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.

Virginia Postrel believes she lacks sufficient buzz to sell books. My remedy: ask you to buy a copy of The Substance of Style; I never got around to reviewing TSOS, but will say—for the record—it is very good, as is her earlier book The Future and its Enemies.

Your purchase probably won’t bring her back as editor of Reason, but it’s a worthy cause nonetheless.

Geaux to hell, LSU, geaux to hell! Losing to Georgia is at least a nice start…

Quaker at Crescat Sententia writes in commentary on this WaPo piece:

I honestly can’t think of a reason why the unanimous (!) staff recommendation would get overruled besides ideological opposition to the Voting Rights Act or a desire to see more Republicans in Congress. If anybody out there can think of better justifications, drop me a line; I’m all ears.

Perhaps the staff of the Civil Rights Division has been enforcing an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that goes beyond the statutory requirements of Congress, and therefore has been making recommendations that do not enforce the VRA but implement something more stringent than the VRA. Thus, the political appointees at the agency felt an obligation to limit the review to the bounds of the statute, rather than the imagined law that the Civil Rights Division staff would like to see implemented. For example, the memo complains about partisan gerrymandering, yet partisan gerrymanders are not illegal under either the VRA or Supreme Court precedent (even if they probably ought to be).

After all, it is not beyond the realm of reason that young, bright attorneys might choose to join the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and forego greater earning potential and prestige in the private sector, for ideological reasons.

Steve of Begging to Differ thinks it’s hard to be enthusiastic about posting to one’s own blog when most of the hits are for people looking for “Gay Batman”.

I certainly know the feeling; the quantity and quality of SN has gone down over the years, and—ultimately—that really doesn’t bother me that much. I’ve never seen a check from Google Ads, BlogAds ignores me, and that Pajamas/Open Source/Pajamas outfit is just sort of “out there” in the zone I frankly don’t care about. And I am simply content to stop worrying and go about my daily business, posting just enough nonsense to stop panicked phone calls worrying that I’m maimed or deceased, in a way that perhaps I wouldn’t have a couple of years ago.

Stories like this one make me thank God we didn’t get Hillarycare. On the stump, Canadian Conservative leader Stephen Harper made this, dare I say bold, promise to his countrymen:

[P]atients should not wait more than 10 months for non-urgent hip and knee replacements.

I suspect it’s pretty easy to say that when it’s not your bum hip or knee you’re hobbling around on for the best part of a year.

Of course, Canadians at least have, for now, the choice of private provision: they can come here for treatment and pay twice—once for the not-very-timely provision of services in Canada and once for the actual provision in the Land of the Gringos. In Democratic-wet-dream America, where’s our (and their) safety-valve going to be? Grenada?

The interview with the place I thought might turn out to be Fundie U went somewhat better than expected, although I’m still not entirely sure why I got the interview in the first place—the job description listed two courses (and only two courses) that I’ve never taught before.

On the topic of the broader market, the prospects seem to have slowed to a trickle; things will probably pick up again in January, as some of the places where people have moved up in the world (usually the ones who can’t afford, logistically or otherwise, to do searches two years in a row) decide to take a crapshoot on the leftovers from the first wave.

In the meantime, it’s strangely liberating to have only sent one job application in the past month and only have a couple on the “I am seriously considering applying” pile—a two-year postdoc at a liberal arts college and a research-only job in my field that is quite a longshot but would be a ticket to the top of the Social Sciences Citation Index, the latter of which I just found out about today.

Unless Mike Easley joins Mark Warner to start a conga line of southern Democratic governors tripping all over themselves to avoid the appearance of being the “heavy,” lest they provoke the MoveOn.org wing of the national party, North Carolina will conduct the 1000th execution since the reinstatement of capital punishment tonight.

On the other hand, we’re still behind Singapore in the number of drug mules awaiting imminent execution. Woo-hoo.

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

Brian Weatherson has some advice that is contrary to the conventional wisdom for his readers. Color me deeply skeptical.

þ: James Joyner, who aptly summarizes Weatherson’s argument thusly:

Go to grad school if you can get a free ride to a top ten institution or if you don’t mind being relegated to the backwaters of academia teaching dull students or don’t mind losing ten years of earning potential before going into another line of work.

Since none of those three really apply to me (except possibly #3), I think we can safely say I am an idiot. Frankly, if I weren’t really good* at teaching a class (research methods) that most political scientists hate to teach with an unrivalled passion†, I’d have no career.

* By “really good,” I mean “not as horribly as 99% of other professors.” I freely admit that I could be better.
† The reasons are two-fold: people who teach methods typically get terrible student evaluations, particularly at schools where methods is a requirement for the major, and teaching methods is typically harder work than sitting around talking about one’s own “substantive” research interests or spewing out the intro outline for the 17th time.

