How Coal Miners Are Like Shamu

The latest edition of Undercover Economist, which is usually devoted to bucking convetional wisdom and congratulating itself for being wacky enough to do so, compares realationships between power plants and coal mines to marriage.

To me, it seems to be a naked (though I think ulitimately unsuccessful) attempt to catch the same wave that propelled What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Mariage to the top of NYT's hit charts, and did not go unnoticed by Slate.

This article is missing the animal hook, which will probably be most successful, but the comparison between coal mining and marriage is so forced that one can't help but think that someone somewhere thinks that "marriage anaolgies = astronomical hit counts," simlilar to Howard Stern's law that "lesbians = ratings."

I think we can probably look forward to more shoehorned comparisons of some aspect of politics, business, or something to husbands, wives, or marriage.