Milton Friedman would’ve turned 100 today. Several economists, columnists, and bloggers have posted tributes to his life and work, and I wouldn’t presume to even attempt to match their words. So instead I’ll just say happy birthday and post a link to the first book of his that I read:

A paperback copy of Bright Promises, Dismal Performances: An Economist’s Protest was buried somewhere deep in Cooper Library. I recognized the author’s name on the spine because some of my professors had mentioned him in class, and I figured it might be worth a look. It turned out to be one of those books that was more valuable than most semester-long courses. If I could design my own introductory econ course, this might be number one on the required reading list.

If you can find his articles, interviews, or Free to Choose videos online, have a look at them. If you agree with him, you’ll find them uplifting and edifying. If you disagree with him, you’ll at least find them challenging. Either way, have a look.

The second big trip of this year’s summer break was to New Orleans, courtesy of a grant from the feds. Said grant covered a chartered bus there and back, three nights on the fourteenth floor of a Hilton, three free dinners, an envelope full of cash to pay for breakfasts and lunches, and a bunch of tours of historical sites.

First, the food: it was disappointing. It wasn’t bad, but it was nothing spectacular. The night we arrived, we were on our own for dinner. We went to some seafood place near the restaurant, and for my first taste of genuine New Orleanian food, I ordered what I expected to be a far, far better bowl of jambalaya than I have ever eaten.

Expecting authentic jambalaya to be pretty spicy, I ordered it mild. But the waiter said the mild was really plain, so I went with medium and kept my fingers crossed. The food came… and it barely qualified as spicy. Their medium was what I’d expected their mild to be. It worked out for me, because I could eat it, but it wasn’t any better or worse than jambalaya I’ve eaten anywhere else.

In fairness to this particular seafood place, I wasn’t expecting weapons-grade jambalaya. But I expected a taste that you just plain can’t get anywhere other than New Orleans. Kinda like a deep dish pizza tastes better-and-different in Chicago than it does anywhere else. Same for thin-crust pizza in New York, or seafood in the Chesapeake, or sweet tea in the Old South, and so on. But here I sat in a French Quarter restaurant eating something I could just as easily have eaten in Jacksonville. It was underwhelming.

That was the first night. Dinner every other night was covered by the grant. The best of those freebies was a buffet on a steamboat: some fried fish, grilled chicken, pork and beef briskets, penne regate in a decent sauce… good stuff. Nothing that screamed “local,” but it was good enough.

The other freebie meals sucked. The tour guide picked a pair of restaurants that subscribe to the theory that drowning meat in sauce or armoring meat in inch-think deep-fried batter counts as “making it taste reeeeal good-like.” I figured it was still food, and it was still free, so I ate it, but most of the rest of the crew just drowned their disappointment in booze. It’s possible that the entrées were mediocre and the service sub-par because we were paying the large group rate and getting the limited menu, in which case we might’ve been better off canceling the group dinners and having a slightly larger per diem.

Maybe it was just a bad choice of restaurants. “They” say we just went to the wrong places for dinner. Could be; I’m told Emeril’s got a few restaurants there, and I’m told Emeril’s a chef or something. But there was a big, bright side to the culinary experience: the sandwiches.

At lunch every day, I ordered a sandwich, and those things were huge. The first time I opened a lunch menu and saw a $10 sandwich listed, I thought it was because the area was touristy and it was a big city. Nope. It’s because the sandwiches were as big as the damn plates. They were big enough to take leftovers back to the hotel room. They were big enough to split a single sandwich between two people, both of whom would have leftovers. I had a couple Italian club sandwiches and a roast beef. The muffulettas looked good though I didn’t have any, and a soda shop offered a $4 peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which was intriguing. However, I’m pretty certain that unless the grapes were flown in from Italy and the peanuts were grown by George Washington Carver himself, it wasn’t worth four bucks.

I’ll have to go back one day, and find some better places to eat. For now, the kindest thing I can say about culinary New Orleans is: you can probably get the same sandwiches elsewhere, but you probably can’t get that much good sandwich for your dollar elsewhere.

