A pack of coyotes attacked a hiker in Nova Scotia yesterday, in a well-traveled area near enough other people that a police officer drove off the attacking dogs. Coyotes almost never attack people; what's going on here? The A.P. reports:
Wildlife biologist Bob Bancroft said coyote attacks are extremely rare because the animals are usually shy.
Bancroft, a retired biologist with Nova Scotia's Department of Natural Resources, said it's possible the coyotes thought [attack victim Taylor] Mitchell was a deer or other prey.
"It's very unusual and is not likely to repeated," Bancroft said. "We shouldn't assume that coyotes are suddenly going to become the big bad wolf."
An official with Parks Canada said they blocked the entrance to the trail where Mitchell was attacked and were trying to find the animals to determine what prompted such an unusual attack.
Possibly the encroachment of humans on their territory has made them less afraid of us? Still, coyotes don't usually behave like that.
Not one single new. Even though MSNBC sent me this urgent update:
msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: Poll: 47 percent of Americans support an increase in troops in Afghanistan.
As I shake my head, I feel impelled to blog the following questions:
- Who did they poll?
- What question or questions did the pollsters ask?
- Why did the people they polled answer one way or another?
- In what way is a poll that shows less than a plurality in any way newsworthy?
- Why did MSNBC feel this important enough to send a news alert?
- What do the people responsible for (5) want to happen as a result of this news alert?
Call me crazy, but I think the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is so difficult and complicated that I really don't care what popular opinion has to say about it. I think we all deserve more complete information, as this is a republic; but I also think most people haven't got enough of a clue to have an opinion that matters.
Possibly the major news media in the U.S. would have more relevance if they tried. But a news alert like this? Heavens.
The CCMBA Dubai residency starts in just over 3 days, and I'm leaving in 53 hours. I hope I've learned from the mistakes I made in the London residency, so I can make all new mistakes. Some observations so far:
- I do not need the one-kilo power converter; I only need a couple of UK-US adapters. This is because, as I realized in London, everything I have with a plug accepts all international power characteristics. (The U.S. is 110 volts, 60 Hertz; the U.K. and U.A.E. both use 220 volts, 50 Hertz, with U.K.—style plugs.)
- The weather forecast for Dubai calls for highs of 33°C, lows of 23°C, and sunny skies every single day. This should significantly reduce the mass of all the clothing I need to pack. Except, I'll have to get to and from O'Hare and I'll be spending two days in London on the way back. Packing for three different climates? Fun!
- I won't have mobile phone service in Dubai. Oh, sure, my GSM phone will work in the UAE, but as T-Mobile would charge something like $5 per minute and $1 per text there, I'll just leave the thing off entirely.
- But when will I have time to make phone calls? The program schedule has us running around up to 15 hours a day, starting at 8:00 the first morning we're there.
- As an aviation geek, I'm particularly excited about the flight from London to Dubai. It'll be the first time I've been on a 747 in over 20 years. (American Airlines hasn't had them since the early 1980s.) I'll have a full report sometime in November.
In conseqence, I'm a lot more laid-back about this trip than I was for London.
Chicago Tribune transport columnist John Hilkevich is shocked—shocked!—this morning to find that Chicago parking tickets are up 26% this year:
The stepped-up enforcement contributed to a $7 million year-over-year increase in parking ticket revenue, which totaled $119.2 million from January through August, the Chicago Department of Revenue reported.
Fines assessed from tickets go to the city's nearly depleted general fund. Revenue collected from a four-fold increase in parking rates this year is kept by Chicago Parking Meters LLC, which paid the city $1.15 billion as part of a 75-year lease to manage on-street parking.
The extra emphasis on enforcement may be contributing to an abundance of parking spaces in many parts of the city where finding street parking was previously luck of the draw.
The clampdown also is discouraging some suburbanites and others to limit their trips to the city.
Discouraging? No kidding. I'm in North Carolina this weekend, where I took advantage of a clothing sale I could have gone to at the same store in Chicago, because even N.C.'s 7.5% sales tax is better than downtown Chicago's 10.5%. (Maine was just too far to go for one suit.)
Mayor Daley fils has done some great things for Chicago, but the biggest things—privitization of public assets, unbelievable taxation, etc.—threaten his legacy. Perhaps now that we don't have the distraction of the 2016 Olympics anymore, he'll turn his energies toward making the city more financially livable again.
The state of Illinois mysteriously doubled its funding request for upgrading the Chicago-St. Louis rail corridor to handle moderately-high-speed trains. First, of the $4.5 bn now requested, only $1.2 bn will go to the actual track upgrades; the state now wants additional funds to build a second track along the route. Second, the upgrades will increase the route's top speed from 126 km/h to only 176 km/h, not exactly a serious rival for other HSR projects worldwide (like, for example, Shanghai's MagLev, which has hit 501 km/h, or France's TGV which routinely travels at 320 km/h.)
Here's Crain's:
"The state's plan is not high-speed rail," says Richard Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Assn., which advocates a new, 350 km/h Chicago-St. Louis route. "Four hours doesn't change a lot. It's not transformative. What is transformative is two hours."
That would cost $12 billion to $13 billion, he estimates, in line with a detailed, 256-page proposal for a complete Midwest high-speed rail system centered on Chicago that French National Railways, known by its French acronym, SNCF, filed recently with the Federal Railroad Administration.
... With Chicago's status as the nation's rail hub, the state's longtime subsidization of passenger rail and its unprecedented clout with the Obama administration, Illinois is considered likely to get a big chunk of the $8 billion in federal stimulus funds for high-speed rail to be disbursed soon, plus billions more expected in future years as Congress embraces one of the president's top priorities
Is it worth billions to improve rail traffic between Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Detroit? I don't think there's an objectively correct answer, but I vote yes. The European experience of moving more people more cheaply (and more quickly) by rail than by air, with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions, shows that HSR can make a huge difference in a region. But Europe makes different choices than the U.S., and in a democracy it's permissible for one population to decide that its quality of life has a higher price than for another.
Still, two hours to St. Louis? Thirty minutes to Milwaukee? That would be cool.
Technically yesterday's incident happened on a Northwest airplane, but since Delta owns Northwest now, and after last week's error, I'm wondering if the jokes from the 1990s about Delta's navigation abilities might not be coming back in earnest:
Today a Northwest Airlines Airbus A320 flight missed their destination of Minneapolis by 150 miles.
The flight crew said they became engrossed in a conversation about airline policy (and honestly, who couldn't?) and lost track of their location. However, the FAA is investigating if pilot fatigue played any roll in this event.
The flight from San Diego to Minneapolis had 144 passengers onboard and none of them were aware of what happened, until the aircraft was swarmed by police once they finally arrived. The police kept all passengers onboard until they were allowed to question the flight crew.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has more:
Military jets had been on standby to track down the jet after it dropped out of radio communication for about 75 minutes.
"When you hear that fighter jets were ready to scramble, that just gets you really mad," said passenger Scott Kennedy.
I certainly hope the next American Airlines flight reaches its proper destination...
First, via AV Web, a report that a Delta 767 landed just a bit off the runway centerline returning from Rio de Janeiro Monday:
A couple of Delta Airlines pilots have been suspended after the Boeing 767 they were flying from Rio de Janeiro landed on a taxiway at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport early Monday morning. The FAA reported there were no other aircraft on the taxiway and the landing and rollout were normal. Spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said the crew was dealing with a medical emergency on board and had been cleared for Runway 27R.
Instead, the crew landed on taxiway M, which runs parallel to the 12,000-foot runway. There was no indication that approach, runway or taxiway lights were malfunctioning. Taxiway landings occur from time to time, but Bergen told Atlanta media that she believes it was the first such incident in Atlanta.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has more.
And this, from Tom Vanderbilt...well, good thing the pedestrian had a running start:
Mayor Daley found another $500m hole in the city's budget this year, so he's proposing...nothing new:
Mayor Richard Daley unveils his new budget this morning, and he's going to call for spending more money from the controversial parking meter lease, slashing the tourism promotion budget and ending Chicago's longest-running public party, Venetian Night.
A key labor union that bankrolled challengers to Daley's council allies in the last election praised the mayor's decision to raid reserves from the $1.15 billion parking meter deal. The 75-year lease, which aldermen quickly approved last year, ushered in sharp rate increases at more than 36,000 public parking spots.
More than $400 million was used to balance this year's budget, records show. And the city already has announced plans to spend at least $146.3 million in privatization proceeds next year.
Remember that, even at a conservative discount rate, the $1.15bn parking meter deal was about $3bn too cheap. So we've given up 75 years of parking meter revenues worth $3bn in exchange for, what, about 6 years of partial operating revenue?
We also got some bad news from recent arrival Boeing, which lost $1.6bn last quarter:
Boeing, the world's second-largest commercial plane maker after Europe's Airbus, has struggled with a series of setbacks: Production problems have delayed its eagerly awaited 787 passenger aircraft and a bigger version of its 747 jumbo jet, resulting in charges from write-downs and penalties.
Those charges, which were expected, led the company to cut its 2009 profit forecast to $1.35 to $1.55 per share, down from $4.70 to $5 per share. Analysts had predicted $1.53.
On the other hand, today is probably the warmest day we've had in a month, and probably the warmest we'll have until next spring. So Parker and I will now go for a long walk.
A Wicker Park chicken-wing stand annoyed hundreds of potential customers recently by sticking fake parking ticket advertisements in their windshields:
Wing Stop's "parking tickets" are menus that look strikingly similar to Chicago's more menacing version, both in design and color scheme. But instead of expensive violations for expired meters and double parking, the restaurant's version has citations listing the restaurant's signature hot wings, sides, drinks and even offers a free order of fries with your ticket.
Representatives of Malcolm X College and William H. Brown elementary school, along with a host of upset recipients of Wing Stop's ticket menu called to voice their displeasure according to Barjas and Pirozzoli. The Chicago Police Department called the other day to ask the restaurant to stop passing out the fliers as multiple complaints had come into the 14th District headquarters. And the City of Chicago called to discourage the promotion as well.
"Advertising taking the form of parking tickets can be confusing to motorists," explains Chicago Department of Revenue spokesperson Ed Walsh. "Sometimes it generates complaints. As such, we ask businesses to refrain."
Personally, I won't patronize any seller who sticks anything on my windshield...but in this case, I might have called the health department on them, just out of orneryness.