I’m set up in my hotel room now after a flight, a hotel check in, some blazing-hot sriracha chicken fingers from Goose Island, a Mets loss to the Cubs game and then about a half hour’s worth of computer trouble.
I had a more fully formed post in my head about this city but it will have to come later. I should mention that I may have said, “I like Chicago,” previously here, but I talk out my ass. I’ve spent about 72 enjoyable hours in Chicago before landing here today. I liked the very small sample of Chicago I was exposed to in the midst of a whirlwind baseball tour that put it up for comparison with such utopias as Detroit, St. Louis and Peoria.
I really don’t know anything about Chicago and I don’t imagine I’ll learn enough in the next 72-some hours either. It seems civilized, even to a lifelong New Yorker, someplace I could handle living if my home metropolis got swallowed up by the sea or destroyed by Godzilla or something.
And it produces good comedy and, I’m told, great pork, so that’s cool.
But I’m not even sure I know why Chicago is here. Why is Chicago here? I’m guessing shipping. I know it was a big railroad hub and it’s right on the Great Lakes, so that would make sense.
Anyway, there’s that to figure out, plus something about Cubs fans I’m working on. But now I’ve got to go see a man about a sandwich. This was something of a lost day on the blog and on the Twitter due to all sorts of technical hangups and shortsighted decision making on my part. Tomorrow and Sunday there’ll be much more from the Windy City, which is, indeed, quite windy.
Tedquarters 
Chicago’s one of four cities I’m annoyed I’ve never been to. The others are San Francisco, New Orleans, and Toronto.
You do realize Chicago is called the “windy city” not because its actually windy, but because back in the day its citizens would talk big a lot and rarely back it up. You know, “blow hot wind.”
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_name_%22Windy_City%22
Chicago has been called the “windy” city, the term being used metaphorically to make out that Chicagoans were braggarts. The city is losing this reputation, for the reason that as people got acquainted with it they found most of her claims to be backed up by facts. As usual, people go to extremes in this thing also, and one can tell a stranger almost anything about Chicago today and feel that he believes it implicitly.
But in another sense Chicago is actually earning the title of the “windy” city. It is one of the effects of the tall buildings which engineers and architects apparently did not foresee that the wind is sucked down into the streets. Walk past the Masonic Temple or the Auditorium any day even though it may be perfectly calm elsewhere, and you will meet with a lively breeze at the base of the building that will compel you to put your hand to your hat.