Trying to Stay Cool in Chicago

Once L&N finally got us out of bed and out of the house, they took us to Lake Michigan to cool off from the stifling heat. where we parked next to this statue of Karel Havlicek, who Wikipedia says was a Czech writer.  The bio didn't mention Chicago so it wasn't clear why the statue was here.  But at the end was this addendum:

A Monument was raised to Havlicek in Chicago by Czech residents of the city in Douglas Park. Unveiled in 1910, the statue by Joseph Strachovsky shows Havlicek in a revolutionary pose, dressed in a full military uniform and a draped cape with his outstretched arm motioning the viewer to join him. The Monument was moved to Solidarity Drive on today's Museum Campus in the vicinity of the Adler Planetarium in 1981^[2]. In 1925 a biographical film was released.

The rest of these will have to pretty much speak for themselves.

This is from the spit that has the planetarium at the end.  That's the Shed Aquarium (lower left)  which our hosts are boycotting because they have "sentient beings" in captivity, including Beluga Whales.  I tried to find something about protests over the whales, and had to go through a lot of google pages until I found this 1991 Sports Illustrated article:

Recently the Shedd, a not-for-profit aquarium that first opened more than 60 years ago, has been the site of numerous protests. And as they have been doing for the past three years, animal-welfare groups throughout the world continue to file legal suits to prevent belugas from being taken into captivity. Lately the battle has escalated. In September two of the Shedd's six belugas died, prompting the governments of Canada and the U.S. to join in an investigation into what killed the seemingly healthy captive whales.

More recent articles talk about two baby belugas born at the aquarium, one of which died.  You can even go into the water and pet a beluga.  As an Alaskan who can from time to time see wild belugas, I have to remember that seeing these belugas live may do more good to protect our Cook Inlet belugas by making more people aware of these great animals.  It's a hard call and I don't have enough information to form a conclusion.  Two calves were born here in December, but only one survived (though this article focuses on the one that survived and the death of the other one is buried in the article.)  The article also says

Beluga newborns in the wild have a 50 percent survival rate and only 10 percent of calves born to first-time mothers live.

I'm not sure how they know this.  The ten percent rate sounds like  bad, if not impossible, evolutionary odds.

Did I say it was hot?

This is the bean at Millennium Park. as we drove by Tuesday afternoon.  Yesterday we spent time at the park and I'll do a post just on the park. 

These are shots from the back seat of the car as we drove through downtown on the way back to Oak Park where we're staying.

We stopped for dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant that had great food at reasonable prices.  It's called the Chickpea.  

It was full of Western ads and movie posters all in Arabic.  You don't need to know Arabic to get the messages.

And the moon played light games with the clouds when we got home.