Events

I go to Whole Foods Market twice a week or more, almost always the Lincoln Park, Chicago store. Even when they have lots of customers, they have plenty of space and plenty of parking, so I didn't worry about ducking out of my house this afternoon to pick up lunch and dog food. Here's the result. Don't let the international units confuse you; that's an hour and 13 minutes to go about 4 miles: Here's the situation when I arrived, which looked remarkably like the situation when I left: Here's the store...

Here's the Tribune's weather infographic for today: The warmer-than-normal temperature formerly over Alaska has now swung around into the arctic, dragged by a persistent high pressure over the pole. That's pushing cold air down into the Prairie Provinces and the upper Midwest. Meanwhile, warmer-than-normal temperatures over the south-eastern U.S. and Caribbean is dragging moisture right over the lower Midwest. Consequence: it's -12°C here right now, and in 36 hours we'll have 250 mm of snow. We're...

Well, I mean, it's already 2014 in time zones east of UTC+8 (Singapore, Tokyo, Australia), but here in Chicago it's 10:30 in the morning. Which means, here in Chicago, many creative works created before 1 January 1924 are still protected by copyright. Many, like the last 10 stories about Sherlock Holmes: A US district court in Illinois found itself wading into the details of the fictional detective's imaginary life this week in a copyright ruling on a forthcoming collection of original short stories...

I just saved myself hours of pain by creating a unit test around a simple method that turned out to have a subtle bug. The method in question calculates the price difference between two subscriptions for a product. If you're using the product, and you use more of it, the cost goes up. Every day, the application looks to make sure you're only using your allotted amount. If you go over, you get automatically bumped to the next subscription level and charged the difference, pro-rated by how much of the...

Two popular Evanston restaurants, Pine Yard and Taco Diablo, burned to the ground this morning: Fire crews from several neighboring communities -- including Morton Grove, Wilmette and Skokie -- were called to the scene to assist Evanston firefighters in battling the blaze. The fire apparently broke out sometime before 3 a.m. and fire crews were still fully engaged in battling the blaze nearly three hours later. The bike shop next door suffered water and smoke damage. Twelve pets at the Bramer Animal...

I'm a few minutes from leaving my folks' house, looking at the weather forecast for Chicago. We may set a new record: The unseasonable late-season 10°C “warmth” which greets Chicagoans Saturday has swept into the area from southern Missouri over the past 24 hours. It’s stay is to be one of limited duration. A bitter southward plunge of frigid arctic air begins a downward temp spiral here Sunday which is to culminate in colder-than- -18°C Monday morning lows and single digits daytime highs—the coldest...

Another shot from Christmas afternoon, as promised:

Nephew #1 arrived yesterday evening while I sat a mile away talking with the manager of San Benito House and, apparently, challenging people to a Scrabble game later today. Nephew #1 is a much lighter sleeper than the rest of us, which causes him frustration, and when he gets frustrated he sets out to determine how much noise is required to make everyone exactly as light a sleeper as he. Fortunately, I'm on Chicago time, so getting up at 5am PST (7am CST) does not bother me. And it gives me some time to...

What is it about the right? I have difficulty imagining what it must be like to have such a constricted worldview that every provocation requires an escalation. The latest example of right-wing anti-diplomacy comes not from a state representative somewhere in the southern U.S., nor from a local Chinese official, nor from Marine le Pen. No, this time it's serial dick-swinger Shinzo Abe, who decided to help diffuse the tense diplomatic situation in the Sea of Japan by poking his finger in China's and...

Check these out: Calculated Risk posits the 10 most important questions about the U.S. economy in 2014. Chicago History maps out some fun bits of street trivia, including this: One street crosses under the same El line four times. Name the street and the El line. The Dictionary of American Regional English is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's fun. Not sure you want to go on that trip but want to lock in the airfare for up to a week? Buy a call option on the fare. McDonald's may have had a...