If You Had Any More Tawdry Quirks, You Could Open Up A Tawdry Quirk Shop

AMY: Where are we?

DOCTOR: We're in trouble.

RORY: What is that?

DOCTOR: A star. A cold star. (runs to the doors and opens it, letting in a blinding light) That's why we're freezing. It's not a malfunction. We're drifting towards a cold sun. That's our danger for this version of reality. (closes door and looks at the larger monitor on the wall)

AMY: This must be the dream. There is no such thing as a cold star. Stars burn.

DOCTOR: So's this one. It's just burning cold.

RORY: Is that possible?

DOCTOR: I can't know everything. Why does everybody expect me to, always? (heads to console area and sits dejectedly)

--Doctor Who, "Amy's Choice"

...okay, we're not quite at that point, and we're certainly not getting blinding light off of it, but we do have a new record for coldest star, clocking in at 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

No, the elderly are not about to come bursting out of the senior center to come kill you. Yet.

Okay, The Gold Investors Win This Round

The basics of investing in commodities revolves around scarcity: the less of something there is to go around, the higher the price, and vice versa.

Over the course of the current... well, what can only be described as a gold rush, really... this hasn't really come up, at least not directly. The price of gold has gone up not so much because people think there's less gold to go around, but because there's less money to go around and gold is at least a stable thing.

Well, now there's less gold to go around. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, intends to nationalize the Venezuelan gold industry, plans announced last week and formalized Tuesday. Not only that, he's making efforts to transfer physical gold reserves to Venezuela; that amounts to an estimated 16,190 gold bars.

That amounts to 211 tons, which is estimated to take about 40 shipments and take a huge amount of effort to physically transport.

The decree is being called almost identical to a law passed in 1965 that nationalized gold mining, and a 1977 law giving the government exclusive rights to extract it. There is no word, however, on whether either of these laws said anything about Venezuela importing gold reserves from overseas, as is now in the works.

According to Chavez's administration, this is being done to get the gold out of countries with unstable economies- namely, European ones. According to local opposition, though, this is being done primarily to shore up a campaign warchest. Chavez faces re-election in 2012. One opposition legislator, Leomagno Flores, said on the floor of parliament, "They are greedy for money for the campaign and want to bring the gold to Venezuela to turn it into cash ... please, this is heresy." Another, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, told Chavez' finance minister, "You will liquidate the gold and sell it because the only thing you know is how to rob, to rob and to rob!"

If Chavez was hoping to keep his own economy stable on the news, it didn't work. Standard & Poor downgraded Venezuela's credit rating on Friday. If you follow credit ratings, it was dropped from BB- to B+. If you don't, it was dropped from the 13th-highest ranking to the 14th, with anything below rank 10 for any of the three major credit agencies being a junk bond. Moody's has them at rank 15; Fitch at rank 14.

Perhaps some gold will assuage their fears.

Rebels Take Gadhafi Compound

I'm just going to direct you towards CNN, or whatever network is airing Libya coverage for the moment. I'm watching Sara Sidner inside the Gadhafi compound in Tripoli, who can barely get a word in edgewise over all the celebratory gunfire. According to Sidner, the rebels have taken so much ammunition from Gadhafi, and they are so assured of victory, that they now feel free to waste ammo by firing it into the air.

This includes anti-aircraft missiles. Celebratory anti-aircraft missiles.

There is no sign yet of Gadhafi himself- he may have fled the country for all we know- but at this point, there does not appear to be much he could do anymore anyway.

Blackjack Does Not Work That Way

When a politician is called out on something they said, and they stand by it, they are often said to be "doubling down".

This is fine.

Until they continue to stand by the original statement, and are said to be "doubling down" a second time. Or a third time. Or whatever. You'd be amazed how many times someone can double down in a given debate...

Since he took office, [Barack] Obama's strategy has been to double down on the nation's failed financial elite, from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to AIG to Bank of America.

This cannot stand any longer. Clearly, we need to review the rules of blackjack.

After you are given your first two cards of a hand- but only at that point- you are given the option to double down. When you double down, you double your bet, are given one more card, and then you are forced to stand on whatever you are given at that point. The dealer then shows his or her card, and the hand is over.

Let us review:

When you double down, you get ONE MORE CARD AND THEN THE HAND IS OVER. You do not get to double down twice. The hand is over. Stop betting. The rest of the blackjack table hates you.

This is also wrong:

[Rick] Perry, for his part, initially didn’t double down on the [Ben] Bernanke comments, but he was unapologetic this weekend after being asked about his comments reportedly making members of Congress nervous.

As we have already established, you may only double down immediately upon getting your first two cards. You can't draw extra cards and then double down. So if Rick Perry didn't initially double down, he could not have doubled down at all.

