...could be today, depending on which competing definition you use:

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a "blue moon." Different definitions place the "extra" moon at different times.

• In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Clergy identify the Lent Moon. It is thought that historically when the moon's timing was too early, they named an earlier moon as a "betrayer moon" (belewe moon), thus the Lent moon came at its expected time.
• Folklore gave each moon a name according to its time of year. A moon which came too early had no folk name – and was called a blue moon – bringing the correct seasonal timings for future moons.
• The Farmers' Almanac defined blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season; one season was normally three full moons. If a season had four full moons, then the third full moon was named a blue moon.
• Recent popular usage defined a blue moon as the second full moon in a calendar month, stemming from an interpretation error made in 1946 that was discovered in 1999. For example, December 31, 2009 would be a blue moon according to this usage.

So, it's possible today's full moon is a blue moon. Or it's possible the next blue moon will occur November 21st. Or after some volcanic eruption which hasn't happened yet.

Regardless, enjoy it if you can. It only happens...infrequently.

It's time for the semi-annual update of the Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.)

An interesting note about 2010: the sunset on November 6th will be the latest sunrise in Chicago (7:30am) until 2021—and that, only within 4 seconds of precision.

Not only does Ben Gurion Airport have, by every measure, more effective security than at U.S. airports, but they move passengers through more quickly, too:

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," [Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy] said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

In other words, more emphasis on people, less on technology. Will body scanners protect us against the next idiot who tries to blow up an airplane? Maybe; but watching people is probably more effective. Says Sela:

"First, [Israeli security is] fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

Instead, we're investing in body scanners, which have created a completely different kind of idiocy:

We're willing to ethnically profile, do all sorts extra-judicial surveillance, maintain massive databases of hundreds of thousands of people who have some vague relationship to extremism, torture captives, condemn people to hours unable to go the bathroom on planes, even launch various foreign military adventures, but when it comes to submitting to a quick scan that might show a vague outline of boobs or penises (almost certainly no more than is exposed in most bathing suits), that's a bridge too far.

Something about that doesn't compute to me. And what I like about this is that there's no clear partisan division on this one. Everyone seems to agree. It just tells me that at some level we're not really serious about this.

No, we're not really serious about this. It's theater. And it will continue until enough people care more about security than silliness.

Do you have the feeling you're no better off today than you were ten years ago? That's because, probably, you aren't:

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. ... And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade.

... What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Happy new year!

After five visits to O'Hare in 8 days, I'm going to stay in one spot for at least a week. Yesterday's 9:45 flight took off at noon, getting me home two hours before I'd planned (even the CTA cooperated), and except for having to get up at an obscenely early time this morning, everything went well.

Still, I have space for one more gratuitous photo of Half Moon Bay, which is a wonderful place to visit:

I'm leaving this:

For this:

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN CHICAGO HAS ISSUED A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 PM CST THIS EVENING.

At least I'll get there earlier than planned. I tried to get on the 11:30, but because the 7:30 had left at 9:30, and the 9:30 was delayed, they put me on the 9:30 which actually leaves (we hope) at 11. So instead of 7 hours at home before traveling again tomorrow, I get 9. I hope.

Half Moon Bay, Calif.:

In honor of the most sweeping legislation since Medicare, it's good ol' Bill:

That's Chicago's weather today. Except I'm not there, I'm here:

Also, if you live near a Peet's Coffee, they're giving away free cups of coffee all day.

Sullivan thinks the President has done extremely well:

The substantive record is clear enough. Torture is ended, if Gitmo remains enormously difficult to close and rendition extremely hard to police. The unitary executive, claiming vast, dictatorial powers over American citizens, has been unwound. ... Domestically, the new president has rescued the banks in a bail-out that has come in at $200 billion under budget; the economy has shifted from a tailspin to stablilization and some prospect of job growth next year; the Dow is at 10,500 a level no one would have predicted this time last year. A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and probably did more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen. ... Relations with Russia have improved immensely and may yield real gains in non-proliferation; Netanyahu has moved, however insincerely, toward a two-state solution; Iran's coup regime remains far more vulnerable than a year ago, paralyzed in its diplomacy, terrified of its own people and constantly shaken by the ongoing revolution; Pakistan launched a major offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in its border area; global opinion of the US has been transformed; the Cairo speech and the Nobel acceptance speech helped explain exactly what Obama's blend of ruthless realism for conflict-management truly means.

The Beltway cannot handle all this. And that's why they continue to jump on every micro-talking-point and forget vast forests for a few failing saplings.

But when you consider the magnitude of shifting from one conservative era to one in which government simply has to be deployed to tackle deep structural problems, the achievement is as significant as his election year.

People have a hard time grasping everything that the President has accomplished because people have short attention spans. But when we look back on his first year from 2020 or 2030, it will be obvious.

You know the truly fun part about traveling through O'Hare five times in one week in December? Not knowing when that will happen:

Delta [says] it is about to issue a weather bulletin allow passengers in 10 states to change tickets without penalty starting today through Dec. 27th. Those states are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin and North and South Dakota. They are encouraging folks to try to change travel plans to get out ahead of any storms if possible. Delta has hubs in Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

No one has started pre-canceling any flights yet – but stay tuned. That may happen tomorrow.

At least, if either of my next two flights gets[1] delayed, I'll be stuck in one of my two favorite cities in North America. Sigh.

[1] Note to the grammar police (you know who you are): "either...gets" is correct because "either" is a singular pronoun.

Once again in Reagan National Airport, our hero pauses to reflect on the great pile of snow that landed on the city three days earlier. I have to say, it really is pretty:

More after the jump.

What is it with U.K. rail? One would think the wrong type of snow would no longer stop an entire train line, but the snow struck again:

IT'S NOT the snow that shut down Eurostar. It's the type of snow. "Fluffy" snowflakes got through special screens and into the power cars of five trains on Friday, shorting out the engines and stranding thousands of travellers in the Channel Tunnel for hours. Service remains cut by a third, and normal service will not resume before Christmas. Some 100,000 people have had their travel plans fouled up, by the Times' count.

... Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has ordered Eurostar to get its trains running again.

Airlines are charging up to £499 to fly between London and Paris until Eurostar gets things sorted.

My question: how exactly did it snow in the Chunnel?

Laredo (pop. 250,000) will shortly have no bookstores, making it the largest city in the U.S. without one:

The Associated Press reports that letters from schoolchildren had no effect on the corporation's decision to shutter the B. Dalton; Barnes & Noble announced plans earlier this year to close all remaining B. Dalton outlets. "Corporate America considers Laredo kind of the backwater," said Jerry Thompson, an author who lives in Laredo and is a professor at Texas A&M International University.

Barnes & Noble, however, says it does think that Laredo can support a bookstore. It has its eyes on a site for a "large format" Barnes & Noble -- but that won't be ready until 2011.

With no independent bookstores in the city and the last chain outlet slated for closure, residents will have to travel about 150 miles across arid ranchland to San Antonio to buy books.

Unless they have an Internet connection, that is.

Still. I think some inferences about Laredo are warranted from this fact.

Washington looks quite pretty from the air with all the snow on the ground:

I'm confused. Yes, I see snow, and on the ground at DCA it seems to be about 30-35 cm deep, but in Chicago we'd find this annoying, not paralyzing.

By this time next Sunday, I'll have gone through O'Hare five times in eight days. I actually don't mind—yet—possibly because this is only my second visit of the week. The flight to DC isn't horribly delayed, and I've got a good perch to watch the planes:

Gotta run. Time to wait on the plane instead of in the club...

That's how much snow covers Washington, D.C., right now:

A major storm that broke all records for a December snowfall buried the Washington area Saturday, forcing authorities to suspend public transportation, declare a state of emergency and plead with residents to stay home.

Hundreds of airline flights were canceled, Metro stopped running trains to aboveground stations and shopping malls closed early because few customers could navigate treacherous roads to get there on the last weekend before Christmas.

But at 10 p.m. Saturday, it appeared that the fury of the great storm might be fading into flurries. Over the next two hours, "any additional accumulation will be light," the National Weather Service said.

Yet, it will be days before things return to normal. Metro said the suspension of bus and aboveground rail service, which went into effect Saturday, would continue Sunday morning when the system reopened.

At the snowstorm's peak in the afternoon, flakes fell at the rate of two inches an hour. Some areas, particularly in Southern Maryland, experienced wind gusts up to 64 km/h. The total measured snowfall at Reagan Airport at 8:58 p.m. was 41.4 cm, but it was as high as 58 cm elsewhere in the region. That would be more snow in a 24-hour period than the region typically gets in an entire winter. According to Weather Service statistics, the storm ranked among the biggest snowfalls in local history.

National Airport has reopened, which is helpful because in half an hour I'm heading over to O'Hare to get there. Diane and Parker stayed another night in Petersburg, Va.; we all hope they get up to Washington by the time my flight arrives. I-95 looks clear on the many traffic cameras set up along the way, but the streets inside the District may not be.

