Events

Time is funny. On this day, 90 years ago, radio station WXYZ in Detroit began a serial called "The Lone Ranger," written by Fran Striker, who had probably never seen Texas or a Native American person in his life. When I read that this morning, it struck me that the radio audience in Detroit had living memory of the closest historical analogue to the entirely-fictional Lone Ranger character. Deputy US Marshall Bass Reeves served from 1875 to 1907, retiring just 26 years before the radio show started. So...

Two writers in the Times looked at two different aspects of the Conservative party's ongoing vandalism to the United Kingdom. First, David Wallace-Wells tracks the post-Brexit economic declines: By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one. On the...

I enjoyed my lunch in the Loop today, but not the walk back to the office: Sigh. At least the sun sets at 5pm for the first time since November 5th.

Welcome to stop #78 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Goose Island Beer Co., 1800 N. Clybourn Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Brown Line, ArmitageTime from Chicago: 12 minutesDistance from station: 600 m I put this one off for a long time because, in the years since I last visited, Chicago has had an explosion of craft breweries. Also because InBev bought them 12 years ago. The combination has taken Chicago's first and, for a long time, only local brewery taproom and made it kind of mediocre. So why...

I've written before about urban highways, never favorably. Ploughing massive roads through dense urban areas has done incalculable damage to North American cities that tearing them down or burying them has only just started to fix—but usually with an order of magnitude more cost than their initial construction. Today I got an innocent little email listing houses for sale around Chicago, both because I'm interested to see what's out there, and also because I've been too lazy to turn it off since I last...

In other news: Greg Hinz goes over the upcoming Chicago mayoral election. Kansas Republicans have not given up their fight against the state constitution as they try to ban abortions there against the will of the majority of voters. The US Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing today into the monopolistic behavior of organized crime syndicate concert promoter Live Nation and its accomplice, Ticketmaster. The Long Island Railroad begins service to Grand Central Station tomorrow, bringing commuters...

Longtime readers will know that I have spent a lot of time in Half Moon Bay, Calif., over the past 15 years. So yesterday's events shocked me: Seven people are dead following two linked shootings in the Northern California city of Half Moon Bay, officials said. The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office tweeted at 3:48 p.m. Monday that they were responding to a shooting “with multiple victims in the area of HWY 92 and the HMB City limits.” The office tweeted roughly an hour later that a suspect was in...

Accused fraudster Sam Bankman Fried did what every prosecutor hopes a defendant will do: start a blog. Researcher Molly White annotated his first post: Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents' Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he's facing. Although many of his statements here repeat things he's said elsewhere, I think it is useful to be able to analyze some of...

If you squint, you can see shadows on the houses down the street from me: Officially those are "broken clouds," covering 7/8ths of the sky. But the sun is peeking out of that other 1/8th. I'll take it. Of course, it'll be overcast the rest of the week. I'm really tired of this.

The graphical forecast for Chicago encourages me: it shows that the 100% overcast we've had for the last week will get a bit thinner tomorrow afternoon, then a bit thinner Tuesday morning, then...go back to another week of 95% cloud cover. Sigh. At least the sun finally sets after 5pm on Thursday. Of course, the clouds actually keep Chicago warm in the winter, and the warm air keeps the clouds from thinning out until a strong enough front blows them away. So despite the lack of sun, the temperature...