This is a correct usage:

The plaintiffs had argued that the deadline had not passed because the DOT had promised them this was a pilot project, but the DOT has emphatically denied ever saying that the PPW bike lane was a trial, and Judge Bunyan saw no credible evidence to the contrary. Jim Walden, the attorney for Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes and Seniors for Safety, has said his clients are reviewing their options. But these are people—especially those who live in fancy homes on Prospect Park West—are used to getting their way, and it wouldn't be surprising to see them double down and take this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is a definitive end to the bike lane debate alluded to here. They are the highest, and last, court that can be asked to rule on an issue. In metaphor terms, they are the one additional card before the hand absolutely ends. Well done, Gothamist!

A much more appropriate blackjack term, when there is the possibility of additional chapters to a story, would be the simple hit: drawing another card. It can be done repeatedly without necessarily ending the hand or providing an immediate win, loss or push. So, remember, fellow writers: unless there is a definite end to the process soon after doubling down, "Hit Me" before I hit you.

This has been a message from Concerned Citizens For Proper Gambling Metaphors.

Stop Reading Chain Letters, Seriously, Come On

So this has been making the rounds on Facebook lately. You may have seen it yourself; I've been hit from several sides by it:

Salary of retired US Presidents ………….$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate …………………..$174,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400 FOR LIFE
...Average Salary of a teacher ……………. $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000
I think we found where the cuts should be made! If you agree… Copy and RE-POST

The sentiment expressed by this... what do we use to describe it? Chain post?... is pretty obvious: if we're going to be making budget cuts, "I think we found where the cuts should be made".

Only one problem: are those facts and figures actually accurate? We need to figure that out before we get out the torches and-- oh, screw it, you lit the torches long ago. Well, it'd be a nice thing to know regardless. We wouldn't want to have our facts wrong and look stupid, would we?

There are two main things we have to cover: first, are these salary figures accurate and where did they come from. Second, we need to settle the 'FOR LIFE' side of the equation. This, it can only be assumed, refers to the pension that those officeholders receive upon leaving their respective bodies. We need to find out if they actually get a pension equal to their active-duty salary; and if not, what the pension actually is.

First, we'll handle the President. A current President's salary, most recently revised in the administration of Bush 43, is $400,000 per year, up from $200,000 previously. He also gets a $50,000 non-taxable stipend. But current Presidents aren't on the list. We want retired Presidents. While $180,000 is a commonly-given answer, their pay- their pension- is actually not a fixed amount. It is indexed to match the salary of current Cabinet members. That salary, along with many others in the highest levels of the executive branch, is part of something called "Executive Schedule". Executive Schedule covers top-ranked Presidential appointees, sorting their salaries into five levels, given Roman numerals I-V. I is highest. Everyone at a given level gets the same salary.

Everyone in the Cabinet sits at Level I. Which means, by extension, retired Presidents also get Level I pay. The salary there, currently, is $199,700. That's actually MORE than the angry chain-post claims by $19,700.

Just for fun:

*Also at Level I are the Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and the directors of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

*Level II salary is $179,700. Sitting here, among others, are the Joint Chiefs of Staff and deputy secretaries.

*Level III pay is $165,300. Undersecretaries sit here. Yes, that is a different thing from deputy secretaries. Also sitting here, among others, are the Solicitor General, the directors of the FBI, DEA, Peace Corps, Office of Government Ethics, and Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and chairmen for the FCC, FTC, SEC, FDIC, OSHA, Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

*Level IV gets $155,500. Assistant Secretaries go here- yes, that's another level- along with various Inspector Generals. Also here are the heads of the Bureau of the Census, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Office of Science, Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Prisons, and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

*Level V gets $145,700. Among the people here are the Archivist of the United States, and heads of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Geological Survey, US Bureau of Mines, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.

The other governmental figures, the members of Congress, match the figures shown here, at least, while they're actively in office. That isn't in dispute. However, the pension is not full. Nor is it immediate, or even automatic. In order to get any Congressional pension at all, members of Congress must first earn it by having served a bare minimum of five years in civil federal service. So if you serve two terms in the House and then lose out on a third term, you're out of luck unless you find some other governmental position in which to get that other year.

There are other restrictions as well. In Congress, you are not eligible for a pension until your 50th birthday, and even to get it then, you have to have served for 20 years or be part of nine Congresses. Other than that, generally speaking, you qualify either on your 62nd birthday, or upon having served for 25 years.

Your pension is figured combining your years of service with the average of the three years in which you earned the highest salary, along with factoring in (PDF file) which of two federal retirement plans you have. (They introduced a new system in 1987, the Federal Employees' Retirement System (FERS) and employees who started prior to 1984 were given the option of which plan they preferred, FERS or their current one, the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS).) However, your pension is not indexed, like former Presidents, and your initial pension amount cannot exceed 80% of your final salary. CSRS sees you max out after your 32nd year. There is no maximum under FERS, but we'll calculate at 32 years there as well for comparative purposes.

