I managed to get my gas and electricity switched on around noon, thus ending my long, semi-homeless saga since arriving in Ann Arbor. (Thanks to the kindness of an acquiaintence and his roommate, I at least had a roof over my head last night, gratis.) Now I’m dealing with accumulated spam email.

Ex-Texas Tech star Ricky Williams has lucked into some good news; the former Texas running back who shares his name is apparently retiring from the Miami Dolphins, at least according to the “hateable” Dan Le Batard* of the Miami Herald. The retiring Williams, you may recall, was the object of the foolish New Orleans Saints trade that gave away all their draft picks for about a decade or so; he was eventually traded to the Dolphins when New Orleans managed to acquire former Ole Miss RB Deuce McAllister.

Frivolous lawsuit or real justice? Check out this story from Knoxville:

The Tennessee Court of Appeals has reinstated a lawsuit against a gas station filed by two victims of drunken driving.

The court ruled Gary West and Michell Richardson could sue East Tennessee Pioneer Oil Company for negligence.

An investigation concluded that employees of a Knoxville Exxon station operated by Pioneer refused to sell Brian Lee Tarver beer because he was intoxicated, but helped him pump fuel into his car.

Police say Tarver left the station with his lights off, driving in the wrong lane and crashed head-on into the car carrying West and Richardson in July, 2000. [emphasis added]

It seems to me the more appropriate target for this lawsuit is the employees, who I doubt were following company policy in helping drunk drivers fill their gas tanks (assuming the Exxon is self-serve only), but considering they were stupid enough to fill the guy’s tank, they probably don’t have any money to collect in a lawsuit anyway.

(Link via email from a friend of the blog.)

Brett Marston isn’t too impressed with the National Labor Relations Board’s decision last week that removed the right of graduate students to organize at private universities. He writes:

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but the majority seems to have little interest in the function of labor law. They seem to view it as a collection of information about congressional views on categories of relationships between people rather than as an attempt to reduce labor conflicts. For the majority, the relevant question is whether TA’s have a primarily “economic” or a primarily “educational” relationship to the university; if it’s the latter, then the administrators win, because educational relationships are not covered by the rules.

In contrast, the dissent seems to indicate that the function of labor law is to provide a regularization of existing disputes that are characterized by the unionizing participants themselves as labor disputes. It’s the disputes themselves that matter, not the formal relationship categories that Congress has helped create.

My suspicion, however, is that TA unionization doesn’t “reduce labor conflicts” at all; instead, it is a vehicle for graduate students to obtain greater benefits from their employer/educator than they might otherwise receive (by bargaining collectively, rather than on an individual basis), which seems rather orthogonal to the idea of “conflict.” If anything, having a union would seem to create a system by which disputes between graduate students and the administration would be increased and intensified, by being channeled into adversarial activities such as “work to rule” and strikes—events that wouldn’t occur if disgruntled students had individual disputes with the administration.

On the other hand, I was raised in an era and a political culture hostile to unions, and grew up cheering on Margaret Thatcher as she pummelled Britain’s excessively powerful labor unions into submission, so I could be wrong.

The “Marriage Protection Act of 2004” has all the good legalist-model-types in the blogosphere scrambling for reasons why it would be unconstitutional. Josh Chafetz says it’s unconstitutional because it (partially) strips the federal judiciary of its mandatory jurisdiction over all cases arising under federal statute and the Constitution.

My gut feeling is that the Court would be more likely to rule the act (assuming it ever becomes law, something I don’t see given the inevitable filibuster in the Senate) unconstitutional on the basis of Romer v. Evans, on the basis of the act being a violation of equal protection.

All this, of course, is trumped by the attitudinalist in me, which sees zero chance of the Supreme Court ever permitting any of its jurisdiction to be curtailed by Congress without its consent. The legal reasoning surrounding such a ruling would be, more likely than not, just window dressing for the underlying preferences of the Court’s members. (I suppose this is my bias as a political scientist showing.)

