The part of “Chris” in this post is being played by someone else. The opinions expressed in this post are not Chris’s, particularly if you are looking to hire a methodologist… in which case, Chris’s vita is linked over there to the right, so read it and skip the rest of this post, which will be of zero interest to you.

For the individual in the San Francisco Bay area from a Comcast IP who did a Google search on “Political Methodology ph.d placement rate”: abysmal, if you generalize from an n of one—but pretty good if you consider a visiting position and spending another year desperately avoiding a tenure-track job with a 4–4 load or worse “placement.” Suffice it to say anyone actively looking for a real methodologist who can publish and teach Ph.D. students (as opposed to an Americanist they can also dump undergrad methods on) isn’t going to be happy with me—never mind that that’s what I’ve been trained to do.

On the bright side, your chances are probably much better if you manage to attend a top 25 Ph.D. program. So polish up those GRE scores!

Silly observations that don’t really deserve their own posts:

• Yesterday in Ann Arbor was cold, rainy, and dreary—to the extent I actually had to switch on the heat in my apartment last night, lest I freeze to death (good thing I decided to have the gas switched on after all). Today, on the other hand, it’s around 80° and sunny, and supposed to stay in the 80s through the next week or so. Weird.

• Maybe I’m getting old or something, but there’s something very disturbing about a current pop hit which has a chorus about a sexual technique. Particularly when it’s performed by someone best known for singing the theme to Disney’s “Kim Possible.” (What may even be more disturbing is I can’t figure out what sexual technique it is.)

• Not to start a big brou-ha-ha like the recently-raging conflict over the relative “hotness” of libertarian women, but I‘ll put any five randomly selected young Mississippi women (18–35) against a comparably-selected slate of native Michiganders any day.

• Would anyone know who Ashlee Simpson was if it weren’t for her sister?

Via Amber Taylor, I learn that the party’s vice-presidential candidate, Richard Campagna, has a Ph.D from a diploma mill, thus moving the party to a position formerly only occupied by the loons of the Natural Law Party and its advocates of “transcendental meditation.”

There’s something very nice about not having access to a television this week. Others, however, are less fortunate.

I may have to deliberately take my TV out of order when I get back to Jackson so I can avoid the Republican convention too.

Stephen Taylor, the proprietor of the real PoliBlog™, points out the folly of leaping from punchcards to touchscreens—particularly by county election administrators whose general track-record of competence was pretty poor to begin with.

Plus, as an added bonus, it would have spared us the conspiracy-mongering claims that Diebold cares who wins the election.