Ebert picks the highest rated season since the inaugural, and the youngest season ever. Also the first season without a musical.

The journal of the Great Waters Association of Vexillology (the study of flags is called Vexillology) reports on the original proceedings of the 1917 Chicago City Council that adopted the flag design, which at that time, only had two stars. Here’s an image of the original flag as pictured in the Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1921, courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. I’ll quote the relevant portion of Wallace Rice’s description here:

Next (to) the hoist and two inches from it at the nearest point is a red star fourteen inches tall with six points drawn from a circle six inches in diameter. Two inches from this is a second star of the same size. […] The two stars stand for the two great formative events in Chicago history, the Great Fire of 1871 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They are given six points each that they may not be confused with the five-pointed stars which stand for the States of the Union in the American Flag.

The bold passage (emphasis mine, obviously) gives us numbers, slightly different from the numbers I calculated in my previous post, “what is the deal with the stars on the chicago flag?”. There, I got:

The outer radius (the circumradius) is 2.4 times the length of the inner radius (which, in Adobe parlance, is the circle which intersects the points of concavity, not the incircle of the hexagon).

The 1917 numbers give an outer radius 2.33 times the inner radius. Let’s compare these stars:

These stars are very, very similar, but more importantly, they’re both pointy. I was going to post a very long entry with all the trigonmetry necessary to show the exact percentage difference in area, but I think I’ll spare you, this time. The key here is that the star was designed to be sharp from the very start, and distinct from the regular hexagram.

Which of the two is most correct? It’s hard to say. I’m pretty sure that Rice’s 1917 14:6 number is just rounding error. He probably just didn’t want to write 14.4 inches. Since the difference is so very small, let’s call them both within the margin of error.

However, the stars on the very same page in the GWAV’s journal are wrong wrong wrong. Those are clearly regular hexagrams in the illustration, 1.73:1 six-pointed stars. I’m going to have to send them a letter.

I’ve made available RSS feeds for both the Empty Bottle and the Bottom Lounge on my calendar page. Those of you who live in Chicago and regularly use a syndicated feed aggregator will find this interesting. The rest of you Luddites can just move along.

Thanks to Andy Baio of upcoming.org for some technical advice. In the future, I hope to inject these events right into upcoming.org, or (in a more perfect world), I expect the venues themselves (or their webmasters) to do the injecting.

Building on previous work:

A regular pentagram

has golden triangles for points.

There are five of them,

and if you peel them back,

and wrap them around a regular hexagon,

and add one more point,

you end up with a Chicago star.

In my ongoing efforts to make this blog as simultaneously uninteresting and strangely fascinating as possible, I am know going into detail about my thought processes concerning appropriate footwear for snowy days in the city.

This is the boot I currently own. It’s a 6″ L.L. Bean rubber/leather boot, in tan and brown. It’s waterproof, but it’s uninsulated, it’s too big for my foot, and it’s not tall enough. The lack of insulation and size do not bother me when I’m wearing crazy, over-thick socks, but the height bothers me whenever the snow is more than three inches deep.

Growing up, I used to have “moon boots”, which I understand are back in a big way, but let’s assume they’re not for me. I also used to have a set of nice black rubber galoshes, with about a dozen buckles, which I would wear over my sneakers. They weren’t very warm, but they were waterproof, black, and shiny.

Now, my Dad had some pretty sweet winter footwear. He had rubber overshoes, which he’d pull on over his nice dress shoes. These seemed cheap, though. I don’t think I’d want to walk a mile in them. He also had these great lace-up leather/rubber winter boots, with removable liners made of what I remember as felt, but what may have been some kind of wool. I wonder what happened to those when he moved to Florida. Gone, I’ll bet.

A man with my background and upbringing immediately thinks of L.L. Bean when it comes to this kind of thing — and they present a panoply of boot options, including hunting boots! I don’t know anything about hunting, and I’m hard-pressed to tell you how hunting boots might differ from hiking boots. Maybe it’s easier to wipe blood off of hunting boots, or perhaps these are the boots in which you can hide your bowie knife.

Columbia’s got something called a “Titanium Ice Dragon Winter Boot”, which frankly scares me.

I think I’d like something around 8″ tall, preferably with a real sole, not a rubber sole like the Bean boots. Those soft rubber soles don’t work so great on slick city pavement. You know who probably has good boots for walking around in the city in the winter — letter carriers! Can the internet and the U.S. Postal Service lead me to decent boots?

…to be continued!