Events

"Nice democracy you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it..."—XPOTUS (paraphrased). The man whose presidency did more damage to our country than any since James Buchanan's and wants another ride on the pony spent yesterday rallying the brownshirts at Madison Square Garden in an event his own supporters equated with the infamous Nazi rally there in 1939. But I have to agree with Michael Tomasky this morning, when he says we "may as well spend this last week feeling confident:" To put it...

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.) Meanwhile, the world continues to turn: Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years...

Absolutely slammed today, though only about 2 hours of it actually mattered in the scheme of things. Regular posting resumes tomorrow.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on his not understanding it."—Upton Sinclair. We lead our news roundup today with the biggest Chicago transit story of the year, with the major players acting just as Sinclair would predict: Chicago's three transit-agency chiefs don't see their complete lack of coordination on top of impressive administrative bloat as any reason to consolidate into one metropolitan agency. (So why doesn't Chicago have a Clipper Card yet, then?)...

Since the beginning of Weather Now back in 1997, I have had total control over what users see on the home page. That changed today. Now, once you have created a profile by logging into the app with your Microsoft account (O365, Live ID, Xbox, doesn't matter), you can change your home weather list. To add a station, simply go to any Current Weather page and click "Add to home page". This will take you to your Profile page, where you can see the entire list on the "Home page" tab. Once there, you can...

Just a few more notes about last Saturday's 43-kilometer walk to Lake Bluff. First, some photos, including the obligatory Baháʼí Temple photo from about 14 km in: And the Green Bay Trail in Glencoe, Ill., around 27 km: The walk felt much easier than previous years, so I ran the numbers to find out why. For starters, this year I took longer (6:32:38) to get to 42.2 km than in 2020 (6:20:32) or 2021 (6:17:41)—but last year I took even longer (6:41:36), so that's only part of it. This year was the coolest...

The most interesting news I have today comes from the Chicago City Council's Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which voted 8-5 yesterday to lower the city's default speed limit from 30 mph (48 km/h) to 25 mph (40 km/h). Advocates have wanted this change for years. One influential group, People For Bikes, ranks Chicago 2,279th out of 2,579 cities in the US for bike friendliness almost entirely because of our speed limit. The change would instantly catapult Chicago to the top quintile of their...

Jim Fallows points out that XPOTUS backers and really horrible people Peter Thiel and Elon Musk surely know that the XPOTUS is losing it, so we need to think about what that means should JD Vance become VPOTUS: Here is a chain-of-being that doesn’t get enough attention: Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were two of the co-founders of PayPal. They are the duo you see above, nearly 25 years ago. Peter Thiel created JD Vance as a political figure. Vance met Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law; he went to...

Moving this annual 42 km walk to October really helped: I'll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow. Right now...I'm a bit sore, but a lot less sore than I was last time.

The sun is just coming up over the trees east of my office, I'm having a bagel and coffee, and I'm checking the forecast for today's 42-kilometer walk: Right now we've got 9°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, meaning a chilly start to the walk. But with the forecast high at our end point of 22°C with dewpoints under 6°C all day, and just a few clouds (bottom panel), I couldn't ask for better. Here we go!