assorted

1. "Role-taking" in symbolic interactionism refers to the capacity to adopt the perspective of the others, as in to understand the way a situation seems from the perspective the person to whom one is talking. I've come to wonder whether a penchant for using too small fonts in PowerPoint presentations be used to make a broader inference about people's role-taking skills.

2. Overheard from today: "She's the kind of person who, when you are with a group of people eating Indian food and one of the dishes is saag paneer, will cherry-pick out all the paneer as she's serving herself."

3. Also overheard:
"You might as well have just typed 'I'm losing it' and hit 'Post.'"
"What's wrong with not wanting anybody to spoil Harry Potter for me?"
"It's like you've announced to the world, 'World, I've sashayed over that boundary that separates the eccentric from the insane.'"

4. As for an actually-sociologically-interesting contemporary animals and society issue, this article on CBS SportsLine speculates that the Michael Vick trial will be lower profile but divide public opinion much as the O.J. Simpson trial did. Although Al Sharpton has already come out hard against Vick. I can't imagine there is ultimately going to be the same kind of evidentiary ambiguity in the Vick case as there was in the Simpson case. I wonder if/to-what-extent Blacks and Whites differ in perceptions of the severity of the crime, given various associations of dogfighting with hip-hop imagery and the more basic difference where Whites are more than twice as likely as Blacks to have pets.