159,000,000

That's how many trees there were in Chicago as of 2019, according to the US Department of Agriculture. I had a hard time believing that myself, and did a spot check. On the half-block where i Live there are cose to thirty trees in the [arkway and in yards. This is a short sstretch with three parking lots.

Between 2000 and 2010, the City planted about half a million trees. I've notice another surge in tree planting jut in the parts of Lincoln Park that I pass on the bus. In one stretch between Diversey Harbor and Belmont there are ovr two dozen nenw trees. That's only about half a mile.

Chicago s rapidly becoming The City in a Forest.

Thought for the Day.

With thanks to commenter🄿🅁🄸🅇🄰🅃🄾🅁 - 🅃🅁🄸🄿🄻🄴 🅅🄰🅇🅇🄴🄳 at Joe.My.God.

The Creationists Were Right!

There were dinasausrs on the Ark. We know them as "birds".

One of the Things

I love about eing a grown-up, is that if you decide you want pizza for breakfast, you can have pizza for breakfast.

Random Note

I have more Philip Glass in my music files than Mozart and Beethoven combined. This is from a collaboration with a number of South American composers, Aguas de Amazonas.

Thanksgiving dinner: Truly American

I was just thinking about where all those foods we serve at Thanksgiving originated. Well, it turns out that they are, indeed, overwhelmingly American in origin.

Turkey, the centerpiece of the meal, was native to eastern North America. Mashed potatoes -- c'mon, you can't have turkey without mashed potatoes: well, potatoes originated in South America. Corn and gren beans, standard vegetables, also both originated in the Americas, beans in South America, corn (maize) in southern Mexico.

Having pumpkin pie for desert? Thank the natives of what is now central Mexico. Ditto sweet potatoes (my mother always included a dish of sweet potatoes with Thanksgiving dinner), although they seem to have been more widespread, occurring down into South America.

So you see, Thanksgiving dinner really is an American feast.

Stray Thought for the Day

Both the sun and the moon rise in the east.

Does that mean the universe is right-handed?

The Original Antifa Leaders

With thanks to Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof:

Sign of the Times

I just got this from my friend Terry in Arizona:

How apropos.

Boy the Way

Happy Solstice! Yesterday was the shortest day of the year.

Now the days are getting longer -- slowly but surely.

Fun Facts

The Chicago Fire Department has a Scuba Unit. I suppose that makes sense, since we're right next to a major lake where people do stupid things and need to be rescued.

The Windy City, birthplace of the skyscraper is a place where the wind is blowing from whatever direction you happen to be facing. Once, when I was an art student, our class met at the Art Institute to see a major Robert Rauschenberg exhibition. (It was a class on collage and construction.) I left work on LaSalle Street and walked through the snowstorm to the AIC. By the time I got there, I was covered in snow on every side.

The Mark of a True Chicagoan

I was on my way home yesterday afternoon, riding the express bus up Lake Shore Drive. The temperature was eleven degrees. And sure enough, there were people out having their afternoon run in the park, and walking their dogs. OK -- if you're running, your generating heat and you don't feel the cold. And the dog has to be walked.

And then there were the people out for a stroll. Just walking along, observing the geese trying to find open water (the harbors and ponds are frozen over, and there's floe ice along the shore).

Well, it's Chicago.

(Actually, I'm dealing with the cold much better than I expected. My body must have had time to acclimate.)

Music Note

Just scrolling through my music and discovered I have thirty-seven albums of music by Philip Glass.

That should tell you something.

Music Note

(See what I did there?) I haven't really mentioned this before, but I play music in the morning while I'm surfing/blogging/whatever. Lately, instead of sticking with my few favorites and the playlists I've put together, I've been playing the stuff that I don't listen to that much. It's all stored on my computer, so it's just a matter of skimming through the files and picking something to play.

One thing, though, is that now I find myself wondering "What am I listening to?" when I don't recognize the music. (Just to give you an idea of the scope of this, my file directory for music lists about 500 folders. Some of those folders have more than one album --they're all listed by artist, so that "Stravinsky" is one folder -- but it contains thirteen albums. The Beethoven folder has sixteen albums; Depeche Mode has eighteen. I think the actual count is somewhere in the neighborhood of 750-800 albums and playlists. They're on my computer because -- well, when compact discs are taking over your space, you have to do something.)

