Howie Mandel Can Save Our Economy

I thought, perhaps, you could use some levity amidst all this talk of $700 billion, financial bailouts, and potential great depression.

If this Weblog is famous for anything, it's for the formula I calculated for NBC's game show, Deal or No Deal. It is far and a way the most popular thing I have ever written, and a day does not go by without several people searching out my regression formula.

In fact, if you Google "deal or no deal formula" right now, this blog is the second thing that comes up. It was No. 1 for a long time, but Yahoo! answers has beat me out.

At any rate, when someone searches this page through Google and loads it, their IP address saves in my StatCounter file. I almost never look at it, and I did today.

And I saw: "treas.gov," which means that in the middle of all this talk of doom and gloom, some Treasury employee was Googling the formula for Deal or No Deal.

And it made me laugh.

Until I wondered: "I hope having the country go on the game show is not our real bailout plan."