My 10th high school reunion is coming up next weekend. Now I need to come up with my brief “what the hell have I been doing the last ten years” speech. I’ve got the two-word version—“not much”—but I feel the need to stretch it out a little. Perhaps I should borrow from the description my fellow classmate Keith just sent me via e-mail: “still alive and as sarcastic as ever.” It has a ring to it, don’t you think?

It’s time for the Carnival of the Vanities XLI at Amish Tech Support. Next week’s stop: the always-insightful Winds of Change.NET.

Via Quare, I learn that the Federal Reserve may be planning to produce new $2 bills for the first time since 1996. For some odd reason, Ann Arbor (Mich.) seems to be awash in the bills. Like the dollar coin, they’re one of the useful things that seem to have dropped through the cracks.

I’ve been granted a brief reprieve on my magnum opus distinguishing between the psychological and rational choice perspectives on the meaning of “political sophistication.” The good news is that means my dissertation chair (probably) won’t kill me. The bad news is more light bloggage for the next few days…

In the meantime, I will leave you with a few random thoughts, most of which will make no sense unless you’ve experienced the same things I have in the past week:

• Vanderbilt may have the most screwed up political science department in the history of man.

• I need more Canadians in my life.

• Replacing Opryland with Opry Mills was a Good Thing™.

• I don’t think Andrew Johnson sounded like Fred Thompson.

• Greene County, Tennessee, may be the most beautiful place on earth.

• Nothing beats sitting around a warm campfire eating S’mores with family.

I agree wholeheartedly, 100% with James. Particularly if you’re one of the gazillion people on the blogroll at the right who isn’t listed at BlogMatrix, since that’s the only other way I’ll know to read your new posts. (I do read RSS feeds in Straw, but only at home; if you have one, please consider this your public notice to start using content:encoded so I don’t have to fool with launching my browser.)

Also, consider this your notice not to expect much, if any, bloggage for a while; I’m headed up to East Tennessee for a family reunion, and I still need to finish this dissertation chapter. So, at best, you may see a few snarky comments with attached links.

I’ve redesigned the right sidebar to use a bunch of buttons from Steal These Buttons (converted to PNGs). For now, the buttons I created that aren’t available from that site are available in a ZIP file here in PNG and GIF formats.

This exchange sounds awfully familiar:

The XO approaches me. “Have you heard about the incident?”

“What incident?”

“Good. You’re the Investigating Officer.”

Heh.

Sorry for the light posting; I’ve been sitting around the house all day waiting for the A/C repair guy to show up. It’s muggy but thankfully not too hot today…

Now’s much better; the A/C's been running for two hours straight, and the house is back down to a sane level of humidity. The cause of the outage: a dead capacitor (I didn't ask the repair guy how many Farads the thing stored, but it was about the size of a soda can).

Conrad thinks that Steven Den Beste’s philosophy of blogrolling post was a tad verbose, and promulgates the following personal policy:

Rule No. 1: There are no rules.

Rule No. 2: When in doubt, see Rule No. 1.

That’s more or less mine, although my regressive recipriocity gene (perhaps left over from my youthful flirtation with being a Democrat) suggests that blogrolling me will almost certainly lead to your being blogrolled. And it helps if you ping Weblogs.com when you update, because otherwise you’ll end up stuck at the bottom, coincidentally down near Steven Den Beste.

Dan Drezner passes on word that he’ll be guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy this weekend. Congrats!

In perhaps-unrelated news, nobody has ever asked (or, for that matter, been asked; perhaps I can only blame myself) to guest-blog at Signifying Nothing.

The Bitch Girls want to know…

The battery in my car died today (more likely, overnight). Thanks to a neighbor and the helpful folks at Wal-Mart, I’m back on the road again. Pretty amazing that the battery lasted as long as it did—it was the OEM battery, manufactured by Hitachi of all people, so it had to be at least six years old.

I dreamt this morning that Dave Letterman had set up a blog. Not quite as exciting as Michele’s dream, but equally incomprehensible.

Just FYI, I’ve taken the $7.95/month drain on my finances and complete waste of money that BellSouth calls “Caller ID with Name and Number Delivery” off of my landline. But you’re still going to get my answering machine. And it’s muted. So nyah.

I realize none of the telemarketers who call me read my blog, but I felt the need to vent publicly, since I won’t be speaking to any telemarketers on the phone.

I’m for it too. But wireless vibrator blogging would be right out. And I just don’t know what to think about penis blogging; however, I think Eason Jordan is somehow blameworthy.

However, I think I’ll just stick to misanthropic ramblings with occassional links to light relationship blogging (and, of course, hot Mox photos) for spice.

I’m for it.

Nice to see fellow GOLUM-ite Mark Turnage back blogging again!

I guess this means I should get off my butt and release LSblog, since Mark’s the first person who showed any interest in using it.

Howard Bashman of How Appealing asks:

By the way, am I the only one who prefers “an URL” to “a URL” (Dixie Chicks excluded)?

The short answer: probably not.

My general rule: use an when the vowel sound is pronounced at the beginning of the subsequent word, and a otherwise. In the case of “H”: an hour, but a hat. “Y” is also potentially problematic, although usually in English it is not pronounced as “i” at the beginning of a word—but one might refer to, or call one’s self, “an Yglesias fan.”

But letters at the beginning of abbreviations could be a bigger issue: “A”, “E”, “I”, and “O” have clear vowel sounds at the beginning, while “U” is pronounced like yew, with the “yuh” sound for y. So “a URL” seems more appropriate to me, if you speak it as a collection of letters—e.g. U-R-L. However, if you pronounce it like the name or title “Earl,” an would work better, and there seems to be a good number of people (techies and non-techies) out there who do.

Incidentally, common British practice would uppercase an abbreviation to be spoken as initials—e.g. USA—and capitalize an abbreviation prounounced like a word—e.g. Nato—but that’s not used west of the pond, so there’s no obvious guide except knowledge of the language. Some also argue that the latter type of abbreviation is the only type that can be called an “acronym,” a position I am agnostic on.

For those who aren't familiar with Florida, the state is not all that monolithic. Ocala, where I'm spending the week and finished up high school, is nestled in the hills of Central Florida and just west of the eponympous Ocala National Forest, and is one of the state's oldest cities (before the 1920s, the state was basically unsettled south of Tampa). The past few decades, it's become a retirement community and increasingly Republican.

But, like the rest of the state, it also has a growing Hispanic population, and nearby Orlando has a Univision affiliate with a very slick evening newscast (and, judging from my limited Spanish, a better newscast than the English-language stations). Still, it was somewhat jarring to be at Wal-Mart (waiting for my car's oil to be changed) and hear the following announcement: “Will a Spanish-speaking associate please pick up line two?” You don't hear that much in Mississippi.

That being said, Ocala is a community that has little to offer relatively young people. I suspect that of all those who will be at my 10th high school reunion, none of the ones who went to college will still be living in Ocala. I'm not sure there's much to do about it — notably, nearby Gainesville offers the bohemian life of a relatively large college town, although the cost of living is somewhat higher. Still, it's home (or at least, as much home as anywhere else has ever been for me), for better or for worse, and I'm sure I'll be back — but I probably won't stay until after my hair starts falling out.

Josh Chafetz at OxBlog has taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Dan Drezner. I think everyone's trying to drive up their Ecosystem ratings.

Anyway, you won't see shameless pandering like that here. Which is probably why blog.lordsutch.com doesn't rank very highly...

Dan Drezner makes his pitch why his corner of the Blogosphere should be “Your #1 International Relations Blog” — at least if those international relations involve a then-underaged Russian media darling's since-terminated marriage to a former Red Army hockey player.

