Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 20m 04s of daytime. The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred fifty-first day.
The Whitewater Unified School Board meets tonight in closed session beginning at 6:30 PM, with open session scheduled for 7 PM. Whitewater’s Library Board also meets at 6:30 PM.
(A necessary condition of a good government is that it has sound policies. A second condition is that it faithfully follows those policies, should they be sound. Anything less is a provocation.)
On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach the Mississippi: “Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Early birds awoke to a treat today at The Atlantic‘s website: William Langewiesche’s extraordinary Vanished: How Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Disappeared (“The explanation lies not in the sea but on land—in Malaysia, where officials know more than they dare to say”):
1. The Disappearance
at 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator. He flew it frequently, and often posted to online forums about his hobby. In the cockpit, Fariq would have been deferential to him, but Zaharie was not known for being overbearing.
The arrangement was standard. Zaharie’s transmissions were a bit unusual. At 1:01 a.m. he radioed that they had leveled off at 35,000 feet—a superfluous report in radar-surveilled airspace where the norm is to report leaving an altitude, not arriving at one. At 1:08 the flight crossed the Malaysian coastline and set out across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Zaharie again reported the plane’s level at 35,000 feet.Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed in on a waypoint near the start of Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed, “Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one-two-zero-decimal-nine. Good night.” Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” He did not read back the frequency, as he should have, but otherwise the transmission sounded normal. It was the last the world heard from MH370. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Minh or answered any of the subsequent attempts to raise them.