Events

A friend drove through the squall line that hit the East Coast yesterday and got extremely lucky, when you think about it: She's fine, and so is her car, though she had to have the windshield replaced in the dark because of the widespread power outages out there. Then there's the heat. Cities all up and down the East Coast hit record high temperatures over the weekend, including 38°C in Raleigh, 41°C in Richmond, and 37°C in Washington.

Via Sullivan, Timothy Lee describes how freeway construction destroyed the center of St. Louis: Planners in St. Louis, as in most American cities, decided that the new expressways would run directly through the cities’ downtowns. One of them (I-44/I-70) now runs North to South between the park and downtown. Not surprisingly, if you visit the park today you’ll find a light sprinkling of tourists, but nothing like the throngs of locals you’ll find in successful urban parks like New York’s Union Square...

Chicago got a bit of rain yesterday, after what seemed like a few weeks of drought: Emergency personnel from Chicago and several suburbs headed to Westchester this morning after flooding caused by heavy overnight rainstorms forced the evacuation of a nursing home in the west suburb. Overnight weather left many people and vehicles stranded on roadways as thunderstorms hit north central and northeast Illinois with intense lightning and winds up to 80 km/h. A flash flood warning [was] in effect until 7...

Chicago is having a one-day respite from the longest streak of 32°C weather in four years: Powerful thunderstorms bypassed Chicago Monday -- and so did 90-degree heat. It marked the first time in six days the mercury failed to reach 90 degrees here and ended the area's longest string of consecutive 90-degree days in four years. Not since July 28 through Aug. 2, 2006 had the Chicago area logged more 90-degree temperatures than in the five days leading up to Monday. Incredibly, July 2010, with an average...

A good friend woke up this morning to find her email and Facebook accounts hacked, with a message sent out to everyone in her address book that she'd been robbed at gunpoint while visiting London and desperately needed a credit card to get on the plane back home. Other than the story's baseline implausibility (a gun robbery in London being about as likely as getting trampled by a moose in Atlanta), there were other clues it was a phisher. For one thing, my friend is an American lawyer, not a Nigerian...

In the past seven calendar days[1], I have worked 40.3 hours[2], traveled 39.8 hours through four countries and six states, and, so far as I can tell, slept for about 40 hours. I am not sure what happened in the remaining few minutes, though part of it included walking Parker and part of it included staring into space dazedly. Fortunately traveling wasn't entirely wasted time, including as it did four episodes of This American Life and two complete novels. This is all a long way of saying I apologize...

The first day or so back is always hectic and exhausting. I still marvel that the 11½-hour time change from India was easier than the 9-hour change from St. Petersburg (or, come to think of it, the 8-hour change from Dubai.) I'm still getting back into my life, so I'll end here, but for this non-sequitur: I have t oget these cookies.

The monument to the heroes of the seige of Leningrad: Like this guy, a hero from a different era, Alexander Pushkin: Finally, a propos of none of the above, one more photo of the hotel. This is just before dawn at 4 am:

Ah, the quandry. Quandries, in fact: there are two. The biggest is that it's 4:30am in St. Petersburg but only 7:30pm in Chicago. I need to be back on Chicago time by Tuesday morning. Thus, I'm staying up very late in order to remain conscious at work in three days. I hope it works. The other is that I took some photos of my classmates at the end-of-term party tonight, but I haven't secured permission for general publication yet. On Facebook, only Dukies and my family can see the Duke photos (if I've...

The Culture Dash took me back to Kazan Cathedral today, only this time, I went inside: