Events

Reader DM commented on yesterday's lament about Inbev acquiring Goose Island Brewery: This is definitely not a good thing, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as people are making it out to be. The brewpubs are reported not to be in the deal (I'm not sure how that is), but that is what I've read. They are also bringing in Brett Porter to run things, who is a pretty good brewmaster from Dechutes Brewery out in Oregon. I've have a few of their brews and they are pretty good. It makes absolutely no sense...

More on Anheuser-Busch's sad acquisition of Goose Island Brewery. First, Brewmaster Greg Hall told the Tribune about the trouble he's seen: In an interview with the Tribune last month, brewmaster Greg Hall said the company’s sales had “outpaced our forecast in 2010, so that we weren’t quite ready for all of the growth we got.” Goose Island also hired an investment banker to assist the family in securing funds for expansion. Although the Craft Brewers Alliance’s 2006 investment in Goose Island has...

Four years after starting a distribution deal, Goose Island Brewery announced today that they've sold out completely to the megabrewery: Goose Island Beer Co., the Chicago-based brewing powerhouse, announced this morning that it will be taken over by Anheuser-Busch. Brewmaster Greg Hall will be stepping down. Can't imagine why: Anheuser-Busch reached an agreement to purchase the majority (58 percent) equity stake in FSB from its founders and investors, held in Goose Holdings Inc. (GHI), for $22.5...

The New Republic's John McWhorter doesn't worry about public cursing: Language is all about creeping numbness, jokes wearing thin, feeling devolving into gesture. Terrible once meant truly horrific. The will we use to mark the future once meant that you quite robustly “willed” to do something, but diluted into just indicating that sometime you would. Hence a burnt steak as terrible, a good movie as awesome, trivial terms like shopaholic based on the glum source alcoholic, and just as naturally, we now...

Chicago got the name "windy city" from...well, no one really knows, but in fact Amarillo and New York top the league chart for average windiness: Notice Chicago isn't even in the top 10. Which isn't to say we're not blowhards; we're just not that windy. (Full-size image at The Chicago Tribune.)

Beautiful (though unseasonably cool) weather in Chicago today. I took these around the North Pond:

Via WGN-TV's Tom Skilling, new video of the tsunami hitting Japan earlier this month:

Yesterday on Facebook I posted, "When voters in Wisconsin elected Scott Walker, did they know he was a thug?" This generated an enormous number of comments, and since they're already published (and none of the commenters objected) I've compiled them here. My only edits were to remove two housekeeping comments from me, and to consolidate some comments from multiple posts into single posts. Randy Zwitch Scott Walker: "I won" Joseph Pearce http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILCNAln_7Z4 David Braverman Joseph...

Via Bruce Schneier, the author of How the End Begins describes how no one can ever be absolutely certain an order to destroy civilization is authentic: Can the president start a nuclear war on his own authority—his own whim or will—alone? The way Brigadier Gen. Jack D. Ripper did in Dr. Strangelove? What if a president went off his meds, as we'd say today, and decided to pull a Ripper himself? Or what if a Ripper-type madman succeeded in sending a falsely authenticated launch order? You're about to kill...

In no particular order: Today is the 100th anniversary of the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York, in which 146 workers died. If you want to know why we have unions in the U.S., read the story. This is the world to which the radical right are happy to return us. I have to hand it to Citibank and their crack team of fraud preventatives. Last week I bought a plane ticket from Chicago to London for about $700. A few hours later I attempted to put down a £100 deposit on a hotel room in...