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Franny's on Flatbush Avenue was possibly the best pizza I've had in the U.S., Gala Manor in Flushing was definitely the best dim sum I've eaten in this country, the projected fall in Wall-E box office is 61 percent (July 4th is a tough weekend but ouch!), and wars of independence are easiest to justify when the population is still relatively small and the nation state is not yet built. Call it investment. Quasi-independence or full independence was inevitable so the real question is whether North America would be better off if Florida remained a Spanish colony and the Louisiana Purchase had never happened. That said, American independence was probably very bad for native Americans and blacks and of course that rent transfer is part of what motivated independence. I am preparing a lecture on The Merchant of Venice and, via Eduardo Pegurier, here is All the Water in the World.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 6, 2008 at 12:13 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
You need to have Pepe's and Modern Apizza in New Haven before you write about the best pizza you've ever had... they truly make superior pies. Pepe's has been doing it for 83 years, and Modern was founded by a former cook there. Go give a talk at Yale and eat the best pizza you've ever had.
Posted by: Bill Mill at Jul 6, 2008 12:50:34 PM
61%? What are your figures?
Opening weekend gross ~$63 million. Estimates for this weekend are ~ $33.4 million, so that would be a drop of only about 47%.
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=wall-e.htm
Posted by: A cubicle is a box office at Jul 6, 2008 2:52:30 PM
Not sure where you got your numbers, but those I saw showed Wall-E only dropped from $63 million to 33-- less than a 50% drop and right about what one would expect for a hit with good word of mouth.
Heck, its total box office has now surpassed that of the Hulk, which pulled in $55 million its opening weekend and has been out for 4 weekends now.
Wall-E is a commercial success.
Posted by: burger flipper at Jul 6, 2008 3:00:54 PM
Source: http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=10785
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jul 6, 2008 3:07:56 PM
The figure you cite is for the Friday one-day totals, comparing the take from Friday, July 4th to the film's opening day. It did well over the weekend.
Posted by: burger flipper at Jul 6, 2008 3:51:10 PM
What does independence mean these days?
How does one get energy independence when pencil independence seems so difficult?
Posted by: richard at Jul 6, 2008 4:00:12 PM
Tyler, thanks for this wonderful hodgepodge of information. Regarding "The Merchant of Venice", I strongly recommend Dick Posner's book "Law and Literature" which has a chapter devoted to it.
PS: you were right about Wall-E: it's really for adults and not children, though kids will like the animation and the robots
Posted by: Enrique at Jul 6, 2008 5:24:35 PM
In what ways was American independence bad for blacks? England ended slavery earlier than we did but if we had remained a colony events might have happened differently: maybe we would have delayed their decision, maybe they would have had a "free everywhere except over there" policy, maybe the South would have declared their independence then.
Posted by: Hei Lun Chan at Jul 6, 2008 5:34:09 PM
Franny's and Gala Manor, with links, at TCEDG
Posted by: chug at Jul 6, 2008 5:36:29 PM
Independence of the United States is definitely an outlier.
Posted by: Jason Armstrong at Jul 6, 2008 5:45:13 PM
On "Merchant of Venice" I strongly recomend John Gross' "Shylock: A Legend and its Legacy."
Curious to hear what your lecture is about, exactly? The rise of insurance? Elizabethan money-lending practices?
I'm serious.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Jul 6, 2008 6:57:26 PM
The danger is that we would have declared independence later. Canada is fine but if the us had declared independence on the schedule of Ireland or India, would we have allied with Britain in the world wars or cold war?
Posted by: DK at Jul 6, 2008 7:01:59 PM
Using Box Office Mojo's data for this and previous weekends, Wall-E's projected drop of 47.0% (figure not yet finalized) is at the lower end of the range of second-weekend drops in gross revenue for major (number 1 or near number 1) movies:
Wanted: -59.5%
Get Smart: -47.8%
The Incredible Hulk: -60.1%
Kung Fu Panda: -44.2%
Sex and the City: -62.8%
Indiana Jones/Crystal Skull: -55.3%
Narnia/Prince Caspian: -58.6%
Iron Man: -48.1%
Most people go on opening weekend, nothing new here.
