Insults Unpunished turns two today. Congrats to Robert Prather on achieving this milestone!

Mainly this is a post to say “I’m not dead.” But it will also contain a few random thoughts:

• Ole Miss beat LSU 7–6 tonight in the first of a three game weekend series. The Rebels are hoping to finish the regular season with an outright SEC regular season title, a high seed in the SEC tournament, and positioned to host an NCAA Regional in early June.
• I’m almost done reading Measuring America, probably the first recreational book reading I’ve done in about a year.
• Never in my life has the term “fabulous” been applied (by me or someone else) to scheduling a meeting, but it happened this week. This was the result. Ok, it’s not the world’s spiffiest website, but it’ll do.
• The Power of the Blogosphere: it’s pretty safe to say I’d never have pondered this question (probably NSFW) at Note-It Posts without Dana’s prompting.
• The Power of the Blogosphere Part Deux: Russell Arben Fox has some typically thoughful comments on public education in Arkansas and in the nation.

Oh, last, but not least: I would have posted this several hours ago but my DSL connection went down inexplicably.

Nick Troester apparently missed the point of being in the National Honor Society in high school: the only reason to join NHS was to have some extracurriculars to put on your college application.

My amusing NHS anecdote: the fact I wasn’t a member of NHS was actually something of a surprise to my classmates—and the Forest High NHS adviser. Everyone just assumed I had the GPA to get in, being one of the class geniuses and all, but I never did. Except for my name on a few plaques here and there, where quantitative measures were not the sole measure of merit, my academic honors are, in fact, quite limited—no Phi Beta Kappa, no cum laude, no Pi Sigma Alpha membership to speak of. Yet still they let me stay in school long enough to get a Ph.D. Go figure.

Apropos of the same post, I also went down to the worst defeat in Forest High School history* when I ran for senior class president, the event that kicked off my part-time career as an also-ran political candidate.

I just got back from a day-long excursion to Jackson, with the twin goals of scoping out apartment complexes and showing one parental unit around the Millsaps campus. Fun but tiring.

Say what you will about George and Laura Bush, but I suspect at least they raised their daughters to wear underwear when appearing in public (NSFW), even if they did use fake ID’s around Austin while attending UT (shock, horror, college undergraduates drinking under the age of 21).

What’s even more scary is that, aside from the obvious attributes on display, Ms. Kerry looks pretty much like a younger John F. Kerry in drag.

Update: More at Outside the Beltway and Ogged, the latter of whom blames flash photography for the explicitness of the photo.

Has anyone else been getting unsolicited bulk emails from an outfit called RatherBiased.com, which appears to be some sort of anti-Dan Rather site?

Just curious. They’re about to be introduced to my procmail filter…

Amber Taylor takes note of a new way to figure out blacked-out words in redacted documents and the new Yale typeface.

When I’m rich and famous, I’ll probably buy a license for Economist, although for now I’m using FontSite.com’s University Old Style (a.k.a. ITC Berkeley Old Style) for a lot of my correspondence and papers.

Commencement was hot and icky… think of sitting and standing for two hours in a solid black, winter-weight cap and gown. Gov. Haley Barbour’s address was a tad more political in spots than I might have liked, but I think his message—“believe in God, believe your country and your state, and believe in yourself”—was a good one. (I half expected entire departments to walk out when, at one point in the speech, he categorically rejected moral relativism.) People who study rhetoric would have had a field day with his speech. I can definitely see how he does well on the stump—Ronnie Musgrove never struck me as much of an orator, and that alone may have made the difference between them in the last gubernatorial race.

In other news, it looks like a neighborhood cat has adopted me, and I haven’t the faintest clue why. My original working hypothesis was that it’s one of my friend Alfie’s cats, and it recognizes me from having visited his place, but I don’t think this is one of them. If it’s still here tomorrow, I’ll have to figure out something to do with it—I’m shocked the neighborhood pack of dogs hasn’t killed it, though.

Brian J. Noggle is displeased that the St. Louis city fathers are now attributing the town’s failure to be “cool” to a “lack of gays and bohemians,” instead of the common-sense perspective of attributing it to the fact that it’s freaking St. Louis.

What I want to know is: since when have Czechs been cool?

Amanda Butler, Will Baude, and Waddling Thunder ponder the role of the suit in modern society.

A sociologist friend of mine was quite surprised to witness the spectacle of political scientists parading around the Palmer House Hilton in suits—apparently, sociologists don’t dress up for conferences, but political scientists (for whatever reason) do. I tend to think the suit is best reserved for special occasions; I wouldn’t dream of teaching in a suit on a regular basis (and, in fact, have only done it once—when I had a job interview immediately after class—although I’ll be teaching in a suit tomorrow as well), and if I were the churchgoing sort, I probably wouldn’t wear a suit to church either. On the other hand, I like my suit, and I don’t even mind wearing a shirt and tie on a semi-regular basis (and I have been known to wear a shirt and tie when teaching). Plus my suit actually manages to make me look halfway respectable, which is no minor feat.