Congress currently gets an annual pay raise unless Congress votes it down. This is a different pay structure than the retired President. At no point in time do Congressional salaries and pensions of retired Presidents meet up in the way they do in the chain-post. The poster had to have gotten them from two different sources that were working on two different timeframes.

The older pension plan, CSRS, is figured as such:

High 3-year average X years of service X .025 = Annual pension

The newer plan, FERS, is figured as such:

[High 3-year average X .017 x years of service up to 20] + [High 3-year average X .01 x years of service past 20] = Annual pension

In 2006, the most recent year available, the average CSRS recipient was getting $60,972 annually. 290 people had retired under CSRS The average FERS recipient, of which there were 123, was getting $35,952 annually; this is the average newly-incoming members of Congress should look at. Individual figures are not given.

Let us assume, for theoretical purposes, the 32-year scenario for all, with three-year averages all locked at current levels:

House/Senate: $174,000
Speaker of the House: $223,500
Majority/Minority Leaders: $193,400

This means that, under CSRS, they would each get in annual pension:

House/Senate: $174,000 x 32 x .025 = $139,200 annual pension
Speaker of the House: $223,500 x 32 x .025 = $178,800 annual pension
Majority/Minority Leaders: $193,400 x 32 x .025 = $154,720 annual pension

And under FERS, there is no maximum, but it would take 66 years in Congress- which has never been done- to achieve 80%. After 32 years, it works out to 46% of that same salary:

House/Senate: [$174,000 x .017 x 20 = $59,160] + [$174,000 x .01 x 12 = $20,880] = $80,040 annual pension
Speaker of the House: [$223,500 x .017 x 20 = $75,990] + [$223,500 x .01 x 12 = $26,820] = $102,810 annual pension
Majority/Minority Leaders: [$193,400 x .017 x 20 = $65,756] + [$193,400 x .01 x 12 = $23,208] = $88,964 annual pension

Remember, those are theoretical, perfect, absolute-maximum pensions that someone could get, today, by leaving Congress. Not only is it nowhere close to the claimed amount in the chain-post, even in a perfect scenario, but the newer plan, FERS, which newly-elected members are placed into, gives them LESS money, significantly less, than the plan that the older members get. So the chain-post is way off here.

Next, we have the teachers. Their average is pegged at $40,065, but this number appears dubious. This number is overwhelmingly seen only in repostings. The most relevant things I could find that uses $40,065 as an average are here, the Elk River Public School District in Minnesota, where $40,065 is the median male income; here, Upper Little Caillou Elementary in Chauvin, Louisiana, where $40,065 is the average faculty salary in 2006-07; and here, Blanket High School in Blanket, Texas, where $40,065 is the average base salary for Blanket High's entire district. Frankly, these appear to be nothing more than lucky shots, because there are so many numbers thrown around in so many districts in so many categories that any given dollar amount is bound to match something somewhere. I shifted the average one dollar lower, to $40,064, and came up with schools in Cape Girardeau, Missouri and New Albany, Indiana. One dollar higher, $40,066, matches the average base salary for a district in Amarillo, Texas.

Blind luck.

As it happens, it's pretty hard to get a blanket figure for "teacher" if you're not really paying attention. When you look for it, you'll find they're usually parsed out by state, by experience, or by type of teacher, and while $40,065 never shows up, the numbers work out to where that comes pretty close to an average of some sort. (Although most of the groups show that $40,065 would skew a few thousand dollars low of average.) It may have been that someone took all the salaries in one of the lower-paying groups shown, smashed them together as a mean average with total disregard as to weighting, and used the result in the chain-post. However, it's almost impossible to tell what group they used.

The first Google result for 'average salary' takes us to salary.com, and the most popular search there is for teacher salaries. An average person needing to smash an average together would most likely go here to do it.

Smashing a mean average together from the 10 categories shown produces $43,934.20, a little less than $4,000 short of the given average. So that's not what the originator did, not precisely. But it is close enough to imagine that this was done somewhere or other. Just not at salary.com.

An actual average, however, is available via the National Education Association. (PDF file.) The average for all classroom teachers was estimated, for 2010-11, to be $56,069, up from $55,202 the previous year. The chain-post's number now looks fairly wildly off.

As for a soldier in Afghanistan, $38,000 matches the number given in the fourth Google result for "average annual salary troop afghanistan", something on Yahoo Answers talking about one specific rank in one specific branch- a tech sergeant in the Air Force.

The Army base pay scale is shown here; the equivalent rank is staff sergeant. $38,000 is higher than any of the figures listed; the highest is $34,088 for a staff sergeant serving for over 6 years. (Privates are started at $17,611 for the first four months.) However, that is only base pay.