See this list for biggest second-weekend drops
Biggest second-weekend drop of 2008 among major movies: Cloverfield, at -68.3%
Posted by: at Jul 6, 2008 8:49:09 PM
As a prior commenter has pointed out, the gross revenue on Friday July 4 compared to Friday June 27 was indeed down -59.9%. But on July 4, people just might have spent the evening watching a different kind of show.
Posted by: at Jul 6, 2008 8:59:30 PM
Here is a related and broader question to ponder: would most of us Americans be worse off or better off if America had never broken from the U.K.? Forget rent transfers, my relatives arrived after that event, as did most of the readers of this blog, I suspect.
Posted by: liberalarts at Jul 6, 2008 9:25:10 PM
I will not see Wall-E because I am insulted when movie producers give human facial features to objects. Who is going to see Wall-E? I am still waiting to find someone who has seen it to give me a recommendation.
Posted by: brainwarped at Jul 6, 2008 10:10:08 PM
brainwarped,
My wife and I went to see Wall-E last week. One of the better movies I've seen. Definitely worth going. More about it on my blog if interested.
If you like Forrest Gump you'll probably like Wall-E
Posted by: Shane M at Jul 6, 2008 10:51:17 PM
Brainwarped,
I can second the recommendation. Pretty great flick. Goofy last half hour, but the stuff with Wall-E on earth and the intro to his new environment after he leaves is some of the best stuff I've seen in a long while.
Posted by: burger flipper at Jul 7, 2008 12:40:36 AM
The danger is that we would have declared independence later. Canada is fine but if the us had declared independence on the schedule of Ireland or India, would we have allied with Britain in the world wars or cold war?
Ireland and India both had majority colonized populations -- the majority of the US comprises the colonizers.
Posted by: Josh at Jul 7, 2008 8:54:59 AM
Every year there's this intellectual hand-wringing over the American revolution and no one ever looks at it in the big picture. Following the revolution, our two biggest allies (France and Poland) both had anti-monarchist revolutions of their own. This led to the Bolivarian revolutions in South America and the Haitian revolution. As for blacks, remember that the Whigs started gaining power as a result of the American revolution, paving the way for the Grey administration. As for the Native Americans, I doubt their fate would have been any better off under the British. Just ask the Tasmanians. Oh wait, you can't.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Jul 7, 2008 9:20:16 AM
Some time round about 1944, as a British child in the USA, I realised that the long term effect of the American War of Independence had been to establish the independence of Britain. Without the War of Independence, a confederal empire would probably have developed, with its drive and effective center increasingly in Nortnh America.
Posted by: Diversity at Jul 7, 2008 10:36:06 AM
Franny's is good but not in my New York top 5. Difara (fun article below) is way better. . just don't go there on a weekend. . .
July 18, 2004
NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: MIDWOOD -- THE VOICE; Charred Bubbles, and Other
Secrets of the Slice
By DOMENICO DEMARCO; AS TOLD TO JEFF VANDAM
Fame has come late for Domenico DeMarco, who for 40 years has operated
Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Midwood, Brooklyn. Since 1999, the year
that a favorable review in a city guidebook put his pies on the map,
Mr. DeMarco has graced the cover of The Village Voice (the ''Best
Italian Restaurants'' issue in June), and his restaurant has topped
the Zagat list of the city's best pizzerias in 2004 and countless
other guides to slice-related nirvana.
Through it all, Mr. DeMarco has changed very little. With his hair
slicked back and flour on his shoes, he has continued to make each
pizza personally as three of his seven children labor in the back. He
maintains beds of basil and rosemary on the windowsill, and imports
nearly every ingredient from such faraway lands as Israel and the
Netherlands. The man insists on no less than three different cheeses
on each pizza, and chowhounds line up, sometimes for more than an hour
to buy a regular slice for $2.50 or the Sicilian for $2.75. The city's
reigning pizza deity is pleased by this sort of success, but he is
hardly surprised.
I'M 67 years old. I've been in Brooklyn since 1959. I'm from Provincia
di Caserta in Italy, near Napoli. When I got here, I spent three
months in Long Island, in Huntington, working on a farm.
I stayed three months in Long Island, then I came back to Brooklyn and
my brother and I opened a pizzeria at Fourth Avenue and 59th Street in
Sunset Park. The name was Little Venice, Piccola Venezia. We stayed
there five years.
