Blockbuster's Future, A Guest Story

Despite my warnings, my wife recently visited Blockbuster. This is her story:

Her: (After picking up the last disc of Mad Men season 4, she walked up to line. A couple minutes go by.)

Another customer: Why are there 4 employees and only 1 register open? Why you make us all wait like that?

Employees: Sorry sorry sorry (as 1 more register was opened and the old crotchety man was helped. But then that new register was closed once he was helped. Eventually my wife got to the front of the line with cash in hand.)

Employee: Oh your paying with cash. We'll have to go to another register. (They move to another register.)

Employee: Is this Blockbuster card new?

Her: No. It's pretty old. I got it when I lived in Clemson.

Employee: Oh, the nationwide system can't read this.

Her: Can I give you a phone number?

Employee: We don't do that anymore. Do you have card for your license number?

Her: I don't know. I just want to rent this.

Employee: Well let's try that (she tries to run her licence number). Nope that doesn't work. Would like to fill out the paperwork for a new card?

Her: I already have a card. I just want to rent this.

Employee: Well let's try that card again. Oh here it is! But this says it's for Harrison Brookie?

Her: Yes he's my husband. I can call and get his licence number.

Employee: No, it has to be you.

Her: [sigh] I just want to rent this...

Employee: Okay (somehow her card magically works now).

Why Many Ignore Ron Paul

I've been an open supporter and voter for Ron Paul (here, here, and here), who recently placed second in the Iowa straw poll. Yet, you may not have heard about it. Jon Stewart explains it as only he can:

Here's Tim Stanley from the Telegraph with a pretty good explanation why:

Sometimes the media ignores Ron Paul out of ignorance or spite. Sometimes it’s because they’ve done the math and convinced themselves that he can’t win. Other times, I suspect that they take a look at the people chanting his name in the bleachers and they don’t like what they see. The Paulites are good folk worried about the direction of their country, but their exclusion from the mainstream makes them come off like the vanguard of a Hicksville revolution. Television is a cool medium. Ron Paul and his angry army are too hot for it.

Update: But Ron Paul's not frustrated. From Dr. Paul:

it’s not like I’m just trying to win and get elected. I’m trying to change the course of history.

Great Television Shows Make You Smarter

Whether it's LOST, The Wire, or my recent European trip find Mad Men, complex TV series' may be more than just entertaining. In a recent post Jonah Lehrer shows how the Flynn Effect, the measurable increase in IQ from generation to generation, is not just because of improvements in education and diet. If the top 5%, who have had access to plenty of food and education for decades,  has also increased, then there must be some other "environmental stimulation”:

One frequently cited factor is the increasing complexity of entertainment, which might enhance abstract problem solving skills. (As Flynn himself noted, “The very fact that children are better and better at IQ test problems logically entails that they have learned at least that kind of problem-solving skill better, and it must have been learned somewhere.”) This suggests that, because people are now forced to make sense of Lost or the Harry Potter series or World of Warcraft, they’re also better able to handle hard logic puzzles. (The effect is probably indirect, with the difficult forms of culture enhancing working memory and the allocation of attention.) As Steven Johnson argued, everything bad is good for us, especially when the bad stuff has lots of minor characters and subplots.

In the name of self improvement, is there any other "homework" I should be watching?

Emptying the Bottle: Early-August '11 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• The world's most dangerous zoo [photos].
• Movie plots that technology killed (ex: Trip Adviser vs. Psycho).
• What North Korea's "economy" looks like [audio].
• The story of the first skyscraper [audio].
• The greatest Superman comic strip ever made (earlier).
• "Bad people" get raped too.
• Why some businesses are family businesses [audio].
• Carrots and sticks as incentives can do more harm than good [video].
• No need to drink Gatorade, just gargle it.
• Patents prevent innovation (solution at minute 18 in this lecture) [audio].

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXIII

Dirty dancing edition:

Before I break your heart with a magnificent demonstration of naked, forlorn, magnificent passion, I should tell you a thing or two about the male jumping spider.

These spiders dance when they woo. Here's a quick, silent introduction showing their basic moves: We start with a flourish of side-to-side quicksteps, then two front legs are fully (and repeatedly) extended like a referee signaling "touchdown!"...

Here's the video evidence (background music added):



Like a human dance club, this dance has high stakes:

This, apparently, is what spider ladies like. The more the male spider shakes, vibrates and extends, the more the female will consent to copulate. I don't know if that "leg snap" thing is the move that gets them over the top, but males who have been "muted" (waxed so they can't dance) frequently get eaten by their intendeds. So if you're a male jumping spider, it's best to dance your heart out.

Here's a more detailed description of the entire research and experiment and here's an article from The Guardian teaching you how to improve your own lady-getting dance moves.

Gross Downtime Product

In my two posts on Tyler Cowen's new ebook, The Great Stagnation, I described a concern (but not crisis) about the possibility of future economic growth. But perhaps even if we don't don't get more productive at work, we are getting more productive at play:

recent advances in technology are actually increasing per-hour productivity by much more than we realize. But then workers are absorbing those gains by goofing off more at their desks, spending their time on Facebook and surfing the web, and completing their tasks only marginally faster than they used to despite much greater productivity. Admit it: the typical white collar office worker under 35 is spending at least a quarter of his or her day on social networking, reading blogs and chatting with friends. Hours worked are shrinking much faster than hours “worked,” and we’re enjoying a lot more leisure time than is reflected in the data.

Maybe this is the solution to our money > time problem.

Economics Of The Jetsons

From blogger Matt Yglesias:

Earlier today, Annie Lowrey drew our attention to the fact that George Jetson enjoyed a nine-hour workweek—thee hours a day, three days a week. Mike Konczal rightly connected this to JM Keynes’ essay on “The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren” (PDF) highlighting the consequences of a super-abundance of material prosperity.

Here's the economic reality:

Essentially imagine a world in which productivity grows by an average of 2.5 percent per year for the next fifty years and Mr and Mrs Jetson have chosen to take the cumulative 418 percent increase in income by reducing hours worked to one quarter of present-day standards rather than vastly increased consumption.

Here's the most fascinating conclusion:

You can imagine two different equilibria here. One is that maybe with so many people able to comfortable support themselves on nine-hour workweeks, that entertainment is done entirely on an amateur basis. Maybe Jet Screamer earns $0 from his music, and instead works three days a week at a nursing home to earn a living. He performs music because it’s fun and because he enjoys the groupies.

This would work great for someone (like me) with more hobbies than they know what to do with.

Human Capital or Capital, Comic Book Edition

I recently shared an article about how college debt has just outgrown credit card debt. My general response was that the average $24,000 in college debt doesn't seem that bad, especially if the average starting salary of a college graduate is $48,351. I also know what it's like to pay off school debt in similar income-to-debt proportion above.

But this got me thinking. What's better for an economy, smart people or effective machines? I came across a great thought experiment in this BBC article about Superman. Apparently the last son of Krypton is considering separating himself from the United States. So here's my question, who would be better for US economic growth, Superman (as capital) or his nemesis Lex Luthor (human capital).

In spite of my love for the Man of Steel, I think that Mr. Luthor would be better for long term economic growth. Here's why: Superman is a great asset to any economy. He's super strong, super fast, super everything. He could decrease crime easily. He could do construction is a fraction of the time. He could even help during natural disasters, which we seem to have plenty of recently.

But Superman dies. Although he ages very slowly, he does get older which mean he will eventually die. Lex Luther on the other hand can use his extreme intelligence to create a second Industrial Revolution bring us unimaginable prosperity. This is shown perfectly in my favorite comic book of all time Red Son.

It's a re-imagining of the Superman story as if he was born in Soviet Russia, not the United States. In this alternate storyline Lex Luther (though still power hungry) is the good guy protecting the American way. After Superman is "defeated" (I don't want to spoil too much), Luther goes on to lead America and Earth into great wealth. Whether in comic books or in life, human capital has more long term value than simple capital:

They found that intelligence made a difference in gross domestic product. For each one-point increase in a country's average IQ, the per capita GDP was $229 higher. It made an even bigger difference if the smartest 5 percent of the population got smarter; for every additional IQ point in that group, a country's per capita GDP was $468 higher.

Especially the smartest people:

researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXII

Here's one shared by my friend-moving-to-Miami-tomorrow Jeff Brenman (goodbye Jeff). Apparently, whales have hit songs just like we do:

the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles (audio). Sometimes the "hit song" contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary. But at any given time and place, there was only one song.

And like us, hits come and go:

What's more, the popular song switched incredibly rapidly; it took only 2 to 3 months for whales in a given region to entirely change their tune, the team reports online today in Current Biology.

