Chicago
Chicago turned out to be very different than what I expected. Aside from the atmosphere coming as close to resembling the south with SEC stickers on tons of cars and pastels polos on half the people, the city itself was crazy. Crazy like there was a beach a mile away from Linkin Park where I was staying. On top of that, it was a freshwater beach because it was on a huge friggin lake. Big enough to have waves, and no shoreline in sight and a sandy beach. The question I want to know is if the sand on the beach is brought in to make it a beach, or if it is legit sand, borne of the dead bodies of the life once lived in the lakes, before they caught on fire. But Cleveland comes later. Some things that you should know about Chicago. Chi town as it was once referred.
- First, there are Irish pubs on every corner. I don’t know if there was a Chinatown in Chicago, but if so, then there is probably a hO’chi MinCallisters on the corner. The area of town is probably called Chinacago, and there are lots of Asian men with remarkably thick moustaches talking broken Chicago English der, eh?
- Secondly, Chicago is a lot like going back to college. Everyone lives in Dorms. Everyone has parking permits for their cars. Everyone is from somewhere else.
- Lastly, everything you’ve seen about Chicago from The Blues Brothers is dead on, whether it be the L Trains, lots of transplanted Southern Black culture, or the affinity for Blues (I just so happened to be there on the weekend of the Blues festival), The Blues Brothers Movie nailed it. I halfway expected the entire city to break out into organized dance moves on the park steps when I went by, but alas, I missed the rehearsal.
The Women. How much for your women?
4 comments:
Ho Chi Minh was Vietnamese you jackleg.
Do you know why Chicago is called the "Windy City"?
From what I can tell, the nickname comes from the amount of wind occuring in the city. This may be, and I'm not a meteorologist, from the shift in temperatures from the lake to the asphalt of the city creating drastic changes in barometric pressures, causing the winds to seesaw back and forth between the city and lake. Or it is just God, blowing on the city a bunch.
It is well know that the first person to use the term "Windy City" was the New York Sun editor Charles Dana. In 1893, Chicago won the bid to host the World's Fair, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition. This was a big deal because the French had just put the Americans to shame at the previous World's Fair with the building of the Eiffel Tower. The next world's fair was seen as a chance by many Americans to show the world that it too was a great country.
Another factor that made this bid competitive was the list of cities competing for the right to host the fair. At the top New York, St. Louis and Washington D.C. all fought hard for the right and many New Yorkers thought they had a win guaranteed. In the end, it came down to New York and Chicago. Chicago finally won in a run-off vote and many prominent New Yorkers were extremely irritated that a "frontier town" could beat them.
Charles Dana was New York's leading fair booster, and there is extensive evidence that he used the "Windy City" term. The first known attribution of Dana to the origin of "Windy City" was in the Chicago Tribune, "Chicago Dubbed 'Windy' in Fight for Fair of '93," June 11, 1933:
“Don’t pay any attention,” wrote Charles A. Dana day in and day out in his New York Sun, “to the nonsensical claims of that windy city. Its people could not build a World’s Fair even if they won it."
-barometric pressure my ass
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