The fun and excitement level of living in Trinity Park seems to be leaning more in the “excitement” direction lately—and not in a good way. The two big highlights: they found a dead guy in a ditch just across from East Friday morning, and a recent party at 610 Buchanan Blvd involving members of the men’s lacrosse team resulted in rape allegations against 3 unidentified team members and a few neighborhood folks seeming to cross the line from holding a vigil to becoming vigilantes—assembling outside private residences and hurling insults at the occupants doesn’t strike me as particularly productive behavior, although perhaps it is understandable given the bad blood between the university and wider community on a variety of issues. (Standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer: I have taught and am teaching members of said team at Duke; I have no idea if any of the students I have taught were involved in this alleged incident, or even at the party in question.)

More thoughts on the latter incident from University Diaries.

Update: See also Brendan Nyhan and the notorious dukeobsrvr .

Over on UPN‘s Veronica Mars, creator Rob Thomas has put most of the pieces on the table for figuring out all of this season’s key mysteries (the identities of those who caused the bus crash and PCH‘er Felix’s killer), as well as side-mysteries like what the Casablancas are really up to. Now if I could just figure out the deal with Logan I’d be set.

Meanwhile, if your only problem with Avril Lavigne is that she’s a solo act, consider Australian sister act The Veronicas, who have smartly figured out that the real money in hit music is in songwriting and clever lyrics (see, e.g. Ludacris), although having good voices and a lot of artistic range helps too.

Priceless: DSG forum attracts no attendees:

High hopes were not met as candidates for Duke Student Government’s 2006–2007 executive offices crowded around an empty lecture hall in the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy Wednesday night.

The contenders arrived at Sanford prepared to share their platforms with members of student organizations, who traditionally choose candidates to endorse.

No students were present, so the forum was cancelled.

Perhaps Duke students are more Downsian than I give them credit for being at times.

If you go to the Ivies, you’ll get taught by grad students and contingent faculty. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, but nonetheless it is to some. (New factor in the U.S. News ratings, anyone?)

Confidential to parents: drop the 40 large per annum on a liberal arts college education for your kids instead.

Prof. Karlson notes that the budgetary situation at NIU is such that “enrollment impacted” departments (that’s jargon for “all our classes are full”) cannot secure additional faculty, but nonetheless the university has found the money to do a bit of landscaping.

At Duke, meanwhile, the administration has found $240 million (yes, that’s one quarter of a billion dollars, give or take, and that’s just Phase I) to make Central really tie the whole university together, but can’t scrape together the cash for sabbatical replacements in numerous departments. As I commented to the bossman, I suppose money really isn’t fungible after all.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that Legos could become a flashpoint of political debate. Live and learn, I suppose.

Laura of 11D recommends Consumating to those seeking “a tattooed man from Austin or a 15 year old, bass-playing chick.” I can’t say I’m in the market for either, but I suppose it beats giving fifty bucks to that eHarmony guy.

I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining the faculty of Saint Louis University (in St. Louis, Missouri) for the 2006–07 academic year as a temporary assistant professor of political science. I don’t have a lot of specific details to share yet, beyond mentioning I will be teaching three undergraduate courses a semester in the fields of American politics and research methods.

From what I’ve heard from friends and colleagues, St. Louis is a very nice place to live and I am really looking forward to spending at least a year there. I expect to be going to St. Louis in the coming weeks for an orientation visit and to make a research presentation, so I expect I’ll have more to say then.

Bryan of Arguing with Signposts today is wrestling with rejection letters. Been there, done that. Got another one of those today, in fact. I have no real advice, besides taking the same approach to the job market a prostitute takes towards her clients—no matter how good you are, in the end you’re going to get screwed.

I’ve managed to parlay my offer into exactly bupkiss thus far (beyond a few congratulatory emails), which is probably a sign I should take it. At this point, I’m about two loose ends away from doing so.

This week’s Economist has a bit of fun with the escalating stakes in the razor blade wars. (þ: Division of Labour)

This one’s from Jimmy James, after Matthew returns from vacation with a moustache (“President,” season 3 episode 1):

Jimmy: Every man has the right to sex himself up however he sees fit, but you… you look like you belong at an amateur porn convention.
Matthew (enthusiastic): Thank you!

Radley Balko, commenting on his field trip to Prentiss County, Mississippi:

There are lots of reasons to be upset by the Cory Maye case that have nothing to do with race. And I’ve tried to avoid injecting race into my own analysis of the case. But it’s impossible to visit the area and come away with any feeling other than that race pervades nearly every facet of life down there.