Also like us, it's all about the ladies and all about the remix (earlier):

For male whales, singing is known to be a mating behavior, and Garland calls the results a "weird interaction of constrained novelty" where each whale wants to one-up the whale next to it but still feels pressure to conform enough that it doesn't stand out as an oddball.

But unlike us, their stars are too big to be studied:

his is extremely difficult to do, as humpbacks are too large to be put in captivity for study, and no good methods for tracking individual mating patterns exist.

CIA's 'Facebook' Program

Worst Thing a Leader Can Do

We've all heard of Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. But few have heard about his best friend, fellow cosmonaut, Vladimir Kamarov, who died literally crashing into Earth. The most horrifying part of his death, recently covered in NPR's science blog, was that most of the Russian staff knew the ship had serious problems. But, as was true in most of the Soviet Union, no one was willing to be the messenger to tell Russian leadership.

This reminded me of something I shared years ago; a video critique of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The main reason given for the tragedy that became the Star Wars prequels, was that no one was willing to challenge George Lucas. He was the after all the creator of not only the Star Wars, but also Indiana Jones, American Graffiti, and THX 1138. Those accomplishments limited his ability to receive feedback from those around him. That's why I think he and Spielberg made such a good team. When Lucas suggested calling the most recent Indiana Jones film Indiana Jones and the Flying Saucer people, Steven said no.

The more responsibility I get at my school or at the theater, the more I realize that what makes a good leader is the people they lead. A good boss hires good people and then lets them succeed. The worst thing a leader can do is separate themselves from those that they lead. We must embrace that we all make mistakes, and rely on those around us to limit them. So as this great blog posts describes, if you are a prominent leader (whether you're a dictator or famed movie director), be sure to realize that your cult of personality only signals support if people are over-supporting you.

Economics of Monopoly

There has been a lot of complaining about the new improved, Monopoly Live. No dice, no paper money, and all-knowing infrared tower. But NPR's Planet Money recently did a story on problems with the classic version game. And who better to ruin a childhood game than an economist. Here's Russ Roberts in an earlier commentary:

But if I play Monopoly now, it's only to teach my kids how badly its lessons prepare you for the real world. In Monopoly, whoever has the most toys wins, and winning means taking everything belonging to everyone else. In Monopoly, landlords are parasites that eventually drive everyone into bankruptcy. And bankruptcy is like death, game over.

Monopoly is the ultimate zero sum game. You profit only by taking from others. The assets of its world are fixed in number. Yes, you can build houses or hotels, but somehow the greater the supply of places to live, the higher the price, an absurd contradiction to real-world economic life. In Monopoly, hotels never get a makeover and railroads, unlike Amtrak, are always profitable. In Monopoly, getting rich and succeeding in business only comes from exploiting unlucky suckers who randomly enter your life. There's no role for hard work or creativity, figuring out what customers might want to buy that isn't being offered by a competitor. There's no competition. I know, that's why it's called Monopoly, but only Marxists look at the world of capitalism the way the game of Monopoly does, as an unrelentingly gloomy system of exploitation where the rich eventually wear everyone else down.

Surprisingly enough, Russ suggests playing my favorite game, Settlers of Catan.

The Almond: Activists Want God Taken Out of Foul Language

A couple of years ago I posted an article that I submitted and got accepted in the satirical Christian news site, LarkNews.com. That wasn't my first experience with online satirical writing. In college, I helped to create and even ran the no longer existent Clemson fake news source, TheAlmond.com. Here's the ClemsonWiki article on it:

The Almond was a satirical news website written by Clemson University students and inspired by the satirical magazine The Onion [1]. The Almond was founded in the Spring of 2005, with the first online issue appearing on February 28th, 2005 [2]. The website was written and edited pseudo-anonymously under pen names, and anyone was free to submit articles to the site through an e-mail submission feature. Briefly, in the Fall of 2005, articles from The Almond appeared in some issues of The Tiger, in the TimeOut section. The Almond was also an official Clemson University student organization. 

Summer of 2007: The Almond was shut down following a cease-and-desist letter from the Onion. The main writers of The Almond created a new site in blog format at TheNewsMen.com. By September 2008, this domain name had expired.

