the polar vortex comes to the windy city

Our official temp comes from O’Hare. They take temps all over the area when they give the weather, especially all those burbs and who the hell cares what the temp is there? If those burb people want to know what the temp is why don’t they move back to Chicago where respectable people live? They should just give the temp downtown where I live and forget about all those other people.

The burbs, I don’t have a lot of respect for the burbs. We used to call them the sticks, and laugh at their skinny phone books. Anymore they have like taken over, and instead if having a nice grid system like respectable Chicago has, they are all higgedly piggedly stretched out over everywhere so that driving down the same street you leave one suburb and then come back to it, and leave it, and come back, and they change the names and numbers of the streets, and the streets are all curvy. Lump them in with the backpackers and skateboarders and snowmobilers and jet skiers.

Sometimes, living by the lake, we get a little air conditioning on those godawful hot hot hot days, and the freeze comes later here because the lake is always at least thirty degrees, but in the spring when those awful suburbanites and even Gage Parkers are sipping lemonade in their shorts, we are freezing our asses off from that east wind.

Maybe polar vortex is not accurate, but I like it, it has a nice ring. And it looked like that in the weather maps last year where there were a lot of concentric circles growing bluer and colder as you go inward, and half the time Chicago was smack dab in the middle.

There are indeed gusts going through downtown on a windy day, where you are strolling along State as merry as the month of May and you turn onto Randolph and you are knocked off your feet. But other than that Chicago is not particularly windy. When they measure those things Chicago is about average.

The windy appellation came when there was a battle between Chicago and New York to see who would host the 1893 World’s Fair. It was mostly a war of words, and Chicago turned out to have more blowhards, and New York, to make fun of us, called us the windy city, and being as we always rather admired blowhards, we accepted the name and used it ourselves. There’s some other story about how we came to be the windy city, but the only thing I remember about it is that it is not as interesting, so the hell with it.

Tongues are wagging after Obama’s speech last night. Oh how those Republicans are shaking their fists and stomping their well-shod feet. There’s nothing they can do about it until they take their senate seats, and by then it will be too unpopular. I think it is a coup for the dems and a slap in the face of the reps after they creamed us in that last election. Though, as you said about the weather, anything can happen before it’s over.