Events

Fog? Check. Cable car? Check. Alcatraz? Check. Must be the Powell and Hyde line: More fog? Check. Bridge? Check.

In a move calculated to let millions of people believe that taste has not fled the American continent altogether, Thomas Kinkade has filed for bankruptcy: The Chapter 11 petition was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Jose in the name of the Kinkade production arm, Pacific Metro of Morgan Hill, Calif. It allows Pacific Metro to reorganize and puts an automatic stay on the collection of all judgments, including one for $3 million owed to Karen Hazlewood and Jeff Spinello. "Kinkade is a … deadbeat,"...

From Matthew Yglesias, information about coffee consumption worldwide, which apparently peaks in Finland: The Swedes are actually a bit less coffee-mad than the Finns, Norwegians, Danes, or Icelanders but as you can see here all the Nordic peoples drink a ton of coffee, in the Swedish case a bit less than twice as much per capita as Americans do. The Södermalm area of Stockholm where Mikael Blonkvist and Lisbeth Salander live and Millenium and Milton Security are headquartered is just littered with...

Via Failblog:

What will they think of next. Now you can get a pair of 2GB USB cufflinks in silver or gold. They're maybe a little pricey ($195), but I do have a birthday coming up...

I mentioned a few days ago that I'm swamped. I didn't realize at the time how swamped, sadly. It turns out I'm more swamped than Florida. I'm so swamped, the Rs.O.U.S.[1] are drowning. So, though it's redundant, I'll reiterate I'm not dead. I am, however, slowing to the worst ratio of blog entries per month since October 2007. Part of this comes from how much work and school are challenging me right now. This is good, actually. I have only a finite amount of creativity, but I'm using it all. And...

Chicago hit 32°C yesterday for the first time since August 9th, and barely missed setting records: By the time Monday evening's rush hour was getting underway, 33°C highs had been logged at both Midway and O'Hare---18°C higher than the peak reading of 14°C a week earlier---a level 10°C above normal. Only 21 of the past 140 years have recorded a temperature of 33°C or higher this early in the warm season underscoring the rare nature of the hot spell. There hasn't been a warmer May temperature in Chicago...

I've got about three hours left on the 8-hour clock for my finance midterm, which is good because I think it will take me only about four hours to finish the last bits. I'm pleased we're learning all the skills required to perform detailed financial analysis at someone else's direction, rather than the skills to direct someone else to do it and to figure out what it means, because it provides a nice break from all that stuff in all our other courses. After today, we have hardly any work left this term...

Actually, almost every country is #1 at something. The U.S. is first in serial killers, for example; the U.K., CCTV; Ireland, quality of life. If I keep finding sites like Information is Beautiful, I'll never finish my morning reading.

Exhibit the First: This morning on NPR, a "retired banker from Eagle River, Wis.," when interviewed about the retirement of Rep. David Obey (D-WI) claimed, "I think the majority of people up here are independent thinkers." Exhibit the Second: via Gulliver, a study of airfare fluctuations in the U.S. market found airfares fluctuate millions of times per year for some city pairs in the U.S. For example, airfares between Atlanta and Las Vegas changed almost 2.5m times last year. Gulliver pointed out that...