Given that we’re already spending the GNP of a small nation on weddings, why not include a little Internet video to share those Big Days with the world? The Wall Street Journal reports that wedding Web sites are a bigger phenomenon than ever, with couples sharing details of their nuptials in blogs, webcasts and online videos.

Consumerist offers a conspiracy-busting walkthrough of the realities of oil/gas prices that may cause complaining commuters to shift their gripes in a new direction. Drawing on information from a 324-page report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, they walk us through the interplay between markets, oil refineries and your local gas station.

Here’s a penetrating and insightful take on the hotly debated subject of organ donation, from someone far closer to the topic than most — the blog’s author is Chicagoan Tom Simon, an FBI white-collar crime investigator who recently donated a kidney to Brenda Lagrimas, a stranger he met on MatchingDonors.com.

There was a nifty article in the New York Times Magazine a while back about “literary spam,” junk e-mail that includes passages from literary classics, in the hopes that legitimate text would fool spam filters. (Apparently, it doesn’t.)

I just got a piece of spam that’s even niftier. Its subject line: “yipping econometrica psychophysiology flourish.” Considering the kind of messages we regularly get here at Freakonomics, I was sure this was a legitimate e-mail.

Unfortunately, it was just a pharmaceutical come-on.

Still, as a non-economist who first came across the journal Econometrica while learning about the now-famous decision-making research of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, I was pretty tickled to see this subject line, and applaud the high standards of this particular spammer.

And yes, my spam filter did catch this e-mail: but, just as I very much enjoy reading newspapers and magazines for the information gleaned from certain ads, I also occasionally like looking over my spam to see what it says about the world.

FWIW, a man who is reportedly among the world’s most prolific spammers was just arrested. I wonder if he’s responsible for any of these zombie networks.

Levitt and Dubner have written before about the origins of star-making talent. But can the road to pop culture megastardom be calculated as a matter of statistical probability? Back in 1994, Kee Chung of SUNY-Buffalo and Raymond Cox of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology applied an equation called the Yule-Simon Distribution to this question. Their findings were that the probability distribution implied by the Yule model mirrored data gathered in the pop music industry — thereby indicating that the model could be used as a map to generate the next pop superstar.

Now, the economists Laura Spierdijk and Mark Voorneveld have tested Chung and Cox’s conclusion in their paper, “Superstars Without Talent? The Yule Distribution Controversy.” Using a “parametric bootstrap and several powerful test statistics,” they checked Chung and Cox’s data and found overwhelming evidence refuting their conclusion. Spierdijk and Voorneveld sum up their predecessors’ apparent mistake as follows:

They base their statement on an approximation of the Yule distribution, a power law. QQ-plots point out where things go wrong: although the Yule distribution seems a fairly accurate approximation of the lower quantiles of the empirical distribution, it puts too much weight in the right tail of the distribution. Consequently, the Yule distribution captures stardom, but not superstardom.

As such, it looks like using statistical equations to find the next Britney Spears may not be such a good plan after all.

A lot of you asked really good questions of Mark Cuban, which he will now pick through and answer.

As it turns out, he’s in the news today for the very topic that several of you raised: his plans to start a new football league to compete with the NFL.

Here are a couple of relevant passages:

“It’s a pretty simple concept,” Cuban said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “We think there is more demand for pro football than supply.” … Cuban said in his e-mail he believes the salary cap makes it easier to compete financially with the NFL because of the salary imbalance that leaves lower-level players with lower salaries. That would allow the new league to fill its rosters with players taken lower than the second round, as well as late NFL cuts and free agents who escape the NFL draft.

All the other rival football leagues that failed did so when the NFL was weaker than it is today — and so I have a hard time imagining that a new rival can prevail. But I also can’t think of anyone better equipped to try than Cuban. I look forward to hearing his answer on the subject.

If you wanted to get elected President of the United States, which of these would you least like to be? (At least, according to the fraction of those surveyed who said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate with this characteristic):

a) Black

b) Catholic

c) Homosexual

d) Jewish

e) Female

f) Atheist

The answer is here at www.data360.org, an interesting site for finding, sharing, and presenting data.

While you’re browsing it you can see which colleges have the largest endowment per student (there is one in the top five that will shock you), homicide rates by country (guess where the United States ranks before looking), and much, much more.

Hats off to Tom Paper for creating such a great site.