, no. 8000, that might illustrate the uneven power output of the steam and diesel strokes of the opposed pistons.

SUMMARIZE IN ONE SENTENCE.  Victor Davis Hanson sees disorder winning, by default.

The original architects of such systems are now mostly dead, and we, their replacements, often lack their education and respect for civilization’s protocols. The result is that millions of Americans are simply enjoying a system built for them by others which they are not quite able to use, repair, expand — or understand.

Read the entire column.

THINK IT THROUGH.  Raise the minimum wage with the hope of reducing income inequality.

The increase in the minimum wage made it less lucrative for firms to hire low skilled people and the recession piled on.

  The timing is all wrong: produce more income inequality.

It may well be that the minimum wage hike of 2007, with its corresponding job losses and employer cutbacks in hours worked, was sufficient to cause the level of payroll employment to erode enough so that the start date of recession was pushed up to November-December 2007, some four to five months sooner than it might have done otherwise as the outcome of the oil shock.

And should that be the case, the increase of the federal minimum wage in 2007 would join with the bursting of the housing bubble and the fallout from the oil shock as the third leg forming the current recession.

But it feels so good to pass the legislation.

BARACK HUSSEIN BUCHANAN.  John Podhoretz (via Betsy's Page) suggests that he's Bartleby.

He began his presidency as a potential colossus -- but if he doesn't change, he will finish it as a pipsqueak. Pipsqueaks don't win second terms.

But his bracketology is sound.

3.14159  Apparently Pi Day began with a ritual in San Francisco.

The first Pi Day was celebrated in 1989 at the San Francisco Exploratorium, whose staff celebrates most years by walking in a circle around a "Pi shrine" a little more than 3 times.

In light of the release of the basketball tournament brackets, perhaps one can obtain some good luck by walking from one end of the free-throw line to the other along the arc of the free-throw circle, thus subtending an angle of p radians.

ECONOMICS IS NOT BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.  Dilbert's site does not present the Sunday strip.  I have taken the liberty of scanning today's.

Scanned from the Sunday Funnies, 13 March 2011.

Perhaps opportunity cost gets lost in the onslaught of formulas and diagrams that make up far too much of the principles course. Or perhaps success in business is the willing suspension of belief.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE ECONOMIST AS ADVOCATE.  What's the point of developing an intellectual apparatus that helps you understand the world if you can't play with designing a better world?  But don't let your preconceptions overinfluence your modelling.  Tyler Cowen offers his impression of blind spots, on the left and on the right.  Arnold Kling revises and extends in both directions, and David Leonhardt offers additional suggestions, this time to readers of the legacy press. Ezra Klein weighs in with observations more practical and less theoretical, provoking further thoughts from Tyler Cowen.  Kevin Drum offers rebuttal and clarification from the left.

It's Spring Break at Northern Illinois University, but there might be a quiz on this later.

PAYING TO CUT THE LINE.  Some amusement parks let you do it.  Some toll road authorities let you do it.  Grocery stores don't let you do it.

A few days ago I happened to stop by the local supermarket during the post-work rush. When I was ready to check out all the regular lanes had long lines. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind waiting a few minutes, but on this particular evening I had dinner plans I couldn’t be late for. So I shelled out the extra $6 for the express lane so I could skip the lines.

There's a variant of this story, which once appeared in Journal of Economic Perspectives, in which some economists, in a hurry to get some steaks and get them grilled, attempted to bribe the holder of the next number to be served at the butcher's counter, only to make the entire store sufficiently angry with them that they left without purchasing any steaks.

I think there are two reasons that people hate congestion pricing. First, we have strong and sophisticated social norms, cultivated since we were young children, for waiting in lines. This bit of self-organization is extremely important for the smooth functioning of civil society. We see waiting your turn as an obligation we have to one another, and therefore not as an obligation that a supermarket or transportation agency can waive in exchange for a cash payment. I suspect customers would see people using a tolled checkout lane as breaking an implicit social contract.

Social contracts, like other institutions, evolve to conserve on transaction costs. A colleague with whom I talked about the butcher shop story suggested that the economists really had to offer to compensate all the other holders of numbers waiting to be served, as the right to be served goes with the position, not the person. Throw in the marginal delay cost and watch the complications cumulate.

(Via The Transportationist, who notes the presence of peak-load pricing and public suspicion of priority pricing.)

