Welcome home, Atlantis. Now what?

You're looking at a NASA photograph of Shuttle Atlantis returning to Florida's Kennedy Space Center early this morning after successfully concluding the final Shuttle mission, STS-135.

Is this the end of manned American space exploration?

There are still plans to keep American astronauts on board the International Space Station. However, for the foreseeable future, in order to get to and from, Americans will have to hitch a ride on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Indeed, NASA astronaut Mike Fossum just joined the space station crew (currently denominated Expedition 28) after a July 8 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

But that's not exactly boldly going where no one has gone before. It amounts to taking a cab.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Director of the Rose Center for Earth and Space of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, tweeted earlier today, "Lament not the shuttle's end, but the absence of rockets to supplant it. Who shed a tear when Gemini ended? Apollo awaited us."

Dr. Tyson hits the nail exactly on the head. Not only does America lack a plan for further space exploration, it lacks the will to execute any plan. There's some vague notion that, some day, maybe, we might think about mounting an expedition to Mars. Maybe we'll go to an asteroid first....

Tyson's tweets note that President Kennedy's original target date for the lunar landing would have been during his second term. (As it happened, the landing was pushed back to 1969 because of the Apollo 1 fire.) Dr. Tyson notes, "One US President can never [actually] commit the nation to a goal that requires fulfillment by a President 'to be named later.'" Case in point: President Bush proposed returning to the Moon as a stepping stone toward Mars. President Obama killed that.

Are we ceding leadership in the exploration of the cosmos because it is too costly?

Again, I look to Dr. Tyson for some perspective (from his July 8 tweets):

• The entire half-century budget of NASA equals the current two year budget of the US military.
• The US bank bailout exceeded the half-century lifetime budget of NASA.
• The US military spends as much in 23 days as NASA spends in a year - and that's when we're not fighting a war.

The United States can afford space exploration; what we can't afford is to stop.

Meanwhile, the private sector is expected to step up and take over flights to low Earth orbits -- but there's some question as to whether private enterprise can rise to the challenge.

In an AP report carried this morning by HuffPost AOL News, Marcia Dunn reports that the STS-135 crew left an American flag on board the space station. This was a flag that was flown on the very first Shuttle flight in 1981. It was left behind as a prize for the first private company that can fly up and claim it in person. Dunn's article continues:

SpaceX maintains it can get people to the space station within three years of getting the all-clear from NASA. Station managers expect it to be more like five years. Some skeptics say it could be 10 years before Americans are launched again from U.S. soil.

Let's hope the skeptics are wrong.

------------------------------------------------------------
For Further Reading:

Why America Needs to Explore Space, by Neil deGrasse Tyson (from Parade Magazine, August 5, 2007.

Now is not the time to quit, by Storer H. Rowley, Chicago Tribune, July 21, 2011.

Comics on trial

Legal problems are a staple of the funny pages. We don't have car pool lanes in the Chicago area, but the concept is not unfamiliar. Most locals, therefore, would not have needed an explanation for this F Minus strip from July 9:


This Bliss panel from July 4 presents a patriotic legal problem:


But lately I've noticed a lot of comics are actually looking for humor in the courts themselves.

Candorville, for example, has been dropping in and out of a custody trial for several weeks now. The protagonist, Lemont Brown, is represented by a six-year old kid pretending to be a lawyer. The real lawyer, the kid's uncle, may have been kidnapped and imprisoned by the 400-year old vampire who gave birth to Lemont's son. This installment, from June 29, features the vampire's lawyer. Yes, he does look suspiciously like John Edwards:


One of my favorite strips, Brewster Rockit, recently featured an alien's negligence suit against the Earth. The alien, it seems, crashed his saucer into Jupiter. Earth was responsible, according to the alien's lawyer, because of NASA's spacecraft Dawn, now (for real) in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. The Earth ship didn't get in the alien's way; he was simply texting about it when he crashed. This strip, from July 13, illustrates one of the high points of the trial:


A new strip, Dustin, usually focuses on the slacker 20-something for which the strip is named. But Dustin's father is a lawyer -- and last week the strip took us inside his practice. Here's the July 15 entry:


Meanwhile, on July 19, the comic pages' real lawyer, former San Francisco lawyer Stephan Pastis, provided a rather cockeyed lesson on the limits of free speech:



------------------------------------------------------------
Comics obtained from Yahoo! Comics and the Chicago Tribune Comics Kingdom.

