It Is All Relative: Population Across the World

TW: When pondering America's place in the world population is one metric. The first represents total population, the 2nd the population of centurians which is a decent proxy for the age of populations. Click on the images to enlarge.

From Paul Kedrosky's
"I found these three Worldmapper chloropleths striking. Remember, in this sort of map country sizes change depending on the relevant measured variable – in this case, population..."


http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/us_corners_glob.html

Food For Thought (cont.)

TW: A poignant take from Roger Ebert on the implications of losing one's ability to consume food orally.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/nil_by_mouth.html

Food For Thought (cont.)

TW: I would assume we have all seen these type studies before but one would do well to keep constantly reminded about their realities.

From John Mauldin at the Big Picture blog:
“...a group of people were asked to read randomly selected studies on the deterrent efficacy of the death sentence (and criticisms of those studies). Subjects were also asked to rate the studies in terms of the impact they had had on their views on capital punishment and deterrence. Half of the people were pro-death penalty and half were anti-death penalty.

“Those who started with a pro-death sentence stance thought the studies that supported capital punishment were well argued, sound and important. They also thought that the studies that argued against the death penalty were all deeply flawed. Those who held the opposite point of view at the outset reached exactly the opposite conclusion.

“As the psychologists concluded: ‘Asked for their final attitudes relative to the experiment’s start, proponents reported they were more in favor of capital punishment, whereas opponents reported that they were less in favor of capital punishment.’ In effect each participant’s views polarized, becoming much more extreme than before the experiment.

“In another study of biased assimilation (accepting all evidence as supporting your case) participants were told a soldier at Abu Ghraib prison was charged with torturing prisoners. He wanted the right to subpoena senior administration officials. He claimed he’d been informed that the administration had suspended the Geneva Convention.

“The psychologists gave different people different amounts of evidence supporting the soldier’s claims. For some, the evidence was minimal; for others, it was overwhelming. Unfortunately the amount of evidence was essentially irrelevant in assessing people’s behavior. For 84% of the time, it was possible to predict whether people believed the evidence was sufficient to subpoena Donald Rumsfeld based on just three things:
1. The extent to which they liked Republicans
2. The extent to which they liked the US military
3. The extent to which they liked human rights groups like Amnesty International.

“Adding the evidence into the equation allowed the researchers to increase the prediction accuracy from 84% to 85%. Time and time again, psychologists have found that confidence and biased assimilation perform a strange tango. It appears the more sure people were that they have the correct view, the more they distorted new evidence to suit their existing preference, which in turns made them even more confident!”

“We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cozily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating,” wrote Ian Banks, of the protagonist in the science fiction novel Transition I am currently reading..."

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/2010-forecast-the-year-of-uncertainty/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheBigPicture+%28The+Big+Picture%29

Many Of Us Are Entering the Sweet Spot

From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"For the past 10 years, I have been studying happiness around the world, in countries as different as Afghanistan, Chile and the United States. It has been an amazing foray into the complexity of the human psyche and the simplicity of what makes us happy. What is most remarkable is how similar the forces driving happiness are in various countries, regardless of a nation's level of development.
Wherever I look, some simple patterns hold: A stable marriage, good health and enough (but not too much) income are good for happiness. Unemployment, divorce and economic instability are terrible for it. On average, happier people are also healthier, with the causal arrows probably pointing in both directions. Finally, age and happiness have a consistent U-shaped relationship, with the turning point in the mid- to late-40s, when happiness begins to increase, as long as health and domestic partnerships stay sound."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/01/how_to_be_happy.html

Or Not!

TW: Conventional wisdom, may be widespread but it is certainly fallible...

From Foreign Policy mag:
"On this day in 1999...
Lou Dobbs was a respected, middle-of-the-road journalist.
The prospect of achieving Middle East peace seemed imminent.
Beltway pundits believed Al Gore and George W. Bush were centrists who would govern similarly.
You could meet your loved ones at their arrival gate.
There were more than 2 million Christians living in Iraq.
Osama bin Laden was living with his family in a compound in Kandahar.
China's GDP was $1.4 trillion, half of Germany's.
Israel still had troops in Lebanon.
Nobody had ever heard of Somali pirates.
Something called Inktomi was the world's largest search engine.
Everybody was clamoring for the new file-sharing program Napster.
We worried Y2K would bring the global banking infrastructure to its knees.
Illinois State Senator Barack Obama campaigned for a spot in the House of Representatives.
First Lady Hillary Clinton campaigned for a spot in the Senate.
Wasilla, Alaska, Mayor Sarah Palin considered running for state-wide office.
India had fewer than a billion citizens.
Strongman Slobodan Milosevic still ruled in Yugoslavia.
The human genome had not yet been mapped.
The Concorde flew between Paris and New York.
Alan Greenspan was widely heralded as the world's greatest financial thinker.
Boris Yeltsin was preparing to step down and make way for the young pragmatist Vladimir Putin.
The Dow Jones closed at 11,484. (Today, it's at 10,545.)
The United States had a record federal budget surplus."
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/29/food_for_thought