This walk down nostalgia lane was courtesy of me coming across an article I originally wrote for the site that was later published in Clemson's student newspaper in 2005. Seems like only yesterday when I first giggled at my own idea:

Activists Want God Taken Out of Foul Language, by Jim Harris 

MIDDLE SCHOOL, CLEMSON - With the apparent outspokenness of the current presidential administration on the topic of religion, it is not surprising to see the opposing side speaking out as well. The legality of God in the Pledge of Allegiance and the 10 Commandments in public schools have become major issues of the times.

Now, even Clemson has been asked to take drastic measures to keep religion out of its doors. Local activist group AmeriCa's Right Of No Youth Ministers (ACRONYM) has confronted Clemson Middle School with the issue of young children using the word "God" in their foul language.

"I just want my children to be able to curse in the name of whomever they want," said Bob Springer, a member of ACRONYM.

When contacted Saturday for a statement, the school did not answer and was apparently not ready to reply.

ACRONYM was formed in 1996 to combat the growing number of children attending church youth groups.

"We formed picket lines of tolerance around local churches to keep our children's minds open to all voices and opinions," said Kathryn Sullivan, president of

ACRONYM. "Living in the Bible Belt can be tough, especially when people only surround themselves with others who believe similar things. ACRONYM is just a group of people who agree that this is wrong."

These activists not only blame the local church but also the media.

"We have seen the continuous collaboration between the church and conservative media for decades," said Springer. "I know my son didn't learn to curse in the name of God from me! Shows that are secretly funded by the Republican Party, like 'South Park' and 'The Osbournes,' are teaching my children ludicrous conservative values when they instruct my children that 'GD' is a 'hip' way to cuss. With this growing epidemic of religious cursing, fearful parents should be offering their children healthy, helpful secular alternatives."

ACRONYM's main legal argument is based on Thomas Jefferson's famous speech in which he quoted the Constitutional phrase describing America's "separation of church and state." Researchers are currently still searching for this line in Constitution.

"We know we are right to not let people force their beliefs on everyone else, but I just wish we could make everyone understand that!" said vice-president John Young.

Until the reluctant school is contacted to see what they are willing to do about the situation, it seems that these activists will just have to wait. ACRONYM has apparently committed itself to calling Clemson Middle School every Saturday until their phone calls are answered.

"They can't ignore us forever! Those Dalai-Lama-darn people will listen to open-mindedness whether they want to or not," said Young.

A rally to gain Clemson University student support is being held at the local Ben and Jerry's this Friday at 1 p.m.

My favorite part about this article was overhearing someone in one of my classes, who apparently didn't realize it was fake, say that he went down to Ben and Jerry's to see if anyone showed up. No one did.

To see the other handful of articles published in the student newspaper go here.

Famous as Shit

I've thought a lot about fame. About what it's like to be really famous and kind of famous. And how to know if you are famous. In the past, my fame-meter has been do you want to have lunch with a stranger. A truly famous person couldn't say yes, if they did, they'd always be eating with strangers. Justin Wehr has come up with an even more unusual metric. In response to poop art:

It is fascinating (to me) to think about the different market values of poop depending on context. The same person who paid thousands of dollars for Manzoni's poop would probably pay hundreds of dollars to avoid the experience of seeing, smelling, or God-forbid stepping in a stranger's poop.

Here is a fascinating question: What person, in what context, would have the highest-valued poop?

I'd bet that a Buzz Aldrin turd released in space would demand a pretty penny. Not sure if it would go higher than a Marilyn Monroe turd.
You heard it here first: If I ever become famous enough to have poop with a positive market value (come to think of it, that is a good measure of fame, isn't it?), I will sell it. In fact, I wouldn't mind being remembered as the guy who sold more of his poop than any other human in history. I am only half-joking.

That's a part of Justin's weird but surprisingly interesting series Poop Mondays. Here are the other posts so far:

• Pooping Shamefully
• How to poop: The proper posture
• The world before [and after] toilet paper
• Bathroom behavior
• Branding and Poop

Here's my contribution to the topic: flushtracker.com.

Super Bowl's Importance to Society

I usually have a hard time getting into major sporting events, with some exceptions for the World Cup and Clemson football. But here's a reason why the Super Bowl may be good for national cohesion:

There is nothing else in the country today that can act as a common language between the boardroom and the bingo hall, the classroom and the union hall. Sports, and most importantly talking about sports, is the only activity just about all Americans share regardless of age, education, or wealth. When the electrician shows up at the doctor's house they can always talk about one of the local teams. This is not as often the case in other countries where interest in sports is closely associated with class.

