Number of Google hits for “desert island”: 447,000
Number of Google hits for “deserted island”: 73,900
So “desert” outnumbers “deserted” by a factor of more than 6 to 1. I had always assumed those islands that castaways crawled onto were devoid of people, not rainfall. I wonder how many islands there are with less than 10 inches of rainfall per year? And I wonder whether there are six times as many of them as islands with no people?
Also, can someone point me to one of those “dessert islands” (2310 Google hits) – that is, islands filled with tasty treats? Does Jamaica count?
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Just Deserts
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Pornoconomics
There’s a store just down the road from me called “Red Hot Video.” It has all black windows. I figured it was a porno store. But then I noticed the signs advertising that they had “All Ratings” and the “Widest Selection.” Why would they put up signs like that if they only had porn? So one evening, after failing to find the title I was looking for at Blockbuster, I decided to check it out.
You know how sometimes you judge a book by its cover, and then you actually check it out and discover you were all wrong? Yeah, well, this was not one of those times. It was a porno store. But here’s the funny part. Although the back room was filled with porn, the little front room had four walls covered with the most amazingly craptacular collection of non-porn movies ever. “Ishtar,” Howie Mandel’s “Little Monsters,” “Gremlins 3”… you get the idea. It was like they had deliberately gone through and removed every movie with more than 1.5 stars. It was a veritable vortex of suckiness. And no new movies either, mind you. It was all from the 1980s, as far as I could tell. Oh, and no DVDs.
In the center of the room, I did not find more racks of crappy movies. Instead, there were 15 or 20 large bins of lousy merchandise. Popcorn and candy, maybe? Nope. In one bin I found a pile of plastic disposable razors. In the next, a jumble of plastic spider-rings, like kids wear on Halloween. In another, temporary tattoos. Thumbtacks. Hair scrunchies. Rubber balls. I can’t remember what else, but it was all random, low-quality, disposable, and made in China or Taiwan.
What was going on? As always, I have a theory. I suspect there must be some arcane zoning regulations that, among other things, regulate the percentage of a store’s floorspace or inventory that can be devoted to sex-related products. Or perhaps sex stores are subject to regulations not imposed on other businesses, and you can avoid the sex-store classification by stocking enough other stuff. Either way, the business ends up buying a bunch of merchandise they don’t expect anyone to buy, purely to meet some arbitrary quota. Stocking the bins with crapola makes sense because (a) it’s cheap to stock, and (b) no one will ever bother to buy it, which means no delivery and restocking costs. Sure, they could put high-quality merchandise there, but who would ever walk into a porno store looking for it?
A similar phenomenon occurred in New York City while I was living there, after Giuliani pushed through a slew of anti-sex-shop zoning regulations. And I have confirmation on my theory here, because the regulations had been the subject of a public debate. The new rules specified (among other things) that no sex-related business could be located within X yards of a school, church, community center, or other sex-related business. They defined “sex-related business” in terms of floorspace, as I recall.
The stores responded (I, uh, heard somewhere) by stocking 90% of their shelves and floorspace with a sparse array of other items. And then they’d cram literally hundreds of porn videos into one little corner of the shop. The result? Stores that were almost completely empty, except for a crowd of horny men all clustered together in an area about the size of a walk-in closet, trying to avoid eye contact. All part of the mayor’s brilliant plan, I assume.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
More ambiguous song lyrics
I remember a one-liner from one of Rodney Dangerfield's old routines. It went like this:
Even in high school, I got no respect. A girl called me up and said, "Why don't you come on over? There's nobody home." I went over. There was nobody home!I was reminded of it when I went with my cousin and Glen to see Shrek 2 while I was in Austin last week. The dance number at the end of the movie was "Livin' La Vida Loca," and one line went:
She'll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rainIt had me imagining a dialogue in some never-released Rodney Dangerfield movie...
RD: She said she'd make me take my clothes off and go dancing in the rain!
Other guy: Sounds kinky! So what happened?
RD: She made me take my clothes off, and then while I was standing there ready to go, she went dancing in the rain! No respect, I tell ya!
More on Punitive Damages
Alex Tabarrok comments on the punitive damages issue I blogged about last week. He makes the important point that taxation of punitive damages (and, by extension, my tongue-in-check proposal to burn them) would create a greater incentive for both parties to settle out of court. That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
UPDATE. A conversation with some colleagues prompted me to add the following: Juries might simply inflate their punitive damage awards if they knew the “victims” would only get 25% of them. Is this really likely to happen? The key question is why juries are inclined to make large punitive damage awards. If their desire is to give victims giant lottery jackpots (even though compensatory damages are supposed to be large enough to make the victims whole), then there is good reason to think they’d inflate the damages. On the other hand, if their desire is to punish the evil corporations (or whatever), then they’d have no reason to inflate the damages any more than they do now, because the defendants have to pay the entire amount.
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