Russell Fox of Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg (and Arkansas State University) and his wife Melissa are the proud parents of a baby girl. Congratulations and best wishes!

On Monday, the drive between my house and civilization will get several hundred feet longer (also see today’s Daily Mississippian), because the university wants to extend the runway at the Oxford airport by 900 feet—right across College Hill Road. They’ve been futzing around with this for almost a year now; I’m glad it’s finally done, even though it’ll be a little out of the way.

I find the use of the word “blog” to describe an individual post in a weblog incredibly annoying. It makes no sense. Would you call an individual entry in a logbook a “log“? An item in a diary a “diary“? No and no.

Signifying Nothing is a blog. This posting is an entry, a post, or a diatribe. Got it? Good. End of today’s class.

Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest.

Stephen Karlson at Cold Springs Shops notes that the verb form of “blog” has an accepted precedent (and I don’t disagree—or have a problem with statements like “I so have to blog this conversation); my ire is actually directed at those who use the word “blog” as a noun to describe a single entry in a weblog. Just to clarify…

If, hypothetically, you’d asked me in, say, the last two days what else you could get me for my birthday or Christmas, and—hypothetically—you were still looking, I wouldn’t mind this. Hypothetically available everywhere on Tuesday, December 9. Maybe even at Costco.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Apropos of nothing (except the Long John Silver’s opening soon in Oxford), I have to wonder why I have the irresistable urge to eat ice cream after I’ve eaten fish. I kid you not—every time I eat fish, in any form, I want to go eat ice cream. Last Saturday night, after we lost to LSU: I went to Burger King, bought and ate the sandwich I still fondly remember as the “Whaler” but since renamed as the “BK Big Fish” since people who were whales in past lives were offended, then had the compulsion to go to the new Baskin-Robbins at the Shell on Highway 6—open 24/7 no less, according to the cute girl behind the counter who I couldn’t figure out whether or not was flirting with me by giving me this extra infrormation—and buy two scoops of Oreo Cookies 'n' Cream ice cream (for not much less money than I would have paid to get a half-gallon at Kroger or Wal-Mart and bring it home, but that's a side story on my spendthrift ways). This bothers me to no end.

What I can’t figure out is if this is conditioned behavior—did my family go to Long John Silver’s or Arthur Treacher’s when I was little, and then afterwards go for ice cream on a regular basis—or if it is something inherent in my psychology that has nothing to do with that. I guess theory #3 is that I’m pregnant and have weird cravings, but that would require me to both (a) be female and (b) have a romantic life that is orders of magnitude more interesting than the one I have (which would probably require me to figure out this whole flirting thing, no?).

The Commissar of The Politburo Diktat has uncovered praised mass perfidity by members of the “League of Liberals” blog alliance that has resulted in inflating their traffic statistics measured by SiteMeter; N.Z. Bear is, shall we say, not amused. Don’t you just love this silly “alliance” business?

Kevin Aylward of Wizbang is still getting serious traffic from his three-week-old post with links to a clip from the now-notorious Paris Hilton sex tape—which, so I’ve been told, is sort of a cross between the Jessica Lynch rescue footage and the Pamela/Tommy Lee tape, and about as, er, effective as you would expect it to be given that lineage.

The Watcher of Weasels has more thoughts on the video; a sampling:

When you take her disgustingly thin “heroin chic” look combined with the poor quality of recording… it almost looks like Calvin Klein tried to remake Village of the Damned as some kind of porno.

Meanwhile, if you want to learn how to drive traffic to your blog in a respectable fashion, I recommend the Commissar’s advice on the topic.

“Hey baby, would you like to help me commit spiritual suicide?”

Just think of it: if she gets it, she’s probably a New York Times reader. Smart and liberal.

Inspired by David Adesnik of OxBlog.

African-American culture has provided a way to greet my black friends: “fo’ shizzle, my nizzle!” But what if I want to get down with my white homeys? Kelley of suburban blight suggests fo’ shizzle, my crizzle!, while Michele recommends alrighty, my whitey!

In related news, Snoop Dogg has a blog (not work-safe). Maybe Dvorak is right?

Both PoliBlog and Xrlq take note of this bizarre AP story that alleges that Bush mispronounced the name of the state of Nevada:

Bush, in Las Vegas on Tuesday, repeatedly said Ne-vah-da. To properly pronounce Nevada, the middle syllable should rhyme with gamble.

There’s only one minor problem with this theory: Merriam-Webster says both pronunciations are acceptable.

I know absolutely no-one who pronounces “Nevada” the way these native Nevadans claim it should be pronounced; it’s like claiming I should pronounce “Mexico” as “Mehico” because that’s how Mexicans say it. This is sheer idiocy masquerading as a critique.

John Cole isn’t impressed either; neither are Nevada residents D.C. Thornton and Sin City Cynic. Xrlq also notes, shall we say, some minor grammatical difficulties with the account as presented in the Las Vegas Sun.

Venomous Kate has a link to a Honolulu Advertiser piece in which she is interviewed about the continuing disappearance of her back yard at the hands of the Pacific Ocean and the rather callous attitude of the state authorities toward the situation.

At least down in these parts, we’re allowed to do something about the kudzu. Not that you can do much about kudzu over the long term, mind you, but still…

One Fine Jay administers a brutal fisking to John C. Dvorak, professional crumudgeon/columnist, for his PC Magazine article predicting the demise of blogging.

Let me focus on Dvorak’s stats backing this up:

Let’s start with abandoned blogs. In a white paper released by Perseus Development Corp., the company reveals details of the blogging phenomenon that indicate its foothold in popular culture may already be slipping (www.perseus.com/blogsurvey). According to the survey of bloggers, over half of them are not updating any more. And more than 25 percent of all new blogs are what the researchers call “one-day wonders.” Meanwhile, the abandonment rate appears to be eating into well-established blogs: Over 132,000 blogs are abandoned after a year of constant updating.

Perseus thinks it had a statistical handle on over 4 million blogs, in a universe of perhaps 5 million. Luckily for the blogging community, there is still evidence that the growth rate is faster than the abandonment rate. But growth eventually stops.

The most obvious reason for abandonment is simple boredom. Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers. This is compounded by a lack of feedback, positive or otherwise. Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs. Some people must feel the futility.

Now, there are plenty of reasons why people may be abandoning blogs. Some people may, in fact, be abandoning blogging altogether. Some have decided to take their thoughts private, so they move. Some may join group blogs. Many migrate from Blog*Spot to hosting providers. Many move from one Blog*Spot address to another—heck, Blogger even advocates the practice. Some bloggers have backup blogs hosted elsewhere. Some people—Matt Stinson, Dan Drezner—have done more than one of these. All of these “failure modes” are lumped together, because it’s simply too hard to track what’s going on.

Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics would be like noting that DirecTV loses 570,000 customers a year, and arguing this means satellite television is doomed. “Churn”—what business calls the continual cycle of losing customers—is a natural aspect of any phenomenon in which collective preferences are aggregated. Companies lose customers, but they also gain new ones. Citizens move in and out of the voting population. And some people decide blogging isn’t for them—but a lot of others do. If there are really 5 million blogs—that is, one blog for every thousand human beings alive today, and perhaps one for every hundred with Internet access—that’s a truly staggering statistic. But I guess Dvorak’s just the latest in the long line of media dinosaurs that doesn’t “get” that.

Perseus' blog has a response to my post (and, by extension, the Dvorak piece). They note that only 1.6% of abandoned blogs include any forwarding information, and go on to write:

Pronouncing blogging a failure on the basis of these weak statistics…

Better to say its a weak argument to declare blogging a failure in a study that showed the number of hosted blogs growing from 135,000 at the end of 2000 to over five million at the end of 2003.

Via Matthew Stinson.

I’ve already said my piece on this blogospheric navel-gazing exercise in the comments at Dan’s place (in short, I think all the participants are talking past each other); however, Matt Stinson, Robert Garcia Tagorda, James Joyner, and Anticipatory Retaliation have the cream of the reactions—from my POV, at least.

