I haven't been as on top of the various candidates in today's primaries as I usually like to be, so there was a certain amount of last minute cramming this week, and a certain amount of just trusting things like newspaper and bar association endorsements for appellate court vacancies and other races I couldn't quite be arsed to form an opinion on ( Read more... )

Due to bad timing and sporadic unpredictable work demands, I didn't successfully manage to do much socializing, but it was an okay weekend all in all. Sorry to everyone I'd hoped to get together with, but failed. Weekend highlights ( Read more... )

I've been walking past the Half Acre Beer Company on Lincoln Avenue for months. I've been meaning to learn more about Half Acre, but the building itself is a plain brick industrial looking place showing no signs of life, so I haven't given it a lot of thought. Now there's a short piece in Chicagoist this week that definitely has piqued my ( Read more... )

No content today, just a picture for aficionados of old neon signs, and anyone who feels like cropping it strategically to make something bawdy and amusing.


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In alleys around the city of Chicago, signs like this have been a common sight for as long as I can remember:


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John Greenfield of the nifty Vote With Your Feet Chicago blog about getting under one's own power in my fair city has done another one of those "Walk the entire length of a Chicago street, stopping occasionally at interesting looking restaurants and bars" things. This time he walked Kedzie Avenue, which runs about a hundred feet from my back door ( Read more... )

So I have a car again. After four days of phone tag with the insurance company, I finally just had a guy come out to start the process of getting an estimate on fixing the damage to the garage, and of more immediate importance, extricate my car from it. Fortunately my car is undamaged, but the garage is even more of a mess than it appeared to be ( Read more... )

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Sorry I've kind of dropped off the face of the earth for the past few weeks. Work, preparations for con, the usual factors apply. Anyway, a Google hole I fell into recently caused me to stumble across this guy's blog. He's an occasional contributor to Gaper's Block and New City Chicago who has been making it something of a project to walk a ( Read more... )

I turned on the TV this morning to check on traffic and annoy myself into wakefulness, and the first image I saw was the street I live on. Uh oh. Turns out a sixteen year old kid was shot on the block north of me at 9:30 last night. As it happens, this was just about two hours after I told a visiting posicat how much safer the neighborhood has become ( Read more... )