Hunger Games

Watched the latest installment at the 9:00 showing in Redwood City last night. Packed house... clearly they have touched a nerve with this franchise.

I thought it was, like the first installment... not bad! As with the first, there was too much time wasted preening and fawning over the fashion elements, but then again, I am not unaware of the core demographic for this film. This one drags a bit in the middle during the buildup to the "game," which then actually goes by a little too quickly. There is a pack of vicious baboons (nice touch) and a poisonous fog (yawn).

The plot, if you are one of the four or five people who have not seen the movie, revolves around a smart, strong, skilled, and compassionate young woman who reluctantly assumes the role of leader in a rebellion against a tyrannical government led by Donald Sutherland... What's not to like about that? Jennifer Lawrence is just about perfect for the role. The movie also seems to have provided work for a number of male actors who are underemployed or who may just have moved into the coasting phase of their careers... in addition to the aforementioned Sutherland, we have Harrelson, Hoffman, Kravitz, Tucci, and Wright.

My two main complaints about the movie are (1) Not one of the insipid young male leads/ love interests is a worthy match for Katniss in any dimension, either as character or actor; and (2) There's no way a drunken Woody Harrelson could physically subdue our hero, even after the trauma of having nearly electrocuted herself saving the day... but I suppose when the main message of the movie is that men fuck everything up, it pays to offer a conciliating gesture or two to the masculine ego...

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Striker and his fiancee (sitdown strike romance) in the Women's Auxiliary room in Pengally Hall. Flint, Michigan. Sheldon Dick, 1937.

We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds

John Prine's 1999 album of duets with a number of the leading ladies of country music, In Spite of Ourselves, is a delight from beginning to end. He has great taste in songs, and even better taste in singers. Unsurprisingly, Iris DeMent stands out, but a couple of my other favorites are with Melba Montgomery, whose voice has the quaver of an old woman's, but retains a lot of beauty and spunk. I couldn't find recordings from the album on the youtube, I'm afraid. But earlier versions of the songs are around. Back in the day, Melba sang duets with another dude who was a smidge better singer than Mr. Prine...

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Happy Thanksgiving!

Driving in a flock of turkeys, Schoenfeldt farm, Russian-German FSA (Farm Security Administration) client, Sheridan County, Kansas. Russell Lee, 1939.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

[Shoeshine stand detail, Southeastern U.S.] Walker Evans, 1936.

Dolphy, Berlin, 1961

You can decide which is cooler: Eric Dolphy deconstructing "God Bless the Child" on solo bass clarinet, or Eric Dolphy in shades tearing apart "GW" on alto. Extraordinary.

The state of the job market

In the NY Times, Greg Mankiw offers a pretty balanced assessment of the current macro state of the U.S. labor market and its implications for monetary policy. For the most part, things still look pretty bad, but there are some hints of upward movement in wages and a rising rate of job vacancies that could signal, especially to inflation hawks, that the Fed should ease its foot off the accelerator. Dean Baker provides useful notes of skepticism.

The vacancy rate is an interesting series, providing a demand-side indicator of market tightness to complement the unemployment rate on the worker side. Unfortunately, the modern vacancy series only goes back to 2001. Here it is, displayed with the unemployment rate and employment-population ratio:

The vacancy and unemployment rates can be combined into the vacancy-unemployment (v/u) ratio, which has the common-sense interpretation of measuring the ratio of job openings to workers looking for them. It should be procyclical. In the following diagram, I plot v/u and an alternative index using one minus the employment-population ratio in the denominator:

The recovery since the bottom of the crisis is pretty clear, but by this measure of tightness, the labor market has a long way to go before it returns to its pre-crisis conditions, let alone the state it was in as of early 2001. Of course, it's possible that the labor market was "overheated" on the eve of the financial meltdown, and maybe we would prefer not to go there. But there's not a whole lot of evidence that wage inflation was accelerating in 2006-2007, as the following chart with the annualized rate of change in average hourly earnings suggests:

P.S.: You too can have fun with FRED!

Townsend's warbler...

... is, like many warblers, a gem, a gift one can never tire of. Like most warblers, it is coy, and flits overhead in the branches, flashing its exceptional yellow and black facial plumage, often with a friend nearby. If you are patient and still, they may come nearer... curious, or just oblivious?

Townsend's warbler is named for the naturalist John Kirk Townsend, who identified the bird for western science in the 1830s. Townsend came from a rather remarkable Quaker family, it seems, back when the world was smaller and people were bigger...

John Kirk Townsend was the son of Charles Townsend and Priscilla Kirk, he had five brothers and four sisters. His sister Mary wrote a book called, "Life In the Insect World" in 1844. And Mary and another sister, Hannah, wrote "The Anti-Slavery Alphabet" in 1846, which was sold at the Anti-Slavery Fair in Philadelphia. His brother Edward was President of the Philadelphia Institution for Instruction of the Blind and helped organize the Philadelphia Dental College.

Photo credit.