I’m pleased to announce that Robert Prather, formerly blogging at Insults Unpunished, has agreed to join Signifying Nothing as a co-blogger; I’ll leave any further introductions to him. Robert’s posts will be this color. Welcome aboard!

Will Baude is taking issue with a favorable review by Pejman Yousefzadeh of Heaven on Seven, a restaurant I had a somewhat-decent lunch at with Dirk Eddelbüttel during my last visit to Chicago after our plans to eat at the restaurant in Millenium Park fell through.

I generally agree that the restaurant only provides a facsimilie of proper soul food, but given that travel to Mr. Baude’s preferred restaurants in the UofC area would not fit in the timeframe of Loop-area office workers (or academic conference attendees desperately attempting to arrange job interviews), sometimes the substitute is preferable just because the only viable alternative is starvation.

Is TV sci-fi back? PoliBlog’s Steven Taylor takes note of the recent improvements in Enterprise (or is it Star Trek: Enterprise?), Stargate Atlantis has had a fairly impressive first half-season, and I hear, since I wouldn’t want to go against the wishes of creator Ron Moore and use BitTorrent to download any episodes before the scheduled January U.S. debut, that the new Battlestar Galactica series is the most kick-ass TV sci-fi since Firefly.

Congratulations to Dan Drezner on finishing the draft of his second book. Now I feel strangely unproductive…

If you have a olemiss.edu address for me, it is going away in a few days. Update your address books accordingly.

Kieran at Crooked Timber is the latest to point to a UC-Berkeley study that represents the new Great Kerry-Really-Won Hope for the left; there’s apparent county-level evidence that Florida counties that used electronic voting had a greater increase in Bush support from 2000 than counties that used optical-mark scanning. Rick Hasen has dug up some skeptical responses from voting experts, while Patrick Ruffini notes the bivariate relationship counters the authors’ thesis.

Of course, Diebold and the other e-voting manufacturers could have forestalled all of this silliness from the start by including a paper trail in their equipment.

Update: Andrew Gelman says only two counties are driving the results: the adjacent Southeast Florida counties of Palm Beach and Broward, both of which have relatively large Jewish populations (and thus might have been disproportionately more likely to vote Democratic in 2000 for the Gore-Lieberman ticket than for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards ticket).

If there is such a thing as a “reality-based community,” Ole Miss AD Pete Boone isn’t part of it:

Ole Miss has taken a few beatings on and off the football field in recent months, but the program is not spiraling out of control, athletic director Pete Boone said Thursday.

“There have been some problems, and while these things have come in bunches (lately), I don’t think this is indicative at all of our overall program,” Boone said.

At issue is a record of off-the-field problems over the past couple of years that might even make Miami’s AD blush:

Since June of 2003, Ole Miss has had at least five players arrested (at least four on felony charges), has placed at least seven players on suspension for disciplinary reasons and has dismissed at least four members from the team.

Coupled with the Rebs’ on-the-field problems, it seems that David Cutcliffe’s leash is getting a lot shorter lately.

One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research.

I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the "mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats."

Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush's failures as badly as Bush was.

Get that woman a thickburger!

Google has unveiled a new toy of interest to academics: a search engine that exclusively tracks scholarly articles. It’s not perfect, and it may not quite put the print journals out of business, but I suspect it’s another nail in their coffins (þ: Ars Technica).

Both Stephen “Screw the big tent now we’ve won” Bainbridge and Begging To Differ’s in-house Atrios-substitute Kriston agree that the House GOP shouldn’t have changed the rules to allow Tom DeLay to stay majority leader (#2 in the House) if he’s indicted by a Texas grand jury. And there’s more agreement from James Joyner and Andrew Sullivan.

It seems to me that the dopes on The Corner should have expended as much effort against this crap as they spent (and still are spending, at least in the personage of the MoDo-esque K-Lo) riling up people to call Congress to demand that they boot Specter. But the word “DeLay” doesn’t even appear on the page. Amazing how that works…

Tony Dungy bizarrely argues that the “towel-dropping incident” on Monday Night Football is some sort of “Jungle Fever” knockoff:

“No. 1, I think it was racial,” Dungy said. “I think it’s stereotypical in looking at the players, and on the heels of the Kobe Bryant incident, I think it’s very insensitive,” he added, a reference to the NBA star now facing a civil suit after criminal rape charges were dropped.

I give up. Everyone on this planet is apparently losing their minds.

I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a New York Giants fan in Mississippi you can cancel NFL Sunday Ticket for the forseeable future.

Jeremy Freese points out that receipts from Best Buy have become ridiculously long as of late—though, in Best Buy’s defense, Circuit City still manages somehow to have both longer and wider receipts.

Viagra and Oxycontin bottles will soon be tagged with RFID chips, under a new FDA initiative to discourage theft and counterfeiting.

"Right away, for the first time ever, a cop can say 'that bottle came from a crime scene and this suspect is in possession of stolen property'," [Purdue Pharma chief security officer Aaron] Graham said.

(Purdue Pharma is the manufacturer of Oxycontin, a narcotic.)

Maybe I’m missing something, but what will stop thieves from just removing the pills from the bottles and throwing the bottles away?

If the “war on drugs” didn’t have such a high cost in human freedom, the ineffectual antics of the drug warriors would be a laugh riot.

Guys, has your girlfriend dumped you for the boyfriend’s arm pillow? Don’t worry, the Kameo corporation of Japan has something for you, too. The amazing new girlfriend’s lap pillow will get you through those lonely nights without her.

(þ Pure Land Mountain, which doesn’t seem to have permalinks.)

Harry Lampert, creator of DC Comics superhero “The Flash” (the original Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick), is dead at the age of 88.

Mark A.R. Kleiman has a modest proposal for Democrats that makes sense:

Think about it: when you pass a car on the highway and see an American flag bumper sticker, what do you assume about the political views of the driver? Right. So do I. And so do all those voters whose behavior you simply can’t understand. At some level, many of them were voting for the party that wasn’t made uncomfortable by the sight of an American flag bumper sticker.

The habit on the anti-Vietnam War left of dishonoring our flag and honoring that of our enemies wasn’t really very widespread. But it wasn’t entirely made up, either. And its result was to allow the right to seize the flag as a partisan symbol, giving its candidates an advantage they still enjoy. If we want to start winning elections, the first thing to do is to recapture the flag for our side.

[After the Oklahoma City bombing, I proposed to the couple of contacts I had within the Clinton White House that the President should ask all Americans to fly flags and wear flag lapel pins as an anti-militia statement. But the idea went nowhere.]

So here’s my idea, which I offer to any seeker of the Democratic nomination for 2008 who wants to take it: ask your supporters NOT to put your bumper sticker on their cars without a separate American flag bumper sticker, or to wear your campaign button without an American flag lapel pin. Yes, that will make some of your potential supporters uncomfortable. But that’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve.

He also has some thoughts on the role of ceremony in national unity that are worth reading.

Maybe I’ve become old and cranky, but this is patently ridiculous:

Abit has just unleashed their first “Fatal1ty” motherboard. For those who don’t know, Fatal1ty is the name used by 19-year old Jonathan Wendel, one of the most respected gamers in the world.

Early in his gaming career, Fatal1ty became the number 1 ranked Quake 3 player in the world. This was followed by wins 3 years in a row at CPL competing in Quake 3, Alien vs. Predator 2, and Unreal Tournament 2003. Fatal1ty also won Quakecon 2002 and became the world’s first Doom 3 champion at Quakecon 2004.

Call me back when he starts acting like most responsible 19-year-olds and goes to fricking college—or at least drops the stupid l33t handle.

The best part is the “badass” pose he strikes in the included photo. That’s worth the click-through on its own.