SPELL OUT THE TRADEOFFS.

Advocates of inclusion will engage in all sorts of logic-chopping to avoid confronting the possibility that different academic standards can mean lower academic standards.   Minding the Campus reports that at Syracuse University, the students see the adverse consequences of neglecting that tradeoff in order to assuage the consciences of faddish administrators.

Donald A. Saleh, vice president for enrollment management at Syracuse, pooh-poohed the student and faculty critics of the new recruitment strategy as fuddy-duddies who don't understand that times have changed. "There is this tension in higher education between the old ways in which colleges described the quality of their class—test scores and G.P.A. and rank in class, and the new metric, which will be much more along the lines of what we are talking about—the socioeconomic diversity, the percentage of students who are first-generation in college, and for students from the Northeast in particular, the geographic diversity of their class," he told Inside Higher Ed. "Some of our faculty members are locked into the old metrics. Our president, our provost and the deans and my area of enrollment management are focused on the new metrics."

That noted, the U. S. News rankings continue to sell well, even though there is no longer a print edition of U. S. News and World Report.  The usual suspects continue to occupy the top of the league tables, and they continue to be seriously oversubscribed.  That oversubscription might lead some of Harvard's rejects to consider Syracuse, and Harvard's rejects don't want to be fobbed off with a diluted degree.

For all the administrative happy talk at Syracuse, it seems clear that the university embarked on a perhaps not carefully thought-out experiment in admissions policy that has backfired, at least in terms of public relations. Although a venerable academic institution with several top-rated programs, Syracuse has struggled for decades with the realities of its unappealing geographic location in economically depressed upstate New York and its second-rate reputation compared to, say, the Ivy League. Although a national research university, it has historically drawn most of its students from the Northeast, a demographically declining region with a diminishing population of young people that has meant, at least in the recent past, a diminishing number of applications for freshman places at Syracuse. 

Note what is unseen: whatever cachet membership in the Big East athletic conference might confer when the office pools get organized, there's no mention of the athletic program providing an attractive front porch for the remaining applicants.

JOHN GALT'S FIRST JOB WAS IN WISCONSIN.  Despite the parlous job market, particularly in the evergreen disciplines, some of Bardiac's potential colleagues have backed out.

I've learned that a number of departments here have reported that candidates with signed contracts have backed out and said they've changed their mind. I can't blame them.

They signed a contract for one salary, and suddenly that salary has been cut by 8% or so. I wish I felt like I could get out.

Perhaps these hires are reacting to the expected fate of higher education at the hands of the hard-liners in the Republican Party, who have been given no reason to think kind thoughts about higher education; or perhaps they are reacting to the implications of increased autonomy for Madison combined with increased austerity for the former Wisconsin State University Conference colleges.  On the other hand, a rational actor will not submit to a hold-up before he or she has developed relationship-specific human capital.  In some academic disciplines, the only condition worse than being an entry-level Ph.D. without a signed contract is that of being a recent Ph.D. with very little portable human capital, known to those of you in administration as grants and publications.

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK.  A National Public Radio report on the Japanese earthquake begins with a reasonable observation.

The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on Friday forced multinational companies to close factories, fight fires and move workers, inflicting at least short-term damage on the Japan's fragile economy.

Assessing the full economic impact was impossible in the hours after the quake. But traffic clogged streets, trains stopped, flights were grounded and phone service was disrupted or cut off.

Read on, though, and the broken window fallacy emerges.

And in the long run, the disaster could help the Japanese economy as reconstruction projects put people back to work.

Natural disasters "do eventually boost output," said David Hensley, an economist at JPMorgan Chase. The 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the 1994 Northridge quake outside Los Angeles, for example, ultimately helped the local California economies, he said.

Takuji Okubo, an analyst at French bank Societe Generale, said Japan's economy will probably take a hit in March and then rebound strongly. Japanese consumers will need to replace lost cars and appliances, and reconstruction will start.

That's pretty sloppy reporting, particularly for a network that claims to appeal to an intelligent and sophisticated audience.

Prior to the earthquake, Japanese consumers had the option to purchase other goods rather than replace their cars or appliances.  The earthquake puts those consumers in a position of having to replace those goods, which kills those options.  We will see cars and appliances being built, but we will not see the purchases consumers would have made had the earthquake not destroyed the option value in those existing cars.  We won't see the purchases of the dead, and we won't see the goods and services the dead would otherwise have produced, but for the earthquake.

The Japanese deserve better than to have their economic success explained by the destruction of property: the earthquake this time, World War II in one potted explanation of Japan's industrial success.  The United States has enjoyed the opportunity to destroy its industrial capacity, without having to pattern-bomb it first.  By the logic of the broken window fallacy, Detroit is the most promising place in the country to jump-start the economy.

RUNNING EXTRA.  According to Knowledge Problem, the Great and Powerful Larry Summers saw the upside of breaking windows.

OUCH.  Our President allegedly is wishing for the obscurity of Hu Jintao. (Scroll down.)  William Kristol reacts, unfavorably.

Unfortunately for him and us, Barack Obama is president of the United States. That job brings with it certain special responsibilities. It’s a tough job—maybe tougher than being president of China. But Barack Obama ran for president of the United States. Maybe he should start behaving as one.

Perhaps, if presidents worked at scaling back their job descriptions, say, to the responsibilities enumerated in Article II, Sections 1 and 2, of The Constitution, the import of their pronouncements on disaffected citizens of countries in civil disorder would be lessened.

Our President, despite his use of the trappings of Abraham Lincoln to launch his candidacy, takes on more of the aspect of James Buchanan with each day.

IT TAKES A LOT TO STOP A TRAIN.  Several Japanese trains have been reported overdue in the aftermath of Friday's earthquake and tsunami.

AP photo courtesy The Guardian.

The Guardian link offers frequently updated content. The recovery from this earthquake will take some time.  The train shown was caught by the tsunami at Shinchi, in Fukushima prefecture.

JOHN GALT GOES TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE.  In Atlas Shrugged, he was one of the brightest students of Professor Hugh Akston, at a highly-regarded university.  But a meditation by the dean at Anonymous Community on the strengths of the Thirteenth Generation has a distinctly Randian undertone to it.

Now I’m seeing a frustrating number of talented, intelligent, well-respected Gen X types on campus walk away from leadership roles for family reasons.

I can’t blame any of them. At this point, many of the institutional constraints on leadership roles are so thorough, and so encrusted with history, that any thinking person would chafe under them. On the personal side, a generation raised mostly by divorced parents can be forgiven for not wanting to pass on that particular tradition. Given the option of generating family tension for not very much money and a whole lot of stress, there’s something to be said for walking away. But I’m concerned about the vacuum they leave behind.

There is a backward-bending supply curve, and it might finally be biting on the universities, and one of these days it will bite on the corporate sector, and the top-level jobs will not all be of the we-pay-a-lot-and-we-own-all-your-time variety.  On the other hand, walking away from being looted and mooched for no gratitude is the essence of Atlas shrugging.

Perhaps that's a singleton observation.  On the other hand, consider this criticism of Wisconsin's new labor relations.

Governor Walker, in Wisconsin, is managing to get absolutely everything wrong. He apparently got his way on the bill to kill public employee unions, but he has proposed replacing contractual protections for workers with civil service protections. I’m perplexed. He’ll keep the single worst aspect of the status quo -- the inability to get rid of terrible performers -- while effectively lowering pay and scaring everyone to death. The predictable result is the best performers simply leaving, and the state being stuck with underpaid, crabby low performers that nobody else wants.

There's a corollary to that proposition in higher education, stingy governors or anti-intellectual legislators or not, or rent-seeking administrators or not.  When the policy toward pay increases becomes niggardly across-the-board increases, and the possibility of a favorable response to an outside offer, there is no incentive for anyone with strong prospects of generating an outside offer to develop institution-specific human capital, and every incentive to negotiate for the best possible outside offer, and, again, people effectively walking away from being looted and mooched, or, put differently, from being punished for being cooperative.

THE BURDEN OF SIXTIES IDEAS.

One such idea was the distinction between reactionary and revolutionary violence.  The former was never defensible, the latter socially necessary.  Professor Leiter consigns the New Left to the memory hole, yet resurrects the distinction.

At some point these acts of brazen viciousness [scaling back the public sector, to the less aggravated] are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified, an issue that has, oddly, not been widely addressed in political philosophy since Locke.

A related idea was that of liberating tolerance, sometimes encountered under the simultaneously pejorative and more accurate rubric of progressive intolerance.

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders.

Nobody says liberating tolerance any more, but perhaps it has been repackaged (re-framed) as civility. Professor Althouse sees through it.

My tag for the "new civility" has always been "civility bullshit." It was always, obviously, a strategy to control conservatives (while liberals regrouped after the drubbing in the 2010 elections). Now that the Wisconsin protesters have gone so far beyond anything that could be attributed to Tea Partiers or to Sarah Palin maps-with-crosshairs, I suppose the MSM will act as if there never was a new civility movement at all. Suddenly, virulent dissent will be portrayed as noble.

And let me drag Ron Schiller — the punked NPR exec — into this. One of the things he said to the fake would-be donors was: "In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives." I loathe this kind of self-flattery. Everyone thinks his own ideas are good. That's why they're your ideas. But to layer in this self-love: I'm smarter. This is what Leiter is doing too. He's inclined to approve of the impulse toward violence on the left and willing to mobilize the discipline of philosophy to generate rhetoric to support its political goals. It's quite disgusting.

Yes, and goodness gracious, if the Good Ideas of Smart People were that persuasive, there'd be no serious debate about their Correctness.   The conclusion is left to the reader as an exercise.

IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE?  (Apologies to Instapundit.) Obama Killed Cap’n Crunch. Our President is not hanging on to the youth vote with this action, if the story is accurate, as the cereal is popular with the collegiate set, based on what the Superintendent observes in the local supermarkets.  An update to the story suggests that the cereal is not going away any time soon.

MAYBE SOMEBODY IS LISTENING.  Cold Spring Shops, last August.

Metra will be rebuilding the old Chicago and North Western Milwaukee Division commencing later this month. When this line hosted Streamliner 400s to the Twin Cities and points north, it was a three track railroad. After the 400s quit and Metra took ownership of the line, it became a two track railroad. As part of the rebuilding, the century-old overpasses (with space for three tracks) will be replaced with new bridges that might last that long. But they are being built with two, rather than three, tracks in mind. A third track on a commuter line can be useful for intermingling express, limited, and local trains (the Burlington line starting trains at about the same time from several outer locations, they each make a few pickups and turn into nonstoppers on the center track). 

The rebuilding project began, with a very unpopular schedule change, and then stopped.

It will begin again, with no disruption of the existing service.

As WBBM Newsradio 780′s Bob Roberts reports, Metra promised Friday that the project won’t require schedule changes and should cause minimal service disruptions, if any.

“We’ve thrown out that train schedule that we ran for a couple of months,” said Metra Deputy Executive Director Bill Tupper.

The commuters -- the North Line does not serve a poverty pocket, and one of the trains still features a subscription club car, persuaded the authorities to rebuild their railroad in a way less inconvenient to the passengers.

The key is keeping two tracks open at all times, just as Metra did when rebuilding Rock Island District and Union Pacific Northwest Line bridges.

Tupper said those projects went well.

“I don’t want to say we had absolutely no delays, but any delays we had were very minimal,” he said. “This is typical of what we’ve done before so we’re not anticipating delays.”

That's standard enough. Some of those influential commuters might have long memories, or perhaps, just perhaps, Someone In Authority Agrees With Me.

The cost is higher than the now-discarded one-track plan — an extra $40 million to install a new retaining wall on the west side of the 2-1/2 miles of right-of-way, all on Chicago’s north side, and the work will take till 2019 to complete. But Tupper said that by keeping both tracks along the west side of the right-of-way, planners will create room for re-installation of a third express track, if the money becomes available.

The third track, which ran as far north as Evanston, was pulled up by the Chicago & North Western Ry. in 1984 as an economy move, and long-time riders say service on the line has not been quite as good since.

Tupper said Metra will consult with city officials, aldermen and area residents to minimize disruption in the neighborhoods surrounding the tracks, and will work with them to put in new vegetation, including ivy along the new embankment wall.

There's no reason a railroad must be unsightly. There is every good reason for a railroad to move passengers.  Parking charges and real gasoline prices are likely to keep increasing.  That third track is going to make economic sense eventually.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY.

Happy birthday, Rosa Luxemburg.

It's also Ash Wednesday. Cold Spring Shops is giving up identity politics for Lent.

There is no shortage of other ills to bring to your attention.