An average is even more problematic to track down than that for teachers, because of the sheer number of variables and bonuses that get in the way of producing that nice, clean single average. I was never able to get that straightforward average. The three most relevant are hardship pay ($225 a month, or $2,700 a year), combat pay ($150 a month in Afghanistan, meaning $1,800 a year), and family separation allowances ($250 a month, or $3,000 a year). Combined, that's $7,500 tacked onto your base pay right there if you have any dependents, or $4,500 if you don't. There is also food allowance, clothing allowance, hazardous duty pay, and various other factors.

There is one more, fairly major oversight made by the chain-post: when in a combat zone, a soldier's pay becomes tax-exempt. That provides a substantial boost to someone's salary. It's not going to get anyone swimming in champagne, not by a longshot, but it's nothing to sneeze at either.

Suffice to say, on what has been supplied, $38,000 is certainly one possible number, but a more responsible thing to do is give a range, and while it's a rough, broad estimate, an average soldier in Afghanistan could probably expect between $30,000 and $60,000, somewhere between 'pretty bad' to 'actually fairly decent'. Were I to venture a guess of my own, I'd settle on something around $50,000, give or take. But don't take that as gospel.

So where does this all leave us? Let's revisit the chain-post:

Salary of retired US Presidents ………….$180,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate …………………..$174,000 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………$223,500 FOR LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400 FOR LIFE
...Average Salary of a teacher ……………. $40,065
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000

And now, let's revise it to reflect the actual numbers we've found.

Salary of retired US Presidents ………….$199,700 (and rising) FOR LIFE
Salary of House/Senate …………………..$174,000, then $35,952 FOR LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House …………$223,500
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders …… $193,400
...Average Salary of a teacher ……………. $56,069
Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN depends on A LOT OF THINGS but is probably between $30,000-60,000, TAX-FREE

The sentiment of the chain-post- that elected officials make much more in comparison to teachers and soldiers- is accurate. However, the exact numbers are almost completely wrong, mostly in a direction that makes the differences more stark than in reality, and the Congressional pension numbers are ridiculously off. And the tax-exempt status of the soldier in Afghanistan gives a big boost to their entire pay structure.

This chain-post is an example of the phrase 'garbage in, garbage out'. It looks to have been put together very lazily, with bad and very possibly outmoded data. Someone probably got angry, had general, predetermined ideas of what the numbers were going to be, threw together the first numbers they could come up with that looked right, and made a post out of it. As such, the numbers only have the most threadbare of resemblances to reality.

To borrow Politifact's rating scale, I rate this chain-post Mostly False.

Rapid-Fire Book Club, Farmers' Market Edition

If you happen to ever be in Madison on a Saturday- ever, even in the dead of winter- and there aren't massive protests going on, the Dane County Farmers' Market is something you really need to do. Every week, enough vendors from around the area set up shop to run a ring around the entire Capitol Square, which when it's not the dead of winter, is exactly what they'll do.

Your task is to walk a lap around Capitol Square- you will go clockwise because the oncoming rush of humanity behind you will force you to- and load up on as much fruits, vegetables, meat (in deer, cow, chicken, turkey, duck, pig, trout, bison, emu and dog-bone varieties), cheese from cows, goats and sheep (minding the sheer volume of bottleneck at the Brunkow Cheese booth surrounding the samples of juusto), baked goods, honey products, maple products, and assorted offerings from auxiliary food stalls without ending up like that guy from the Monty Python skit that got detonated by a wafer-thin mint. And just to keep things interesting, every time you round a corner of the square, there's some sort of person wanting some sort of support for some sort of political cause. Whether we're angry or not.

And then you can buy little trinkets as the market empties out on one corner onto State Street, where you will be assaulted by so many restaurants that you will soon no longer fit into your car and have to walk home, which is why State Street is pedestrian-only, according to the sources in my head.

That established, after nearly bursting, off I went to Avol's Bookstore, just off State, to add two books to my shelves:

*A.V. Club- Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined By Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists
*Rich, Katherine Russell- Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language (there was a celebration of India's independence day, which was on the 15th but celebrated today because it's the weekend)

So... Bad News Concerning The Hikers.

After an inordinately long wait to hand down a verdict concerning Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, the remaining two hikers held in Iran on charges of illegal entry and espionage, they have been given a guilty verdict and sentenced to eight years in prison: three years for illegal entry, five for espionage (the evidence for which has still yet to be presented). They've already been in detention for two years, but it's doubtful that there's any credit being given for time served.

There is no official comment as of yet from the families, but one can imagine their reaction.

The movement dedicated to their release, Free The Hikers, has no intention of giving up. According to a Facebook post by organizer Brendan McShane Creamer, "We're getting them home & it's not going to be in 8 years." They are currently brainstorming ideas on just how to make that happen. If you have any- any respectful ones, that is- you're encouraged to Like the Free the Hikers Facebook page and chime in.

Obviously, this is not over yet.