Via Abiola Lapite, I learned that this pathetic racist piece of shit is running for the Republican Congressional nomination in Tennessee’s 8th district, which includes part of Shelby County (although not Memphis).

Unfortunately, he’s the only one on the ballot. According to this AP story, Tennessee Republican leaders didn’t bother fielding a candidate, since the 8th district is considered a safe Democratic seat for Rep. John Tanner.

The polls will be closing in about ten minutes. Nevertheless, I’d like to wish good luck to Dennis Bertrand, who is running as a write-in candidate.

UPDATE: The racist piece of shit is in the lead, 4907 to 416, with 48% of precincts reporting. Sigh.

UPDATE 2: The racist has won. This has not been a good week for race relations in western Tennessee.

My first thought on seeing the headline

Recreational Use of Viagra on the Increase

was, “What other sort of use is there?”

On second thought, however, there are some people who use it professionally, or so I’ve been told.

The CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases has reported that many Americans are getting sick each summer from diseases spread in public pools.

One of the largest pool-related outbreaks in the country happened last August in Lawrence, Kansas, when as many as 600 people may have been sickened by the parasitic disease cryptosporidium. The CDC found that the parasite was spread through local pools, day care centers and people who lived together.

This summer, the Lawrence-Douglas County health department has been trying to help pool operators and swimmers learn how to keep their pools germ-free. The No. 1 message: Don’t swim if you have diarrhea.

Indeed.

Digital Camera Shopper magazine reports that most digital camera memory cards are virtually indestructible:

They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests.

Obviously they can only be destroyed by casting them into the volcanic furnace in Mordor in which they were forged.

I’ve posted a review of Reiner Knizia’s game Modern Art at Settling Catan.

Prof. Bryan Caplan revels in his nerdiness at Marginal Revolution.

In case you haven't guessed, yes, I consider myself a nerd. I'm such a nerd that I worry that my sons will fail to embrace their nerd heritage. The best game show in history, Beat the Geeks, began by asking each contestant "What's the geekiest thing about you?" I still wish I could have been a contestant just to give my response:

"I am the Dungeon Master for an all-economists' Dungeons and Dragons game."

Beat that, geeks!

That sounds like a challenge to me. Or perhaps a new blog-meme. Okay, here’s the geekiest thing about me:

I met my wife because we were both subscribed to a Sandman fanzine entitled Dream Lovers.

And to tie it all together, here’s a blast from the past: a mailing list discussion on free will from 1995 between Caplan, me, and several others. In the midst of this discussion, I announce my engagement. Wow, it’s been nine years.

IIRC, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, was also a member of that mailing list. Although maybe that was a different philosophy mailing list.

Eugene Volokh, defending the legal profession from charges that the This song is your song controversy is all the lawyers’ fault, writes:

But at most what we have here is a few special lawyers-by-training -- many of whom are no longer even lawyers in private service, but are lawmakers of one sort or another -- making unsound decisions. We do not have some general ethical failing on the part of the legal profession as a whole.

I don’t have anything substantive to say about Prof. Volokh’s post, but this does give me an opportunity to advance a linguistic mission of mine: to bring about a distinction between the words lawyer and attorney.

Now I’m not claiming this is distinction is found standard American English, but I think it would be a good distinction to make.

If we make the distinction, a lawyer is a person who has a certain professional training, whereas an attorney is a person, usually a lawyer, who represents people in their legal affairs.

An attorney is not necessarily a lawyer. Judges and law clerks are almost always lawyers, but (at least in the federal judiciary), they are not permitted to be attorneys. And someone who decides to represent himself in a legal matter is his own attorney, even though he may not be a lawyer.

We may make a similar distinction between doctor and physician. Senator Bill "Cat Murderer" Frist is a doctor, since he has a medical degree, but he is no longer a physician.

From today’s obituaries in the Commercial Appeal:

A___ S___ W___, 67, of Memphis, retired cook for the Memphis City Schools, died Wednesday at Methodist South Hospital. ... She was a member of the Heroines of Jericho, Heroines of Temple Crusades P.H.A and the Order of the Eastern Star Eureka Chapter 241, where she was past most ancient matron of Eureka Court 19, princess captain of Wolverine Guild 3 and second lieutenant commandress of Moolah Court 22 Daughters of Isis.

I can only hope that my obituary is as colorful.

When I went to summer camp, all we learned was how to tie square knots and clove hitches. But Tyler Cowen’s daughter is learning a lot more in the Center for Talented Youth program at Johns Hopkins.

Yana, who is fourteen, took a class on the philosophy of mind. She just started another class on the French and Russian Revolutions. This is her third year there, she calls herself a CTY addict. The year before she did Latin. This time we had her for two days between sessions. I heard about modal logic, Newcomb's Paradox, and mind-body reductionism. Yana now knows why she believes in free will, and why she doesn't want to be an undergraduate philosophy major.

Apparently they’re warning these kids about the state of the philosophy job market.

Happy blogiversary to me! July 18 marked one year of blogging here at Signifying Nothing for me. During that time, I’ve posted 144 times, which is an average of 2.76 times per week.

I’d like to thank Chris for letting me spout off on his blog, in spite of our substantial political differences.

