One of the iconic images of a snowy winter in almost every large city in the Northeast is a shoveled-out parking spot on the street, “protected” by a chair, a traffic cone, cinderblocks, or any number of other obstacles placed there by the shoveler to keep random people from taking their hard-won spot. There’s an informal code among the residents of those densely-populated but poorly-plowed neighborhoods, but unsuspecting people from other places might find themselves getting the crap beaten out of them or their cars if they transgress. In Boston in recent years, the situation has gotten so out of control that Mayor Tom “Mumbles” Menino himself has tried to convince people to stop to no avail.

Now there’s an effort afoot in Chicago to try to short-circuit the practice of saving parking spots even before the snow begins to hit the ground. Chair Free Chicago.org is trying to mobilize people to declare entire street blocks as “Chair-Free” zones with signs they can post all over to let people know its not okay to block parking. The effort began last winter, as Chicago was pummeled with storms, and continues again this year, which is shaping up to be another snowy, stormy one for everyone from Minnesota to Maine.

That might not be the catchiest of buzzphrases, but it certainly covers quite a lot of ground.

Not all protests are created equal. Compare these first-hand accounts of Occupy Boston and Occupy Austin. Then, read about the near-riot conditions at the protest in Rome over the weekend.

Philosopher/social theorist Slavoj Žižek spoke to the protesters in New York on October 9th and reminded them that the real point of the demonstrations is not simply the romance of symbolism, it is about trying to catalyze real change:

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like – oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Seems to me real change comes more often from the sort of actions that took place in Rome than the ones that come from the careful deliberations in Boston or the hippy-dippy party in Austin. Power is rarely given up willingly because a group of polite people issued some communiques. The situation in New York late last week where the city tried to kick out the protesters with some bullshit about cleaning up the park shows that the powers-that-be already see the need to short-circuit the rather toothless action before it finds some teeth.

If you’ve got some time, this Russia Today interview with journalist and author Chris Hedges runs for about 10 minutes, but is really worth watching. Hedges’ latest book, The World As It Is, is a pretty unflinching look at the collision of the economic crisis, political paralysis in the United States, the rise of corporate control of world government, and America’s militaristic adventurism. In the interview, he calls it as he sees it, but even still finds reason to be optimistic that Occupy Wall Street and its growing global reach might be able to affect actual change:

There may be no words more poetic in the English language than “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..”, but for his “felicity with words”, ol’ Thomas Jefferson didn’t have much of a way with names. Exhibit #1: this map he created divvying up the Northwest Territory into 10 new states with such mellifluous names as “Assenispia”, “Chersonesus” and “Metropotamia”.

Big Map Blog has been doing an ongoing series of “birdseye” maps of American cities created in the late 1800s, and yesterday was Boston’s turn. The amount of detail included by the original mapmakers is simply incredible. Here, for example, is the State House:

Recently, Foreign Policy magazine ran its 2011 edition of their “Failed States Index”. It’s rather interesting to see China in the same category as Egypt, which experienced a weird and still-unresolved change of government earlier in 2011, but equally intriguing to see the U.S., Japan, and virtually ALL of Europe except for Scandinavia as a full step short of “Most Stable”. And this was published BEFORE the debt ceiling fiasco really came to the forefront. Right now I wonder if it might not be more honest to put us in with China and Egypt.

Pruned, a blog by Alexander Trevi that usually features posts about landscape and architecture, recently had this post about the Nike air defense missile system that the United States operated in the 1950s and 1960s and, more specifically, about the missile launch sites in and around Chicago. Nike missile sites were deployed around 40 “Defense Areas” in the U.S., but the Chicago area had the largest number of missile batteries (22), and, to my astonishment, three of those batteries were located right along the lakefront in central Chicago. One was located underneath Jackson Park, right next to the Museum of Science and Industry. Another was located near the McCormick Place convention center. The third was located at Belmont Harbor. Trevi includes a Google Map that allows you to locate the sites.

All of the sites were decommissioned in the late 1960s, as military planning shifted from air defense to ICBM deployment, and most of the sites were completely destroyed or converted for civilian use. Trevi’s post includes some photographs from inside a missile site elsewhere in the Chicago Defense Area, taken during decommissioning. There is also this photograph of one of the Nike sites here in Massachusetts:

Wikipedia tells me that there were twelve Nike sites in and around the Greater Boston area, including a couple very close to my home: a site in Reading that is now a skating rink just a couple of miles from my house and one in Burlington that is now a parking lot for a Northeastern University satellite campus. According to the Wikipedia list, at least a couple of the sites are still mostly intact (minus the missiles, of course).

This Stanford Medical School journal article considers the question of at what point is a patient “dead enough” to ethically permit organ harvesting. Clinical standards of “brain death” developed in the 1970s and ’80s are giving way to a determination of death based on the cessation of cardiac activity alone as a way of procuring organs for transplantation very shortly after “death” to address the time-critical nature of transplantation, but it has met with resistance from medical ethicists and physicians.

It’s Opening Day at Fenway Park today, and thousands of Boston sports fans have suddenly developed all sorts of 24-hour illnesses that prevent them from going to work, but not from going to the baseball game, even though the Red Sox are off to their worst start since 1945. The Boston sports fan is a particular and peculiar beast, and this n+1 article about sports radio in Boston offers some insight into the nature of the animal. And I *do* mean animal.

