* “Gary King”:http://gking.harvard.edu/ raised the following point on Facebook yesterday: if politicians are always retiring for executive office appointments to spend more time with their families, then how come when they are being appointed in the first place are they never asked whether they plan to spend less time with their families?
* The “Christian Science Monitor”:http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0809/Russian-fires-prompt-Kremlin-to-abruptly-embrace-climate-change is reporting that the horrible fires in Russia may be having an effect on the Kremlin’s attitude towards climate change. This is reminiscent of a paper by my colleague “Patrick Egan”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/PatrickEgan and “Megan Mullin”:http://unix.temple.edu/~mmullin/ which finds that “weather patterns have a significant effect on people’s beliefs about the evidence for global warming”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4819/egan_mullin.pdf in the United States.
* “Bill Clark”:http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/wclark.html will be performing on jazz guitar on Thursday, Aug 12, at the “Tower Inn in Ypsilanti, Michigan”:http://billclarkjazz.wordpress.com/ from 8-10 pm with Saxophonist Brandon Boudreau.
* “Josh Clinton”:http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/newspub/hicS4M?id=42203 is in the press offering expertise on … “open football practices at Vanderbilt University”:http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100809/SPORTS0602/8090311/2168.
* Finally, here’s a great description from a sport’s reporter of what’s wrong with his city’s baseball team: “There are injuries, of course. There is youth. There is the bad hop and the befuddling bunt and the wasted, ninth-inning, two-out homer. There is also the ballooning ERA and the miscalculations on the bases and the dubious decisions to wave in runners and the struggle to drive in runners in scoring position and an inexplicable inability to square up 87-m.p.h. fastballs in the zone.” For fun, you can play guess which team this is, or you can “click here”:http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100808/SPORTS02/8080483/Tigers-collapse-adds-insult-to-injury-for-fans-players&template=fullarticle#ixzz0w87GKJTC for the whole article.