Events

The New Republic yesterday declared the British men's suit to be the island's greatest invention: We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colors of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck. It said something and it meant something to men around the world; it said and meant so much that they would discard their local dress, the costumes of millennia, their culture and their link to their ancestors, to dress up like English...

John Judis explains: In 2014, about 46 percent of Hispanics are eligible to vote. The rest are not citizens or are under 18. By contrast, voter eligibility among whites is in the high seventy percent and among African Americans is in the low seventy percent range. The other factor is turnout. In 2012, only about 39 percent of eligible Hispanics voted compared to a little over sixty percent of Anglos and African-Americans. So in the 2012 election, and most likely in the 2014 election, in spite of...

The final score from my FitBit challenge over the weekend was: friend, 33,800; me, 37,800. Yesterday I gave Parker 3 hours of walks and also walked home from dinner instead of taking public transit or a Divvy, which got me almost to 23,800 steps (and 17.7 km) for the day. There was a cost. My feet hurt, Parker was lethargic this morning, and I ate too much. And this week it's not likely I'll get 10,000 steps in every day this week because I've got an all-day meeting Wednesday. Which is probably a good...

A couple weeks ago I updated SourceTree and discovered I could no longer connect to my Bitbucket repositories through SSL. This is because of the Poodle defect in SSL 3.0. (I'll skip the explanation.) The failure looked like this: In any event, the only Atlassian forum entry on the subject gave me only partial guidance. The problem, which took me some time to uncover, turned out to be that I had Mercurial 2.7 lurking on my machine. Uninstalling it and SourceTree, then installing Mercurial 3.0 and...

Following a friend's example, I got a FitBit this week. The same friend has challenged me for the weekend, getting 15,300 steps to my 14,000 yesterday, and going hiking this afternoon. Ah, but I have a dog, you see. And the weather is perfect. So far today I've walked 15,400 steps (11.6 km), almost all of it with Parker, and we're about to go out for another walk. Here's walk #1, this morning, in Lincoln Park: And walk #2, at lunchtime, down the Lakefront Path: I got my 15,000-step badge on Friday, my...

The Nag's Head, Angel: Coincidentally, this pub has the same name as my go-to pub when I lived in Hoboken, N.J., 15 years ago.

I'm a little busy today, preparing for three different projects even though I can only actually do 1.5 of them. So as is common on days like this, I have a list of things I don't have time to read: Jeff Atwood suggests ways of minimizing online douchery. The Economist Gulliver blog maps how many times French people kiss when greeting each other. Hint: It's more than Americans. Pilot and journalist Jim Fallows explains yesterday's aviation accident outside D.C. involving a helicopter and a small plane....

Cranky Flier, a nerd after my own heart, sees so much missed potential with the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, an airplane that makes its last commercial passenger flight this weekend: This week marks the final commercial flight of the last of the Douglas widebody aircraft. When KLM flight 672 from Montreal touches down in Amsterdam at 635a on Sunday, the era of the trijet in airline service will officially end. I’ll miss the MD-11, but today I’m going to focus on the negative. The MD-11 was a symbol of...

The total lunar eclipse two weeks ago required getting up early in the morning and trying to find the moon through trees and Chicago street lights. Late this afternoon, Chicago (and most of North America to the west) will get a much better show from the moon as it partially obscures the sun. Starting around 16:35 CDT this afternoon, the moon will creep in front of the sun, reaching maximum eclipse right at sunset (17:59 CDT). Of course, this being Chicago, and despite the crystal-clear blue skies above...

This is pretty alarming: A gunman has been shot and killed inside Parliament Hill’s Centre Block and police are swarming over downtown Ottawa hunting for other possible suspects after several shootings Wednesday morning — including one at the War Memorial that wounded a soldier and another near the Rideau Centre mall. The War Memorial shooting occurred just before 10 a.m., and the shooter then apparently drove to the gates of Parliament Hill and ran inside the buildings. A witness also reported that...