✶✶✶✶ Chicago MMXIV ✶✶✶✶

well tbh if you invite lady friends it will prob be a half days of nudity

also i saw that fred frith is going to be at constellation 3/3 if anyone's interested?

do i need to wear clothes

in general or to this event?

My wife swears by this Korean spa in Niles where old, underwear-clad Korean ladies scrub inches off your body:

http://www.kingspa.com/

She and her friends now call it the Naked Spa.

Having just moved to a new place and settled in, our cat picked the one-month mark to make his escape. He's been missing since Sunday. I can only hope he's found some place to wait out the weather while feasting on small(er) animals, but I feel horrible every time the temp drops further.

thats the place we've been talking about all day

and if you are a man you can have an underwear-clad Korean man scrub you down

Lol
Sorry about yr cat JiC :(

Aw kitty. I'm sorry, Josh. Fingers crossed.

There are all sorts of gambles at play when you let a cat out. He could be hit by a car, he could drink antifreeze, he could be eaten by a coyote. I figure at least Oscar has a fighting chance: he was born on a farm, still has his claws, has been out in the cold before, and he can kill animals like a pro. When he comes back, he'll have some stories to tell, I'm sure.

xpost Oh shit, that totally is the place, sorry for skimming. Anyway, she loves it. I think she and her buddies are going back for the fourth or fifth time. She tried to get some of the dudes to try out the guy side, but half of us were all hell no.

Josh, I hope your cat comes back, and soon.

When I was kid in rural northern MN my cat disappeared in late winter. We'd seen bears in the yard and we'd found one of our dogs mauled to death by a trail in the swamp, so we thought maybe a bear killed the cat, too. But months later, sometime in summer, she turned up on the porch like nothing happened. She was skinny but otherwise fine.

I'd read Pet Sematary before any of this happened, and the memory of the book plus that cat's reappearance precipitated a recurring dream where I had to stuff my undead pets into a mop bucket and hand wash them.

Anyway, I hope Oscar is having fun and comes back before too long.

Hooray, the return of everyblock.

Oh good!

Jeff,where did you hear about Buster's developer quitting support?

I tried Transit Stop for a week or two but I really don't like it. Its structure is confusing.

otm.

i just use google maps and cta's bustracker webpage mostly now

Because they haven't updated since May 13, 2011. I'd consider that done. It's hasn't even been updated to fit the iPhone 5 resolution. I try contacting the developer but they never responded.

Buster did bus times fine, but did a half assed job on the train tracker part. You have to drill down to get to your stop every time, and it's just loading the CTA mobile webpage anyway. With TS you can just create bookmarks and have them all on the same page. And you can have the app open directly to that page.

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3807/12102810833_1258a27eed.jpg

Then tap the clock icon in the upper right to show the next arrival times for all your stops, all at once.

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3795/12102812953_7748b6f658.jpg

Adding bookmarks and finding stops can be confusing, but I don't have to do that very frequently. One thing that took me a little while to learn how to do was to find the stop closest to you that isn't in your bookmarks. Unfortunately you can't just click the location arrow and list all the stops closest, but you can search for a specific route, then click the location arrow in the lower left and it will sort them by proximity to your current location.

I'm listening to this guy on the radio talk about the closing of Sears and he's being so cold! Of their State St store, he said, "they were trying to come home, and nobody wanted them." Gotta give it to the guy for not sugarcoating, I guess.

I hope a Whole foods opens in that spot. With about 4 bars in it.

jeff you are super in to drinking at whole foods

errbody in whole foods gettin tipsy

drinking at whole foods is always delightful

i am more a fan of having a slice of pizza at whole foods

I'm never in the mood to stay at any grocery store any longer than I have to. Sometimes I dilly dally around the bakery at Fresh Farms but most of the time grocery shopping is strictly business.