If you’re a federal employee, you might just find yourself with plenty of spare time on your hands by the end of the day today. The Republican jihad on America continues full-blast, and just in case you haven’t been paying attention, they aren’t going to stop until they have destroyed everything in the middle, leaving a nation of serfs and super-millionaires only. Joseph Stiglitz, one of the economists who tried to warn us all about the economic collapse in 2008, has written a piece for Vanity Fair entitled “Of The 1%, By The 1%, For The 1%” that now tries to warn us about the perils of the wealth inequalities 30 years of Republican slash-and-burn economics have given us. You might also read this opinion piece at MarketWatch from a couple of weeks ago that sums it up neatly: “Tax the super-rich now or face a revolution”. (Personally, I am in favor of revolution)

The always-awesome “Beware Of The Blog” from ur-radio station WFMU recently had this piece about David Letterman’s early years as a performer, and how he developed his comedy through the 1970s equivalent of the old vaudeville circuit — radio DJ, local weatherman, late-night movie host, stand-up, bit performer, the works. It includes the stories of a number of other famous names from 1970s comedy, and revisits a lot of obscure TV shows from the era.

I also liked this Popular Mechanics article that’s a first-hand account of what it’s like to work at an Apple Store. There’s a lot of Kool-Aid you have to drink, apparently, and despite the casual appearance of the workers, it doesn’t sound like very much fun at all for what is essentially a glorified malljob. Better off sticking to the Playmobil version.

Finally, if you’re a student of television, you will immediately appreciate this Splitsider.com article called “In Defense of the Multi-Camera Sitcom”. As the very genre of the sitcom itself has waxed and waned over the years, the production format has similarly seen shifts in popularity. The multi-camera style features three or more cameras filming or taping what amounts to a live performance of an episode, played in front of a studio audience like a theatrical production. The single-camera style is shot more like a movie, with individual takes of every angle in every scene. Each has its advantages, both in terms of creativity and budget. The 1970s were a Golden Age of multi-camera shows like “All In The Family” and “Mary Tyler Moore”, while today’s sitcoms are predominantly single-camera.

My fellow New Englanders should feel a twinge of recognition looking at these pictures of cars trapped in the drifting snow on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive during the storm on Tuesday.

Nobody here got trapped on the highway this time around, as far as I know, but instead people are having to contend with collapsing roofs from too much snow. The town where we live now has the rather dubious distinction of having received the most snow in the state for the last TWO storms. Yay us. Poor Charlotte is going to be going to school until July at this rate.

Those guys at Bostonography.com continue to delight; yesterday they offered this image, which is the very first aerial photograph of Boston, taken from a balloon above Boston Common in 1860. It also happens to be the first aerial photograph of any American city and was taken by a gentleman named James Wallace Black, who is best known for documenting the Great Fire of 1872, which destroyed much of the city.

The Bostonography guys point to this Boston Globe page where they have put the 1860 view next to a modern view of the same vista, and you can drag the divider back and forth to see the change over 150 years. The Globe offers then-and-now photos fairly regularly in their Sunday magazine; here’s a slideshow from 2008 that mostly focuses on changes caused by the Big Dig, and another recent one that also features that “move the slider” feature.

Using maps to find out more than directions:

This recent post at The Society Pages looks at a website called Mapping The Measure Of America, which uses a variety of census data combined with interactive maps that let you slice-and-dice the United States by a number of different measures and see the results in several infographic styles. The post is a bit critical of using maps as a way to represent some of this information, but the project website itself is very interesting to poke around with. (I discovered the hard way that the Measure Of America site isn’t compatible with Chrome, so if you visit, be sure to use a browser other than Chrome).

Back in June at the height of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I posted about a site called If It Were My Home that superimposed the outline of the dimensions of the oil slick onto your Google Map coordinates to help illustrate the size of the spill in terms anyone could relate to. The BBC now has a site called “Dimensions” that does sort of the same thing, but with a variety of historical events and places: here, for example, is the Great Wall Of China superimposed over a map of New England, with Boston at the center. The wall would stretch from somewhere near Indianapolis, IN all the way to Newfoundland, Canada.

Via Eric Fisher, the guy who did those racial diversity maps of American cities, here’s a brand new blog called Bostonography by a pair of map/information design guys with ties to Our Fair City. One of their very first posts is a consideration of how we locals make mental maps of the Hub Of The Universe based on landmarks (including things long gone from the local landscape — a sure sign of being a REAL local is knowing where you are based on where things used to be), as inspired by the seminal work of urban planner Kevin Lynch. I’m watching this blog with keen interest to see what else they have to offer about the unique geography of Boston.

Newsweek tries to put the plight of those Chilean miners into perspective with this amazing infographic from last week’s issue:

There are four access holes from the surface to the miners, each exactly the size of that circle (which I have attempted to show here exactly as it is on their website), and EVERYTHING they receive from the outside world until the rescue shaft is completed must fit that diameter.

This one might be a little hard to discern at first:

That is a density map of the Boston metropolitan area indicating racial makeup. Red represents white people, blue represents black people, orange represents Hispanics, and green represents Asians. As you can see, honkies got the bruthas surrounded. It’s not new knowledge that Boston remains a deeply-divided city racially, but it’s still a little startling to see it displayed so markedly. Compare Boston to the maps for New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and you’ll see that the difference isn’t in the segregation but in the overall diversity of a metro area. These maps were created by a fellow named Eric Fisher, who created similar maps (all based on 2000 Census data) for 40 major American metro areas (which I found via this Fast Company post)

It was officially 100° in Boston on Tuesday, which may not sound like that big of a deal to people who live in warmer parts of the country, but it has only happened twice in the last decade and only a handful of times in the last 100 years or so.

Tuesday also happened to be the point of Earth’s aphelion — the time of year when the planet is closest to the Sun — but this National Geographic article explains that the heat wave and the aphelion really have nothing to do with one another.