Events

This is interesting. I opposed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1998 (officially the Copyright Term Extension Act), sponsored by Sonny Bono (R-CA), because I (a) believe that copyright protection already went on too long (50 to 70 years), and (b) it was such a naked lobbying bid by Disney. Well, it turns out, Disney's copyright in the Mickey Mouse character may actually have lapsed in 1998 despite the Act: Film credits from the 1920s revealed imprecision in copyright claims that some experts say could...

Short flight today, just landings. But—despite its monotony—I've still got a Google Earth file of it. It's hard to see from the KML, but my pattern actually got much better as I practiced, which was the point, I suppose.

Via Talking Points Memo, the Associated Press makes an inadvertently true comment about Sen. Joe Lieberman (R-CT).

...and bison start wandering the Chicago suburbs: Illinois State Police say four buffalo escaped from a farm in Braidwood and were shot after they blocked morning traffic. The buffalo wandered onto Interstate 55, shutting down the highway in both directions from Illinois Route 29 to Route 113 in the Coal City and Braidwood area. First we get coyotes in downtown Chicago drink coolers, now this. These guys must think they own the place or something.

I wrote this post on my flight to Dallas listening to the Indigo Girls. Fitting, because having an extra day to spend in Atlanta, my cousin and I went out to Decatur to have lunch with one of my oldest surviving friends and her wife. As my cousin said while we were poking around the interesting kitsch in Blue Moon (below), "Ah, here's the Community." My Decatur friend suggested the most appropriate (and, in fact, tastiest) place to have lunch in these circumstances: Watershed, which the Indigo Girls'...

My cousin and I are in Atlanta, which works well with the 30-Park Geas because we saw the Cubs play. Tuesday's game got rained out so we got to Turner Field for the second half of a double-header. The first game went to Chicago 10-2; ours, 8-0. We're going back again tonight to see what should, by averages, be a 9-1 Cubs victory. From our seats we had a great view of the field: Including the gilded dome of the Georgia State Capitol and what the hell is that cow in the baseball hat? Oh. It's a Chik-Fil-A...

The 30-Park Geas continued yesterday with a trip up to Milwaukee, the charming and colorful city only 90 minutes away from Chicago by train: All right, it's not that bad everywhere—just in the road-contstruction hell near the Amtrak station that made me walk nearly a mile out of my way. Downtown Milwaukee has improved in the past few years, and even appears to have something like a skyline: Of course, I've been to Milwaukee many times, and I have even gone to Miller Park. But, because of the rules I put...

The 30-Park Geas continues this afternoon with Washington at Milwaukee, my second trip to Miller Park but first as part of the geas. Milwaukee is in second place, 4 games behind the Cubs, and has won their last 5 in a row. This game counts, in other words. (Washington is still in last place, and could stay there until the 2015 season.) Still, it's Milwaukee, and I can never get out of my head the speech a Russian defector gave in an episode of Barney Miller, explaining what the Soviet Union was then...

Parker and I checked out the annual festival in Boystown, and lasted 45 minutes before both of us suffered serious crowd fatigue. The walk did both of us some good, though my sunscreen, nowhere nearly as effective as the natural stuff he sheds all over the place, seems not to have lasted, so I'll definitely feel the walk longer than he will. Crowds, though. My goodness. The weather was perfect today—I mean, perfect—so the entire city squeezed itself into four blocks of Halsted Street. Parker got his...

I just finished Paul Johnson's History of the American People, which I started four weeks ago. Well-written as it was, I couldn't help noticing, around when the book got into the Harding administration, that perhaps Mr. Johnson leans farther to the right than I do. He made some good arguments for more-conservative views of modern American history, and I'll think about them, but parts of his discussions of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush père made me snort. Still, I recommend the book, and I found it a great way...