Eric Grey attempts to describe the rules for forming a minority government. There are a few points worth mentioning:

• The rules vary among parliamentary democracies. Some democracies, like Germany, require constructive votes of no confidence; in other words, to get rid of an existing government, you have to nominate a new one, which necessarily increases the stability of the system. In some other parliamentary democracies, the government falls if any government proposal is defeated on a party-line vote (i.e. not a “free” vote). Canada generally follows Westminster tradition, where “confidence” is a customary rather than a legal requirement; since only the Prime Minister (well, technically, the sovereign) can dissolve parliament and call elections, essentially this system is equivalent to the German system—although, since a government could only be replaced by a plurality vote, the PM is more likely than not to call new elections before such a vote could take place.
• Minority governments are somewhat more common than one might suspect. Notably, Israel’s government is currently a minority government. Britain and Canada each have had a few since World War II. Interestingly, minority governments are much more common than coalitions in countries with first-past-the-post (plurality) elections.

An interesting study of coalition government, by the way, is Multiparty Government by Michael Laver and Norman Schofield. Laver and Ken Shepsle’s Making and Breaking Governments is probably also worthwhile (from a more game-theoretic perspective, as is Shepsle’s bent), but, alas, I haven’t read it.

Incidentally, I’d appreciate recommendations on a scholarly text (or even a textbook) on Canadian politics, perhaps something comparable to Philip Norton’s The British Polity. For now, it’s just an idle scholarly interest, but maybe an employer one of these decades will be desperate enough to let me teach some comparative courses.

If you’re suitably wealthy (to the tune of $16.00), you may now invest in a printed copy of my dissertation. Of course, you can still download it for free, but this gives you the option of obtaining it in convenient book form—and, I might add, at a price significantly cheaper than that charged by UMI, while still funneling several bucks into my pocket.

I seem to have struck a nerve with my (admittedly off-the-cuff) criticism of critics of popular music.

I think Jay gets to the heart of much of my critique, but there’s another component of it as well. One often hears that “band X is a ripoff of band Y.” Band X need not have covered any of band Y’s songs—all they have to do is “sound like” band Y. This has always struck me as something of a silly critique; if people like what Pearl Jam sounds like, and Pearl Jam isn’t making any more songs, why should we complain if Creed makes some songs that sound like something Pearl Jam might have performed? I could understand the critique if Creed went out and covered every song on Ten, or if Pearl Jam were still releasing new albums, but the critique as it stands seems rather odd.

There is one other point I should clarify from my previous post; I made a point of including “NPR listeners” among the group of similarly-afflicted snobs. I actually have no problem with NPR listeners in general, although I do have a problem with NPR listeners who make a point of telling everyone they meet that they listen to NPR. (The classic quote on NPR is, alas, missing from the memorable quotes page for NewsRadio in the Internet Movie Database.)

As mentioned earlier, I rented Love Actually and Lost in Translation last week. Not surprisingly, the combined effect of the films was to make me want to visit both London and Tokyo.

I think Lost in Translation was the weaker of the two films, although I did enjoy it nonetheless. Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanssen both gave excellent performances, the film deftly avoids a cliché resolution, and the cinematography was outstanding, but the whole is ultimately unsatisfactory—although I can’t really put my finger on why. Perhaps the weakness is simply relative to the amount of hype the film received.

On the other hand, Love Actually was a supremely enjoyable film, with excellent acting, an engaging plot, and (also) outstanding cinematography. In terms of story construction, the obvious referent is Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, but Newell uses that framework in service to a more comedic story. A minor demerit for the use of Rowan Atkinson in a throw-away role; if you’re going to use him, put him in a real role (a sin also committed less egregiously by Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral).

The only other problem with Love Actually is that the widescreen cinematography used—on the order of 2.8:1 2.35:1—would make the film virtually unwatchable on a standard 4:3 television set (and thus seems inappropriate for a comedy). Luckily, as I mentioned before, it did play on my laptop’s 1.6:1 display, though even there was ample unused screen real estate at the top and bottom of the screen.

I noticed on my last visit to Blockbuster that sufficient desperation has set in that they’ve decided to offer a NetFlix-style “unlimited rentals” plan… for $24.95 per month (limit 2 rentals at once), which strikes me as rather noncompetitive if you ask me, although I seem to remember NetFlix being significantly cheaper than it is now in the past.

Of course, the fact Blockbuster decided to raise the DVD rental fee to $4.19 hasn’t exactly ensured my continued patronage after I use up my $20 gift card.