The neighborhood, it was mostly Irish. I wasn't happy over there. The
people were cheap. If you raised it a nickel, they made a big deal out
of that. There were a lot of break-ins, a lot of broken windows. I got
a gun pointed at me one time.
So I sold, and I opened over here in 1964. I was supposed to open a
pizzeria at 77th Street and 18th Avenue. But then somebody put a bug
in my head and said there's a good spot on Avenue J. I didn't even
know Avenue J existed. So I come over here with my accountant on a
Saturday night, and this corner was for rent. It was so crowded, the
street. So I take the phone number, I call the landlord, and he says
to come see me Sunday, make sure you bring a deposit.
When I opened the store, my partner's name was Farina. My name is
DeMarco. So when the lawyer made the paper, he put the two names
together. Di Fara. Di for me, and Fara for him. I bought my partner
out in 1978, I think. I kept the same name; I didn't bother changing
it.
It was all Jewish then, but they weren't that religious. Then, little
by little, it became very Orthodox. People, they got scared, and they
all sold out their restaurants. I was left alone. And it was the best
thing that could have happened.
Nobody taught me to make the pizza. You gotta pick it up for yourself.
All of these 40 years, I keep experimenting. My pizza is good, because
I use fresh tomatoes. They come from Italy, from Salerno. Then I
started to get mozzarella from Italy, from my hometown in the province
of Caserta. It's $8 a pound, and this parmesan, it's $12. It comes
twice a week. This might have been made two days ago, or three days
ago.
I do this as an art. I don't look to make big money. If somebody comes
over here and offers me a price for the store, there's no price.
There's no money in the world they could pay me for it. I'm very proud
of what I do. I don't have any employees; I use my kids.
You want to know something? A lot of people, they pay more for a slice
than they have to. That guy David Blaine, the guy who does the magic
tricks? He was over here the other day. His bill was $75, but he gave
me $100. He comes here all the time.
I come over here at 8 o'clock in the morning, sometimes 7, because I
use fresh dough. I come from Italy, and I go back there every once in
a while to see how they do it over there. They don't throw it in the
icebox. It's not supposed to be cold dough. The fresh dough bubbles
when you put it in the oven, and the bubbles get a little burnt. You
see the pizza, and it's got a lot of black spots, it's Italian pizza.
If you see pizza that's straight brown, it's not Italian pizza.
We make the dough three or four times a day, because I believe in
fresh dough. Besides, when you use fresh dough, the pizza comes out
thin, not thick.
We start to close at 10 o'clock, but I never count the hours, because
I'm a farmer. We go into the farm early in the morning, and we go home
when the moon arrives. No problem.
I eat once a day, after I close. With wine. But I have one piece of
pizza every day, to see if it comes out all right. Then, after I
close, I sit down with my bottle of wine and I eat. When I eat, I like
to sit down. There's no way I can sit down once I open the door in the
morning.
I don't intend to retire. But I want my kids to take over the place.
They've got to follow me. They've got to follow my idea. Like I said,
I don't take the shortcuts.
Pizza has become considered a fast food. This one is slow food.
Anything you do, when you do it too fast, it's no good. The way I make
a pizza takes a lot of work. And I don't mind work.
Posted by: Jeff Gramm at Jul 7, 2008 1:45:31 PM
Box Office Prophets update:
Cars opened to a similar $60.1 million, and fell 44% in its second weekend, which was just a quiet weekend in June with no holiday to deal with. I think Pixar and Disney will be quite pleased with the second weekend of WALL-E. It now has a ten-day total of $128.1 million, crossing the $100 million mark on Friday, its eighth day of release. That ties Finding Nemo as the fastest Pixar flick to reach $100 million. WALL-E will have no problem becoming Pixar's seventh film to earn $200 million.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Jul 7, 2008 4:35:09 PM
Tyler wrote:
That said, American independence was probably very bad for native Americans and blacks and of course that rent transfer is part of what motivated independence.
What does this mean? The upper class colonists thought they would profit more from the institution of slavery if they seceded from England? (I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't understand the claim.)
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Jul 7, 2008 8:06:12 PM
The final figure for Wall-E's second-weekend gross revenue drop: -48.5%
Posted by: at Jul 8, 2008 2:49:21 PM
