Friday . . . life, as usual, produces happiness and comedy, as well as un-comedy.

Happiness and comedy first.

Two Washington-based lawyers have formed a 527 group to publicize John Kerry's "recent sports misstatements" including the infamous and consequential reference to Green Bay's "Lambert Field."

". . . a collection of actual senior photos that I found on the web." (Link via the indispensable Black Table.)

A warm endorsement of charter schools from the SacBee's Daniel Weintraub and another one from Villanova's Robert Maranto.

Roland Patrick is has a lot of entertaining things to say about a certain UC Berkeley economist: "Some Grade School Arithmetic for U.S. News (and its admirers)," "It Doesn't Take an Econometrician to Understand Reductions in Force Levels After a War Ends," and "In the Land of the Self-Unaware, Brad DeLong is King." I'm taking a wild guess here, but I think there will be much more from Mr. Patrick along these lines.

From the comments section of the same Professor DeLong's blog, bjako@optonline.net issues this cri de coeur: "Why is it that every time something bad is about to happen to Bush or something awful is about to be revealed, he gets away largely unscathed?" Brian, from your friends at the Door: 1) open Occam's Razor, and 2) apply liberally (but carefully!). You're welcome.

Douglas Kern pursues a novel premise--"Why should hapless high school seniors have to apply to colleges? Why shouldn't colleges apply to them?"--with some funny results.

Finally, Michael Van Winkle explains how 3,872,561 blogs are a modern tribute to the beauty and truth of F. A. Hayek's idea: "Hayek Smiled: Why Blogging Works." (If this sounds familiar, Newmark's Door made, briefly, the same point about three weeks ago.)

Some not funny news.

Chris Silvey reports that the economics graduate students at Cornell are not doing at all well on their micro qualifying exam.

Chris also reports that Ngan Dinh at the University of Chicago did not pass her qualifying exams. Ms. Dinh has been writing a brilliantly observed and utterly charming account of her graduate studies at Chicago. I share Chris's sadness from this news and I second Chris's good wishes to her.

Comments

[Blah blah]

I think it was stupid to post an entry about Ngan not passing the qualifying exam. You want more people to know about that.