Events

Welcome to stop #71 on the Brews and Choos project. Note: Exit Strategy closed permanently on 29 October 2023. Brewery: Exit Strategy Brewing, 7700 Madison St., Forest ParkTrain line: UP-W, River Forest (also CTA Blue Line, Forest Park)Time from Chicago: 18 minutes (Zone B)Distance from station: 1.3 km (800 m from CTA) Forest Park used to have a reputation for anchoring one end of Chicago's skid row. No longer: the village has great restaurants and cute neighborhoods, including Exit Strategy Brewing. I...

Something about some sheep defending their pasture against cats? Do I have that right? I'm working through Best Picture nominees and generally chilling out, so I might have to miss it. Let me know which of the barnyard animals wins.

The temperature dropped 17.7°C between 2:30 pm yesterday and 7:45 this morning, from 6.5°C to -10.2°C, as measured at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. So far it's recovered to -5.5°C, almost warm enough to take my lazy dog on a hike. She got a talking-to from HR about not pulling her weight in the office, so this morning she worked away at a bone for a good stretch: Alas, the sun came out, a beam hit her head, and she decided the bone could wait: Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Julia...

Welcome to stop #70 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Afterthought Brewing, 218 E. St. Charles Road, LombardTrain line: UP-W, LombardTime from Chicago: 46 minutes (Zone D)Distance from station: 500 m In my conversation with the staff at Afterthought Brewing, I mentioned that they are almost precisely the opposite of Goldfinger. Where Goldfinger precisely controls yeast strains, brewing times, temperatures, and their immaculate Euro-style taproom, Afterthought lets nature do her thing and decides...

Via Josh Marshall, Canadian journalist Matt Gurney raises the alarm about the other group of truckers camping in Ottawa: You may have heard reports of a secondary encampment that is well removed from the main protest sites around Parliament Hill. I certainly had. It has been described in different reports as either a logistics area or some kind of staging ground for protesters. This site, for lack of a better term, has been fortified. There are many trucks parked in the parking lot, but some of them...

I've sent some test results off to a partner in Sydney, so I have to wait until Monday morning before I officially mark that feature as "done." I'm also writing a presentation I'll give on March 16th. So while the larger part of my brain noodles on Microsoft Azure CosmosDB NoSQL databases (the subject of my presentation), the lesser part has this to read: Remember all the fuss Republicans made over Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016? Yeah, neither do they. Even as the president warns that Russia could...

Before heading into three Zoom meetings that will round out my day, I have a minute to flip through these: US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made a bold grab for the Dumbest Person in Congress award yesterday when she warned OAN viewers about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "gazpacho police." Let the memes begin. The Economist has an update to the Democratic Freedoms Map, and things do not look good—unless you live in Norway. Along similar lines, WBEZ reports on the Urban Institute's findings...

Someone might need to have a word with HR. Yesterday, my office helper accomplished this: After speaking to her about this performance gap, we got this today: Clearly we have some work to do here.

A Dutch prankster has started a Facebook group that has so far attracted 13,000 people who want to throw rotten eggs at Jeff Bezos' new superyacht: "Calling all Rotterdammers, take a box of rotten eggs with you and let's throw them en masse at Jeff's superyacht when it sails through the Hef in Rotterdam," wrote organizer Pablo Strörmann. It all started last week when Dutch broadcaster Rijnmond reported that the city appeared willing to grant a request to dismantle the centuries-old steel bridge so that...

Eighty years ago today, the US imposed daylight saving time as a wartime energy-saving measure. It took until April 1966 for Congress to enact a permanent regime of changing the clock twice a year. But that's all ancient history. More recent history: Peter Wehner examines how the loser XPOTUS really hates that he's a loser. Meanwhile, Michelle Cottle wonders when the Republican Party turned "into a bunch of snowflakes?" The City of Chicago has (finally!) started cracking down on "dibs," the practice of...