I finally made it to Chicago after missing my connection in Atlanta due to the nasty storms out by the Jackson airport delaying my flight to Atlanta. In five minutes in the lobby, I ran into five different political scientists I know (four of whom actually recognized me), two of whom are named Chris. For a change, the folks at the Palmer House actually honored my request to be near the elevator (I guess finally making Silver HHonors membership has its privileges), but then again that may have just been a coincidence.

Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with Dirk tonight; then I can get organized for my panel tomorrow morning and my discussant gig Friday morning, so I’ll be free to work on the “things to do in Chicago” list Kelly gave me Friday night most of the rest of my time here.

You have to admit that The New York Times has quite a bit of testicular fortitude to publish the following paragraph with a straight face:

Two years ago, the Masters tournament was ensnared in a debate over the absence of women in the Augusta National membership, a debate spearheaded by Martha Burk, the chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

Then again, maybe the Grey Lady is just hoping its readership will forget that Howell Raines was ever employed by the paper.

The BBC is among those reporting that British prime minister Tony Blair will call a general election for Thursday, May 5th, one month from today; at the moment, the Conservative Party is trailing Blair’s Labour Party by about five percentage points in the polls, although the Tories are running ahead among those “certain” to vote (þ: PoliBlog).

1. What’s the deal with Lindsay Lohan?
2. So… how about them Dodgers?
3. Complete the analogy: George Bush is to chimpanzee as (blank) is to Lurch.
4. Would Ashlee Simpson be famous if her sister weren’t Jessica Simpson?
5. If you were the president of Haiti, how would you increase your exports of baseball players to match that of the Dominican Republic?
6. Explain the song “Dip It Low” by Christina Milian in one sentence.
7. How does theft of silverware and glassware from the Caf affect the international system? Give examples.
8. “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” What is “it”?
9. Under the CAN-SPAM Act, what is the maximum prison sentence that the assistant director of intramural athletics can receive for mailbombing the campus population with four announcements of a 3-on-3 Dodgeball tournament?
10. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

Today is the first of five consecutive days that I have to be up at an ungodly hour (today and Tuesday due to oral comps, Wednesday due to my flight to Chicago, Thursday and Friday due to my morning panels at MPSA). I get the odd feeling that I may not be a happy camper as this week progresses.

I think the weather gods are conspiring against me… check out the forecast for my trip to Chicago this week:

Wednesday: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 64. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

Wednesday Night: Showers likely. Mostly cloudy, with a low near 44. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

Thursday: A chance of showers. Cloudy, with a high around 50.

Thursday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 35.

Friday: Partly cloudy, with a high near 57.

Friday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 32.

Saturday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 65.

Ugh.

I cooked spaghetti for dinner with the lovely, talented, and pointy-eyeballed Kelly Friday night; she brought chocolate ice cream and I supplied a bottle of 1996 Gossamer Bay cabernet sauvignon that I’d somehow acquired a while back (and was very good). It was a thoroughly pleasant evening, although I spent most of Saturday recovering from the wine intake—not to mention the two pints of Bass I had earlier at Fenian’s with some other colleagues.

Update: Just to clarify (for any concerned readers): all I was really suffering from on Saturday was a lack of sleep; alcohol seems to interfere with me falling asleep.

Well, the long-awaited column has finally arrived in print, and I only just learned it was there with an email from a reader. Serves me right for not checking the Clarion-Ledger website today.

It’s on judicial filibusters and a possible compromise between the Democratic and Republican positions on the “nuclear option.”

Jeff Licquia finds that thieves are discovering something anyone who saw Demolition Man twelve years ago already knew: biometrics don’t do a good job checking whether or not the owner is still attached to the thing being scanned. For that matter, the Tom Selleck sci-fi flick Runaway showed biometric scamming in action 21 years ago. Do the people who come up with these things just not watch sci-fi films?

Todd Zywicki has a lengthy post at The Volokh Conspiracy on the merits of intellectual diversity on campus, most of which I am in full agreement with. However, Zywicki seems to have picked a rather poor example of indoctrination:

My “History of the American South” class was a one semester narrative by a Marxist professor on how rich southern whites had conspired to manipulate racist sentiments among lower-class whites to keep them from banding together in the “natural” economic alliance of poor whites and blacks to plunder the property of rich whites. He was the only one who taught it, so if I wanted to take it (I was from South Carolina, so I was interested in it), I had to take it from him.

I hate to break it to Zywicki, but that’s basically what rich whites did during the post-Civil War era in the South, a phenomenon that continues (in diminished form) to this day. You don’t have to be a Marxist to buy that argument, although I suppose it helps.

Granted, there are other important aspects of Southern history and politics (although most of them are connected, at least somewhat, to the twin issues of elite dominance and race as well), so if the entire semester was just a rant on that particular topic I’d say Zywicki had a rather poor instructor. But “divide the have-nots through racist appeals” was a cornerstone of planter-elite strategy to maintain political and economic power, particularly in the Deep South, well into the 1960s.

A couple of somewhat weird articles have appeared on the Chronicle of Higher Education website in the last few days. First off, a graduate student decides to reinforce some stereotypes of academics:

After years of reading The Chronicle, I’ve heard just about every complaint that teachers can make—about a lack of appreciation for what we do, trouble getting students to talk, the vagaries of grading—but there’s one basic complaint that has gone unexplored so far: What if you’re so hot and bothered that you have trouble teaching the class?

Um, I’d advise sucking it up and dealing with it, or getting a girlfriend to solve that whole being “hot and bothered” thing. For what it’s worth, it’s 80 degrees out today and everyone’s pretty much half-naked here.

Second, Gene Fant of Union University (in lovely Jackson, Tennessee) explains why I can’t get a job in the geographic area that I want to work in. Now someone tells me.

I came home today to find a gas leak in my apartment, apparently caused by a hole in the hose between my gas stove and the supply line in my kitchen. Fun! (Thankfully, the gas to the stove was able to be switched off until the landlord can get a replacement gas hose tomorrow morning, without also disabling the heat and hot water.)

I saw the first episode of Invasion Iowa last night and found it pretty entertaining. The person who came up with the idea of Shatner hauling around his Emmy with him was a genius, and “Tiny” dancing around in his nude Speedo was pretty funny too. We’ll see how they push it a bit further over the next few days as the other characters get fleshed out.

Mike Munger writes:

Now, those of you who have had the great pleasure of beholding Kgrease in the flesh know that (1) there is a lot of flesh, and (2) my hair is shoulder length, very curly, and with lots of blonde highlights. Some of those highlights are from the sun, but most come from chemical products applied by a trained and highly competent hairdresser. (That’s right: “My name is Blonde….Fake Blonde.”)

A wash/haircut/highlights job from my hairdresser costs $90, plus $15 or so tip.

I think it’s pretty safe to say I’d never had guessed that Mike spent $105 on his hair, although I suppose it’s also safe to say I suspected the “clean cut” look on his vita or here was probably closer to nature’s effects than this. Surreal, indeed.

Before I become Staff, Departmental and blank, there’s still a job to be done here—most notably on my current radar, administering written comprehensive exams to 24 seniors on Monday night, then grading the American portions of said exams and sitting in on oral comps the following week. Happy happy, joy joy.

If I’d known there was a T-shirt with this logo on it, I might have considered purchasing it to wear at the conference this weekend. Somehow I doubt the humor would have been highly appreciated.

Four hints:

• You might want to run a spyware and virus scan on the guest PC on the fourth floor of the Fogelman Executive Center. It sorely needs it.
• Don’t try to secure your wireless network with MAC address security, particularly if you allow guest login access to a PC on the network.
• If you do secure your wireless network with MAC address security, don’t allow known wired MAC addresses to connect wirelessly.
• Don’t annoy your alumni by not granting gratis wireless access to guests at your own hotel. Particularly when the Holiday Inn across the street, also operated by the university, does have gratis access for its guests, and you already have wireless infrastructure in the building. (This annoyance, by the way, will be remembered when I have some money to give to various alumni associations.)

Toodles!

I met my friends Alfie and Annie for dinner tonight at Corky’s, followed by beers at the Fox and Hound on Sanderlin; both events were punctuated by bad service, but otherwise quite enjoyable.

As both Mr. and the future Mrs. Sumrall are avid Signifying Nothing fans, I indulged a request from Annie for her photo to be posted to the blog; apologies for the low quality, as the flash on my camera phone sucks royally, although daylight photos come out fairly well.

Some interesting discussion is happening on the H-PolMeth list over an apparent policy by the editors of the American Journal of Political Science to reject papers for a variety of reasons, most controversially including summarily rejecting any article that advances formal theory without an empirical application of that theory. Without taking sides (I can always hope I might get a pub in the AJPS someday, and the people on the other side of the dispute include at least one good friend of mine), all I can say is that this one could become highly entertaining real quick.

Greg of Begging to Differ says House is his new favorite TV show. While it’s not my absolute favorite show at the moment (I probably would rank Galactica a small notch higher), it’s truly compelling TV—and that’s spoken by someone who has never cared for either medical dramas or CSI-type shows.

I shouldn’t have laughed at this post on the Terri Schiavo saga from the newly-made-over Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, but I did:

In all the debate about “what Terri would have wanted” people seem to be forgetting that her vegetative state was initially caused by anorexia and bulimia. She was TRYING to starve herself. Let her finish.

In all seriousness, though, I’m thinking there are far more important things for the Florida and U.S. legislatures to be using their time on; of course, the libertarian in me thinks (perhaps on the erroneous assumption that time is a meaningful legislative commodity) the more time they spend on this the less they can spend futzing with my life.

Since Mom “Beat Beifuss” (the Commercial Appeal’s movie reviewer) in the Oscar picks this year, she won a crapload of free passes to Malco movies, so we went to see Hitch tonight out in Collierville. We both thought it was a very entertaining and cute movie; I’d go see it if you haven’t already.

The second exam in American government had good and bad points; the good point was that the average, an 82, was basically where I wanted it to be. The bad point is that, somehow, the standard deviation was 4. So bad, in fact, I was sorely tempted to rescale the scores so there would be a larger standard deviation. Even worse, the correlation between scores on the first two exams was something like 0.2.

In layman’s terms, somehow I managed to ask 30 multiple choice questions, about 25 of which were either too easy (almost everyone got them right) or too hard (the only way people got them right was by guessing); coupled with the essay questions that never seem to discriminate well among students, I produced an exam that was borderline useless. Ugh.

Michael Jennings has photos up at Samizdata from his recent trip to view the highly impressive Millau Viaduct in France.

James Joyner links to an AP article about Coca-Cola’s plans to launch a new product in June, called “Coca-Cola Zero.” He asks:

It’s unclear why Coke Zero will be different from Diet Coke or Coke C2.

Well, the obvious answer is that C2 is not a zero-calorie soda; it’s just half the calories of regular Coke. Diet Coke doesn’t taste anything like Coke. So, the moral of the story is that a “diet Coke” that tastes like real Coke would be worth having; according to Coke’s press release, that’s the plan:

“Coca-Cola Zero is exactly what young adults told us they wanted – real Coca-Cola taste, zero calories and a new brand they can call their own,” said Dan Dillon, vice president, Diet Portfolio, Coca-Cola North America. “Young people today do not want to compromise on flavor or calories and we think Coca-Cola Zero’s taste and personality will appeal to them.”

There’s a product website here, of course.