by Kieran Healy on December 29, 2006
So Nouri al-Maliki pardoned Saddam Hussein to promote national healing and move on, Gerald Ford is making one last appearance at the Apollo theater, and James Brown will shortly be buried at Arlington cemetery, his long reign of terror having come to an end at last. No, that’s not right. I’ll try again.
While I puzzle it out, go read “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/011729.php pre-emptively cutting through the bullshit that will pile up around the gallows this weekend:
bq. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. … This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. … for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting. … This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right. What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?
by Kieran Healy on December 24, 2006
French Church Street, Cork. To avoid excessive nostalgia, below the fold is an equivalent photo from my current location, Tucson. Merry Christmas, everyone.
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by Kieran Healy on December 21, 2006
I’m sure you’re all tearing your hair out with frustration or worry, so I apologise for not posting much. For the past week I have been on a very tiny island on the south end of the “Rangiroa”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangiroa atoll, in French Polynesia. No internet access there. Also no electricity.
In other news, it turns out that if you write a book called “Last Best Gifts”:http://www.lastbestgifts.com then the website for it gets a _big_ surge in hits from Google searches in the weeks before Christmas, but not because people are suddenly interested in the topic.
by Henry Farrell on December 20, 2006
I’m buried in grading at the moment (like, I suspect, many of our readers), and not up to writing any longwinded posts. But I did come across something that I thought might make for an interesting discussion for the academic types who want to take a few minutes out. A vanity search on Google Scholar revealed that a piece (PDF) that I co-wrote with Jack Knight a few years back had been cited in an “article”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/tesg/2006/00000097/00000004/art00009 by Pieter Tierhost for the _Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie_ on “The Scaling of the Dutch Vegetables-Under-Glass-Cluster: Sweet Peppers, Tomatoes and Cucumbers.” Now it isn’t quite as odd as it might sound that Tierhost would cite an article by a political scientist and political theorist; there’s an actual connection there (and Tierhost’s article looks like an interesting and valuable take on industrial clusters for those who follow these debates). But I certainly never thought that anything I wrote would be of interest to scholars debating the cooperation strategies of Dutch vegetable-growers. Which leads to a point for discussion by those of our readers as gets cited occasionally – what’s the most surprising venue/field/article that you’ve been cited in?
by Kieran Healy on December 5, 2006
Although we’ve been on the same panel once before, Minnesota sociologist “Chris Uggen”:http://www.chrisuggen.com/ clearly travels on a “rougher conference circuit”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/12/mickey.html than me.
by Kieran Healy on November 13, 2006
I just got an email from a stranger with a flair for delegation:
Hello ,
I am a BSc student with the [X University] external program and a course that I am taking requires the reading of the book ” Sources of Social Power volume 1 by Michael Mann ” . Now while surfing i came across your email and i would like to know if you could give me a brief overview about this book and probably help me if i get stuck while going through it. I have just started reading this book and its a topic that i find really intresting and will be awaiting your reply.
Maybe I could write his final paper for him as well.
by Eszter Hargittai on November 12, 2006
Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.
by Kieran Healy on November 8, 2006
“Calvin from the outside.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA64g3pi97M It ain’t pretty.
by Kieran Healy on October 22, 2006
Via the “common-as-dirt PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/how_common.php comes “this site”:http://ww2.howmanyofme.com/search/, which alleges it will tell you how many people in the U.S. share a name with you. The results are not encouraging.
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by Kieran Healy on October 18, 2006
“A new Bravia Ad”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/paint/thead/. No, not the bouncy balls one. A new one. Via “Alan”:http://www.schussman.com.
by Eszter Hargittai on October 6, 2006
by Eszter Hargittai on October 2, 2006
.. or where we confirm that I am, on occasion, obsessive about some things. The New York Times has a short piece about GMail’s increasing ability to avoid false positives when it comes to legitimate commercial email requested by the user.
What caught my eye was the accompanying illustration (on the left in this image below).
That Inbox screenshot is not from a GMail account. GMail calls spam “Spam” not “Bulk” as per the screen capture on the right. A commenter on my Flickr stream noted that the illustration they put up comes from Yahoo! Mail. Hah. How hard would it have been to feature the matching Inbox?
by Kieran Healy on October 2, 2006
“ABC news runs a story”:http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/warnings_about_.html under the headline “Warning Signs about Foley Ignored for at least Five Years.”
“No one in the Republican leadership, nor Congressman Shimkus, saw those messages until last Friday when ABC News released them to the public,” said Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL). But there were lots of warning signs. In 2001, pages were warned to be careful with Foley. In 2005, one page complained to his congressman about “sick” e-mails from Foley, a complaint passed on to the Speaker’s staff.”
You can see how the story is taking shape. I expect soon we will learn of the existence of a Presidential daily briefing headed “FOLEY DETERMINED TO STROKE IN U.S. CONGRESS.”
by Kieran Healy on September 21, 2006
Here’s an Ad from Amazon’s front page, designed to sell the drug “Adderall”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall.
The sketch writes itself, I suppose. Thank you for calling 1-800-GOT-ADHD. Please listen carefully as our menu of options has recently changed. If you have questions about ADHD diagnosis, please press hey, have you ever put a bunch of Mentos in your mouth and then drunk some Diet Coke? I did that once and it was a blast. I want to go outside.
I’m sorry. I’ll get my coat.
by Eszter Hargittai on September 13, 2006
As I mentioned recently, I am hiring for a full-time staff position in my research group. Details are below. If you know of someone in the Chicagoland area who may be interested (or someone somewhere else who’d be up for moving to the area), please let them know about this opportunity. Or if you can think of relevant mailing lists, please let me know. (I’ve posted it on air-l and CITASA. I’ve put an ad on Craig’s List Chicago and on Salon Jobs. And I’ve sent a note to a bunch of people I know both in Chicagoland and elsewhere. I welcome suggestions for additional ways of publicizing it though. For now I’m holding off on posting it on Monster.com.) Thanks!
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