My most recent rentals are Love Actually (some of the humor in which, I suspect, is lost on people on this side of the pond—most notably, the plight of the has-been singer trying to get the Christmas #1 is something of a riff on a British tradition of has-beens and never-wases trying to gain glory with a hit Christmas single) and Lost in Translation, the latter of which doesn’t seem to be very cooperative with my laptop for some reason (I couldn’t get Totem to play it at all under Linux, and Windows Media Player won’t let me skip past any of the promo crap on the DVD). So we’ll see if the real DVD player can cope with Lost, and then I’ll run to Blockbuster to return the DVDs.

Apparently, Dick Cheney was ahead of the curve and speaking on behalf of fans of P2P networks when he told Patrick Leahy what he thought of him:

According to this News.com article, Senator Hatch’s “INDUCE” act has been renamed the “Inducing Infringements of Copyrights Act,” but has not otherwise been changed. ”Foes of the IICA, including civil liberties groups and file-swapping network operators, are alarmed that the measure enjoys strong support from prominent politicians of both major parties. Its supporters include Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.”

Brian J. Noggle has figured out how Celine Dion came into existence. Cloning is involved.

Stephen Karlson ponders curriculum reform—in particular, an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. My knowledge of such matters is necessarily limited—I was not a guinea pig for the integrated first-year curriculum at Rose-Hulman (those of us with high-school calculus were too far along), and I was never a freshman again.

All I’ve gotten so far on Millsaps’ interdisciplinary core is the fluffy, press release material aimed at potential students and parents and anecdotal accounts from various participants (principally, my tour guide during my interview)—I assume it works, since they’ve been doing it for over a decade, but I have no empirical evidence either way. It certainly seems more rigorous than NIU’s approach to the problem, but then again there are advantages in such things to being a selective private school that can restrict its enrollment and worry less about the implications of transfers in or out.

I have two Gmail invites to spare. Email me if you’re interested. All gone!

James Joyner links reviews of C2 by Meryl Yourish and Kevin Aylward.

I gave a fairly positive review to the product last weekend, which seemed to fit the general consensus until Ms. Yourish weighed in.

Update: Steven Taylor asks a question that proves he’s not a cola connoisseur.

My latest little project for Debian is an automatic printer setup tool, built from lots of the bits and pieces I’ve developed for Foomatic-GUI. Details here on debian-devel. Short instructions:

Add this to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://lordsutch.dyndns.org/~cnlawren/printconf/ ./

Then do (as root):

apt-get update; apt-get install printconf

Success or failure reports would be greatly appreciated.

It’s something of a cliche to say that someone has a spiffy new design for their blog… but Matt Stinson’s new design, coupled with a transition to WordPress, is pretty darn impressive nonetheless.

Vincent Baker confesses how he got started playing role-playing games:

When I was 8 or 9 I was playing Zork on my uncle's new Atari 800 with a couple friends, and we dug it. At some point we wanted to play it but we weren't at my uncle's house, so I volunteered to "be the computer." We even played it text-based! I'd write a description, pass the notebook, my friends would read it and write their actions, I'd write the results. We kept that up for a while, actually, several sessions, before we figured out that we could just talk instead.

He’s got me out-geeked. (Link via Jim Henley.)

What can I say? I like seeing my name in print. Plus, the paranoid part of my brain likes seeing visual evidence that I actually have a job and that the whole thing isn’t a giant clerical error.

Steve Verdon and I managed to scoop Matt Drudge on this working paper by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the bias of media outlets using the ADA scale. Where’s my gold star?

Meanwhile, James Joyner reacts to the paper itself. I agree that the method of using think-tank citations isn’t ideal, but I can’t come up with a better one offhand that allows you to put members of Congress and media outlets in the same measurement scale without a lot of a priori assumptions. (There are some other critiques at the Dead Parrot Society.)

Update: As Brock points out, Alex Tabarrok scooped us all. Story of my life.

James Joyner has some poll numbers that pretty much explain why John Kerry hasn’t articulated much of a political vision beyond “I’m not George W. Bush.”

Jeff Licquia has a pretty insightful look at the news that the rapid improvement of Mozilla Firefox has shamed Microsoft into start developing Internet Explorer again.

Of course, the fact that IE’s pathological problems with modern CSS are being fixed by one guy using JavaScript ought to be pretty embarrassing to begin with.