In which the blogger tries to figure out what Google+ is supposed to be

The Tribune's Eric Zorn wrote Sunday that the sudden growth in Google+ is "making it increasingly likely that those of us who try to stay current with social media will have One More Darn Thing To Do Every Day."

And what is Google+ you ask?

A Georgia blawger says "Google+ seems to be attempting to combine Facebook (Stream), Twitter (Following and Inbox), Skype (Hangout), and pick your own flavor of photo sharing (Photos) and instant messaging (Huddle), with its own RSS/news feed thrown in (Sparks)." If you know what all that means, you and Eric Zorn are probably already traveling in the same circles. (Yes, that's an actual attempt at a Google+ joke.)

For my part, I only know what I read in the comics. I'm pretty sure that this episode of the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse is talking about Google+:



And this episode of the webcomic xkcd provides an explanation of Google+ that even a Luddite like me can understand:



The explanation makes even more sense when you read Mr. Munroe's embedded rollover comment: "On the one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!"

How SB1586 became P.A. 97-81

Otto von Bismarck said, "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."

And, in Illinois, if you insist on trying to see how laws are made, sometimes you have to look very quickly.

The General Assembly website tracks how a bill that was originally drafted to take the Secretary of State out of the business of registering voters became a bill that, inter alia, substantially changes how judges are elected in Illinois. The following table shows the actions taken on the bill. Keep in mind that May 31 was the very last day of the regular legislative session.

The final amendment of the bill, House passage, and Senate concurrence in the dramatically revised bill all happened in a single day, on June 22, the very next day the Senate was in session. (The State House had a "perfunctory session" on June 21.)


