Memnison Journal

State Ag department:  http://www.agr.state.il.us/markets/farmers/ Farmers Markets Online: http://www.farmersmarketonline.com/fm/Illinois.htm

For all of the folks in Facebook who invite me to participate in a game: Sorry, don’t have the time to play them, and I distrust a lot of the join-this stuff in Facebook anyway. For all the folks anywhere who invite me to events out of town (Chicago): Sorry, too laid up after the [...]

We’re facing a foot of snow or better in the next 24 hours, and the phone and internet are *already* up and down like a windowblind today.  Highly annoying.  Comcast says it’s weather-related failures – which makes me worry about what we’ll do if we get first snowed in and then frozen with sub-zero temperatures! [...]

The typewriter turned out to be broken; the carriage does NOT advance when a key is struck – you have to keep hand pressure on the thing to move it with each key.  Everything else is in good shape. Anyone who has a good idea of where in the Chicago area I might get this [...]

Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the  northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the [...]

Guy is away, and his friends troupe in and wrap his entire apartment for Christmas.  Including stuff in the freezer, towels on the rack, you name it. (video)

Meredith came home early today sick to her stomach and running just under 100F; the H1N1 still isn’t available out here except a trickle with the public health departments, and there’s been some deaths with teenagers (usual serious swine flu symptoms).   I can’t take the live virus nose spray, and that’s all that’s available. Susan [...]

Two prominent Cook County politicians who are black will be running in the next election for President of the Cook County Board; this article discusses how that could split the black vote in the election and let Candidate #3 in the door, a reverse of what happened when Washington beat Byrne and Daley for the [...]

I am singularly uninterested in the Jackson story.  I’ve seen enough oddball celebrity circuses, and the really interesting and truly weird stuff will not come out for a while for most people.   I expect more news circuses repeated endlessly on the news, and I will ignore them all. Finally, someone sems to be doing something [...]

More about Daley’s efforts to sell off city parking meters and other property, and how his idea of ‘quick money now so I can keep services going now and the heck with the future’ isn’t working so well. Also, there’s the damage that the Olympic bid will do to the parks system, and Daley’s pledge [...]

Cecil Adams on Jim Butcher’s DRESDEN series (which I have not read; I saw a couple of the TV shows based on it) and how it does and doesn’t fit the realities of Chicago – and a bit on the ‘underground’ of Chicago (mostly downtown).

I’ve been wondering why the old US Post Office that surrounds the Western expressway entrance into downtown Chicago has remained intact and empty all this time.   Here’s the reason: nobody will take it.

The short end of it is that Susan, Meredith and I will be totally occupied with a Seekrit Project from about dinnertime Thursday to Friday evening (the first night of Duckon). Mike Harrington is flying in on Friday morning from Birmingham to be Duckon’s Science Guest of Honor, along with his daughter Meredith Ellen, and [...]

Chicago Reader: As for defending the deal, it’s pretty clear that the mayor’s central argument is that $1 billion in the bank today is worth more than anything 75 years down the road. and also here: In a damning 45-page report issued this afternoon, city inspector general David Hoffman said the Daley administration’s “hasty” consummation [...]

” I know you tell us what to do, but you’re supposed to warn us when you tell us to do something that is going to get us into trouble with our constituents and the law!”