Jacqueline has some rather utilitarian relationship advice for her readers, with emphasis on the value of self-confidence. Contrary to the commercials on TV, apparently you don’t need Enzyte to become more confident—go figure.

Bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now.

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan* / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C. /

* I don’t really know whether to count Michigan or not, since I’ve never stayed there for more than 30 days at a time. (þ: CheekyProf)

Steve at Begging to Differ links an interesting site that lets you graph the popularity of first names over time. Shockingly, my all-time favorite girl’s name, “Latrina,” has never cracked the top 1000 names in any decade.

AP story here (and Denver Post story here), although there are no real details yet. (þ: Protein Wisdom)

Belated congrats to Tim Sandefur on his engagement and to all those Signifying Nothing readers out there whose hot Valentine’s Day dates were not with a treadmill in the HAC.

Catallarchy’s Micha Ghertner suggested that “Libertarian Girl,” a blog I’ve never even read or seen before today, is not actually operated by a libertarian girl; the author confirms the theory. Ah, well, for those of you who have to get your libertarianism from a youthful female perspective, there’s always Jacqueline and Amber. (þ: JMPP)

Update: Wizbang!, always your home for coverage of the underbelly of the blogosphere, is now on the case.

The next time someone wants to sell you on the whole “red state/blue state” thing, point them to this AP piece:

LITTLE ROCK — In a bid for more national exposure, the Arkansas owners of the Miss Gay America Pageant have sold the franchise to a Mississippi company.

The annual pageant has had its headquarters in Little Rock for more than three decades. Organizers describe it as the largest and most prestigious female impersonator competition in the nation.

Former owner Norman Jones sold the pageant, its copyright and a smaller circuit of competitions on Feb. 4 to L&T Entertainment, a firm in Nesbit, Miss., about 20 miles south of Memphis.

Very slick.

Daniel Drezner received a gratis copy of a sex manual in the mail and is plugging it as one of his books of the month. I have two comments for Dan:

1. Given Jacqueline Passey’s thoughts on the matter, I suspect that if some of Dan’s under-18 readers (is that a null set?) got hold of the book, I doubt many of their future mates would disapprove.
2. Speaking of null sets, anyone considering throwing a copy my way should be aware that me having a copy of this book might possibly be even more useless than tits on a bull.

Our book of the month, however, is less likely to get you laid but may nonetheless be of interest to readers.

I ran into one of the half-dozen or so students who was in my first-year class in grad school at the University of Mississippi (he subsequently changed majors, worked for a while as the assistant dean of student affairs at Ole Miss, and got a Ph.D. in education) today at Brookshire’s; he’s now living in Jackson and serving as the education policy advisor to the governor.

Actress Teri Polo, last discussed in comments here, is again becoming a topic of debate thanks to a new pictorial in Playboy magazine; Michele doesn’t get the appeal, while Jeff Goldstein does. I tend to think she looks quite a bit better than she did in the notorious ribcage pics from the Meet the Fockers premiere, but I can’t say she is particularly good-looking.

Jacqueline Passey is bemused by the reaction garnered by a casual statement that she “often” blogs without any clothes on. If I thought that a similar revelation about my blogging habits would improve our traffic, I’d happily chime in, but I strongly suspect this would just lead to numerous readers gouging out their eyes in mortal terror.

I humbly apologize to those readers who now won’t be able to get this song out of their heads.

The Lincoln’s wing-wang debate has captured the blogosphere’s attention; Tim Sandefur says the evidence isn’t there, while Jon Rowe has at least an argument-from-authority that he was (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I really don’t care either way.

At the doctor’s office today following up on my dislocated shoulder, the nurse asked me if I had the local winter illness going around, generally known as “the crud.” I didn’t at the time, but I think I have it now; the series of handshakes with new-to-me students I engaged in today probably didn’t help, either.

Speaking of crud, this week’s weather forecast continues the bizarre trend of late, with a 50°F net temperature drop expected between Wednesday afternoon and Friday night.

If your first thought when reading that your cable modem service is going to increase its downlink from 3Mbps to 5 Mbps this month is that you’ll need to change the parameters to your wondershaper ip-up command, you might be a total geek.

If I’d had any sense after 9/11, I would have gone into business producing portable concrete Jersey barriers; you can’t pass almost any federal government building, even such unlikely terror targets as national guard armories and Corps of Engineers buildings, that doesn’t have a few dozen of the things around it.

I’m not dead, I just have nothing much to say—particularly on the wrong end of a 56k dialup line. Happy New Year to all our readers; I expect to have some things to say in a few days, probably including a review of one of my Christmas presents, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

In the meantime I’m trying to relax my brain—and my separated shoulder—so I won’t look like a babbling fool when I try to teach three new courses (public opinion, civil liberties, and an independent study course in southern politics) in addition to a revamped Introduction to American Politics class in the spring.

