Events

About that new phone, I have to say, I am very impressed with T-Mobile's new 5G network: Also note that temperature bug in the upper-left corner. Yes, it was 26°C yesterday afternoon in Chicago. For comparison, October 10th has a normal high temperature of 18.2°C. June 7th has a normal high of 26°C. I hope autumn actually starts sometime this month.

ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio dropped a bombshell description about how Rutherford County, Tenn., treats its Black children. That the main perpetrators of the violence against children under color of law appear to have a Christianist view of the world does not surprise me in the least: In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which...

Welcome to stop #59 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: District Brew Yards., 417 N. Ashland Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Pink and Green Lines, Ashland Time from Chicago: 6 minutesDistance from station: 400 m District Brew Yards is just up the road from All Rise Brewing, but that road is Ashland Avenue, you have to go under a dark and scary railroad bridge to get from one to the other, and the Fulton Industrial District doesn't inspire feelings of warmth and happiness at night. I recommend you go...

And yes, Cassie posed naked for this one:

Welcome to stop #58 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: All Rise Brewing Co., 235 N. Ashland Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Pink and Green Lines, Ashland Time from Chicago: 6 minutesDistance from station: 200 m In terms of breweries and distilleries accessible from one Metra station, mine (Ravenswood) tops the list. But the single densest train station of any kind is actually Ashland on the CTA Pink and Green lines. Two stops from Clinton, which is close to both Ogilvie and Union Station, and three...

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, which burned for two days and left 100,000 people homeless. But only for a short time; by 1874, when the city had a second big fire, our population had already grown by about that number. Flash forward to now: Time Out rated Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood second-coolest in the world, after Nørrebro, Copenhagen, and beating out Leith in Edinburgh; Chelsea in New York City; and Dublin 8, just to name three. A pre-pandemic article from the...

So many things this morning, including a report not yet up on WBEZ's website about the last Sears store in Chicago. (I'll find it tomorrow.) Jennifer Rubin advises XPOTUS "critics and democracy lovers" to leave the Republican Party. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely caved against a unified Democratic Party and will vote to extend the (probably-unconstitutional) debt limit another three months. An abolitionist's house from 1869 may get landmark approval today from the Commission on...

After 2½ years and one unfortunate crunching sound last week, I've finally gotten a new phone. I decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy S21. So far, I like it, though with any new hardware you also get new software. Some of the basic apps work differently. Switching phones got really easy in the past couple of years, though. The only dicey part came when I had to transfer all my multifactor codes over. And I have to keep my old phone handy for a while in case I missed one. Now my eyes hurt from squinting...

Remy Porter, owner of the hilarious blog The Daily WTF, responded to Facebook's catastrophic BGP update by pointing out how software actually gets made: IT in general, and software in specific, is a rather bizarre field in terms of how skills work. If, for example, you wanted to get good at basketball, you might practice free-throws. As you practice, you'd expect the number of free-throws you make to gradually increase. It'll never be 100%, but the error rate will decline, the success rate will...

Josh Marshall points out that the harm Facebook causes comes from its basic design, making a quick fix impossible: First, set aside all morality. Let’s say we have a 16 year old girl who’s been doing searches about average weights, whether boys care if a girl is overweight and maybe some diets. She’s also spent some time on a site called AmIFat.com. Now I set you this task. You’re on the other side of the Facebook screen and I want you to get her to click on as many things as possible and spend as much...