I can’t even pretend to care about the ACC-Big Ten challenge (much less college basketball in general), and I was falling asleep on my sofa a few hours ago while watching good TV, yet for some silly reason I’m wide awake and watching Duke–Indiana on TiVo delay with Dickie V anyway.

They must put drugs in the water supply here; that’s the only explanation.

Brian from MGoBlog and Mark Hasty add to the list of reasons to dislike ESPN, pushing it well over 100 entries.

þ: EDSBS, of course.

For those unable to read between the lines of my recent posts or comments, I’ve declined the offer. I won’t be publicly identifying the university in question, but let me say that I was treated well by them and my decision is in no way a reflection on the fine folks there—rather, in the end it boiled down to a question of whether or not it would be fair (to either party) for me to take a tenure-track position knowing in my heart-of-hearts that I wasn’t planning to stay.

I believe I’m still in a good position to secure a tenure-track job that is more compatible with my interests as a teacher and a scholar, and I have been assured I have a fall-back position here at Duke for the next academic year, should it become necessary. So… back to the salt mines (or at least Emacs).

I never thought I’d be asked a question about Iraq in a phone interview. Go figure.

And the fun never ends… Thursday, I get to have a phone interview with a place that will hire non-Christians, but they won’t tenure them. I get the odd feeling that after I ask the college’s position on hiring Christians who don’t buy into scriptural inerrancy or young-Earth creationism, this one’s going to be over pretty quick.

The EDSBS crew compiles a list of 52 reasons that ESPN sucks, and somehow manages to leave out the Sunday Night Football crew and Jeremy “I’m not Dick, but I am one” Schapp.

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

Stephen Moore adds more fuel to Stephen Bainbridge’s discomfiture with John McCain. I’m not exactly a huge McCain fan either, but given the likely contenders on both sides of the aisle I’m hard-pressed to pick a better nominee—or, for that matter, a better president.

You know, if I were an Ole Miss chancellor looking for a pretext to can Coach O, the evidence of his apparent attempt to poach players from Tulane’s football team might be a good place to start. The allegations at this point seem to contain a lot more smoke than fire—there’s no evidence, for example, that Orgeron or his subordinates actually contacted any Green Wave players—but nonetheless the whole episode appears rather unseemly.

Well, that sucked.

Update: More thoughts from BigJim. Is it a “gots-to-go situation” for Coach O? Probably not immediately, but with disgruntled players continuing to bolt and ineptitude that goes well beyond the parts of the game under the control of the allegedly-already-fired OC Noel Mazzone, the Orgeron honeymoon is going to be shortlived. That may be bad for Orgeron’s career prospects in Oxford, since it’s likely his legendary recruiting prowess won’t even yield substantial dividends on the field until the 2007 season due to redshirting.

And the $64,000 “what-if” questions surrounding the firing of ex-coach David Cutcliffe probably aren’t going away either. Would QB “guru” Cut have gotten more out of Spurlock, Flatt, and Lane? I don’t know, but if things turn around in Knoxville next year (and, realistically, they probably will; a team with UT’s talent almost never goes under .500 in college, no matter how poorly they are coached) a lot of the credit will go to Cutcliffe.

One final thought: a lot of the Rebel’s woes can be traced to two positions on the field: place kicker and punter. Thirty-yard punts and regularly missed field goals don’t add up to scoring or good field position. Kicking may be the Rebels’ most glaring deficiency, even if it seems to be lost in the discussions over the revolving door at QB.

After taking a free roundtrip ticket to wait five hours for a later flight, I’m back safe and sound in Durham; I think the only thing I missed was the Duke–Memphis championship game in what still ought to be called the Preseason NIT.

Oh, and Arkansas choked against LSU—there’s simply no other way to describe that performance.

My big debate for tomorrow: use my women’s basketball season tickets to see Duke dismantle Arkansas State or listen to the Egg Bowl over the Internet. Maybe one of these decades I’ll have a fancy phone that will let me do both at once.

Figuring out how I’m going to get to all the places I need to get over the Christmas holidays is becoming a bit of a headache; it’d be a little easier if SPSA weren’t the first weekend after New Year’s. With gas prices coming down I may end up taking a very long road trip around the southeast.

The Noel Mazzone era at Ole Miss is apparently over, although no official announcement has appeared as of yet. Mazzone, who previously served as offensive coordinator on Tommy Tuberville’s staff before the latter’s departure for Auburn, apparently never was a good fit with Ed Orgeron’s plans to implement a USC-style offense in Oxford.

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

As I alluded to in the comments of the previous post, the offer I was hoping would materialize in Frozen Tundra country seems unlikely to do so. Them’s the breaks; I guess that gives me an extra incentive to sell myself well on the phone interview with a relatively small private university on the west coast I have scheduled for Tuesday at noon. And it gives me the opportunity to do the complete revamp of my application materials—most notably, my thoroughly unsatisfactory statement of teaching philosophy—I’ve been thinking about for the last two weeks.