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COME TO CHICAGO, LAND OF YOGHURT AND HONEY!

Athenos is giving out free samples of their Greek Yoghurt line on the streets of Chicago this morning. This is genius, really, because while my statistics are anecdotal I've spoken to plenty of staff and fellow admins in other buildings and we've come to the general conclusion that almost nobody who works downtown eats breakfast. And then someone gives you breakfast!

So I am enjoying a homemade mango-maple granola bar and some strawberry greek yoghurt with honey.

A couple of people, most notably onebrightroad, linked me to a recent LOLcreation with a mockup of Hugh Laurie as the Doctor, and I'd just like to point out CALLED IT.

I even made him ginger, so there.

(This is just an excuse to use my Oh Snap Vindicated tag.)

(no subject)

Occasionally, I read stuff and think "That's pretty cool" and then don't know what to do with it. SO I GIVE IT TO YOU.

I recently stumbled over a very old article in Chicago Magazine called Heartbreak Hotel, about the Stevens Hotel of Chicago and its untimely ruin in the early part of the 20th century. I'm not necessarily that fascinated by the rise and fall of the Stevens family fortunes, but it's an entertaining read if you like history.

The little asides in the article are the most interesting, really -- the random factoid that the Stevens Hotel kitchen could produce 120 gallons of ice cream per hour, or the dinner plates that had silhouette images of Elizabeth Stevens on them (rather sweet, I thought). It's a very literary sort of story, from the Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' off-the-record stories about his dynasty's follies to his brother Bill's memories of watching their father study the hotel's blueprints at night on the family dinner table.

It's also a story about Prohibition, which caused speakeasies to draw dinner patrons away from hotel restaurants, and the Depression, which drove eighty-one percent of US hotels into bankrupcy. The hotel was run by a father and his two sons; during the last gasp of the business, when they were being indicted for fraud and disdained by general Chicago sentiment, the father suffered a massive stroke and one of the sons committed suicide, leaving his younger brother Ernest -- Justice Stevens' father -- to stand trial alone.

There is a somewhat happy ending to the story; Ernest was found guilty but the decision was later reversed, and three of his four children went on to become prominent lawyers. The hotel is still standing today, at Michigan just south of Balbo -- you can see it for yourself.

And now all this crap is in your head as well, and I can write it out of mine. :)

(no subject)

I have acquired new glasses! Kind of. Not really. I will have, in another week, when they come back from the lens lab.

My old glasses are perfectly fine, actually, and my prescription hasn't even changed (though the optometrist said I'm looking down the barrel of bifocals in another ten years, oh god) but the lenses are scratched to hell and back, which is what happens when you wear them through two Chicago winters, so I'm gettin' new lenses and frames that are basically exactly like my old ones except black instead of silver. I tried some chunky emo glasses on just to see if I still look like a douche in them, and yep, I still do. So, thin square frames it is.

BUT THAT'S NOT THAT INTERESTING. Origami is interesting! I folded a hummingbird today.

I'm pretty sure I messed up his ass, but I have it on good authority that hummingbirds don't care what their asses look like.