Michael Badnarik has Chip Taylor reminiscing about Harry Browne. Say what you will about Browne (and, in the four years since I met him, I’ve found plenty of bad things to say about him—now, it’s just one shell game after another with no sign of anything productive ever coming out of it), but at least he wasn’t a complete nutter.

Mike Hollihan recalls “Hurricane Elvis,” the storm that knocked out power in some parts of Memphis for three weeks last summer.

Conrad fills in the gaps in reporting the Filipino government’s spineless capitulation to terrorists. As most sane observers predicted, copycat terrorists have emerged in the hopes of finding similar appeasers elsewhere—though the logic of kidnapping citizens of countries that aren’t even part of the occupation force escapes me.

Steven Taylor notes that it’s apparently pretty hard for his university’s administration to figure out that he—and most of the rest of the faculty—are on fall-and-spring semester contracts, and thus have no obligation to set foot on campus over the summer. Personally, I’d be happy to sit in my office all summer for ⅓ of my nine-month pay, but somehow I doubt that would be offered.

Free advice for those planning to move:

1. Pay someone else to do it for you.
2. Budget at least a week to pass out afterward.
3. If you decide not to spring for professionals, go back to #1.

All that said, I’m slowly but surely getting settled down here in Jackson, and getting back up to speed with current events and the like. Hopefully I’ll be back in the groove in no time.

Amber Taylor is soliciting votes in a face-off of The Volokh Conspiracy’s three worst guest contributors. As they say, vote early and often.

Update: One of Taylor’s candidates for “worst conspirator,” Cathy Seipp, has really gotten under Conrad’s skin with a fisk-worthy post accusing non-voters of being lazy and idiotic, a phrase Conrad would more likely apply to Ms. Seipp’s analysis of the issue at hand. Go away for a few days, and apparently all hell breaks loose in the blogosphere…

Also, Will Baude is running a web poll asking the same question. At present, Clayton “I'm a homophobe, and I'm OK” Cramer is well in the lead.

A few friendly words of advice: if you’re moving, hire professionals.

More later Tuesday, I hope…

Uh-oh. It seems Laura and I are headed for a disagreement over the merits of Avril Lavigne. For what it’s worth, I do find “Sk8er Boi” to be a deeply annoying song. I realize this won’t really redeem me in Laura’s eyes, mind you.

More ammunition here. But if you really want to know what pop sensation I truly have a “thing” for, click here and forever hold your peace.

Tyler Cowen rhetorically asks whether anyone would buy fluoridated water:

But hey, when you buy bottled water isn’t fluoride what you’re trying to avoid?

It may not make sense in urban areas, but if you get water from a well (or even from some rural water utilities), the water isn’t going to be fluoridated. Presumably, this product is aimed at parents in rural areas (or who live in areas with bad drinking water supplies, like Washington, D.C.) who want their kids to have more cavity-resistant teeth. So it makes sense to me, at least, especially when you consider the alternative is trying to make your kids take fluoride tablets every day (something I had to do while growing up).

I hate to rain on the poor guy’s campaign, but Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik’s first fundraising mail didn’t exactly get off to a good start. In addition to making the mistake of targeting me (although, if I had some cash, I might actually be willing to part with a few bucks of it), the letter also managed to give a return address in “Austin, Texax.”

Victor of The Dead Parrot Society is back from a trip to Mississippi with James Bates, who’s a photojournalist putting together a portrait of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Interesting stuff.

Eugene Volokh finds a shocking relationship between ice cream consumption and sex crimes. Fun with stats ensues.

(This item is blogged so I remember to shamelessly rip it off when I teach methods in the fall.)

I can’t answer all of Will Baude’s questions, but I’ll give two of them a shot:

Why is a turnpike called a turnpike?

For that matter, what exactly makes a particular stretch of limited-access highway a turnpike?

Turnpikes were originally named “turnpikes” because that was the name of the turnstiles that were used at the toll gates; they started out as “turnpike roads” but the name was shortened to simply “turnpike” or even (particularly in the South) “pike.”

