Mein blog.

If I blog any more about Hitler, I might start seeing “Mein Kampf” for sale (by Amazon) on the ad banner at the top of the page, which I’m not sure would be a good thing. Lately, I’ve noticed, the banner has been selling weather gizmos, including digital anemometers, even though it’s been some time since I’ve written about the weather.

(Too damn cold for May, that’s the current weather — unless you live on Ellesmere Island.)

By golly, that’s what I need for the new house, an anemometer. I used to walk by one regularly near Yodoyabashi (the Yodoya bridge) in Osaka, which I suppose belonged to the Japanese equivalent of the National Weather Service. Rumor also had it — gaijin lore, that is — that the bridge was the site of a smog-alert light at one time. But it had been removed because its constant red-light alerts embarrassed the municipal government.

Or maybe I should just hang a windsock at the new house, for the amusement value.

Yesterday after work I attended an event at the Winter Garden of the downtown Harold Washington Public Library, a party given by one of the larger commercial real estate companies in town in honor of itself. Its twenty-fifth anniversary, if I remember correctly. My experience with the company goes back to about 1988, when I interviewed its president and some of the other execs, and put them on the cover of “Metro Chicago Real Estate.” That was a good cover, because behind them was a large banner that (I think) hung at one of their properties. The banner sported a painting of a kangaroo, which probably made it the only marsupial to ever appear in the Chicago real estate trade press.

Anyway, the Winter Garden was a fitting space for the function. It’s a sweepingly large space, with a terrazzo and marble floor below and a light-admitting sky dome about 50 feet above, which extends the length of the room — about half a city block. Vast, airy, and formal. Very formal, from the latticework overhead to the shiny floor — a room as stylized and polished as kabuki, but not sterile. The sort of place best suited for grown-up events, suit-and-tie events, and for the kind of medium-sized talk about business that promotes cohesion within an industry.

The room was so big, in fact, that the hundred or so people at the function had space to spread out among the tables and food stations and the open bars, which meant that you could retire away from the crowd if you wanted. Waiters with trays of artful food roamed the marble floor, and musicians played pleasant background music.

I spoke with the president of the company, all gray now, who only half-remembered who I was (I’m used to that), plus a handful of other people who work for him. I talked for a time with a former PR woman, someone I also knew during “Metro Chicago Real Estate” days; she’s now a broker with a national firm. I’ll always associate her with the time she took Kevin D. and me to lunch at Shaw’s Crab House, only to be audibly shocked at how much it cost. I’ll bet she’s forgotten that.

Also, I ran into Larry O., aerial photographer and expert witness at zoning hearings. One of the many things he does well is model the shadows that would be cast over the course of a year by proposed highrises, to answer the objections of people who believe that it would cast too much shadow on the neighborhood. Talking with Larry is invariably interesting.