Shrewd work as always by Prof. Drezner. This blog's best search hits by far are on the phrase “Jennifer Garner lingerie,” so the, er, jiggle factor definitely seems to drive traffic. Nevertheless, there are some serious questions to be asked:

1. I wonder why I never heard that Ms. Kournikova was in Memphis? Surely it wasn't to play tennis...

2. Ashley Judd is probably a better conversationalist than Ms. Kournikova. Then again, my pet rock probably is too.

3. Even if Den Beste did have this news, wouldn't it take you more than an hour to read through his post on it? Perhaps, but I'm sure Lake Placid and containment would have been discussed at length, and Martina Hingis and Mary Pierce would have been properly chastised for their political failings, so at the very least (a) the post wouldn't really be about Sergei and Anna's hanky-panky, but rather most instructive in the current workings of the International System from a neorealist perspective, and (b) there would have been some creative new insults flung at the Franco-German axis. (Of course, then there would be the inevitable series of posts from hawkish lefty bloggers insisting that while they approved of the Federov-Kournikova relationship, he really should have waited until her 18th birthday, which quickly would have degenerated into name-calling and discussions of which cities should be attacked by WMDs. So perhaps it's better this way...)

In any event, my predilictions lean more in the Jennifer Capriati direction: you could still take her to meet your parents, but it's a safe bet she'd go to second base on a first date. Win-win all around.

Of course, this last paragraph is a joke.

Apparently, ten anti-war protestors got themselves arrested when some decided “to heck with the whole non-violence thing” and attacked Ministry of Defence police guarding RAF Fairford in England.

RAF Fairford was where I was twelve years ago during the first Gulf War; I spent a lot of time loitering around my dad's office in Base Operations — I think it's the building in the background of that picture on the front page, which they'd taken out of mothballs after shutting down most of the base just a few months earlier — watching CNN with the airmen and officers who were quartered in the then-unused second floor. I don't remember a bunch of war protestors back then, but there may have been a few (we never seemed to get the CND activity). Back then, Fairford was a staging area for B-52 flights armed with conventional ordinance (in addition to Diego Garcia); some early B-52 flights in the war actually originated from Barksdale Air Force Base (Shreveport, Louisiana).

Anyway, go surf the unofficial site; it's got some pretty interesting stuff, including information on some of the past uses RAF Fairford saw. (I can verify that Fairford was/is the Transatlantic abort site for the Space Shuttle in certain orbits; my dad went to the Cape for special training in 1989 or so, and would have been responsible for coordinating things until a dedicated NASA team arrived.)

Matthew Yglesias and Katie have been having fun deconstructing the lyrics to Avril Lavigne's “Sk8er Boi” (on her debut album, Let Go). Frankly, it's all slick marketing — she may really be a skater punk, but the album isn't what you'd think of as skater punk. IMHO, the gems of the album aren't among the tracks getting airplay; “Losing Grip,” “UnWanted,” and “Things I'll Never Say.”

Anyway, if you won't believe me, believe Ryan McGee, who's down with the Mox's peeps. So he must be cool or right or something.

Hit & Run passes on word that the Pacific island-state of Nauru (population approximately 12,000; area 1/10th that of the District of Columbia) has apparently dropped off the face of the earth. Sounds like someone needs to airdrop a few Iridium satellite phones or something.

I'm going to be in the car all day, so the usual diet of misanthropy will be limited. The good news is: I have links!

• Bitter considers a new career option and notes her cohort's investment in duct tape is paying off.

• VodkaPundit lays down a brutal Fisking on an unsuspecting commenter.

• Dan Drezner speculates that Weaseldom may be overwhelmed by the evidence sooner rather than later.

• Ryan McGee has a brutal two-parter on relationships.

• Michele has lost her patience with Hollywood's weasel entertainers.

• Virginia Postrel has lots of great new stuff up that I'd post direct links to if I felt like picking the anchors out of the page source. Notably, the book's now The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness; apparently, Look and Feel was too risqué for the publishers. Or maybe they were just concerned that the jacket photo would lead to readers mistaking the title as an imperative. [Grammar humor. Cute. —ed. Aaagh, I've caught the dreaded ed meme!]

As an aside, I was brutally disappointed when I turned on C-SPAN late last night and there was no evidence of Robert Byrd reading the phone book. I thought we were supposed to be having a good old-fashioned filibuster? Meanwhile, Howard Bashman suggests the possibility of a double-whammy filibuster; I, too, have never heard of a committee meeting being filibustered. No word yet either on whether this will hold up final passage of the four-month-overdue Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which I can hopefully pore over in detail by tonight (assuming the GPO is on the ball).