Just a reminder: Brock is still soliciting your list of “Schelling points” for Memphis, the United States, and the world. To review: where would you expect to meet someone if you arranged to meet them on a certain day at noon, but didn’t know where exactly to go?

So far, we’ve gotten four answers (2 votes for 2 different locations) for Memphis* and two for both the whole U.S. and the world. Keep your suggestions coming at blog@lordsutch.com!

Back in February, Will Baude asked

If you had to meet somebody you’d never met before someplace in Chicago, but you hadn’t agreed on a time or a place, and you couldn’t talk to them in advance, where and when would you go, hoping that the other person would pick the same time and place?

Last week he answered, pulling together suggestions from readers. Will decided that noon on the steps of the Chicago Art Institute was the best answer, although the Sears Tower (the observation deck, I suppose?) was chosen by just as many readers.

I wish to pose the same question for Memphis. I’ll take it that the time answer is settled: you’ll meet at noon. If you had to meet somebody you’d never met before someplace in Memphis, but you hadn’t agreed on a place, and you couldn’t talk to them in advance, where would you go, hoping that the other person would pick the same place?

And lets suppose we extend the geographical area a bit. If you had agreed to meet someplace in the U.S., but had not agreed on a place, where would you go?

And finally, removing all geographical constraints: if you had agreed to meet somebody from a different country (but you don’t know which one), and you hadn’t agreed on a place, where would you go?

Send your answers to blog@lordsutch.com.

I have to say, that Brian J. Noggle comes up with some pretty good ideas every once in a while.

Of course, sometimes he doesn’t. Such is life.

I just walked out to put something in the mail, and saw fire trucks down the street; the house two doors down is on fire (or, was on fire; it’s out now, as best as I can tell). It looks like the house was pretty well gutted, considering I can see inside the rafters where the flames burned through.

Amazingly, I wouldn’t have known this had I not gone outside to put something else in the mailbox (I didn’t hear the fire truck siren, though I did hear it when it pulled up). An hour ago, when I put a couple of other things in the mail, all was perfectly tranquil.

I thought I’d make myself useful today by filling out the paperwork to move the contributions I made was forced to make to Mississippi’s state retirement plan to my personal IRA. This is not an easy task:

• One form (Form 5) needs to be witnessed by two different people, in addition to me, then approved by the University of Mississippi HR department, then shipped off to Jackson for paperwork pushing.
• A separate form (Form 5C) does not require witnesses; however, I have to get the custodians of my existing IRA to approve the rollover, then have the form shipped off to Jackson for additional paperwork pushing. This would seem to be a relatively trivial exercise, except the closest branch of the credit union I have my IRA with is in lovely Picayune, Mississippi (best known as “the place all the signs on I-59 say you’re going when you’re actually headed to New Orleans”), which is about 6 hours from here.

I have thus decided the sensible course of action is to defer further action until I find out whether I’ll end up being a state employee again in the fall—the odds of that are rather slim, but one more year of state employment would be sufficient for partial vesting in the plan, thus making this entire exercise financially counterproductive.

Tim Sandefur points out that James Madison would be 253 today. Although the term “political scientist” wouldn’t be coined until much later, Madison was among the first American political theorists. Of course, he also managed to provoke the British into kicking our asses in the War of 1812, New Orleans notwithstanding . Still, when compared to the other “political scientist” president that we can claim as our own—the not-quite-as-infamous-as-he-should-be racist Woodrow Wilson, whose hopeless idealism in some matters of international relations has earned him a free bigotry pass in the history books—Madison is vastly preferable using virtually any metric.

Oddly enough, as they say, I was born in the now-no-longer (thanks to the newfangled abomination that is Nashville-Davidson County) town of Madison, Tennessee.

