Events

The Chicago Tribune's home page this morning has this counter, which as a native Chicagoan I have to call pretty whiny: Yes, it's colder right now in Chicago than at the North Pole, and yes, we've only had 44 days in the last 139 years when the temperature failed to go above -17°C, but this counter just seems silly. And it's so short-lived: we'll be out of the danger zone by noon today. Now, a counter ticking down the 4 days, 4 hours, and 1 minute until Barack Obama is sworn in as President? Not silly...

In no particular order: Three cheers for the US Airways crew who executed a good landing[1] in the Hudson River this afternoon. I'm not joking: it's hard enough to glide any airplane after a total power loss, something else entirely to land on water without flipping the plane or sinking immediately. That all 155 passengers got out means Capt. C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger and his first officer deserve medals. Let's remember that one kilometer in either direction would have led to a horrible outcome. This...

The other-worldly cold that parked over Alaska at the end of December has now schlumped down to Chicago. For the first time since 3 February 1996, we've got more than 24 consecutive hours of temperatures below -18°C—officially bottoming out at -23°C overnight at O'Hare. (This is nowhere near the record set 15 January 1972 of -33°C.) You know, between this weather and their annoying governor, I'm wondering about whether we should have admitted the state in 1959....

The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, dead at 80. Yesterday, Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) died at 88. Imagine the conversation: "Where am I?" "You didn't expect to find me...you thought this was a dead planet. Tell me: why are you here?" "Whose side are you on?" (Come to think of it, that gets too silly, too quickly...never mind.)

Two examples of totally ineffective security responses in today's news. First, in suburban Chicago, a commuter-rail ticket agent called police about a man with a gun boarding a train, causing a two-hour delay as heavily-armed cops evacuated and searched the train. They found the man with the gun when the man in question saw the commotion and identified himself as a Secret Service agent, not realizing he was himself the target of the search: Metra spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet said the incident began when a...

Developers generally don't like third-party UI controls because they're generally frustrating to use. Case in point: in the Infragistics Windows Forms controls package, the UltraGridColumn has sucked a substantial portion of my day away. If you don't write software, you still appreciate it when it works simply and intuitively. You want to search for something, you go to Google and type in a search term. Brilliant. When you go to some company's website because you want to call the company, you look for...

It's official: Roland Burris will sit his ass in the U.S. Senate seat previously occupied by Barack Obama's ass tomorrow, restoring the Illinois tradition Obama interrupted of having seriously flawed junior senators. Seriously. The seat was previously sat in by Peter Fitzgerald, Carol Moseley-Braun, Alan Dixon...despite Adlai Stevenson III being in the seat as well, you kind of have to go back to Everett Dirksen to find another person we can actually be proud of in there. I recommed a quick perusal of...

The frigid weather in Alaska (ten consecutive days below -40°C) has apparently broken. Yesterday, for the first time since December 27th, Fairbanks got above -20°C. Right now it's a balmy -17°C, in fact, which is out of the realm of truly-dangerous cold and into just-plain-annoying cold.

MSNBC reports President-Elect Obama will order our detention facility at Guantánamo Bay closed next week. However, "[i]t's still unlikely the prison would be closed any time soon. Obama last weekend said it would be 'a challenge' to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration," MSNBC reports. In related news, outgoing President Bush still can't fathom how he damaged our standing in the world: "I disagree with this assessment that, you know, that people view America in a dim light," he...

Dawn Turner Rice, like a lot of people, found the 1960s-style race-baiting of Roland Burris' supporters disturbing: Perhaps the real architect of this fiasco is Blagojevich who, although ham-fisted in almost every other regard, handled this skillfully. He knows his way around racial politics. He was the one who gave Rush the platform at the news conference announcing Burris' appointment. Blagojevich knew he couldn't, with any great effect, warn reporters not to "hang" or "lynch" his appointee. In...