This is the question: Can we ever have some decent weather in Chicago.

Please show us the sun!

Folksey

Chicago is the third largest city in the United States, with a population of nearly three million people. Its scenic lakeside location, world-class cultural offerings and unique architecture are just some of the reasons why Chicago is a great place to live and visit.

Chicago is home to…

• 237 square miles of land
• An estimated 2,896,016 residents
• Dozens of cultural institutions, historical sites and museums
• More than 200 theaters
• Nearly 200 art galleries
• More than 7,300 restaurants
• 77 community areas containing more than 100 neighborhoods
• 26 miles of lakefront
• 15 miles of bathing beaches
• 36 annual parades
• 19 miles of lakefront bicycle paths
• 552 parks
• United States President Barack Obama

Did you know…

• More than 45 million people visited Chicago in 2007!
• Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837.
• Chicago’s nicknames include: The Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders, the Second City, and The City That Works.
• The “Historic Route 66″ begins in Chicago at Grant Park on Adams Street in front of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• The Chicagoland area contains nearly 10 million people in three states – Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana – and is the 22nd largest metropolitan area in the world.
• Chicago is home to eleven Fortune 500 companies, while the rest of the metropolitan area hosts an additional 21 Fortune 500 companies.
• McCormick Place, Chicago’s premier convention center, offers the largest amount of exhibition space in North America (2.2 million square feet).
• The first Ferris wheel made its debut in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Today, Navy Pier is home to a 15-story Ferris wheel, modeled after the original one.
• Chicago’s downtown area is known as “The Loop.” The nickname refers to the area encircled by the elevated (‘L’) train tracks.
• The game of 16-inch softball, which is played without gloves, was invented in Chicago.
• In 1900, Chicago successfully completed a massive and highly innovative engineering project – reversing the flow of the Chicago River so that it emptied into the Mississippi River instead of Lake Michigan. Each year, the Chicago River is dyed green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
• The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the largest and most extensive collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world. 
• Chicago was one of the first and largest municipalities to require public art as part of the renovation or construction of municipal buildings, with the passage of the Percentage-for-Arts Ordinance in 1978.
• The Chicago Cultural Center is the first free municipal cultural center in the U.S. and home to the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome.
• When it opened in 1991, the Harold Washington Library Center, with approximately 6.5 million books, was the world’s largest municipal library. 
• The Lincoln Park Zoo, one of only three major free zoos in the country, is the country’s oldest public zoo with an estimated annual attendance of three million.
• The Sears Tower is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 110 stories high.
• The Sears Tower elevators are among the fastest in the world operating as fast as 1,600 feet per minute.
• Four states are visible from the Sear Tower Skydeck (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan & Wisconsin).
• The first steel rail road in the United States was produced in 1865.
• The first mail-order business, Montgomery Ward & Co., was established in 1872.
• The world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Company, was built in 1885.
• The original Ferris wheel was built on the midway of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
• The Adler Planetarium became the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere in 1930.
• The nation’s first blood bank was established in 1937 by Dr. Bernard Fantus at Cook County Hospital. 
• The first drive-in bank opened in 1946.
• Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1949.
• The remote control was invented in 1950. 
• The first Democratic National Convention televised coast-to-coast was held in 1952 at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. (The first televised Democratic National Convention, in 1948, only reached viewers in the Northeast.)
• Maria Callas made her U.S. debut at the Lyric Opera in 1954.
• The first televised U.S. presidential candidates’ debate was broadcast from Chicago’s CBS Studios on September 26, 1960, between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon.
• Sen. Carol Moseley Braun became the country’s first female African-American U.S. senator in 1992.
• The late Mayor Richard J. Daley and current Mayor Richard M. Daley became the first father-son team to head the United States Conference of Mayors in 1996.

Folksey

I have just returned (landed in Chicago late last night) from 2 weeks in NZ and some time in Sydney. As such this blog will be a little be random as my thoughts are still in another TimeZoneOne.

What is jet lag?

It is a physiological desynchronization caused by travel between different time zones.

The severity can vary according to the number of time zones crossed as well as the direction of travel-most people find it difficult to travel eastward (i.e., to adapt a shorter day as opposed to a longer one). The resulting symptoms include extreme fatigue, sleep disturbances, loss of concentration, disorientation, malaise, sluggishness, gastrointestinal upset, and loss of appetite.

In general, adjustment to a new time zone takes one day for each hour of time difference.

