Events

I'm in Durham, N.C. today, having pounced on a delightful airfare American Airlines released on Tuesday. The fictional supernatural personifications of travel were with me yesterday, from the 35-minute (door-to-door) trip from home to O'Hare, to the upgrade, to my friend taking advantage of my visit to bring her boyfriend and me on a Segway tour of downtown Raleigh. The last counts as travel because I learned how to ride a new vehicle. We looked like a string of electric ducks following the tour guide...

The Conservative Party have apparently obliterated Labour in yesterday's local U.K. elections: Although most of the county councils have yet to declare, early results show the Conservatives taking dozens of seats from Labour and seizing control of two county councils in the Liberal Democrats’ stronghold in the South West. In Staffordshire, Labour, which has controlled the county for over 20 years, has already lost half its seats and the Tories are on course for an easy victory. The Conservatives also...

The City is seeing more incidents of systematic violence against meters—this time in Andersonville. I have a hypothesis, with some of the evidence to support it coming from my own head. Before the parking meter lease, people mostly accepted that feeding parking meters was part of our civic responsibility. We drive on the streets, which are a public good, so we should do our part and pay the $1 per hour or so for the privilege of parking on them. Now, however, a private company gets the money from the...

I wrote yesterday about all of New England (except that one little bit in the southeast) has now ratified marriage equality. I asked some friends, why not Rhode Island? Reader EC wrote back from East Greenwich: eventually they'll pass it. We have a Republican gov and he's trying to posture, but maybe even more significant is the fact that Rhode Islanders never rush into anything. We were the first to enter into the revolutionary fray with the burning of the British ship, the Gaspe, but the last of the...

Governor John Lynch today signed legislation making New Hampshire the sixth state (and the fifth in New England) to allow gay marriage. If gay marriage—or, the right of a person and another person to marry—can pass New Hampshire and Iowa, I think it's officially "mainstream." New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die") is the most Republican state in New England, and John Lynch is a Republican governor; so this isn't a party issue any more. Rhode Island politics may not permit the state to weigh in for some time...

This morining Chicago's Inspector General released his official report confirming what everyone already knew: Chicago's parking-meter lease deal was, not to put too fine a point on it, galactically stupid. Apparently, though, Mayor Daley can't fathom why this scandal hasn't quietly disappeared like all the others. Here's the Trib: While Inspector General David Hoffman put an official seal on what critics have been saying for months, the scathing report comes amid public outrage. Anger over the parking...

Australian comedy duo John Clarke and Brian Dawe comment on the 1991 Kikri oil spill:

As I'm less than three months from starting an MBA program designed to foster international relationships, I don't know what to make of this: [F]oreign (or, more euphemistically, "international") students are thinking twice about handing over their hard-earned and recession-hit cash for an education at a prestigious Western hall of academe. ... Big private business schools in America, already hit by the much lower valuations of their endowment funds, seem likely to take the biggest hit. The...

There are apparently proposals out there to make beer drinkers sad: In Congress, the Senate Finance Committee has raised the possibility of a 150% increase in the federal tax on beer to help pay for health care reform. And about three dozen states, including Illinois, have called for alcohol tax hikes to offset budget shortfalls. The federal government hasn't raised the beer tax in nearly 20 years, but legislators are considering increasing it to the same level as spirits. An equalization of alcohol...

Here's the KML from yesterday's flight. And here's more art: Contrast with a photo from earlier this year: See? The second photo is from about 100 m south of the first one. Otherwise they both show the Cubs avoiding a major loss.