As for Ms. Butler’s complaints about footwear, I can empathize—finding comfortable dress shoes is something of a challenge for me, given my rather wide feet, although my recent pair of SAS leather shoes are remarkably comfortable (my mother swears by SAS). I honestly don’t pay much attention to the footwear that female political scientists wear at conferences, though they do tend to dress more casually than the men, so I suspect many eschew heels in favor of more comfortable footwear, a decision I wholeheartedly support.

I am also rather convinced that the only people, aside from those with various fetishes, who care what shoes women wear are other women. Not being a sociologist, though, I can’t explain why this would be the case or how this might affect one’s strategies in making more comfortable footwear acceptable for women’s business attire.

Today’s Beltway Traffic Jam has a decidedly topical theme, given the gender role discussion that has swept this little corner of the 'sphere lately.

While I was off doing better things, apparently some debate arose over whether or not the Hot Abercrombie Chick is really a, er, “chick.” (The hotness and the wearing of Abercrombie & Fitch were not debated.)

I really don’t know what to make of all this. I know better than to think that good-looking women can’t be smart though… and thus my gut feeling is to give Ms. Doerty the benefit of the doubt on actually being Ms. Doerty.

I’m alive and well back in Oxvegas. More when I’m actually motivated to do anything…

Tim Sandefur takes exception to familiar address among bloggers who don’t know each other:

Can it really be that hard for people to understand that when you don’t know someone, it’s not proper to call him by his first name? There’s no way to point this out without sounding rude in today’s backslappingly Jacksonian ultraegalitarian world, but when I’m tired of ignoring it, and finally say something about it, all I get is a ration of crap. There’s nothing mean or uppity about the rule, folks, it’s just the rule. The rule is, if you don’t know someone, you call him Mr. Soandso, you don’t call him Jim or Bob or Bill—and if you’re publicly speaking to a third person about Mr. Soandso, you call him Mr. Soandso, even if you are on a first name basis with him.

I think that’s true to some extent, but in a lot of ways blogging is like a community—you get to know people in a different way (by reading their posts, rather than by interacting with them), perhaps, but I think it’s awkward to refer to someone whose blogging I read and respect (and hopefully vice versa) on a regular basis using formal pronouns and titles. Heck, there are a few bloggers I’ve never met who I consider friends (of course, there are also folks like Dean & Rosemary Esmay and Mike Hollihan and Len Cleavlin who I have met in person, though only because of blogging).

There is also a certain carryover from academe, where it is considered generally collegial to refer to eschew titles—the hierarchy is enforced in other, more subtle ways instead.

As far as I am concerned: I’m Chris (or Christopher if you’re my parents), and you may call me that, although I’ll certainly forgive, and wouldn’t dare correct, anyone who insists on “Doctor Lawrence” or the (technically incorrect, at least for now) “Professor Lawrence” for reasons of upbringing or an interest in maintaining the tu-vous distinction for other reasons.

Amanda Butler shares her tax-filing pain. She should count herself lucky—going back as far as I’ve had to file tax returns, which would be about 15 years or so, I’ve never been able to file either 1040EZ or 1040A. Products like TaxCut are a godsend, that’s all I can say.

Heidi Bond lets loose the BLINK tag but somehow fails to incorporate Microsoft’s one-upping of Netscape’s non-standard HTML ante: the sublimely evil MARQUEE tag.

Apropos of the substance of Heidi’s post, given the vista of my career options at the moment, a job as an “evil minion” seems like a reasonable option.

Anyone who tells you that email propogation is instantaneous should consider this Received trace:

Received: from X.Y.edu
        by sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu (8.12.10+Sun/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i38G1LAf017356
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:01:21 -0500 (CDT)
Received: from a.b.c.d
        by X.Y.edu (8.12.9-20030924/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i36JvaK3027962
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Tue, 6 Apr 2004 14:57:37 -0500 (CDT)

In other words, the email took 44 hours, 4 minutes to get here (well, 44:08 if you count the 5 minute fetchmail cycle on my inbox). I probably could have gotten a paper letter sent first class from X.edu (within a day’s drive in a neighboring state) in less time.

One of the posts I inadvertently trashed during the composition stage yesterday was essentially the same as this Steve Verdon post.

It coulda been worse… I could have come out as Krugman.

