Happy New Year to everyone in Greece, Israel, and South Africa!

Via Marc Andreesen (yes, the Marc Andreesen), from Variety:

[O]verall music [CD] sales during the Christmas shopping season were down an astounding 21% from last year. From the week of Thanksgiving up through the day before Christmas Eve, 83.9 million albums were sold, a decrease of 21.38 million from 2006's 105.28 million.

It's important to realize, as the RIAA simply can't grasp, this has nothing to do with piracy. Suing people isn't the answer; getting a clue and selling over the Web is.

Via Paul Krugman, I've been reading the Calculated Risk blog for a while. They write about finance and economics, from the perspective of a retired senior public-company executive. Very good stuff, and very frightening.

...It's 2008 in Katunayake.

Happy New Year!

Tonga is almost the west-most place on earth, at least by time zone, so they entered 2008 almost 4 hours ago. New Caledonia, New Zealand, Fiji, and most of Australia have also gotten to next year ahead of us. The Koreas, Japan and Singapore are up in 10 minutes.

Updates throughout the day, or until someone makes me stop...

A priest, a rabbi, and a giraffe walk into a bar.

Bartender says, "Is this some kind of joke?"

One week at overnight camp (Parker's day care provider also boards dogs, so he got to hang with his friends every day) has exhausted my dog. This is a common behavior in dogs, apparently. He was overjoyed to see me again in a way I've never seen in a human older than four, but as soon as we got home he climbed into his crate and passed out. (Actually he ate two entire bowls of kibble first.)

Action shot:

Returning from the West Coast after staying up late (in a different time zone) every night got me off to a slow start this morning. I'm glad to report that Half Moon Bay still exists, San Francisco is still the second-coolest city on the continent (after Chicago, and only just the barest fraction of a point above New York), and it's still winter.

...a new president.

The good news is that 48 hours of above-freezing temperatures—with almost 18 hours at or above 8°C—melted just about all the snow and ice in Chicago.

The bad news? A cold front moved in overnight...

We atheists need holidays, too; why not an astronomical event? Eight minutes past midnight in Chicago tonight, light a candle to mark the bottom of the analemma.

I don't usually comment on stupid celebrity tricks—that's my friend Katie's job—but this made me laugh out loud. Despite her obvious successes as a mother, apparently Lynne Spears (Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears's mom) will not publish her upcoming Christian parenting book after all:

Lynne Spears' book about parenting has been delayed indefinitely, her publisher said Wednesday. Lindsey Nobles, a spokeswoman for Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., said Wednesday that the memoir by the mother of Britney Spears was put on hold last week.

She declined to comment on whether the delay was connected to the revelation that Spears' 16-year-old daughter, Jamie Lynn, is pregnant.

Update, via Cele|bitchy: Bonnie Fuller has a good take on this at Huffington Post.

The city of Half Moon Bay, Calif., is in danger of dissolving after losing a major lawsuit:

Half Moon Bay is wrestling with unpleasant options for responding to a court ruling that officials say threatens the "very existence of our city government"—a $36.8 million judgment against the city for turning a proposed housing development site into wetlands.

Under the worst-case scenario, officials say, Half Moon Bay would become the first Bay Area city forced to dissolve, and the coastal town's land would become an unincorporated part of San Mateo County.

As of this moment (12:00 EST), less than 400 days remain in the worst presidency in U.S. history.

Another piling-on overnight, leaving 13 cm on the ground. Parker enjoys it:

And it's very pretty...

The New Jersey legislature yesterday voted to abolish the death penalty, becoming the first state to do so formally since executions were re-instated in the U.S. in 1976:

The Assembly voted 44-36 on Thursday to approve the legislation, which passed the Senate on Monday by a 21-16 vote. Gov. Jon S. Corzine said he will sign it within a week.

New Jersey reinstated the death penalty in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, but nobody has been executed in the Garden State since 1963.

New Jersey has been barred from executing anyone under a 2004 court ruling that declared invalid the state's lethal injection procedures.

A special state commission found in January that the death penalty was a more expensive sentence than life in prison, hasn't deterred murder, and could kill innocent people.

Note from the dog-walking service: "He owes me one. I pulled a 6-inch string out of his ass."

LMAO

Last night the Evanston city council approved what will be the tallest building in Illinois outside Chicago:

The Evanston Plan Commission tonight voted 4-3 to recommend approval of the proposed 49-story tower at 708 Church St. to the City Council.

The commissioners were sharply divided on whether development downtown over the last several decades has made the Fountain Square block an appropriate site for high-rise development.

Commissioners who looked to the east and west saw Sherman Plaza, the Chase Bank tower and other high rise developments and said yes.

Giant gay flesh-eating rats: Romney opposes them. Via Talking Points Memo:

The paper's signed, forget the pens
Wonder if we'll ever meet again?

—Aimee Mann

Apparently this is the first time since records have been kept (back to 1924) that we've had four consecutive days of gleeshy, sleety, nearly-frozen weather.

I just got very good news for Parker: for the first time in his entire doggy life, he is free from all intestinal parasites. No more bad butt.

This is one of my favorite milestones. Thanks to the analemma, tonight's sunset (4:20 pm) is the earliest of the year in Chicago. Of course, the sunrise still gets later every day until January 4th. At least tomorrow we'll have just a smidge more evening light than we'll have today.

The Stanford law professor is focusing on corruption as a way of combating creeping copyrights:

Mr Lessig has concentrated for a decade on copyright law and its interaction with the internet. So he left some people feeling confused earlier this year when he announced a new focus for his campaigning efforts: tackling corruption. Not everyone understood that this change in academic and activist emphasis is more of a shift in strategy than in substance.

For years Mr Lessig has presented legal arguments against excessive copyright extensions. But he says lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realise that counter-arguments to copyright extensions exist. Even though Britain's Gowers Review, published in 2005, argues against such extensions, and eminent economists such as the late Milton Friedman have declared the importance of copyright limits to be a “no brainer”, Mr Lessig says legislators are clueless about “an issue that any rational policymaker has no problem understanding.” Swayed by campaign contributions from vested interests—such as film studios, music companies and book publishers—America's Congress has lengthened copyright terms 11 times in the past four decades, he observes.

Princeton economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman thinks Tresury's subprime plan won't do much:

[W]e're almost surely looking at less than $10 billion in losses avoided. Meanwhile, estimates of subprime losses to investors are currently running in the $300 -$400 billion range. So the back of my envelope suggests that this plan is a drop in the bucket.

When we woke up this morning the temperature was -16°C. Did Parker care? He did not:

This one from the Washington Post. Unlike the one I mentioned from WQAD, WaPo's limits you by party, and to the top 5 in each.

I came up all Edwards again, mostly because of his positions on health care.

No sooner had our first snowfall melted when we started to get our second one:

Via my dad, an interesting tool to help pick your primary-election candidate from the NBC affilliate in the Quad Cities.

This leash used to be longer. I wonder what could have happened:

The first snow of the season has begun in Chicago. Yippee.