In general, a modern turnpike is a fully-controlled access highway (what engineers and Californians call a “freeway,” Britons would call a “motorway,” and francophones call an autoroute) that charges a toll for use; however, there are exceptions—most notably, the Connecticut Turnpike (part of Interstate 95), which stopped charging tolls after a nasty multivehicle accident at a tollbooth in 1985. Also, some contemporary turnpikes only charge tolls on part of their length—the Maryland Turnpike starts near Baltimore and runs to the Delaware border, but the toll is only charged at one location on the route.

So, in sum, the name “turnpike” is generally applied to roads that are, or used to be, toll roads, and there’s no particular logic to whether or not a particular toll road will be called a “turnpike.”

I think this report says pretty much everything you need to know about the Mississippi Democratic Party’s attitude toward its African-American base: like children, best seen (particularly when voting), but not heard.

Link via Radley Balko. More discussion from the Jackson Free Press lefty echo chamber here.

Signifying Nothing will be offline this coming weekend (most likely, beginning sometime Friday); we should be back up and running sometime on Monday, July 19, depending on the vagaries of my new cable company and the general level of progress in moving into my new home—most specifically, whether or not I manage to reassemble my computer desk properly. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

Unlearned Hand fesses up to liking Avril Lavigne’s new album. I generally agree; it’s better than most sophomore efforts, and it more than surpasses the “three good songs” test.

Brian J. Noggle muses about Subway’s decision to stop giving out “Sub Club” stamps in some markets. Considering the existence of superior competitors, like Jimmy John’s and Lenny’s (to leave aside national chains like Quizno’s, Blimpie, and Schlotsky’s), I think Subway may be making just a minor tactical error here.

In this otherwise sensible Clarion-Ledger op-ed praising Bill Cosby for his recent remarks imploring poor blacks to do more to help themselves, Ole Miss and Marshall prof Burnis R. Morris pulls out a strawman to joust with:

However, I fear Cosby’s comments will be taken out of context and open a floodgate of criticism against the disadvantaged. Cosby’s constructive criticism is useful because of his credentials, but all messengers don’t wish success for the poor.

Are there really that many people out there who “don’t wish success for the poor” beyond the lunatic fringe like the Klan, who are hardly a large segment of society who can “open a floodgate of criticism”? Libertarians and conservatives (and even many liberals) favor welfare reform, and even cutbacks, not because they don’t want the poor to be successful, but because they believe that existing welfare programs don’t actually help the poor become more successful, instead miring them in a cycle of poverty and dependency.

One can legitimately debate the merits of these reform proposals (see, for example, this Tyler Cowen post on taxes and public assistance in industrialized democracies), but implying the goal of most reformers is to hurt the poor is pretty asinine.

Ahem.

Rather, just like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the Confederate battle flag motif used in Southern state flags, it was a belated addition of the Eisenhower era. Both the cross and “under God” were added as part of a wave of religious iconography that swept the nation in the 1950s in response to fears of “godless communism,” while the Confederate flag was added to demonstrate contempt for the growing civil rights movement — and to rally local support for continued enforcement of Jim Crow laws.

(Minor) point of fact: the Confederate battle flag emblem was first incorporated in the Mississippi state flag on February 7, 1894—Mississippi’s legislators must have been quite prescient to forsee a conflict over civil rights arising in another six decades or so.* The only other state to incorporate the battle flag “motif” into its own was Georgia, which did so in 1956; however, the use of Confederate imagery in the Georgia state flag dates back to 1879. No other state adopted the battle flag in part or whole, although South Carolina put up the flag in 1962 over its statehouse, but never incorporated the design into its flag.

Dan Drezner is having trouble figuring out why Nicole Kidman is going through a bit of a dry spell on the dating scene. My working hypotheses:

• Men think she looks like Virginia Woolf when not wearing makeup.
• She’s too young for Russell Crowe.
• Her gaydar is broken (insert your own Tom Cruise joke here).

Update: Xrlq in comments points to this Kim du Toit post, which blames the drought on her previous association with Lenny Kravitz.