Events

When I got home from our Messiah performance yesterday, my car ended up here: If you don't have International System conversion factors ready to hand, just know that one statute mile is 1,609.344 meters. So right before I got to my garage last night, my car hit 10,000 miles exactly. And how about that average fuel economy? For the luddites, 2.2 L/100 km is about 105 MPG. If you recall, I bought the car just shy of 3 years ago. So in three years, I've driven about 10,000 miles and filled up the car 12...

Messages for you, sir: As of yesterday, officially 800,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. Two members of the president's bi-partisan commission looking at ways to fix the Supreme Court say we shouldn't fix it because "Federal judges aren't politicians." Ah, ha ha, how droll. Those non-politicians comprising the Republican wing of the Federal judiciary are helping nudge the country to civil war, according to Charles Blow. Why isn't the media covering the war on democracy like an actual war? asks Mother...

Just two of note. First, on this day 21 years ago, Al Gore conceded the 2000 election to George W Bush. Good thing that made almost no difference at all in world events. Another anniversary is the one that happens every January 1st to works of art created a certain point in the past. A whole bunch of books, films, and musical compositions pass into the public domain as their copyrights expire, including: The Sun Also Rises and Winnie-the-Pooh, both published in 1926; The works of Louis Armstrong and Jim...

Pity Cassie, who had to stay home alone yesterday for about 8 hours and will have to do the same today. She trusts that I will eventually come home, though, meaning she just crossed her paws and waited for me. While she slept in various positions on the couch, I sang Händel's Messiah for the first time in nearly two years. It's great to be back on stage. And here we go again... Regular blog posts resume tomorrow.

My outdoor thermometer has alerted me to an unusual temperature swing: Yes, that's a 4°C rise in one hour. At least it's stopped raining. But there is a tornado warning about 100 km from here, so there's a lot of energy in the air right now. Meanwhile, indoors, my fireplace caused a spike in CO2: Don't worry, 2,000 ppm won't hurt me. But I did get an alert about it.

We're all set to perform Handel's Messiah tomorrow and Sunday, which got noticed by both the local news service and local TV station. Otherwise, the week just keeps getting odder: Monkees singer-songwriter Michael Nesmith died today at 78. Consumer prices rose at an annualized rate of 6.8% in November, the highest rate in 39 years. Catherine Rampell wonders who would ever design a political system like ours. Kate Riga explains the dog-whistle Justice Amy Coney Barrett (R) used in last week's oral...