What fun. It was going to be a quick long weekend trip, too...

Yesterday I mentioned how helpful American Airlines was helping me avoid what promised to be an excruciating layover at O'Hare today. It turns out, Washington's weather is worse than even the most pessimistic forecasts:

A snowstorm of historic proportions is burying a wide swath of the Mid-Atlantic under as much as 30 to 90 cm of snow as the weekend gets underway. The Washington D.C. area is to end up among the locations hardest hit with as much as 60 cm of snow a possibility -- the heaviest accumulation to hit the nation's capital in at least six years and enough to grant the windy, rapidly intensifying system a spot among that city's Top 3 biggest snowstorms. Washington snow records date back to 1885.

It could be worse. We could be in Alaska, for example:

With all the snow in the Lower 48, it should be noted the port city of Valdez in southern Alaska has been hit with one of its heaviest weekly snow tallies ever. Snow began falling Monday and by Wednesday had totaled 1.7 m.... Additional spells of snow boost had boosted tallies to 2 m as Friday ended.

Art after the jump.

Original plan: Fly to Chicago tomorrow, then change at O'Hare for D.C. New plan: Fly to Chicago tomorrow, twiddle my thumbs at home, and fly to D.C. Sunday morning. Why? Because no one is flying to D.C. tomorrow:

The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for the entire [Washington] area, starting midnight Friday and lasting through 6 a.m. Sunday.

ABC 7 Meteorologist Chris Naille says the most of the region can expect 10 to 15 inches of snow, with up to 20 inches in spots along and east of I-95.

Parts of western and central Virginia could get up to 18 inches.

What fun. Fortunately, American Airlines has already gone into emergency mode, so when I called to see what my options were, they said "any plane Sunday."

So, I'll see everyone on Sunday.

Um...

A high court in the U.K. has ordered British Airways cabin crews not to strike over Christmas:

The dispute at BA centres on its desire to cut costs by reducing cabin staff on most flights and limiting wage increases. The airline’s pilots and engineers have already accepted austerity measures; cabin staff, notified of the proposed changes in July, are less inclined to compromise (though some have taken voluntary redundancy). On December 14th Unite, the union which represents almost all of the company’s 13,500 cabin staff, said they had voted overwhelmingly to strike.

The next day BA applied to London’s High Court for an injunction to stop them. The airline argued that Unite had not polled its members correctly: some votes were recorded from people no longer employed by BA, and the call for industrial action did not specify the intention to strike for 12 consecutive days precisely at Christmas. Had members known those details, fewer might have supported a strike, BA argued. The judge agreed, and ruled against the strike.

... Willie Walsh, the airline’s punchy Irish chief executive, was appointed in 2005 to knock such practices into competitive shape. He is unlikely to yield much ground to union militancy. It seems that BA’s core shareholders support him: the share price hardly moved when the strike was announced. Many reckoned that the benefits of BA’s restructuring outweighed the likely damage from the threatened strike. Estimates of potential net revenue loss over the 12 days ranged from £60m to £160m, whereas the benefits of restructuring were put by some analysts at £60m a year.

That court order can't have helped the union. Generally I'm sympathetic to organized labor, being a leftie with some knowledge of labor history, but the union here scored an own goal, as they say in Britain. I'll be on a BA flight in late January, and I can't wait to find out first hand what the cabin crews really think.

Via the Freakonomics blog, the New Scientist has examined the science behind the eternal question, dogs or cats?

Utility

Dogs can hunt, herd and guard. They can sniff out drugs and bombs and even whale faeces; they guide blind and deaf people, race for sport, pull sleds, find someone buried by an avalanche, help children learn and possibly even predict earthquakes. Cats are good if you have an infestation of rodents.

Perhaps that assessment is unfair, though. After all, we love our pets for other reasons. Cats are beautiful and soft, and stroking them has been shown to reduce stress. Then again, dogs are also good stress-busters: owning one can lower your blood pressure and cholesterol levels. What's more, Fido has other health benefits. Daily dog walks may be a chore, but they repay the effort, not just in terms of regular exercise, but also by providing immune-boosting opportunities for social contact with other dog walkers. That's why in a head-to-head contest of health benefits, it's dogs all the way

Having spent the last 9 days watching the two species interact, I have seen evidence of the magazine's conclusions. The cats Parker has suffered (and who have suffered him) haven't demonstrated stellar problem-solving skills, but they have learned that moving quickly across the living room causes lots of noise (the dog barks, the human corrects the dog), while slinking on their bellies slowly sometimes causes nothing more than a growl and a small correction. One of the cats (Nick, the orange pile of...cat pictured right) has the IQ of a philodendron, and still has not figured out that moving away from the dog cuts down on the noise. (Nick is just ornery, hissing at people even while getting brushed and purring. Yes, he hisses while purring. But that's a different post.)