A longer post or two on my trip to New Orleans is on the way, but let me get this one in real quick.

Today we spent a good bit of time at the National World War II Museum. I fell behind most of the rest of the group due to snapping a bunch of pictures of vehicles and weapons, as well as talking to a few elderly volunteers about their experiences in the war. The gentleman pictured below took the cake.

I was about to head upstairs to the Nazi eugenics exhibit and the D-Day exhibit when a fellow teacher pointed out a gentleman dressed in blue, wearing a ball cap, and sitting alone. She said that he’d been at Pearl Harbor.

So I headed over to speak with him– the exhibits can wait; World War II survivors can’t. His name was Bert Stolier and he was a nonagenarian native New Orleanian. He stood up ramrod straight and launched into his stories.

On December 7th, 1941, Bert was a young Marine stationed at Pearl Harbor and had made plans to visit Honolulu (to attend a dance, if I remember correctly). Then the Japanese attacked. He described the confusion, the waves of bombers, the ships sinking. He told us of men who jumped off their burning ships ship only to find they were diving into spilt oil. The oil saturated their cotton clothes, weighed them down, and they drowned. “Over two thousand of us died that day.” Of us.

He saw action at several battles in the Pacific, including Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. He was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just days after the atomic bombs were dropped:

ME: Why?

HIM: The generals wanted to see what was there.

ME: What was there?

HIM: Dust.

ME: …dust?

HIM: Dust. It was a wasteland. There was nothing.

He was on board the USS Missouri when the Japanese formally surrendered. Bert saw and did a lot during the war, but there was plenty that he flat-out said he wasn’t going to talk about. That’s good enough for me.

He went on. If I understood him correctly, he met his wife at a dance— he cut in on some schmoe who’d been dancing with her— and married her the next day. They ran an ice cream business called Swensen’s, which later became Edy’s. The Stoliers had a long and, based on his accounts, deliriously happy marriage, and several kids who went on to their own successes.

And to top it all off, Bert mentioned that his father had also fought the Japanese. Back in 1904. In the Russo-Japanese War. His dad served in the Russian army, but quit out of disgust with his corrupt superiors and emigrated to America… only to have his son turn around and go back to the Pacific 40 years later to fight the Japanese again. Go figure.

Meeting Bert was the highlight of my trip so far, but they wouldn’t let me keep him. I had to settle for shaking the man’s hand, getting a picture with him, and thanking him.

WARNING: Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen the movie yet and do not wish to have any clue or hint revealed unto you, don’t read this post. Proceed at your own peril.

Here’s the last paragraph of my 2008 post about the second installment in this series, The Dark Knight:

In short, this movie was so good that now I’m depressed because I don’t see how the next one can be as good, never mind better. I hope the producers ensure that Nolan comes back for a third movie, and they take their time making the next one… this one’s going to be damn tough to top.

No movie has ever disappointed me as much as The Dark Knight Rises.

Click here to read my rambling review.

As of last Friday night, my two best options were a 2012 Kia Rio EX and a 2013 Hyundai Elantra GLS. The Elantra was bigger and better to drive, but cost $1,400 more. Both deals were pretty good, so I had already notified family, friends, the media, the police, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that I was going to buy a new car on Saturday.

I called Hyundai to see if they could make my decision easier by lowering the price. The sales rep asked how much more I wanted them to lower the price. $50? $100? I said I was thinking more along the lines of $500, because that was the difference between Hyundai’s and Kia’s offers for my trade-in. I asked her to talk to her finance manager, either that night or as soon as the dealership opened in the morning, and to call me back in the morning.

What made the choice so difficult was the fact that the Rio offer was ridiculously good. The price was low because it was a 2012 model on clearance. A new 2013 Rio would have been priced at least $1,000 higher, which would’ve made the Elantra the obvious choice.

And that made me curious about other cars on clearance. So that night, I got online, dug around a while, and found a 2011 Corolla LE at a nearby Toyota dealer. It would be worth checking out, since this dealership opened at 9 and Hyundai wouldn’t call until they opened at 10. But if Toyota offered a low enough price on the 2011, then the previously disqualified Corolla might be back in play.

