Archive for the ‘local’ Category
NIU shooting
February 14th, 2008
The report of today’s shootings at Northern Illinois University was not just a news story to us in the Chicago area. Lots of local kids go there; everyone in my neighborhood knows a student—or knows the parents of a student—at NIU. My daughter, safe at another school, has been frantically texting and calling her friends at Northern. They’re all fine, but I won’t be surprised to learn in the next few days of a connection with one or more of the victims. Kids the same age as my daughter, gone forever.
As my wife and I were running errands this evening, we heard interviews on the radio with students who were in the class and escaped. There was a strange matter-of-factness in the way they talked, as if they had watched someone else rather than lived through it themselves. I suppose it will seem more real to them in a day or so.
This tragedy comes not only on the heels of other school shootings in Louisiana, Tennessee, and California, but just a week or so after a shooting in a suburban Chicago clothing store. There were five victims in that incident, too.
The public reaction to shootings like these has changed since I was a kid. In the 60s and 70s, these incidents would lead to calls for tougher gun control laws. Now they seem to always lead to nutty arguments for concealed-carry laws. I’ve already seen letters to the editor claiming that the clothing store shootings wouldn’t have happened if the store’s customers had been packing heat, and I won’t be surprised to see the same thing in response to the NIU story. This is almost as disturbing as the shootings themselves—not just that there are idiots who think it’s a good idea to have several people spraying bullets around, but that there’s no embarrassment associated with expressing those thoughts in public. Newspaper editors think it’s an opinion worth publishing.
Angry thoughts at the end of a bad day. I should just go to sleep.
Primary Day
March 21st, 2006
Today is primary election day in Illinois, but I don’t think I’ll be voting. Because the local officials, state representatives, and US representative from my area are always Republicans—and Illinois has an open primary system—I usually grab a Republican ballot and try to pick the least objectionable candidate. I assume Republicans in Chicago do the same thing with Democratic ballots.
(In 1992, I was so focused on the local elections that I forgot I would be voting in the Presidential primary. [The nominations are usually wrapped up by time Illinois’s primary comes around.] So there I was, staring at a ballot with George Bush and Pat Buchanan as my choices. I established my paleo-conservative credentials by voting Buchanan, and he rewarded me by giving the “culture war” speech at the convention that may have thrown the election to Clinton. Clinton was the first presidential winner I ever voted for.)
But this year I can’t bring myself to vote Republican, even in a primary. The war, the corruption, the fundamentally criminal behavior of the national Republican party—I just can’t do it.
If I lived a few blocks to the west, I’d probably force myself to the polls, because there’s a school referendum for that district on the ballot and it’s pretty heated. I see a lot of yard signs about it on my drive to work; my favorite is
VOTE YES!
No Overcrowding
Voting Yes for No is primary voting in a nutshell.
Journey back in time
March 17th, 2006
Today I went to Kara, an engineering supply store, to get a pocket penetrometer and a pocket rod. Only civil engineers—the same people who talk abut “erection aids” without thinking about sex—could come up with product names like these.
Kara is in Countryside, one of the closer-in western suburbs of Chicago. Its name may have been appropriate a hundred years ago, but there’s precious little country in Countryside today. Kara itself is next door to the giant ElectroMotive Diesel facility, a vast industrial wasteland dedicated to producing monstrous locomotive engines. This is how it looks on Google Maps. Zoom in to see the beautiful countryside.
Driving toward Chicago on surface streets rather than an expressway is like driving backward in time. As you go through the older and older suburbs, the architecture shifts, and today’s electronics superstores and chain restaurants give way to storefront appliance shops and “retro” diners that aren’t really retro, they just haven’t changed in 50 years. When I was in college, I had a friend who thought he grew up in the 50s. “Art,” I’d tell him, you were born in 1959. You grew up in the 60s and 70s.” Then I visited his hometown of Skokie and realized that he had been right—even in the 80s and 90s Skokie was solidly in the 50s. I haven’t been there in a while, but I expect it still is.
In addition to the things-that-sound-like-sex-toys-but-aren’t, Kara sells drafting equipment, and I picked up a new Staedtler Mars 780 leadholder.
I have a few of these and they are built to last forever, but I worry about losing them and Staedtler ceasing production, leaving me without my favorite writing instrument. I’ve never understood people’s preference for those clicky mechanical pencils with the wimpy leads that break under the slightest pressure. The leads in a leadholder are 2 mm in diameter; the only way they can break is if you oversharpen them, and even then you’ll only break off a small portion of the tip.
Last year, I added a couple of paragraphs to the 43 Folders wiki on the value of leadholders. At the time I was using 2H leads, which are pretty hard. The advantage of hard leads is they almost never need sharpening, the disadvantage is they leave a relatively light line. The light lines never bothered me before, but in the last year I’ve been trying out softer leads to make things easier on my aging eyes. Still haven’t decided between H and HB.
I think my worries about Staedtler no longer making the 780 are well-founded. Like the diners and small appliance shops in Countryside, leadholders are an anachronism and will slowly fade from the scene. Me too.
The first thing we do…
February 27th, 2006
In the business section of today’s Chicago Tribune, there’s an article about some bankruptcy attorney from Kirkland & Ellis. The photo that accompanies the article shows him in his office next to a gigantic portrait of John Wayne. The lawyer’s pose is sort of a mirror of Duke’s (I feel certain he calls Wayne “Duke” when he talks to the portrait). His hands are on his hips, his gut is sucked in, and he has that “women want him, men want to be him” look that can only come from spending 12 hours a day on the telephone.
He credits his great success to his bartending and wrestling experience, but it’s clear that he only tended bar for a while during college and hasn’t wrestled since high school. Of course, he did go to high school at New Trier, well known in Chicagoland as the training ground for the city’s baddest-assed arbitragers and urologists.
The article is here, but unfortunately the picture isn’t part of the online story. Your loss.
Discovering Logo
February 21st, 2006
My older son is in an accelerated math program at his grade school, and a few weeks ago he came home talking about Logo. This surprised me. I didn’t think Logo was much in favor anymore, and my daughter’s experience in the Naperville school system (she’s in high school now) led me to believe that “computer literacy” in District 203 was equivalent to “knowing how to use PowerPoint.” Maybe I got that impression because she wasn’t in the accelerated math program, but I think its more likely that the program’s new teacher is trying some new things.
Anyway, I installed MSW Logo on the family computer, and Older Son showed us what he had learned about Logo and turtle graphics. I did a little research and learned enough to show him the repeat and help him learn to draw “circles” by making many-sided polygons. We’re going to move on to making new words soon. I think an alphabet would be a good project, with word definitions like this:
to a
lt 75 fd 105 rt 150 fd 105
penup
back 50 lt 75
pendown
back 25
penup
fd 25 rt 75 fd 50 lt 75 fd 10
pendown
end
which is, I’m sure, more complicated than it needs to be, but is the sort of definition you get from exploring interactively until you get something that looks like an A.
If you go searching the Internets for Logo information, you won’t go far before running into Brian Harvey, a lecturer at UC Berkeley who’s written his own version of Logo—on which MSW Logo is based—as well as three books on Logo, all available for download from his site. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Harvey is that he’s a Marxist—exactly the sort of dangerous faculty member David Horowitz is always warning us about. (I won’t link to Horowitz himself, but I’m happy to link to a post about him.) Apparently, Harvey doesn’t breathe enough fire, as Horowitz has not seen fit to put him in the Discover the Network matrix.
(Following up a Horowitzian link from Michael’s site, I came across this stunning quote from the article on Pol Pot:
Months later the American “anti-war” left and its allies in the Democratic Party led by Senator Edward Kennedy brought down the Nixon presidency in the Watergate affair.
