Thanks for the plug of the Winter Institute, Dave, which started tonight and carries on to tomorrow. Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke is up tomorrow morning, and tonight he told a story of how he got back to DC (leaving a day early, still only barely making it) to give a vote this week through their driving snow, only to find out that the vote was postponed due to snow. Tremendously funny. If you'll forgive a plug for economics and the Economics Department where I work, this is simply the best time I have as a professor at this campus. Tonight we had several alumni back in town for the Outlook, three of whom I had not seen in several years. Catching up, laughing, visiting -- if only academia could always be like this! And most of the faculty were there; we're a department that enjoys each other, and when I read stories like the troubling tenure decisions at Brooklyn College, I think to myself that in spite of all the things we document here as being wrong with SCSU, there are some real joys that come with our jobs.

So I'm home late perusing the blogs and I read simply the funniest line I've heard all week on AtlanticBlog. Discussing philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser of Columbia, Bill writes:

At a conference, a linguist was explaining that although there were cases where a double negative meant a positive, and cases where a double negative meant a negative, there were no cases where a double positive meant a positive. From the back of the room, Morgenbesser says, "Yeah, yeah."

That, my friends, is Lileksian.

UPDATE: Bernanke's speech Friday morning turned out to be a policy speech, and a big one at that.