Author: jbenton

I think I mentioned this before, but I’m about to skip town for a month. First, I go up to Connecticut for my friend Kim‘s wedding to the lovely and talented Eric. Then a brief stop in New Haven for a visit to my journalistic alma mater.
Then comes the big fun: a Jefferson Fellowship that will take me to China and Japan for almost all of October. And it starts out with a trip to…Hawaii. (I know — I’m a lucky guy.)
I’ve never been to Hawaii. Never even really thought about going to Hawaii. Anyone have any advice? I’ll be there from a Thursday to a Sunday and I have neither hotel reservations nor plans.

For the record, when I said passionless picking was the core of the crabwalk.com investing philosophy a few days ago, I didn’t mean to take it to these extremes:
“Functional psychopaths” make the best investment decisions because they can’t experience emotions such as fear, a study by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business showed.
Fear stops people from taking even logical risks, meaning those who have suffered damage to areas of the brain affecting emotions, and can suppress feeling, make better decisions, the report showed. The ability to control emotion helps performance in business and the financial markets, the researchers found.
That said, I don’t see how anybody could screw up the gambling/investing experiment the researchers were trying out. (They gave people $20 and then offered to flip a coin for a $1 wager. If they lost the coin flip, they lost the $1. If they won the flip, they won $2.50 — their $1 back plus $1.50. The researchers found that people with brain damage deadening their emotions agreed to more coin flips than people with “normal” brains, who apparently got scared of losing.)
I mean, who wouldn’t take that bet, every single time? First, your actual risk is zero — you’re playing with the researchers’ 20 bucks! Second, a 50/50 chance at a 150% return? You gotta take that bet every time — particularly if you’re going to get, at a minimum, 20 chances to make the bet, meaning the law of averages alone gives you a near 100% chance of coming out ahead.
Still, the “functional psychopaths” only wagered their buck 84% of the time, and the “normal” folks wagered only 58% of the time. Silly.
(Also, I wrote the other day about David Swensen, the man who invests Yale’s endowment and wrote a new book about a sort of investing strategy not far from mine. Well, the results are in from another year of Swensen’s work: a 22.3 percent return, versus 4.4 percent for the S&P. Quote: “The University consistently ranked in the top one percent of institutional funds during the past decade, with an average return of 17.4 percent…In comparison, the S&P 500 had an annualized return of 8.1 percent.”)

Best search term to ever lead a Googler to this site: Scooby-doo started many Criminal Justice careers.

AstroWorld, 1968-2005. R.I.P. To a kid growing up in southwest Louisiana, AstroWorld was the bomb.
It was also the punchline for one of my favorite jokes as a kid (third post down, the one about the pig). Although I’d always heard it told as an Aggie joke, not a Cajun joke.

New Orleans native and Friend-of-Crabwalk Nicole finds her dad among the muck. Gotta love that Daily News tone — “flooded roads and gun-toting thugs!” More here.

Here’s my column from today’s paper, on the injustice of the TAKS test.
Also, in my continuing quest to expand the crabwalk.com media empire, I unveil two new ways to get your fill of this site’s piping-hot content:
– An RSS feed! (I’ve had one for years, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned it.) If you’re an RSS type of person — and oh boy, I am — there you go.
– If you’re a LiveJournal person: this is a feed of all crabwalk.com posts sent through LJ. You can add it as a friend in LJ and I’ll show up there — no need to come over here any more. (Although, of course, you’re always welcome.) Much thanks to Leah for setting it up.

If the rumors are true, you’ll be hearing a very interesting Bush-related story out of Austin in the next few hours. Hasn’t broken anywhere yet, that I can tell.
(How’s that for a tease?)

In case you’ve ever wondered about the anal sex patterns of your fellow Americans, the CDC now has the dish. (The answer: 34 percent of men and 30 percent of women 15-44 have had heterosexual anal sex.)
I’m very glad our government is on top of this issue. So to speak.

Today’s Wilmer-Hutchins story (and it’s a good one):
A baritone horn from a pawnshop. A $7,700 set of murals. A pizza crisper, cookie-dough scoops, and a Queen Anne loveseat for the principal’s office. According to state auditors, those are some of the ways Wilmer-Hutchins officials spent more than $270,000 in federal education funds – money that was supposed to pay for reading and math instruction for the district’s weakest students.
Including one of the best quotes I’ve had the privilege of typing:
“I don’t care if they have to sell a kidney, they need to pay this money back,” [said former W-H trustee Joan Bonner of the folks who misspent the district’s money]. “We know they don’t have a heart or a brain, but a kidney might be usable.”
(Several of you who know me well are chortling knowingly right now.)

Animal-loving types have to be told to stop flooding FEMA offices with phone calls because “the barrage of phone calls is now hampering [Gen. Honore’s] humanitarian missions, rather than helping.” Some folks on this site have apparently been posting Gen. Honore’s phone number and telling people to call it repeatedly so they can tell him…I don’t know what, really. “Worry about the puppies”?
As I said: I like animals too, but I’d like to think I know better than to flood an already-stressed emergency-management system with “save the kitties” calls. This isn’t your congressman before a vote — this is a disaster area. Priorities, people.