I anticipate my blogging will become less and less political as the November election approaches, and I become more and more disgusted with the whole sordid process. I’ll be doing a lot more boardgame blogging at Settling Catan. And I’ll also be returning to my philosophical roots. I just received my copy of Donald Davidson’s first posthumous volume of essays, Problems of Rationality, and I’ll be posting a review of each essay as I read through them in the coming weeks.

I’ve posted a review of the game Ra at Settling Catan.

I’ve posted a review of Memoir '44, a boardgame about the Allied Invasion of Normandy, at Settling Catan.

According to this story at IOL, Japan’s defense ministry plans to release it’s annual white paper in manga (comic book) format.

"We'd like to be able to reach the younger generations, those in their 20s and 30s," a ministry spokesperson said.

“We hope the public reads the report so that we gain their understanding,” Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted by Kyodo news agency as telling a news conference after the white paper was released.

I’ve posted a review of the game El Grande over at Settling Catan.

In an attempt to curb underage drinking, Missouri has passed a new law which goes into effect Thursday, requiring beer kegs to be registered to their buyers.

The law requires retailers to attach a tag that will allow the keg to be traced back to the buyer. The store must keep records for three months with the buyer's name, address and birth date.

The idea is that if someone bought a keg and supplied it to teenagers, and the party was broken up, law enforcement could identify who provided the alcohol and pursue charges.

They'll take my beer when they pry it from my cold dead hands!

According to this story in the New Zealand Herald, the terrorist menace may have a new weapon: booby-trapped beer coolers!

Security officials have warned of a possible new weapon in the terrorist arsenal - booby-trapped beer coolers.

Law-enforcement officials in the United States have been warned to be alert for the enticing bombs.

The warning was sent to 18,000 law-enforcement groups by the FBI last week, Time magazine reported.

Is nothing sacred to those barbarians?

I was puzzling today over the semantics of the term “laundry.”

When clothes are on your body, they are not laundry. But when you toss them into a pile, basket, or hamper, and they are waiting to be washed, they become laundry. They are laundry while they are being washed, dried, and folded.

But when you put them away, into a closet or drawer, they cease to be laundry.

I, along with a couple of friends from the Memphis Strategy Board Games Community, have started a new boardgaming blog, Settling Catan.

So far, we’ve got a repeat of a Signifying Nothing post by me, reviewing Princes of Florence, and a review of Die Macher, a game of German electoral politics.

Expect more game reviews, thoughts on game strategy, and musings on what makes a good board game in the near future!

Vincent Baker confesses how he got started playing role-playing games:

When I was 8 or 9 I was playing Zork on my uncle's new Atari 800 with a couple friends, and we dug it. At some point we wanted to play it but we weren't at my uncle's house, so I volunteered to "be the computer." We even played it text-based! I'd write a description, pass the notebook, my friends would read it and write their actions, I'd write the results. We kept that up for a while, actually, several sessions, before we figured out that we could just talk instead.

He’s got me out-geeked. (Link via Jim Henley.)

I went to the downtown Walgreens today to purchase some Wal-phed (Walgreens’ generic version of Sudafed). I walked back to the aisle where it is normally kept, and there were lots of little yellow signs, telling me that tall products that contain pseudoephedrine are now kept behind the pharmacy counter.

I went back to the pharmacy counter to buy some, and while I was there, asked the salesperson (I don’t know whether he was an actual “pharmacist” or not) about the change. “They make methamphetamine out of it.” Yes, I know. But they can’t make it from the liquid caps that also contain guaifenesin. (Which is what I was purchasing.) Was this a government requirement or was this just a new Walgreens policy? “It’s not a government requirement. We’ve got to do something bout it.” Yeah, I said. Legalize it.

We can’t stop people from making it and selling it, so there’s no reason to make it inconvenient for me to buy decongestants.

This was in my daily dose of spam:

Remember President Ronald Reagan by owning your own deck of
Commemorative Playing Cards. As seen on national news!

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Join us in honoring this great President and great man by owning a deck of
the Ronald Reagan Commerative Playing Cards. These wonderfully designed
“Gipper Cards” feature photos of “Dutch” throughout his life and also
contain delightful jokes, quotes and anecdotes from this amazing American
figure.

Don’t be fooled by expensive, lower-quality imitation sets! This is the only
Ronald Reagan Deck that contributes 10% of all purchases directly to the
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Click here to purchase now! These are a limited quantity item, so act fast!

Over at Fafblog, Giblets explains the god of ceremonial deism, the god we invoke in pledges, in oaths, and on currency:

This God is a fitting adornment for oaths and flags and coins. Especially coins! Ceremonial God blesses your divine use of a slot machine with every quarter you feverishly insert. He marks His glory upon every dollar bill you stuff into the g-string of an aging lap dancer. He is the God of Coke and Pepsi, the all-embracing deity of McDonalds and Wal-Mart. All are one in His commercial bounty.

Giblets longs for a day when God will proudly stand out not just on money, monuments, plaques, greeting cards, university mottos, bumper stickers, action figures and gun shows, but on everything from hamburger wrappers to beer to car insurance. Giblets had a Big Mac dripping with special sauce yesterday, and he thought “Is this special sauce godless, commie special sauce? Or is it All-American, True-Blue, Under God special sauce?” And the sad thing is my friends that Giblets did not know, because it did not say on the box.

Prof. David Chalmers of the University of Arizona has put together a list of philosophical weblogs.