I’ve managed to kill two posts in the middle of writing them today (one of which was no-thanks to Windows XP SP 2 deciding to pop up a dialog right before I pressed Enter). I think that’s a sign that I need to take a break…

Coming tomorrow: the semi-legendary Midwest paper (once I figure out why my sem specification isn’t working—I think I know why now, but I had to think about it all afternoon), a semi-review of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta, and probably more rants and ravings on the state of the nation and the world as I work off nervous energy prior to the two phone interviews I have scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

I ought to make this a daily feature… today’s lowlights:

• Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) thinks his November election opponent looks like Uday or Qusay Hussein. Only if Dr. Mongiardo is loading his patients in the wood-chipper, methinks.
• UW-Madison sophomore Audrey Seiler was responsible for her own alleged kidnapping.
• Oh, yeah, well-connected Democratic party hack/consultant Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is subhuman scum.

I spent most of the evening out at a bonfire (out in the boonies of Panola County) with some friends, some beer, and some hot dogs. A few choice observations:

• Coat hangers, even when straightened out, are rather non-ideal implements for roasting hot dogs.
• Every picture my camera phone takes in the dark looks like a blurry Bigfoot photo. I should get in touch with the National Enquirer.
• Endorsement: a former student of mine from a few years back (in fact, the only one that took two different classes with me) said he liked my class because I “wasn’t a communist,” presumably in comparison to my more liberally-inclined colleagues in the department. I should slap that on the vita.
• The young woman who the host of the shindig was pursuing was apparently quite disappointed that her current boyfriend was getting married.
• Around 9:45, several people went for a beer run. When they returned 30 minutes later, it was opined that this was a rather long time to head to the gas station just down the hill. The conversation then went as follows: “We had to go to Bumf*ck to get the beer.” “We’re already in Bumf*ck.” “Well, we had to go to West Bumf*ck.”

Just another night in the soap opera that is my life.

Will Baude today heard of the Peabody ducks for the first time.

I’ll count this as the tie-breaker for the Memphis Schelling point. I had two votes for the gates of Graceland, and two votes for the lobby of the Peabody.

You have heard of Graceland, right, Will?

Will Baude has “mixed feelings” about the illegality of dueling, and asks:

How did the introduction of the pistol change dueling culture? When did "pistols or swords?" first become a choice, and how did this new choice on the part of the challenged man change the game theory of duelling? Did this deter duels (as it logically should, since now the challenger knew that his opponent would get to pick the weapon with which he was relatively stronger)? Did those who regularly felt offended make a point to practice both shooting and stabbing?

I can’t imagine what positive aspects of dueling would prompt Baude to have mixed feelings about the barbaric practice, and I don’t have any particular answers to his questions. But Baude may want to find a copy of the March 2004 issue of Smithsonian magazine, in which there is an article on dueling.

Two interesting tidbits from the article:

Perhaps as a way of relieving ennui, the French weren't averse to pushing the pushing the envelope in matters of form. In 1808, two Frenchman fought in balloons over Paris; one was shot down and killed with his second. Thirty-five years later, two others tried to settle their differences by skulling each other with billiard balls.

Even in dueling's heyday, reluctant warriors were known to express reservations about their involvement by shooting into the air or, after receiving fire, not returning it. Occasionally they chose their weapons -- howitzers, sledgehammers, forkfuls of pig dung -- for their very absurdity, as a way of making a duel seem ridiculous.

Nerf guns at twenty paces!

Kelley is shocked to learn that the Georgia legislature is proposing a law that will ban not only the barbaric practice known as “female genital mutilation” or FGM (which I’ll spare you the details of), but also female genital piercings.

Last week I asked readers to submit Schelling points for Memphis: places that you would go to meet somebody if you had prearranged the meeting time but not the place, and you just had to guess where that person would be (knowing that the other person would be guessing where you would be). I also asked about Schelling points for the U.S. and the world.

I myself would choose the gates of Graceland for Memphis, the steps of the Capitol for the U.S., and the top of the Eiffel Tower for the world.

In Memphis, Scott Hayes and Mike Hollihan would meet me at the gates of Graceland.

Randal Woodland would miss me, because he would be in the lobby of the Peabody, “even though I’m resigned to the fact that the person I’m meeting will probably be at Graceland.” Alexander Ignatiev and Chip Taylor will be there as well.

For the U.S., there will be no successful meeting. Scott Hayes will at least be in the same city as I will, but at the Washington Monument. Alexander Ignatiev will be in New York at Madison Square Garden. Chip Taylor and Scott Hayes will also be in New York, at the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building, respectively.

In the world, Skip Perry will meet me at the Eiffel Tower. Alexander Ignatiev will be at Trafalgar Square, and Scott Hayes will be at the Taj Mahal.

Thanks to everyone who submitted answers!