Actions

Date	Chamber	Action
2/9/2011	Senate	Filed with Secretary by Sen. M. Maggie Crotty
2/9/2011	Senate	First Reading
2/9/2011	Senate	Referred to Assignments
2/23/2011	Senate	Assigned to Executive
3/3/2011	Senate	To Executive Subcommittee on State Government Operations
3/14/2011	Senate	Reported Back To Executive; 002-001-000
3/17/2011	Senate	Do Pass Executive; 014-000-000
3/17/2011	Senate	Placed on Calendar Order of 2nd Reading March 17, 2011
4/8/2011	Senate	Second Reading
4/8/2011	Senate	Placed on Calendar Order of 3rd Reading April 11, 2011
4/14/2011	Senate	Third Reading - Passed; 055-000-000
4/14/2011	House	Arrived in House
4/27/2011	House	Placed on Calendar Order of First Reading
4/27/2011	House	Chief House Sponsor Rep. Michael J. Zalewski
4/27/2011	House	First Reading
4/27/2011	House	Referred to Rules Committee
4/28/2011	House	Assigned to Elections & Campaign Reform Committee
5/10/2011	House	Do Pass / Standard Debate Elections & Campaign Reform Committee; 004-003-000
5/10/2011	House	Placed on Calendar 2nd Reading - Standard Debate
5/26/2011	House	Second Reading - Standard Debate
5/26/2011	House	Held on Calendar Order of Second Reading - Standard Debate
5/27/2011	House	Final Action Deadline Extended-9(b) May 31, 2011
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Filed with Clerk by Rep. Michael J. Zalewski
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Referred to Rules Committee
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Rules Refers to Elections & Campaign Reform Committee
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Recommends Be Adopted Elections & Campaign Reform Committee; 004-003-000
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Adopted by Voice Vote
5/31/2011	House	Held on Calendar Order of Second Reading - Standard Debate
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Fiscal Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 State Mandates Fiscal Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Balanced Budget Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Correctional Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Home Rule Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Housing Affordability Impact Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Judicial Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Land Conveyance Appraisal Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Pension Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 State Debt Impact Note Requested as Amended by Rep. Ron Stephens
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Filed with Clerk by Rep. Michael J. Zalewski
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Referred to Rules Committee
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Land Conveyance Appraisal Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Correctional Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Recommends Be Adopted Rules Committee; 003-001-000
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Home Rule Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Judicial Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 State Mandates Fiscal Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 State Debt Impact Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Housing Affordability Impact Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Fiscal Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Pension Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	Senate	Chief Sponsor Changed to Sen. Don Harmon
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Balanced Budget Note Filed as Amended
5/31/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Adopted by Voice Vote
5/31/2011	House	Held on Calendar Order of Second Reading - Standard Debate
5/31/2011	House	Placed on Calendar Order of 3rd Reading - Short Debate
5/31/2011	House	Rule 19(a) / Re-referred to Rules Committee
6/21/2011	House	Final Action Deadline Extended-9(b) June 24, 2011
6/21/2011	House	Approved for Consideration Rules Committee; 003-000-000
6/21/2011	House	Placed on Calendar Order of 3rd Reading - Short Debate
6/21/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Filed with Clerk by Rep. Michael J. Zalewski
6/21/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Referred to Rules Committee
6/21/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Recommends Be Adopted Rules Committee; 003-000-000
6/22/2011	House	Recalled to Second Reading - Short Debate
6/22/2011	House	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Adopted by Voice Vote
6/22/2011	House	Placed on Calendar Order of 3rd Reading - Short Debate
6/22/2011	House	3/5 Vote Required
6/22/2011	House	Third Reading - Short Debate - Passed 082-022-000
6/22/2011	Senate	Secretary's Desk - Concurrence House Amendment(s) 1, 2, 3
6/22/2011	Senate	Placed on Calendar Order of Concurrence House Amendment(s) 1, 2, 3 - June 22, 2011
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Motion to Concur Filed with Secretary Sen. Don Harmon
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Motion to Concur Referred to Assignments
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Motion to Concur Filed with Secretary Sen. Don Harmon
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Motion to Concur Referred to Assignments
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Motion to Concur Filed with Secretary Sen. Don Harmon
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Motion to Concur Referred to Assignments
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Motion to Concur Be Approved for Consideration Assignments;
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Motion to Concur Be Approved for Consideration Assignments;
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Motion to Concur Be Approved for Consideration Assignments;
6/22/2011	Senate	3/5 Vote Required
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 1 Senate Concurs 053-000-000
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 2 Senate Concurs 053-000-000
6/22/2011	Senate	House Floor Amendment No. 3 Senate Concurs 053-000-000
6/22/2011	Senate	Passed Both Houses
6/22/2011	Senate	Sent to the Governor
7/5/2011	Senate	Governor Approved
7/5/2011	Senate	Effective Date July 5, 2011; Generally Effective;Some parts effective on the Effective Date of Senate Bill 63 of the 97th General Assembly.
7/5/2011	Senate	Public Act . . . . . . . . . 97-0081

More scenes from yesterday's Norwood Park Memorial Day Parade

Continued from this entry on Page One.


There were plenty of Scout groups represented. There was a large contingent from Immaculate Conception School.








Among the many other scout groups participating were these from St. Thecla, Norwood Park Lutheran Church and Norwood Park School:






The Onahan School group included the cheerleading squad:











The group from Stock School had a message for parade-goers.












Memorial Day is often cool and dreary in Chicago. Yesterday, though, the weather was sunny, hot and humid.

In other words, it was a tough day to be sporting a fur coat. Especially a spray-painted one:






One canine seems to have decided it was just too hot to walk:


The Norwood Park Memorial Day Parade always features dozens of old cars:




But one of the cars, in particular, seems to have caught the attention of a lot of people. Apparently, BMW was not always a luxury status symbol:



The Chicago Police closed the proceedings on horseback:


The message on the side of this last car through was quite appropriate to the occasion: "Thank You for attending to Honor Those Who Gave Their Lives for Freedom."


Photo credit: Brigid Leyhane.

---------------------------------------------------------------
And if you need to see even more photos from yesterday's Norwood Park Memorial Day Parade, see this page on the Norwood Park Chamber of Commerce & Industry website.

Happy 70th Birthday, Bob Dylan

Ah, but I was so much older then/
I'm younger than that now.

Forever young?

