Here’s the deal. Your job is to roundly defeat the current occupant of the Oval Office. Right now, that’s all it is. If you’re talking about anything else, you’re wasting your time and my time. If you haven’t calculated what making him go away is going to take, start calculating Continue Reading
Edmund McDevitt
Judicial Elections (and Other Elections) – Cook County – March 17, 2020
We all know that the Illinois Presidential Primary Election will occur on March 17. It is, however, not just a Presidential Primary. The election goes far beyond voting for a party’s Presidential candidate. This blog posting provides you with information on what you’ll be voting for overall and on what Continue Reading
A Short Disquisition on I.T. “Help”
It’s good to see that some things don’t change. Throughout my work activity in Information Technology I worked with many company user communities whose IT “support” was too often characterized by stone-eared listening. A user team would identify a tech problem. The IT staff then would respond, too often, in Continue Reading
A Musical Interlude: The Chicago Symphony plays Liszt, Wagner and Brahms/Schoenberg
Yes, this blog is about lots of different things. Sometimes it will be about music, usually a review of a concert or other musical event. This one is about the Thursday, June 6, 2019 Chicago Symphony concert at Orchestra Hall. Last night at the Chicago Symphony concert we saw guest Continue Reading
The “Plague” at the Chicago 1933 Century of Progress
The 1893 the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago had its serial killer, H.H. Holmes, made famous as “The Devil in the White City.” The actual extent of Holmes’s crime spree is probably far smaller than the legend and the book suggest, but popular imagination keeps the legend alive. Most people Continue Reading
UPDATE: The Eagle Fountains: Where Have They Been?
August 20, 2024 This is an update to this entry, first published in 2019. I received an inquiry from a friend about the Eagle Fountains, asking why they’re still not back in place. I queried my contact at the Chicago Park District and got this reply: “Restoration of the fountains Continue Reading
Monuments to Women. Seen Any Lately?
I lecture on Chicago’s public art (and on public art in general). Monuments are necessarily part of the conversation, though generally speaking, the making of representational monuments became passé in the 1950s. However, prior to that all of the commemorative monuments in Chicago were to dead white men, several of Continue Reading
Chicago’s Lost, Altered and Disfigured Public Art, #2
As we said in our first entry on this topic, “When we start telling the stories of our public art, the conversation inevitably turns to art that is gone. Where did it go? Why?” The list of missing art is long and, at least to this observer, maddening. Herewith are Continue Reading
The Dentist in the Park
You can picture the faces. Visitors to Lincoln Park walk up to a statue, look at it and walk away saying, “Who?” Many of Chicago’s parks contain monuments that are like that. Humboldt. Schiller. Altgeld, not to name just Germans. Schiller. A sculpture that stands in a lovely, very prominent Continue Reading
The Polar Vortex Song
I have adapted a well-known song so that you have something to sing as we experience the descent of the polar jet stream to our environs. My respects to Mel Torme and Robert Wells. Chestnuts freezing in an open fieldJack Frost nipping off your noseWarm-weather songs being cried by a Continue Reading