Good morning.

Wednesday will bring an even chance of snow to Whitewater this afternoon, with a high temperature of twenty degrees.

It’s Lincoln’s 205th birthday. On September 30, 1859, Lincoln spoke in Milwaukee to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, the last portion of which is especially moving:

….It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Here’s Puzzability’s Wednesday, Valentine’s week game:

This Week’s Game — February 10-14

Candy and Flowers

We’ve gotten you two gifts every day this Valentine’s week. For each day, we started with the name of a chocolate brand plus the name of a flower. Each day’s clue shows the brand name and the flower name melded together in a string of letters, with each in order but intermingled with the other.

Example:

LDOILVEY

Answer:

Dove/lily

What to Submit:

Submit the brand and the flower, in that order (as “Dove/lily” in the example), for your answer.

Wednesday, February 12

CAVIDOBLUERTY

Good morning.

Visitors to my sites are likely to see a banner at the bottom of the page for 2.11.14 about The Day We Fight Back (https://thedaywefightback.org), a widespread, grassroots effort to curtail NSA encroachment on citizens’ rights. Thousands of websites are participating, across America, with easy means for readers to contact their Congressional representatives to demand an end to NSA abuses.

Here at home, Whitewater will have a sunny day with a high of eleven.

There’s a Park and Rec Board meeting today at 5:30 PM.

On 2.11.1861, Lincoln leaves for Washington. D.C.:

On this day in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln leaves home in Springfield, Illinois, and embarks on his journey to Washington, D.C.

On a cold, rainy morning, Lincoln boarded a two-car private train loaded with his family’s belongings, which he himself had packed and bound. Hiw wife, Mary Lincoln, was in St. Louis on a shopping trip, and joined him later in Indiana. It was a somber occasion. Lincoln was leaving his home and heading into the maw of national crisis. Since he had been elected, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union. Lincoln knew that his actions upon entering office would likely lead to civil war.

He spoke to a crowd before departing: “Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being… I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail… To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”

A bystander reported that the president-elect’s “breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely command his feelings.” Indeed, Lincoln’s words were prophetic—a funeral train carried him back to Springfield just over four years later.

Wisconsin’s legislature has been turbulent recently, but more so in our territorial past:

[February 11th] 1842 – Shooting in the Legislature
On this date the Territorial Legislature of Wisconsin met in Madison, only to be interrupted by the shooting of one member by another. The legislature was debating the appointment of Enos S. Baker for sheriff of Grant County when Charles Arndt made a sarcastic remark about Baker’s colleague, James Vineyard. After an uproar, adjournment was declared and when Arndt approached Vineyard’s desk, a fight broke out during which Vineyard drew his revolver and shot Arndt. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]

Puzzability‘s Valentine’s series continues:

This Week’s Game — February 10-14

Candy and Flowers

We’ve gotten you two gifts every day this Valentine’s week. For each day, we started with the name of a chocolate brand plus the name of a flower. Each day’s clue shows the brand name and the flower name melded together in a string of letters, with each in order but intermingled with the other.

Example:

LDOILVEY

Answer:

Dove/lily

What to Submit:

Submit the brand and the flower, in that order (as “Dove/lily” in the example), for your answer.

Tuesday, February 11

GTODUILVIPA

Good morning.

Monday will be sunny and cold, with a high of eight degrees.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6 PM.

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently took a picture of the Martian night sky, with Earth and the Moon visible:

This view of the twilight sky and Martian horizon taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover includes Earth as the brightest point of light in the night sky. Earth is a little left of center in the image, and our moon is just below Earth. Two annotated versions of this image are also available in Figures 1 and 2.
Researchers used the left eye camera of Curiosity’s Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture this scene about 80 minutes after sunset on the 529th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (Jan. 31, 2014). The image has been processed to remove effects of cosmic rays.

A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct, bright “evening stars.”

The distance between Earth and Mars when Curiosity took the photo was about 99 million miles (160 million kilometers).

On this day in 1763, Wisconsin – once French – becomes English:

1763 – Treaty of Paris Cedes Wisconsin to England
On this date the Treaty of Paris ceded formerly French-controlled land, including the Wisconsin region, to England. [Source: Avalon Project at Yale University]

Puzzability begins a new game series today, with a Valentine’s holiday theme:

This Week’s Game — February 10-14

Candy and Flowers

We’ve gotten you two gifts every day this Valentine’s week. For each day, we started with the name of a chocolate brand plus the name of a flower. Each day’s clue shows the brand name and the flower name melded together in a string of letters, with each in order but intermingled with the other.

