Events

The Superbowl starts in a little over an hour, with weather in Indianapolis no one expected: clear skies and 9°C. In Chicago it's just a smidge cooler, but still a beautiful afternoon for February. Or for March, for that matter. Parker gets one more walk before the game. Go Giants! (For why, see Robert Wright's decision tree on the subject.)

Erin Ryan at Jezebel put together a brief outline of the Susan Komen Race for the Cure public relations disaster over the past week: We reported that the timing of Planned Parenthood's defunding seemed oddly coincidental, seeing as less than a year ago, Komen appointed a woman named Karen Handel to serve as the charity's Senior Vice President of Public Policy. Handel had run unsuccessful for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-choice platform that cited as one of its central tenets the necessity of...

The international airline consortium oneworld, which includes American Airlines and British Airways, this week lost one member and had an applicant postpone membership. On Thursday, Hungarian flag carrier Malév suspended operations: Malev, the state-owned Hungarian airline, ceased flying with debts of €205 million after the government withdrew financing. The airline, which was placed under bankruptcy protection earlier this week, stopped operating all fights at 06.00 this morning. Ryanair today...

Sure, I've posted photos of the moon before, but it never gets old to me: Well, all right, at 4½ billion years it is old to me, but you know what I meant. On a side note, I just Googled "age of the moon" and discovered that many of the top results are from outside the reality-based community. For example, the second item on my results came from the Institute for Creation Research ("Biblical. Accurate. Certain."), in which one Thomas G. Barnes, D.Sc., begins with the assertion: "It takes but one proof of...

The thing I like most about February: at the end of it, Chicago has an hour and a quarter more daylight than at the beginning of it. Today we have 10 hours of daylight, the most since November 10th, and on the 29th we have 11 hours and 14 minutes. I notice this every year around now, just as I forget every year how grim December can be.

With yesterday's temperatures more like April than January, Chicago magazine's explanation of it is timely: So what is going on? It's the warmest La Niña on record. That brings the global temperature down, but causes different effects in different places. Chicago is going through a near-record warm spell—strong La Niñas correlate with above average temperatures, like the 18°C we hit in 1989 when the mean January max was 11°C, 2°C higher than this month's mean. Meanwhile, Alaska and northern Europe are...

The normal temperatures in Chicago for January 31st are a low of -8.3°C and a high of 0°C. Right now, the temperature is 13°C; the low last night was 7°C The normal temperatures in Chicago for April 9th are a low of 2°C and a high of 13°C. That is all.

Who was Saul Alinsky? Bill Maher explains, sort of:

I can scarcely believe I've had this guy for 10 years: The car is named João, because he's from Brazil, and he seemed kind of like a Joe: He's a little rough around the edges, he's fun to hang out with, and he's super-reliable—except for the occasional hangover. The photo is from the day after I got him. He's scarcely aged. (See, for example, this shot from last February. You can kind of see the dings, but he's still got a good profile.)

Robert Wright secretly loves Newt's candidacy: The horror I feel when I imagine Newt assuming a position of responsibility can give way to melancholia if I contemplate the prospect of life without the feisty, aging smurf. Here are some things I'll miss should anyone ever succeed in driving a stake through Gingrich's heart... Newt boldly goes where no aspiring president has gone before. He has pledged that as president he would support something that he (who else?) dreamed up as a congressman: "the...