Events

Instead of writing a banal post about American Airlines' changes to their million-mile program, here's something one of my co-workers just brought to my attention. A woman is on trial in Illinois for secretly recording a conversation with a cop she alleges was trying to get her to drop a harassment case against another cop. Because the person she recorded was a police officer, however, the crime is a Class 1 felony—the same class that includes second-degree murder[1], rape[2], and carjacking[3]...

Via Raymond Chen, on Monday the Nashville Sounds, Milwaukee's farm team, turned a triple play against the Omaha Storm Chasers: For those who don't know baseball's rules, a few things happened. First, a ball is "caught" (for an out) if the fielder making the catch gains full control over the ball before it touches the ground or another player, even if it touches a part of his own body—or his cap, as happened here. In the video above, this put the batter out. Second, if a fielder catches a fly ball, all...

More from Sunday's air show: Canon 7D at ISO-400, 1/2000 at f/8, 250mm, here. Bonus shots:

Well, that was interesting. A magnitude-5.9 earthquake just rattled Virginia, and we felt it in our office about 15 minutes later. According to the USGS, this is the strongest quake since 1897 in Virginia: The shock was felt severely at Narrows, about 3 kilometers west of Pearisburg. Here, the surface rolled in an undulating motion, water in springs became muddy, and water in some springs ceased to flow. The flow of water in springs also was disturbed in the area of Pearisburg, about 70 kilometers west...

According to a recent study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tea Party supporters believe in "authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration:" The study used polling of North Carolina and Tennessee, conducted by Public Policy Polling (D) in the Summer of 2010, and determined the cultural dispositions by measuring the responses of tea partiers to set questions. After PPP surveyed over 2,000 voters who were sympathetic to the...

Kitten (yes, that was her name for all 16 years) relaxes in a sunbeam: April 1985, Northbrook, Ill. Canon AE1-P with Kodachrome 64. Exposure unrecorded. Here.

The USAF Thunderbirds performed today at the Chicago Air and Water Show: Canon 7D at ISO-400, 1/2000 at f/7.1, 250mm, here. Two more:

As he starts to look like the GOP's nominee next year, let's pause and consider what Rick Perry—"Governor Goodhair" to Molly Ivins not so long ago—has actually done: So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth. For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population...

Because we have more craft breweries than probably the rest of the world, combined: Today we have 1,759 brewing facilities—more than the pre-Prohibition high of 1,751. What happened? People got sick of corporate swill and started brewing their own. Some of them got really good at it and started small breweries. The circle of people who enjoy a good beer widened, drawing more good brewers in. And so on. ... At any rate, the explosion in popularity for real beer has been noted been by the giants, which is...

From the World's Greatest Newspaper, aka WGN-Chicago: