Events

Beloit College, just across the Wisconsin line and just outside the Chicago area, puts together a list every year to describe the incoming class of first-years. Last year's list made me cry. This year's list provoked a different emotion, one that I can't quite make out with my age-addled brain: 2. Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents. 12. Amazon has never been just a river in South America. 22. John Wayne Bobbitt has always slept with one eye open. 39. Moderate amounts of red wine...

Breaking news: Nearly 300,000 New York City residents were told Friday to get out of their homes in a first-ever mandatory evacuation as officials ordered an unprecedented shutdown of the city’s mass transit system for Saturday in advance of Hurricane Irene, raising the prospect of a singular scramble as hundreds of thousands of residents try to get out of the massive storm’s way. Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered an evacuation by 5 p.m. Saturday for low-lying areas that house about 270,000 people....

Hurricane Irene, currently category 2 on the Staffir-Simpson scale, looks like it's heading straight for New York City. Both the NYC and New Jersey emergency management agencies have published maps (pdf) showing the likely flood zones for various categories of hurricanes. They're scary. I used to live in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., and Hoboken, N.J. Both areas would be affected by a category 1 hurricane. My place in Hoboken, in fact, was only 2 m above sea level. My stuff would probably be OK—I lived on the...

Yesterday I wrote about a criminal trial here in Chicago in which a woman was charged with felony eavesdropping for recording a conversation with two police officers. Under Illinois law, this "crime" carries the same penalties as rape and manslaughter. The law needs to go, whether through repeal (unlikely) or being overturned by a Federal appeals court (more likely). Good news for Tiawanda Moore this afternoon, but bad news for Illinois civil liberties: she got acquitted: [A] Criminal Court jury quickly...

Do you ever eat fish? If so, are you aware that many fisheries are unsustainable, that popular fish species have high incidence of contamination, and that while generally good for you, some sushi can give you heavy metals with your wasabi? For years I've carried around a pocket sustainable seafood guide the Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes semi-annually. Now they've got a smartphone app for both iPhone and Android. No more printing it out on paper! W00t!

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...