The Carnival of the Vanities is back in town. One of these days I'm going to simultaneously possess a decent, recent post and the drive to actually submit it to whoever is hosting it that week. On that same hypothetical day, I shall also wash my car, learn Arabic, solve world hunger, and clean my windows. The one good thing about indolence is that it makes everything equally possible. Or improbable.

Harvey of Bad Money has an excellent post on the value of artificial status, comparing the League of Liberals' linkwhoring stats-manipulation games with the negative effects of affirmative action. I think he overstretches the point by invoking "status versus power", in that I don't think that true status is necessarily a metric of power, soft or otherwise.