Events

Doonesbury turned 40 today. NPR reports: Created in the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip blurred the lines between comics and the editorial pages, and produced some of the most memorable cartoon characters ever sketched. Trudeau developed Doonesbury around three foundational characters — everyman Mike Doonesbury, football quarterback B.D. and campus radical Mark Slackmeyer. They represented the center, the right, and the left, Trudeau says. Six weeks after...

Via reader AS, this has to be my favorite jack-o-lantern ever:

One of the benefits Avanade provides is a fairly generous "technology" budget. I'm given cash, every year, to buy things that either demonstrate my (read: Avanade's) love of technology, or give me better work-life balance. This week I bought a 240 GB solid-state drive for my work laptop to replace the 256 GB drive it came with. So, I backed up the entire drive using Windows 7 System Image, swapped the drives out, and...crap. Did anyone else notice that 240 So, yeah, I can't restore the image. I am now...

This month has set the record, and it's only the 22nd: Chicagoans have been soaking up sunshine at a record rate this month in what has been the sunniest October to date. So far this month the city has recorded 86 percent of its possible sunshine, surpassing the previous Oct. 1-21 record of 84 percent established in 1958. Another mostly sunny day is on tap for Friday before a weekend storm promises to bring extensive cloudiness along with the city's first significant rainfall since October's opening...

No, not Christine O'Donnell or Sharron Angle—though this one answers Barbara Walters' famous question for them: Now I'll be honest. When TPM Reader JB told me about Pterocarya fraxinifolia earlier today, I thought there was a pretty decent chance I was being punk'd. Or maybe JB had been punk'd. Someone was getting punk'd. But some simple googling showed that if this is a put-on someone has spent a ton of time posting spoof pages on tons of arboreal and nursery websites around the world. More than 16,000...

This caught my eye not only because of its absurdity but also because, at the moment, I'm just outside Cincinnati: In a stunning twist to a Tuesday Hamilton County jury trial, Najah Johnson-Riddle went from juror to witness. Johnson-Riddle was one of 12 jurors seated to hear the domestic violence and felonious assault charges against James Capell, 42, of Colerain Township. Capell is accused of - but has pleaded not guilty to - brutally beating a woman in her College Hill home May 30. He is accused of...

Kooky Christianist and Delaware U.S. Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell failed her constitutional law exam yesterday: The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine. Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious...

Via Sullivan, a really cool science project: Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

(Apologies to Bill Cosby.) The Chicago Tribune reported today that Chicago needs more software engineers: With a national unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, many people assume employers have their pick of applicants for any job, McCombs said. Not so. Within every down job market exist bright spots, which in Chicago means tech jobs, particularly for software engineers. The continued growth of the Internet and mobile technology is fueling the increased demand for IT professionals, McCombs said. Computer...

Via Sullivan, Kenneth Davis at the Smithsonian sets the record straight on our history: From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between...