Events

Someone had time to have the sign made up, then had the inclination to stick it on the construction site. That's kind of sad: There's a building in Chicago, at the corner of Wacker and Clark, that could use similar treatment. Someday, there will be funding again. Someday. As long as we're in San Francisco, how about an iconic shot of a successful construction project? Here you go:

Airbus Industrie and the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) have worked out how to get an A380 to the EAA show at Oshkosh next weekend: The aircraft will do a seven-minute flight display before setting up for landing on Runway 36. In a web conference Friday, Airbus test pilot Terry Lutz said that while the 8,000X150 runway is plenty for the A380, there's only one taxiway that will accommodate the aircraft, although, happily, it's the one that leads to Aeroshell Square. That gives the crew about...

Forty years since that one, small step. NASA has real-time audio, 40 years later. The lunar module landed at 20:17 UTC, so if you're near a computer at 3pm Chicago time, you should listen to it.

Usually, my July visits to my family in San Francisco allow me to get away from Chicago's oppressive heat. This year, both cities are about the same, San Francisco just a little warmer than usual, and Chicago...well, it's the coolest July of my life: July has slipped to the coolest to date here in 42 years—its 68.7°F degree average temperature running nearly 5 degrees behind the long-term (138-year) average. Friday's 70°F high was the first time in 53 years a July 17 temperature failed to rise above...

Yesterday I pondered Amazon's deletion of works by Orwell, and asked for confirmation that they had deleted unauthorized (i.e., stolen) copies of the copyrighted material. Amazon last night confirmed this is, in fact, what happened: An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from...

A few things of note happened while I was en route to San Francisco yesterday: The Cubs continued winning, taking their second in a row after the All-Star break and moving up to second place, though only because they've beaten up the hapless (25-63) Nationals to do it. Wisconsin officials announced a deal to buy new 320 km/h train sets for the Chicago to Milwaukee route. Initially plans call for allowing the trains to run at 176 km/h (40% faster than today) while a new, dedicated high-speed line is...

Even though there are more important things going on in the world, there are also better bloggers out there, so I trust sticking with entirely petty and parochial issues won't offend anyone. Like this, for instance: Prying the Sears name off North America's tallest building was as simple as asking the leasing agent from U.S. Equities Asset Management to do it. "I kept saying, 'Sears Tower, Sears Tower. I'd rather have it be Kmart Tower,'" said Carmine Bilardello, the Willis executive who negotiated the...

I'd like confirmation on this: the Times' David Pogue reported today that Amazon deleted a particular author from people's Kindles overnight: [A]pparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was...

Cubs win their first game to start the beginning of the ending of the season at 1 game over .500. Hey, it could happen.

The Sears Tower's name officially changed to Willis Tower this morning, under the new ownership of UK insurance brokerage Willis Group Holdings Ltd. No one will call it that for a generation, of course, a fact not lost on NPR's Steve Inskeep this morning. Willis CEO Joseph Plumeri, in what I sincerely hope was a moment of retail British irony rather than wholesale American idiocy, suggested a way to help ease the transition: [Crain's Chicago Business]: Any idea how long will it take for people to get...