You can follow the drama in as much detail as you would like. Deep or shallow, this passion unifies us and keeps us from trying other worse ways to unify:

And this is right, because as Tocqueville warned, the passion for equality can produce the most desperate inequality. The passion for equality and the passion of envy are remarkably similar, and in our zeal to obtain equality we’ll blindly give up other goods. In the extreme, we will give up freedom, preferring to be equally subject to one power and safe from being proved inferior to another than free to exercise our unequal abilities.

I'll be specifically watching to see how the eyes of the world influence individual decisions.

Kid Lincoln Presents Harold

You've seen me do it, now see the team I coach:

Rationality of Playing the Lottery

Sometimes seemingly irrational things, like recessions, may actually be a result of perfectly a rational decisions. The lottery is no different:

Why do people play the lottery? On the one hand, the answer is obvious enough: We’re happy to spend $3 for approximately 15 seconds of irrational hope, for the pleasure of thinking about what might happen if we’d suddenly won millions of dollars. While most players know they won’t win – the odds are a joke – the latex coated ticket is a cheap permission to daydream, to think about the possibility of a better life.

So we pay a couple of dollars to dream big. Seems harmless, until you consider who plays:

Not surprisingly, those without lots of money are more interested in such escapist pleasures. As I note in my recent Wired article on the statistician Mohan Srivastava, state lotteries have become a deeply regressive tax. On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries.

Those who most want to escape the reality of their finances play the lottery. Sadly, that lottery helps to keep them in their real financial problems. Sounds like we need a savings lottery.

Economics of Leno vs. Conan

Or, why Leno's 10 o'clock show didn't stand a chance:

In 2009 key demographic group ratings for network 10 P.M. shows were just half of what they had been five years earlier. And a reason for that was that some 40 percent of households now had the technology of digital video recorders, allowing people to easily program their own TV schedules.

And a habit many people had apparently gotten into was to use the 10 P.M. hour to catch up on programs they had recorded either earlier that night or even earlier in the week. So Leno at 10 wasn’t just up against alternative network programming. Thanks to consumer technology, he was up against millions of people’s personal programming options, too. 

Economics of Ego Surplus, An Economics Novel

Last month I got an email from economist and freelance writer Paul McDonnold. He was contacting "leading economics bloggers" (his words, not mine) to see if they would read and review his new book, The Economics of Ego Surplus: A Novel of Economic Terrorism. I happily agreed.

The sub-genre of economics fiction is small to say the least. This novel takes a couple of its sections (it doesn't really have chapters) and devotes them to a little economic history. Intermixed with meeting the main character, grad student Kyle Linwood, is a short history of Adam Smith (and later Keynes and Marx). Instead of teaching the economic way of thinking, instead this book shows what it's like to be a person who thinks like that. Everything from debates about free trade at dinner parties to the idea that teaching is on a reverse farming schedule, which means during the best weather you have the time off. Rarely do I meant a person, or especially a character, who's economic presuppositions are similar to mine.

It tells a story of financial manipulation, with short economic summaries along the way. Mention the Federal Reserve? Well you also get a little bit of history about it. Rationality? Behavior economics? Same thing. I even learned about a type of financial fraud called spamming. It's where a spammers buy a lot of cheap stock, driving the price up. Then email people telling them the stock will continue doing well, and as the price rises, the spammers sell. The plot moves fast. One minute he's simply a college instructor, next he's recalling his own kidnapping by terrorists, then not to much longer he's stealing a car in Dubai and setting himself up for another terrorist kidnapping. The book really takes off when the plot (that is the terrorist plot) is revealed. The idea of economic terrorism is fascinating. Why blow up a building or a bus when you can shut down the gears of the economy? Hopefully I'm not spoiling anything, but here's the ingenious terrorist plot:

Raise a huge amount of capital. Enough to influence a $60 trillion global market. The main villain is a terrorist who runs a hugely profitable bank, in part, by bank rolling and investing for the world's huge black market (another reason to legalize drugs). The plan is to use an advanced computer system and wait for an economic bubble to rise. Put your own money in, furthering the problem. Then, right before the bubble pops, you sell all of your assets making it crash faster and farther. Finally, begin rumor that trillions of counterfeit US dollars are about to be released into the world market, causing a worldwide fear of inflation and abandonment of the dollar. US banks are abandoned and fail. While the more stable Islamic banks, that is, loans without interest, survive. All with the goal of bringing the Middle East back to the prestige it once had while Europe was in the Dark Ages. The appreciatively not-that-evil bad guy interestingly claims that "the West's problems aren't policy, their culture".

