Snappy Casual - The Alumni Lounge

No, no, no no. In order to convey the manic Fred, you'd need Robin Williams or Martin Short in prosthetics. Doesn't _ANYONE_ besides me note the similarities between Fred and Jiminy Glick? Anyone see the Jiminy Glick interview of Jimmy Kimmel?

Gattuso would be played by Jeff Goldblum (in a wig, obviously) - or by David Duchovny doing his Jeff Golblum impression.

Every member of the policy (and adjunct) staff recently received a letter from this gentleman. He's a Republican "of Libertarian leanings" going by the nom de plume of "Sophacles," and yes, that's really how he spells it. He's looking for help getting his writing a wider audience. So far he's managed to turn out 7 monographs which he's got for sale on his website, prices ranging from $0.50 to $3.50 each. You can also save by buying in bulk - all 7 studies, a grand total of 135,684 words - can be yours for only $8.00, approximately 27% off of the combined single-study price. Just to compare, there are 180,552 words in the entire New Testament, which is available on many different websites, free of charge. But what, you ask, does a Libertarian-leaning Republican with a budding freelance policy career write about? Some fascinating topics, you'll be glad to hear. Not having purchased any of the monographs yet, I can't give a full review, but the titles and descriptions are tantalizing: There's "Mammary Glands and Why They Have Nothing To Do with Evolution," "Female Irresponsibility," and the admirably concise "Scary" (a one-word title and only 4,669 words of text). The latter is about a proposed amendment to the Constitution intended to combat organized crime that would cause "drastic change in our criminal law [and] entail ... serious change in our culture." The potential changes are appearantly so serious and drastic that the substance of the amendment can't be mentioned in the summary. You'll have to shell out $0.75 to find out what has so scared the author.

I wondered who the man (a safe assumption, I'd say) behind the Sophacles mask was. Network Solution's useful Whois function told me that his url (sofeea.com) was registered to yet another web entity, Americaneagle.com of Park Ridge, Illinois. The administrative contact was 'tonys@americaneagle.com.' That site turns out to be the home of company called American Eagle Computer Products, Inc. According to the site, they're a web design firm who has done work for Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Virginia state government, among others. No obvious affinity between that business and eccentric monographs on the irrelevancy of breasts to evolution, so my guess is that Tony S. has registered his private site through his work address. That's not so unusual - blog celebrity and print columnist James Lileks has done the same thing, listing the address of the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis on his registration. On the other hand he doesn't write essays like Sophacles' "Mirror," which deals with race relations: "White people do not achieve prosperity by making whining excuses, blindly voting Democrat, and talking in rhyme." Enough said. I haven't met the author, so I'll leave interested observers to form their own conlusions.

Max: Clearly, when CEI: The Movie graces film screens, it will be Danny DeVito playing Fred, with a beard and white hair. What Hollywood celebrity could possibly so manic and so short at the same time? To continue the family theme, Rhea Perlman would make a great Fran – long-suffering but with an indomitable sense of humor.

Friday saw Fred on CNN International (full transcript), talking with anchor Jim Clancy and Economic Forecasting Forum director Rajeev Dhawan about the blackout and why regional electricity grids are a legacy of “America’s socialist economy” –

SMITH: Well, what we did in this area is we had a totally regulated electricity system. What we did was we moved the -- electrical grids are network industries. They have two components. They have the flows, the electricity that flows around the system, powers our air conditioning, our lights, and we have the grid, the wires, the cables, to generate -- the transformers and so on -- that move it from A to B, from the power plants to our homes.

What we did was we deregulated the generation capacity. We created a freer market in that area, but we left the grids totally regulated, and the effect of that was essentially to create one wheel spinning very, very quickly and the other wheel gummed up in bureaucratic regulation. The effect of that was the increased demand. It's a rigid system. And we had the blackout.