I cooked spaghetti for dinner with the lovely, talented, and pointy-eyeballed Kelly Friday night; she brought chocolate ice cream and I supplied a bottle of 1996 Gossamer Bay cabernet sauvignon that I’d somehow acquired a while back (and was very good). It was a thoroughly pleasant evening, although I spent most of Saturday recovering from the wine intake—not to mention the two pints of Bass I had earlier at Fenian’s with some other colleagues.

Update: Just to clarify (for any concerned readers): all I was really suffering from on Saturday was a lack of sleep; alcohol seems to interfere with me falling asleep.

Even though I haven’t been to Mass in a couple of years, I’ll be going tomorrow out of respect for this man. He wasn’t perfect—he didn’t respond well to the rise of Islamofascism, nor did he respond well to the pedophile priest fiasco a couple of years ago—but he was a good, even great man. His leadership provided moral support, even encouragement, for dissent in the Soviet Union, which played a large role in its collapse. He also remained consistent in his opposition to both the death penalty and abortion, a view that informs me to this day.

Part of my love for him is just sentiment, since he was the only Pope I knew growing up. May he rest in peace.

Spoons has more.

Well, the long-awaited column has finally arrived in print, and I only just learned it was there with an email from a reader. Serves me right for not checking the Clarion-Ledger website today.

It’s on judicial filibusters and a possible compromise between the Democratic and Republican positions on the “nuclear option.”

Gmail has started upping its storage size to two gigs. It seems to be happening gradually, but if you look at your main screen and choose new features, you should see it.

Here's what the help screen says:

G is for growth Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people's lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more. We're not in the plains anymore Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white.

Jeff Licquia finds that thieves are discovering something anyone who saw Demolition Man twelve years ago already knew: biometrics don’t do a good job checking whether or not the owner is still attached to the thing being scanned. For that matter, the Tom Selleck sci-fi flick Runaway showed biometric scamming in action 21 years ago. Do the people who come up with these things just not watch sci-fi films?

Pope John Paul II has received his Last Rites and appears to be near death. The death doesn’t appear imminent, but the ceremony of Last Rites is not a good sign. I’m not particularly religious these days, but I grew up a Catholic and he’s the only Pope I’ve ever known. In any case, Godspeed, good man:

Pope John Paul II was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church late Thursday night as his health deteriorated, a Vatican source has told CNN.

The sacrament does not necessarily mean that the pope is dying. Last rites—also known as the sacrament of anointing the sick—are commonly given to people who are seriously ill as well. The pope received the sacrament after he was shot by a would-be assassin in 1981.

The pope is suffering from a high fever caused by a urinary tract infection, the Vatican confirmed earlier Thursday—one day after revealing he had been put on a nasal feeding tube for nutrition.

Todd Zywicki has a lengthy post at The Volokh Conspiracy on the merits of intellectual diversity on campus, most of which I am in full agreement with. However, Zywicki seems to have picked a rather poor example of indoctrination:

My “History of the American South” class was a one semester narrative by a Marxist professor on how rich southern whites had conspired to manipulate racist sentiments among lower-class whites to keep them from banding together in the “natural” economic alliance of poor whites and blacks to plunder the property of rich whites. He was the only one who taught it, so if I wanted to take it (I was from South Carolina, so I was interested in it), I had to take it from him.

I hate to break it to Zywicki, but that’s basically what rich whites did during the post-Civil War era in the South, a phenomenon that continues (in diminished form) to this day. You don’t have to be a Marxist to buy that argument, although I suppose it helps.

Granted, there are other important aspects of Southern history and politics (although most of them are connected, at least somewhat, to the twin issues of elite dominance and race as well), so if the entire semester was just a rant on that particular topic I’d say Zywicki had a rather poor instructor. But “divide the have-nots through racist appeals” was a cornerstone of planter-elite strategy to maintain political and economic power, particularly in the Deep South, well into the 1960s.

A couple of somewhat weird articles have appeared on the Chronicle of Higher Education website in the last few days. First off, a graduate student decides to reinforce some stereotypes of academics:

After years of reading The Chronicle, I’ve heard just about every complaint that teachers can make—about a lack of appreciation for what we do, trouble getting students to talk, the vagaries of grading—but there’s one basic complaint that has gone unexplored so far: What if you’re so hot and bothered that you have trouble teaching the class?

Um, I’d advise sucking it up and dealing with it, or getting a girlfriend to solve that whole being “hot and bothered” thing. For what it’s worth, it’s 80 degrees out today and everyone’s pretty much half-naked here.

Second, Gene Fant of Union University (in lovely Jackson, Tennessee) explains why I can’t get a job in the geographic area that I want to work in. Now someone tells me.

