Dan Weintraub at California Insider has an interesting post breaking down the numbers in the California recall race. If the polling holds up, the plurality winner may get at least 40% of the vote—not bad for a ballot with 134 other names on it.

In somewhat related news that doesn’t justify its own post, in the library today I picked up some light reading: Sampling of Populations: Methods and Applications by Paul S. Levy and Stanley Lemeshow. Disturbingly, it has (almost) nothing to do with my dissertation. I think that just proves I’m a total geek.

I’m back in Oxford after putting 830 more miles on the car, and the blog’s back online. The culprit: a power outage that led to a reboot into an apparently-broken kernel. So much for complaining about BellSouth FastAccess…

While we were sleeping:

• Daniel Drezner got himself a spiffy new Movable Type blog.
• Matthew revealed his surname to the world.
• Joy Larkin got Slashdotted and demonstrated all the cute women aren’t taken (at least, not yet; no word on how many marriage proposals she received).
• A bunch of Windows machines got smacked-down by a nasty virus. (What else is new?)
• A nice big chunk of the country and the most populous parts of Ontario got to enjoy a power outage due to grid failure. Everyone’s traditional enemy of choice (in Ann Arbor, it was fairly evenly split between the Canadians and Ohioans) was blamed repeatedly.

Coming soon from me: why recalls are A-OK by me (despite my general distaste for the initiative power), who has replaced political parties in translating aggregate preferences into policy (and why Madison would like it), and probably a rant or two once my held mail shows up. I’m sure Brock will have plenty to say too. I’m glad we’re back and glad you’re back reading us!