It’s this ability to cram so much error into so few words that makes Horowitz a beloved figure.)
Let’s see…brief swipe at local schools, programming, right-wing fantasists—I think it’s time for bed.
Day Trippers
January 17th, 2006
Yesterday, mrsdrang and I took the train into Chicago to see the Pompeii exhibit at the Field Museum. Included in the day’s plan was a stop at The Berghoff for a last lunch there before it closes next month. It was a beautiful day, bright and brisk but not cold. A day sans children, a treat that only parents of many years can appreciate.
The Pompeii exhibit is nice, but not dazzling or overwhelming. Maybe the story is just too familiar. Maybe Roman coins and jewelry aren’t my thing. I enjoyed looking at the frescoes, particularly the well-preserved one of Apollo and the Muses, but the rest just wasn’t too exciting. Worth going to (skip the audio tour, it adds virtually nothing), but not an experience you’ll carry with you.
The Berghoff was fun, as always. The beer and the rye bread are very good, the food OK. This is not a disappointment—you know going in that German food barely qualifies as food, let alone as great cuisine. You go to the Berghoff because it’s the Berghoff, in business since 1898, the first bar to get a liquor license after Prohibition. It’s closing because the current generation of owners (still Berghoffs) are retiring, and their daughter wants to run her catering business out of the old restaurant. She plans on renting out the facility to corporations and other groups for dinner and party events. I’m sure it will be a good strategy for a while, as law firms and other local businesses will think it’s cool to have their affairs at the old Berghoff. But isn’t she afraid that, as people go for years without the experience of eating at the restaurant, the cachet associated with the place will fade? Her food will have to be better than her parents’ if the place is to survive on its own merits.
Since the announcement of its closing, the place has been making money hand over fist. When we got there, about quarter to 11, the line from the door stretched west from the door down Adams nearly to Dearborn. In no time it was around the corner at Dearborn and south to God-knows-where. When we shuffled up to the door at about 11:30, the man at the door told us that wait for those at the end of the line was probably over an hour and a half. That’s a lot of schnitzel.
Yerkes
January 17th, 2006
This weekend, I was in Williams Bay, Wisconsin at a “campout” with my two sons. We didn’t actually camp (we stayed in dorms at the George Williams College campus of Aurora University), and our times out consisted of going back and forth between buildings on the campus (mostly the dining hall and the gym) and a few hikes.
Two of the hikes took us to the Yerkes Observatory, a beautiful and historic building on an adjoining property owned by the University of Chicago.
The building dates back to the late 1890s and was built shortly after the university was founded. The large dome houses a 40-inch refractor telescope, once the largest telescope in the world and still the largest refractor.
We weren’t able to go into the observatory either of the times we were there: a notice on entrance said it wasn’t open Saturday night because of poor viewing conditions (there were a few scattered clouds, but I’m guessing it was the full moon that made the conditions poor), and it’s generally not open to the public on Sundays. The notice did give the address of the observatory’s web site, which I wrote down in my HPDA and visited this evening. It has a wonderful history section and a (90s era) “virtual tour.”
(Photo from the University of Chicago.)
What’s the matter with Kansas?
September 2nd, 2005
Through the reliably bad taste of our local middle-aged Jaycees, Kansas is playing at my town’s Labor Day festival, the Last Fling, and I’m a nonpaying and unwilling member of their audience. Although my house is a good mile from the stage, turgid rock has the power to carry for incredible distances.
According to the schedule, they took the stage about an hour ago, but are somehow still playing. What in God’s name can fill up a Kansas playlist? And think of the decisions to be made: do we play Dust first, saving Wayward Son for the encore? or the other way around?
Update: In an unwise moment, I went to their site and clicked through the discography. Somehow in the intervening three decades, I had forgotten about Point of Know Return. So they actually have three songs that people with no taste might be willing to listen to—my apologies for suggesting they have only two.