You know, if someone had told me earlier in the week that Ben-Jarvus Green-Ellis would run for 226 yards and Seth Adams would pass for 305 today, I’d probably have been happy. But zero execution in the red zone and missed conversions = a loss to Missouri. I’d have consoled myself with a Mississippi State loss to Tulane, but no such luck, despite the game being tied at 17 at the half. What’s even worse is I was sitting next to a kid, so I couldn’t even shout profanities at the State fans or the referees.

So instead I consoled myself by seeing Superbad. That did the trick.

My presentation on measuring political sophistication with item-response theory models is here; it’s something of a work in progress, as I haven’t put together the pretty graphs for the American NES data yet.

I’m off tomorrow for a day trip over to Columbia to give a talk on measuring political sophistication… so don’t expect a lot of posting from me while I browbeat R and LaTeX into producing my slides this evening.

And, no, before anyone asks: this isn’t a job talk—just a practice run.

Here are some photos from the game last weekend, for the curious or otherwise disturbed.

I have to say I had a pretty good time in Columbia this weekend, despite Ole Miss’ general ineptitude leading to a 34–7 drubbing at the hands of Mizzou. I also enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with one of my professors from grad school days, Marvin Overby, and getting together with Frequent Commenter Alfie and the gang for a Midwestern tailgate and pub crawl.

In other football-related observations:

• Line of the weekend: Brad Nessler, Paul Maguire, and Bob Griese are calling a game on ESPN (Oklahoma–Washington, I think). Maguire sets up Nessler to plug his doing play-by-play on the late MNF double-header game, and this exchange follows:
  

  Maguire: What about me and Bob? We’re not doing anything Monday night.
  Nessler: You’re not doing anything now.

• Incidentally, that game was worth watching for Bonnie Bernstein alone.
• NBC should have left the “players introduce themselves” video packages with the rotting corpse of ABC Sports where they found them.
• Fox’s NFL graphics package looks a hell of a lot more professional this year than in years past. CBS… not so much.
• The solid ABC bug on ESPN on ABC needs to go away. Now. Before plasma TV owners start calling in death threats to affiliates.
• ESPN needs to give up on trying to hype its “talent” to get people to watch its shows. Telling me that I can hear Colin Cowherd spew his ignorance on ESPNU while I get queasy from the SkyCam (and Cowherd), or trying to dupe me into watching the Sunday night SportsCenter with Stoo-yah Scott by promising more of Chris Berman’s stale act, is not effective promotion of the brand unless I accidentally find another Disney network to watch instead.
• People sitting in a studio don’t need to be using hand-held microphones. Either body-mike them or use a frickin’ boom mike.

Finally, any sports bar that has blown $5k on a widescreen flatscreen television should not be showing a stretched standard-definition broadcast of anything, much less a football game available in high definition. At the very least, switch off the damn stretch mode—am I the only person alive who thinks that exaggerating people’s width by ⅓ is a bad idea?

I now have an appointment to see Brent Schaeffer demolish the Missouri Tigers on September 9th. That is, if Brent can manage to be eligible to play by then…

Update: As Alfie notes in the comments, the Brent Schaeffer era has now commenced in Oxford.