Met with an admissions counselor today and discovered I can pick up an Associate’s in Comp. Sci. with just 35 credits, thanks to the degree I already have. Family says I should go for it. Hmm…

Canadian actress Jessica Paré, who is apparently not related to Komodo vs. Cobra star Michael Paré.

450/400 Nitro Express Ruger No. 1s are starting to pop up on Gunbroker.

Good-looking wood on that one. No. 1s tend to have pretty decent wood, probably since nice two-piece stock blanks are a good bit cheaper than nice one-piece blanks. Gonna have to sell a few things to make it happen…

Today’s another one of those days ending in “y”, which means my morning email once again contained the old “ZOMG don’t buy gas today and we’ll bankrupt Texaco!” chain-letter.

:sigh:

No. The market does not work that way. As the kind and patient folks over at Snopes pointed out in their thorough debunking of this myth:

Gasoline is a fungible, global commodity, its price subject to the ordinary forces of supply and demand.  No amount of consumer gimmickry and showmanship will lower its price in the long run …

If you actually believe that email and CC it to everyone in your address book, you’re essentially declaring to the world that you are an economic retard with no understanding of the structure and function of markets. But at least you have plenty of company.

Cynical and misanthropic as I am, I’m still regularly amazed by the profound, widespread ignorance of economics displayed by otherwise intelligent, educated people. Granted, I was an econ major so I naturally think that MY field is especially important; hell, I’m sure even the sociology nutjobs manage to convince themselves that what they study has some relevance. But really, economic forces have a tremendous influence on just about every facet of your life: what you do, where you live, how many kids you have, and, as the recent insanity over corn-based ethanol production illustrates, what you put in your belly and your gas tank.

And people are just dumb as hell about it.

And it’s easy to see why. My high school, like many others, didn’t even OFFER an economics class. My college didn’t require any econ courses unless you were an Econ or Business major. So to the average student, economics is some arcane dark art a half-step removed from alchemy. To this day, when I tell people what I studied, many of them look at me like I have three heads: “Wow, isn’t economics, like, really really HARD?!?”

No, it isn’t; there’s nothing (or very, very little) in basic neoclassical economics that’s conceptually difficult to understand. The problem is that after mathematics, economics is probably the most poorly-taught subject in our schools. The IDEAS are simple, it’s the standard presentation and explanation of those ideas that makes eyes glaze over and class sizes shrink by 50% after the first week. And that’s a shame.

I’d dearly love to see colleges require an introductory course that covers at least the broad strokes of economics and personal finance from both a theoretical (”these are supply and demand curves”) and a practical (”here’s how a Roth IRA works”) point of view. They might even think about presenting the material in a way that won’t scare the shit out of the students. Maybe then I’d stop meeting college sophomores with $20k in credit card debt and other people would stop forwarding me these goddamn emails.

Longdog is, indeed, looooong.

Longdog is looooong.

If you can’t do witty, informative or insightful, go for cute.

Your Humble Narrator is halfway-pondering a return to school to pick up another degree. Maybe. At least enough of a “maybe” to warrant a conversation with an admissions counselor.

I’m freakishly good at school, which is odd because I’ve never actually enjoyed it; I’m more of an autodidact. I love LEARNING, but actually sitting through lectures, writing essays and doing exams bores me to tears, or at least heavy drinking.

So we’ll see. Any advice from the peanut gallery?

I received a $50 Visa gift card for being in the wedding party last weekend, so this afternoon I trotted off to wallyworld and picked up two 100-round boxes of Winchester white-box 9mm for the Hi-Power. Time to hit the range!

I watched a lot of reruns on Nick-at-Nite as a kid, especially Get Smart, Dragnet and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (I know, I was a weird little kid).

My all-time favorite Hitchcock episode was “Man from the South,” based on a short story by Roald Dahl and starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre, who creeped the hell out of me when I was little. Actually, he STILL creeps the hell out of me. I don’t know how the guy managed to be so simultaneously wimpy and menacing.

Anyways, one of those late-night Perpetual-Wiki-Loops led me to the full text of Dahl’s original story and the whole Hitchcock episode on YouTube. Here it is, in three parts:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

This is as close as I get to posting actual photographs of myself:

I don’t actually have the scrawny moustache and I rarely smile, but it’s not a bad likeness otherwise. For those of you who’ve met me, whaddya think?