Events

United Airlines flight 2546 avoided traffic getting from O'Hare to Midway on Monday by taking the shortest route possible for an airplane its size: The 13-minute flight got all the way up to 4,800 feet MSL to reposition an Airbus A320 the White Sox needed to get to New York later that day. The Sun-Times explains: Although the flight did happen, it was merely the airline repositioning a charter plane, according to United spokesman Charles Hobart. And although the flights have no passengers, they still...

A persistent weather system continues to bring smoke from Canadian wildfires through the Chicago area: You may have been wondering about the recent vibrant, reddish sunsets and hazy skyline in Chicago. What’s behind these phenomena can be traced back to a combination of particulate matter and smoke from Canadian wildfires and pollutants that create ground-level ozone. While the red sun and milky-looking skies might give the city an otherworldly, even awe-inspiring appearance, Chicagoans — especially...

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime: In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months. A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets. James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation...

Between my overflowing PTO balance and getting two "floating" holidays every year, I decided I have enough free time to extend my vacation by a day to get stuff done. I'm glad I did. Cassie provided her vet with a really good sample of...things that her day care needs to know about, I've done 3 loads of laundry and queued up a 4th, I've gone through the important receipts from the trip, and I've loaded all 740 photos up into Lightroom. I've also done some Apollo-related stuff, so some of today went to...

I'm finally at Heathrow about 10 minutes from boarding. Whew. I've got loads of photos to go through, and hours of sleep to catch up on. I am ready to be home. Tonight I'm going to spend as much time as possible on the couch with Cassie. I've got a lot of pats for her.

I learned on this trip that the German word for the small computer you carry everywhere is "Handy." That got me thinking. In the US we call it a "cell phone." Most of the rest of the Anglosphere calls it a "mobile." Same in Czech ("mobilní telefon"), French ("téléphone mobile"), Spanish ("teléfono móvil") and most other European languages. I find this interesting because in most parts of Europe, the name describes what the thing is. In German, it describes how you use it. But in the US, we still use a...

The billion-pound London rail project called "Crossrail" when it began opened a year ago as the Elizabeth Line. I rode it for the first time to West Ealing last Sunday, and thought it absolutely the slickest, cleanest train in the UK. (I'll ride it again tomorrow thanks to industrial action and construction on the Piccadilly Line.) British Airways pilot Mark Vanhoenacker takes it every time he comes home from a trip, and loves how it connects the city in all new ways: Running from Reading and Heathrow...

I took a quick trip to Berchtesgaden, Germany, this afternoon. I think it might be the most beautiful place I've seen in Europe: I didn't stay too long, but I did get in a 2½ km walk that included part of a river path: The whole area looks like Bavarian storybook hour: To get there, you take a train from Freilassing, a nondescript town just over the German border from Salzburg. The train meanders through Alpine meadows at a slow but steady pace, passing through this kind of scenery: I will pass through...

Wow, do I love European trains. They're fast, clean, and way less expensive than flying. Except they do fly, as my train from Vienna to Salzburg did for part of the trip: That screen capture from my phone's GPS monitor shows us moving at 229 km/h (143 mph) roughly here. And then I landed in Salzburg. It's cute. I might even say lovely. But it's tiny—only 150,000 people or so—so it doesn't rise to Prague-like overwheliming beauty. But it's a lot less touristy than I thought. It turns out, Salzburg is a...

Thanks in part to Conservative Party mismanagement of the UK transport sector for the last 13 years, things have gotten a bit fraught in the Old Country. And now, I get to spend a bit of extra time getting from Gatwick to my hotel on Saturday: The Gatwick Express takes about 30 minutes from the airport to London Victoria Station. There is no other train option. Instead, it looks like I can take a cab straight to my hotel for about £90, or a bus to bloody Heathrow and the Elizabeth Line for about £25....