Events

Yesterday around sunset I found myself driving down Halsted St., just west of the Loop. Here's the Sears Willis Tower and Presidential Towers:

Usually I hate July weather in Chicago. Not this year. We ended up with the coolest July in my lifetime (at Midway), and also one of the driest, making for an unusually pleasant month: Chicago's 69.4-degree average July temperature at O'Hare International Airport was the coolest of the past 17 years. But at Midway Airport, the month's 71-degree average temperature was the site's coolest in 42 years. Estimates based on the month's temperatures suggest the need for air conditioning was 30 percent below...

The Freakonomics blog interviews author Christopher Steiner about his book $20 Per Gallon: [At $8 per gallon, predicted in 2019,] our restaurant world won't be terribly different from what we’re used to now. We'll always have Chinese food — or at least the Americanized version of it (batter it, fry it, smother it in sweet and tangy sauce). The tricky part of the question concerns foods like sushi. When gas is $8 per gallon, sushi will still be hanging around. Things get interesting, however, at $18 per...

The Cubs' win against Houston yesterday started early. Here's the scoreboard after Kosuke Fukudome's two-run double in the 3rd, right before Ryan Theriot got to first on a throwing error: The inning started with back-to-back solo home runs by Jake Fox and Milton Bradley, and ended with Derek Lee striking out and Fukodome, in one of the stupidest base-running moves I've seen in a long time, running on the dropped third strike and getting caught sealing home. Final score, Cubs 12, Astros 3: Notice the...

I'm going to be in London two weeks from now, so it saddened me to hear this on NPR's Morning Edition today: The British Beer and Pub Association says an average of 52 pubs are closing each week. Changing consumer tastes, a two-year-old smoking ban and the deepening economic recession have hit pubs hard. But for thousands, the death blow has been dealt by rising government taxes on beer — up to 20 percent in the past two years. The traditional pint glass of beer now runs about $6, meaning few...

When Chicago-based Horizon Realty sued a former tenant for defamation because of a Twitter tweet, did anyone tell them how badly this could go for them? Seriously, that's some atrocious lawyering: "Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay," Amanda Bonnen apparently wrote in her Twitter feed May 12 at 9:08 a.m. Horizon Group Management, which leased Bonnen's Uptown apartment, wasn't pleased. Last week the company filed suit against Bonnen in Cook County...

"Landing" might be too subtle a term for it, but when you put 327 tonnes of airplane on a runway designed with Cessnas in mind, graceful is less important than intact. This is what a super-jumbo looks like landing at OSH: Yes, they can use the airplane again. Possibly the runway, too. (Note: "PIO" is "pilot-induced oscillation," which you can see on three axes in the video.)

Put a camera on him instead: In the beginning there is one big question and a lot curiosity: that is the cat doing all day long ? The solution and answer is the CatCam. The small digital camera is attached to the collar of the cat. It features a user programmable timer function. Based on the interval time it takes automatically pictures or video clips (based on version). The unit is protected against shock, dirt and humidity in order to survive the cats lifestyle.

Ah. It all makes sense now (via the Daily Dish):

The Cubs, against all logic and reason, remain in first place, half a game ahead of St. Louis, thanks to Alfonso Soriano's walk-on grand slam last night in the 13th, and remained as humble and gracious as ever: "I play nine innings all the time," Soriano said. "I had three strikeouts and was 0-for-5, but in that last at-bat, I changed my day. I got the victory tonight, and I think everybody is happy now." But it was Soriano who looked like the goat in the 11th when he stood at the plate on a grounder to...