Ted Rall

Cat and girl

Irrefutable!

Also, exam day.

Reagan Republicism

Still back with Doonesbury Flashbacks, I noticed this gem – from August 19th, 1981 (click for larger version):

One of many rips into former Interior Secretary James Watt (see The Reagan Years, if you’re interested).

Still – prescient, eh? A demonstration that, indeed, Bush the Younger was the Reagan Republican of our times (he will have presided over two recessions, though).

A Short History of America

Tip for applied researchers: if you’re going to calculate marginal effects by hand, using the Delta method to secure standard errors, do it with something simple. Don’t use, say, back-transformed coefficients from Beta regression. For example.

Meanwhile, some R. Crumb, from the Guardian’s week-long celebration of the man and his work (originally found, by way of trivia, while looking for his infamous Joe Blow comic, read about earlier while in fact reading a Doonesbury book. Trudeau had said that Crumb had written that he’d made that comic just to be a punk, which makes sense).

A Short History of America, parts 1 and 2 (I hope he draws a part 3 one day):

Penny Arcade

I’m not really doing anything today. Inspired by a recent book, breakfast was (vegan!) madeleines, and now I’m solving the Riemann Hypothesis. Actually that second part might not be so true – and, no, Madeleines do nothing for my memory. They kind of remind me of the Transporter, but I doubt that was what Proust had in mind.

My wife bought me Penny Arcade’s book 4: Birds are Weird. This contains, amongst other things, 2003’s strips – I’m pretty sure I began reading PA prior to this year (the year 2003), but maybe not. This is the year I remember most well, in any event, so I’m leaving you with this, for the day:

If you don’t know Penny Arcade already, there really is something wrong with you.