Ah Those Good Old (Smelly) Days

TW: Economist is behind a firewall now, but their end of year piece on the evolution of personal hygiene was a nice reminder that the good, old days were perhaps not only not so good but most definitely not particularly well scented...

From Economist:
"...young Louis XIII, born in 1601, was not given a bath until he was almost seven. Throughout the 17th century, writes Georges Vigarello, in “Le Propre et le Sale”, it was thought that linen had special properties that enabled it to absorb sweat from the body. For gentlemen, a wardrobe full of fine linen smocks or undershirts to enable a daily change was the height of hygienic sophistication. Racine and Molière owned 30 each.

Indeed, bathing, certainly in hot water, was considered a veritable health risk. France’s Henri IV was famously filthy, “stinking of sweat, stables, feet and garlic”. Upon learning that the Duc de Sully had taken a bath, the king turned to his own physician, André du Laurens, for advice. The king was told that the poor man would be vulnerable for days. So a message was dispatched informing Sully that he was not to go out, or he would endanger his health. Instead, he was told, the king would visit his Paris home: “so that you come to no harm as a result of your recent bath.”

In England, Elizabeth I bathed only once a month and James I, her successor, seems to have washed only his fingers. One medical pamphlet printed at the time by Thomas Moulton, a doctor of divinity and Dominican friar, advises particular caution during outbreaks of the plague: “use no baths or stoves; nor swet not too much, for all openeth the pores of a manne’s body and maketh the venomous ayre to enter and for to infecte the bloude...”

TW: The other point being the accepted "experts" and mores at the time were in fact completely foolish.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108662

Good News: Crime Is Down...Again

TW: Crime stats came back well in 2009 continuing an improving trend. Folks like to attribute the improvement to their favorite reasons (more prisons etc.) but I recall an expert claiming crime stats correlate tightly with the relative number of 18 year old males entering the population. Regardless the numbers are better despite the Great Recession.

"ONE of the happy trends of 2009 has been that crime is down in major American cities, even the ones that have had a rough year in other respects. Today the New York Times reports that New York City is on track to have its smallest number of murders since 1962:

...The trend can be understood as crime being on a downward trajectory for years, for a variety of reasons—the end of the crack epidemic, better gun control, new policing strategies, and so on—rather than something special about 2009..." http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/crime_in_decline

No Mo' Beetches, Just a Chimp And a Hound

Later

TW: Mr. Blogger is taking hiatus. The 7 pm follies and occasional posts may appear as the mood strikes.

Entrepreneurship Is Hard

TW: And entrepreneurship within the restaurant business is even more deadly. Many folks dream of their own business the realities are daunting. But upon reflection could this person have done all of the analysis he lays out BEFORE taking the plunge? If there is one characteristic of poor start-ups it is not having a viable plan to begin with. Success requires great execution of a solid plan.

From Slate:
"You know that charming little cafe on New York's Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.

The scary part is that you think you can do better.

I never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until I fell under its spell myself. Friends' eyes misted over when my wife and I would excitedly recite our concept ("Vienna roast from Vienna! It's lighter and sweeter than bitter Italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!"). It seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it.
[see link for his brief walk through the economics of a cafe]
...The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given.
There was, of course, one way to make the cafe viable: It was written into the Golden Rule itself. My wife Lily and I could work there, full-time, save on the payroll, and gerrymander the rest of the budget to allow for lower sales. Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it's fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, Lily and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other's throats. I hesitate to say which was worse: working the same shift or alternating. Each option presented its own small tortures. Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee. After four more months, we grew suspicious of each other's motives, obsessively kept track of each other's contributions to the cause ("You worked three days last week!"), and generally waltzed on the edge of divorce. The marriage appears to have been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy.

Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."
http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/

Guest Post From Max

TW: Our cat Max wanted this posted...

Via Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"So long as we're talking about meat, I might as well link this op-ed by Jonathan Safron Foer arguing that we should all eat dog. Foer is coming out with a book on vegetarianism soon, and though the initial excerpt in the New York Times seemed plodding and banal, this takes more, and more useful, risks:

'Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire? ... What might be the reasons to exclude canine from the menu? The selective carnivore suggests:

Don't eat companion animals. But dogs aren't kept as companions in all of the places they are eaten. And what about our petless neighbors? Would we have any right to object if they had dog for dinner?

OK, then: Don't eat animals with significant mental capacities. If by "significant mental capacities" we mean what a dog has, then good for the dog. But such a definition would also include the pig, cow and chicken.'

And, as he notes, it's not as if dogs are always treated humanely, or always excluded from the food production system:

'But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

In a sense it's what we're doing already. Rendering — the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets — allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. So let's just eliminate this inefficient and bizarre middle step.'

An Abstract Start To the Day

(first two above from Indexed blog, cant remember on the bottom one)

See We DID Evolve From Monkeys...

From Economist:
"VIA Brad DeLong, here is some fun research...:

'Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species? We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles, including reference dependence and loss aversion. Given our capuchins’ inexperience with money and trade, these results suggest that loss aversion extends beyond humans and may be innate rather than learned.'

Interesting! And not really that surprising, I guess. The world in which our hominid ancestors evolved was pretty similar to the world in which these monkeys live. Notably, neither include things like financial markets.

Which is a shame. Had financial markets existed a few million years ago, we probably would have evolved better market responses by now."

The Art Of the $20 Greased Palm

TW: This is a vintage 2003 piece on the art of using $20 bill to get one's way in the world. I only clipped a couple of bits, the whole piece is pretty good though.

From Esquire via the Big Picture blog:
"...On the plane, I approached the woman in seat 1A and held out a twenty. She asked if I was serious. I said yes. She took it and ran to 9B like her pants were on fire.

On the next leg--Cleveland to New York--I skipped the ticket counter altogether, walked straight into first class, and announced that I'd give anyone twenty dollars for his seat. There was some laughter, some nervous ass shifting, and just when I figured no one would bite, a big guy with a beltful of pagers and cell phones took the deal. The flight attendant jumped me when I sat down, asked if money had changed hands. The guy next to me nodded, and she jabbed me with her finger. "I could have you removed from the plane for that," she said, but the flight was crowded and soon she moved on. The guy sitting next to me said he'd never seen that trick before, and he was going to try it next time he didn't get an upgrade. "The FAA would shit their pants if everyone could do that," he said. "You could auction first class away if you had enough time...

...I always grease Bobby H., the bellman at my hotel, and on my first night, within minutes of the pass, he suggested that I might request a room upgrade. He even gave me a room number to ask for. Another twenty at the desk and I was out of two queens, snug in my one king. The next day, we ran the same drill, and wham, I was in the minisuite. The twenty after that, I was in a full suite with a view of Times Square. We used a different desk guy each day. When you're passing twenties, Bobby H. told me, you have to spread the wealth. "It's a one-time trick," he said. "You don't want anyone to catch on." Somehow he managed to take a twenty each time, having caught on fully some time ago."
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0303-MAR_20DOLLARS

Mon Dieu...C'est Horrible...Relax

TW: I love the French especially when they are tut tutting us...priceless

From The Daily Telegraph:
"Lovers of France's two great symbols of cultural exception – its haute cuisine and fine art – are aghast at plans to open a McDonald's restaurant and McCafé in the Louvre museum next month.

America's fast food temple is celebrating its 30th anniversary in France with a coup -the opening of its 1,142nd Gallic outlet a few yards from the entrance to the country's Mecca of high art and the world's most visited museum.

The chain faces a groundswell of discontent among museum staff...

"This is the last straw," said one art historian working at the Louvre, who declined to be named. "This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum," he told the Daily Telegraph.

Didier Rykner, head of The Art Tribune website found the idea "shocking".

"I'm not against eating in a museum but McDonald's is hardly the height of gastronomy," he said, adding that it was a worrying mixture of art and consumerism. "Today McDonald's, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops," he said.

...The McDonald's would represent the "American" segment " of a new "food court", and would be situated "among (other) world cuisines and coffee shops," it wrote.

