Events

Welcome to stop #97 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Goose Island Beer Co., 1800 W Fulton St., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Green and Pink lines, Ashland Time from Chicago: 6 minutesDistance from station: 600 m Given Chicago's long association with Goose Island Beer, and my own review of their (now closed) flagship brewpub on Clybourn almost exactly a year ago, I haven't got much to add. Since InBev bought the brewery in 2016 and expanded to places like Seoul and Shanghai, it almost doesn't qualify as...

Welcome to stop #96 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Great Central Brewing, 221 N. Wood St., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Green and Pink lines, Ashland Time from Chicago: 6 minutesDistance from station: 500 m Despite the cold yesterday, a friend and I set off to the West Fulton Corridor industrial area to visit a cluster of three breweries all within a few hundred meters of each other. First on the list: Great Central Brewing. We liked the place, though it really leans into the "industrial" part of...

I grabbed a friend for a couple of Brews & Choos visits yesterday, and through judicious moderation (8-10 oz of beer per person at each stop), we managed to get the entire West Fulton Corridor cluster done in six hours. So in a few minutes I'll start writing four B&C reviews, which will come out over the next three days. Before I start, though, I'm going to read all these stories that have piled up since Friday: Sports Illustrated shut down publication and laid off the entire editorial staff after an...

Wow, is this a Chicago story. On January 6th, a local comedian posted a photo of what he thought was the impression of a rat in concrete on a Chicago street. (Local residents claim it's actually the death mask of a very unfortunate squirrel that fell from a tree into the wet concrete decades ago.) Quickly dubbed the "Chicago rat hole," it went viral, and so far thousands of people have made pilgrimage to 1918 W. Roscoe St. to see it. Well, yesterday, some jagoff filled it in with "a plaster-like...

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret: Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him. I can't...

An Ottawa judge told the Crown Prosecution Service to return a suspect's mobile phones after prosecutors failed to unlock them after trying 175 million passwords: The police seized the phones in October 2022 with a warrant obtained based on information about a Google account user uploading images of child pornography. The contents of the three phones were all protected by complex, alpha-numeric passcodes. Ontario Superior Court Justice Ian Carter heard that police investigators tried about 175 million...

Around 7 this morning, the official Chicago temperature at O'Hare went above -15°C for the first time in 81 hours, the longest such cold snap since February 1996: In the 1996 stretch, O’Hare recorded highs of -20.6°C on Feb. 2 and 3, and of -16.7°C on Feb. 4, according to NWS meteorologist Casey Sullivan. Sullivan said the longest stretch of temps below -15°C in the area was a period of five days in the 1880s, according to NWS records, which go back to 1871. “It doesn’t look like we’re going to do that...

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming...

She's in this photo, trust me: A bit closer, after we got home:

Our company has Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off, which will allow me to get a bit of rest after my lightning trip to Seattle. And to celebrate, I've broken out the Arran sweater and long-johns, because wow is it cold: The National Weather Service reported extreme cold and a wind chill of minus 40 in Aurora on Sunday morning and issued a wind chill warning through noon Monday. Weather service senior meteorologist Brett Borchardt said Chicago narrowly missed breaking the record — 1 degree — for the lowest...