If, as my good friends on the left argue (quite plausibly, I might add), Iraq was not linked in any way to the 9/11 attacks, what are we to make of the AP consciously linking the conflict in Iraq to the 9/11 attacks in its latest ‘body count’ dispatches? Here are your choices:

1. The AP has bought into the Bush administration’s false consciousness of a 9/11-Iraq link.
2. The AP has a right-wing bias in its reporting.
3. The AP had to “balance” reporting of the Saddam Hussein appellate decision in order to create the appearance of fairness.
4. All of the above.

If you chose the last option, you too can write for Salon.com.

I’m back in St. Louis for about four days before embarking on the 3rd Annual Underemployed Academic Grand Holiday Roadtrip featuring stops in Memphis, Ocala, and the site of SPSA (in 2005 and 2007, New Orleans; in 2006, Atlanta). The song, as they say, remains the same.

In the meantime, I have two phone interviews to take care of, along with about 100 items to grade (between tests, papers, and extra credit assignments), five job applications, and probably a couple items to get as part of my last-minute Christmas shopping. Oh, and laundry. There’s always laundry.

A nice capper to a semi-miserable day: one of my upstairs neighbors informed me a couple of hours ago that we have no water in the building. At least the damn electricity is still on… for now, at least.

Like Megan, I like much of Ed Tufte’s work—heck, I own a reprint of Data Analysis for Politics and Policy, which nobody has read in 20 years, in addition to The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and its successors Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. But I apparently don’t like him as much as she does.

It would seem that the power is finally back on in my apartment after nearly four days (either that or someone has stolen all of my computer gear and hooked it up at their house... I can't really tell from work). Now I get to look forward to going home and throwing away the contents of my refrigerator.

Elsewhere: Mike Munger took notice of my plight.

Here’s a big shocker, I know:

A minor disclaimer: I tend to use a weird mix of formal speech and Southern colloquialisms in everyday conversation, so I do have my Southern “moments” when speaking, but if I avoid Southern terms (primarily “y’all”) I pretty much sound like Tom Brokaw.

þ: Prof. Karlson

As of today, I am now two weeks behind on my Economist reading. Clearly I need to step it up a notch… or figure out a way to have a longer commute so the whole thing gets read before a new one arrives.

Britney and Kevin are no more. The line forms at the Dairy Queen on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge.

After fiddling with my thermostat this afternoon, including partially disassembling it and then putting it back together, I got the heat to work in my apartment. I have no clue what I did, but whatever I did to it seems to have worked.

Here is a list of everything I’m trying my hardest not to work on today:

• Grading methods homework and labs. (did that, alas)
• Grading American politics exams.
• My presentation on measuring political sophistication that I have to give on Friday afternoon at Mizzou.
• Converting the LaTeX version of the Damn Impeachment Article™ into Word format to make the editors of PRQ happy.
• Job applications.

A singularly unproductive afternoon, if I do say so myself.

It would figure that the one day that my monthly Metrolink pass wasn’t in my wallet (I’m 99.8% sure I left it in the pocket of the trousers I wore Tuesday, after I used it on the bus to save myself the uphill walk between the Grand station and Lindell) would be the day that I lucked into bumping into a fare inspector between CWE and Grand. I am now officially annoyed.

Now the only question is whether the time and hassle canceling class on my court date so I can go plead my case to a judge turns out to be worth avoiding the fine.

Never before has a single photograph been the subject of such debate.

First, we have a debate over whether or not the woman standing in front of Bill Clinton is posing to accentuate her chest. Then we have a debate about why whitey seems to have invaded Harlem.

I really don’t care, I just find this all incredibly amusing. And, for that matter, stupid.

Craig Newmark notes a Slate Explainer that tries to answer the question, “why are introductory college courses numbered ‘101’?”

Oddly enough, of all the institutions I’ve taught at, only Ole Miss numbered a political science course (in that case, Intro to American Government) as 101. At Millsaps, the same course was 1000; Duke was 91 (or 91D if taught with discussion sections); and here at SLU it’s 110 (we have a “100” but no “101”). Not only that, but all four institutions also use different abbreviations for political science—POL, PLSC, POLSCI (or unofficially PS), and POLS, respectively.