Example:

LDOILVEY

Answer:

Dove/lily

What to Submit:

Submit the brand and the flower, in that order (as “Dove/lily” in the example), for your answer.

Monday, February 10

LIRNODSET

Good morning.

We will enjoy a mostly sunny day in Whitewater with a high of fifteen degrees. Sunrise is 7 AM today, and sunset 5:16 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with seventy-nine percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1950, a Wisconsin senator levels an accusation:

Joseph Raymond McCarthy, a relatively obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, announces during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he has in his hand a list of 205 communists who have infiltrated the U.S. State Department. The unsubstantiated declaration, which was little more than a publicity stunt, suddenly thrust Senator McCarthy into the national spotlight.

Asked to reveal the names on the list, the reckless and opportunistic senator named officials he determined guilty by association, such as Owen Lattimore, an expert on Chinese culture and affairs who had advised the State Department. McCarthy described Lattimore as the “top Russian spy” in America.

These and other equally shocking accusations prompted the Senate to form a special committee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, to investigate the matter. The committee found little to substantiate McCarthy’s charges, but McCarthy nevertheless touched a nerve in the American public, and during the next two years he made increasingly sensational charges, even attacking President Harry S. Truman’s respected former secretary of state, George C. Marshall….

On 2.9.1870, America gets a National Weather Service:

1870 – National Weather Service Authorized
On this date President Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution authorizing a National Weather Service, which had long been a dream of Milwaukee scientist Increase Lapham. Lapham, 19th-century Wisconsin’s premier natural scientist, proposed a national weather service after he mapped data contributed over telegraph lines in the UpperMidwest and realized that weather might be predicted in advance. He was concerned about avoiding potential disasters to Great Lakes shipping and Wisconsin farming, and his proposal was approved by Congress and authorized on this date. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Good morning.

We’ll have snow today in Whitewater, with an accumulation of one to two inches, and a high of seventeen.

It was a good day in Sochi for Sage Kotsenburg, who won a snowboarding gold:

Here’s his happy, justifiably proud tweet afterward:

WOW!! I just won the Olympics!! Bringing back the first Gold here to the USA! Love seeing all the support from everyone YOU RULE!!

— sage kotsenburg (@sagekotsenburg) February 8, 2014

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and (since his retirement from competitive chess in 2005) a human rights activist, as a fine post online about politics and sport: Putin’s Sochi and Hitler’s Berlin: The Love Affair Between Dictators and the Olympic Games. Kasparov is a powerful, succinct writer, and in this essay he nicely addresses political manipulation of sporting events, among other topics.

Significantly, Kasparov isn’t opposed to the Olympics, or even to the Olympics in Sochi, but to their politicization under Putin:

Do not mistake the epic graft in Sochi as unusual or incidental. Corruption is the overriding principle of Putin’s 14 years in power and looting the Russian treasury and the Russian people is itself the goal. For all the foolish attempts to interpret Putin’s geopolitical strategy and personal ideology, the common denominator is always whether or not an action helps him maintain the cash flow that in turn enables him and his clique to stay in power.

Of comparisons to Hitler generally – when legitimate or when overwrought, here’s Kasparov’s spot-on assessment:

I will detour for a moment because this where I often see interviewers and pundits roll their eyes. The phrase “Putin is no Hitler!” forms on their lips before the word “Berlin” is completed. It is a fascinating development in historical ignorance that nearly any mention of Hitler or the Nazis is now ritually scoffed at, from professional journalists to anonymous tweets. “Godwin’s Law,” which doesn’t even say what most wits seem to think it says, is immediately invoked, as if the slow and public evolution of a German populist politician into history’s most infamous monster is beyond rational contemplation.

Of course the evil of the Nazis is beyond comparison. Of course no one can rival the murderous fiend Hitler became in the 1940s. Of course no one expects a new world war or an attempt to emulate the Holocaust. But summarily discarding the lessons of Hitler’s political rise, how he wielded power, and how he was ignored or abetted abroad is foolish and dangerous. In 1936, even Hitler was no Hitler. He was already viewed with suspicion by many inside and outside Germany, yes, but he stood beaming in that Berlin Olympic stadium and received accolades from world leaders and stiff-armed salutes from the world’s athletes. There is no doubt this triumph on the world stage emboldened the Nazis and strengthened their ambitions.

Powerful, all of it, and well worth reading and bookmarking.

For chess players in particular, I’d recommend also Kasparov’s The Bobby Fischer Defense, a review of Frank Brady’s Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.

Kasparov so evidently understands and respects Fischer, all the while appreciating Fischer’s later, sad decline into paranoia.