I hate to directly contradict Ryan of the Dead Parrots, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the widespread condescension displayed by the self-annointed music cognoscenti toward popular music. It’s the same order of pretentious twaddle advanced by NPR listeners, independent bookstore owners, peddlers of concern about low levels of political knowledge among the American public, and film-school graduates—faux bourgeois superiority, nothing more, nothing less.

You know what? I couldn’t care less that every Nickelback song sounds alike, that Jewel’s music is now the soundtrack for marketing womens’ razors, or that record companies—in their efforts to produce sufficient content consistent with Canadian domestic artist quota rules—have foisted a succession of Alanis Morrissette-wannabes on the North American listening audience. I refuse to care what poor, long-suffering garage band has been pushed aside for Linkin Park, or what nameless-but-nonetheless-vastly-superior Little Rock bands toil in obscurity while Evanescence’s Amy Lee rockets up the charts, or how Kenny G killed the market for Herbie Hancock CDs.

So, if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to listening to Avril while the bourgeois piety police go back to diving into the remainder bins full of obscure, but doubtless vastly more “artistic,” artists in their endless search for art that meets their own exacting standards.

Kate of Small Dead Animals has visual evidence of the Saskatchewan NDP’s hostility to the United States.

Radley Balko is keeping an eye on the state-level activities of the increasingly prohibitionist (and increasingly misnamed) MADD and their pet state legislators. It’s not a very pretty picture.

Dean Jens explicates the original purpose of the Electoral College:

[T]he electoral college as originally conceived was expected to elect George Washington as many times as he could be talked into it, and then to very rarely actually give a majority of the votes to any candidate. It was viewed largely as a nominating committee, giving the House of Representatives a short list of candidates from which to select a president. It didn’t work out the way they envisioned, and, if it had, it may not have worked out the way they envisioned; regularly having the legislative branch elect the chief executive may or may not have proved to be a good idea. But it’s my understanding that that was the idea.

Alexander Hamilton’s explanation of the selected procedure is in Federalist 68. Funnily enough, one of the changes to the procedure made in the 12th Amendment reduced the “short list” of candidates from an indecisive vote of the Electoral College from five to three.

Jeff Jarvis has unkind words for the 9/11 Commission:

The 9/11 Commission has perverted its work and, in my view, committed the unpardonable sin of politicizing 9/11 and turning the attacks of mudering terrorist nutjobs into a litany of things we did wrong, things that are our fault.

No, 9/11 is the fault of murdering terrorist nutjobs and the only solution to this is to hunt down and capture or kill every one of them we can find wherever we find them—yes, even in Saudi Arabia, even in Iraq, even in Pakistan, even in New Jersey. I wish I heard the Commission giving us a few more suggestions about how to do that.

I found some C2 at Wal-Mart tonight in the course of handing over a significant portion of my last paycheck to the Walton heirs. My general first impression is that it tastes like a slightly less syrupy version of regular Coca-Cola Classic; unlike, for example, Diet Coke,* it actually manages to evoke the flavor of regular Coke.

Since it is less syrupy than regular Coke, I’d imagine C2 probably makes a better mixer with vodka. Not having any vodka (or, for that matter, any hard liquor) on hand, such experiments will have to wait until at least Monday.

Update: Len Cleavelin also has a review of C2 that goes into more scientific detail.

The slo-mo breakup of the Lakers finds no regret from either Big Jim or Matt Yglesias, although Kevin Drum is probably crying on the inside.

In an interesting twist, the Shaq trade scenarios (dictated largely by cap considerations) strongly suggest that the big man will return to the team that drafted him way-back-when, the Orlando Magic, in (nominal) exchange for Juwan Howard and/or Grant Hill. In a not-so-interesting twist, Lakers owner Jerry Buss is apparently betting his franchise on the possibility that a Colorado jury—fresh on the heels of the UC-Boulder sexual harassment and rape allegations—will be sympathetic to an out-of-state athlete accused of raping a local woman. Glad it’s his money and not mine.

Steven Taylor debunks the theory that the Saudis didn’t care about saving Paul Johnson:

It seems that with the scant information available, that the logical conclusion is that something about the disposal of the body or the delivery of the video tipped off the Saudi security forces leading to al-Moqrin’s whereabouts and his subsequent death.

An alternative conclusion is that killing al-Moqrin would have pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would be executed; thus, the sensible course of action was to wait until after they confirmed Johnson was dead to go after al-Moqrin (who may not have been at the same physical location as Johnson anyway).