Vashon Pearson, the Rebels’ leading rusher last year (not that that’s saying much) didn’t make the grades last year and has been declared academically ineligible for what would have been his senior season. (þ: EDSBS) ‘Twas nice knowing you, Vashon.

It looks like the bulk of the running game will be in the hands of junior Jamal Pittman, who has had his own share of off-field troubles, but emerged from the spring as tied on the depth chart with Pearson after Coach O decided to give him a clean slate. So, if Pittman can keep himself out of trouble, the Rebels may still be in decent shape at RB; mind you, I’m not sure anyone expected anything much beyond another “rebuilding” year and a possible EV1.com Bowl bid out of the team to begin with.

Today’s Washington Post reports that Bob Costas will be Larry King’s permanent guest host for about 20 appearances a year, starting this Sunday. I’ve always enjoyed Costas’ work as an interviewer, particularly on Later, and it’ll be fun to see him doing real interviews again somewhere other than HBO. (þ: memeorandum)

Kamilla, somewhere between Istanbul and Kyrgystan, gives some advice to global aviation authorities:

We all would be more civilized and less stressed if there were more clocks in airports; I don’t understand why, since it’s THE place of changing time zones, they only announce the local time once, if that, as you’re landing.

Nick Troester on the latest round of arguments about the potential success of third party presidential candidates:

Political parties, being more-or-less coalitional, actually need to take positions on a wide number of issues to be able to draw in people who are oriented towards things other than the party’s main issue—that is to say, one might think both parties are bad when it comes to good government issues, but one still probably lines up as a D or R when it comes to entitlement spending, the deficit, foreign policy, etc. A lot is needed to uproot people from where they are.

Or, to put it another way, there just aren’t enough people who care about politics who’d support the “not stupid or evil party” just because it’s not stupid or evil.

And, many observers suggest Roosevelt would have won the Republican nomination—and almost certainly the presidency—had the 1912 convention not been stacked with Taft patronage appointees from “rotten borough” delegations from the South. I don’t know that there’s a specific lesson for John McCain in there, but the route to power is much easier if you can take over a major party than starting your own… ask the Christian Coalition or the Deaniac crowd, who now effectively control the two major parties, if you don’t believe me.

If your attempts to connect to your PostgreSQL database from psycopg fail with a missing socket error after upgrading from Debian sarge to etch or sid (as I inadvertently did yesterday), add "host=localhost" to the DSN string. Apparently the Unix domain socket was disabled in the default configuration, so database connections must now go through TCP/IP. This may affect other database adapters too.

Nick and I are pondering who—if anyone—Radiohead was ripping off on The Bends, as a followup to the Coldplay discussion from Monday. Please post any comments, if you have them, at his place.

Glenn Reynolds takes heat for the Instapundit thong (though it’s apparently on the Father’s Day shopping list for some), while new-to-the-reciprocal-blogroll Memphian Serrabee wonders why nobody buys her underwear for Valentine’s Day while linking a story informing Britons that thong underwear can be bad for your health.

Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t think the particular style of underwear you’re wearing makes that much difference to others—now, it might make a difference to you (Lord knows I’d be embarrassed to be seen in a lot of the underwear I own, something I suppose I should rectify), and if that’s the case I suggest a change. But if you’ve gotten to the point that someone else is seeing them I think the main concern is going to be how easily they can be removed, not whether or not they give you a wedgie when you walk.

Then again, in this low-rider world we live in (apparently, the plumber butt look is “in”), maybe underwear matter more than they used to… but you’d think OFJay would have found some evidence of that.

I got my written evaluations today, and while some of it was bizarrely contradictory (some people complaining that my lecture was too much like the book outline, others complaining that the tests and lecture had nothing to do with each other even though the tests came from the book materials!) I got a rather odd comment that I’d made “occasional anti-Catholic remarks and jokes” in my civil liberties class. I suppose there are a few things that could be stretched that way (mostly, a few Louisiana jokes), and maybe even a few things that could be construed as anti-religious in general (I generally stay away from that soapbox, although I will make an occasional “Ten Suggestions” joke for the Methodists in the audience), but I don’t remember singling out Catholics in particular. Weird.

Stephen Fry and John F. Kerry. I link, you decide.

And let me get this straight: Kerry hid his military records to cover up the fact he was a mediocre student at Yale? Sheesh. Of course, since the “smart” guy got 4 D’s and the “dumb” guy got 1, I guess I could see how that would make at least a modicum of sense.

The Minor Fall, The Major Lift on some erroneous chronology in the New York Times:

Coldplay’s powers of suck are so all-encompassing that they extend out backwards through time, influencing bands that actually predate them.

þ: Nick Troester, who also finds other aspects of the article to be amusing.

The long-rumored move of Apple OS X to Intel processors was confirmed today by Apple at its annual developer’s conference. More at Wizbang and Slashdot, the latter of which claims that there is a “preview” that you can order for Intel processors today, something I wouldn’t mind taking for a spin, although it is as yet unclear whether you’re going to be stuck with buying Apple’s hardware to run OS X. Frankly, I’m much more interested in spending $350 or so to upgrade my desktop box’s motherboard & CPU combo to an Athlon 64 than dropping two large on a similar configuration just so I can run OS X.

I just got back from the dentist’s office after receiving the first of two fillings I’m due for. Except for the fact I can’t talk, and probably shouldn’t eat or drink for a while (not that the dentist told me anything), I think I’m fine.

Incidentally, there’s more personal crap at the other place, wherein I talk about helping Kelly move her stuff into storage last week. It’s probably rambling and overly detailed, and a healthy chunk of the more amusing stuff is omitted anyway, but the post is there nonetheless.

I’d personally like to thank the Supreme Court for announcing its decision in the medical marijuana case Gonzalez v. Raich (né Ashcroft v. Raich) today. I guess the silver lining is that I have a week before I actually have to talk about the case in my con law class.

Slightly more seriously, James Joyner approves (although not of the public policy in question), while Glenn Reynolds doesn’t. More, of course, at the Volokh Conspiracy from Orin Kerr and David “Buy My Book” Bernstein.

Amber Taylor and Hei Lun Chan of Begging to Differ have uncovered yet another reason not to bother with the new Love Bug movie: you won’t be seeing as much of Lindsay Lohan as you might have figured—no pun intended:

Disney technicians were forced to go through numerous scenes – especially those showing the actress jumping up and down at a motor racing track, reducing her breasts by two cup sizes and raising revealing necklines on her T-shirts.

That must have been a hardship tour. Both linkers think this problem could have avoided during production; Taylor with technology, Chan with casting:

If Disney wanted a teenage blonde without big breasts for the movie, why didn’t they just cast Hilary Duff?

A question for the ages, to be sure.

Meanwhile, given Lohan’s recent emaciation (documented by Taylor), someone really ought to get her to read up on the health benefits of having body fat (þ: Instapundit).

My brilliant plan to use shipping boxes I bought at Sam’s Club to pack up all the books in my office has been foiled, mainly because if I tried to put my books in them they’d be impossible to lift. Time to think of Plan B, which is most likely to be “beg the campus bookstore for boxes”; I’ve already used up all my Amazon.com boxes.

That said, I’m sure the Sam’s Club boxes will work for lighter stuff like my clothes, so there’s that at least.

I noticed yesterday, while engaged in an ultimately futile effort to switch the hard drive on which Windows XP is installed on my Athlon XP box, that I had a bunch of photos on the hard drive from spring 2001, from just after I bought my now-aging Olympus C-2100UZ.

So now they’re on Flickr: vacation (well, actually, Western Political Science Association conference) photos from Hoover Dam in March 2001, and a few Ole Miss photos from April 2001 that I took for some website work. Hope you enjoy them!

One of the perks of only having one student in a class (in this case, Introduction to American Government) is that when you’re done, there’s no need to pad it out, or reexplain things six times so it might penetrate the skull of the kid in the back of the room who’s half-asleep. My wallet would have liked it had he had some compatriots, but I suppose on a per-hour basis I’m actually coming out ahead on the deal. It also helps to be using a textbook that’s readable by humans with minimal handholding.

Incidentally, it’s funny but I’d actually somewhat forgotten over the past four weeks how much fun it was to teach.

Somehow I managed to forget all about implementing lsbinstall when I uploaded LSB 3.0–1 for Debian to sid last month. Grrr…

Former Rebel head coach David Cutcliffe’s stint at Notre Dame didn’t last very long: he resigned Tuesday from his position as quarterbacks coach for the Fighting Irish after deciding that he couldn’t come back to coaching this year. Cut, known to Ole Miss fans as the master of the “prevent offense,” recently underwent triple-bypass surgery after suffering a heart attack in March. (þ: Jeff Quinton @ FanBlogs)

In the space of two days, my two closest friends in Jackson have up and left to do cool summer things for the next few weeks—one is doing research in Central Asia, while the other is headed up north to work on some projects and hang out with friends and family.

If it weren’t for my students in summer classes, I’d be almost completely abandoned at this point (although I’ve seen a few soon-to-be-ex-colleagues around and I’ll probably have lunch with some of them later on in the month). Of course, if it weren’t for my students, I’d be off doing something else myself—more likely than not, spending late June and most of July in Ann Arbor with stats geeks.

Without students, I probably also wouldn’t have been up at 8:30 this morning either, come to think of it.

I like to imagine a little cash register sound going off every time one of these numbers increases. Never mind that cash registers don’t make that sound any more…

In related news, the reader for my intro class this summer is apparently lost in the ether, so I guess I’ll be making use of the library reserve a lot.

In what seems to be becoming something of a theme, I had dinner this evening with yet another blogger—in this case, Signifying Nothing alumnus Robert Prather. We ended up talking for about three hours at the Steam Room Grille, mostly about graduate school but with some forays into politics and economics.

Like Robert, I start summer school Wednesday, albeit at the other side of the desk. I guess I should be working on getting organized for that, although at this point I’m still not even sure if I have enough students to bother teaching the classes, or, for that matter, to bother writing up syllabi—the per-student remuneration works out to be about minimum wage if only one student enrolls, although if you look at it as additional pay (since I am being paid through September 1st by Millsaps on my 9-month contract) rather than living pay it feels better.

Others are already doing the summer school thing, of course: Jeff Quinton isn’t having much fun so far, which I suppose is understandable given the material.

On the recommendation of Orin Kerr and Glenn Reynolds, I read this Jon Henke post that makes a fairly compelling case that there are systematic problems with detainee abuse in the War on Terror—relying on sources that most would consider to be objective.

Henke also proposes two solutions, POW status and real trials, both of which should be familiar to longtime Signifying Nothing readers—heck, it’s been a recurring theme from Robert and I for over two years now.

A day late and a dollar short, I find out that John Ford resigned from the Tennessee Senate in the wake of the Tennessee Waltz arrests. Good riddance, although I think there’s a fair shot he’ll be back—even if it’s after a trip to the Big House. (þ: Wizbang)

Sarah Hempel has followed up on our discussion of relationship categories from a couple of weeks ago.