Anyway, I vote for dogs. Cats are fine as accent pillows and occasionally if you have a granary you need protected from rodents. Dogs are actually happy to see you when you get home, even if you don't have any food in your hand.

Time to walk Parker.

Parker got a chance to explore Oakwood Park today, the first sunny day we've had since we got here a week ago. The park is huge—I would guess about 75 hectares—and Parker (with help) ran around the whole thing:

Krugman has a good summary:

[T]he belief that lower wages would raise overall employment rests on a fallacy of composition. In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.

Here’s how the fallacy works: if some subset of the work force accepts lower wages, it can gain jobs. If workers in the widget industry take a pay cut, this will lead to lower prices of widgets relative to other things, so people will buy more widgets, hence more employment.

But if everyone takes a pay cut, that logic no longer applies. The only way a general cut in wages can increase employment is if it leads people to buy more across the board.

Really, employment won't rise until after the fundamentals get better, and general wages have very little to do with it.

Specific wage decreases do have specific effects; however, smart employers avoid offering significantly lower wages to higher-skilled workers because they don't want those workers to leave as soon as conditions improve.

In this case, "town" has a State Capitol building:

Even Parker has a level of dignity beneath which he will not sink. This, however, is still above that line:

Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt writes this week about the history and future of the American Drive-Thru:

But despite the Stakhanovite quotas being met by the Bluetoothed cadres across the land, all is not well with the drive-through. The facilities saw a 4 percent drop in business in 2008 due to the recession. And—more threatening still—a number of communities have recently passed anti-idling ordinances, some of which implicate even the fastest drive-through windows. ...

Meanwhile, people who would actually contribute no emissions at a drive-through window—pedestrians, cyclists, and the like—haven't exactly been having it their way. Any number of carless individuals have broached the drive-through fortress, only to be rebuffed with vague rejoinders about "company policy" (though there are some exceptions).

But not everyone is taking drive-through restrictions lying down. One Portlander—a cycling mom denied service at Burgerville—went viral, forcing a public change of heart from the company. And cyclists aren't the only ones clamoring for access: A Minnesota woman suffering from degenerative arthritis, driving a Pride Mobility Celebrity X scooter, was refused service at a White Castle, whose policy is to serve only licensed motor vehicles. ...

Sojourning as I am for a fortnight in an area with a walking score about half that of home, I still can't quite bring myself to use drive-thrus. Maybe with more socialization...

Want frequent-flyer miles? Try this:

At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off.

Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.

Add that to the list titled "Now why didn't I think of that?"

A bunch of people went over to Ruckus Pizza on Wednesday for their weekly trivia contest. I do much better at College Bowl-type quizzes, and this one was all pop culture, but that didn't diminish the company and the pizza. All good.

The second round featured advertising slogans. See if you can find one product for which all these slogans work beautifully:

• "The quicker picker-upper"
• Two for me, none for you
• Get up to four hours longer
• Makes mouth happy
• Stress stinks, ____ works
• Any time's a good time for ___

Answer...

I tried to get out ahead of the weather on Tuesday, but it found me. The trip started out at just past 7am with the car in this condition:

Via Strange Maps comes a field outside Minden, Neb., shaped like...well, like Nebraska:

We got to Raleigh in one piece through a billion liters of rain, it seemed. Then this morning we got right back in the car to rescue one of our hosts after her radiator blew a hose:

More...

One of Chicago's largest real-estate companies has defaulted on $1.72 bn in loans:

The portfolio, which also includes 161 N. Clark St., 30 N. LaSalle St. and 1 N. Franklin St., already illustrates several recent real estate trends, such as rapidly falling property values after prices peaked thanks to large amounts of cheap debt. With credit now virtually gone, defaults on downtown buildings are likely to rise, forcing them into foreclosure or onto the market at big discounts that will put more downward pressure on prices in a spiral similar to the struggles of residential real estate across the country.

"Virtually all the assets bought between '05 and '07 cannot be refinanced today without a significant capital infusion," says Shawn Mobley, executive vice-president at real estate firm Grubb & Ellis Co. "These buildings need to be recapitalized to get back in the business of being active real estate."

