Kids are funny, and Sheila O’Malley’s nephew is no exception. Even without visual aids, it’s a great story.

Last month, I wrote the following:

Not to start a big brou-ha-ha like the recently-raging conflict over the relative “hotness” of libertarian women, but I‘ll put any five randomly selected young Mississippi women (18–35) against a comparably-selected slate of native Michiganders any day.

A couple of minor clarifications are in order. In general, the above statement is empirically valid, but one should not make the ecologically-fallacious assumption that all young native Michiganders are less attractive than all young native Mississippians, a statement that would be quite untrue. The second clarification is that, ceteris peribus, Michigan girls have somewhat cuter accents (in this gentleman’s opinion, at least), which may or may not be “hot” in your particular book.

I’d love for someone to review the last 48 hours of my life and explain to me how, exactly, I got conned into driving two entirely different groups of people out to eat at the exact same restaurant twice in 24 hours. I really, really want to know this. I can’t possibly be that gullible.

Incidentally, I’ve about had it with today; it’s been one lousy day from start until this exact moment. Thankfully, tomorrow is only 6 hours and 25 minutes away.

Tomorrow couldn’t possibly be worse… or could it?

Update: The guy who takes on the role of “surrogate older brother” in my life emailed the following theory:

Answer: there was a chick Chris thought was cute in one or both groups; a situation, like a black light on bodily fluids, that brings out the word "Doormat" on Chris' head.

While the latter part of the statement is sadly true, I’m afraid all seven people (actually six; one Danish guy talked his way into both groups) whose asses I hauled to dinner were male. What may be even sadder is that I enjoyed both events.

Apologies for the relative silence as of late. Tests to grade, articles to referee, karaoke to sing, ladies to woo—you know the drill.

In keeping with Brock’s posting, I probably ought to offer some advice for incoming freshmen and graduate students. A former Ole Miss professor had what was infamously described as the “Bull Durham speech,” which is deeply pessimistic but nonetheless accurate, and was known to send potential grad students away in fits of tears. Personally, I think Monty Python said it best: “Run Away! Run Away!”

Since it’s the cool thing to do, I decided to take Michelle Malkin’s diversity test. Apparently, you get 5 points for every statement you agree with.

1. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life. No.
2. I think my taxes are too high. Yes.
3. I supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Yes.
4. I voted for President Bush in 2000. No.
5. I am a gun owner. No.
6. I support school voucher programs. Yes.
7. I oppose condom distribution in public schools. Yes. The bastards ought to have to pay for them, just like the rest of us do.
8. I oppose bilingual education. No.
9. I oppose gay marriage. No.
10. I want Social Security privatized. Yes.
11. I believe racial profiling at airports is common sense. No.
12. I shop at Wal-Mart. Yes (but not when I’m in Michigan, because Meijer is better up here). Do I get bonus points for also shopping at Sam’s Club?
13. I enjoy talk radio. No. I’d rather have my teeth pulled sans anesthesia.
14. I am annoyed when news editors substitute the phrase “undocumented person” for “illegal alien.” Yes.
15. I do not believe the phrase “a chink in the armor” is offensive. Yes. Etymology, it’s a wonderful thing.
16. I eat meat. Yes.
17. I believe O.J. Simpson was guilty. Yes.
18. I cheered when I learned that Saddam Hussein had been captured. Yes.
19. I cry when I hear “Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood. Yes. (There goes any chance of me ever being seen as “macho.”)
20. I don’t believe the New York Times. No, I believe more than 50% of what’s in the New York Times. Not all of it, mind you…

Well, I scored 60/100. What do I win?

For some odd reason, the ntp server on my laptop refuses to keep sync with any servers on the Internet; instead, it’s decided to just go off and run several minutes slow, for some odd reason I can’t quite understand. Maybe it’s a 2.6.8-rc kernel bug or something. I noticed it yesterday too—my laptop lost nearly a half-hour over a day, somehow.

Nick Troester (apparently, it rhymes with “toaster”) is under the impression that last evening’s events fall under the Chatham House Rules. My personal perspective is that it’d be hard to enforce those rules, considering that all activities took place in public venues, but I’m still leaning toward relative confidentiality, if only for the sake of the honor of our mixed company (or at least for my continued employment).

I will, however, note that Kevin, Leslie, and I did make it to the ICPSR picnic on Saturday, something that cannot be said for others of our group.

BTW, I did find my hat… it was in my backpack all along.

Eugene Volokh, defending the legal profession from charges that the This song is your song controversy is all the lawyers’ fault, writes:

But at most what we have here is a few special lawyers-by-training -- many of whom are no longer even lawyers in private service, but are lawmakers of one sort or another -- making unsound decisions. We do not have some general ethical failing on the part of the legal profession as a whole.

