The American economy gained 225,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 135,000 jobs. That’s pretty good. The headline unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 3.6 percent.

The news on wages wasn’t as great. Hourly wages of blue-collar workers was up 1.6 percent, but when you account for inflation that’s a decline of about 0.6 percent.

BLS does its annual adjustments in the January jobs report, so it’s hard to make any further comparisons—although it’s notable that the absolute number of unemployed people went up substantially from December. Despite the seasonal adjustment, that might be due to the end of temporary holiday work. Or it might just be an artifact of the annual adjustments. In any case, the news on the jobs front remains pretty solid, while the news on the wage front is disappointing.

I got my latest M-protein readings last night:

That’s an increase from 0.25 to 0.49 since the last test a couple of months ago. This is not the best news in the world, but as usual, a single measurement might or might not mean anything. We’ll find out next month if this is an outlier or the start of a trend. If it’s a trend, it probably means I have to switch to a different chemo regimen.

Oddly, this coincided with a sudden spike in my level of lactate dehydrogenase, which has something to do with cell death. But that might be an outlier too. We’ll find out next month.

This is a very calming morning view of the Grand Canal in Venice. I took it on a trip to Italy in 2002.

The musical accompaniment is a harpsichord sonata by Antonio Soler. It’s from a 1957 recording by Fernando Valenti, who plays it more slowly than normal, but also with much more than the usual clarity and definition.

I’ve been puzzled by the whole mattress-in-a-box phenomenon for a while, and yesterday’s calamitous IPO of Casper has got me thinking about it again.

I get that I’m a boomer and these mattresses are aimed at millennials. Still, a mattress is a mattress. They all come in boxes, and they all get delivered to your house one way or the other. So all that matters is how good the mattress is. Right? Am I missing something?

Anyway, if you head over to the Casper site, you’ll find that “The Casper”—their original, middle-grade memory foam mattress—costs $1,095 in a queen size. Is that a great deal for a superlative mattress? You can’t trust mattress review sites to tell you, but you can probably trust Wirecutter, and they’re unimpressed: “Although a couple of Casper’s mattresses had a distinct feel that many testers liked, as a whole we think they’re probably overpriced for what they offer.” They recommend seven different foam mattresses ranging from $250 to $2,200—all available online—and none of them are Casper mattresses.

Alternatively, you can look at inexpensive mattresses from ordinary sources like Ikea. Their Myrbacka memory foam mattress will set you back $499 and you can buy it online if you feel like it. They have others at price points a little above and below that. Costco sells all the usual name brands, at prices ranging from $400 up to about $1,000. Sit ’n Sleep, a local chain that’s inescapable around here, sells loads of memory foam mattresses for $500 and up.

So what’s the deal? Casper sells perhaps the ultimate in non-tech merchandise: a mattress. Their quality seems to be OK but nothing great. Their price is also OK but hardly great. They sell online, but so do other folks. And even if you buy in a store, your mattress will still get delivered to you just like a Casper.

And of course, Casper is losing potloads of money. What a surprise. So will someone please tell me: Just what is Casper doing that is supposedly disrupting the mattress industry?

Donald Trump is addressing a room full of Republicans right now, and it’s truly an unprecedented festival of grievance, vengeance, and glorious triumph. And this:

“Had I not fired James Comey…it’s possible we wouldn’t even be standing here right now,” Trump says. “If this happened to President Obama, a lot of people would have been in jail already.”

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) February 6, 2020

Now we’re on to slagging Mitt Romney. This is truly a remarkable display of vituperation from a sitting president. I’m sure we’ll have a greatest hits mashup soon.

UPDATE AT 1:23 PM: It’s finally over. Godalmighty, I’ve never seen something like this before in my life.

POSTSCRIPT: In case you’re curious, Bill Clinton’s post-acquittal speech is here. It’s only two minutes long and ends with this: “I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.” Trump, of course, has never asked and never given.

Today Gallup released the latest version of one of my favorite survey questions:

The reason this question fascinates me is simple: it makes a hash out of the quadrennial deluge of stories telling us that Americans are deeply frustrated with life and are demanding a president who can address their profound angst.

Maybe so. And yet Americans generally seem pretty happy as long as the economy is in good shape. What’s more, there are plenty of other measurements of happiness that tell the same story. As long as you have a steady job, you’re probably feeling OK.

Politically, I assume this is good news for Republicans. On the other hand, it turns out that satisfaction has a very partisan cast this year:

Can Democrats turn their deep gloom into an election win? I don’t know. Stay tuned.

Here’s the headline of every newspaper this morning. Because what better place is there to unleash fury than at a prayer breakfast?

United Artists

I guess it’s official: Donald Trump really can shoot someone and not lose any voters. In fact, they’ll all line up to insist that he never shot anyone in the first place. The GOP is now the Manchurian Party and Winston Smith is their mascot.

Last night, as Donald Trump was taking one of his usual shots at the socialist hellhole of California, I womped up a chart of economic growth by state since the end of the Great Recession. California turned out to be the fastest growing big state in the country.

But you might have missed it, so let’s do it again. This time, though, let’s do growth of per capita GDP so we account for population growth. Here are the results for the ten biggest states in the nation:

This time it’s not even a close call. California is by far the fastest growing state since 2010, posting an increase in per capita state product from $55,000 to $68,000. Trump can throw out all the insults he wants about climate change, immigrants, and regulations, but the numbers don’t lie. California is kicking ass.

One of the other things I did on my Arizona trip was shooting the night sky. Northern Arizona has some of the darkest night skies in the country, so it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity.

The surprising thing about the picture below is that it’s not a composite. Most night sky pictures are. For the sky itself, you have little choice in exposure: you use a shutter speed of 20 seconds with a high ISO and your lens wide open. The problem is that even a flashlight shines like the the sun with an exposure like that, so normally you have to take a picture of the foreground separately and then merge it with the sky. In this case, however, there was a shed about 200 feet behind me with only a single bulb over the door. It barely provided any light at all—which was perfect. It was just enough illumination to look normal even with a super-long exposure.

The moon is way overexposed, but there’s no help for that. I dodged it some with Photoshop, which helped with the clouds, but the moon itself is so blown out that nothing will help it.

Overall, though, this turned into a nice picture. The moon and the clouds are very picturesque, and the warm, shadowy colors of the fence make a very nice foreground. I’ll post more pictures like this one over the next few months.