I went to my first Cubs game tonight after not entering the park for an entire season. As I write this, they're up 8-0 over the Reds going into the 9th. But I'm not there, because I didn't dress appropriately. By the end of the 4th inning my teeth were shivering. It's April; 8°C is not that unusual.
I'll be back, when it's warmer. Possibly by then the Cubs won't be in first place anymore. I think it's going to be a weird season.
Here we go:
It's also a nice day outside, so Parker will probably get two hours of walks in.
Crains reported today that a 0.93-hectare hunk of Addison Street directly across from Wrigley Field will finally become the nightmarish eyesore in the neighborhood the Ricketts family always wanted:
The deal was completed after two foreclosure suits against the seller of the site, Steven Schultz of Preferred Equities, were resolved, Rossi said.
By gaining control of the 2.3-acre site, the M&R venture is on the verge of starting a development first announced by Schultz in 2007, before a real estate crash and foreclosure suits stalled the project.
The development, formerly known as Addison Park on Clark, will cost more than $150 million and include 148 luxury apartments, 405 parking spaces and 150,000 square feet of retail. The retail space will include a movie theater, fitness club and restaurants...
Yeah, but it's huge, it doesn't look like anything around it, and it barely improves upon the vacant buildings and parking lots that occupy the site right now.
Can't wait.
Stuff to read later:
OK, conference call is ending. Time to perambulate the pooch.
This weekend I've had a lot going on, resulting in yet another blog miss on Saturday.
Friday was C2E2; Friday night was Whiskyfest; yesterday was a pair of rehearsals for Apollo After Hours.
Today? Errands, mainly. And catching up on stuff—like the news.
Sometimes my life is just this exciting.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won their respective Illinois primary elections yesterday. And in other news:
- Turns out, a strong social safety net leads to lower mortality, and because poor, mostly-white areas in the U.S. voted theirs down to minuscule levels, poor, white people are not doing well.
- When you vote against your own party in a hot battle with the opposition governor, and the governor wins that battle, that's a career-limiting move. Illinois representative Ken Dunkin (D-Chicago) got spanked hard for doing that last night. Good.
- A guy got charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly jamming cell phones on the CTA Red Line.
- President Obama nominated an old white guy to the Supreme Court this morning, flummoxing Senate Republicans who want to stonewall the process.
- For no reason anyone can determine, the city seems to be waging a war against valet parking companies. Businesses are annoyed.
- The Daily WTF thought President Obama sounded like an idiot boss on the subject of cell-phone encryption. Even John Oliver thought so.
- London is using pigeons with tiny backpacks to measure air pollution. No, really.
- Marco Rubio's friends say he's a lazy, devious little twerp—on the record. He's also dropped out of the 2016 race, and will probably be out of politics for a couple elections.
- Donald Trump's butler probably thought he was helping his boss by giving an interview to the Times, but...well...
- The Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) is this weekend. Here's what to see.
Time to write some documentation. Whee.
Oh, you crazy kids. This is a short list of what happened Saturday afternoon and evening in the area around Wrigley Field:
1:26PM — Dust off the ambulance. We have a female unconscious outside of Sluggers World Class Sports Bar, 3540 N Clark.
2:16PM — Callers at Addison and Halsted report seeing a man with a gun in his pocket. He is the first of many persons who will be described as wearing green clothing.
11:26PM — Recommendation: Don’t drink on the public way. Especially in front of the police station. Citation issued. 850 W Addison.
1:50AM — Hey! Remember that car that the police were impounding at Addison and Sheffield? Yeah, well, two women got into it and drove away. They've been caught and arrested at Belmont and Sheffield.
For all that, this year arrests and ambulance calls were way down from years past. Come on, Millennials, you're slacking.
I really, really like the Original Pronunciation movement started by David and Ben Crystal. Through analysis and performance, they're trying to understand Shakespeare's plays as audiences 400 years ago would have understood them.
The Crystals are back in the news with the upcoming publication of the Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation this June. The Atlantic has the story:
It’s a book, a guide to Shakespeare’s first folio, that Crystal has been working on for 12 years (on and off, because, as he notes, “it’s deadly boring” to put a dictionary together). That work involved, essentially, linguistic sleuthing: Crystal started by looking at the words that might have originally rhymed, based on rhyme schemes and the words’ current pronunciations, and then cross-referenced them against other appearances of those same words in Shakespeare’s corpus.
The resulting dictionary is meant, he explains, as a resource for anyone who wants to understand Shakespeare’s plays and poems not as amber-frozen relics of literary history, but as works that have evolved along with English itself. “I’m not suggesting for a moment that Original Pronunciation replaces other approaches to Shakespeare,” Crystal says. “It simply is an extra tool in the kit that you use when you’re putting on a play.”
And OP doesn’t simply add dimensions to Shakespeare’s work (or, for that matter, to Marlowe’s, and Jonson’s, and Webster’s). It can also help modern audiences simply to parse the plays, to tease out basic meanings that have been eroded in time. In Henry IV Part I, for example, Falstaff tells Hal, “Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.” The line would seem, Crystal points out, to make very little sense—unless you understand that “reason” was pronounced, in Shakespeare’s English, as “raisin,” and that “raisin” was a synonym for “blackberry.”
I have, of course, pre-ordered the book.
Here are the Crystals giving a demonstration: