From today’s obituaries in the Commercial Appeal:

A___ S___ W___, 67, of Memphis, retired cook for the Memphis City Schools, died Wednesday at Methodist South Hospital. ... She was a member of the Heroines of Jericho, Heroines of Temple Crusades P.H.A and the Order of the Eastern Star Eureka Chapter 241, where she was past most ancient matron of Eureka Court 19, princess captain of Wolverine Guild 3 and second lieutenant commandress of Moolah Court 22 Daughters of Isis.

I can only hope that my obituary is as colorful.

Ex-Texas Tech star Ricky Williams has lucked into some good news; the former Texas running back who shares his name is apparently retiring from the Miami Dolphins, at least according to the “hateable” Dan Le Batard* of the Miami Herald. The retiring Williams, you may recall, was the object of the foolish New Orleans Saints trade that gave away all their draft picks for about a decade or so; he was eventually traded to the Dolphins when New Orleans managed to acquire former Ole Miss RB Deuce McAllister.

Frivolous lawsuit or real justice? Check out this story from Knoxville:

The Tennessee Court of Appeals has reinstated a lawsuit against a gas station filed by two victims of drunken driving.

The court ruled Gary West and Michell Richardson could sue East Tennessee Pioneer Oil Company for negligence.

An investigation concluded that employees of a Knoxville Exxon station operated by Pioneer refused to sell Brian Lee Tarver beer because he was intoxicated, but helped him pump fuel into his car.

Police say Tarver left the station with his lights off, driving in the wrong lane and crashed head-on into the car carrying West and Richardson in July, 2000. [emphasis added]

It seems to me the more appropriate target for this lawsuit is the employees, who I doubt were following company policy in helping drunk drivers fill their gas tanks (assuming the Exxon is self-serve only), but considering they were stupid enough to fill the guy’s tank, they probably don’t have any money to collect in a lawsuit anyway.

(Link via email from a friend of the blog.)

Brett Marston isn’t too impressed with the National Labor Relations Board’s decision last week that removed the right of graduate students to organize at private universities. He writes:

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but the majority seems to have little interest in the function of labor law. They seem to view it as a collection of information about congressional views on categories of relationships between people rather than as an attempt to reduce labor conflicts. For the majority, the relevant question is whether TA’s have a primarily “economic” or a primarily “educational” relationship to the university; if it’s the latter, then the administrators win, because educational relationships are not covered by the rules.

In contrast, the dissent seems to indicate that the function of labor law is to provide a regularization of existing disputes that are characterized by the unionizing participants themselves as labor disputes. It’s the disputes themselves that matter, not the formal relationship categories that Congress has helped create.

My suspicion, however, is that TA unionization doesn’t “reduce labor conflicts” at all; instead, it is a vehicle for graduate students to obtain greater benefits from their employer/educator than they might otherwise receive (by bargaining collectively, rather than on an individual basis), which seems rather orthogonal to the idea of “conflict.” If anything, having a union would seem to create a system by which disputes between graduate students and the administration would be increased and intensified, by being channeled into adversarial activities such as “work to rule” and strikes—events that wouldn’t occur if disgruntled students had individual disputes with the administration.

On the other hand, I was raised in an era and a political culture hostile to unions, and grew up cheering on Margaret Thatcher as she pummelled Britain’s excessively powerful labor unions into submission, so I could be wrong.

The “Marriage Protection Act of 2004” has all the good legalist-model-types in the blogosphere scrambling for reasons why it would be unconstitutional. Josh Chafetz says it’s unconstitutional because it (partially) strips the federal judiciary of its mandatory jurisdiction over all cases arising under federal statute and the Constitution.

My gut feeling is that the Court would be more likely to rule the act (assuming it ever becomes law, something I don’t see given the inevitable filibuster in the Senate) unconstitutional on the basis of Romer v. Evans, on the basis of the act being a violation of equal protection.

All this, of course, is trumped by the attitudinalist in me, which sees zero chance of the Supreme Court ever permitting any of its jurisdiction to be curtailed by Congress without its consent. The legal reasoning surrounding such a ruling would be, more likely than not, just window dressing for the underlying preferences of the Court’s members. (I suppose this is my bias as a political scientist showing.)

Michael Badnarik has Chip Taylor reminiscing about Harry Browne. Say what you will about Browne (and, in the four years since I met him, I’ve found plenty of bad things to say about him—now, it’s just one shell game after another with no sign of anything productive ever coming out of it), but at least he wasn’t a complete nutter.

Mike Hollihan recalls “Hurricane Elvis,” the storm that knocked out power in some parts of Memphis for three weeks last summer.

Conrad fills in the gaps in reporting the Filipino government’s spineless capitulation to terrorists. As most sane observers predicted, copycat terrorists have emerged in the hopes of finding similar appeasers elsewhere—though the logic of kidnapping citizens of countries that aren’t even part of the occupation force escapes me.

When I went to summer camp, all we learned was how to tie square knots and clove hitches. But Tyler Cowen’s daughter is learning a lot more in the Center for Talented Youth program at Johns Hopkins.

Yana, who is fourteen, took a class on the philosophy of mind. She just started another class on the French and Russian Revolutions. This is her third year there, she calls herself a CTY addict. The year before she did Latin. This time we had her for two days between sessions. I heard about modal logic, Newcomb's Paradox, and mind-body reductionism. Yana now knows why she believes in free will, and why she doesn't want to be an undergraduate philosophy major.

Apparently they’re warning these kids about the state of the philosophy job market.

Steven Taylor notes that it’s apparently pretty hard for his university’s administration to figure out that he—and most of the rest of the faculty—are on fall-and-spring semester contracts, and thus have no obligation to set foot on campus over the summer. Personally, I’d be happy to sit in my office all summer for ⅓ of my nine-month pay, but somehow I doubt that would be offered.

Free advice for those planning to move:

1. Pay someone else to do it for you.
2. Budget at least a week to pass out afterward.
3. If you decide not to spring for professionals, go back to #1.

All that said, I’m slowly but surely getting settled down here in Jackson, and getting back up to speed with current events and the like. Hopefully I’ll be back in the groove in no time.

Happy blogiversary to me! July 18 marked one year of blogging here at Signifying Nothing for me. During that time, I’ve posted 144 times, which is an average of 2.76 times per week.

I’d like to thank Chris for letting me spout off on his blog, in spite of our substantial political differences.

I anticipate my blogging will become less and less political as the November election approaches, and I become more and more disgusted with the whole sordid process. I’ll be doing a lot more boardgame blogging at Settling Catan. And I’ll also be returning to my philosophical roots. I just received my copy of Donald Davidson’s first posthumous volume of essays, Problems of Rationality, and I’ll be posting a review of each essay as I read through them in the coming weeks.

Amber Taylor is soliciting votes in a face-off of The Volokh Conspiracy’s three worst guest contributors. As they say, vote early and often.

Update: One of Taylor’s candidates for “worst conspirator,” Cathy Seipp, has really gotten under Conrad’s skin with a fisk-worthy post accusing non-voters of being lazy and idiotic, a phrase Conrad would more likely apply to Ms. Seipp’s analysis of the issue at hand. Go away for a few days, and apparently all hell breaks loose in the blogosphere…

Also, Will Baude is running a web poll asking the same question. At present, Clayton “I'm a homophobe, and I'm OK” Cramer is well in the lead.

A few friendly words of advice: if you’re moving, hire professionals.

More later Tuesday, I hope…

Uh-oh. It seems Laura and I are headed for a disagreement over the merits of Avril Lavigne. For what it’s worth, I do find “Sk8er Boi” to be a deeply annoying song. I realize this won’t really redeem me in Laura’s eyes, mind you.

More ammunition here. But if you really want to know what pop sensation I truly have a “thing” for, click here and forever hold your peace.

I’ve posted a review of the game Ra at Settling Catan.

Tyler Cowen rhetorically asks whether anyone would buy fluoridated water:

But hey, when you buy bottled water isn’t fluoride what you’re trying to avoid?

It may not make sense in urban areas, but if you get water from a well (or even from some rural water utilities), the water isn’t going to be fluoridated. Presumably, this product is aimed at parents in rural areas (or who live in areas with bad drinking water supplies, like Washington, D.C.) who want their kids to have more cavity-resistant teeth. So it makes sense to me, at least, especially when you consider the alternative is trying to make your kids take fluoride tablets every day (something I had to do while growing up).

I hate to rain on the poor guy’s campaign, but Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik’s first fundraising mail didn’t exactly get off to a good start. In addition to making the mistake of targeting me (although, if I had some cash, I might actually be willing to part with a few bucks of it), the letter also managed to give a return address in “Austin, Texax.”

Victor of The Dead Parrot Society is back from a trip to Mississippi with James Bates, who’s a photojournalist putting together a portrait of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Interesting stuff.

Eugene Volokh finds a shocking relationship between ice cream consumption and sex crimes. Fun with stats ensues.

(This item is blogged so I remember to shamelessly rip it off when I teach methods in the fall.)

I can’t answer all of Will Baude’s questions, but I’ll give two of them a shot:

Why is a turnpike called a turnpike?

For that matter, what exactly makes a particular stretch of limited-access highway a turnpike?

Turnpikes were originally named “turnpikes” because that was the name of the turnstiles that were used at the toll gates; they started out as “turnpike roads” but the name was shortened to simply “turnpike” or even (particularly in the South) “pike.”

In general, a modern turnpike is a fully-controlled access highway (what engineers and Californians call a “freeway,” Britons would call a “motorway,” and francophones call an autoroute) that charges a toll for use; however, there are exceptions—most notably, the Connecticut Turnpike (part of Interstate 95), which stopped charging tolls after a nasty multivehicle accident at a tollbooth in 1985. Also, some contemporary turnpikes only charge tolls on part of their length—the Maryland Turnpike starts near Baltimore and runs to the Delaware border, but the toll is only charged at one location on the route.

So, in sum, the name “turnpike” is generally applied to roads that are, or used to be, toll roads, and there’s no particular logic to whether or not a particular toll road will be called a “turnpike.”

I think this report says pretty much everything you need to know about the Mississippi Democratic Party’s attitude toward its African-American base: like children, best seen (particularly when voting), but not heard.

Link via Radley Balko. More discussion from the Jackson Free Press lefty echo chamber here.

Signifying Nothing will be offline this coming weekend (most likely, beginning sometime Friday); we should be back up and running sometime on Monday, July 19, depending on the vagaries of my new cable company and the general level of progress in moving into my new home—most specifically, whether or not I manage to reassemble my computer desk properly. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

I’ve posted a review of Memoir '44, a boardgame about the Allied Invasion of Normandy, at Settling Catan.

Unlearned Hand fesses up to liking Avril Lavigne’s new album. I generally agree; it’s better than most sophomore efforts, and it more than surpasses the “three good songs” test.