Paris Werewolves

The Excel chart image from the previous post on political forecasting left the webpage ugly. Let's pretty it up again with a vintage Aston Martin, done up mildly for bridal photos.

Note: red sparkline bars indicate aggregate losses on IEM vote share contracts by month. Blue sparkline bars indicate aggregate gains.  Since my last post  about the discreet charms of gambling on election outcomes, I was kindly directed by IEM to its historical vote share contract prices for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The table above shows that with these additional data, traders had still tended to overvalue Democratic candidates from August through October, while undervaluing Republican candidates. The extreme overvaluations of Hilary Clinton in 2016 still exert an influence, but it is much less pronounced. Excluding 2016 prices, Democratic candidates would still be overvalued in each month, but never by as much as 2%. Republican candidates would not be undervalued at all, except in August by about 3%.  Hence from a gambling perspective, the IEM market appears reasonably accurate to the extent that there are not many information gaps left to exploit. Let...

It was just a matter of time before the vortex of politics sucked me in. Since arriving in France, we've been through: An intense period of social security "reform" that resulted in weeks of protests and a long, stinky garbage strike The resignation of a sitting prime minister A European Union election that led to ... The dissolution of the French parliament followed by ... A snap parliamentary election that produced no governing majority, culminating in ... The appointment of a new prime minister from the coalition that won the fewest seats in the snap election There was also a little sideshow vote on whether electric scooter services like Lime would be allowed to operate any longer on the streets (and by extension, the sidewalks) of Paris. A whopping 13% of voters turned out, 90% of whom voted to get rid of them. And it happened: one day, all the rental  trotinettes were gone. But what recently focused my mind on politics was the receipt of my overseas absentee ballot....

Wheelchair Rugby, Paralympics Preliminary Rounds, USA vs. Japan, Champ-de-Mars Arena We took the five-minute walk from our apartment to the Grand Palais Éphémère at the Champ de Mars to watch a wheelchair rugby double-header, Great Britain vs. Denmark, followed by USA vs Japan. It goes without saying that I knew nothing about the sport going into the arena, and only slightly more after having watched two complete matches. But that didn't really matter because superficially, the game shares the basic structure as rugby, soccer, basketball, hockey polo or lacrosse. A squad from one team possesses an item (ball, puck or human skull) with the intent of of placing it within the confines of a demarcated scoring location, while a squad from another team attempts to prevent them from doing so. If successful, the other team possesses the item and the roles reverse. If unsuccessful, possession of the item is up for grabs. I guess in this regard, American football follows a similar blueprint....

Should she squint, she'll surely see Sugar. Parque das Virtudes, Porto. Cascais Belem, Lisbon

Lisbon's crafty recycling bins. Portugal is a normal country . Though that makes it sometimes tourist-tacky , there is still enough beautiful weirdness and macabre oddities to keep it lively. Red junglefowl ( Gallus gallus , the progenitor species of chickens) roam the Parque da Cidade do Porto. Carmo convent, Lisbon. A baby-eating monster (probably not a werewolf) adorns a baroque 17th century carriage in the National Coach Museum, Lisbon. The Coach Museum's most modern installation: Tom Slick 's Thunderbolt Grease Slapper, converted for the 1967 Apple-less Indian 500.   Two images of the divine from Lisbon's National Tile ( Azulejo ) Museum in the former Madre de Deus convent: the mortal remains of an unnamed martyr (left) and a tile effigy of Bacchus (right).

Porto as an idea. Porto in reality. How I felt nearly all of the time in Porto: besieged by werewolves. More and more places are realizing that they're ill-equipped to deal with the number of people who want to visit them. Venice, Barçelona and Amsterdam are probably the best-known examples of locals turning on the droves of tourists who descend each vacation season--seasons that are getting longer and longer to the point where the idea of an "off-season" starts to seem like a quaint relic of a more innocent age. Our first night in Lisbon, we made an ill-fated choice to walk down Rua Augusta , which turned out to be one of the cookie-cutter retail streets you see anywhere in European cities now, marked by chocolate shops and "luxury" brand outlets. But Rua Augusta also had a lively trade in street merchants, selling everything from clothing to handbags and liquor from blankets spread out on the ground. Between the vendors, the tourists, buskers and break-danci...