Alcohol Prohibition Was A Failure, says a Cato paper of 1991. (No kidding?) This is the first time I’ve seen the data so thoroughly laid out. Here’s another survey. (Both cited by Radley Balko.)

A spammer asks, “Can you imagine a Silvester without Caviar?”

Well, no, I guess not. What’s a Silvester?

There’s an old joke that “there are no guilty men in prison,” i.e. that practically all inmates claim to have been unjustly accused. I’ve also heard that in fact most convicts cheerfully admit to the charges. The latter seems more likely given that reporters find it worth mentioning that so-and-so (e.g. the late Tookie) “has always maintained his innocence”.

I recently found (but did not save the address of) a website listing the last words of convicts put to death in Texas. I read the most recent dozen or so. Almost half expressed remorse, and just one expressed a hope that the real criminal would someday be found.

In a review of a biography of Lillian Hellman, The Economist used the phrase “at the height of the first cold war in 1952.”

I’m always the last to know. Is this usage widespread? When was the height of the second cold war?

Jerome K. Jerome – or his fictional counterpart “J.” – says in chapter 5 of Three Men on the Bummel:

  I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte. This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home upon me by experience.
  . . . [six pages] . . .
  Therefore it is that I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages.

Chapter 10 touches on the advertising of bicycles:

. . . one feels [looking at such posters] that, for perfect bodily rest combined with entire freedom from mental anxiety, slumber upon a water-bed cannot compare with bicycle-riding upon a hilly road. No fairy travelling on a summer could could take things more easily than does the bicycle girl, according to the poster. . . .

Water-bed? thought I. Everyone knows™ that Robert Heinlein (1907-88) conceived the water-bed as we know it when he spent some time in a hospital bed, and wrote it into Stranger in a Strange Land. So what did the word mean in 1900? I turn to the OED (something I do less often than you might imagine).

3. A water-tight mattress partly filled with water, designed to serve as a bed for an invalid.

. . . with quotations beginning in 1853.

We learn something every day. Not always something useful, but something.

So I was writing a little allegorical paragraph which invited the reader to imagine a poker game in which a dispute arises over whether a flush beats a straight or not. “(The one holding the straight,” I explained, “is a math nerd who assumes that the rank reflects the probability.)”

But it’s a lucky thing I stopped to make sure. There are 10×4⁵ = 10240 possible straights, and only 4×13!/5!8! = 5148 possible flushes. Yet somehow I’ve believed for most of my life that a straight is more unlikely than a flush, and the ranking of flushes over straights a mere arbitrary anomaly. I wonder how the heck I got that idea.

(I’ve temporarily removed poker from the spam list so that you can respond to this without excessive awkwardness. If after clicking the button you find yourself looking at the FBI’s homepage, you’ve found another word on the list.)

Choose your own joke!

Pillow is fixed, and I’m still

• broke.
• variable.
• floating.

(He’s hiding under my bed.)