My other life ...

... is apparently as a gatherer of signatures for citizen initiatives in California.

D. B. Cooper

According to the Daily Mail, the FBI thinks it may have finally found D.B. Cooper, the early 70s hijacker who parachuted out of a Northwest Orient (as they were back then) plane over southern Washington State and was never found.

Cooper became a bit of a folk hero; wikipedia has a whole separate page about his appearances in popular culture. There is even a song, the "Ballad of D.B. Cooper," that received some radio attention, at least in the Pacific Northwest. And, particularly in the wake of 9/11, his antics do have an innocence to them. No one was hurt, he didn't take all that much money, and he was pushing no political or religious agenda other than the enrichment of D.B. Cooper. There are worse things.

I have a very slight personal connection to old D.B. Cooper as my father, who had just been working at the Seattle-Tacoma airport for a year or so at the time of the hijacking, was called out to the airport that night, though as I recall he ended up doing nothing other than standing around and watching the proceedings.

And, what are we to make of the Daily Mail calling it the Tacoma International Airport? Not hardly. At the time, Tacoma was best known locally for the awful smell that emitted from a large smelter.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Finding people from the past

There was a fellow in my entering class at Chicago called Derek Scissors who left the program after a year to get a doctorate in political science at Stanford. Perhaps because his name is easy to remember, it has stuck with me all these years and I have always wondered where he ended up.

The other day while surfing around I saw a mention of a Derek Scissors and decided to track him down. It turns out he is now at the Heritage Foundation in their Asian Studies Center. The Heritage folks should get Derek to sit down for another picture and make him smile for it.

Now ... all I have to do is figure out whatever happened to Claire Marie Hintz, who also started the Chicago doctoral program with me but never finished.

Rob McKenna for Governor ?!?!

My friend Rob McKenna is running for governor of Washington State. He is presently attorney general.

Rob was student body president at the University of Washington when I was an undergrad there, and I got to know him (as I recall), through my friend Ken Troske, who knew him from high school. The three of us all ended up at the University of Chicago for graduate school, with Ken and me in economics and Rob in the law school. Indeed, in the fall of 2005, five of us - Rob and Ken were married then but I was not - had a fine adventure when we drove together, in two cars, from Seattle to Chicago, stopping along the way to see Mount Rushmore.

Make no mistake, Rob is a politician through and through, but conditional on that, he is a good guy. Maybe even unconditional on that. :)

The idea that he is some sort of extreme right-winger, put forth by this democrat website, is utterly ridiculous. Indeed, based on the discussions we had back in the day, I was always a bit surprised that he ended up as a Republican. My take was always that he was smart, organized, ambitious and much more a manager and a technocrat than an ideologue.

I don't endorse politicians on the blog, but I wish Rob the best of luck in his campaign.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

A longer title for yours truly

As of yesterday, and subject to approval by the Regents of the university, I now have a "zero budget" appointment at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. A "zero budget" appointment is Michigan-speak for what most other places call a "courtesy appointment". Among other things, this means I can now refer to myself as "Professor of Economics and Public Policy."

I sought the appointment because I hope to become somewhat more involved at the Ford School. I taught at the Harris School at Chicago during my gradual student days and really enjoyed interacting with the MPP students there, as well as with the multi-disciplinary faculty. I expect the same to be true at Michigan.

One nice feature of both Michigan and Chicago is that their policy schools are not named after people I would be embarrassed to be associated with, like John F. Kennedy or Woodrow Wilson.

Economics Department Wall, U of Chicago

Brother Lones sends this horrifying historical artifact, which you can view in person on some wall in the economics department at Chicago.

Looking up some of the folks in the picture that I hung out with, I find Karl Snow, Dave Surdham and Kei-Mu Yi.

Board wargaming

This video, which brings back a lot of memories for me, may be the nerdiest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Board wargaming was my hobby of choice in 8th and 9th grades. I still have a big stack of games in a closet downstairs, the vast majority made by Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), the company featured in the video. Every Saturday night my very indulgent parents would drive me (and often one or two of my friends) down to Heritage Bookshop in Renton - long since closed - to spend the evening playing these games, with a side trip at some point to Jack in the Box to get some food.

Wasted youth ....

First single I ever got

As best I can recall, this is the first single I ever owned. I think I do still own it now but it is buried somewhere in the basement.

I am not sure what this proves other than that I already had a bit of an off-kilter sense of humor at age seven.

Oh, and for the student readers, that thing in the picture is a 45 rpm (revolutions per minute) record, which contained one song on each side and was called a "single" (though perhaps it should have been called a "double" as there were two songs). It was played on something called a phonograph or record player.

Gotcha day

Yesterday was "gotcha day" for our daughter Elizabeth, meaning that three years ago yesterday we picked her up in not-so-beautiful Nanning.

In her honor, a piece from Jesse Walker at reason on the policies that indirectly led to our adoption.

Life's little pleasures

After the Michigan vs. UConn game today I'll be watching the Washington vs. BYU game on channel 734.

I am pretty sure you have to be around my age or older to get why having channel numbers with three digits is so cool and still brings a smile to my face.

In my boyhood days there were only channels 4 (ABC), 5 (NBC), 7 (CBS), 9 (PBS), 11 (reruns) and 13 (more reruns).

This is better!

People I knew in Judy Thornton's class at UW

Readers who know me and also my old friend Ken Troske may have heard me tell a story about a small honors economics class - about 10 students - that Ken and I both took back in our undergraduate days at the University of Washington. The amazing fact about this class - amazing at least if you know both Ken and me - is that neither of us was the loudest person in the class nor the second loudest person in the class.

The loudest person was a fine fellow called Dan Shasteen, whose father sold aluminum siding in Hawaii and who was a great fan of Austrian economics in general and of Ludwig von Mises in particular. The second loudest person, and the motivation for this post, was called Nelson del Rio. I learned yesterday, by first reading the UW Economics Department's alumni newsletter and then following up on the "Celebration" awards ceremony page, that he has done quite well for himself indeed.

Congratulations to Nelson!