I think we may have a winner for dumbest statement by a politician in 2006 already, and it’s only mid-March:

“Gerry Adams should not have been on a terror watch list,” said [U.S. Rep. Brian] Higgins [(D-NY)].

Just because the guy and his best pals in the IRA don’t advocate blowing up Americans (well, at least not Catholic Americans, or Americans who don’t make the mistake of going to London) doesn’t make him à priori not a terrorist and therefore exempt from the Full Osama treatment.

Apparently, American politicians of both major parties get a free pass when they’re running political cover for the IRA's cheering section—even when they’re the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Just in case you were still wondering if Washington was actually serious about the War on Terror in All Its Forms…

Congratulations to the Dallas Cowboys on acquiring the locker room cancer known as Terrell Owens. I suppose if there’s an NFL coach that can handle Owens’ ego, it’s Bill Parcells, but I can’t see this working out over even the medium term.

Congratulations also to the Blue Devils on making it back to the Sweet 16; the only category of the contest where George Washington bested Duke was in the attractiveness of their cheerleading squad (admittedly a matchup in which the Blue Devils frequently falter).

Finally, after praising WRAL for their telecasting work the first two days of the tournament, I have to issue a major demerit to our CBS affiliate for not airing the first five game minutes (and possibly more) of the Florida/Wisconsin-Milwaukee matchup on one of the umpteen available digital channels, instead of making us all sit through the interminable foulfest at the end the Duke–GW contest.

As of this moment, 16-seeded SUNY Albany is leading #1 seeded UConn by seven ten seven ten eight points.

Update: Curse Albany and all they stand for.

I (finally!) have another job offer. if I were a Bayesian, I’d place my prior on accepting the job at somewhere near 75% in the absence of any other information. Now to go and collect the information necessary to make a final decision…

Would it kill CBS Sports to buy a couple of HD cameras for their New York studios? Considering they could ammortize the cost across their NFL and NCAA operations, this seems like a no-brainer.

That said, I am somewhat impressed that WRAL and Time Warner are giving us two HD feeds (which may be the only HD feeds they’re transmitting, knowing CBS’ cheapskate ways) and all four regions in SD. If only I really cared about basketball…

Actually, it’s a HD sports bonanza today: World Baseball Classic on ESPN HD (although I could have lived without seeing Bud Selig in hidef), the NCAA tournament on CBS, and an NBA double-header on TNT. No hockey, but what can you do?

Matthew Shugart has the goods on the most recent example of the World Baseball Classic’s most glaring weakness (besides the lack of live English-language television coverage for most of the games)—the horrible officiating.

Incidentally, for all the discussion of how embarrasing it would be for the U.S. to not win this tournament, consider that (a) the British invented virtually every individual and international team sport, and they now suck at almost all of them (the English Premier League in soccer is the world’s best club league, but the English national team is just one of a half-dozen elite teams in European soccer; the cricket and rugby teams routinely get their butts whipped; British people never win Wimbledon), and (b) it’d probably be more embarrasing for Japan to not make the semi-finals than it would be for the U.S.—baseball is pretty much the only major sport Japan is good at on the international stage.

Speaking of soccer, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the U.S. win a World Cup within 30 years. I think the current world #5 ranking is probably a bit high, but the ascent to the U.S. team from nowhere to the top dozen in the world in the past 20 years has got to be one of the most meteoric rises in the history of the sport. Consider that in the 1986 World Cup, North America (CONCACAF) was represented by the host team Mexico, who did not have to qualify, and Canada; the latter team was a motley collection of indoor-league and ex-NASL players. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that the U.S. will win a World Cup before England’s next win.

Sometimes when you vote in a legislative body, the smart move is to vote for final passage of something that’s not entirely perfect—not, mind you, because your vote matters in the final outcome, but because whatever symbolic value your stand will have will be lost in the muddle of the discussion (see Cleland, ex-Senator Max for the prototypical example).

The administration made exactly this mistake when it chose to vote against the establishment of the new U.N. Human Rights Council yesterday, and went down to ignomious defeat by a 170–4 margin (with three abstentions, two from current human rights cesspools Belarus and Iran, and one from probable future human rights bad boy Venezuela), despite some quite legitimate objections to the new body’s election rules, which had been watered down since the original proposal by Kofi Annan.

