Events

The most accomplished former President of the past century has decided to spend his last few days at home in Georgia: Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 is the longest living president in American history, has decided to forgo further medical treatment and will enter hospice care at his home in Georgia, the Carter Center announced on Saturday. “After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice...

The Centers for Disease Control released its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System report for 2021, and things do not look good: Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and...

I see a connection between all of these. First, the city has accepted six proposals to convert office buildings on LaSalle Street to apartments. I used to work in one of them, so that should be interesting. These will go through community review, and will cost over $1 billion, but could bring almost 2,000 apartments to the Loop. Second, Zurich Re and Motorola have separately sued the Chicago suburb Schaumburg, Ill., one of the most dismal suburban hellscapes I've ever seen, to get the $100 million in...

Christopher Hitchens may have pissed off a lot of people, but I can't dispute the wisdom of that quote. And today, we have a story out of (where else?) Florida, where a fundamentalist Christianist college woke up and discovered that one of the King's Singers "openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture:" The King’s Singers, a Grammy Award-winning British a capella vocal ensemble, announced Monday that their planned concert at Pensacola Christian College was abruptly canceled two hours...

I just got an automated note from HR saying my PTO bank will overflow next month, so look for new Brews & Choos reviews to pop up after March 3rd. We're just that busy on my team. But that isn't the most interesting thing that happened today. No, that honor goes to waking up to hear that Nicola Sturgeon resigned this morning: Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed she is resigning as Scotland's first minister after more than eight years in the role. The Scottish National Party leader said she knew "in my head...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

John Scalzi explains why he doesn't write a lot of political posts anymore: [S]o much political messaging these days, particularly on the right, is so performative that engaging with it is also performative, and a furtherance in distributing the original performative messaging. The political right in the United States understands that, inasmuch as it currently lacks a coherent political strategy other than will to power, it must keep its followers forever afraid, and its opponents forever on the...

Yesterday, Cassie and I walked about 11 km and ended the day sitting outside at Spiteful Brewery. In February. Today the weather looks about the same (right now it's 12°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters), but between work and rehearsal tonight I can't just sit on my porch reading. Dang. The forecast predicts it'll stay below freezing from Thursday night until Saturday lunchtime, but hey, it's still February. One March-like day during this stretch of April weather doesn't bother me.

One of my neighbors sent this to the HOA mailing list this morning: Since the guy didn't have a box marked "Acme," and since the rabbit he seems to have under his paw looks quite dead, he's welcome to stay on our block. We'll see a lot more of them in the next few weeks, it turns out. It's coyote cuffing season: Late winter is coyote mating season, which reaches its peak toward the end of February. And that’s leading to more sightings than usual by humans — even in downtown Chicago — as the animals are...

Here we have a typical mid-March temperature profile for Chicago: Of course, that's not from mid-March, that's today. It got up to 9.1°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, without a cloud in the sky, and it looks likely to do the same tomorrow. Cassie got a 5 km walk earlier today and I plan to do 7 km tomorrow. Consequently I won't spend a lot of time banging away at my keyboard this afternoon. Probably not much tomorrow, either.