Finally. But the benefit of having a really strict instructor is that my landings are now better than two years ago when I flew more often.

And, of course, a Google Earth file is available.

Living in a temperate climate means everything changes constantly. But there are rhythms. Things change fastest in late August and early March, for example: the sun set after 8pm from early May until just three weeks ago, but last night, the sun set at 7:30; in two and a half weeks it sets at 7; three weeks after that, at 6:30.

So what prompted this nearly-inane observation? The insects. It's late evening and my windows are all open, so I can hear thousands of cicadas, grasshoppers, crickets—yes, even in the center of Chicago. And the spiders have come out by the hundreds, anywhere they can get two anchors and a cross-beam. While Parker and I sat at Ranalli's on Monday, two of them spun webs side by side in alternating gaps in the patio fence; there are four new webs on our back staircase in the last week.

To everything there is a season, at least above the 30th parallel.

My cousin and I went to Wrigley Field last night, and as expected, we had seats like you can only get at that park:

That was the only bad part of the evening, though, because thanks to Aramis Ramirez, the Cubs came back from a 4-2 deficit against the Phillies to win 6-4.

Excellent speech by former nominee John Kerry tonight. (Where was this guy in 2004?)

I'm overwhelmed, even though everyone knew it was coming, even though it's "just politics:" tonight, for the first time ever, the United States has a nominee for President who is not a white man.

I have a degree in U.S. history, so I know full well that many of the most important events in our past passed right by the people living through them. This one, though, this one happened on international TV, in real time, and everyone watching knew it was important.

The best part? That he's black doesn't really matter. He's the nominee on the merits. People will vote for him because he's qualified, he's competent, he's shrewd, he's cool-headed, he's smart, he's a good judge of advisers, and he's exactly what we desperately needed (but desperately didn't have) to guide us through the horror of September 2001. His skin color does not matter in any of that. And yet, incidentally, my party has nominated someone who doesn't look like the guys on the currency to be its standard-bearer. And it only took 220 years.

I can hardly wait for 68 days to cast my fourth[1], and most important, vote for Barack Obama: our next President.

[1] I voted for Obama for Democratic nominee to U.S. Senate, March 2004; U.S. Senate, November 2004; and Democratic Nominee for President, January 2008.

I admit, I missed HRC's speech, and I'm looking for it right now on YouTube. But so many bloggers are commenting on it right now that I am, as my dad would say, "taking a Pasadena."

Instead, I would like to highlight (via Talking Points Memo) a ruling today, in which a Federal judge denied Harriet Miers's and Josh Bolten's motions to avoid testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee. This is a non-trivial victory for the legislature over the executive, probably in the short term at least as important as the Democratic Convention. From Chairman John Conyers (D-MI):

Today's ruling clearly rejects the White House's efforts to run out the clock on the Committee's investigation of DOJ politicization this Congress. I am heartened that Judge Bates recognized that the public interest in this matter is best served by the furtherance of the Committee's investigation. ... The Committee intends to promptly schedule a hearing with Ms. Miers and stands ready as always to consider any reasonable offer of accommodation with the White House.

"Reasonable," in its plainest meaning, means that the White House will turn over the documents requested. We'll see.

No, not me; Gustav. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the storm pointing straight at the Louisiana coast by this time Monday. True, six days out the error bars are pretty far apart, but New Orleans is right in the center of them.

There, they've said what I only hinted at: the Cubs are on track to win 100 games this season, and their current record (81-50) is not only the best in baseball right now, but also the Cubs' best since 1969:

Perhaps it would be fitting for the Cubs to win 100 games on the 100th anniversary of their 1908 world championship.

After Monday's 12-3 romp over Pittsburgh at PNC Park, they were on pace to finish with that nice round number, a mark the Cubs haven't reached since 1935.

...[Yesterday] the Cubs moved to 31 games over .500 for the first time since the end of the 1984 season.

If they win on Tuesday, the Cubs will be 32 over for the first time since, gulp, 1969.

Baseball. October. Wrigley Field. Mmmmmm.

The Cubs are the first team to win 80 games this season, continuing their unbroken run in first place since mid-April. Can they make 100 in the 33 games remaining?

Maybe, maybe not. Still, it's good news to wake up to.

This is interesting. I opposed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1998 (officially the Copyright Term Extension Act), sponsored by Sonny Bono (R-CA), because I (a) believe that copyright protection already went on too long (50 to 70 years), and (b) it was such a naked lobbying bid by Disney.

Well, it turns out, Disney's copyright in the Mickey Mouse character may actually have lapsed in 1998 despite the Act:

Film credits from the 1920s revealed imprecision in copyright claims that some experts say could invalidate Disney's long-held copyright, though a Disney lawyer dismissed that idea as "frivolous."

...

Today, title-card claims are no longer required. But when courts rule on historical copyright issues, they follow the laws in place at the time—in this case, says [Georgetown University law graduate Douglas] Hedenkamp, the 1909 law requiring that the word copyright or its symbol be "accompanied by the name of the copyright proprietor"—a rule scholars said means in the immediate proximity.

The article isn't exactly law-journal ready, but it gives a reasonable outline of the issues. I'm not expecting anyone to challenge Disney on this, but it's funny to me how they spend a lot of time yelling and screaming to protect their Mickey Mouse trademark even when they know they've lost the copyright on several films, and possibly the character itself.

Short flight today, just landings. But—despite its monotony—I've still got a Google Earth file of it.

It's hard to see from the KML, but my pattern actually got much better as I practiced, which was the point, I suppose.

Via Talking Points Memo, the Associated Press makes an inadvertently true comment about Sen. Joe Lieberman (R-CT).

...and bison start wandering the Chicago suburbs:

I wrote this post on my flight to Dallas listening to the Indigo Girls. Fitting, because having an extra day to spend in Atlanta, my cousin and I went out to Decatur to have lunch with one of my oldest surviving friends and her wife. As my cousin said while we were poking around the interesting kitsch in Blue Moon (below), "Ah, here's the Community."

My cousin and I are in Atlanta, which works well with the 30-Park Geas because we saw the Cubs play. Tuesday's game got rained out so we got to Turner Field for the second half of a double-header. The first game went to Chicago 10-2; ours, 8-0. We're going back again tonight to see what should, by averages, be a 9-1 Cubs victory.

The 30-Park Geas continued yesterday with a trip up to Milwaukee, the charming and colorful city only 90 minutes away from Chicago by train:

The 30-Park Geas continues this afternoon with Washington at Milwaukee, my second trip to Miller Park but first as part of the geas. Milwaukee is in second place, 4 games behind the Cubs, and has won their last 5 in a row. This game counts, in other words. (Washington is still in last place, and could stay there until the 2015 season.)

Still, it's Milwaukee, and I can never get out of my head the speech a Russian defector gave in an episode of Barney Miller, explaining what the Soviet Union was then like: "Imagine you're in Milwaukee. You walk in any direction, one hundred miles, and you're still in Milwaukee. No matter where you go, you're still in Milwaukee." At which point, Wojo begins screaming.

Milwaukee has changed since then. Really.

Game photos probably tonight, or tomorrow morning.

Parker and I checked out the annual festival in Boystown, and lasted 45 minutes before both of us suffered serious crowd fatigue. The walk did both of us some good, though my sunscreen, nowhere nearly as effective as the natural stuff he sheds all over the place, seems not to have lasted, so I'll definitely feel the walk longer than he will.

I just finished Paul Johnson's History of the American People, which I started four weeks ago. Well-written as it was, I couldn't help noticing, around when the book got into the Harding administration, that perhaps Mr. Johnson leans farther to the right than I do. He made some good arguments for more-conservative views of modern American history, and I'll think about them, but parts of his discussions of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush père made me snort.

Still, I recommend the book, and I found it a great way to review, essentially, my college degree.

And now, as a palate-cleanser, I will snack on the next Discworld novel (specifically, #13, Small Gods). One's reading mustn't be too heavy all the time, what what!

Perfect weather yesterday allowed me to finish my BFR. It almost didn't happen, as my usual flight instructor, Chris, got sick the night before and couldn't fly and the plane I'd scheduled lost its transponder earlier in the day. But, the flight school found a plane and an instructor, so off we went. Next time I see Chris, he'll sign off, and I'm good to fly again.

If you have Google Earth, you can not only see my route of flight, but also the actual plane I flew, sitting in its parking space right there in the Google Earth satellite photo.

Not the people, the rhetoric:

[K]now-nothingism—the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise—has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: "Real men don’t think things through."

This comports with my Wills professor, ten years ago, who called stupidity "the omnibus explanation." Yep.

Via Calculated Risk, a cartoon about one solution to the energy crisis:

Via Scott Adams: Apparently, the Sumerians thought farts were funny:

Academics have compiled a list of the most ancient gags and the oldest, harking back to 1900BC, is a Sumerian proverb from what is now southern Iraq.

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap," goes the joke.

Those ancient rubes. We're much more advanced today.

The Chicago Tribune had another write-up of Monday night's storm. Apparently, it produced unprecedented electrical activity:

Over four hours, about a half-year's worth of lightning bolts bombarded the Chicago area, electrifying the night sky as trees were split, transformers were zapped and houses were set ablaze.

As work crews picked up Tuesday from the previous night's storms, meteorologists were assessing the staggering power of a historic thunderstorm.

Nearly 90,000 thunderbolts had hit northern Illinois, according to the National Lightning Detection Network. At the storms' peak, it was firing off more than 800 bolts per minute; and that only counts those that hit the ground.

I still need to do some high-altitude maneuvers (clouds were about 2800 ft, too low for slow turns and stall practice), but I finished much of my biennial flight review today. Interested people who have Google Earth can download the KML file.

There's a write-up of last night's storms in the Trib:

Clean-up efforts were under way Tuesday morning after a line of severe thunderstorms moved through the Chicago area Monday night, downing trees and power lines, starting fires, peeling off roofs, briefly closing down both Chicago airports and ending a Cubs game after two rain delays.

As of 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, crews from the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation responded to reports of 1,104 damaged trees, 132 malfunctioning traffic signals, 55 damaged street light poles and 92 downed wires. The department said there were also 194 city blocks without working street lights.

...but only because I got to watch it from inside my apartment. A major squall drove through Chicago this evening with 90 km/h winds (including two small tornadoes) and dime-size hail reported. My neighbors across the street have lost power, too. We didn't, but the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center battery backups complained loudly through the worst of the storm.

It's gone now, which makes Parker happy for two reasons: he didn't enjoy the storm itself, and he really, really wanted to go outside.

Here's the radar image from Intellicast...

Via friend RU, a blog about...well, really hideous cakes.

Yes, we still have to wait almost 169 days and 3 hours until he's sworn in. That aside, today is Barack Obama's birthday.

The four-park sprint (and seeing some really great—and really patient—friends along the way) has ended. I'm off in a few minutes to restock my fridge and, at 4pm on the nose, to pick up Parker.