Robert Prather also responds, noting that Salam Pax in particular owes his livelihood to the U.S. forces who liberated Iraq.

Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries notes the latest events in the bizarre Hong Kong Crocodile saga. In Florida, they send out a dude in a truck to wrangle the reptile in question (usually an alligator, mind you), and the problem is solved, at least until another one wanders into the neighborhood. They most certainly don’t dick around for two weeks in the process. Simply amazing.

Happy first-year blogiversary to fellow political scientist Brett Marston of Marstonalia (via PoliBlog and OTB).

Matthew Stinson has a photograph of a young Dutch woman eagerly awaiting the kickoff of a soccer match between Scotland and the Netherlands.

The letter of the day is, of course, K for Kate.

Ryan of the Dead Parrots posts an “irregardless considered harmful” memo. My personal all-time language peeve is people who seemingly can’t tell the difference between “it’s” (the contraction for “it is”) and “its” (the possessive form of “it”); the deeply annoying thing is that the rule is incredibly simple: if you can replace the word with the two words “it is,” and the sentence still makes sense, the right word is “it’s“; otherwise, “its.” No sentence diagram neeeded—just a little bit of English any first grader should know.

I couldn’t come up with anything better than this “on the fly”…

Matthew has a few more, all more inspired than mine, guaranteed to tick off all wings of the Blogosphere. And Ryan at The Dead Parrot Society apparently isn’t a big Dauber fan either.

Built with the Church Sign Generator via Michele.

Brock noted Cori Dauber’s inauspicious start at the Conspiracy yesterday, and I agree that her blogging has been a bit uneven. However, her critique of the San Francisco Chronicle’s fawning piece on Robert Fisk is spot-on. But I think the key paragraph in the article is on Fisk’s attitude toward objective reporting:

Fisk doesn’t believe in the concept, calling it a specious idea that, as practiced by American reporters, produces dull and predictable writing weighed down by obfuscating comments from official government sources.

Of course, a lot of critics of the American media—on both the left and right—would argue that American reporters don’t practice “objective reporting” either.

My recommended reading for this month, The Adventures of Amos and Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, holds a special place in my heart—it’s the first real scholarly book I ever read, at the tender age of 15, while I was otherwise bored out of my mind at a family reunion in Richmond. It was written by Melvin Patrick Ely, a cousin of mine (first cousin, once removed, to be precise). I think that book, more than anything else, is what set me on the path to an academic career. The least I can do in return is hopefully steer a few bucks in royalties his way…

For those who are interested in such things, here’s a new graph from my dissertation. More on this topic soon…

Brock is stumped by the fact that politicians get a lot of speeding tickets but don’t get in a lot of accidents. I don’t find that entirely confusing, as politicians probably drive a lot more than the average person—going back and forth to the state capital, for example—and do more of that driving on safer roads—like interstates—than the average person does (the highest accident rates are typically on two-lane roads). Since interstates are both safer and more heavily patrolled than other roads, people who use them are likely to both have more speeding tickets and less accidents than the average person.

According to this CNNMoney story, politicians as a profession are some of the worst drivers, and some of the best drivers, depending on how you measure driving ability. Politicians rank in the top five professions by number of speeding tickets, but in the bottom five professions by number of accidents.

A few days ago, I came up with plausible explanations for the fact that December is the worst month for falling deaths, and November the worst month for shooting deaths.

But this one has me stumped.

I normally don’t bother with announcing blogroll changes or additions, but I have to make an exception for Matt’s spiffy new Movable Type-powered site®. Très slick.

The downside is that those of you with alpha-blogroll switched on will have to scroll down to visit him in the future, since he’s forfeited his lead positon in the sort order to Michele. (How do you switch on—or off—alpha-blogroll? Simply visit the handy-dandy config page where you can also set your timezone and preferred stylesheet.)

I probably will have next-to-nothing to say for the next 24 hours too, but I can’t pass up a free chance to swipe some of Kate’s traffic Thursday. There’s a not-so-secret project nearing fruition here at the Oxford branch of SN; that’s all I’m going to say (I don’t want to jinx it…).