Events

Chicago woke up to 25 mm or snow of fluffy snow this morning, our first measurable snowfall of the year: We don't mind this kind of snow. It took about 30 seconds to brush it off my car, the streets got cleared before sunrise—nothing heinous. No, "heinous" describes the forecast starting tomorrow night: Tuesday Night: Snow before midnight, then rain, snow, and sleet. Low around -1°C. Breezy, with an east wind 30 to 35 km/h becoming southwest. Winds could gust as high as 45 km/h. Chance of precipitation...

If she can't see you, then you can't see her...

The slide scanning project is almost done. I'm right now scanning the end of 1998, right around when I switched to digital cameras. Here are three from the mid-1990s showing bits of Chicago that no longer exist. First, in this view from the Sears Tower from April 1993, you can see Meigs Field and Soldier Field, both since destroyed: This April 1995 photo shows the view from the Michigan Avenue Bridge that now would encompass Trump Tower: The sun, however, still rises above Lake Michigan:

Autumn in the Green Mountain State: Cornwall, Vt., 17 October 1992. Same here: Just up the road in Whiting, same day: And up in Weybridge, 1 November 1992:

Coincidentally with the Illinois Dept. of Resources' desperate (and probably too-late) effort to stop Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes comes another tragically predictable outcome of local politics. The Mayor of Chicago this week forced a budget through the City Council over an unusually-high 12 dissenting votes that raids the paltry parking meter trust fund only a year after the (allegedly) corrupt and (actually) stupid decision exactly a year ago to sell the streets of Chicago: As has...

During the few months I lived in Vermont, Bill Clinton got elected President. He spoke at one big rally that year, up in Burlington, and thanks to a press pass from a friend at a radio station, I got to see him in person: I think you can see the Secret Service agent pushing me away in this shot, though Clinton himself couldn't get enough of the rope line: Then-Vermont-governor Howard Dean was there too:

Few people knew before, you know, this blog entry, that I lived in Vermont for a few months in 1992. (I was young, I needed the work.) Actually, it was the most beautiful place I've lived. That said, I grew up in one big city and went to college in another, so the things that made Vermont beautiful were precisely those things that made it difficult for me to live there: wide open spaces, trees, idyllic rural living, etc. I moved back to Chicago in short order, but not after taking a few hundred photos....

More photos from 1992. Taking the Kyle of Lochalsh train from Inverness through the Scottish highlands capped the trip. I took three rolls of film in as many hours. (We didn't have digital cameras back then, so each photo, with processing, cost about 35c—the equivalent of about 70c today—so those three rolls represent about $75 of today's dollars.) Here are three of those shots, from 24 June 1992: Note, please, that I have licensed some of my work as stock photos, and I would like to do so again. So...

After detecting Asian carp DNA only 10 km from Lake Michigan, the Illinois Dept. of Resources last night started killing everything in the Sanitary and Ship Canal that runs through the city: About 8,300 liters of the liquid toxin rotenone were put into a 6-mile stretch of the canal near Romeoville Wednesday night. More than a dozen boats were to go on the canal later today to begin cleanup operations.... The toxin was put into the water because fears that the carp--which can grow to about 150 cm and 50...

The trip I took in 1992 went from West Sussex, England, to Nice, France; Genève, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; then back to the U.K. As I continue the (excruciatingly slow) process of scanning all these slides, I'll continue to post the better ones. Like these, the first from Nice: And Strasbourg: