Events

I officially gave up on a couple of books this week, with mixed feelings about both.  Both are massive biographies; both are considered outstanding examples of their craft; and both started putting me to sleep somewhere between page 257 (Ron Chernow's Hamilton) and 632 (Robert Caro's The Power Broker). And man, I really tried with Caro, but seeing that huge book sitting on my bedside table for more than two years with a bookmark just past the half-way point made me sad. I don't drop books often. I gave...

If, as expected, Chicago gets no measurable snow by 6pm tonight, we will set a new record for the latest measurable snowfall of the cold season (July 1st to June 30th, believe it or not), and the second-longest stretch without snow in recorded history: On Monday...Chicago tied the record, which dates back to Dec. 20, 2012. There is no snow in the forecast until possibly well beyond Christmas. There has been some snow so far this season. But instead of having the first typical snowfall earlier in the...

US Senator Joe Manchin (D?-WV), the 74-year-old multimillionaire most recently re-elected in 2018 with just 290,000 votes (i.e., 0.08% of the US population), announced yesterday that he simply could not support the President's chief legislative goal for the current Congress, even though he apparently said he totally could before his last conversation with some random coal executive. Because the US Senate is evenly divided between the two parties, with Vice President Harris as the deciding vote in case...

The Washington Post breezes in with a month-by-month interactive feature: [E]vidence increasingly shows that historic heat waves, monster rain events and ultra-intense storms are exacerbated by the warmer air and water of our overheating planet. “The only two truisms when it comes to extremes in climate change are that almost everywhere: The hot hots are getting hotter and more frequent, and the wet wets are getting wetter and more frequent,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA who...

I've just added two places to my shortlist of vacation spots once travel becomes a little easier. On Tuesday, I saw Japan's entry for this year's Academy Award for best foreign film, Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー). Most of it takes place in Hiroshima, Japan. Clearly director Ryusuke Hamaguchi loves the city. For obvious reasons most of the central parts of Hiroshima only date back 70 years, but the hills and islands surrounding the postwar downtown look like the Pacific Northwest. And this morning, the New...

The US Senate has confirmed former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who lives just a couple of blocks for me (for now), as the new US Ambassador to Japan: The Senate voted 48-to-21 to confirm Emanuel, with the longtime political operator receiving support — as well as opposition — from Democrats and Republicans alike. The vote came in the middle of the night after Democrats struck a deal with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who agreed to lift a hold he had placed on 32 of President Joe Biden’s nominees in...

First run

I will now take a break from my ongoing struggles to make Blazorise play nicely with Open ID authentication so I can read these: Block Club Chicago, which has essentially taken over from the Chicago Tribune in local news coverage as the latter is slowly strangled by a hedge fund, investigated the Amazon carryall boxes that seem to pop up everywhere these days. Paul Krugman spends some time explaining inflation in general and our current round of it in specific. Gordon Ramsay has opened his third...