I've only ever drank at the Kingsbury one, but they usually have very good draft lists at both bars. Plus I have a lot of pals that go there every Friday after work.

http://www.beermenus.com/places/12664-red-star-bar-whole-foods-lincoln-park

Routine would be to have two drinks at the bar, then another while I'm shopping.

binny's on a friday nite can get you hammered just w/ the free samples

That Sears store kind of sucked, though, which is the thing people seem to forget to mention when hassling Chicagoans for acting like we're better than Sears. The Lands End part was okay but the rest was a mess.

Agree. That's what the guy said too, he was just like welp the store sucked and it died who cares the end.

I don't have any friends (outside of you guys) who like to drink at Whole Foods! It still sounds totally bazonkers to me.

Sears in general is kind of a shit show. I've blocked out the specifics but I had a Kafka-esque battle with their CS reps about a defective air conditioner shortly after we moved here.

i live practically next door to the dinosaur sears on lawrence, its so weird and old but i like having it there

that sears is kind of cool, I like feeling like I'm shopping in a store in 1920.

Whole Foods bar is a good place to drink with a baby.

Not that the baby is drinking you know what I mean.

I still hate that Whole Foods though.

I liked having that Sears there b/c every now and then I needed some shit and there it was. But that was once every couple of years and Target will take up the slack just fine.

You're right about the bookmarks being better in Transit Stop, Jeff. I spent some time w/ it today and I just have to do a bunch of bookmarking and remember how to navigate it. Unfortunately you can't just click the location arrow and list all the stops closest This is my biggest beef w/ it. Frequently I want to find out which bus lines are nearby. I'm supposed to just know that info when I'm in a strange part of town?

For a moment this morning I thought, hey, maybe Electropuf (whose website is gone, BTW) will let me have their API and I can build my own dream CTA app, which, come the fuck on, eat me, Jesse.

I've only ever drank at the Kingsbury one, but they usually have very good draft lists at both bars. Plus I have a lot of pals that go there every Friday after work.

I like that northwoods-cabin upstairs corner at the Kingsbury Whole Foods.

That Sears has been so understaffed that the few times I've stopped in there for something essential, it was never worth waiting in a long line. (No crowds--just 8 out of 10 customers in the entire store waiting in line.) Reminded me of Borders' last days in that way.

It's been varying shades of that for a long time. The last several years have felt like a protracted going out of business sale.

The guy on the radio was saying the State St store had been losing money since it reopened in 2001. The sad part was how they stopped all catalogue operations (closed warehouses, shipping centers) not long before they could have become competitive in Internet sales. Oh well!

i remember the Sears "wish book" was the most amazing thing to flip though before christmas as a kid

I would love to browse some old Sears catalogs right about now. So soothing!

Those things were nuts. They had Star Wars toys that I'd never seen anywhere else, before or since.

Oh god the Wish Book! Almost as good as actually getting toys.

I still look at catalogs as a form of self soothing to this day.

Since we lived overseas so much of the xmas experience was using Sears and JC Penney mail-order catalogs to build xmas lists. I wonder how many years I asked for, and (fortunately) did not receive, a rock tumbler.

OMG I wanted a rock tumbler so bad!

Unrelated but hilarious: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/01/23/chicago-gop-hopeful-reveals-gays-cause-autism/

She's running against Jan Schakowski!!! Lololol good luck w/ that you fucking loon.

Well no she's running in the republican primary and would run against Jan if she won. But still. LOL.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wishbook/sets/72157603419794725/

Chicago: There Is No Foreeable End To The Deep Cold Here

Unrelated but hilarious: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/01/23/chicago-gop-hopeful-reveals-gays-cause-autism/

She's running against Jan Schakowski!!! Lololol good luck w/ that you fucking loon.

― carl agatha, Thursday, January 23, 2014 5:07 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fuck?! I mean, apart from her batshittedness, there's like a total of 3 conservatives in that district. Maybe her campaign is actually some sort of elaborate tax dodge.

ugh i am so deeply bummed about -XX degrees on the first week of school

also i might need to go to kingspa on sunday