Wherein I post about things that have nothing to do with current events:

• The boss gave me tix to see the Durham Bulls in action against the Charlotte Knights Saturday evening at DBAP; here are some photos. The game was rained out in the top of the 7th, but it was pretty fun nonetheless.
• In what has to be one of the most thoroughly bad ideas in human history, my Southern Politics students browbeat me into joining Facebook. Next you know I’ll be streaking all over Durham like Will Farrell in Old School.
• I picked up this Plain White T’s album at Best Buy today; it’s surprisingly good, especially for a band I’d never heard of.
• Most of the remainder of the weekend (other than the time I spent sleeping), I looked over around 20 draft papers for my quantitative political analysis class. Although having a huge stack of papers to grade at the end of the semester isn’t the most fun experience in the world, it’s still cool to see some of the questions—and answers—that students come up with as part of the paper process. Particularly fun is seeing the students who go after underexplored questions and find fascinating stuff.

No, no Chronic-les of Narnia; just more lacrosse stuff…

• The Newsweek cover story this week is on the Duke lacrosse scandal; here it is in all its glory. Most notable is the new-to-me revelation that “defense lawyer Bill Thomas told NEWSWEEK that in the first round [of tests] some DNA showed up under the woman’s fingernails, though tests were inconclusive about identity.”
• Robert KC Johnson has two good posts up at Cliopatria on the scandal: one looking at the rush to judgment by nearly 90 Duke faculty members in the case, and one on the Campus Culture Initiative announced by Dick Brodhead a few weeks ago, which thus far seems to be barrelling towards reaching its preordained conclusions about Duke’s alleged culture of privilege and rape. Similar themes appear in the discussion between Margaret Soltan and I at University Diaries about New York Times public editor Byron Calme’s apologia for the paper’s excessive interest in the scandal.
• The AP reports that alumni in Durham for class reunions have expressed their concerns about President Brodhead’s treatment of the lacrosse program and indicted player Reade Seligmann in particular.
• John in Carolina links a good column by Dallas Morning News columnist Mark Davis on this case.
• Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong fails to get the endorsement of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People; African-American challenger Keith Bishop receives their endorsement instead.
• Last, but not least, if you thought this was going to be over any time soon—guess again. Nifong says the second round of DNA results won’t be back before the preliminary hearings for Seligmann and Collin Finnerty on May 15th. The Herald-Sun also reports “Nifong also denied an allegation by some defense attorneys that the second exotic dancer at the March 13 party where the rape allegedly occurred received special treatment from Nifong’s office so she’d cooperate with the prosecutor.”