This Is Some Watermelon! August 10, 2005March 2, 2017 OUT OF THE WOODS Maine was beautiful, the Red Team won by 30 points (unlike 1956, when Red won by just one-twelfth of a point!), but Grey won soccer and their original song brought down the house. The Hertz Lady and I drove back in record time. (‘Recalculating route! Recalculating route!’ I love blowing her mind. Sometimes I’ll drive in a circle just to make her crazy.) How did anyone ever live before NeverLost®? I’M JUST SAYING Back in our Managing Your Money days, we had users who took the old 5¼-inch floppy disks it came on and trimmed them with a pair of scissors to fit the new 3½-inch drives. I don’t know what color their hair was – and you must know I mean absolutely nothing by this (it is a little known fact that Einstein, whose hair was famous but black-and-white, was actually blond, as were Madame Curie, Pythagoras, Newton and Shakespeare . . . Stephen Hawking is platinum blond) – but a friend writes: Dear Diary, Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with those expensive double-pane energy-efficient kind, but this week I got a call from the contractor complaining his work had been completed a year ago and I had yet to pay for them. Boy oh boy, did we go around and around! Just because I’m a blonde does not mean I’m automatically stupid. So, I proceeded to tell him just what his fast-talking sales guy told me last year – namely, that in one year, the windows would pay for themselves. There was silence on the other end of the line, so I just hung up. I have not heard anything since. Guess I won that stupid argument! BOREALIS Much of this from Flight International just rehashes Boeing’s press release. But as someone who has no idea how our little motor works, I liked the box at the end. (I still have no idea how our little motor works; but I do understand, vaguely, what “the motor drive is capable of achieving five times the torque speed of a similarly sized unit and is therefore much smaller and lighter” means.) Richard Factor: “Just got the 08 August issue of Aviation Week. On page 40 there’s an article about the Chorus motor. It’s a lot more detailed than the material I’ve seen so far, although not detailed enough for a real analysis. One quote: Carman says the test motor on the 767 measured about 11.5 inches in diameter and 16 inches long but he describes the installation as “clumsy” because so much data collection instrumentation was needed. ☞ You mean to tell me that a little electric motor the size of a watermelon can tug a Boeing 767? Could one the size of a peach tug a Honda? NTMD So how is the BiDil selling? It’s still very early, but one service that surveys pharmacies is apparently estimating that the weekly scrips (prescriptions) have been as follows: 4 49 103 (last week) If this is right – and I hope any of you who know different or better will chime in – 156 patients are now “on the pill,” as it were. With thousands more, no doubt, to follow. What we don’t know yet is how many of them will have those prescriptions honored by their insurers, and how many will be switched to the generic alternative that costs roughly 85% less. Closing at $21.60 last night, the company is valued at $653 million. THE BUBBLE If your house is in Manhattan, Kansas, you could be okay. In the other Manhattan – maybe not. Paul Krugman explains.