Well Done to the BancVue team…

During the last couple of weeks the TimeZoneOne BancVue team has been flat out getting the new campaign ready to market. This project has many moving parts and many deliverables but with hard work, creative thinking and a positive attitude we have broken the back of it. Upon my return to the office today I asked Hamish how he had been copying with the very late (1am) nights. See photo.

Lor on the road…..

This morning I caught up with Lor who also returned yesterday having had a week traveling around NZ with Patty.

How was the weather?

We had great weather. It only rained a couple of times when we were driving. It didn’t even rain in Doubtful Sound. (Where it rains 190 days a year, 230 feet annually).

Best moment?

We flew from Mt Cook on a small plane over the mountains and landed on the Franz Joseph Glacier. The landing was so soft and when the engine was off it was so quiet, nothing but clear sky and bright snow. The eerie blue ice of the glacier ice made it seem like we were standing on a huge slice of blue cheese. If only I had a giant cracker. 

How was the driving?

The driving went fine, although there is not as much hard shoulder as I would have liked. As the towns are quite small we had no traffic problems especially after I understood the ‘secret of the circle’.

One odd thing about NZ cars is that each time I went to indicate the windshield wipers went on.

Meet any good people?

I was on a jet boat going across Lake Horoko and the driver said ‘this lake is 98% fresh water’.

Another passenger asked ‘what is the other 2 percent?”

The driver replied, ‘fish shit’.

Gotta love kiwis.

5 Highlights…

1.       Mac Black beer

2.       See Mel in Queenstown, yelling at her until she couldn’t ignore me any more

3.       Getting slowly drunk on the wine tour

4.       Meeting Paul the Hump Ridge jet boat driver. Eating his BBQ.

5.       Paying $50 to see a 3D movie the Hermitage Hotel.

When biscuits become cookies….

A NZ trip always means a new office stock-up of biscuits. The aim is that our clients can get a wee taste of NZ when they visit, but they have to be quick as general office consumer is high.

Thanks to the Creative Team….

It was great to catch up with the C Team recently. Thanks to y’all for your hospitality.

Tatts

Hi Everyone,

MadMen is one of my favorite shows on TV,  being in the Ad business it is a great look back at how this world worked in the 60′s and how much it has changed since this time…. and how much it hasn’t. With the US team in NZ this week I started to compare our Ad Men to the Mad Men of the show, and so with out further a do, I present to you The Mad Men Guide to TimeZoneOne. So print it out, pin it up, and the next time you call us timewarp back to the 60′s, poor yourself a strong 10.30am whiskey, light a cigarette, and do business the old school way….

Click on the image to embiggen it….

T

Surprisingly Chicago is an excellent place for fabulous local grandiose theatres as well as Broadway hits.

Chicago current broadway shows

- Jersey Boys

- Xanadu

- A Bronx Tale

- Mary Poppins

- Rent

- A Chorus Line

- Legally Blonde

- Fiddler on the Roof

- Spring Awakening

- The Addams Family

- RAIN: A Tribute to the Beatles

- CHICAGO The Musical

- Dirty Dancing

- Monty Python’s Spamalot

- Grease

We were all sad to see to the fabulously entertaining Wicked show leave Chicago after 3 1/2 years.

On that sad note here is a lovely snippet of Monty Python’s Spamalot London show that is currently running at the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Theatre newby Folksey

Yesterday March 17th, 2009 was a record tying weather day in Chicago.  The Chicago metro area recorded a temperature of 74 F degrees high which is a most unusual temperature for this time of year.

Yesterday was a infact the warmest day by far in 5 months and Chicago enjoyed the warmest official St Patricks Day in 115 years.  In fact not since October 13, 2008 when the temperature hit a high of 77 F degrees has the city enjoyed warmer weather.

The question we Chicago based Zoners ask ourselves:

- Is this a pivotal day in the change of our weather or is this a teaser before we get another few months of lovely winter filled weather in Chicago.  That is the $100 question for now.

Chicago Weather Video

Signing off a winter frustrated Zoner, but now a optomistic warmer weather Zoner! 

I have finally worked out that thru some odd living and relocating selections that the Summer Olympics seems to follow me.  I believe I would be a perfect candidate for a world city using me as a marketing tool for bringing the Olympics to their city…. well these cities may have to potentially rethink this strategy as they would be stuck with a little nuggetty Aussie bloke as their spoke person, I personally think a fantastic strategy anyway.

