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Don Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, posted the following blog today.

If you know me, you can probably tell how much I loved that post.

To me, political campaigns are not sacred events, to be eagerly anticipated and avidly followed. They are brutal assaults on reason.

That’s from economist Arnold Kling over at the EconLog site. Check out the rest of his (short) post here.

Before it gets too late to tell this story, I figured I ought to post it.

For the past several weeks, I’d been helping my friend Mike with a tiling job. Due to her work schedule and our work on tiling, Ashley and I hadn’t gotten to spend a lot of time together. So one of the nights last week when I went to work, she went with me.

As we pulled up to the house and got out of her car, I did something dumb: I left the car keys in the car and locked them in. Whoops. To make matters worse, the keys to my truck were also in Ashley’s car. No spare keys were available.

I knew my brother-in-law Jeff had a door-opening-kit of some sort, and hoped he could come rescue us. Unfortunately, he was unable to come. So instead, my sister drove out and gave us the kit. Mike and I messed around with it for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, and then decided to call a locksmith. I used my phone to google “las vegas locksmith” and the first result (in Google Adwords) was the following outfit.

When I called, I asked how much it would be to get keys out of a car. They told me it was $50 and up, depending on the situation. Perhaps I should’ve inquired more, but I assumed “$50 and up” couldn’t go any higher than 80 or 100 bucks.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, this unprofessional, yet smarmy looking fellow in a car (no business decals on the side to indicate his company, either) showed up. He popped the door open in about 30 seconds. Then we walked back to his car so I could pay him, and he told me it was going to be $160.

I told him I wouldn’t pay that amount. I’d pay $50, $75… even as much as $100. But $160 was downright extortion.

He argued with me for a few minutes, and then Janet (the lady we’d been doing the tile job for) came over and started calling him a scammer. I reiterated that I wouldn’t pay him $160.

He finally said, “Fine, I’ll just put the keys back in the car and lock the door, and you can find someone else to come open the door for you.” I figured waiting another half hour for another locksmith would be worth $100 or so in savings.

However, by now, Ashley had posession of the keys. He yelled at Ashley to put the keys back in the car so he could lock it. After some minor confusion as to what was going on (Ashley hadn’t been really involved or paying close attention to what we had been arguing about), Ashley stepped out of the car and threw the keys back in. The guy got in his car and sped off.

As I was thinking to myself, “Well, time for Plan B,” Ashley revealed something amazing. Her key ring has detachable rings on it, and she had detached the car key and hidden it in her pocket when she threw the rest of the keys back into the car.

It’s a good thing I married such a crafty, tricky lady. She saved us from having to call anyone else AND 160 bucks. She succeeded in scamming the scammer.

Check Amazon if you want to find out about any of the books. Also, feel free to make suggestions and tell me where I should stick them into the list. I’m not sure how long it will take me to get through this, and I’m assuming I’ll amend the list as I go along, sticking in titles I want to read sooner than others. One goal I have is to have the Twilight series and Harry Potter series read before their respective movies are released (by the way, I have very very low expectations for these series — I’m sure I’ll blog about it in the future after I’ve read them). Anyway, I think it’ll be possible to read them before their movies come out with the use of audiobooks. Another goal is to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (again) about six months to a year before The Hobbit comes out. So… Here’s the list:

• The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
• Investing for Dummies (Tyson)
• Real Estate Investing for Dummies (Tyson and Griswold)
• Oil! (Upton Sinclair)
• Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
• The Myth of the Rational Voter (Bryan Caplan)
• Loopholes of the Rich (Diane Kennedy)
• Twilight (1)(Stephanie Meyer)
• New Moon (2)(Stephanie Meyer)
• Eclipse (3)(Stephanie Meyer)
• Breaking Dawn (4)(Stephanie Meyer)
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1)(J. K. Rowling)
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2)(J. K. Rowling)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (3)(J. K. Rowling)
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (4)(J. K. Rowling)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (5)(J. K. Rowling)
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (6)(J. K. Rowling)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (7)(J. K. Rowling)
• Dracula (Bram Stoker)
• The Case Against the Fed (Rothbard)
• Human Action (Ludwig von Mises)
• The Road to Serfdom (Hayek)
• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Ayn Rand)
• Options Made Easy (Guy Cohen)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
• Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
• A Foreign Policy of Freedom (Ron Paul)
• The American Presidency (compilation encyclopedia-like book Shilo gave me)
• Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy (Williams)
• People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn)
• Saying Yes (Jacob Sullum)
• What to Eat (Marion Nestle)
• Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
• I Am Legend (Richard Matheson)
• The Hobbit (1)(J. R. R. Tolkien)
• The Fellowship of the Ring (2)(J. R. R. Tolkien)
• The Two Towers (3)(J. R. R. Tolkien)
• The Return of the King (4)(J. R. R. Tolkien)
• The Lucifer Effect (Philip Zimbardo)
• Last Child in the Woods (Richard Louv)
• Havana Nocturne (T. J. English)

