James Joyner jumps on the wine blogging craze. I won’t be jumping aboard, as I’m not much of a wine drinker; however, I will say that you can’t go wrong with Rosemount, a purveyor of fine, inexpensive Australian wines.

You know, the only thing I ever lost at summer camp was my pocket knife.

If you are under the age of 70, and—at any point in your life—decide you “feel old,” there’s an easy remedy: come to Ocala, Florida, where you’re virtually guaranteed to be the youngest person in any given establishment.

Update: Matt Stinson may have had more fun in Ocala during a single meal than I had in two years of high school. Sounds about right.

I’ve been in a bit of a blogging rut lately; I think our extended downtime in mid-December somehow got me out of the “blogging groove,” so to speak. That, and being at the semi-proverbial “ass end” of the Internet, along with holiday and no-job stress, is severely cramping my style.

Original thought, maybe, soon.

Brian J. Noggle adds more potential subversives for you to be aware of, in addition to those evil Almanac-toting folks.

Lots of people—sometimes, even me—have trouble remembering where their keys are. Venomous Kate apparently has problems keeping track of her vibrator. I guess Hawai'i is more exciting than the mainland after all.

Matt Stinson finally stops teasing us and announces his big plans for the new year. Très cool.

Will Baude has yet another 20 Questions interview, this time with Reason writer/blogger Julian Sanchez. Plenty of good stuff there; go RTWT™.

While waiting in line at Books-A-Million today here in Ocala (a long wait, since the computers crashed due to a power spike), an elderly woman noticed that I was buying a copy of the latest book on Southern politics by the Black brothers, Merle and Earl, The Rise of Southern Republicans (a real find in a general-interest bookstore). The woman, who I really didn’t want to get into a political conversation with,* informed me that she hoped Bush would be reelected in 2004, and that she considered two Democrats particularly “dangerous”: Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton. I nodded, smiled, and seriously considered backing away slowly.

She didn’t seem quite as interested in the copy of The Economist’s “The World in 2004” I was buying.

This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Eugene Volokh, in a post defending Strom Thurmond against the charge of child molestation, notes a handy table that lists the age of consent in all fifty states, and comments:

I also suspect that the table is mostly designed for people who like to have sex with teenagers, but it seems to be pretty accurate, and I’ve found it useful even for more academic purposes.

Now, I’m not an expert on such matters, but it seems to me that having sex with teenagers is quite a popular activity, particularly among college students; the only thing I can figure is that law professors—the only academics who, as a group, don’t have much contact with the 17-21 demographic—are unaware just how much sex goes on among undergraduates.

I safely arrived at my dad’s house in a secure, undisclosed location in southeastern Marion County, Florida last night. Traffic on both I-10 and I-75 was horrible, albeit fast moving—though I-10 could use an extra lane from Pensacola to I-75, as left-lane traffic was continuously stacked up trying to pass the few stragglers in the right lane.

Anyway, if you’re a regular SN reader within, say, a two-hour radius of Ocala (roughly anywhere north of I-4, south of I-10, east of Tallahassee, and not in the Atlantic Ocean), the first beer’s on me.

Dan Drezner will be playing the role of guest-blogger for Andrew Sullivan this coming week. I knew there had to be a reason I added Sully to the blogroll…

Rosemary Esmay apparently is familiar with the same driver I saw today on I-10 between Mobile and Pensacola who apparently thought the left lane was his own personal playground—even when the right lane was clear a mile ahead of his pickup truck.

Also of note: I think I saw more Mississippi state troopers today than I’d seen total in the 5½ years I’ve lived in the state.

Kevin Aylward passes on the good news that we can expect increased venom levels in the near future.

Merry Christmas.

I discovered Christmas Eve that the reason I thought that my mother’s new cell phone—my old cell phone—wasn’t working for the past week, since I added it to my account, is that I put the wrong phone number for her line in my new cell phone’s built-in phone book.

So, the moron scoring goes: Me 1, SprintPCS customer service 0. At least it made the day of the CSR who handled my call.

If you’re the morbid sort, you can join The Amish Tech Support Dead Pool, coordinated by everyone’s favorite catblogger, Laurence Simon. So far, the pick distribution seems fairly interesting. Now I just need to remember (or dig out) the list of picks I sent Lair…

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Update: Patrick Carver begs to differ with me and Rand Simberg, helpfully pointing out that the Florida state constitution does explicitly recognize a right to privacy. Now, if only Rush would recognize that all people (not just Floridians) have an inherent liberty interest in privacy absent a compelling governmental interest to the contrary—the Lawrence v. Texas standard in a nutshell—I’d be more inclined to be sympathetic.

Nice to see mad cow disease has finally followed me across the Atlantic. Yipee!

Unlearned Hand of En Banc draws my attention to Brian Leiter’s weblog. Leiter is apparently a philosophy professor of some repute at the University of Texas at Austin.

Leiter plans to “start a blogroll for the handful of blogs [he] actually now read[s].” Unlearned Hand observes that Leiter’s selections seem to reflect a belief “that only people with doctoral degrees are qualified to talk about anything publicly,” although political scientists are apparently fail to make the grade under the special proviso that political scientists are mentally inferior to individuals who have earned philosophy degrees (which I guess means Leiter will probably only read Brock’s posts here at Signifying Nothing—although Brock is only ABD, so maybe he doesn’t count in Leiter’s world). I for one wish the best of luck to Leiter in his quest to tame the blogosphere.

And that is the first and last bit of thought I ever plan to devote to Leiter. Next?

As anyone who’s viewed Signifying Nothing’s sidebar can probably guess, I don’t think much of the homeland security threat level thingy—mainly because it’s a bogus five-point scale, since we all know it’ll never fall below yellow nor go higher than orange (making it a dichotomous variable for all practical purposes, a weakness that James Joyner expounds upon here), but also because it’s essentially meaningless to the public at large. That being said, Dean Esmay does have a bit of a point worth considering.

Nice to see Congress has nothing better to do these days (via Gary Farber).

I saw one of these pizza baking machines today at Wal-Mart while doing the grocery shopping. I’m not sure that I could justify spending $50 for an object that does something my oven seems perfectly capable of doing on its own, albeit more slowly, but I can see some value to it for college kids and people with more tempermental ovens than mine.

Also on the topic of pizza: I’m pretty sure pepperoni isn’t supposed to contain chicken, yet the pepperoni on Tombstone pizzas has “chicken” listed as an ingredient. Someone in Italy should sue.

Amazing how all the news seems to happen while we’re down. (The appropriate parties have been executed for their roles in our period of downtime, in case you were wondering.)

To review:

• I got rid of about half the beer in the house at a grad student party on Friday night. Less crap to move. Yipee! (Thanks to Brooke and Lindsey for organizing the gathering.)
• I turned 28-going-on-60 on Sunday.
• Someone actually wants to cite part of my dissertation in a book. I’m stunned.
• Steven Taylor had the latest Toast-O-Meter update, with Howard Dean widening his lead over the pack despite increased attacks from the trailing candidates.
• The presumptive Democratic nominee made a speech on foreign policy that somehow failed to mention North Korea.
• Everyone’s favorite Dixiecrat apparently didn’t mind dipping his pen in different-colored ink, so to speak.
• Signifying Nothing went down to ignominious defeat in the Wizbang 2003 Weblog Awards balloting. I blame the butterfly ballot and the use of a first-past-the-post system.
• And, last but not least, coalition forces arrested a biker dude near Tikrit and gave him a lovely shave and a fight to Qatar at taxpayers’ expense.

This is today’s entry in the Beltway Traffic Jam, in case you were wondering about such things.

Congratulations to Virginia Postrel, whose book The Substance of Style was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2003.

One of these decades (actually, hopefully later this week, once I’ve accomplished something on the job application and “sending the stupid impeachment paper out for review again” fronts), I’ll actually get around to writing up my thoughts on TSOS.