Dear Paul,
I have come across a bottle of La Poubelle Noire 1982 from the Le Sablier vineyard. It’s selling for the equivalent of $560. Should I buy it?
- Horace K., Akron, Ohio
Dear Horace,
Oh my goodness, only $560 a bottle! Buy it. Buy it! Buy as many as you can. You can easily sell it on Wine-bay for $1,220. And listen to what the 2006 Cowboy Wine Connoisseur says about this fine wine.
“Git along little doggies. This wine embodies all the fine, raucous insouciance of a buck-naked virgin a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ astride a rip-snortin’, man-killin’ mustang. Yep, this here fruit of the vine sure packs the punch of a cowpoke’s socks at the end of a cattle drive. A fine addition to anyone’s wine corral.”
- Paul De Lancey, First Lord of Fun
please visit Paul’s website at www.lordsoffun.com
Dear First Lord of Fun,
Can CowboyMetrics prove at the 95% level of statistical significance whether John Wayne or William Boyd was the better cowboy actor?
- Horace A., Vancouver, British Columbia.
Dear Horace,
Why, of course, it can. I await with a great deal of excitement imminent results from the cowboy cells of the Rand Group and The Heritage Foundation.
-Paul R. De Lancey, First Lord of Fun and active member in The CowboyMetricsTM Society
visit Paul’s website at www.lordsoffun.com
Did you ever wonder how the film critic Leonard Maltin assigned the number of stars to those great Hopalong Cassidy movies of yesteryear. How could he have seen all 66 movies. Did he use econometrics? Perhaps he used
stars = 1.55^ + 1.13^*Ellison + 1.38^*Janey + 0.96^*Hayden + 0.24*King + 0.44^Kirby + 0.10*Reeves + 0.54^*Rogers +
0.08*Hayes - 0.50*Clark - 0.00*Darien -0.10*Wood + 0.42*Clyde
where all the names represent dummy variables (0,1). The names in the top line are Hoppy’s impetuous, youthful sidekicks. The names in the second line of the equation are the hero’s older, humorous sidekicks and ^ represents statistically significant at the 95% level.
The most salient result is that four of the youthful sidekicks had a 95% chance of affecting Maltin’s viewing in a positive way while none of the older sidekicks did. Many of you no doubt noticed that the young pup, Rand Brooks, is missing from the equation. This was, of course, done so that the (X’X) matrix could be inverted. But you surely also remembered the the coefficients on the sidekicks represent how much better or worse they did than Brooks. Similarly for Toler, an older sidekick.
It is also interesting that the Brooks era coincided with Boyd’s reign as producer. These latter movies generally received fewer stars than the earlier Hoppy movies. If this effect is analyzed none of the coefficients on both types of sidekicks are statistically significant.
But as Hoppy would have said, “Aw, that’s all right.”
-Paul R. De Lancey, First Lord of Fun & active member in The CowboyMetricsTM Society
visit Paul’s website at www.lordsoffun.com
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