Chicagoania

Chicago Parking Meters

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The City of Chicago, in order to close their yawning budget deficit without cutting any spending, resorted to a one-time sale of their parking meters to a third party.

Here is a link to a Chicago Tribune article about the lease. The City received $1.2 billion in cash, immediately, but forfeits the revenue from the meters for the term of the 75 year lease.

In practical terms, the meter rates have increased drastically. All week long they are basically $2 / hour, where ever there are meters (most side streets don’t have meters). From 8am to 9pm this would work out to $26 / day. You can see the rates on the meter. Note also the sign that you can’t put in money for more than 30 minutes at a time (on this particular meter) – probably that’s left over from its prior incarnation. I assume that there is some sort of credit card way to pay else you need to walk around with 100+ quarters (a roll?) just to pay for parking.

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Joke of the Day

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A minister was raising a young lad.   The boy was approaching his late teen years and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, a situation many young men find themselves in.   The minister decided to try a little experiment to see exactly just what the boy would do with his life.

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Coyotes Continued (Updated!)

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Well, apparently the stuff is hitting the fan a little bit wrt the coyote problem here in Madison. Two family pets (both dogs) have now died and there is now a public meeting scheduled, where I assume nothing will be done.

This article was on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal today. An alderman is quoted a few times in there, and I assume the complaints of the people in his ward are what made him get on the stick to organize the meeting, where wildlife people from the Wisconsin DNR, City of Madison and UW will be attending.

The whole theme of the article is living with the coyotes. There is not one single mention of shooting or trapping them, the time honored way to rid yourself of a pest. I couldn’t ever imagine the council of the city of Madison approving a hunt for them. So reproduce, they will.

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“Shovel Ready” stimulus

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Recently I went to the Chicago Dog show and then down to Hyde Park, where our president used to live, to eat at a restaurant I saw on the show “Check Please” called Calypso. The restaurant was a Caribbean restaurant and the food was excellent. It seemed nice to get some sun and imagine I was in the tropics, if only for a minute.

While driving home on East Hyde Park Boulevard, a major street in Hyde Park, I was driving with a car right beside me and I came up to a monstrous pothole. Since there was someone right next to me I tried to swerve and slow down but still ended up in the hole. The depression was very large and the edges were completely jagged – it was more like a construction site than a pothole.

My tire was flat in a matter of seconds. I pulled over in a residential neighborhood and with the help of some friends along for the ride (I am not a particularly handy guy, although I was game to get out there and do the work) we changed the tire and put on the little spare.

Later I heard that the City of Chicago will reimburse you for pothole damage but I wasn’t able to find the link on their site. I will look into it a bit more but I am not too hopeful that our maze of bureaucracy would be paying me out in my lifetime.

I was looking to get new tires for my car, anyways, since the damn Altima will live forever (it is going on 10 years) so I wasn’t really out much. Glad I didn’t replace the tires FIRST because there was no way any tire could have survived that ditch.

The ironic part of this is that city mayors are scrambling to figure out what to do with the windfall of cash and they can’t even bother to plan to fix a major pothole right near the President’s house.

Cross posted at LITGM

IKC Dog Show Chicago

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We have a lot of weighty posts here at Chicago Boyz so I figured I’d post one that was just fun

On Sunday I attended the IKC Chicago dog show at McCormick Center. The fun part of the show is not the judging or the agility contests like they show on TV but it is the fact that you can walk through and see all of the dog owners grooming and preparing their dogs prior to the show. It is also interesting to walk down a row and see lots and lots of dogs of the same breed, even if it is a rare one. I highly recommend attending – pretty much everyone there seemed to be having a good time.

The little dogs and the big dogs are a lot of work to prepare for judging. The effort spent on getting their coats ready to go takes hours.

I use Picasa 3 which is a google product for photo editing and made this you tube video of all my pictures. I originally had “hound dog” by Elvis in the background but You Tube stripped that out so now it is silent – use your own music. It is just a couple of minutes long and very family friendly so watch it with your kids or kids who aren’t yours for that matter. It is about 2 minutes long.

Here is a link to the movie.

Enjoy!