At some level the market economy is based on faith. Faith that I can specialize on one thing and get everything else through trade. If that faith is shattered, it can have huge implications. The&historical skepticism surrounding capitalism is also it's greatest weakness. The reason an attack like this could work, is because people have such a hard time understanding economics in the first place. That's one of the main things economists are trying to do, increase faith in the market.

Full of nice snippet of wisdom, like "you can't study something without changing it" or "the stock market is a rational reflection of all publicly available information". The villain even describes the fallacy of voting in American culture, something I've done myself. If you want to understand how economists talk to each other, this is a great book. This quote, from one economist to another, is just like something you might hear in a Econ101 class: "economists want to understand the economic universe like physics wants to understand the physical universe." In fact, I may add that to my first day lecture.

Interestingly, the main character has a similar ideological change that I have experienced over the last couple of years. Though I am certainly still a "hard-core libertarian", I've grown to understand the many irrationalities we all have. Though I came to that conclusion with a lot less trauma than the main character of the novel. Perhaps there are two ways to change our worldview, slowly over time through deliberate thought or quickly through traumatic experience. In many ways that seems to be the lesson of the book. Beware of the confidence to which you hold your beliefs, large egos can be dangerous. It's doesn't really have a happy ending, just an introspective one.

Not sure if I would recommend it, because I don't really recommend any books. Though I believe there is a place for fiction in convincing people of truths. It's just been so long since I've read fiction, so the dialogue felt a little awkward. Just seemed unnatural. All these adjectives describing things that didn't really happen. Perhaps it's my own lack of attention to detail that makes me weary of descriptive novels. Or perhaps my weariness of the power of fiction has my brain pulling some Inception security to ensure I'm not unduly influenced. However, the extensive details have convinced me that if I ever have to write a novel I will visit the places in the story and just describe what I see.

Though with the main character as an economics instructor and short little chapterettes, I couldn't ask for much more. In end it didn't really raise my concern for economic terrorism, though I don't think it was trying to. After all, with the estimated assets of $4 trillion the terrorists had, I wonder if they could have done more damage by setting off nuclear bombs in major American industrial cities. I guess I'm not setting myself up very well for another chance at a complimentary book.

Dirty South Heads to Charleston

Having already performed at New York's Del Close Marathon and the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, my Harold team, The 708, is heading to the Charleston Improv Festival this weekend. Recently I was interview by the Charleston City Paper about the team. Here's an excerpt:

North Carolina's Dirty South Comedy Theater, a comedy training center and theater in Chapel Hill's sister city of Carrboro, boasts a company of 45 performers and a national network of almost 100 professional comedians. DSI resident act the 708 is heading to the Charleston Comedy Fest for a wild session.

The current 708 team roster features four original players — Harrison Brookie, Jeff Brenman, Juan Mojica, and PT Scarborough — plus four relatively new participants, including Bryan Barnes, Kennedy Gates, Zannie Gunn, and Shane Smith.

The group's name refers to a broken clock in a room where they initially practiced on the UNC campus. "The thing was stuck on 7:08, so our 7 p.m. rehearsals always seemed to start late somehow," Brookie says. "Inspired by that, we often break clocks." Brookie is the lanky, tall, bespectacled guy in the troupe, famous in the Research Triangle for his physical work. "I try to heighten what is already established by other players in the scenes."

The scenes start with an invocation that becomes a "larger-than-life experience" that inspires the scenes that follow.

"It's been a transforming beast," says Brookie. "It's always been based on a quick style of play — very game-based, which is a very DSI format. It didn't take a lot to get off the ground, but it's been a slow-growth process.

"I don't know if the audience will consider us to be polite," Brookie adds. "I mean, we do come from a place called the Dirty South. But I don't think 'dirty' quite describes our style either. We have more of a reputation for being fast and fluid. I think what separates 708 and the DSI style from other long-form improv around the country is its fast pace and clear aim. It kind of plays out like an episode of Seinfeld that really ramps up at the end."

We'll be performing at Eye Level Art this Saturday at 8 p.m.