Events

There's a blizzard outside, which has alarmed Parker to no end (the wind scares him), and my computer is dragging because it's running a virus scan. And I'm having yet another version conflict installing a NuGet package, which is annoying since NuGet is supposed to stop that from happening. Otherwise, just an ordinary Wednesday...

Esquire's Charles Pierce is glad Trump is looking after "shitkickers like you," but he worries that stopping Trump will take more than just a moderate Republican: The only way to stop He, Trump is not, as the Boston Globe so tragically suggests today, to have unenrolled people pick up the Republican ballot and vote for John Kasich. I can't think of a more impotent suggestion than that. In the general scheme of things, Kasich is worse off than either Cruz or Rubio and, also in the general scheme of...

Last Friday, Chicago got up to 17°C, not a record but certainly not what we expect on February 19th. Today it's a more-seasonable 3°C. Tomorrow afternoon we're going up to the same temperature, but with a covering of wet snow, gusty winds, and general unpleasantness. Saturday's forecast? 10°C and sunny. Ah, Spring.

A medium-length list this time: A Megabus exploded outside Chicago yesterday, but that shouldn't scare you away from intercity buses. Let's not forget that Antonin Scalia tried to take the country backwards, and was an intellectual phony on top of it. BBC Radio 4 has just released a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, featuring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer. While Flint, Mich., has bad things in its municipal water supply, Chicago's isn't much better. California tax offices have had to adapt...

It's odd that I haven't posted on a Saturday since January 23rd, and I haven't posted on both weekend days since December 5th-6th. I'm not sure why, really. This time, it's because last night I had a big party, so I didn't have any time to post. Today I have no creativity. But I still wonder at the pattern.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a light breeze: It's so windy that the Randolph Street Bridge is closed. Cromidas saw this too. Officials told her they were worried debris from a nearby construction site (the same one where a wall collapse a few months ago) would be blown into traffic. Fire officials tweeted that building occupants at 150, 180 and 191 N. Wacker Drive were all evacuated because of debris falling from the construction site at 150 N. Riverside. It's so windy that a woman almost blew away...

The official temperature at O'Hare got up to 15°C this afternoon, which you'd expect in early April and not in mid-February. That's the good news. The bad news is the warm air mass is being driven by converging jet streams more or less directly over Chicago, giving us 67 km/h winds gusting to—I am not making this up—100 km/h. Buildings in the Loop are being evacuated because windows are popping out. Also, people are giving cranes wide berths. Have I mentioned that anthropogenic climate change will (a)...

Crain's lists five Chicago-area distilleries, including Few (my favorite), that have run out of room: The West Loop's CH Distillery plans to build a 20,000-square-foot distillery in Pilsen on the site of the old bottling building of the long-defunct Schoenhofen Brewery. It aims to boost capacity to more than 100,000 9-liter cases per year, up from about 8,000 in its current distillery and tasting room. The two-and-a-half-year-old distillery, whose top products are vodka, rum and two types of gin...

New Republic's Jeet Heer points out how the Republican Party's "Sourthern Strategy," going all the way back to the 1950s, led more or less directly to Donald Trump's campaign: Far from being a “cancer” on Republicanism, or some jihadi-style radicalizer, he’s the natural evolutionary product of Republican platforms and strategies that stretch back to the very origins of modern conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s. The racist voters swarming around Trump didn’t just pop out of nowhere. The Republicans have...

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym yesterday ordered Apple, Inc., to bypass security on the iPhone 5c owned by the San Bernadino shooters. Apple said no: In his statement, [Apple CEO Tim] Cook called the court order an “unprecedented step” by the federal government. “We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand,” he wrote. “The F.B.I. may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would...