Events

Note: Ten Ninety closed permanently in January 2025. Welcome to stop #2 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Ten Ninety Brewing Co., 1025 Waukegan Rd., Glenview, Ill.Train line: Metra Milwaukee District North, Glenview station.Time from Chicago (Union Station): 38 minutes, zone DDistance from station: 700 m A trio of bros formed Ten Ninety in 2012 and moved to Glenview in 2016. They specialize in Imperial-style beers, but they have a full line to go with their full kitchen. From left to right, I...

Welcome to my new project: Brews and Choos. Off and on over the next year, I'm going to visit 98 breweries and distilleries that are within about 1.5 km of rail lines around Chicago. Some of them are right downtown; others require a 100-minute schlep to a neighboring state. I'll post reviews and visit notes in chronological order. For a list organized by train line, check out the explanation page. Here's the first stop. Brewery: Macushla Brewing, 1516 E. Lake Ave., Glenview, Ill.Train line: Metra...

I love trains. I love beer. I don't love driving when I'm having beer. So how to reconcile all of those things, I wonder? My solution: identify breweries in and around Chicago close to rail lines and visit them. Starting in February 2020, I identified 98 locations ranging from one as close as 400 m from a downtown Chicago train station to four that require a 100-minute train ride to a neighboring state. Even better, the densest stop on any train line turned out to be the one closest to my house: there...

British Airways flight 112 arrived at 4:47 this morning at Heathrow, having made the trip from New York in an astonishing 4 hours, 56 minutes: Virgin Atlantic wasn’t far behind British Airways, though. VS4 from New York JFK to London Heathrow was scheduled to depart at exactly the same time. The flight was operated by an A350-1000, and that plane completed the flight in just 4hr57min. It ended up arriving at the gate at Heathrow at 5:05AM, a full 1hr25min ahead of schedule. Tail winds on both flights...

I've got an idea for a new series of posts that I'm researching this weekend. Nothing may come of it, but the research itself should be fun. Stay tuned.

The frozen continent hit its all-time-warmest temperature yesterday: Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 18°C was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history. The Antarctic Peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50...

Yes, the Democratic Party had a bad week. But those of us paying attention knew we would. Now, I couldn't have predicted the unconscionable fuck-up (no other word for it) perpetrated on the national party by its Iowa subsidiary. In future, I hope Iowa's quirky, exclusionary method of selecting delegates either goes away entirely or gets moved so late in the year that no one cares anymore. Or simply that no one cares anymore, full stop. The idiots running the IDP deserve nothing better for at least two...

The week keeps getting more fun: Former ambassador Marie Yovanovich has more optimism than a lot of people about the future. Republican trolls clogged the Iowa Democratic Party phone lines on caucus night. The Washington Post's Timothy Bella outlines exactly why Rush Limbaugh receiving the Medal of Freedom offended so many people, even as Republican trolls laughed about "the greatest own the libs moment in American history." The doctor who first identified the Wuhan virus has died of it. Talking Points...

Welp, the Senate has acquitted President Trump almost entirely along party lines, as everyone knew it would. Only Mitt Romney (R-UT) crossed the aisle to vote for conviction. Here's a roundup of the news in the last few hours: Josh Marshall says "Romney's vote is more than symbolic" because it puts the lie to the Republican Party's assertion that Trump did nothing wrong. George Conway gets caustic in "I believe the president, and in the president." The Atlantic says Congress has lost its power over...

You'll just have to imagine the context for all of these comments I posted on my Facebook feed last night. At least I put them in chronological order: Watching the State of the Union with the sound off, and PBS closed captions. And a big martini.—at Agami Contemporary Sushi. I don't know if I can do this. I thought without the sound my skin wouldn't crawl as much. But the words could have come from the Politburo. And Mike Pence is so creepy. OK, I need a non-trivial truthful statement. Just one. Please....