R. Preston McAfee is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business Economics and Management at Cal Tech and a renowned expert on issues relating to pricing of goods and services.
Before going to Cal Tech, Professor McAfee was the Murray S. Johnson Professor of Economics and former Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. In this engaging lecture on how companies determine prices, Professor McAfee reveals that his decision to leave UT for Cal Tech was cemented when he received the following email from the UT administration regarding a message from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board:

From the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board:
Your last name is your password. If you have questions or have forgotten your password, please contact the Coordinating Board.

Hat tip to Craig Newmark for the link to Professor McAfee’s lecture.

The Wall Street Journal ($) online edition has a section entitled “At a Glance,” which contains several groupings of articles from the WSJ online edition. One of the grouping categories is called “Most Popular,” which lists the articles that are receiving the most hits from WSJ readers.
On this weekend of Berkshire Hathaway’s always popular shareholders meeting, the No. 1 article receiving the most hits in today’s WSJ online edition is science columnist Susan Begley’s column entitled Darwin Revisited: Females Don’t Always Go for Hottest Mate.
Heh.

I realize that he may have bombed at the recent White House Correspondents’ Association awards dinner, but I’m still a big fan of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. Here is the recent 60 Minutes segment on Colbert (segment 2 and segment 3), which includes a good dose of Colbert’s hilarious interviewing techniques.
By the way, one thing that I’ve always wondered about Colbert — but that Morley Safer did not ask him in the 60 Minutes piece — is whether the pronunciation of Colbert’s name (prounouced “Cole-bear”) on his show is a play on the wonderful Hyacinth Bucket character (pronounced “bouquet” by Hyacinth and “bucket” by everyone else) in the equally hilarious BBC comedy show, “Keeping Up With Appearances“? Anyone know the answer?
Update: In the small world department, turns out that Jeff Skilling’s law firm — O’Melveny & Myers — has a Colbert connection. One of Colbert’s older brothers is Jim Colbert (who pronounced his name with a good, hard “ert”), who was a litigation partner at O’Melveny for approximatey 30 years in Los Angeles. The elder Colbert was known at O’Melveny as a brilliant litigator with — you guessed it — a sharp wit.

Anyone who has lived in Texas will appreciate the truth of this very clever commercial. Particularly after this past college football season.
You gotta love those Texas college rivalries!
By the way, LSU closed out the Aggies’ most successful basketball season in a couple of decades on Saturday by beating the Ags with a buzzer-beater in their second-round NCAA Tournament game.

I count as friends a number of major college coaches, and so I have a special appreciation of the demands involved in being a big-time college football or basketball coach. Not only do such coaches have to deal with sometimes overbearing media, fans, and college administrations, they also have to oversee their athletes’ off-the-field conduct, such as keeping the usually cash-deprived athletes away from the various sources of financial inducements that violate various NCAA rules that could lead to disastrous sanctions for the coach’s program. Believe me, it’s a full-time job.
Well, as difficult as their job already is, it now looks as if those college coaches are going to have to include review of their athletes’ instant messenger habits in their oversight duties.

The indefatigable Peter Lattman shares with us this hilarious opinion by Bankruptcy Judge Leif Clark of San Antonio, who cites a scene from the Adam Sandler movie, Billy Madison, in concluding that “[t]he court cannot determine the substance, if any, of the Defendantís legal argument, nor can the court even ascertain the relief that the Defendant is requesting. The Defendantís motion is accordingly denied for being incomprehensible.î
A friend of mine commented that Judge Clark’s opinion reminded him of Houston-based U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes‘ reaction several years ago to a particularly illiterate FDIC motion to substitute counsel. After marking up the proposed form of order to delete surplusage, Judge Hughes wrote the following message in bold pen under his signature to the attorney who had drafted the motion:

“How did you write before your lobotomy?”

The Latin phrase sua sponte is often used in legal pleadings to refer to actions that the court takes in a case on its accord or motion. But this Law.com article ($) indicates that Santa Cruz, CA lawyer Arthur Dudley’s use of that phrase will never quite be the same:
In an opening brief to San Francisco’s 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words “sea sponge” instead of the legal term “sua sponte,” . . .

“Spell check did not have sua sponte in it,” said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.

That left the justices reading — and probably laughing at — such classic statements as: “An appropriate instruction limiting the judge’s criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction.”
And: “It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense.”
The sneaky “sea sponge” popped up at least five times.

At least grizzled courthouse veterans are honoring Dudley with a new characterization of the legal duty involved in his case:

The faux pas has made Dudley the butt of some mild ribbing around Santa Cruz. Local attorneys, he said, have started calling his unique defense the “sea sponge duty to instruct.”

This Eyewitness News article reports on a rather unusual reason for a big-city traffic jam:

Drivers on the city’s south side found themselves caught up in a very unusual traffic tie up overnight.
Officers are used to pulling over drivers, but a bull on the Beltway proved a much greater challenge. Authorities did finally catch the bull, but not before the animal ran loose for about 30 minutes.
The bull originally got loose at about 11pm, and started blocking the Beltway for drivers. It was spotted first headed east on the South Belt near Sabo.
At one point, someone had a rope around the bull, but that person was dragged a little bit and the bull got loose again. The bull jumped the median and started heading west, finally exiting at the Pearland Parkway, and U-turning through the underpass.
Officers from the Houston Police Department and the Constable’s office finally managed to round the bull up and tie him to a fence.

I wonder if this is the reason why Texans owner Bob McNair didn’t consider former Bears and Saints coach Mike Ditka before hiring Dan Reeves as a consultant to evaluate the state of the Texans?
Ah, the indiscretions of our youth. Hat tip to Eric McErlain for the Ditka link.