Friday assorted links

1. Entertainment spending is up, and food stamp expenditures are down, both bullish indicators.

2. Where do all those books come from in restaurant libraries?

3. In the Philippines, in response to typhoons, they lower wages and hours but not employment.  A different implicit contract perhaps?

4. Why Major League Baseball dirt comes from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.

5. Nissan protects its newly manufactured cars with (noisy) hail cannons.

6. “”This was not the first translation of “Moby-Dick” in Macedonian. There was one edition published in the 1980s, translated from Serbo-Croatian, which did not produce a lasting impact.

The main problem of translating a book from 1851 about sailing and whaling was that the Macedonian language lacked maritime terminology. Most of the ethnic Macedonian population had been landlocked during the last centuries, having little contact with the sea in general and sailing in particular. In order to overcome this, Čemerski had to re-construct the vocabulary by first discovering the origins of the English terms, and then trace their equivalents in Macedonian or other Slavic languages.”  Link here.