Louvre Pour Tous, a website whose aim is to "inform and defend" museum visitors, said: "Henri Loyrette, president of the Louvre museum just had to say one word to stop the whiff of French fries from wafting past the Mona Lisa's nose. He chose otherwise."

There was already an outcry last year when Starbucks opened a café perilously close to the Right bank museum's entrance....

"Starbucks was bad enough but McDonald's is worse," said the Louvre art historian.

...statistics suggest the battle of Le Big Macs has already been lost. France has become McDonald's biggest market in the world outside of the US, according to the chain. While business in traditional brasseries and bistros is in freefall, the fast food group opened 30 new outlets last year in France and welcomed 450 million customers – up 11 per cent on the previous year."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/6259044/McDonalds-restaurants-to-open-at-the-Louvre.html

Social Networking Feast Or Famine...

TW: I am on Facebook, I like it. I do not post much there but it is interesting to see what my friends or more likely acquaintances are thinking about. Once one reaches a certain age we tend to exist within a bit of an echo chamber. But our acquaintances from years gone by tend to be more eclectic and diverse. For my generation which pre-dates email, internet and such being able to re-connect has been enriching.

Social networking though exhibits classic networking externalities and those externalities can work both ways as the piece illustrates. Here is to hoping FB retains its positive momentum.

From Economist:
"SOCIAL networking sites are, unsurprisingly, subject to network externalities—the value of participating in a network increases with the number of people on the network. The dynamics of network externalities have become very apparent with the growth of services like Facebook or Twitter. When just a few of your friends are on Twitter, the value you receive from the service may not be worth the hassle of setting up and maintaining account. But as the number of users grows, the benefit to being a part of the network increases, until it's actually costly not to join. With network externalities, we will tend to see positive feedback loops and tipping points.

We'll see that as sites grow to prominence, and we'll see it as they collapse in on themselves. Consider MySpace:

'Numbers released by web analytics firm Compete.com paint a terribly bleak picture for the future of MySpace. According to the Compete numbers, MySpace’s U.S. traffic dropped from 55.6 million unique visitors in August to 50.2 million in September. It has nearly shed off 20% of its U.S. traffic since June...'

MySpace’s downfall is accelerating. It lost a little over a million U.S. visitors between June and July, but more than 4 million between July and August and over 5 million between last month and this month.

The downward spiral is on. People are visiting MySpace less, which reduces its value as a social networking platform, which causes people to visit MySpace less.

Now, social networks are tricky things, and there are undoubtedly smaller sub-networks that are relatively isolated within the MySpace world. Declining use among other groups will not affect them as much, and the increasingly fringe character of the service may actually enhance its appeal among some users. In other words, MySpace probably won't shrink to nothing. But its days as a rival of other major social networking sites, like Facebook, are over..."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/10/fun_with_network_effects.cfm

The Marshmallow Test (cont.)

TW: Here the marshmallow test implications are expanded. And below a great article from the New Yorker which speaks to the predictive value of the test for kids. The test subjects were tracked for years, those with the discipline to wait ended up with higher earnings later in life...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer
again h/t reader CM

The Marshmallow Test

TW: This was forwarded with comment:
"I wonder how the members of Congress would do with this?"

I would ask:
"I wonder how the average voter would do with this"
As per my previous posts I say we get the governance we ask for...such as it is.

Regardless h/t to reader CM

Why Others Speak More Foreign Languages

TW: This Economist blogger makes a old lament- English speakers in general do not learn foreign languages. But I agree with the blogger's ultimate critique. Americans (and other English speakers) can be terribly parochial but lack of foreign language skills is not a core source of the parochialism.

English speakers due to the ubiquity of English can easily get by without learning other languages hence learning them becomes an extravagance rather than a valuable career enhancer. This dynamic may seem arrogant but it is real. It does not, however, mean those English speakers who forgo learning other languages are not missing out. It does not mean English only speakers are not missing out some career ops but it does mean on average they are missing out on few than non-English speakers.

From Economist:
"...the grim statistic about language learning in...Britain, where more than half of all schoolchildren in upper secondary education (51.4%) learn no foreign languages at all.

...Europe is becoming bilingual, except for Britons, who are becoming monolingual.

There is a logic behind this turning away from languages. I wrote a column in February about language, which made the point that as more and more Europeans speak good English, the benefits to a Briton of learning European languages are reduced and the costs increase. The benefits are reduced because a smaller and smaller group of people can be reached only by speaking their language. The costs rise because Britons have to learn to speak foreign languages really well, to avoid inflicting halting French, say, on a room full of fluent English-speakers.

...But Britain's unique (in the EU) refusal to study other people's languages still worries me. Learning a foreign language teaches you humility, empathy and respect for others. In Europe, it teaches you the ancient links that unite our squabbling continent...

My language teachers at school were amongst my favourites. The teacher who influenced me more than any other in my school career taught me Spanish. He told us about his student days in Franco's Spain (he recalled the little vests painted on pictures of boxers in the newspapers, to avoid the shocking sight of nipples), taught us about the civil war...the role of the Catholic church, the Moorish occupation and the savagery of honour killings (in the 17th century). You don't get that in business studies GCSE. He died far too young: here's to you Gerry Ashton, and to learning languages."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2009/09/the_disaster_of_monolingual_br.cfm

Change From the Not So Distant Past

TW: We are avid fans of Mad Men even if Ms. Blogger watches with her toes clenched as the "good, old" days unwind when men were men and women were...well something different than today. So as this piece frames the world has begrudingly changed despite the regrets and fretfulness of many. Perhaps there is hope...but please remember who were the folks opposing change (frequently kicking and screaming) back then...and who are they today. The Republicans did not lead the charge that I know...

From NYT:
"...“Mad Men,” the television drama that serves as anthropological time travel to a world where doctors smoke, sexual harassment is a hoot, and it is never too early for an office drink because it’s always noon somewhere.

But as much fun as it is to revel in the cosmetic retro fascination of the era — ooh, bullet bras, up-do hairdos, and finger-snapping hepcats down in the Village — the series about a Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s works best as a startling reminder of just how distant the near past really is.

Americans may be heavier, with a diminished attention span, even less classy than the troubled souls of the Men in the Gray Flannel Suit costume drama. But clearly, we’re better off in most regards.

Consider the show’s treatment of three themes: personal health, attitudes toward race, and sexual equality.

My parents and their friends were nicotine fiends, the women smoking even during late pregnancy. The high point of tobacco addiction was around 1964, when 42 percent of adults smoked. Today, the figure is less than 20 percent — a modern low.

I remember rattling around inside a station wagon filled with secondhand smoke. No seat belts, of course. And after the ride, we 6-year-olds reeked of Lucky Strikes.

...If a driver of that station wagon had a drink or two before getting behind the wheel, so what? Drunken driving was a respected social skill. Last year, 11,773 Americans died in accidents involving drunken driving — tragically high, but down by more than 50 percent from a generation ago...the death rate from heart attacks is down 72 percent since 1960.

...Don Draper, has high blood pressure. When his doctor asks how much he’s boozing, he admits, after some hesitation, to five drinks a day. He also has sexual problems, unable to match the passion of his stunning wife, a Grace Kelly look-alike who is a shrink session away from going full Betty Friedan.

Another mad man has an African-American lover. When a child sees the girlfriend in a picture frame on his desk, she asks, “Is that your maid?”

It was not an unreasonable assumption. Interracial marriage was illegal in more than a dozen states until 1967, and constituted less than 2 percent of all sanctioned unions in that decade. Now the number is close to 7 percent. And the child of one such marriage is president of the United States.

Women are portrayed as both ferocious felines and passive hens in the show. Peggy Olson, the secretary allowed into the writers pool, is smarter than most of her colleagues, but is still treated like office furniture — a situation that matches my mother’s memories of writing ad copy with the Brylcreemed boys.

In the office 2009...Women account for 51 percent of all workers in high-paying management, professional or related occupations, the federal government reported in its latest labor force portrait. They outnumber men as writers and public relations managers.

For gays, it’s been a similar sea change. A closeted homosexual art director, Salvatore Romano, can only sigh and speak in artsy code with the writer he pines for on the show. Gay marriage, which has been legalized in six states, would not even have made a source of homophobic office jokes in 1962, it was so far-fetched.

Is all of this progress, a march toward a more tolerant, equitable, less socially inauthentic society? Sure. Plus, Don Draper would have Lipitor for his heart and Viagra for his sexual troubles. The interracial couple would hardly draw a stare in most states. Romano would be part of an old married gay couple. Peggy would run the place..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16egan.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=tim%20egan&st=cse