Events

With perfect weather and a D&D-themed pub crawl today, posting will be...suboptimal. I promise at least one photo later this weekend.

The National Climate Prediction Center has released its outlooks for the next few months, and they look mixed for Chicago: For the summer months of June, July, and August, the outlook for Illinois is [equal chances] for rainfall and an increased chance of being above-normal on temperatures. It is a rare combination in Illinois to have a warmer than normal summer without being drier than normal as well. For September, October, November, southern Illinois has an increased chance of being drier than...

It's crystal-clear and 20°C in Chicago right now, so blogging will lag a bit as I spend all of my free time outside.

YouTube user John Meyer has found two films of boat rides on the Chicago River and into the lake. This one is from 1956: And this one is from 1983:

Too many things to read before lunchtime: Chicago's NPR affiliate, WBEZ, has a new mobile app. There's a new mobile device that functions like a Babel fish. Republicans really don't care about your unborn baby. Serbian authorities colluded with a Dubai-based property developer to illegally destroy an entire neighborhood overnight. A snarky Republican writing for Bloomberg actually makes a good point about why the TSA may be taking much longer to screen you than before. It looks like your brain naturally...

Bullet the Bison takes this folk song literally: The Dallas NBC affiliate has more.

On this day in 1954, the Supreme Court handed down Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which ended "separate but equal" education after finding that the two concepts are antagonistic. Also on this day in 1954, the City of Chicago announced plans for the Stateway Gardens housing project, which eventually replaced an African-American slum with a high-rise hell-on-earth housing African Americans. As historian John R. Schmidt comments, "Maybe the new public housing projects were an attempt to keep...