Events

Welcome to stop #63 on the Brews and Choos project. Distillery: Koval, 4241 N. Ravenswood Ave., ChicagoTrain line: UP North, Ravenswood (also CTA Brown Line, Irving Park)Time from Chicago: 13 minutes (Zone B)Distance from station: 1.2 km (Metra), 500 m (CTA) Koval is the granddaddy of Chicago distilleries. Conventional wisdom is that Koval's owners, Drs. Robert and Sonat Birnecker, taught all the other Chicago distillers how to make spirits. Conventional wisdom is also that everyone else does it better....

Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle has some theories about cooking an entire bird for Thanksgiving: The time is here again when millions of Americans anguish over a nearly impossible culinary task, in hopes of producing (by any objective measure) an insipid result. I speak of roasting an entire turkey. This yearly project dates back many centuries, to an individual named Satan, who specializes in devising infernal tortures. Roasting a turkey involves placing an irregular form — meaty lobes, bony...

Welcome to stop #62 on the Brews and Choos project. Note: A massive fire destroyed the brewery on 21 February 2022. Brewery: Twisted Hippo, 2925 W. Montrose Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Brown Line, FranciscoTime from Chicago: 38 minutesDistance from station: 700 m I will say this: Twisted Hippo has awesome beer names, and I respect the way they portray Africa's deadliest animal as kind of cute. And inebriated. I was less impressed by their brewpub than I had hoped, though. It seemed more like a suburban...

I finally got a chance to re-edit some of the photos I took in London last weekend. Here are four from Thursday, in chronological order. Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich: Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn: St Paul's Cathedral, west façade: Blackfriars Bridge:

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets. And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes: Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but...

The richest person in Illinois has bought one of the only remaining original copies of the US Constitution at auction for $43 million, and I think this says a lot about where America has gotten in the 21st Century: Citadel Founder Ken Griffin bought a first printing of the U.S. Constitution which sold for a record-setting $43.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction, the auction house announced Friday. Griffin said he will loan the document to Billionaire Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American...

A nearly-all-white Kenosha, Wis., jury acquitted Killer Smurf Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges today, which will have the immediate effect of turning Kenosha into a war zone, and the long-term effect of escalating violence at what would otherwise be peaceful protests nationwide. I haven't followed the case closely, though I do trust the sources I've read who say an acquittal would make sense under Wisconsin law. But I doubt that most people who haven't gone to law school will see it that way, or even...

It's hard to believe Parker has been gone a whole year. I miss you, buddy.

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th. Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now. So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services...

Just a couple of eye-roll-worthy lunchtime links today: Chicago police union head John Catanzara, who I referred to on Facebook yesterday as a "whiny, belligerent infant," has quit the CPD and announced a run for mayor. My previous comments stand. Sears closed its last remaining store in its home state of Illinois on Sunday. I still hate Eddie Lampert for it. Michelle Goldberg takes the "social justice industry" to task for policing words instead of accomplishing real change. Ordinarily-idyllic coastal...