Aside from being a founding father of the modern blogging culture (he lent John Amato money to get Crooks & Liars started), Mike Finnigan has decided it’s time to hang up his blogging pen and enjoy his travels as one of the world’s most well-respected musicians.

Joanne Siegel has passed away. She was the model for the first sketches of Lois Lane and the wife of Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel. That gives her the best claim to being Lois Lane that any real person has ever had. In her later years, she was a fierce advocate for her husband's intellectual property claims. I've thought a lot about the Superman creators over the years, and part of me is tempted only to blog about intellectual property.

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better by Tyler Cowen

The Great Stagnation, a short yet ambitious e-book by economist Tyler Cowen, has been generating a lot of buzz lately. It has been recommended by Matthew Yglesias (ThinkProgress), Ezra Klein (Washington Post), Tim Harford (Financial Times), and Nick Schulz (Forbes), to name a few.

I bought the book on the suggestion of EmmaZahn here at dagblog. I found it to be clear, original, and so engrossing that I missed my subway stop. But I did not ultimately find it persuasive.

In the book, Cowen argues that America's spectacular growth of the past 200 years has been driven by the consumption of "low-hanging fruit" which we have now exhausted. In particular, he cites cheap land, advances in education, and technological innovation. He argues that since we can no longer rely on these drivers, our economy will stagnate for the foreseeable future.

But you don't have to be an economist to see that the evidence Cowen relies on to bolster his low-hanging fruit theory has been derived from some aggressive cherry picking.

I was walking to the station this morning, and heard a rush of steps in the old creekbed next to the road. I looked over expecting a beaver and saw a startled doe, which was looking back at me across the swale. "Hello, deer," I said, then realized how odd that sounded. I'll be glad when my wife rejoins me next week. I find myself talking to plants, the TV, the sink.

In between the Wisconsin protest coverage, Pale Rider and A Fistful of Dollars, I watched the ATP Marseille final, in which world #4 Robin Söderling came back from losing a close first set tiebreak to defeat world #21 Marin Čilić 6-7 (8-10), 6-3, 6-3. I know sportswriters try to vary the terminology, but I was surprised to read this headline in the UK Mirror:

 Remember Mark Williams?  The same Mark Williams who was kicked out of the Tea Party Express (!) for writing a letter from the "colored people" to President Lincoln?  The same Mark Williams who called President Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug"?

In this half hour interview, Dmitry Orlov once again compares the collapse of the Soviet Empire with what he sees happening to the American Empire. His proposal that we are near collapse may seem outrageous, but the reasons he gives are not easy to dismiss.

The U.N. Security Council is poised to vote on a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlement activities in occupied Palestinian territory, calling the construction "illegal" and "a major obstacle to the achievement of peace."

The White House is trying to block the resolution, but Obama has not indicated whether the U.S. would veto it. Predictably, American politicians and pundits from across the political spectrum are furious that Obama would "sell out" Israel.

Already set to reclaim the #1 world ranking from Kim Clijsters, Caroline Wozniacki easily won the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championship today, winning in the final 6-1, 6-3 over Svetlana Kuznetsova.

This week DARPA unveiled its newest entry into the spy game, the Nano Hummingbird.  The teeny, tiny $4 million prototype flew around a parking lot and then through a standard-sized door, all the while showing us on a small screen what it was seeing through its teeny, tiny eyes.  The hope is that it can be used for reconnaissance and surveillance without anybody noticing, as it zooms in at eight miles per hour and gathers info we might find useful.

I started reading the Econbrowser blog because it's peak oil-aware founder JD Hamilton posted frequently on The Oil Drum. At some point, Hamilton brought in the very technical Menzie Chinn as co-blogger. Yesterday, in Analogy Watch: "Cairo has come to Wisconsin"? Chinn repudiated the claim Paul Ryan had made on MSNBC:

Here we have a short tale on Twitter of how professional NFL Player Reggie Bush handles a fire at his neighbor’s house.

Reggie Bush - @reggie_bush

Damn my neighbors house is on fire!!!!! Whoa!!

about 1 hour ago