So, instead of registering these complaints through some procedure other than voting against final passage of the resolution, the administration instead generated negative public relations fodder like a headline blaring that this represents a ”[h]uman rights defeat for [the] US” and a lede that states that the no vote was an effort to “derail” the formation of the new body, when in fact the administration did not try to derail it at all, instead (further going against “type”) supporting the original proposal from Annan (by the way, that is not an atypical read on the vote).

Bear in mind that, unlike the Kyoto situation (where many of the signatories and ratifiers have no ability to abide, and/or no intention of abiding, by the spirit or letter of the text, and thus not making a fraudulent U.S. commitment was the correct decision) this vote was a purely symbolic exercise—one that, probably wouldn’t have bought the U.S. any real goodwill had it gone the other way, but nonetheless wasn’t worth generating additional gratuitous animosity toward the U.S.

As for the domestic politics angle, the constituency for a “no” vote in this particular instance was about six people, all of whom were going to vote for Pat Buchanan or some Constitution Party lunatic anyway; the mainstream anti-UN crowd in the GOP coalition already was placated by the Bolton appointment, and this vote wouldn’t have made any real difference with them.

I can no longer feel guilty about having no scholarly accomplishments over spring break, as I finally got the R&R of The Damn Impeachment Paper™ out of the way, along with my measly contribution to July’s issue of PS. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do something with either the strategic voting paper or do something with the silly economic voting idea I have floating around in my head.

In other news, I found out that I have at least a week’s worth of gainful employment for the summer. Now to see if I can con someone else into hiring me for another month or so; although I could pretend I was going to get a lot done over the summer on my scholarship, the reality is that nothing in my life ever gets done without some degree of time pressure—idle hands and all that. Employment would probably make me get something done, as opposed to sitting around the apartment watching World Cup games.

University Diaries, on the increasing interest in Loren Pope and Colleges that Change Lives, his guide to 40 of America’s great liberal arts colleges:

As more and more Americans realize how many excellent colleges there are—many of them in settings more inspiring than New Haven—the Ivies run the risk of becoming drab asylums for the status-obsessed.

Run the risk? I’d say they’re mostly post-shark already.

You know, if you were going to go to the trouble of remastering a movie for DVD, including adding 5.1 Dolby Surround sound, you’d think it would be trivial to master the DVD in anamorphic mode so I’d get more than about 300 lines of effective vertical resolution on my 16:9 HDTV. Grr.

The failure rate on the bar exam appears to be rising, although the absolute number of individuals passing the bar seems to be nearly constant nationwide over time.

Multiple-choice question: which of the following explanations for this pattern is most plausible?

1. Although more students are graduating from law school today than a decade ago, they are nonetheless dumber, at least as measured by the bar exam.
2. Affirmative action is churning out large numbers of law school graduates who subsequently cannot pass the bar.
3. The body of knowledge necessary to practice law in America has substantially increased in the past decade, thus requiring greater knowledge by new attorneys; thus the bar exam has become harder.
4. The bar exam is designed to limit the supply of lawyers, not to test whether potential lawyers have sufficient knowledge to practice law.

Free hint: the bar exam is set by existing members of the profession who have a state-granted monopoly on the practice of law.

þ: Glenn Reynolds and Amber Taylor’s comments.

Division of Labour links a Reuters piece that says ”[t]he day is coming when carriers will require special fees even to check a bag.” That day has already arrived in Europe, which you’d think Reuters (of all news agencies) would already be aware of.

A couple of disconnected thoughts about the NCAA basketball tournament thus far:

• If the NCAA wants us to treat the play-in game as part of the “real” tournament, they’re going to have to do better than producing “Opening Round” bunting for the scorer’s table. At the very least, they need to call ESPN and tell them that they’re not allowed to do bush-league phone-in blowout material over the game action. More realistically, the “opening round” needs to be a real round, with four play-in games—one for each region. And the games need to be played in front of a crowd that gives a shit about the outcome, which you’re not generally going to find in Dayton, Ohio.
• I’d never accuse the selection committee of showing favoritism toward generating good product, but it’s a mighty convenient coincidence that a lot of good, name-brand major conference teams are free to play deep into the now NCAA-owned-and-operated NIT rather than facing a second-round “big dance” exit against like likes of UConn or Duke.

My brackets, incidentally, are pretty boring; I’m not at all sold on Gonzaga or Tennessee doing much in the tourney. I picked Duke to win it all, over North Carolina (in my Yahoo! bracket) and Boston College (in my ESPN bracket)—I think otherwise the two brackets are identical.