Datebook
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS. The 48th annual Grammy Awards are doled out in Los Angeles. There are 108 categories in all, even one for Best Album Notes. Stars will glitter (Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, U2, Jamie Foxx, Faith Hill, and Coldplay, for starters), and the show will include a tribute to back-in-the-day funk-rockers Sly and the Family Stone.
LET IT SNOW. Judges select the best snow sculpture from the work of 15 international teams at the 57th Sapporo Snow Festival on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. A ski marathon and a symphony orchestra concert conclude the festivities on February 12.
HOMAGE TO GORE-TEX. The National Inventors Hall of Fame announces its 2006 inductees in Washington, D.C. Among inventions in the spotlight will be Gore-Tex fabric, coaxial cable, fiberglass, and the intravascular stent.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9
A BUSH FRIEND FROM EUROPE. President Lech Kaczynski of Poland, a conservative who took office in December, meets with President Bush at the White House. Poland has been a stalwart Bush administration ally, sending a contingent of 900 troops to Iraq. Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party has struggled to form a ruling coalition and has floated the possibility of holding new elections this spring.
SCREEN GEMS. The 56th Berlinale, as Berlin's international film festival is known, opens with the premiere of the British-Canadian film Snow Cake, a drama starring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver. The festival, which ends February 19, claims the largest movie audience anywhere, with 150,000 or more tickets sold.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10
BUON GIORNO, TORINO. Flag-waving athletes open the XX Winter Olympiad in Turin, Italy. Some 2,500 competitors, including American heartthrob Bode Miller, vie for 84 medals through February 26 in seven sports: biathlon, bobsled, curling, ice hockey, luge, skating, and skiing (story, Page 30).
CHECK AND MATE. Ten years ago today, chess champion Gary Kasparov lost a game to an IBM supercomputer dubbed Deep Blue. Kasparov went on to win that heavily hyped match in New York, 4 games to 2, but lost to a reprogrammed Deep Blue the following year. While Kasparov (who has since announced his retirement) played computers to ties twice in 2003, the trend has favored the machines. Last year Britain's Michael Adams, then No.6 in the world, managed only one draw in six games against a chess supercomputer named Hydra.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11
THROW ME SOMETHING, MISTER! The first parade of Mardi Gras season steps off in New Orleans as the satirical Krewe du Vieux moves through the battered city's French Quarter with the Hurricane Katrina-inspired theme of "C'est Levee" and the motto "Life's a breach." The krewe promises brass bands, traditional floats, beads, and some attitude ("We've learned that there are nine different types of mold and they all smell worse than a congressional appropriations committee").
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12
ON THE ORIGIN OF DARWIN. Fans of Charles Darwin stage an "evolution teach-in" at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. The occasion: the anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809 (Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day) and the continuing controversy over how evolution is taught in American schools.
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