Events

Monday I cabbed out to the Gorilla Tango Theater near Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood for Chris Conley's and Kevin Sheehan's one-act play The Last Word. I loved it. I won't give anything away—at 30 minutes, any useful summary would spoil it—except to say that Sheehan and Conley have created an intriguing capsule of a world on GTT's tiny stage. Becky Blomgren (Grace) brought her character to life with the right blend of vulnerability and integrity it required. The character has an odd trait that her...

NPR put listener comments about the State of the Union address through a word-cloud generator and came up with this: They explain: Why is "salmon" so big? As The Two-Way explains, NPR's Facebook followers were referring to one of the night's humorous moments — when the president joked about the complicated and convoluted way the government regulates salmon. "The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater,"...

As the President prepares for tonight's address to Congress, we might reflect on a small but significant trend in the past three months:

After yesterday's appellate court ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court has agreed to take the case immediately, but enjoined the Chicago Board of Elections from printing ballots without Emanuel's name on them: "The Court is taking the case on the briefs filed by the parties in the appellate court," the order said. "No additional briefs will be filed in the Supreme Court. Oral argument will not be entertained." Chicago election officials said about 300,000 ballots without Emanuel's name on them had been...

An Illinois Appellate Court has reversed the Chicago Board of Elections ruling allowing Rahm Emanuel to stay on our mayoral ballot next month: Burt Odelson has argued Emanuel doesn't qualify to be on the ballot because the former White House chief of staff doesn't meet a requirement that the mayor of Chicago live in the city for one year before taking the office. "You can't mentally just have a residence," Odelson said last week after arguing before the appeals court. "You have to have a residence. You...

Duke's Dan Ariely suggests accepting irrationality in designing economic policies: When it comes to designing things in our physical world, we all understand how flawed we are and design the physical world around us accordingly. We realize that we can’t run very fast or far, so we invent cars and design public transportation. We understand our physical limitations, and we design steps, electric lights, heating, cooling, etc., to overcome these deficiencies. ... What I find amazing is that when it comes...

The last couple of days have reminded us we live in Chicago, severely limiting Parker's walk time. I don't want to keep him outside more than 15 minutes when it's below -15°C. He doesn't understand hypothermia, and he's got a double coat, so to him it seems like I'm being completely arbitrary. He probably doesn't remember the day it got down to -27°C and he fell over, whimpering, because his paws were too cold to walk after less than five minutes outside. So he's at day camp today, and I'm working on an...

Via Sullivan, what happens in the House of Commons when a MP's tie starts to make unusual noises:

At least the sun is out: We had days last year close to -17°C, but it was last this cold on 5 February 2009. Parker is bored, but even he didn't seem to want to stay outside this morning. As an aside, because of the radiator in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center that I can't turn off, I have two windows open right now and it's still 24°C—3°C above normal—over by the server rack.

Should they go to year-round Daylight Saving Time? Scotland says no: Britain currently sets its clocks at Greenwich Mean Time in fall and an hour ahead of that in spring. (New York is generally five hours behind Britain; Western Europe is an hour ahead). The problem is that while a clock change might bring afternoon joy to London, it would condemn Inverness in the far reaches of Scotland — in relative terms, about 700 miles north of Montreal — to long, dark winter mornings with sunrises as late as 10...