Events

Welcome to stop #49 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery closed in August 2023. Brewery: MyGrain Brewing., 50 E. Jefferson St., JolietTrain line: Heritage Corridor or Rock Island, JolietTime from Chicago: 70 minutes (Zone H)Distance from station: At the station One of the subtle (to American audiences, anyway) bits of satire in Simon Pegg's 2013 movie The World's End is the sameness of the pubs that the characters visit. They have the same faux-handwriting, faux-chalk menu boards; the same layouts...

While I look out my hermetically-sealed office window at some beautiful September weather in Chicago (another argument for working from home), I have a lot of news to digest: The infrastructure bill unveiled in the US Senate this morning would give $66 billion to Amtrak, which desperately needs the money. Josh Marshall argues that social-group identity drives resistance to vaccination. Brooke Harrington elaborates by pointing out that people who are conned usually can't admit to being conned. In...

Fifty years ago today, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar put on the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden: It was the first major charity concert of its kind — the Concert for Bangladesh. In that corner of South Asia, civil war, cyclone and floods had created a humanitarian disaster. "There are six million displaced Bengalis, most of them suffering from malnutrition, cholera and also other diseases that are the result of living under the most dehumanizing conditions," former All Things...

Welcome to stop #48 on the Brews and Choos project. Elder Brewing closed permanently in January 2024. Brewery: Elder Brewing Co., 218 E. Cass Ave., JolietTrain line: Heritage Corridor or Rock Island, JolietTime from Chicago: 70 minutes (Zone H)Distance from station: 500 m Joliet: the end of two train lines. Home of the Big House, the Sting, and a weird little brewery that I will make a point of visiting again. When Andrew Polykandriotis opened Elder Brewing in 2017, he saw the brewery as a part of the...

Welcome to stop #47 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Imperial Oak Brewing., 501 Willow Rd., Willow SpringsTrain line: Heritage Corridor, Willow SpringsTime from Chicago: 32 minutes (Zone D)Distance from station: 100 m It is very important to remember, if you plan to visit either of the breweries along Metra's Heritage Corridor line, that they run only three trains only from Chicago on weekday afternoons, and none to Chicago. So when I visited Imperial Oak Brewing yesterday, I took the first...

Via Andrew Sullivan:

We have delightful summer weather in Chicago today, and Cassie has a ride home from school, so tonight I'm going to add three breweries to the Brews & Choos list. Look for the write-ups this weekend.

A few examples of idiocy, bad intent, or general ineptness crossed my desk this morning: Apparently Illinois has an "Israeli Boycott Restrictions Committee" of our investment policy board. Despite the (very Jewish) founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream explaining one more time that criticism of Israel's government is not anti-Semitic, the Committee wants to divest from Unilever to protest the ice cream manufacturer's divestment from the occupied West Bank. Now, why would anyone think Simone Biles doesn't...

Not exactly like clockwork, but still at least in the month of July, I've got the latest semi-annual sunrise chart for Chicago. Enjoy.

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) An interesting thing happens in 2021: on November 6th at 7:30:11, we'll have one of the latest sunrises possible—indeed, the latest sunrise in 47 years. I found only one occasion from 1975 to 2040 when the sun rises later: at 7:30:35 on 6 November 2032. The last time the sun rose after 7:30 was at 7:31:26 on 26 February 1974, after Chicago started daylight saving time...