Events

The Met issues a heat warning as London experiences its fifth consecutive day of 30°C weather? Nope. Heathrow will finally get a third runway, with new plans submitted this week? Nope. The Queen has given her assent to a law making same-sex marriage legal in England and Wales? Yep: The Queen's approval of the Marriage (same sex couples) Bill was a formality, and now clears the way for the first gay marriages, the first of which are expected to be conducted by Summer 2014. The bill enables gay couples to...

At 10th Magnitude, we have used Beanstalk as our central code repository. We transitioned to Mercurial about a year ago, which Beanstalk supported. Today they sent around an email saying they're ceasing Mercurial support—including existing repositories—on September 30th, and would we care to switch to Git? No. No, no, no. No Git. I'm not asking people to learn another damn version control system. (Plus Git doesn't quite suit us.) But fortuitously, this forced re-evaluation of Beanstalk coincides with a...

No, not more modern Pinkertons, repeating bad policy from the 1880s. This time we're repeating ancient Rome's mistakes, a parallel Atlantic writers Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane draw out: Before their empire fell, the Romans built walls. They began by erecting barriers along the border following the death of the Emperor Trajan in 117 A.D., notably Hadrian's Wall, which belted Britain. Later emperors erected internal walls, even around the great city itself, to ward off barbarians. After 300 A.D., the...

Today begins baseball's All-Star break, with the All-Star Game tomorrow in New York and 2/3 of the season behind us in purgatory. Despite yesterday's 10-6 loss to St. Louis, the Cubs have improbably won 14 of their last 21 games, bringing them nearer .500 than at any point since the fifth game of the season back on April 6th, ending the first half of the season at 42-51 (.452): So after 93 games, with 69 left to play, the Cubs are in 4th place, 4½ games away from a winning season, but unfortunately 10...

One of Josh Marshall's readers says Florida's self-defense rules are insane: I’m a criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin... In Florida, if self-defense is even suggested, it’s the state's obligation to prove its absence beyond a reasonable doubt(!). That’s crazy. But ‘not guilty’ was certainly a reasonable result in this case. As I told in friend in Tampa today though, if you’re ever in a heated argument with anyone, and you’re pretty sure there aren’t any witnesses, it’s always best to kill the other...

After adding 25 original braverman.org posts from May 1998 yesterday, this morning I added another 32 posts from June and July, including a review of an Antigone Rising performance I saw at the Bitter End when they were first starting out. It's a little trippy.

The Spectralia theater company gave their fifth performance of Comedy of Errors yesterday at Touhy Park, Chicago. Don Johnson's adaptation clocks in at 90 minutes and zips along through Shakespeare's farce of two sets of identical twins who meet for the first time at the end of the play. Yesterday's Chicago weather could not have been better for the Mary-Kate Arnold as the Courtezan: Don Johnson, the adapter, playing Doctor Pinch: The cast:

After a short experiment yesterday at lunch, in which I put up three original braverman.org posts from 1998, I've added all the content from May 1998. A couple of things came up during this process: 1. dasBlog, whose open-source project has ceased active development, won't display any of the entries for a particular day if any one of them has any errors in its HTML. That is really annoying. 2. In frustration, I started looking for other blog engines, and came upon Orchard. I'm intrigued. The extension...

My first website, braverman.org, debuted in New York on 16 August 1997. We didn't have things called "blogs" back then, but over the course of about four years I posted jokes, stories, and poetry—almost all of it submitted by other people—two or three times per week. It was kind of blog-like, except I had to add actual Classic ASP pages to the site until I figured out a way to automate it in May 1998. I'm going to start re-posting the archives, with their original time stamps... Here are the first ones...

First, a Boeing 787 caught fire at Heathrow this afternoon; fortunately, no one was aboard: Video footage showed the plane surrounded by foam used to quell the flames. The airport said in a statement that it was an on-board internal fire, but didn’t offer more details. It said the plane was empty, parked in a remote area and there were no reported injuries. All flights in and out were temporarily suspended Friday afternoon -- a standard procedure if fire crews are called out. Ethiopian Airlines said...