FASCHING IST.

WINNING THE POSITIONAL ARMS RACE, LOSING ALL THE SAME.  The ZooConn football team earned a trip to the Fiesta Bowl to get schooled by Oklahoma, and dropped $1.6 million for the privilege. (Via University Diaries.)

Something is very wrong with a system in which schools get punished for athletic success. If I were an administrator or student at UConn, the question I would be asking is: Who did profit off of the Fiesta Bowl?

Possibly nobody. Northern Illinois lost $154K on the Independence Bowl (and the game) at the end of 2008; at the end of 2009 they were the last team to lose the now-discontinued International Bowl.  The accounting for the Humanitarian Bowl (a win) is not yet in.

BLAMED FOR KEEPING THE PRICE FROM RISING FURTHER?  It's often a bad sign when People in Authority condemn speculation as a source of "artificial shortages, panic and a surge in prices." Yes, I'm talking about you, President Sarkozy.

Soaring grain prices, linked to adverse weather in major producing countries, have brought higher food costs and fanned social unrest in some countries, putting agriculture back on the agenda of world leaders three years after a similar food debate.

Like elsewhere in Europe, livestock breeders in France have been hard hit by climbing grain prices that account for a chunk of their production costs and that have not been offset by higher sale prices.

Let me see if I understand this ... hungry people in poor countries object to higher prices for cereals, and protecting French ranchers' rights to buy those same grains for lower prices is going to help ... how?

Then comes MSNBC agitator Ed Schultz, griping that gasoline prices are rising at the same time that inventories of gasoline already in country are currently high.  (It's transition time, the inventories of winter gasoline have to be drawn down while the inventories of summer gasoline are built up.  But a clean environment requires only seashells and balloons, nothing so mundane as inventories of the right formula for the atmospheric conditions on hand.)

He's encouraged in his griping by the cosmic convergence -- or so he thinks -- of Dennis Kucinich and Bill O'Reilly agreeing that commodity speculators are profiting to the expense of consumers.

Three Blind Mice, anyone?

A FAD, A JOHN GALT MOMENT.  Bardiac discovers the downside of going-along-with-fads.  It's another assessment exercise.

I was talking to one of the powers that be here, someone I like and respect a lot, about how our department might do the evaluative work that we're under pressure to do, with the constant threat of "if we don't do it, they'll do it to us."

That "they" might refer to the regents, or perhaps to the legislature, if the Wisconsin legislature ever reconvenes.

We have, say, ten of these classes, and you want me (and any number of other colleagues) to read and evaluate 50 extra papers about this one aspect?

I said I might be talked into spending an hour together with some colleagues to norm ourselves on the form, but there was no way I was reading an extra stack of papers.

Not even for money, my colleague questioned?

This school can't pay me enough, I said.

They pretend to pay us, we pretend to assess?  To compile reports that will neither be read nor used as a basis for doing anything differently?

There's no serious evaluative stuff happening here, despite blathering and spending money up the wazoo to talk about it. And what is being done is being done to us already, in ways that make me lose a class day in intro writing every fall.

I've never yet seen anything useful come out of all the money they've spent and all the crap they've made us do. I have seen viscious nastiness happen, however. And I've seen threats of more to come.

Meet the next fad, crowding out the current fad. Meanwhile the graduates get no stronger intellectually.

MADISON AVENUE'S MENCKEN MOMENT.  "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," if memory serves.  Chicago Tribune columnist Michael Esposito is not impressed with the result.

Call me sentimental, but forced to choose between saving my sweetheart or a beer, I'd pick my sweetheart every time.

That's not necessarily such an obvious choice in the world of TV commercials, where a subspecies of addlebrained humans thrives. They're usually guys (but not always), and the message that seems to be coming from many such commercials is: "Idiots and jerks buy our product. Unless you're too good to act like a buffoon or pick on the defenseless, you stuck-up snob you, you'll buy what we buy to be just like us!"

Perhaps it's just the latest business fad, as one of the columnist's sources suggests, or perhaps it's more pushback against the sociology of the light beer commercial.

QUOTE OF THE DAY.  Tightly Wound calls nonsense on the Northwestern snap-on-tools show.

Real adults don’t feel the need to stage live pr0n shows for teenagers in the guise of learning about human sexuality.

Indeed.

FASCHING.

Prosit!