Baseball and golf. And, god help us, poker. That's the July sports landscape; it's not a pretty sight. The only option: start daydreaming about football season. Email invites to fantasy leagues are starting to circulate; plans are beginning to formulate to skip work and go get drunk at training camp. It's much, much too early of course, and the microscopic analysis of the Redskins will be unbearable by the time the preseason actually starts, but what else can we do?

Anyway, I'm primed to notice football items. So a bit of the Onion's review of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds caught my eye. Surowiecki's thesis is that crowds make better decisions than individuals, and one of his examples says that trying to convert on fourth down is a much better idea than kicking a field goal. The crowd at a football game always thinks the team should go for it, and Surowiecki says this is the correct decision. Apparently the decision's quality isn't dependent on the crowd's sobriety.

You know it's a slow day at work for me when I start reading Instapundit -- to my tastes, it's a blog of last resort. However, I thought I had lucked out when I visited today and was greeted by the phrase

Although to be fair, Reynolds may not have used exactly that formatting.

Alas, it turns out this was just Reynolds shilling for a documentary put together by his wife about yet another group of alienated teenagers with tragically easy access to firearms and Anne Rice novels. So there are probably better ways to satisfy my appetite for homicidal underage lesbians. However, the movie's "about" page is kind of interesting*:

• Natasha Cornett was committed to the Charter Ridge Behavioral Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Though diagnosed as Bipolar and dangerously disturbed, she was released after eleven days because she had no insurance.


• Cornett, and some of the other teens, approached school authorities for help because of bullying and harassment, but were told that they were "freaks" and deserved it.


• The teens were pulled over for speeding near Gate City, Virginia by a state trooper who failed to search the car or detain the teens, despite the fact that he thought they were dangerous.

As the site says, "the six teens are behind bars. But the system that bred them is still on the loose." So... we need better healthcare, some sort of policy to fight bullying in schools, and maybe expanded police powers? Not exactly what you would expect to hear from the internet's biggest, baddest Libertarian.

Of course, it would be pretty lame of me to beat up on the man just because he was smart enough to marry a woman who disagrees with him, but Reynolds is listed in the credits as a "creative consultant". So while I certainly don't mean to imply that the man is a hypocrite because he was involved with his wife's film, it does make me curious to hear what conversations are like at their dinner table.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to write "teenage lesbian satanist killers" in big red letters.

* I've removed one of the bullet points from the "about" page -- it deals with the cops failing to follow up on a lead, and didn't really aid or inhibit my point.