Unless Mike Easley joins Mark Warner to start a conga line of southern Democratic governors tripping all over themselves to avoid the appearance of being the “heavy,” lest they provoke the MoveOn.org wing of the national party, North Carolina will conduct the 1000th execution since the reinstatement of capital punishment tonight.

On the other hand, we’re still behind Singapore in the number of drug mules awaiting imminent execution. Woo-hoo.

The functionality of wearing a thick wool crewneck sweater would seem to be defeated if two inches of your midriff are bare.

Brian Weatherson has some advice that is contrary to the conventional wisdom for his readers. Color me deeply skeptical.

þ: James Joyner, who aptly summarizes Weatherson’s argument thusly:

Go to grad school if you can get a free ride to a top ten institution or if you don’t mind being relegated to the backwaters of academia teaching dull students or don’t mind losing ten years of earning potential before going into another line of work.

Since none of those three really apply to me (except possibly #3), I think we can safely say I am an idiot. Frankly, if I weren’t really good* at teaching a class (research methods) that most political scientists hate to teach with an unrivalled passion†, I’d have no career.

* By “really good,” I mean “not as horribly as 99% of other professors.” I freely admit that I could be better.
† The reasons are two-fold: people who teach methods typically get terrible student evaluations, particularly at schools where methods is a requirement for the major, and teaching methods is typically harder work than sitting around talking about one’s own “substantive” research interests or spewing out the intro outline for the 17th time.

I can’t even pretend to care about the ACC-Big Ten challenge (much less college basketball in general), and I was falling asleep on my sofa a few hours ago while watching good TV, yet for some silly reason I’m wide awake and watching Duke–Indiana on TiVo delay with Dickie V anyway.

They must put drugs in the water supply here; that’s the only explanation.

Brian from MGoBlog and Mark Hasty add to the list of reasons to dislike ESPN, pushing it well over 100 entries.

þ: EDSBS, of course.