Spanish authorities have released an American privateer treasure ship captain from custody:
The Spanish Navy blocked the salvage ship after it left Gibraltar on Tuesday and threatened to open fire when the captain refused to let police aboard.
In May, Odyssey found shipwreck booty estimated to be worth $500m (£245m).
After a tense standoff when it left the British port of Gibraltar, Spanish civil guards boarded and searched the vessel.
The Odyssey was then escorted to Algeciras, where the captain was arrested.
The Jews, the perennial fly in history’s ointment, have never been able to resist the impulse to sabotage a good thing. We ruined a rich Egyptian tradition of public works projects by letting a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment lead us, as one might expect from a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment, straight into freedom at the heart of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. We managed to improve on that enormous step sideways by sticking around for forty years because the whirling column of flames we were worshiping at the time didn’t appreciate artistic self-expression. We managed to let two perfectly good commonwealths get destroyed, the second time by a gang of sheet-wearing bathhouse enthusiasts. We nailed someone who was by all accounts a pretty nice guy to a stick. We called in a few favors from the countries we owned through our control of global banking and brought the proud German Empire to its knees - which, I remind you, did not turn out well for us.
The next paragraph is even better. After that, it degrades into an announcement for a blog that’s all about Humus. If he had quit at paragraph 2, it might be my favorite post of the year.
And for those who don’t know, Fuul is one of the most disgusting things on earth. It’s an Egyptian dish that resembles shit and tastes only slightly better, eaten for breakfast and every other meal. Why any rational human being with a choice would subject themselves to it is beyond me.
“We owe a debt to these students for providing my family with a home, but I was expecting glass in the windows and a ground floor,” said Mavis Riggs, whose original house was completely destroyed. “Converting the new septic tank into a hot tub was inventive, but we really won’t get a lot of use out of it. Or the barbecue pit, which I think was meant to form part of the foundation.”
The article gets bonus points for the shout out to my Alma Mater in the second paragraph. An AnonymousSister reported back from her Alternative Spring Break in an AnonymousLatinAmericanCountry with a similar experience.
Why pay professional house builders to build houses when we can spend twice as much to do it ourselves, party while we’re at it, and feel good along the way?
I sit on the couch and stare at that rustic path and those big old maple trees. By now I know the name of this particular wallpaper or background or whatever it is: Autumn. Moving to the desk and gazing more closely, I see a vague, dark, summoning something at the end of the path. A cabin? A covered bridge? A barn? I want to be there, for real, on that path, under those maples, moving slowly toward that dark, summoning something.
He’s talking about the windows background with the trees and bright orange leaves, and he actually tracked down where it’s from.
The not-so-weekly Equation of the Week returns with a formula for determining whether or not a person will engage in prostitution:
[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w - [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]
Where U=utility, L=leisure, C=goods and services consumed, S=quantity of prostitution sold, w=wage for prostitutes, and r=your reputation.
In other words:
An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.
Reputation, or more broadly social costs, may be one thing that individuals consider when selecting a profession, but to say it’s the only thing?
Taking a short break from sunny, geriatric Weston Florida (winds around 18 mpg, gusting to 27), I give you a technique for scoring your think tank panelists:
In times dominated by momentous questions of war and foreign policy, a particular kind of Washingtonian is bound to thrive: the think-tank pundit. But competition is relentless. Good judgment and extensive research may help advance a career, but what really matters in Washington is an elusive quality known as “Say-sO Superiority,” or SOS. Staffers at Asia Policy Point, a Washington foreign policy research center, devised the following highly scientific measure to calculate a speaker’s SOS score (and to keep themselves awake during luncheon talks).
The spermatophore is a package of male sperm that is deposited on the female. The researchers were able to monitor the sizes of the spermatophores and found that its diameter per copulation decreased in males that mated with many partners. The scientists wrongly hypothesized that this decrease in average diameter might result from the males rationing their sperm; it turned out, however, that they were running out of resources to distribute. As a result, the females sought more mates to accumulate enough sperm to fertilize all their eggs.
Contrary to the rhetoric of bored cosmopolites, most cities don’t exist primarily to please tourists. The children toddling through the Chandler mall hugging their soft Build-A-Bear animals are no less delighted because kids can also build a bear in Memphis or St. Louis. For them, this isn’t tourism; it’s life—the experiences that create the memories from which the meaning of a place arises over time. Among Chandler’s most charming sights are the business-casual dads joining their wives and kids for lunch in the mall food court. The food isn’t the point, let alone whether it’s from Subway or Dairy Queen. The restaurants merely provide the props and setting for the family time.
In Praise of Chain Stores, in this month’s Atlantic. The whole time reading it, I was thinking “this is exactly how I feel around people in Ann Arbor,” and then I get to the last paragraph:
In the name of urbanism, officials and activists in cities like Ann Arbor and Fort Collins, Colorado, are driving business to the suburbs. “If people like shopping at the Banana Republic or the Gap, if that’s your market—or Payless Shoes—why not?” says an exasperated Gibbs. “Why not sell the goods and services people want?”
On Malcolm in the Middle today, Malcolm joins the Boosters. I wish this conversation didn’t remind me of so many real philanthropic groups I’ve worked for:
Philip: First, let’s review our food for the homeless program. Wayne…
Wayne: Good news Boosters, we raised $428 on our rad bowling for hobos event. Unfortunately, the decorating budget got away from us. We spent $425 on the balloons. But, I think we might be able to salvage this by taking that $3 and buying the homeless a really nice card.
Philip: Good save Wayne. Alright, Stephanie, what about our pancake breakfast for the abused children’s counseling center?
Stephanie: It’s gonna be awesome, we have tons of decorations, and hundreds of balloons.
Malcolm: Maybe if you eased up on the balloons, you’d have some more money for the counseling center.
Stephanie: I don’t think abused children want to eat in some gloomy undecorated room. I mean, after what they’ve been through, lets not abuse their sense of taste.
*Spoiler Alert (but do you really care about a Malcolm in the Middle spolier?)*
At the end of the episode, Malcolm auctions off embarrassing items from the Booster club members - raising tons of money, and thinking he’s going to expose their hypocrisy. Instead, the Boosters get excited about how much money they’re raising and offer more items for auction. The whole time they cared about helping people, they just had no idea how to do it effectively.
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