In the year 2000 I lived in the State of Georgia in the US of A and briefly in Atlanta, Georgia.  Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics.

I spent the first 21 years of my life in Sydney, Australia and oddly left about two months before the start of the 2000 Summer Olympics.

and

Now I live in Chicago that is one of the candidate cities for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

We all here in the TimeZoneOne Chicago office have our fingers crossed that Chicago will win the 2016 Summer Olympics and then maybe I will actually get to see the games.  Keep all your fingers and toes crossed for Chicago winning the bid then the world will see how fantastic this city really is.

Folksey

This weekend I went to the Wairewa Marae to stay for a few days. That’s probably a uniquely kiwi thing to do, so I’ll blog about it for a bit. I arrived late because I had to wait for a video to render before I left town. As it is anywhere, arriving late for a pÅ�whiri is considered rude. But when you arrive late to a marae, you can’t simply sneak in the back door, as with any home, you don’t just wander on uninvited. So, you have to wait at the gate and hope that someone notices you. And then everyone gathers around to welcome you, which is nice, but then your tardiness is very much exposed. Then on top of being late, I had to leave in the middle of the night and drive down to Dunedin for a family emergency. Obviously leaving the marae while everyone’s asleep in another show of poor form. Heoi anÅ�, ko te whÄ�nau te mea nui.

In the Wharenui , you have to formally introduce yourself, part of this introduction includes stating the name of the mountain where your ancestors are from. Being of Scottish ancestry, my mountain has a Gaelic name, which means I have to stand in front of a large group of people and get my tongue around MÄ�ori and Gaelic in the one sentence. I’m not the most confident public speaker in my first language, so that makes me nervous.

There’s a Chicago/America tie-in coming up….

Another Wharenui that I’ve visited fairly recently is Ruatepupuke, it once stood at Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast, but now stands at the field museum in Chicago. According to MÄ�ori legend Ruatepupuke discovered the art of Whakairo (Carving), and this Wharenui is an amazing example of traditional whakairo, with nearly every piece of wood in this 100+ year old Whare meticulously carved.

Here’s a photo of Ruatepupuke in the Chicago Field Museum.

And to change things up a bit, while sort of keeping with the theme, here’s some Hip-Hop…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The artist is from Christchurch, you can find out more about him here .

N�ku noa, N� David

This month Christchurch is promoting it’s Bike Wise Battle encouraging commuters to ditch their four wheels and hop on two in the name of health, fun (some would say) and the environment. Today in particular is their Go by Bike day and some of those Zoners who don’t walk to work have rocked up on their metal steeds.

Christchurch’s position on the Canterbury Plains makes it is a cycling cummuter’s dream due to the lack of hills and the abundance of cycle lanes, although we still have a way to go if measured by Chicago’s efforts to get folks sweaty before work. The McDonald’s Cycle Center (located in Millennium Park) provides secure bike parking, lockers, showers, towel service and bike repair amongst others. In fact the city’s Mayor, Richard M. Daley , has his own Bicycling Ambassadors to promote bike safety and his goal of making Chicago the most bicycle friendly city in the US.

If you’re still reading, here’s a few facts for you…

• The first two wheeled rider propelled machine was invented by Baron Karl de Drais de Sauerbrun, in France in 1818. It was entirely made of wood.

• On a bicycle you can have your cake and eat it. A moderate half-hour each-way commute will burn 8 calories a minute, or the equivalent of 11kg of fat in a year.

• On a bicycle you can travel up to 1037 kilometres on the energy equivalent of a single litre of petrol.

• On a bicycle you protect yourself against the ‘Western diseases’ of heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity and stress (although car doors can cause the occasional freak-out).

Matt Armstrong

I know there’s been a lot of commentary on the weather over the last few blog entries, but I’m afraid the current weather conditions in Chicago cannot go without comment.

While Christchurch New Zealand has been experiencing a heat wave, Chicago has been hit by a series of blizzards and snow storms that has brought with it continuous snow, and arctic conditions.

Tomorrow the expected HIGH for the day is 1 Fahrenheit,  which in Celsius speak is  a HIGH of -17 degrees!!  

You’ll be pleased to know however that this hearty kiwi stock still braved the cold on the weekend to test out our new outdoor fireplace…..check out the winter images below and our forecast for the week….uuuurrrrgh
   

Signing off: A shivering kiwi