Events

What happens when you're a talking head and your mom calls into your show? The Woodhouse brothers are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Brad is a Democratic operative who helps run the super PAC American Bridge and Dallas, by contrast, is a Republican who helps run the conservative Carolina Rising. The were on C-SPAN to talk about their documentary, Woodhouse Divided, when their mother called in. Hilarity ensued:

Very busy today; less so the rest of the week. So after I'm done with this deliverable today I'll read these: Wow, the Bears suck ass. Wait, yak poop is a problem? Oy, NASA spent $349m on a project after the project was cancelled. Heh, politicians sometimes lie. Cool, the space L2O is leaving next month will reopen quickly with a rotating-chef concept. Yo, come hear The Messiah on Saturday. Back to the mines...

In the legislation passed over the weekend that will keep the U.S. government operating for another few months, the House had its cake and ate it with respect to marijuana. Slate's Josh Voorhees explains: Among the myriad policy riders buried inside the 1,600-plus-page bill is one aimed at blocking the Washington, D.C., City Council from legalizing recreational marijuana, something voters in the district instructed them to do by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 last month. That ban was inserted at the behest...

I was a bit overloaded yesterday, so I didn't have time to absorb these articles thoroughly: The Atlantic's CityLab blog wants an end to horrible license plates. Krugman is weary of financial commentators who can't learn what the zero-lower-bound means. Want some real excitement? The IRS has raised standard mileage rates for 2015. I know: shut the front door! Illinois Climatologist Jim Angel says we have almost no chance of a white Christmas this year. I say, fine. Even though I thought the 10 km walk...

...if we weren't arming drug dealers?"—Aaron Sorkin Alas, Americans increasingly want everyone to have guns: For the first time since Pew began asking the question two decades ago, a majority of Americans now say that gun rights are more important than gun control — a striking shift in public opinion over both the last generation and just the last few years. As recently as December 2012, in the immediate aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, 51 percent of people surveyed by Pew said it was more...

Since the client on the Paris thing for some reason declined to spend $9,000 per person for us to fly business class, I decided to take American 90 to London and then take Eurostar under the Channel. The strategy worked; I got sleep on a real bed Sunday night, and was coherent and lucid Monday afternoon at the job site. This time, I put a clock on the train. Here's what my phone GPS showed about 30 minutes outside London: The screen shot above (click for full size) shows that about here the train was...

They're interesting if you like, for example, airplanes: The Wright Amendment is finally gone, helping make Southwest Airlines more profitable. Cranky Flier goes over American Airlines' plans for its fleet and says some uncharitable things about the 767-300ERs that I was on this week. James Fallows digs into the fatal aviation accident in Maryland that happened over the weekend. That's it for now.

Because I stayed in the Airport Sheraton, had only carry-on bags, and got my boarding pass last night, I got on my flight home less than half an hour after leaving my hotel room this morning. Then, at O'Hare, because of the aforementioned lack of checked baggage, a New York-style walking speed, and Global Entry, I got from the airplane to my car in exactly half an hour. Parker was in the car half an hour after that. Compare that to the trip out, when I left my house at 7, the plane finally left the gate...

I had a pretty good blog entry to post a couple of hours ago, and I forgot it totally. This is because I was wrestling a virtual machine to the ground because it had gone somewhere HTTP requests could not follow. I'd have posted about that nonsense, too, except the VM hosts The Daily Parker, you see. I am therefore reduced to a link round-up, though this time I will embed, rather than link to, two of the things that people have sent me in the past day and a half: I had an excellent dinner tonight....

It's 7:35, and pitch black outside. When people talk about permanent daylight saving time, because they don't want to switch clocks twice a year, they should consider that France is an hour ahead of the "correct" time zone for its longitude and therefore has sunrises at 8:30 in the morning this time of year. If there were daylight right now, I'd upload a photo of all the airplanes taxiing past my hotel window. It's kind of cool. Tomorrow, when I can sleep in.