The reason I bring this up is because it just happened. And then I remembered -- Toru Takemitsu, "Toward the Sea". (Actually, the album is titled I Hear the Water Dreaming, but "Toward the Sea" was the piece that was playing.)

And that's what's playing now.

Stray Thought: Trees

Did you ever think how big trees get? I don't mean trees like giant Sequoias or redwoods, I mean everyday sorts of trees like oaks and maples and locusts and such.

Maybe it's because I live in Chicago -- the "city in a garden" that might as well be called the "city in a forest". There are trees just about everywhere, especially in the older residential neighborhoods. Some of those are over a hundred years old. But even walking down a major commercial street, you notice that even the younger trees are a couple of stories tall. The older ones can easily top four stories, and even then, those are not really old trees -- maybe twenty or thirty years old, which is nothing for a tree.

There's an ash tree outside my window that pretty much covers three out of four windows facing that direction. I'm on a high second floor (the first floor is all commercial spaces), and I can just see the top of it from my window. The top is up into the third story, so it's at least twenty-five or thirty feet tall, and it's not really an old tree.

There are a couple of locusts up in the next block that I can see from the front door that tower over the buildings -- they're easily forty feet tall. And the maple next door is just about level with the roof of the building -- a three-story apartment building with a high basement, making it almost four stories.

Sadly, I can't find any pictures online that give a good idea of what I'm talking about here, so you'll just have to use your imagination. Or look out the window.

Stray Thought for the Day

From this article by Peter Baker at the New York Times on Mueller, Manafort, Gates, et al.:

In a fiery speech to supporters on Friday, President Trump went after his vanquished opponent from 2016. “We had a crooked candidate,” he declared.

We had a crooked candidate, and he got elected.

Via Bark Bar Woof Woof.

Stray Thought For the Day

America has become socially backward in a couple of respects. That popped into my head while reading this article, specifically this:

Getty Images, Via PinkNews

Leo Varadkar, the first gay leader of Ireland, has met with LGBT-friendly Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – and they were so happy together.

Varadkar took office as Ireland’s Taoiseach last month, becoming one of just five openly gay heads of government in recent global history.

There are only two other openly gay leaders currently in office: Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and Serbia’s Prime Minister Ana Brnabić.

(For an explanation of the socks thing, see the article.)

There have actually been, according to Wikipedia, fourteen gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or otherwise not straight heads of government.

And according to Time, there have been 70 women elected or appointed as heads of government or heads of state*, which puts the U.S. behind such bastions of male privilege as Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Chile, Liberia. . . .

Get my drift?

We elected an idiot with no experience in politics, a shady history in his business dealings, and no impulse control over a woman who was eminently qualified to be president.

Think about that.

* To clarify, in a parliamentary system, the prime minister is the head of government, i.e. Theresa May of the UK; in that case, Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state. In a parliamentary system with no monarch, the president is the head of state, which differs from a system such as ours, in which the president is both head of state and head of government.

One of Those Things

that just pop into my head when I allow my mind to wander:

Are there any flightless birds on northern continents?

It seems like very major southern landmass has (or had) flightless birds: ostriches in Africa, rheas in South America, cassowaries in Australia and New Guinea, moas (extinct) and emus in New Zealand, elephant birds (extinct) in Madagascar.

And checking the list at Wikipedia, it seems there are a few species of smaller flightless birds on some Caribbean islands (not to mention the Guam rail, and I'm sure there are others in the Pacific islands), but nothing on the order of the larger ones north of the equator.

I wonder why.

"Historic"

This post by Digby sort of crystallized something that's been in the back of my head for a while:

The pundits and the reporters all seemed to notice at the same time that Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination. And it seemed to dawn on them that it was an important moment worth noting. After all, it had never happened before. Ever.

It's been all over the blogosphere, and I'm getting real sick of seeing "HISTORIC!!1!" all over the place.

And a small correction to Digby: It's never happened before here. Just off the top of my head, and in no particular order, I can think of a number of countries that have had female heads of state or heads of government: Iceland, the UK, Ireland, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, the Philippines, Australia. . . .

I'm sure there are more.

Is this American exceptionalism in overdrive? Or just blinkered vision?

It's 2015

I don't know why, but for some reason "2015" is off -- there's something about the number itself that's just not right.

I suppose I'll get used to it.

Anyway, best to everyone for the coming year.

Cross-posted at Booklag.