I’m taking Glenn’s advice and blogging outdoors this afternoon; it’s just a wee bit chilly where I am (on the north side of Weir Hall on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford), since it’s in the shade, but there isn’t a lot of choice—the alleged wireless network in these parts is nowhere to be found, so I’m sitting in a patio area that has wired 100 Mb/s Ethernet and power outlets. But, as they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words…

Don’t ask how much work it was to get that photo from my SprintPCS camera phone onto the blog. I guess I need to work on making that easier.

I bought a Hamilton Beach ShortCut food processor at Target on Saturday. My wife took it out of the box today, only to discover the following warning, in English, French, and Spanish, on the plastic bag enclosing it:

IMPORTANT: REMOVE BAG BEFORE USE

Stephen Karlson notes plans by the Chicago Transit Authority to create a new station in downtown Chicago that will finally link the State and Dearborn subways, and provide express service to both O’Hare and Midway airports. Speaking as someone who once made the mistake of trying to use the “L” to get from O’Hare to a hotel on the Magnificent Mile, which required changing from the Blue (Dearborn) to Red (State) lines, such a project can come none-too-soon.

These days, with the colossal pain in the ass that flying has become, I just drive to Chicago. It’s cheaper, even after paying to park downtown, and the extra time involved is only a couple of hours, if you compare flying direct on Northwest or American—going via another airline, such as Delta, will certainly kill any time savings of flying. (Amtrak usually costs more than flying.) The downside is that you have to drive both the most boring 250 miles of interstate highway in the eastern United States (roughly, I-57 from I-64 to I-80) and the second-most-boring stretch (I-55 and I-57 through Arkansas and Missouri)—really the only interesting parts are in the hills in southern Illinois and when you get to metropolitian Chicago.

Most “cheapo” font collections are pretty much dime-a-dozen; however, I’ve been pretty impressed with the FontSite 500 collection, which I’ve had for several years, and which (in the grand scheme of things—fonts tend to be not cheap) is a steal. Yesterday, I discovered that Christopher League put together all the stuff you need to use the FontSite fonts in TeX and LaTeX under Linux.

If you’re someone like me, who gets annoyed at the limited font selection in TeX,* but can’t live without it—after all, I typeset all my papers and my entire dissertation in LaTeX, not to mention my vita and cover letters—this is a really neat add-on.

My two cents on using “they” as a singular pronoun: it’s acceptable in spoken English, but not in written English. In writing, one should use “he or she” unless one has to repeat it more than once in succession, or if one has to use the reflexive form, at which point it just gets too awkward. In that case, one should just use “he” or “she.” And for crying out loud, don’t ever write “he/she” or “(s)he.” Shudder.

I also note that Tim Sandefur shares my biggest grammatical peeve: signs at the checkout aisle that say “10 items or less.” It’s “10 items or fewer.” Use “less” with mass nouns (“Less than 10 inches of snow”) and “fewer” with count nouns (“Fewer than 10 cats”).

It’s interesting that “more” works with both mass nouns and count nouns.

If it’s any consolation to Kofi and the gang, I’ve had the exact same thing happen to three of my ties. Granted, my ties weren’t key evidence in figuring out what triggered the genocide in Rwanda, but it’s still pretty much the same thing.

Will Baude has received a fair amount of feedback on his advocacy of “they” as a singular pronoun. I am overall, sympathetic, to Baude’s plight, and certainly prefer a singular “they” over such awkward PCisms as “he or she.” French, alas, has a decent third-preson genderless singular, on, and I am somewhat partial to “one” as a substitute for it—particularly as a substitute for the oft-colloquial “you” in hypotheticals and the like. Unfortunately, “one” is a bit pretentious for everyday speech. If we must move to gender-neutral language—a need that, frankly, is lost on me—“they” is infinitely preferable to “he or she,” although “one” is reasonable as well.

My general policy in academic writing is one I picked up from a book on voting behavior (I honestly don’t remember which; it may be Zaller’s The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion): I tend to use female pronouns for citizens and voters and male pronouns for politicians, reflecting the empirical preponderence of both.

