Events

Humorist Alexandra Petri didn't write a humor column today: There are several details of the Matt Gaetz story that keep sticking in my head, but the one that sticks in it most is the report that the Florida Republican used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with. I keep coming back to the detail in CNN’s report that this wasn’t something Matt Gaetz did a single time, but repeatedly. Because if it happened more than once — if it happened twice, even — that is...

Via Josh Marshall, Pfizer has halted vaccine shipments to Israel because political chaos there has made the company worry about getting paid: Pfizer has halted shipments of coronavirus vaccines to Israel in outrage over the country failing to transfer payment for the last 2.5 million doses it supplied to the country, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Senior officials at Pfizer have said they are concerned that the government-in-transition will not pay up and the company does not want to be taken advantage...

You read that right. The UK has so few dogs available for adoption that organized crime has stepped in: “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the field for 35 years,” said Wayne May, police liaison with Dog Lost, Britain’s largest lost-and-found dog service. May said thefts reported to his organization have increased 250 percent, year-on-year. “That’s over 400 cases, just in England, just reported to us,” he said. “This isn’t a dog that’s run off. This is a reported case of theft.”...

It's the warmest day of 2021 so far, up to 21°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, so basically I'm just in between Cassie walks. (She's gotten two hours already today, including half an hour at the dog park.) Tomorrow it may be cooler, but still 16°C by mid-afternoon. So, posting may be light this weekend.

A few articles caught my attention this week: Jennifer Rubin says the GOP's opposition to literally everything President Biden has proposed is killing their popularity. The New Republic, in collaboration with the Chicago Reader, tells the story of the last remaining men's hotel in Chicago. NPR host Steve Inskeep describes his difficulties getting his adoption records from the State of Indiana. Writing in The New Yorker, Daniel Alcarón mourns the loss of Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory last December....

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud: Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline. Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline. The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the...

Amtrak has big plans—especially for Chicago—if it gets a piece of President Biden's $2-trillon infrastructure bill: Chicago passenger-rail riders ought to thrilled. A proposed map released by Amtrak shows rail service out of the Windy City absolutely exploding, with enhanced service to Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and other locales, plus new service to cities including Minneapolis/St. Paul, Green Bay, Iowa City, Rockford, Cleveland and Louisville. According to spokesman Marc Magliari...

Someone has lost her unsupervised time for a while: I have no idea why she attacked the table. When I last saw the room, all the pillows were on the couch and the table had straight edges. That was an hour ago. Cassie is now confined to my office until further notice.

At the dog park: After the dog park, phase I: Phase II: Not that I was trying to read, mind you. Sometimes one makes sacrifices for one's companions.

Back in May, which seems like ten years ago rather than ten months, I started going through all my CDs in the order that I acquired them. I don't listen every day, and some (like Bizet's Carmen) take a bit more time than others (like a 4-song mini CD of Buddy Holly songs). I've now arrived at about the middle of my collection, with a set of four CDs I bought on 19 September 1993. Holy Alternative, Batman. I had just started doing one shift a week at WLUW-Chicago, Loyola University's radio station...