Events

I've finally gotten back to working on the final series of place-data imports for Weather Now. One of the data sources comes as a 20,000-line Excel spreadsheet. Both because I wanted to learn how to read Excel files, and to make updating the Gazetteer transparent, I wrote the first draft of the import module using the DocumentFormat.OpenXml package from Microsoft. The recommended way of reading a cell using that package looks like this: private static string? CellText( WorkbookPart workbook...

Welcome to stop #75 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Maplewood Brewery, 2717 N Maplewood Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, Logan SquareTime from Chicago: 16 minutesDistance from station: 1.7 km I've actually visited Maplewood many times in the past, but not since starting the Brews & Choos project. The pandemic got in the way, especially after it killed Fat Willy's Rib Shack and nearly killed the movie theater around the corner. I finally returned to the movie theater on Wednesday to see...

Cassie and I spent almost all day outside yesterday, starting at Puptown: Including pool time and some new friends: Followed by a 3½-kilometer walk to Spiteful Brewing, where one of us read a book and the other napped: Today, though she doesn't know it yet, she will get a bath.

In 2008, Chicago gave up its parking meter revenue for 75 years in exchange for $1.16 billion, which made no sense at the time and got widely criticized by everyone who knows what "Net Present Value" means. Guess what? The deal still sucks: In their failed attempt to block Bally’s $1.7 billion River West casino, downtown City Council members warned the deal was being rushed — just like the one that privatized Chicago parking meters — and that it would end up being “even worse” for taxpayers. That dire...

Chicago's two baseball teams gave up a combined 36 runs yesterday, with the Cubs losing to the Reds 20-5 and the Sox losing to the Red Sox 16-7. Perhaps the bullpens could use a little work, hmm? In other news: US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has taken more money from gun lobbyists since taking office than anyone else in the Senate, and did not like a British reporter asking him about it yesterday. The local police in Uvalde, Texas, bungled basic policing during the school shooting Tuesday in ways that just...

Australia, Canada, and the UK managed to prevent mass shootings in the aftermath of horrible crimes. And as The Onion reminded people again this week—for the 21st time since 2014—the United States is the only place where this happens. You know how they do it? How other free, English-speaking democracies keep their citizens alive? How every other civilized country in the world does? They ban the fucking guns. Civilians do not need assault rifles. They do not need large-capacity magazines. They do not...

Three reactions to this week's school shooting, the 27th of the year (despite this being only week 22 on the calendar). First, from Josh Marshall: The “good guy with a gun” theory was always absurd. These events make that all the more clear. But this is a bit more than that. In both these incidents armed police officers or security guards exchanged gunfire with the perpetrator. But they were outgunned. The assailants had more powerful weapons and they had body armor that allowed them to absorb gun shots...

The Elizabeth Line through central London, formerly known as Crossrail, opened today: First approved in 2008, the heavy rail line will dramatically improve public transport coverage of the city, says Transport for London (TfL), slashing journey times, providing substantial extra capacity and making the city more altogether more accessible. By extending the transport system to areas that were previously much slower to access and creating new central hubs for transfers to the Tube, the line could also...

The Supreme Court began its early-summer ruling season a bit early this year, starting with an opinion from Justice Thomas (R) that will make it easier for the state to kill innocent people: [The] opinion claimed that a law restricting the power of federal courts to toss out convictions in state courts prevents Jones from seeking relief. But Thomas’s reading of this law is novel — his opinion had to gut two fairly recent Supreme Court decisions to deny relief to Jones. Before Monday, the Supreme Court’s...

Two stories that bear connecting. First: the Southern Baptist Convention found in an internal investigation that its leaders had covered up sexual assaults and other bad behavior throughout the hierarchy: The SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, by far. It is the nation’s most powerful and influential evangelical denomination, by far. Its 14 million members help define the culture and ethos of American evangelicalism. Last June delegates, called “messengers,” to the SBC’s annual...