My policy as a grader, however, is most agnostic. I do not insist on the use of gender-neutral language, as some of my own professors did when I was an undergraduate. In general, I prefer clarity of expression over form; the ultimate test of good writing is not whether or not it conforms to a particular style, but whether or not it communicates ideas successfully. “Standard written English” is a standard largely because of the latter, and, while I will correct awkward locutions, I do not insist on precise conformity with a stylebook, as such requirements can be counterproductive to the essayist’s central goal of clear, efficient communication.

Like Chris, I can’t resist those silly internet quizzes, so I also took that Libertarian Purity Test that’s all the rage today.

The first time I took it, I answered all the questions yes or no, since there was no “undecided” option. I was able to answer a solid “no” to all the five point questions, a pretty solid “yes” to most of the one-pointers, and felt like I needed an essay-style format to answer the three-pointers, but I gave gut-level answers to all of them. I scored a 34, “your libertarian credentials are obvious.”

That’s hardly the stratospheric heights occupied by Will Baude, but that didn’t seem quite right. Apart from my support for drug legalization, I don’t think my libertarian credentials are at all obvious.

So I took the test again, refraining from answering most of the questions that I felt unsure about. I scored a 23, “soft-core libertarian,” putting me in the neighborhood of Amanda Butler, Josh Chafetz, and Matthew Yglesias, which seems about right.

Congratulations to Kelley on her first blogiversary! And also congrats to Kevin Drum on the occasion of his moving on up in the world.

Via both Stephen Bainbridge and Will Baude, I took the latest “flavor of the month” quiz: the Libertarian Purity Test. I got a 50 out of a maximum 160, mainly because my hard-core minarchist libertarian views have subsided over time in favor of more practical politics.

IMHO, the quiz was actually pretty poorly engineered; the “libertarian” answer was always the “yes” answer. This sort of thing generally leads to response bias. But, the questions seemed to tap libertarian attitudes better than the infamous Political Compass does.

Starting this summer, Mississippi’s getting a new area code—769—which will overlay the 601 area code in central Mississippi. Amazingly, Mississippi only had one area code until 1997. (Everything you’d ever want to know about area codes is here.)

A recent addition to SN‘s blogroll is the self-described Hot Abercrombie Chick!, Amanda. She seems to attract very weird commenters. She also received this email, which is just downright odd… but, since I’m bored, I’ll put my limited matchmaking skills to work to fulfill this gentleman’s request.

Ryan Gabbard inquires:

Anyone else think Liv Tyler was much prettier presenting the music at the Academy Awards than she was playing the most beautiful Elf in Middle-Earth?

Well, it’s your big chance to judge for yourself. Personally, I could have done without the Lisa Loeb glasses, which look fine on Ms. Loeb, but seemed odd on Ms. Tyler.

Plus ça change…

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, faced with an armed rebellion and pressure from the United States and France, left Haiti this morning, according to numerous reports.

For more, see James Joyner.

Well, after two days of trying, I finally got someone on the phone at Best Buy… and I will be getting a replacement laptop. Now to work out details; I have my eye on this one.

Happy first anniversary to PoliBlog!

If I'm a member of Generation X, and today's crop of college students are in Generation Y, are the kids currently in kindergarden members of Generation Z?

And more importantly, what will call the generation after that? Do we roll back around to the beginning of the alphabet, making them Generation A? Or perhaps they'll be Generation Yuzz.

The latest Toast-O-Meter is up with a special Valentine’s Day theme, courtesy of Steven Taylor. As always, it’s the comprehensive review of everything you tried to tune out about the primary campaign over the last seven days.

I’m off shortly to Memphis to argue with Best Buy for what should be a new laptop, probably something Centrino-based (woo-hoo!).

Update: Well, that went well… not.

Even remotely superstitious people tend to be a little suspicious around Friday the 13th. Actually, studies do show that the number of accidents can increase by, like, 52.4% on this particular date.