Events

I've had only one difficulty with the Duke CCMBA (aside from the material—talk to me Sunday night after I hand in my accounting final, for example): travel optimization. Our next residency starts October 30th in Dubai. Getting from Chicago to Dubai has inherent difficulties, particular with the (self-imposed) constraint of flying only oneworld carriers. I initially tried to go through Amman, and take a couple of days after the residency to visit Jordan and Israel. That fell through when Royal Jordanian...

A number of confusing changes occurred to the world while I slept: President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. I love the man; I voted for him; I gave lots of money[1] to two of his campaigns. I'm still confused. It might offend some of my fellow progressives to say, but possibly the prize means nothing more than "thank you for not being like the last guy, and keep up the good work." The President is, in fact, the second person who is not George W. Bush to win the Prize in the last four years. For...

From the "I can't watch, it's too embarrassing" department, the other day I said there were no 100-game losers in baseball this year. I was wrong. The Washington Nationals lost their 100th game on September 24th, and kept on losing until the 27th, reaching 103 losses. Then...they finished the season with a 7-game winning streak, finishing the season 59-103. Apologies to the Nationals for the oversight.

It took Andrew Sullivan to remind me that Monty Python's Flying Circus turned 40 on Monday. Forty. Tweak the film and drop the laugh track and it's still the funniest television ever filmed. For example.

The Twins hadn't even polished off the Tigers yesterday before Major League Baseball unanimously approved Tribune's sale of the Cubs to the Ricketts: The vote was made during a conference call. Tom Ricketts, who has headed the sale for his family, could take day-to-day control of the Cubs by the end of the month. Commissioner Bud Selig says the Ricketts family will be "great owners and custodians" of the storied franchise perhaps best known for a World Series championship drought that now stands at 101...

And you don't let a convicted hacker near the prison computers, either: Douglas Havard, 27, serving six years for stealing up to £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet, was approached after governors wanted to create an internal TV station but needed a special computer program written. He was left unguarded and hacked into the system's hard drive at Ranby Prison, near Retford, Notts. Then he set up a series of passwords so no one else could get into the system. How could this be worse?...

Oh, for a two-hour link from Raleigh to Washington, or a three-hour train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Not soon, unfortunately. But maybe...Baton Rouge to New Orleans? No, not that either: Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Republican governor, made headlines on Saturday for rejecting $300m in stimulus money intended to jump-start high-speed rail in the Bayou State. Mr Jindal missed the deadline—midnight Friday—to apply for the funds. The governor said he worried about the future maintenance costs of the...

Baseball season ends today for Chicago, making it 101 years since the Cubs last won the World Series. Last year they had to add another digit to the sign on Waveland Street. This year, they only have to increment the numbers: AC 01 64 101. ("AC" means "Anno Catuli" or "Year of the Cub;" the numbers refer to the years since they last won the division, the Pennant, and the World Series, respectively.) Here's the sign at the beginning of this season for comparison: The one encouraging thing from this...

They only have about half an hour of Gandhi's birthday left in India, so I just got this under the wire. Everybody knows that Gandhi fasted often, making him somewhat frail. People also know that he walked all over India barefoot in solidarity with the nation's poorest citizens, which gave him extremely tough feet. Many people do not know that the Mahatma had bad breath, however. All of his treks across the Sub-Continent left him little time or opportunity to brush his teeth, it seems. Anyway, if you...

The International Olympic Committee has eliminated Chicago from consideration for the 2016 games. The defeat marked the first time since 1980 that the U.S. has failed in consecutive bid attempts. Los Angeles lost to Montreal in 1976 and Moscow in 1980, but then was awarded the 1984 Games when it was the only viable candidate bidding. There was a stunned reaction in Chicago to the decision. Yes, the people gathered in Daley Center Plaza, including the Mayor, would be disappointed. I confess to being...