On this august occasion I am reminded of Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic(Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission):"

I knew a man, his brain was so small,
He couldn't think of nothing at all.
He's not the same as you and me.
He doesn't dig poetry. He's so unhip that
When you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was.
The man ain't got no culture,
But it's alright, ma,
Everybody must get stoned.

But it's the unhip Dylan Thomas reference that seems particularly appropriate:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Prom Season begins... shudder

From Pardon My Planet by Vic Lee

Here's something I just found out: The Chicago Tribune has a "Comics Kingdom" page. I've been looking at the Comics Kingdom page for some months now via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer web site.

It's a small world after all.

And a surprisingly ecumenical one: Though I pulled this timely Pardon My Planet cartoon from the Tribune web site, this comic appears in print in the Chicago Sun-Times. There's probably an uplifting lesson in here about cooperation. Either that, or a depressing lesson about the continuing collapse of the newspaper business.

Mommie Dearest: Earth can be one mean mama

This beautiful photograph of Mother Earth was taken earlier this month by NASA astronaut Ron Garan, now in residence aboard the International Space Station. Mr. Garan is currently blogging from space on a site called Fragile Oasis, a site he shares with three other NASA veterans. I learned about Garan's efforts (and obtained this photo) from Denise Chow's April 21 article posted on OurAmazingPlanet.com. Chow writes that by "shining a light on Earth from space, Garan and his colleagues hope to mobilize people to improve the conditions on our fragile planet."

This is a wonderful goal and entirely appropriate for this Earth Day weekend.

We should work together to protect our home.

But we must also worry about how to protect ourselves from our home -- and this Earth Day season seems as good a time as any to remember this.

A lot of politicians and pundits are obsessed with "climate change." This used to be called "global warming," but "climate change" tests better in markets experiencing unusually cold weather, such as we've had in Chicago of late.

Climate change was before the U.S. Supreme Court just this week, in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, No. 10-174. The Court was reportedly skeptical about whether courts are proper places to address such complicated issues.

The Court's apparent skepticism seems quite appropriate to me. I am no climate change denier; the one constant of Earth's climate throughout time has been change. At different times in pre-history, Earth has been completely covered in ice and completely ice-free. Inasmuch as we weren't here yet, humans had nothing to do with these extremes. Climate fluctuations in the relatively brief time that humans have clung to this floating rock have been linked to any number of human tragedies, including the French Revolution, the Viking terror raids on Britain and elsewhere, and the collapse of the Mayan Golden Age. Humans were not driving SUVs during any of these events. If everyone switches to Priuses tomorrow, Toyota stock might soar, but climate change would continue.

Interestingly, while the courts, the EPA and the states wrestle with how best to regulate carbon dioxide (fingered, not so many years ago, by a still-nascent science as the key culprit in climate change), science may have moved on to another suspect: Soot. A nearly invisible layer of soot, released into the atmosphere from autos, trucks, airplanes and coal or wood-burning all over the world, is collecting in the Arctic, absorbing sunlight and contributing to record warmth (and ice melt) in that region. The AP reported just a couple of days ago that scientists now believe "that cutting the concentration of short-lived pollutants, such as soot, will reduce the rate of warming in the Arctic faster than cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which last far longer in the atmosphere." This one seems obvious in retrospect. Anyone who's watched the difference in the rate of snow melt on asphalt as opposed to grass could figure it out -- if they knew that soot was accumulating in the Arctic.

But if all the soot from every car and power plant in the world could be scrubbed from the sky tomorrow, climate change would still continue. The Earth may be our mother, but she's often an indifferent one.

And, of course, she might kill us at any time, too. Folks in Japan recently received a harsh reminder of this sad truth.

And earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes and even plain old ordinary volcanoes (e.g., Mt. St. Helens) aren't the worst things that Mother Earth can hit us with. The eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra, around 74,000 years ago, seems to have caused an immediate global winter followed by an ice age of a thousand years or so. Some scientists believe that the Toba eruption may have also caused the near-extinction of the human race. The event has been linked, by some, to a 'bottleneck' in human evolution.

There's a supervolcano in our own backyard which erupted 1.2 million years ago and 640,000 years ago. We call it Yellowstone National Park. Scientists recently announced that the "gigantic underground plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano might be bigger than previously thought."

The volcanic plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano.
Yellow and red indicate higher conductivity, green and blue indicate lower
conductivity. Made by University of Utah geophysicists and computer scientists,
this is the first large-scale 'geoelectric' image of the Yellowstone hotspot.
Credit: University of Utah.

Eventually (though presumably not next week) Yellowstone will erupt again.

So let's celebrate Mother Earth on Earth Day and every day and do what we can to preserve our home. But let's not forget the need to keep learning how to figure out how best to preserve ourselves and our posterity from Mommie Dearest.

There's nothing like a good pun

And this web comic, from Luke Surl, is nothing like one.

Still, I needed a laugh, even a pained one, with the White Sox on a losing streak and a wet, gray, misty, near-snow rain falling outside, and this comic provided it.

Passwords obsolete? It's about time

The Chicago Tribune Breaking Business site reports a Reuters story this afternoon about passwords: The Obama administration, it seems, is against them.

Finally, some good news out of Washington.

Maybe.

See, the administration wants the private sector "to develop methods that consumers can use instead of passwords to identify themselves online," which sounds pretty good until one reads further that "the Commerce Department is also keenly aware that any attempt by the federal government to create a national identity card would be extremely controversial."

To say the least.

However, standardization of password structure might be very helpful. The problem is not that people can't handle complex or unique passwords; the problem is that most people can't handle 87 of them.

Soulless Megabank wants a password of not less than seven nor more than 11 characters, two of which must be numbers, one of which must be a punctuation mark.

2Big2Fail.com requires no more than eight characters, three of which must be numbers. And don't even think of using a punctuation mark.

On the other hand, Master-Visa-Express insists on a password that has no z's or x's, except on Tuesdays, or during a full moon when the password must be changed to only p's and v's.

Every one of these sites also requires the customer to provide a "user name." The customer often finds that the same user name will not work on every site. The user name might be the customer's last name... but some sites won't accept that. At least one initial, at least one number, or at least one character which is neither a letter nor a number must sometimes be added. The customer now has two things to remember for each site.

More and more of us are paying bills on line. Every vendor wants a password and every one has unique requirements. The security gurus tell us this is supposed to protect our security -- but with so many different passwords necessitated by so many different rules on each website, only a genius or savant can avoid writing these all down somewhere.

And the one thing we're never supposed to do with passwords is write 'em down.

And then there are the challenge questions. Many sites require customers to answer questions in advance in case he or she has trouble remembering the user name or password. Or in case the customer tries to sign in from a machine in which the site hasn't planted a cookie. And even when the customer is using a familiar machine and has remembered the user name and password, these questions may be asked anyway, just because. Now, if these were objective, factual questions (Where were you born? What was the name of your high school?) the challenge questions might be reasonable. But... what is your favorite color? How the heck do I know? Today it might be green. Tomorrow, blue. How will I remember, six months from now, how I answered that question today? And some sites have even more esoteric, speculative questions. What is your least favorite vegetable? What is your neighbor's favorite pasta? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Some sites don't bother with challenge questions. These give you a limited number of chances to guess your user name and password combination and, when you exhaust these chances -- typically, three strikes and you're out -- the site assumes you must be an identity thief. The site then goes on total lockdown.

This is fine if someone really is trying to steal your identity. It is not particularly helpful if the bill must be paid by 4:00pm and it is already 3:57.

A standard password format might solve everything. As a nod to the paranoid, we could make the standard password 15 to 20 characters long. If the security gurus think that 15 to 20 characters is not enough, we could make it 25 or even 30. We could require that three characters be numbers or that two be neither letters or numbers. At least it would be only one password. I'm sure I could remember that.

Probably.

Today was International Be Kind to Lawyers Day

Honest. There's a web site and everything.

According to that web site, Be Kind to Lawyers Day is the brainchild of Steven Hughes, a non-lawyer from St. Louis. The web site explains:

[Hughes] had been working with attorneys for several years in the presentation and rainmaking arena. He liked his job and the clients who hired him.

However, whenever Steve mentioned to friends and neighbors that he worked with lawyers he was met with crinkled up faces, snide remarks and sarcastic sighs. They would say things like, "Lawyers? I bet that's a treat." Or, "Lawyers? You poor thing." (Can't you just feel the animosity?) Suddenly he found himself playing defense counsel for an entire profession.

Then one day as Steve was putting away the decorations from National Bubble Wrap Day (late January) his thoughts drifted to National Ice Cream Day (late July) and then it struck him. Why not a special day for lawyers? Lawyers are just as good as bubble wrap and ice cream, in fact, they're better. Thus, the idea for NATIONAL BE KIND TO LAWYERS DAY was hatched.

After extensive planning, detailed research and countless reviews by a team of legal experts, NATIONAL BE KIND TO LAWYERS DAY was established as an annual holiday celebrated on the second Tuesday in April. This date was chosen because it is strategically sandwiched between April Fool's Day and U.S. Tax Day on April 15th.

This is a very nice idea and, even if it's too late today for extensive celebration, I hope you start making big plans right now for April 10, 2012.


Although... bubble wrap is pretty cool, too.... (Go ahead... click on the link. You know you want to....)

Plastic bottles made from trash? We're going to need the marketing department to work overtime on this one...

But, otherwise, this is really a great idea.

The Chicago Tribune reports this week that PepsiCo has invented "what it calls the world's first plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources."

Actually "plant-based, fully renewable resources" sounds a lot better than the explanation in the linked Tribune article, namely, "such renewable materials as switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. The company expects to use other materials, such as orange peels, potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its own food businesses...." In other words, trash. That kind of diminishes the 'yum' factor, I suppose.

This is a picture of switchgrass. I suggest we start the marketing department with a nice picture of a plant like that one, or a pastoral scene like that one below.

Most plastic bottles these days are made from petroleum. It strikes me that if we can drink from bottles made from the same stuff as oil slicks without even flinching, we can get used to drinking from bottles made from trash. And we can toast an important step on the road to energy independence when we do.

Politicians and more on the march at Sunday's Northwest Side Irish Parade

Parades and politicians go together like peanut butter and jelly or (to be seasonal) corned beef and cabbage. Some pictures of the groups supporting Northwest Side aldermanic runoff candidates can be found on page one.

State Senator John Mulroe had a large group marching down Northwest Highway.

So did Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky:


The best parades mix the serious and the silly. This, for example, was not the Grand Marshall of this year's Northwest Side Irish Parade, the banner notwithstanding:


The real Grand Marshalls of this year's Northwest Side Irish Parade were Brother Konrad Diebold and Dr. Joe Schmidt, the President and Principal, respectively, of Chicago's St. Patrick High School.

St. Pat's is observing its 150th anniversary this year.

Sights and sounds of the 2011 Northwest Side Irish Parade

The Notre Dame Resurrection Marching Band participated in this year's Northwest Side Irish Parade.








A group of athletes from Notre Dame College Prep also marched in the parade. With that group were Head Football Coach and Athletic Director Mike Hennessey and Coach Joe Gale, Chair of the school's physical education department.






The Northwest Side Irish Parade forms up at Onahan School. Onahan's group marched near the front of the parade.




A JROTC group from Foreman High School also participated:





And there's always an interesting variety of costumes on display at any St. Patrick's Day Parade. Today's was certainly no exception:



The spectators sport interesting costumes, too:



And there's always something to learn at a parade. For example, until today, I never knew how to use windshield wipers as a flag waving device.



Special thanks are due my daughter Brigid for volunteering to take all the pictures used in this and all the other posts I've put up about today's parade. She pointed out, not unreasonably, that I take an inordinate number of pictures of my shoes or of fuzzy things that seemed perfectly in focus when viewed through the unaided eye.

As today's posts attest, Brigid's pictures turned out very well. Brigid, however, is a dog fancier. She seems to have taken a disproportionate number of pictures of dogs. It didn't help that the Norwood Park Dog Association participated in the parade. Here are a couple of pictures from that large group:




There was yet one more dog, near the very end of the parade, who had to be photographed. Descriptions of this creature would have been scoffed at unless accompanied by this indisputable proof that a dog can achieve this prodigious size:


Brigid advises me that this is an Irish Wolfhound. It looks more like a Whole-Pack-of-Wolves-Hound to me.