Events

Parker is asleep on my back porch and not allowed in the house because he decided, within 15 seconds of being off-leash at the park, that it would be fun to roll in a pile of gross, green, grass-covered, glistening, goose poop. We are now on our way to Petco for an emergency bath. Dogs.

While in San Francisco for the weekend, I decided to continue the 30-Park Geas by seeing what the Oakland A's were up to. Last place, it turned out; but then, so were their opponents, the Tampa Bay Rays. From the moment you get off the BART, you know you're not going to the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field. Wrigley, for example, has less concrete and barbed wire: Of course, Wrigley has fewer "World Champions" banners, too, but we'll skip that for now. Not a bad game, on balance. The home team won, it...

Arriving home this evening, after three days in San Francisco and frequent email checking while there, Outlook presented me with 295 unread messages (not counting the hundreds of messages in my spam filter). Of these, almost all were on my RSS reader—75 Facebook status updates, 50 posts from Andrew Sullivan, etc., etc. It's amazing how much better you can feel after hitting +A, right-click, "Mark As Read". Problem: solved. Still, I hate feeling like I missed something....

I'm returning from San Francisco this afternoon, so tomorrow I'll have photos from Saturday's A's game and, if I get my very own YouTube account, a video of my sister's dog. I'll leave that for now. This morning, just a link: TheExpiredMeter.com, of interest to anyone who deals with the Chicago parking system. I found it because I discovered only yesterday that, sometime today, my car will get a parking ticket. I discovered this when my alderman's office sent a notice of street sweeping yesterday saying...

Via Dan Savage: More from Garfunkel and Oates...

So confusing. At my last Cubs game, they beat the Cardinals to get into first place. But here's yesterday's result: Let's see that in close-up, just to drive home the pathos and pain: So yesterday, as they got schooled by the fourth-place Reds, St. Louis won their game. So the Cubs swapped places with Reds and dropped to 4th place. It's going to be one of those seasons...

The Chicago Tribune reports today that the City Council now, five months later, wants to have hearings about the late-night, rush-rush, badly-managed parking meter privitization they pushed through in December: Less than five months after the Chicago City Council quickly and overwhelmingly approved the deal, aldermen buffeted by public complaints pushed a slew of ordinances Wednesday targeting the $1.2 billion lease of Chicago's parking meters to a private company. One measure calls for hearings to...

Via TPM, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) thinks he stumped Nobel laureate Stephen Chu: Barton: You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean? Chu: (laughs) This is a complicated story, but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology, and in that time also the plates have moved around, and so, um, it’s the combination of where the sources of the oil and gas are– Barton: But, but...

That's the word the first commenter used to describe Paul Krugman's conclusion about the march to war: Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There's a word for this: it’s evil. If that's shrill, we need to re-examine the 2002 State of the Union address, don't we?

Via Daily Howler, Naomi Klein argues we should throw out Larry Summers: The criticisms of President Obama's chief economic adviser are well known. He's too close to Wall Street. And he's a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we're told we shouldn't care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain. And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein...