Events

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...

The Chicago Tribune ran an exposé of suburban red-light cameras recently; today they're reporting that one suburb, Schaumburg, has removed its camera despite its success at generating revenue. So why would they remove a million-dollar-earning camera? Because it doesn't actually stop accidents, and it really annoys drivers: When Schaumburg first signed on to the red-light camera business last year, officials could hardly wait to get started, which is why they chose Meacham and Woodfield Roads as the...

Frango Mints, the historic Chicago mint-chocolate candy, have returned to Chicago: South Side candymaker Cupid Candies has started producing the No. 1-selling Frango product — one-pound boxes of the mint chocolates — in the past several days for local Macy's department stores. The start of production, to be announced today by Macy's and Cupid Candies executives, comes a year and a half after production was expected to start. ... The production is meaningful to Chicagoans outraged by the 1999 outsourcing...

Heaven knows some teams need it. With baseball taking a three-day break for the All-Star Game (tomorrow night in St. Louis), we take a moment to reflect on how much worse things could be for the Cubs. They wound up exactly at .500, with 43 wins and 43 losses, tied with Houston and 3.5 games behind St. Louis (49-42). The real story, though, has to be how the Washington Nationals haved lost 61 games so far, the second time in a row they've dropped 60 before the break, putting them on course to lose120...