I ran into Nick and one of my devoted band of lurkers yesterday and was reminded that I have been insufficiently social this, er, year or so. So, in order to rectify that, I’m proposing the first annual “Hang Out With Chris and Watch the Super Bowl on his Spankin’ New HDTV Party.” It probably needs a more catchy title, but I’m working with nothing here.

If nothing else, at least it will serve as an excuse to clean up my living room.

Why is it every time there’s a new Osama tape I think of Hari Seldon? Well, except for the “accurate predictions about the future” bit…

From an email I received today in response to an application:

Thank you for your letter indicating your interest in the political science position at [Redacted Institution]. The search committee appreciates your willingness to be considered as a candidate and, as our work proceeds, we will keep you informed about the status of the search. [emphasis added]

I didn’t realize I was doing them some sort of favor by applying.

Incidentally, the effect was somewhat spoiled by two identical versions of the form letter being pasted into the email, but what can you do? It could be worse: a couple of weeks ago, I got a rejection letter with someone else’s name on it…

This may become an ongoing series…

• Doing the same lecture two days in a row is a bit (ok, highly) disconcerting the first time you’ve ever done it.
• Seminars are much less painful when you don’t do all of the talking.
• It will be hard for Duke University Transit to find a blue canvas bag you think you left on one of their busses when it has been sitting in your living room the whole day.

At the ripe old age of 30, I’m still learning new things; to wit:

• My car will not start if I don’t have the transmission in park.
• It is embarrassing when the AAA guy makes this discovery after you’ve been sitting in a parking lot for 45 minutes.
• Parking in the Campus Drive lot is impossible at 11 a.m.
• Trying to wet erase a purple marker from a whiteboard is not a good idea if you want your hand to stay flesh-colored.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why I agreed to do a phone interview for a job (that, to be perfectly honest, isn't exactly at the top of my rank-ordering of preferences based on admittedly incomplete information) late on a Friday afternoon after two classes.

Of course, the idea sounded like a better idea at the time I booked the interview slot (which I think was sometime in early December), when I didn’t think I needed to spend the afternoon tracking down a half-dozen books for my Southern politics seminar.

It stands to reason that the day I decide to go looking for all of my Southern politics book chapters and articles is the day I can’t find them anywhere—my office, my apartment, my car, nowhere.

This is, in one word, annoying.

Update: It turns out they were in my apartment, completely differently organized from how I remembered them being—I'd forgotten I'd separated them out by topic into separate manila folders last Spring.

I’m safely back in Durham after a rather dull and uneventful drive yesterday afternoon/evening. Now I’m watching the Giants suck horribly on Fox.

I’m still alive.

I had a nice Christmas here in Memphis, and now I’m getting ready to head down to Florida for New Year’s. I’ve made a bit of progress on a few projects; the main fun will be wrapping up my SPSA papers over the next few days.

Happy holidays from Signifying Nothing to you, my (mostly) beloved readers.

As should be pretty obvious by now, I’ve conceded the Fifty Book Challenge. I did get ten pages of Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist read while waiting for my car’s oil to be changed today in Collierville, but the ruthless efficiency of Mathis Tire and Auto (in and out in less than 20 minutes, including a tire rotation, for $17.50 or so) precluded any further reading. Except for the stuff I’m being paid to read, it may be a while before I get back in the reading groove.

Scipio writes:

This is roughly… equivalent… to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Funnily enough, I think this actually has happened to me on both the job and romantic markets.

Good luck trying to figure this one out on your own without asking the registrar’s office: WF pattern classes in Spring 2006 first meet on Friday, January 13th, not Wednesday, January 11th.

Good thing I put a slack day in my in-progress methods syllabus.

Tyler Cowen offers some tentative answers.

Pretty much the most enjoyable thing I’ve done thus far on my birthday is spend 90 minutes reviewing for my methods exam with about a half-dozen students.

The least enjoyable thing was walking back and forth to East Campus when I realized about 30 minutes ago that I’d left the canvas bag with said exams in it on the damn C-1 bus.

Fighting with PeopleSoft to get my grades entered for the other class, watching a couple of DS9 reruns on TiVo, and breakfast at Elmo’s Diner appear somewhere in the middle of that hierarchy.

See, I knew there was an upside to not getting the job in Frozen Tundra country, it just took me a month to realize it. The concept that there’s a temperature below which it is too cold to snow, and that people in Wisconsin have empirical evidence of this fact, is truly frightening to me.

Compare and contrast: me last Friday and Stephen Bainbridge today.

Now I get the sense of what Kevin Drum must feel like every day Paul Krugman publishes a new New York Times op-ed.

My power has briefly (i.e. about a second each time) cut out at least twice this morning, for absolutely no discernable reason I can figure out—the weather is unremarkable, if a little cold. Weird.

I can tell my downstairs neighbors are currently watching The Big Lebowski; I can only hope it’s because they always have their volume set way too loud, because otherwise I shudder to think what they think of me.

The functionality of wearing a thick wool crewneck sweater would seem to be defeated if two inches of your midriff are bare.

It feels good to be able to throw away all the ads for one-year visiting positions lying around the computer.

Best wishes to all of Signifying Nothing’s readers for a happy Thanksgiving day.

Part of the difficulty of being in job limbo: am I supposed to be rooting for the Rams or the Packers? Given the teams’ records, I’d rather not have to root for either.

I just realized I have worn a suit all three weekdays thus far this week. Maybe I’m closer to going corporate than I thought; I may have to dress down for office hours Thursday to compensate.

Plus, the woman who works at the Sanford Deli cash register complimented me today on the coordination between my second-newest tie and my new Oxford blue Stafford dress shirt, so apparently I’m quite the fashion plate these days.