Disney v. Satire

July 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” So said George S. Kaufman. The updated version is “Satire is what Disney closes on Saturday morning.”

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the satirical website BuyNLarge.com that Pixar set up to accompany Wall-E. In the movie, Buy N Large has come to dominate the universe by feeding our desire for consumer products and entertainment. The only thing that people do is shop and lie around watching television. The website continued this satirical idea in a delightfully pointed way.

The final sentence of my post about the website was, “I wonder what kind of reception it’s getting among the Disney brass.”

Now we know.

When you click on BuyNLarge.com now, instead of getting the tongue-in-cheek fictional website, you get an utterly conventional Disney-style movie auxilliary complete with games, video clips, stuff to buy, and even links to real corporate tie-in sponsors.


The only trace of BuyNLarge.com I could find on the Internet (aside from the two images I posted) was the Disclaimer page, which begins

In order to access services through our site, you must provide us with certain personal information such as your name, your Vari-Credit number and expiration date, your Vari-Credit billing address, your telephone number, your e-mail address and the name or names of the person(s) in your immediate family. We may also ask you for other personal information, such as your medical history.

All acquired customer information becomes the property of the Buy n Large corporation and can be used (but is not limited to) any venture the Buy n Large Corporation deems beneficial to it. By visiting Buy n Large (or a Buy n Large partner) the user agrees to relinquish (if requested) any personal assets that may be deemed "usable” by the Buy n Large Corporation; this includes (but is not limited to) real estate, stock holdings, user transportation, employment income and the users “soul” (either real or imagined, regardless of spiritual or religious affiliation).

This gives you some idea of what the rest of BuyNLarge.com was like. If anyone knows where BuyNLarge.com can be found, please spread the word.

How Smart is the QB?

July 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Former defensive tackle Tim Green once said that being a quarterback, reading defenses to find the open receiver, “is like doing calculus problems on flash cards.”

So when I heard about the NFL’s IQ test test – fifty questions in twelve minutes – I figured that quarterbacks would be at the head of the class. Close. But they’re outscored by their protectors – the interior offensive line. The averages are pretty close for all the interior offensive players. Ben Fry, author of Visualizing Data, graphs the results.


It’s not an easy test, and most guys don’t finish in the allotted time. Only one player, punter and Harvard grad Pat McInally, got a 50.

If you want to take the test yourself, go here and follow the link.

Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.

Pick a Psych Journal, Any Psych Journal

July 19, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve been reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. As Gilbert warns in the Foreword, it’s not a self-help book on how to be happy. It’s an academic psychologist’s take on how we think about happiness and about other things. Like most academic books, it cites many journal articles, especially those based on psychology experiments.

As I read Gilbert’s summary of one experiment, I said to myself, “That sounds like a JPSP article.” Now, there must be dozens of psychology journals that cover the kinds of topics Gilbert was talking about, but this study seemed like just the kind of thing that would appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, at least as I remembered that journal from my days in grad school long ago. I turned to the notes in the back of the book, and I was right.

Amazing. I felt like I was watching myself as a magician – eyes closed, hand pressing his temple in great concentration – calling out the name of the selected card. Jack of Hearts. Maybe I did learn something in grad school. (Full disclosure: mostly out of ignorance, I had enrolled in a social psychology program; my degree is in “psychology and social relations.”)

A few pages later, the same thing happened – from Gilbert’s description of a study, I was almost certain it would be a JPSP article. Again I checked the endnotes, and again I was right.

Unusual powers of perception? Then I recalled one technique that a magician can use to be sure of knowing that the card you selected was the jack of hearts.




So I took a quick look through the endnotes and did a rough count. If journal citations were playing cards . . . .


I’m exaggerating. Other journals were represented. There were “only” 77 JPSP citations. In some chapters, that was one per every three footnotes. Surely, there must be measures of journal influence and dominance in their field. I wonder if the degree of citation inequality varies among disciplines.

What Color Is Your Paramour?

July 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
Sociological musings in the checkout line at the Publix. Two lovers, two magazines. Same story. But why is A-Rod so much darker on the In Touch cover than on Us?


I did not buy the magazines to see if the stories too were different. I didn't even buy the Star to see if Mary Kate was going back to rehab.