Washington 21, San Jose State 12

Washington's first game of the season was a lot closer than it should have been. That's the bad news. The good news is that the defense looked much improved from last year.

Seattle Times story here.

Next week: LSU in Baton Rouge. Ugh. I am unsure of the point of putting LSU on the schedule.

The other bad news is that Comcast is not carrying the Pac-12 network in Ann Arbor, as well as many other places. Given that they provide hundreds of channels of worthless drivel, this seems an odd choice, particularly given the long-standing rivalry between the Pac-12 and the Big Ten..

Shooting fish in the DNC barrel

Reason's interviewer demonstrates what you really already knew: (1) most people hold large numbers of mutually inconsistent political views and (2) that is even true of people at a political convention whom you might have thought would have devoted more CPU cycles to trying to be consistent.

Being pro-choice only in cases where you might actually make the choice but not in other cases is a bit like wanting free speech only for people who agree with you (and there are many on both teams who hold essentially that position). It truly is amazing that we have any freedom at all.

The red team would, of course, have done no better if asked, for example, to account for the inconsistency inherent in believing that the post office and other domestic bureaucracies are hopeless failures while the military bureaucracy can be expected to successfully transform backward autocracies into liberal societies in a deacde.

Assorted links

1. Some bits and photos on the history of course registration at Michigan. I always loved picking courses - so many cool choices, but tempered with the frustration at not being able to take all the ones that sounded interesting. Sort of like seminars and conferences, I suppose.

2. Size matters at the Fed's Jackson Hole symposium.

3. Where the college students are - from Atlantic Cities.

4. Organizing the school day morning. This is new for us - tomorrow is Elizabeth's first day of kindergarten.

5. Interview with Maggie Gyllenhall on Salon.

Dan Drezner on being a Sunday morning pundit

This does not sound like something I would like.

PDD Illustrated

Partisan Differentiation Disorder (PDD) illustrated with Star Wars characters.

Via Tom Headrick on Facebook

Katie Rophie on children and their invisible mothers

The starting paragraphs of Katie's fine essay:

If, from beyond the grave, Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend’s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favourite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some earnest future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about “the construction of women’s identity” at this particular moment in time?

Many of these women work. Many of them are in book clubs. Many of them are involved in causes, or have interests that take them out of the house. But this is how they choose to represent themselves. The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafés and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when fresh-scrubbed Vassar girls were losing their minds amidst vacuum cleaners and sandboxes. Which is not to say that I don’t understand the temptation to put a photograph of your beautiful child on Facebook, because I do. After all, it frees you of the burden of looking halfway decent for a picture, and of the whole excruciating business of being yourself. Your three-year-old likes being in front of the camera. But still.

Good stuff - and real feminism, not WCTU tracts rewritten with post-modern jargon, which is much of what passes for feminism these days.

Movie: Dark Horse

Dark Horse is sort of a love story about two very awkward people. At times hilarious, at times brutal, at times painful to watch, but overall worth a look.

I did not like it quite as much as A.O. Scott in the NYT.

Recommended.