Any email message containing the phrase “this is not meant to be a flame” inevitably is a flame.

Via Stephen Karlson, I found a site that will let you display all the urban rapid transit systems you have used in the world:

Got at b3co.com!

With a little source hacking, I added the Munich U logo (which is the same as the Berlin U logo anyway).

JMPP explains why she won’t be dating you—yes, you. Me, I know I’m quality… heck, my mom says so, and whose mom would lie to their kid?

Sorta-kinda credit to Amber Taylor, although I saw it in Google Reader before she mentioned it.

Update via Amber’s comments: If you know your SAT or GRE score, find out if you are worthy of JMPP here (broken in Safari, use Firefox instead). Fun for the whole family!

A couple of noteworthy blemishes on my otherwise pleasant day thus far:

• What logical reason could exist for using a different lock (which my key doesn’t open) on the door to a building facing the street when I can walk (but really wouldn’t want to while carrying a 50-pound box of books) through a breezeway and unlock the door facing a giant open space in 30 seconds?
• People who get in line at Sam’s Club with memberships they know are expired to try to put something over on the cashier are, in a word, irritating.

I can’t say my day has been that productive, but I did unpack a few boxes of books in my office, flip through the (limited) amount of information I received about my advisees, and start to get the computer in my office pointed in the direction of being functional.

How to calculate the effective size of a 16:9 television when viewing 4:3 material:

effsize = √((diag × 0.654)² + (diag × 0.49)²)

where diag is the diagonal size of your 16:9 television.

For example, the viewing area of a 27-inch 16:9 HDTV is about the same as that of a 22-inch 4:3 television when viewing old-school, non-widescreen material.

Reader exercise: solve for diag to figure out how to replace an existing 4:3 television with a 16:9 one that provides the same viewing area as that TV.

As promised, a photo:

And, just to emphasize that customer service ain’t what it used to be, the earliest anyone (and I called half-a-dozen places) could fix it is Monday.

As I move out of town, I suppose it is only fitting that more-or-less the same thing that happened when I moved into town would happen, although this time it was the larger rear window instead of the little one that some snot-nosed punk decided to smash out. Photos tomorrow, I promise…

I’ve decided to list my return address on job applications as “St. Louis” rather than “Clayton,” since the USPS says either is acceptable, and the six people who know the difference might think I was some sort of rich snob otherwise.

I freely admit to snobbery (I do put "Dr." on my frequent flyer accounts and hotel reservations, after all), but I’m afraid I’m not rich—else I’d be living in the Central West End or the Washington Avenue loft district.

Serrabee has a link to a pretty funny Craigslist post by the seller of a mini-fridge. And people wonder why I don’t sell stuff on Craigslist…

I paid $24 today to the Gateway Clean Air Program to hook up one of these to my car under the misguided belief that this is a fool-proof way to ensure that my car isn't polluting the environment. Then I paid another $12 to NTB so a mechanic could look at my car and prove that it wasn’t falling apart, only to be passed on I-70 by a car that I am 99% certain would fail any safety or emissions inspection miserably.

Tomorrow I get to go stand in line at City Hall to prove I don’t owe any property taxes to Missouri on my car, then I get to stand in another line in the same building to get my plates. No word on how much in fees, taxes, and kickbacks that will entail.

BigJim alerts me to evidence that the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ latest hit “Dani California” is a rip-off of Tom Petty’s “Last Dance for Mary Jane.” I thought “Dani California” sounded pretty familiar when I heard it the first time, but I just chalked it up to RHCP imitating themselves à la Nickelback.

Things are clearly topsy-turvy when Michelle Branch has gone country while the Dixie Chicks have gone rock-and-roll. Not that the two genres are all that distinct these days, mind you (or, for that matter, historically).

I leave it to my readers to guess which album I purchased.