I don’t have anything substantive to say about Prof. Volokh’s post, but this does give me an opportunity to advance a linguistic mission of mine: to bring about a distinction between the words lawyer and attorney.

Now I’m not claiming this is distinction is found standard American English, but I think it would be a good distinction to make.

If we make the distinction, a lawyer is a person who has a certain professional training, whereas an attorney is a person, usually a lawyer, who represents people in their legal affairs.

An attorney is not necessarily a lawyer. Judges and law clerks are almost always lawyers, but (at least in the federal judiciary), they are not permitted to be attorneys. And someone who decides to represent himself in a legal matter is his own attorney, even though he may not be a lawyer.

We may make a similar distinction between doctor and physician. Senator Bill "Cat Murderer" Frist is a doctor, since he has a medical degree, but he is no longer a physician.

I just received the first UUEncoded email attachment I’ve seen in about half a decade. Now I have to remember how to decode one of the bloody things.

Silly observations that don’t really deserve their own posts:

• Yesterday in Ann Arbor was cold, rainy, and dreary—to the extent I actually had to switch on the heat in my apartment last night, lest I freeze to death (good thing I decided to have the gas switched on after all). Today, on the other hand, it’s around 80° and sunny, and supposed to stay in the 80s through the next week or so. Weird.

• Maybe I’m getting old or something, but there’s something very disturbing about a current pop hit which has a chorus about a sexual technique. Particularly when it’s performed by someone best known for singing the theme to Disney’s “Kim Possible.” (What may even be more disturbing is I can’t figure out what sexual technique it is.)

• Not to start a big brou-ha-ha like the recently-raging conflict over the relative “hotness” of libertarian women, but I‘ll put any five randomly selected young Mississippi women (18–35) against a comparably-selected slate of native Michiganders any day.

• Would anyone know who Ashlee Simpson was if it weren’t for her sister?

I can’t quite figure out why the bit-error rate of the terrestrial signal from a XM repeater seems to float in and out of tolerance; most of the time, it is right around 3, but it has short bursts up to 25—what’s annoying is that anything over 10 makes it lose signal. (It also only seems to produce a usable signal if I put the antenna within a 10 square-inch area of my office.)

Maybe next year (if I return) I should request a south-facing office.

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.

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.)

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 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.”

James Joyner ponders at a distance the following hypothetical exchange:

• A says to B, “I have X.”
• B says to A, “So I’ve heard.”
• A says to B, “And I have to offer it to someone.”
• B says to A, “Funny how that works.”
• A says to B, “If I offered you X, would you take it?”
• B says to A, “No, I wouldn’t take it.”

Here’s your ontological question: did A offer X to B? If not, what is the substantive difference between “If I offered you X, would you take it?” and “Would you like X?” if A intended to offer X to B had B answered in the affirmative?

Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong and the Volokh Conspiracy (at the moment, Tyler Cowen and Eugene Volokh) ponder the “alternative history” question of what the world would be like without a successful American Revolution. I don’t have much to add, but it’s an interesting concept to ponder. My gut feeling is that separation was inevitable by 1820 or so; the resources of the period (most notably, the lack of real-time communication and fast intercontinental transportation) probably just couldn’t sustain any form of unified government over an area separated by thousands of miles of sea.

Well, the ice maker is fixed, with plastic tubing this time so we won’t be having another lightning strike (through it, at least) in the next week, and the DSL seems back to normal after a reboot or two.

In addition to damaging the copper pipe that feeds water to my icemaker, the lightning also took out one of the two inputs on the DirecTiVo in my bedroom, one output of the multiswitch on the dish, and (apparently) put my DSL modem in flakeout mode, where it loses sync once every 10–20 minutes.

The good news is I’m ditching the DSL and my current dish when I move to Jackson at the end of next week. The bad news is I was hoping to use the DirecTiVo in Jackson, but, since the primary input was the one that was fried, it’s not going to be a happy camper any more after the next time my power goes out. Now off to get a replacement pipe at Home Depot and some dinner…

Somehow, a lightning strike by my house a few minutes ago managed to burst the copper tubing between my wall and the ice maker in my fridge. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.

Update: Things have also been deeply flaky with the DSL since the lightning strike. Grr…

To echo Steven Taylor: Happy Independence Day #228.

Will Baude is doing his best to promote International Kissing Day, July 6, introduced to these fair shores by Amber Taylor (who, incidentally, only seems to get linked by Glenn Reynolds when posting in the realm of making out).