Events

The frozen continent hit its all-time-warmest temperature yesterday: Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 18°C was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history. The Antarctic Peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50...

Yes, the Democratic Party had a bad week. But those of us paying attention knew we would. Now, I couldn't have predicted the unconscionable fuck-up (no other word for it) perpetrated on the national party by its Iowa subsidiary. In future, I hope Iowa's quirky, exclusionary method of selecting delegates either goes away entirely or gets moved so late in the year that no one cares anymore. Or simply that no one cares anymore, full stop. The idiots running the IDP deserve nothing better for at least two...

The week keeps getting more fun: Former ambassador Marie Yovanovich has more optimism than a lot of people about the future. Republican trolls clogged the Iowa Democratic Party phone lines on caucus night. The Washington Post's Timothy Bella outlines exactly why Rush Limbaugh receiving the Medal of Freedom offended so many people, even as Republican trolls laughed about "the greatest own the libs moment in American history." The doctor who first identified the Wuhan virus has died of it. Talking Points...

Welp, the Senate has acquitted President Trump almost entirely along party lines, as everyone knew it would. Only Mitt Romney (R-UT) crossed the aisle to vote for conviction. Here's a roundup of the news in the last few hours: Josh Marshall says "Romney's vote is more than symbolic" because it puts the lie to the Republican Party's assertion that Trump did nothing wrong. George Conway gets caustic in "I believe the president, and in the president." The Atlantic says Congress has lost its power over...

You'll just have to imagine the context for all of these comments I posted on my Facebook feed last night. At least I put them in chronological order: Watching the State of the Union with the sound off, and PBS closed captions. And a big martini.—at Agami Contemporary Sushi. I don't know if I can do this. I thought without the sound my skin wouldn't crawl as much. But the words could have come from the Politburo. And Mike Pence is so creepy. OK, I need a non-trivial truthful statement. Just one. Please....

Did someone get trapped in a closed time loop on Sunday? Did I? Because this week just brought all kinds of insanity: Video emerged of the President acting like a teenager on too much Dr Pepper during the national anthem on Super Bowl Sunday. Margaret Sullivan's headline this morning: "Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse." Yup. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker Tweeted that Illinois should lead off the next primary election cycle because...

I don't often use profanity on this blog, but this morning I am moved to call the Iowa Democratic Party's leaders a bunch of fucking morons. Last night we saw the results of the IDP picking "fast" and "cheap" for critical infrastructure in the most important election cycle in a generation. Now the national Party will go into New Hampshire with a black eye and no end of razzing from the Tweeter in Chief. It's not just that the IDP chose "fast and cheap" instead of, you know, "good." It's also that...

Both O'Hare and Midway set temperature records yesterday: 11°C at O'Hare and 12°C at Midway. Which we can all agree was a much more pleasant day than 2 February 2011.

Share and enjoy:

Today is 2020-02-02, which is 02/02/2020 in the U.S. and 02.02.2020 in Europe. There's a thing going around the Internet today that this is the first time in 909 years that both ways of representing dates have been palindromes on the same date. They put the previous instance as 01/01/1010. Unfortunately that's not true. This has never happened before, for a few reasons: Representing dates as a string of numbers only started, as far as I can tell, in the mid-19th century. As recently as the middle of the...