The best part of this job – besides writing some of the words Melba speaks while anchoring ATC – is being able to head out to really cool events at a moment’s notice. Eg. the Haiti Benefit Monday night at Hideout.

I’m biased of course – Hideout is among my top-10 favorite bars in this city (despite some random idiot stealing my bike during a show over the summer) – and I already knew that the Waco Brothers were awesome before I got there.

It turns out Eleventh Dream Day is awesomey-punky as well. And the concert was a success – the bar/Bloodshot Records et al. raised a ton of money ($8K!) for Haiti relief.  It was a great precursor to the next great benefit being thrown by Chicago’s Twitterati – #chiHelpsHaiti - tomorrow night at English.

So I just got back from the Chicago Police Department where Superintendent Jody Weis proclaimed crime in 2009 is down from the previous year.  They brought out evidence to support that claim, but upon close inspection, the drugs were old.

Weis says CPD  seized more than $6.9 million dollars in felony-related assets, and almost 8,300 guns in 2009. Yet this substance (cocaine is suggested on the evidence bag) is more than four years old.

I spent most of last night sitting on the floor of Schuba’s Tavern, wondering if the odor of spilled beer was going to be a new facet of my favorite boots, and staring at the pretty face of one Butch Walker. Walker, 40, is in town for the first night of a four-night series of shows at the tavern.

It was my first Butch concert – and it reminded me a lot of hipster church. The room swayed with every lyric and it seemed like every single fan knew each and every word of the 5-year-old album (Letters) he was playing end-to-end.

An Asian carp at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. (WBEZ/Kate Gardiner)

Back in the day, sewage used to flow from Chicago’s sewers directly into Lake Michigan. This had the unfortunate effect of giving people diseases – cholera, typhoid – and making everything smell yucky. But the city needed drinking water. And interstate industry needed barges and shipping and commodities.

So the Army Corps of Engineers thought about the problem for more than 30 years. They came up with an ingenious solution: reversing the flow of the Chicago River.  Engineering-wise: way cool. Smell-wise: who cares about people downstream? The project was completed in 1900. Today, it’s considered one of the reasons Asian carp are this close to Lake Michigan. And it’s one of the reasons Illinois is being sued. Read the rest of this entry →

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School say they’ve uncovered a forgery in their collection – and they’re happy about it. The “Archaic Mark,” long suspected of being too good to be true, was used as a guinea pig for new micro-analysis techniques. The findings: a white ink found in one of the illustrations in the Renaissance-style copy of the Gospel of St. Mark was invented in 1874. That means there’s no way the book – purchased for the University’s special collection in 1937 – could possibly have been written between the 13th and 17th Centuries.

University of Chicago Professor Margaret Mitchell says the book will be stripped of its official status as a good resource for the scholarly community. Mitchell says the book will likely exist more as a precedent-setting scientific teaching tool than anything else.

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The lead scientist on the project, Joe Barabe of McCrone Associates in Westmont, Ill.,  says he examined the chemical compounds of the ink under a microscope and carbon-dated the parchment used by the  forger to the middle of the Renaissance.

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Barabe says he and Mitchell also worked with specialists from Baltimore’s legendary Archimedes Palimpsest project, where researchers found the works of Archimedes hidden behind a lesser text through micro-spectral analysis.

Mitchell says while the forger wasn’t the best at forgery, he was great at erasing and re-treating antique parchment. They found nothing of interest in the book.

Mitchell says suspected forgeries at other universities around the world, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg will probably use the University of Chicago’s research to figure out whether or not their own documents are fake.

To examine the Archaic Mark on your own, visit the Goodspeed collection online. High resolution photos documenting the book’s drawings and text are available – in a scramble of ancient and modern Greek.

Airplane geek? Chicago-based Boeing’s new carbon-fiber 787 is in the air for the first time today from its factory home just outside Everett, Wash. The cool part: You can watch.

The plane has been delayed by a new international outsourcing plan, manufacturing concerns and a variety of technical issues for more than two years. Today, it’s headed into the sky for about 5.5 hours with two test pilots aboard.

Spokesman Russ Young says Boeing will learn a lot more about the plane’s fuel efficiency, and about its hi-tech carbon fiber fuselage. He says it’s Boeing’s first large passenger plane to be made from carbon fiber – which, he says, the company hopes will reduce both maintenance costs and lighten the plane’s load.

Young says one of the perks of his job is the possibility of being one of the first consumers to fly on the plane after  the first test flights are completed. He says he was one of the test bodies for the last new consumer plane from Boeing – the 777, released in 1995.

Last year, I meant to get out to the Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Festival… and then something came up.

This year I made the trip – and boy am I glad I did. It’s the Lollapallooza of bluegrass at the Congress Theater.

Set to remember: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Why? Siberian throat singers and the mad fiddle of fellow Homewood-Flossmoor (go Vikings!) grad Casey Driessen (he’s only gotten better since graduation ;)

An amendment Sen. Durbin and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wanted to add to a federal media shield law failed yesterday in the judiciary committee. The Free Flow of Information Act of 2009 (PDF) passed, however, and it’s headed to it’s place in line, somewhere behind health care.

Senator Durbin’s amendment wanted freedom of speech rights to cover journalists that were either paid by salary or independent contract, not those who work independent or voluntarily. Durbin told @848 that the shield law isn’t meant for just “anyone who emails.”

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Illinois Department of Natural Resources officials head out to sea on day 1 of the Rotenone application to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Lockport, Ill. (WBEZ/Kate Gardiner)

We killed it. The one and only Asian carp dumb enough to be on the wrong side of the “poison here” line in the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal.

It took $3 million, 2,200 gallons of fish poison and more than 250 people, but the Task Force got it done.

We spent $137,000 per inch of bighead carp. And we didn’t even eat the caviar.

What’s going to happen next time? The barrier might have to go down for maintenance in six months. Are we going to risk turning it off during what might be their next migration upstream, toward the city? Or do we kill all the fish in the canal, again and again, effectively establishing a kill zone in a body of water known for its poor water quality?
Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve been trekking around the city for the past few months talking to generations of blues musicians. It’s like fun but with a little bit of work behind it.

They all say the same thing: there’s a dearth of young, impressionable kids out there learning the ins and outs of the blues.

Part of that, they say, is because of a lack of exposure to the classics – including local legend Buddy Guy. I asked the man himself what he thinks about the state of his industry.