I apparently have a love-hate relationship with my students; in my mailbox at work today were a Christmas card from a student and my abysmal (at least by Millsaps standards) course evaluations. Four students in my intro class apparently thought it would be amusing to give me the lowest possible ranking on all 19 questions, even such procedural items as “gives clear directions” and “presents [material] in a clear sequence.” Ah well, at least I “demonstrate knowledge” of what I’m teaching…

My response to all this, of course, was to finish my SPSA paper on voting in recent presidential elections and continue getting organized for my trip to Florida tomorrow.

Allow me another plug for the one, the only, Dead Pool 2005… and tell ’em we sent you. It’s all in good fun, and there’s no fee to enter, although Lair may get testy with you if you don’t have a blog. All you have to do is pick the 15 semi-famous people you think are gonna die in 2005. So, in the immortal (or at least immoral) words of Gwen Stefani, ”what you waitin’ for?”

One for the News of the Weird file: the Palestinian Authority’s investments included, until this week, a $3.1 million stake in a chain of bowling alleys in the Northeast Corridor.

Alan Henderson has generously added us to his blogroll, but thinks I’m an “evil law prof”; actually, I’m an evil political science prof who teaches con law because the other evil political science prof has better things to do, and he’s the chair—so what can I do?

Heidi Bond clarifies that Mac OS X isn’t Linux, which probably explains why I could never figure out how to configure anything important that wasn’t in Preferences. She also links Gus, who started DynDNS.com a few Internet eons ago and whose creation helps keep Signifying Nothing on the air… our real hostname is lordsutch.dyndns.org.

Steven Taylor calls Signifying Nothing a “righty blog,” although I’m not sure any of us make particularly good right-wingers… though if you, like me, visit west Jackson or Orange Mound (substitute your favorite inner-city slum) and the first thought in your head is “40 years of failed social policy” instead of “residual racism,” I suppose that might be evidence of “rightiness.”

Will Baude asks:

Does anybody find libertarian Linux-users sexy?

Heidi Bond responds that at least the Linux-using part may increase perceived sexiness, but also adds that ”[t]here are plenty of people who run Linux who I wouldn’t date.”

Undoubtably this is a pressing question for our time—not to mention our blog. Presumably Brock’s wife finds him sexy, although I don’t know that Brock would consider himself a libertarian; if pressed to judge, I’d say Brock is tall and handsome, and thus probably considered “sexy” by women, but neither of those attributes derive from his politics or his choice of operating system.

Robert runs Mac OS X, as does Heidi Bond’s boyfriend, which may count as “Linux usage” for sufficiently vague definitions of “Linux” (i.e. operating systems that use a lot of GNU software and use a kernel patterned after that of the Unix operating system). I have no idea whether Robert is sexy, since I’ve never met him and don’t generally judge the sexiness of other guys (not that there’s anything wrong with that), my assessment of Brock notwithstanding.

Nobody has called me sexy lately, but for the most part I haven’t gone to great lengths to advertise either my libertarianness or my Linux usage in the “real world”; there may be individuals who think I’m sexy, but they haven’t told me that or otherwise indicated they think I’m sexy in an unambiguous manner—defined in my world as “not made blatantly obvious,” so I could be oblivious to such matters.

So, Mr. Baude’s question is now in order. Let the debate commence.

Sign up for the one, the only Dead Pool 2005, and tell Lair we sent you—we’re currently tied for second in the referral contest, so every roster counts!

Jeff Licquia writes of a lesson he learned after some problems (thankfully resolved) with tires he bought at Sam’s Club:

Nevertheless, as a lesson hard won, it bears repeating: do not buy anything from club stores that you foresee needing ongoing customer support for, including automotive parts, computers and other electronics, or anything else where warranty support is important to you.

It seems to me that he omits the caveat “if you don’t plan on keeping your membership through the warranty period.” Given the extremely generous Costco and Sam’s return policies on most goods, maintaining one’s membership would seem to be a relatively inexpensive insurance policy.

Will Baude and Heidi Bond are considering the difficulty of spelling various words correctly. Baude and Bond suggest “necessary, privilege and judgment” are difficult, as is “license.”

The latter two are perhaps difficult because the Commonwealth spellings “judgement” and “licence” are similar (but invalid in Standard American Written English).

Personally, I only seem to have trouble with “tendency”... which I managed to misspell on the American government exam I gave today, and is confusingly different from words like “attendance” that are pronounced the same. The moral of this story: flyspell-mode is your friend.