Not that it can make the hurt go away, Brig, but I miss you too. (Oh, wait, she probably wasn’t talking about me.)

Prompted by the flurry of mentions on webloglog, I buckled and took the Suave-O-Meter Test. 87 out of 100. Of course, this is entirely meaningless, seeing as it doesn’t change the fact that I’m single. (Or, as we say here in New York, that and a buck and a half will get me a ride on the subway.)

This week’s Bushism of the Week, too long to quote here but worth reading just to see how this man’s mind works, makes me wonder if the Washington Post didn’t mistakenly interview the elder Bush instead…

I agree — opening the 2000 Major League Baseball season in another country is wrong. (I also think it’s pretty audacious for MLB to do this in Japan, a country which has a pretty strong baseball tradition of their own, and don’t need ours imposed on them.)

Gawrsh, I stop paying attention to the NEAR Shoemaker asteroid spacecraft for a few weeks, and they release an amazing flyover movie. (You can get higher-quality QuickTime or MPEG versions if you want, and a second flyover, too.)

Wendell has published Prerequisites to Being a Modern Conservative Republican, a great rebuttal to Mike’s Prerequisites to Being a Modern Liberal Democrat.

Mike, at least for me, it’s about where I subjectively feel safer, not how stats tell me I should feel safer. And it’s tough for me to accept any conclusions on gun safety from John Lott, a man who: in the wake of the Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings, suggested arming teachers with concealed weapons is the answer; has said “To force airlines to ban smoking on all flights thus makes smokers worse off by a greater amount than it benefits non-smokers”; and has attacked affirmative action in the police force because of his conclusion that it increases crime rates in their precincts. (Since you want them, here are the references on those.)

For anyone who’s interested in good analyses of the John Lott study which concluded that allowing citizens to carry guns lowers crime rates, I’d recommend reading “Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?” by Dan Black and Daniel Nagin in the January 1998 issue of Journal of Legal Studies. For a quicker, and more easily accessible read, check out Tim Lambert’s “Do more guns cause less crime?”