I came home today to find a gas leak in my apartment, apparently caused by a hole in the hose between my gas stove and the supply line in my kitchen. Fun! (Thankfully, the gas to the stove was able to be switched off until the landlord can get a replacement gas hose tomorrow morning, without also disabling the heat and hot water.)

I saw the first episode of Invasion Iowa last night and found it pretty entertaining. The person who came up with the idea of Shatner hauling around his Emmy with him was a genius, and “Tiny” dancing around in his nude Speedo was pretty funny too. We’ll see how they push it a bit further over the next few days as the other characters get fleshed out.

Mike Munger writes:

Now, those of you who have had the great pleasure of beholding Kgrease in the flesh know that (1) there is a lot of flesh, and (2) my hair is shoulder length, very curly, and with lots of blonde highlights. Some of those highlights are from the sun, but most come from chemical products applied by a trained and highly competent hairdresser. (That’s right: “My name is Blonde….Fake Blonde.”)

A wash/haircut/highlights job from my hairdresser costs $90, plus $15 or so tip.

I think it’s pretty safe to say I’d never had guessed that Mike spent $105 on his hair, although I suppose it’s also safe to say I suspected the “clean cut” look on his vita or here was probably closer to nature’s effects than this. Surreal, indeed.

Before I become Staff, Departmental and blank, there’s still a job to be done here—most notably on my current radar, administering written comprehensive exams to 24 seniors on Monday night, then grading the American portions of said exams and sitting in on oral comps the following week. Happy happy, joy joy.

If I’d known there was a T-shirt with this logo on it, I might have considered purchasing it to wear at the conference this weekend. Somehow I doubt the humor would have been highly appreciated.

Four hints:

• You might want to run a spyware and virus scan on the guest PC on the fourth floor of the Fogelman Executive Center. It sorely needs it.
• Don’t try to secure your wireless network with MAC address security, particularly if you allow guest login access to a PC on the network.
• If you do secure your wireless network with MAC address security, don’t allow known wired MAC addresses to connect wirelessly.
• Don’t annoy your alumni by not granting gratis wireless access to guests at your own hotel. Particularly when the Holiday Inn across the street, also operated by the university, does have gratis access for its guests, and you already have wireless infrastructure in the building. (This annoyance, by the way, will be remembered when I have some money to give to various alumni associations.)

Toodles!

I met my friends Alfie and Annie for dinner tonight at Corky’s, followed by beers at the Fox and Hound on Sanderlin; both events were punctuated by bad service, but otherwise quite enjoyable.

As both Mr. and the future Mrs. Sumrall are avid Signifying Nothing fans, I indulged a request from Annie for her photo to be posted to the blog; apologies for the low quality, as the flash on my camera phone sucks royally, although daylight photos come out fairly well.

For most of the Terri Schiavo controversy, I’ve sided with the Schindlers. The ideal outcome, given that the daughter had the medical problems to begin with, would have been to let the parents take custody of her and have Michael Schiavo divorce her and move on. The time for that has passed, though.

When the week started, I was a little concerned that opponents of Congress’s move to allow federal jurisdiction would claim that it was unconstitutional, when the Constitution allows Congress to set the jurisdiction of cases. As a matter of custom we usually don’t allow this, but it’s unclear that it’s unconstitutional. It appeared to me that the opponents of the move were themselves being selective—and dishonest—in claiming that it’s unconstitutional.

Now it seems that the Schindlers have gone overboard. They’re obviously interested in seeing their daughter, but they’ve shown themselves to be too hysterical for anyone to accept their judgment. They made political threats against the Republicans in Congress and against Jeb Bush; one of their “expert” doctors is a quack; and, they’re making unverifiable claims that their daughter tried to speak before the tube was removed. Clearly they can’t be trusted on future decisions about the matter. To make things even worse, they’ve brought Randall Terry into the mix, which is never a good sign.

I started the week off thinking that Congress and the President did a good thing by allowing the federal courts to have a look at this. In the mean time it has become clear that the other supporters of that decision won’t be happy until they get the right outcome, regardless of what the law says. Every time a decision that goes against them is made, they move the goalposts and no-one will be spared from their wrath. I hope the Republicans (and I, also) never fall for an attempt to pander to hysterics again.

For more of their misadventures, see the attacks on Donald Sensing, here and here.

Some interesting discussion is happening on the H-PolMeth list over an apparent policy by the editors of the American Journal of Political Science to reject papers for a variety of reasons, most controversially including summarily rejecting any article that advances formal theory without an empirical application of that theory. Without taking sides (I can always hope I might get a pub in the AJPS someday, and the people on the other side of the dispute include at least one good friend of mine), all I can say is that this one could become highly entertaining real quick.

