A Curious Little Blog

I found an amusing story, which I am stealing shamelessly from Jay Nordlinger's column at National Review : He’s on MacNeil-Lehrer (I believe) with some woman from the education establishment (what Bill Bennett used to call “the Blob”). Gramm says, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” The woman says, “No, you don’t.” Gramm says, “Okay: What are their names?” This pretty much sums up my philosophy of government (and also of history): people are self-interested. If you are a cynic, you might say they are selfish. If you are a Christian (which I am), you might say that man is fallen and inherently sinful. However you express it, the point is the same: people are going to do what is best for them. If you establish any social institutions on the expectation that people are going to be altruistic, you are heading for disaster. Moreover, as the Gramm interview implies, self-interest is not necessarily a bad thing. Not only...

I bought milk tonight, and I noticed that skim milk was the cheapest. Each of the other types -- 1%, 2%, and whole -- was progressively more expensive. It hasn't always been this way. I remember that for some time, 2% was the cheapest; and no doubt whole milk was cheaper when they first started producing reduced-fat milk. I would expect whole milk to be cheapest, simply because they don't have to process it beyond the pasteurization and homogenization that all milk goes through. Reduced-fat milk produces a useful byproduct, but it has to be replaced by more milk. Or does it? Milk is sold by volume, and I guess the fat is dissolved in the milk, in which case skim milk is lighter but just as bulky as whole milk. If so, skim milk would be the better bargain -- presuming the fat was worth more than the cost to extract it. It still might be a better bargain even if the fat took up space that had to be replaced by additional milk, but only if the fat was more valuable than ...

When I first moved to Georgia, I was intrigued by a "bottle shop" located just off the interstate. From its size and position (right next to a gas station), I gathered it was not a market for antique bottles, but I had no idea what it really did sell. It was only after some time that I finally learned that it sold alcoholic beverages. Another common euphemism for liquor store is "package store ." At least the products sold in a bottle shop are uniquely bottles; you can walk out of just about any store with a package, so this one seems particularly obscure. In Virginia, hard liquor sales are regulated by the government, and spirits can only be purchased in an ABC store -- Alcoholic Beverage Control (and not, as it sounds, a place for educational materials for primary school students). I can understand that this name is mandated by the government, but, in the case of bottle shops and package stores, I wonder why they don't just say outright what they sell. S...

Have you ever wondered why we have a separate name for light red -- pink -- but no commonly used separate names for other light colours? Baby blue is as different from navy as pink is from red, but we can only identify it by adding a modifier to "blue"; it doesn't get its own word. "Pretty in Pink" makes a nice title, but "Pretty in Light Red" would never do. The same goes for light green, light purple, and other colours -- yellow, too, I suppose, although it's hard to think of yellow as being anything other than light. One could speculate that we use pink in a lot of common contexts -- flowers, lips, sometimes even skin colour, and it is the archetypal colour for girls -- but I don't know if that is adequate. I've also wondered why green seems so different from the colours that form it. When I see purple, it looks red and blue to me; when I see orange, it looks red and yellow. But when I see green, it doesn't look at all blue or ...