You know, when I read about people who run with the bulls, I always wonder what exactly they want out of the experience. It's like, nobody wants to get gored, but everybody loses if nobody gets gored. It's the prisoner's dilemma of risking your life.

Speaking of prisoner's dilemmas, I am becoming a fan of both Friend or Foe and Russian Roulette on the Game Show Network. If you haven't been watching, FoF is a classic prisoner's dilemma -- you and your partner have a pot of money at the end. If you both vote "Friend," you split it. If one votes "Foe" and the other votes "Friend," the "Foe" voter gets all of it. If both vote "Foe," nobody gets anything. The wonderful thing about it is that I can prove you should always vote Friend, and I can also prove you should always vote Foe. I can also prove that no matter how much they tell you that the trick is to figure out what your partner is going to do, it actually doesn't help you all that much to know what your partner is going to do. It is the fact that I am interested in that kind of thing but appreciate the opportunity to shrug and put it down when it starts to make my head hurt that makes me a writer, and not an academic.

As for Russian Roulette, when you lose, then drop you through a hole in the floor. That's pretty much all there is to it. You'd be surprised how entertaining it is. I laugh every time.

And over at the Food Network, I watched a bunch of shows on July 4th about various regional festivals around the country. Very cool, including a half-hour about the Lobster Festival in Rockland, Maine, which is about ten minutes away from the little house where my family stayed, which I recently wrote about over in the journal.

Strange things on cable have been my delight of late. I don't know why.