Events

Because it's the first day of summer, I'm only posting fun things right now. First, I'd like to thank Uncle Roger for upping my egg fried rice game. Here's my lunch from earlier today. Fuiyoooh! Around the time I made this delicious and nutritious lunch, a friend who teaches music in a local elementary school sent me a photo of the family of ducks she escorted from one side of the school to the other: In other good news: Believe it or not, today is the 55th anniversary of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club...

The outside temperature when I went to sleep last night was around 29°C, so I had the air conditioning on. It's now about 20°C and falling, so I have the windows open—and I'm wearing a sweater. Today is the first day of summer, too.

We're still grappling with the horror of last week's mass murder in Uvalde, Texas. Nick Meyer, a retired lawyer who grew up there, shares our horror but not our surprise: First, you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and...

I've finally gotten back to working on the final series of place-data imports for Weather Now. One of the data sources comes as a 20,000-line Excel spreadsheet. Both because I wanted to learn how to read Excel files, and to make updating the Gazetteer transparent, I wrote the first draft of the import module using the DocumentFormat.OpenXml package from Microsoft. The recommended way of reading a cell using that package looks like this: private static string? CellText( WorkbookPart workbook...

Welcome to stop #75 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Maplewood Brewery, 2717 N Maplewood Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, Logan SquareTime from Chicago: 16 minutesDistance from station: 1.7 km I've actually visited Maplewood many times in the past, but not since starting the Brews & Choos project. The pandemic got in the way, especially after it killed Fat Willy's Rib Shack and nearly killed the movie theater around the corner. I finally returned to the movie theater on Wednesday to see...

Cassie and I spent almost all day outside yesterday, starting at Puptown: Including pool time and some new friends: Followed by a 3½-kilometer walk to Spiteful Brewing, where one of us read a book and the other napped: Today, though she doesn't know it yet, she will get a bath.

First run

In 2008, Chicago gave up its parking meter revenue for 75 years in exchange for $1.16 billion, which made no sense at the time and got widely criticized by everyone who knows what "Net Present Value" means. Guess what? The deal still sucks: In their failed attempt to block Bally’s $1.7 billion River West casino, downtown City Council members warned the deal was being rushed — just like the one that privatized Chicago parking meters — and that it would end up being “even worse” for taxpayers. That dire...