Events

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago and the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra will celebrate Anton Bruckner's 200th birth anniversary next weekend. We perform Saturday at the Glenview Community Church and Sunday at the Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church. Here's a sample, from our rehearsal last Monday: Note that we're only doing this and two other a cappella motets on Saturday. Our Sunday performance will have Mozart's "Linz" symphony instead. Both performances will feature Bruckner's Te Deum and Psalm 150, two...

This Is Spinal Tap came out 40 years ago yesterday. Enjoy:

I went through the photos I took on my trip to Germany last week and put a couple of them through Lightroom. Getting coffee in Viktualienmarkt: A very practical car for city life in post-war Germany, the 1955 BMW Isetta: The Trödelmarktinsel, Nürnberg: A better edit of my earlier photo of the main gate at Dachau: And finally, I had a really great view of the New York metro area on the flight home:

Author Cal Newport examines "one reason hybrid work makes employees miserable and how to fix it:" f you ask Americans with a desk job what they want, many say flexibility. Specifically, they want control over where that desk is located and when they work at it. Luckily for them, the American workplace is by some measures more flexible than ever before. About half of U.S. workers have “remote-capable” jobs. And Gallup data suggest that a majority of those jobs are now hybrid, meaning that employees can...

It turns out we actually missed the record for warmest winter in recorded history. Chicago averaged 1.67°C from December 1st to February 29th, making it the 5th-warmest winter after 1881-82 (1.72°C), 1879-80 (1.78°C), 1931-32 (2.0°C) and 1877-78 (2.89°C). So it was only the warmest winter in 92 years, not the whole 153 years of data. We did, however, have the warmest February on record, with an average temperature of 4.17°C. And it was unusually sunny: we had 75% of possible sunshine, while normal is...

Stories for the last day of winter, this year on the quadrennial day when your Facebook Memories have the fewest entries and, apparently, you can't pay for gas in New Zealand: Josh Marshall calls out retiring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for, among other things, turning the Senate "into a genuinely Calhounian body in which minority factions exercise a de facto and permanent veto over the majority." Steven Rattner calls out the XPOTUS for his destructive economic proposals. Ruth Marcus...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ bottomed out this morning, hitting -4.8°C at 10:41 am, and it may even end the day above freezing. So this mercifully-short cold snap won't keep us out of the record books, just as predicted. It's still the warmest winter in Chicago history. (Let's hope we don't set the same record for spring or summer.) Meanwhile, the record continues to clog up with all kinds of fun stories elsewhere: Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has led his...

The cold front we expected passed over my house around 8:15 last night. I wouldn't call it subtle, either: Even that doesn't get to the truly unsubtle aspects of this frontal passage. The radar image might, though: Not shown: the 60 km/h winds, lashing rain, brilliant lightning show, 5-10 mm hailstones, tornadoes to the northwest and southeast, and a mildly alarmed dog getting pats on the couch. And it keeps getting better this morning. Right now I'm in a Loop high rise gently swaying in the 45 km/h...

It's official: with two days left, this is the warmest winter in Chicago history, with the average temperature since December 1st fully 3.5°C (6.3°F) above normal. We've had only 10 days this winter when the temperature stayed below freezing, 8 of them in one week in February. This should remain the case when spring officially begins on Friday, even though today's near-record 23°C (so far) is forecast to fall to -6°C by 6am. And that's not even to discuss the raging thunderstorms and possible tornadoes...

As fun as my trip last week was, having this last night was awesome: I've also got my windows open, because we just set a new record high temperature for February 26th of 19.4°C. Of course, it may snow tomorrow night, because it's still winter until Friday. OK, back to work...