I have to agree with Amber Taylor, and disagree with Will Baude.

If one wishes to be asked on a second date, one must in some way indicate the desire to be asked. The easiest way to do this is a goodnight kiss. If one is, as Will writes, “shy, or merely very very reluctant to make bold moves,” then I recommend learning to say the words “Can we see each other again sometime?”

It's hard enough to ask a person out on a first date and face the possibility of rejection. One should not have to do so for the second.

I haven’t been in the dating scene for about eleven years, but when I was, I always interpreted no kiss as “kiss off.”

Dear lord, what a miserable display the Rebels put on today. BigJim blames the coach for the downward spiral, and I think it goes back to a decision I’ve mentioned before:

I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the result of Cutcliffe not playing Spurlock enough last season—I don’t think Spurlock saw a single snap in an SEC game until Saturday—and some of it is growing pains with working with what Spurlock’s strengths are. Flatt, who does a lot of the same stuff Manning did (not to mention having another half-foot on Spurlock), is actually a better fit in the playcalling “package.”

The Spurlock QB problems led directly to fumbling around with this 2.5 quarterback system (mostly featuring Flatt and Lane, with Spurlock coming in apparently solely so Cutcliffe could hear some boos from the stands*) which has been generally unsuccessful except in its debut against a fairly mediocre South Carolina squad.

The question still, however, is whether the Rebels can expect to find anyone better on the market. Spurrier isn’t coming to Oxford—the golf sucks. Petrino will be in BCS land next year. The best that can be hoped for is probably an assistant off of a decent staff, and there is going to be a lot of competition for those guys even in the SEC (with both Florida and South Carolina apparently looking for replacements, and LSU likely to be looking too if Nick Saban goes to the Dolphins, as many expect).

In Thursday’s Clarion-Ledger, former U.S. representative David Bowen distills some advice for the national Democrats that’s been floating around the punditocracy over the past week:

The Democratic Party could once again become America’s majority party if it chose a more conservative path on social issues while remaining liberal on economic and governmental issues. That combination is sometimes called populism, an unbeatable combination.

It is not necessary for Democratic nominees to abandon a pro-choice or stem-cell-research position. Just abandon partial birth and late-term abortion. Respect and defend gay Americans, but abandon gay marriage. Don’t abandon your consistent support for African-Americans, but modify race-based discrimination. Don’t think you have to speak in tongues or teach Sunday school to get the evangelical vote, but do show respect and understanding for all people of faith and demonstrate some faith of your own.

I’m not entirely sure populism is “unbeatable” (ask Ronnie Musgrove, the highlights of whose unsuccessful reelection campaign were joining Haley Barbour in pathetically pandering by offering to take on Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument and running away from the unpopular state flag referendum he helped engineer), and referring to affirmative action as “race-based discrimination” probably won’t play well with the left-wing set, but nonetheless Bowen may have a point.

It turns out a friend from ICPSR is passing through Jackson next weekend, so I’ve reached my “LSU-Ole Miss fever” tipping point and decided to save the hassle and expense of a trip to Red Stick. So do me a favor and take my ticket off my hands. Thanks!

Or five bottles, to be precise. Following up on their successful turkey and gravy soda from last year, the Jones Soda company is selling a holiday five-pack: turkey and gravy soda, cranberry soda, mashed potato and butter soda, greenbean casserole soda, and fruitcake soda. (þ apostropher.)

The sociology department at the University of Wisconsin is 22 times bigger than the political science department at Millsaps (or, perhaps more “apples-to-apples,” 11 times bigger than our sociology/anthropology department). I think (not being bored enough to count faculty in the sciences, which both soc/anth and polysci are at Millsaps) it’s bigger than the whole sciences division here. Yowzah.

Both* of us polysci types, incidentally, got our Ph.D.s in “red” states (and at SEC schools, to boot), for those of you playing along at home.