Without a financial restructuring, the properties are likely to join a new trend — "zombie buildings," which can't compete for new tenants because they lack the money to cover brokers' commissions and interior office reconstruction.

My friend Gina has some things to say about using economics to figure out one's personal life, with heavy emphasis on seeing decreasing marginal utility as a leading indicator. More on that later. Right now, though, Chicago commercial real estate has some serious problems, but still not nearly as threatening as New York or Orange County, California. Right now.

Or, why anyone who cares about America—left or right—should be concerned:

[The argument] really isn't about Palin. Or about [Levi] Johnston.

It's about our democracy's apparent lack of interest any more in what is true and what is false. It's about the mainstream media's willful decision not to tackle a story that was integral to a major candidate's core integrity; it's about the Republican party elite's cynicism and condescension to millions of voters; it's about the decision of Harper Collins, Adam Bellow and Jonathan Burnham to publish a book so riddled with untruth without even a gesture toward ensuring its accuracy; and it's about the recklessness of John McCain, a man hollowed out by careerism and cynicism, selling out every scruple or principle he may have had to make his way in the modern GOP; and it's about the power of fundamentalist religion to blind everyone to the banal but vital details of secular politics.

It's about the constant struggle of being human: take the quick-and-easy route to ruin, or the slow-and-hard route to the future. Aaron Sorkin said it better:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, you want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free."

It's so much easier to call people names and make up stories, to make lying and cynicism the planks in a party platform. To the people leading the Republican party to its own ruin, and taking American democracy with it, I recommend meditating on Matthew 26:52.

Chicago woke up to 25 mm or snow of fluffy snow this morning, our first measurable snowfall of the year:

We don't mind this kind of snow. It took about 30 seconds to brush it off my car, the streets got cleared before sunrise—nothing heinous. No, "heinous" describes the forecast starting tomorrow night:

Tuesday Night: Snow before midnight, then rain, snow, and sleet. Low around -1°C. Breezy, with an east wind 30 to 35 km/h becoming southwest. Winds could gust as high as 45 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 100%.

Wednesday: Snow. High near 2°C. Breezy, with a west southwest wind between 25 and 35 km/h, with gusts as high as 65 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 80%.

Wednesday Night: A 20 percent chance of snow before midnight. Mostly cloudy and breezy, with a low around -12°C.

Thursday: Mostly sunny, with a high near -7°C.

Thursday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around -16°C.

The best part about this forecast? I won't be in Chicago.

(Another photo after the jump.)

If she can't see you, then you can't see her...

The slide scanning project is almost done. I'm right now scanning the end of 1998, right around when I switched to digital cameras. Here are three from the mid-1990s showing bits of Chicago that no longer exist.

First, in this view from the Sears Tower, you can see Meigs Field and Soldier Field, both since destroyed:

Autumn in the Green Mountain State:

Three more after the jump.

Coincidentally with the Illinois Dept. of Resources' desperate (and probably too-late) effort to stop Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes comes another tragically predictable outcome of local politics. The Mayor of Chicago this week forced a budget through the City Council over an unusually-high 12 dissenting votes that raids the paltry parking meter trust fund only a year after the (allegedly) corrupt and (actually) stupid decision exactly a year ago to sell the streets of Chicago:

As has become customary, aldermen bitched and moaned about Mayor Daley’s $6.1 billion budget before they passed it today. Nobody claimed to like it, though 38 aldermen voted in favor of it. But that number is smaller than it has been for most of Daley's reign. In years past the mayor viewed a single nay vote as an intolerable act of defiance; these days he’s lucky no one else has the clout to wield or goodies to hand out that he does, because his governing style is wearing thinner among an ever larger group of aldermen. As in a dozen.

Still, their arguments are getting more pointed. For evidence, consider the diatribe that 38th Ward alderman Tom Allen delivered to explain why he was casting his first vote against a Daley budget since the mayor appointed him to the City Council in 1993. “I have come to the conclusion that this 2010 budget is one that I have no confidence in,” Allen said.

He offered three reasons. “First and foremost,” he said, “the parking meter spending plan here I consider to be a breach of our fiduciary duties to the taxpayers that we represent.” Allen produced materials that Daley budget aides had distributed to aldermen a year ago when they rammed the 75-year parking meter privatization deal through the council in four days. He said aldermen were promised that the administration would save enough of the proceeds that the interest on them would equal or exceed the $20 million the city was accustomed to collecting from the meters. Instead, Daley’s budget will burn through two-thirds of the replacement fund in a single year.

