Events

The temperature at O'Hare did, in fact, rise above freezing around noon today. It's now officially 2°C. Break out the shorts!

We last had a temperature above freezing in Chicago at 7pm on February 4th, 16 days and some hours ago. Yesterday afternoon it got all the way up to -2°C before sodding off to bed. Close enough to give us oceans of meltwater on dark-colored streets and sidewalks, but still not, you know, above freezing. Today, though, the National Weather Service predicts the temperature will just crest freezing around 2pm, and hover there for about 12 hours. This won't get rid of the meters-high snowdrifts in our...

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) Tweeted yesterday morning, "Protecting and defending the Constitution doesn’t mean trying to rewrite the parts you don’t like." Josh Marshall wasted no time taking her to school: Who's gonna tell her? There's a worthwhile point that we can draw out of this otherwise useless dumbshittery. Folks on the right who stile themselves "constitutional conservatives" generally know next to nothing about the constitution and treat it as a kind of go to unicorn to validate what they want...

If the forecast holds, today will be the 15th of 16 straight days of below-freezing temperatures, and the 19th consecutive day with 30+ centimeters of snow on the ground. On Sunday, though the temperature will just barely break the freezing point (1°C predicted), this winter will move from 5th to 4th place in history on that last statistic. Officially O'Hare has 46 cm of snow right now, and until Tuesday's predicted mostly-sunny 6°C, not a lot of that will melt. (The last time we had this much snow on...

The junior US Senator from Texas, Republican Ted Cruz, has demonstrated a particular unfitness for office this week: Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Ted Cruz jetted to Cancún. And although the emperor was at least ensconced in a lavish, louche palace, the senator from Texas was stuck in economy class with the peasantry. Cruz’s appeal as a politician, such as it is, has never been about being lovable or relatable, but the latest incident is embarrassing even by his standards. He was spotted on a flight...

Welcome to stop #38 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Dry Hop Brewers, 3155 N. Broadway, ChicagoTrain line: CTA Brown, Purple, and Red Lines, Belmont Time from Chicago: 16 minutesDistance from station: 800 m Dry Hop Brewery on Broadway belongs to the same restaurant group as Corridor Brewery and Provisions (stop #37) and Crushed by Giants. It has similar (good) food, plus the advantage of sharing space with the fourth restaurant in the group, Roebuck Pizza. Like Corridor, Dry Hop's beers are...

Microsoft has started sending little reminders of things that happened "on this day," no doubt taking cues from Google Timeline and Facebook Memories. But I did enjoy getting a reminder that I took this photo 14 years ago this morning: Parker at Bardwell Park, Evanston, Ill., 18 February 2007. It'll be 3 months tomorrow. I do miss him.

Extreme cold and winter weather slammed Texas over the weekend, dropping temperatures to -9°C in Houston and causing snow in Galveston. But Texas politics has made the situation far, far worse as power failures have affected a quarter of all Texans: As this map makes obvious, politics seems to have caused the worst of it. The right-wing Republican government of Texas slashed regulations and even disconnected Texas from the National Grid to avoid Federal rules. And now, the poorest and hardest-hit in the...

WBUR–Boston's Julie Wittes Schack says Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" tops the list: [N]ow, nearly 50 years after it was released on “Blue,” one of the best singer/songwriter albums of all time, I can still confidently assert that “A Case of You” is one of the best love songs ever written. The quantitative evidence of that can be found in the fact that there are over 300 known cover versions of it; 300 artists who found something in its distinctive melody or conversational lyrics that they felt they...

It snowed overnight. Actually, it snowed from Sunday afternoon until about 4am today, so we have a bit of accumulation: Our official weather station at O'Hare reported 53 cm of snow on the ground at 6 am, including yesterday's record 16 cm of new snow. (Midway Airport, on the Southwest Side, reported 46 cm for just this storm.) So far, 46 cm of snow has fallen since February 1st at O'Hare, about 3 times the normal amount, while we're having the coldest February in history, averaging -10.4°C. And yet...