…

Saturday morning, I rolled over to the Toyota dealership and asked the salesman about the 2011 Corolla. He said it had already been sold; they just hadn’t updated the website yet. He offered to let me test drive a 2012 Corolla LE. I figured I had some time to kill anyways before Hyundai called, so why not? The test drive was just like the one earlier in the week: comfortable car, good view in all directions, good engine, good interior layout, good gadgetry.

The salesman asked to appraise my car and show me some prices, even though I’d come to the store looking for a 2011. Once again, I had some time to kill, so why not? We went inside the dealership and sat at his desk. I gave him the key to the ‘Rolla for the appraisal, answered a few financial questions, and said to run the numbers as if I were putting X dollars down. He took the key and the paperwork into the back.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, he came back with the key and a finance manager. This was, by my count, the billionth time I’d been through this act in the last week: they show me some numbers, thinking I don’t understand what they mean, go back and forth between the sales desk and the finance office in hopes of wearing me down, asking what they can do to put me in a car that day, blah blah blah. It’s tiresome, I’d rather they just get to the point.

The finance manager introduced himself, said they’d appraised my car, and showed me a piece of paper with some numbers on it.

I looked at the bottom and saw a number that was about $800 less than the Rio offer. It confused me. It seemed too low to be the total price of a new Corolla, especially considering that at the other Toyota dealership, the base price of the same car was ridiculously high, so I thought it was the sum of the principal and the interest on the loan, but it seemed too high to be the loan repayment, and for the interest to be that high, the interest rate would have to be pretty high because my credit is pretty good and bright lights and colors were everywhere and–

I short-circuited my own train of thought by asking if that number was the total repayment.

The finance manager asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “I mean, is this how much I’d pay in addition to the down payment? Is this the principal and the interest?”

He looked at me oddly and said, “No, that’s the price of the car.”

I was still confused. Based on my experiences that week– the car magazines, the online research, the test drives, the dealing with finance managers, the haggling– that number was way too low to be the price of a new 2012 Corolla LE. So I asked, in what I hope was the least stupid-sounding way possible, “What do you mean?”

HIM: “I mean if you give me your trade-in and give me that much money, then the Corolla is yours.”

ME: “…but then I pay tax, tag, and title?”

HIM: “It’s already in there.”

Now that I got it, my jaw dropped. Before I could pick it back up, he excused himself, went back to his office, and returned with a new offer sheet. The number at the bottom of this offer sheet was another $800 lower. It was now $1,600 lower than the Rio offer. It was now $3,000 lower than the Elantra offer.

He asked, “Can I sell you a car today?”

I had resolved not to buy a car on my first visit to any particular dealership. So I said, “Not today, but you might’ve just sold it to me first thing tomorrow morning.” Then he threw in a few more options, and I said I’d probably be back as soon as they opened the next day.

By the time I got home, Hyundai had called back and left a message. The message was that they were willing to drop the price a little more. No specific numbers, just “a little more.” Well, given the $3,000 gap between the Corolla and the Elantra, “a little more” wasn’t going to cut it.

I alerted everyone that I was delaying my decision by one day, and summoned the Council from far and wide. We examined the offer sheets for the Rio, the Elantra, and the Corolla. We tried to think of reasons to not buy the Corolla. The only reason we could think of was the warranty, because Kia and Hyundai offer great warranties on every new car. But the Corolla offer was so insanely low that I could afford to buy an even better warranty and still save an ungodly amount of money.

The Corolla deal was too good to be true, but there it was on paper. What’s the worst that could happen? They might claim they forgot to include something in the cost, they could change the price– fine, I’d still have the two other decent offers to fall back on.

…

I went back at 10 on Sunday morning, and sure enough, the price had changed. It was another $100 lower. Nobody said anything about it; nobody asked; it was just magically lower.

By noon, I’d bought a new silver 2012 Corolla LE. If it works as well as my old car did, then Toyota can expect my business again in 2022.