The pattern should be familiar to students of 20th-century history. As they grow older, leaders become more concerned with their legacies than their constituents. The trend accelerates, until, near the end of their political careers, they almost inevitably experience epic failure. In the case of fairly-elected leaders in functioning democracies, the results are merely disappointing: Clinton, Nixon, and Gray Davis come to mind. But in the case of one-party states, where the leaders have no functioning or effective opposition, the outcome often destroys the polis as it destroys the leader: Mugabe, Cheney, and recently the mayors of Baltimore and Detroit.

I don't know which hypothesis I prefer: that Daley doesn't actually believe his actions will prove beneficial to the city in the long run, so he's feathering his nest before retiring; or that Daley, after 17 years without tolerating any criticism or dissent, has gotten so deluded he really thinks these decisions are good. Of course, without an effective challenger—where's Harold Washington when we need him most?—we're stuck with Daley Sese Seku until he chooses to leave office.

During the few months I lived in Vermont, Bill Clinton got elected President. He spoke at one big rally that year, up in Burlington, and thanks to a press pass from a friend at a radio station, I got to see him in person:

More...

Few people knew before, you know, this blog entry, that I lived in Vermont for a few months in 1992. (I was young, I needed the work.) Actually, it was the most beautiful place I've lived. That said, I grew up in one big city and went to college in another, so the things that made Vermont beautiful were precisely those things that made it difficult for me to live there: wide open spaces, trees, idyllic rural living, etc.

I moved back to Chicago in short order, but not after taking a few hundred photos. These, for example, I took in Middlebury, where I lived at the time:

More...

More photos from 1992. Taking the Kyle of Lochalsh train from Inverness through the Scottish highlands capped the trip. I took three rolls of film in as many hours. (We didn't have digital cameras back then, so each photo, with processing, cost about 35c—the equivalent of about 70c today—so those three rolls represent about $75 of today's dollars.)

Here are three of those shots:

(You know the rest. This means you, JLF.)

After detecting Asian carp DNA only 10 km from Lake Michigan, the Illinois Dept. of Resources last night started killing everything in the Sanitary and Ship Canal that runs through the city:

About 8,300 liters of the liquid toxin rotenone were put into a 6-mile stretch of the canal near Romeoville Wednesday night.

More than a dozen boats were to go on the canal later today to begin cleanup operations....

The toxin was put into the water because fears that the carp--which can grow to about 150 cm and 50 kg--are pushing their way north toward Lake Michigan and could devastate the Great Lakes' $7 billion commercial fishing industry. The carp can eat 40 percent of their body weight each day.

Apparently they don't taste too good, either.

Since the Canal runs backwards, thanks to an engineering trick in 1901 that stopped us poisoning our drinking water (and started us poisoning Peoria's), the carp may not make it all the way to the lake. Except for that jumping thing they do, when they launch themselves in the air the same way pigs don't, and have occasionally cleared 20 meters.

The trip I took in 1992 went from West Sussex, England, to Nice, France; Genève, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; then back to the U.K. As I continue the (excruciatingly slow) process of scanning all these slides, I'll continue to post the better ones. Like these, the first from Nice:

(More, of course, on the original post...)

Like many Americans, I backpacked through Europe right after graduating from college, in the summer of 1992. I've been scanning all of my slides, gradually, for a couple of years in fact, and I'm now up to that Europe trip. (The trip starts on slide #2362, and I'm just today up to slide #2500.)

Here are two. First, Chichester Cathedral, England:

(As usual, full size and the other photo after the jump.)

Just a few quick things today:

• The temperature hit 13°C today, not a record but definitely a pleasant day in December. In Chicago. Because, of course, there are parts of the world where that temperature on any day of the year would cause alarm.
• Matthew Yglesias thinks mutual funds are stupid. I'm linking because of his two clear charts. His recommendations: index funds. (But...is any of this news?)
• The local pizza place around the corner folded last week. This was Parker's favorite summer hangout. We'll miss it.
• Comcast and AT&T are fighting public broadband in areas that don't have it. Common sense suggests that the government subsidy would ultimately go to them, but their first reaction is that of any monopolist. As Duke University economist Leslie Marx put it only yesterday, "remember that everywhere a firm looks, it is obligated to look for profits, and I would challenge anyone to show me an industry where the suppression of rivalry is not profitable."

More later. Possibly a Parker photo, too.