When Ashley and I went on our honeymoon, I took The Magician’s Nephew (book 1 of 7 in the Chronicles of Narnia series) with me. I just finished The Last Battle (7 of 7) last night. The shortest book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes in at just over 200 pages, while the longest book, The Silver Chair, is just over 260. At an average of about 225 pages per book, that’s just shy of 1,600 pages.

In that same period, I also listened to Atlas Shrugged on audiobook. While the book is just over 1,150 pages, since I listened to it it would be more accurate to say how long the book is in time: 52 hours, 22 minutes.

Regardless, to hammer through that much material over the summer seems pretty impressive, and I’m proud of myself.

I’ve made a list of books I’m hoping to read in the next year or so… hopefully. Though, I think the only realistic way to do so is to get most of the fiction on audiobook. I’ll show the list in the following blog post.

I rearranged the sidebar a bit. And I more or less got rid of categorization. I realized that sometimes things don’t really fit in the categories I came up with, but I don’t want to have a long list of categories. Tags are kind of silly too. The search function over there works well enough that categories and tags seem almost pointless.

So basically, the site’s just gotten a little more simpler. I’m sure nobody except me even notices.

The gist: Some guys with too much time on their hands analyzed a bunch of songs and figured out which body parts are sung about / referred to the most. The results are interesting. I found out about it from Tyler Cowen’s post on Marginal Revolution, but he apparently got it from Wired. Both links are below:

Marginal Revolution

Wired

Once upon a time, when I’d have a few spare minutes, I would sit at my computer and think, “What sites do I like to visit? I’ll go visit them now to see if there’s anything new.”

…Such sites including my friend Brian’s, Marginal Revolution, Original Sound Version, and about fifteen others that I don’t read quite as religiously, but enjoy checking out every once in a while.

The only problem with checking a couple dozen sites is that it’s time consuming, and you have to sort through what’s new and what’s not. This made the site-checking-out become a chore at times, especially if I hadn’t had free time in several days. The task of looking through all the material would become daunting.

And then I learned about RSS feeds.

What is an RSS feed? you ask.

Well, without getting into too much technical jargon, an RSS feed is a small file that a program called an RSS reader can scan to let you know what new things have been posted since your last viewing of the site. In even simpler terms, by using an RSS reader, you can go through posts made on your favorite sites as easily as you go through your email. And that’s really what it comes down to.

I use Google Reader. If you have a GMail account, all you have to do is login to check your mail and click the “Reader” link/button at the top of the page. It loads up Google Reader, and from there, you can add and manage all your favorite sites. It takes about five-ten minutes to set up, and then… no more wearisome site-checking! Just go into Google Reader!

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly — yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!” — “Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!” — “Don’t argue, obey!” — “Don’t try to understand, believe!” — “Don’t rebel, adjust!” — “Don’t stand out, belong!” — “Don’t struggle, compromise!” — “Your heart is more important than your mind!” — “Who are you to know? Your parents know best!” — “Who are you to know? Society knows best!” — “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!” — “Who are you to object? All values are relative!” — “Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!”

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival — yet that was what they did to their children.

From Atlas Shrugged.

… how a political party / ideology can understand that government-run health care, education and social programs don’t work, while simultaneously thinking the military can work.

It is a contradiction. It is illogical and irrational.