The Democrats offered a compromise on abortion that wasn’t a compromise at all. One of Ross’s commenters (see link) made a suggestion that is a real compromise and fits quite nicely with my own views on both the death penalty and abortion: pass a constitutional amendment that bans post-first-trimester abortions and ends the death penalty in this country.

It has the benefit of matching my views, which I’m sure everyone is concerned about, and it wouldn’t come down from our robed masters at SCOTUS. If it did pass it would represent a real consensus that we don’t get from SCOTUS rulings. It won’t happen, though, because the Left isn’t interested in compromising, but rather holding their own views in place and calling it a consensus.

(þ: Jane)

Greg of Begging to Differ says House is his new favorite TV show. While it’s not my absolute favorite show at the moment (I probably would rank Galactica a small notch higher), it’s truly compelling TV—and that’s spoken by someone who has never cared for either medical dramas or CSI-type shows.

I shouldn’t have laughed at this post on the Terri Schiavo saga from the newly-made-over Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, but I did:

In all the debate about “what Terri would have wanted” people seem to be forgetting that her vegetative state was initially caused by anorexia and bulimia. She was TRYING to starve herself. Let her finish.

In all seriousness, though, I’m thinking there are far more important things for the Florida and U.S. legislatures to be using their time on; of course, the libertarian in me thinks (perhaps on the erroneous assumption that time is a meaningful legislative commodity) the more time they spend on this the less they can spend futzing with my life.

Since Mom “Beat Beifuss” (the Commercial Appeal’s movie reviewer) in the Oscar picks this year, she won a crapload of free passes to Malco movies, so we went to see Hitch tonight out in Collierville. We both thought it was a very entertaining and cute movie; I’d go see it if you haven’t already.

The second exam in American government had good and bad points; the good point was that the average, an 82, was basically where I wanted it to be. The bad point is that, somehow, the standard deviation was 4. So bad, in fact, I was sorely tempted to rescale the scores so there would be a larger standard deviation. Even worse, the correlation between scores on the first two exams was something like 0.2.

In layman’s terms, somehow I managed to ask 30 multiple choice questions, about 25 of which were either too easy (almost everyone got them right) or too hard (the only way people got them right was by guessing); coupled with the essay questions that never seem to discriminate well among students, I produced an exam that was borderline useless. Ugh.

Michael Jennings has photos up at Samizdata from his recent trip to view the highly impressive Millau Viaduct in France.

James Joyner links to an AP article about Coca-Cola’s plans to launch a new product in June, called “Coca-Cola Zero.” He asks:

It’s unclear why Coke Zero will be different from Diet Coke or Coke C2.

Well, the obvious answer is that C2 is not a zero-calorie soda; it’s just half the calories of regular Coke. Diet Coke doesn’t taste anything like Coke. So, the moral of the story is that a “diet Coke” that tastes like real Coke would be worth having; according to Coke’s press release, that’s the plan:

“Coca-Cola Zero is exactly what young adults told us they wanted – real Coca-Cola taste, zero calories and a new brand they can call their own,” said Dan Dillon, vice president, Diet Portfolio, Coca-Cola North America. “Young people today do not want to compromise on flavor or calories and we think Coca-Cola Zero’s taste and personality will appeal to them.”

There’s a product website here, of course.

As alluded to below, I am very pleased to announce that I have accepted an appointment as a visiting assistant professor at Duke University for the 2005–06 academic year, which—if nothing else—will make Duke the most blogged political science department in the world. Thankfully for Messrs. Troester and Nyhan, however, Dr. Munger has chosen to inflict me primarily on the undergraduate population.

I’m told that my offer of employment is conditional on learning how to spell Coach K’s full name, so I suppose I should get to work on learning that, as well figuring out why a glorified gym is referred to as an “indoor stadium”—perhaps because the events at the outdoor stadium, absent the good graces of Mr. Spurrier, are such a disappointment.

In other news, the paper I sent to APR got rejected (or, as I like to call it, “revise and resubmit—but elsewhere”). At least it wasn’t in turnaround hell forever.

Update: Will Baude quibbles with my assertion that Duke is now the “most blogged” political science department in the world. If one were to count the joint-appointed and intermittent blogger Cass Sunstein and the silent Jacob Levy, I might grant his point, although I’ll raise him the equally-silent Dan Lee in the Blue Devils’ defense. Of course, Drezner can squash us all like bugs, but on one-person, one-blog rules I think we’re essentially tied.

Further Update: Mr. Troester adds D. Laurence Rice to the list, pulling Duke ahead by my estimation.

The crisis continues: Mr. Baude has dug up two more UC types with blogs. Can my fellow Cameron Crazies meet this challenge?