Events

Today seemed like the right moment to recollect this short poem from Luis d'Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: Raseuse arrête, valet de Tsar bat loups, Joues gare et suite, et sot voyou. As van Rooten's commentary makes clear, the wolves were really at fault.

So how do people at Maho Beach know when planes are landing? They check the surfboard: And now my final Maho Beach photo for this trip, a US Airways A330 coming in from Charlotte: We now return to your regularly-scheduled winter, already in progress...

First, to give you a better sense of what it actually looks like, here's a Delta 737 approaching SXM normally: And here's a (gorgeous) Air France A340 landing normally: And here's an American 757 landing two meters above people's heads: Sorry about the image quality—I had a long lens on the camera, and it was set for a different kind of photo than this. We didn't realize how low he was until just a few seconds before this happened. The entire beach yelled "Whooooooaaaaa!" and then broke into applause. I...

My dad highlighted a Washington Post article from the weekend outlining why Accenture may have been a bad choice (as I pointed out at the time) to manage the healthcare.gov project: At the University of Michigan, students and faculty members are protesting the school’s use of Accenture to help cut costs, citing a report by a committee of alumni and graduate students that said the firm has “a disturbing pattern of problematic past performance.” In North Carolina, glitches in an Accenture-configured...

Wow. Getting off the plane in New York last night, then taking the bus into Manhattan during a gentle snowfall (during rush hour, on the Van Wyck and Grand Central Parkway), reminded me why I went to St. Maarten for the weekend. Getting home to this made me ask why I didn't stay longer: Today was the 20th day this winter that temperatures have dipped below -18°C at O’Hare. Tomorrow should be the 21st. That is triple the average of 7 days per winter. The record number of sub-zero days for a winter was 25...

I've figured out the hotel's WiFi. It's not the slowest Internet connection in the world; it's the slowest SSL in the world. In other words, they're not really throttling the Internet per se. But somewhere between here and the U.S., someone is only letting through a very few secure packets. The genius of this is that things like restaurant reviews (think: TripAdvisor.com) come up normally. But just try to get your email, check your airline reservations, or heaven forbid, get to your bank's website. It's...

When I last visited St. Martin five years ago, I struggled a bit to get through the heavily-defended border between the French and Dutch sides. I am happy to report that the two countries have made significant improvements to the border since then. For starters, they've put up a brand-new sign: Unfortunately, it appears that an aggressor nation has taken over part of the French side: All right, I'm wasting time writing a blog post when I could do it with something else. If only this Internet connection...

This is why I love Sint Maarten:

I'm about to close my laptop for the remainder of the day, so I'm just noting these two for later reading: Someone calculated which cities in the U.S. have the pleasantest weather. Apparently the top 5 are all in California, and so is one of the bottom five. Along the same lines, WBEZ's Curious City blog attempts to unravel how bad Chicago's winter is this year. Well, it depends... And now, allons-y! The beach awaits.

According to FlightAware, KLM 785 is over the central Atlantic and will land in just under 2½ hours. I've already showered and eaten, so it's likely I'll have time to make the 15-minute walk along the beach to the Sunset Bar & Grill to see it come in. The weather is -19°C and windy—sorry, that's back in Chicago. The weather here is 27°C with a gentle breeze from the east, same as the last 48 hours. (It did get all the way down to 24°C last night. Brr.) After the 747 lands, I'm not exactly sure what I'll...