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I haven't had a chance to work on the comments problem, because, you see, I have another job. I've also had a plumber and a carpet cleaner here today, traumatizing poor Cassie who couldn't show them her blanket because she got shoved into a different room. She's now on her bed in my office rather than on one of the couches downstairs. I expect she'll get over the soul-crushing exile she experienced for nearly an hour today.

Happy February!

Cassie and I just finished a 41-minute walk through the neighborhood, bringing her total walkies over an hour for the first time in a week and a half. As I mentioned yesterday, we've both gone a bit stir-crazy without the exercise.

Cassie and I took a 2.88 km walk at lunchtime today, which turned out to be the longest walk we've taken since January 11th (6.28 km). Why? Because for the first time in over a week, the temperature got above -6°C. No kidding: it hasn't been this warm since 2:16 am last Thursday.

The temperature has just barely gotten above -10°C (14°F) today, with a possibility of more tolerable temperatures by Saturday. Still, the official NWS forecast has us below freezing as far out as it goes; some commercial forecasts hint at, but do not commit to, an above-freezing reading sometime next Friday. We've already had 13 days below freezing; that would make it 21.

On January 27th, we still have 5 weeks until spring officially begins. The forecast doesn't predict any above-freezing temperatures as far as it can see, and we've already had 10 days below freezing in this seemingly endless cold snap.

Oh, look, the temperature is going up! It's almost all the way to -15°C (5°F).

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ dropped below freezing at 8:52 pm last Friday and will probably not go above freezing until at least February 6th. We have had three-week stretches below freezing many times, and every one of them has sucked. I lived through the longest below-freezing stretch in Chicago history, the 43 days between 28 December 1976 and 8 February 1977. I also lived through the record low of -33°C (-27°F) on 20 January 1985, the earliest first freeze on 22 September...

After bottoming out at -21.3°C (-6.3°F) around 8:30 this morning, the temperature has skyrocketed to -18.7°C (-1.7°F) a few minutes ago. I decided to walk to my optometrist appointment, 12 minutes there and 13 minutes back thanks to a red light, which wasn't too bad in my swaddling. When I got back, Cassie lasted just over 4 minutes before bolting for my front door. Smart dog.

The temperature at Inner Drive World HQ has slid down to -20.9°C (-5.6°F), the coldest temperature we've had in two years. O'Hare shows -23.9°C (-11°F), which is colder than the low temperature in January 2024; the last day it got this cold was 31 January 2019, when it hit -29.4°C (-21°F).

The longest cold snap in years is right now descending upon us from the northwest. It's still a tolerable -5°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, but this forecast, man... It looks like temperatures will dip below -17°C (0°F) around 2am tonight and stay there until 7am Saturday, bottoming out around -22°C (-7°F) right before dawn tomorrow.

I've just had a lot to do today and I'm not feeling particularly creative. So, nu, maybe Friday?

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Cassie is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in March 2021. Quite a lot has changed since then, most notably I wrote a whole new blog engine. (More on that in a moment.)

Here's the annual Chicago sunrise chart. As always, you can get sunrise data for your own location at Weather Now. Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2026 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 29th 07:19 16:33 9:13 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:51 4 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:10 10:09 20 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:40 17:31 10:50 27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:29 17:39 11:10 7 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 12th Earliest sunset until Nov 1st 06:16 17:49 11:32 8 Mar Daylight saving time begins Latest sunrise until...

Cassie and I went out right at sunrise (7:14—two more weeks before the latest one of the winter on January 3rd) just as the temperature bottomed out at -10.5°C (13.1°F) after yesterday's cold front. Tomorrow will be above freezing, Sunday will be a bit below, and then Monday through the end of the year looks like it'll be above. And the forecast for Christmas Day is 11°C (52°F). Meanwhile, as I sip my second cup of tea, these stories made me want to go back to bed: As much as we want to ignore the...

I made it to the Bay Area, and I'm about to fall asleep. Tomorrow I've got plans in both San Francisco and San Jose, which, if you care to glimpse a map, are nowhere near each other. (Seriously, they're farther apart than Chicago and Milwaukee.) Fortunately they have trains here. Right, well, I'm off then. Assuming I don't get re-routed involuntarily, I should be home mid-afternoon Sunday, and assuming meteorologists know what they're doing, I will be rewarded for schlepping a heavy coat all over the...

Despite the FAA reducing flights at O'Hare and Midway today because of the Republican-caused government shutdown (longest in history!), I got from my house to O'Hare and through security in just over an hour. Red-state friends: I took the #81 bus to the Blue Line, so the whole 45-minute trip cost $3.00. I even had time to get coffee. So far my flight is on time, and--unusually for the heavily-traveled ORD-SFO route--I got upgraded. Sometimes I think about cancelling my club membership because I only fly...

This was a lot of fun and a lot of work: This was my fifth full marathon walk: According to my watch, it was also the least draining, judging by my body battery score this morning: For comparison, here are the previous two years: This year, I rested a bit more, and more aggressively managed my heart rate. I also got a lot of good sleep earlier in the week. However, as this year was considerably warmer than last year, these mitigations meant it took a bit longer. Oddly, it was slightly cooler in 2023...

I had a long day of debugging today, and I'm about to go to Cassie's doggie daycare the way I got here: on a Divvy e-bike. They cruise at 31 km/h and cost only $2 more than the train for my commute. Plus, I get some aerobic exercise. The forecast calls for summer-like weather through the next few weeks, except for a 3-day cooldown next week, so I'll keep pedaling. And yes, I wore a helmet. Tomorrow: my 5th marathon walk—in 30°C weather.

A total lunar eclipse has just started and will reach totality at 12:30 Chicago time, which is unfortunately about 10 hours too early for us to enjoy it here. It's a good way to end the first day of meteorological autumn, though, as is the 8 km walk Cassie and I have planned around 2 this afternoon. With a forecast high of 19°C, it should be lovely. In other eclipses this past week: The OAFPOTUS has so badly damaged US foreign policy and our standing in the world that China has eclipsed us as the de...

Welcome to stop #133 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Pilot Project Brewing, 3473 N Clark, ChicagoTrain line: CTA Red Line, Addison Time from Chicago: 18 minutesDistance from station: 450 m Even though Pilot Project doesn't actually brew beer at their new Wrigleyville location, thus technically not being eligible for the Brews & Choos list, I liked the place enough and found it a little oasis in the maelstrom surrounding Wrigley Field, so I'm overruling my own rules. It helped that my Brews...

The temperature at Inner Drive World HQ bottomed out at 14.6°C at 6:35 this morning. It was last this cool on June 5th at 8:18 CDT, just under 81 days ago. I like summer, I really do. And I recognize that the overnight low at O'Hare this morning (12.8°C) was a bit below normal for August 25th (17.8°C). Still, I didn't sleep with the windows open for 22 days, which may be a (summer) record. That's too long. The next few days should remain unseasonably (but delightfully) cool before it gets warm again...

As I showed yesterday, this summer we've had significantly higher temperatures and dewpoints than last summer. Finally, around 8 this morning, the dewpoint dropped below 20°C and has kept dropping, while the temperature peaked at 23.4°C just after 1: The dewpoint is now 17.7°C, which feels so much better than 20°C that I almost feel giddy. Autumn begins in 10 days. This is a lovely preview.

I have a chunk of work to do this afternoon, but I'm hoping I can sneak in some time to read all of these: Dan Rather cheers on the Democratic Party for finally finding the fight. Francis Fukuyama says: move over Berlusconi; the Clown Prince of X has done considerably more to harm Western civilization than you ever did. David Daley puts responsibility for the exploding fight over Congressional maps squarely on US Chief Justice John Roberts. Jennifer Rubin wants us to stop using the word "guarantee" when...

Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming: “I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ has passed 32°C (with a 42°C heat index!) and it keeps going up. Welcome to the summer heat advisory season, with 30 million hectares of maize corn sweating to our west. Speaking of an uncomfortable atmosphere, the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have had a bad couple of days, which they responded to by making everyone else's days bad as well. First, on yesterday the US Court for the District of New Jersey declined to allow acting US Attorney Alina Habba (whom...

Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all: The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely. In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple...

I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain. Before I do any of that, however, I'm...

Inner Drive Technology World HQ hit 34.3°C yesterday afternoon and only cooled down to 25.7°C by 6 this morning. As we do on hot days, Cassie and I started our long walk just before 7am, doing exactly 5 km in 50 minutes while the temperature (and dewpoint) rose a full degree. Fortunately, it looks like a much-anticipated cool front went through just after 10. I wouldn't know; I've been in meetings. So I'm about to take Cassie out again before the thunderstorms hit. I might even have time later today to...

Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.

First, an update on Cassie: her spleen and lymph cytology came back clean, with no evidence of mast cell disease. That means the small tumor on her head is likely the only site of the disease, and they can pop it out surgically. We'll probably schedule that for the end of June. I have had an unusually full calendar this week, so this afternoon I blocked off three and a half hours with "No Meetings - Coding." Before I dive into finishing up the features for what I expect will be the 129th boring release...

I encountered a couple of head-scratchers in today's news feeds. They seem like parodies but, sadly, aren't. Exhibit the first: Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss (Cons.—South West Norfolk), who got tossed from office in less time than it takes for a head of lettuce to rot because of her disastrous mismanagement of the UK economy, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post praising the OAFPOTUS and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for the "herculean task ahead of them in turning around the U.S. economy and...

As Crash Davis said to Annie Savoy all those years ago: A player on a streak has to respect the streak. Well, I'm on a coding streak. This week, I've been coding up a storm for my day job, leaving little time to read all of today's stories: Despite (or perhaps because of) his obvious mental illness and dementia, the OAFPOTUS is really a predictable negotiator who our adversaries have figured out how to manipulate easily. Voters may not like the OAFPOTUS, but they don't like us either. Still, the...

We start this morning with news that US Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), for whom I voted all 5 times he ran for Senate, will not run for re-election in 2026. He turns 82 just after the election and would be 88 at the end of the term. I am very glad he has decided to step aside: we don't need another Feinstein or Thurmond haunting the Senate again. In other news: Vice President JD Vance outlined a proposal to reward Russia for its aggression by giving it all the land it currently holds in the...

Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you? Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous! Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry. Former US...

When the OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X turned their attention to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, it hit Chicago almost immediately: President Donald Trump this week ordered closures of offices at the Environmental Protection Agency that help low-income communities overwhelmed with pollution. It’s unclear how many positions will be cut in Chicago, but union officials estimate it may affect 20 to 30 of the roughly 1,000 EPA regional employees. Most significantly, the order ends a...

Today marks the middle of winter, when fewer days remain in the (meteorological) season than have passed. Good thing, too: yesterday we had temperatures that looked happy on a graph but felt miserable in real life, and the forecast for Sunday night into Monday will be even worse—as in, a low of -20°C going "up" to -14°C. Fun!. (Yesterday's graph:) Elsewhere in the world: Israel and Hamas have reached a cease-fire agreement, with the US and Qatar signing off. OAFPOTUS Defense Secretary nominee, former...

It's New Years Eve, so it's time for the Chicago Sunrise Chart for 2025. Other end-of-year and beginning-of-year posts will dribble out today and tomorrow.

The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime. Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these: Andrew Sullivan shakes his head at "the dumb luck" of the OAFPOTUS. On David Roberts' podcast, Dan Savage muses on "blue America in the age" of the OAFPOTUS....

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago has performed Händel's Messiah 145 years in a row. Our 146th will happen at 7pm Saturday December 14th at DePaul's Holtschneider Performance Center and at 2pm Sunday December 15th at Millar Chapel, Evanston. We've gotten really good at this. And Josefien Stoppelenburg is the absolute queen of melismas. Don't miss this!

The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.) Meanwhile: Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling...

The Brews & Choos Project had a net shift of zero in the last two weeks. I am pretty bummed about the loss, but intrigued by the gain. The loss: Long-time Evanston microbrewery Temperance closed up shop on October 27th. I am sad: Evanston didn’t have a brewery before Temperance Beer Co. arrived at the end of 2013. The suburb’s first brewery was a historic moment, and the taproom quickly became one of the city’s finest with hits like Might Meets Right and Gatecrasher IPA. Temperance represented the...

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media: The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems. The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation...

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write. Meanwhile: The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party...

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in...

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can. Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real: Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy...

Mayor Johnson's newly-appointed Chicago Public Schools Board president The Rev Mitchell Ikenna Johnson has resigned: Amid a wave of backlash over troubling social media posts that were criticized as antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial, Chicago’s new Board of Education president is resigning at the request of Mayor Brandon Johnson just seven days after he was sworn into office. It’s the latest stunning development in the ongoing leadership struggle atop Chicago Public Schools. His resignation...

Recently-elected Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has made a couple of moves this week all but guaranteed to make him a one-term mayor. First, despite "no property tax increases" being the cornerstone of his campaign, he proposed a budget today that—wait for it—would increase property taxes: “I’m not going to raise property taxes. I’m the only person running in this race who made a commitment to that,” he said during a Block Club interview in March 2023. “For my first term, we’re not raising property...

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.) Meanwhile, the world continues to turn: Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years...

I had a busy Friday and a busier Saturday, so I just got to these this morning: The entire Chicago Public Schools board resigned Friday in the latest salvo in the fight between Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. The Supreme Court rejected two emergency applications from polluters who want to continue polluting while their cases work through the system. Brett Stephens looks back at a year of increasing anti-Semitism disguised as "anti-Zionism." (This is exactly why I'm reading...

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 today, making him the first former president to do so. James Fallows has a bit of hagiography on his blog today, and the State of Georgia has declared today "Jimmy Carter Day." I hope I make it to 100, too, but I don't expect the State of Illinois to declare that day a public holiday. In other news: Hussein Ibish says Hezbollah got caught in a trap of its own making when it attacked Israel a year ago. A Chicago ordinance takes effect next Tuesday that will grant the...

I meant to post more photos from my trip earlier this month, but I do have a full-time job and other obligations. Plus it took me a couple of days longer than usual to recover, which I blame squarely on the shitty hotel room I had for my first night causing a sleep deficit that I never recovered from. I posted a couple of these already, but with crude, quick edits done on my phone. I think these treatments might be a little better. Sunrise at O'Hare on the 18th: The hills of Hampshire: Invasive...

I had the opportunity, but not the energy, to bugger off from Heathrow for an hour and a half or so connecting from Marseille. Instead I found a vacant privacy pod in the Galleries South lounge, and had a decent lunch. Plus I'm about to have a G&T. I've loaded up my Surface with a few articles, but I really only want to call attention to one of them. Bruce Schneier has an op-ed in the New York Times with his perspective on the Hezbollah pager attack and supply-chain vulnerabilities in general. I may...

Last night, the Chicago White Sox lost their 120th game of the season, tying the record set by the New York Mets in 1962: With their fifth consecutive defeat and 23rd in the last 28 games, the Sox fell to 36-120 to tie the expansion 1962 Mets’ record for most losses in the modern era and break the 2003 Tigers’ AL-record 119 losses. Rookie right-hander Sean Burke pitched six innings of one-run ball with eight strikeouts, and Korey Lee also homered to give Burke a 2-1 lead, but the Padres (90-66) rallied...

Our lead story today concerns empty suit and Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter, who just can't seem to bother himself with the actual CTA: From the end of May 2023 to spring 2024, as CTA riders had to cope with frequent delays and filthy conditions, Carter spent nearly 100 days out of town at conferences, some overseas, his schedule shows. Most of Carter’s trips between June 2023 and May 2024 were for events related to the American Public Transportation Association, a nonprofit advocacy...

Last weekend, California governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced that the San Francisco-San Jose heavy commuter rail line had entered the late 19th century (in a good way): On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority named its new CEO, Ian Choudri – and today, Choudri joined Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco to help celebrate the debut of Caltrain’s new electrified train fleet that will transform rail service in the Bay Area and play a key role in California’s high-speed rail system. The...

Lots of stories in the last day: Are we about to see a historic change at the top of the Democratic ticket? What's the connection between vice-president nominee JD Vance (R-OH) and Hulk Hogan? Or between JD Vance and Faust? Or between JD Vance and your menstruation cycle? The City of Chicago has approved tearing down the Eamus Catuli building on Waveland. We actually had 25 tornados on Monday. Twenty five. Finally, comic genius and Chicago native Bob Newhart has died at age 94. He was a national treasure.

Monday's derecho spawned so many tornados in Northern Illinois that the National Weather Service hasn't yet confirmed the paths they all took. But one of those paths got my attention: That's, uh...that tornado ended at the front door of the Ogilvie Transportation Center, where I get off my morning commuter train, which is 300 meters from my office. It went straight down Madison Street from Racine to Canal. That does not usually happen. And yesterday, this one little punk rainstorm dumped almost 10 mm of...

I'm about to leave the office for the next 4½ days. Happy Independence Day! And who could forget that the UK will have a general election tomorrow? To celebrate, the Post has a graphical round-up of just how badly the Conservative Party has screwed things up since taking power in 2010: There’s a widespread feeling among voters that something has gone awry under Tory government, that the country is stagnating, if not in perilous decline. Nearly three-quarters of the public believes that the country is...

I woke up at my usual time this morning, noticed how dark it was, checked radar, and got Cassie out the door less than 10 minutes later. Because by the time I had her to day camp and got myself to the Metra platform, it looked like this: Waiting for the train, I got this: But what luck, it let up just as the train arrived. The photo doesn't do it justice: those are horizontal rain bands, and I was standing behind a window. By the time I got down to Ogilvie, we had this: Again, just a bit of light rain...

First, let me just say how lovely it was to wake up to this today, especially as we're mere minutes from the earliest solstice since the Washington administration: My windows are open, and I no longer hate the world. Which, it turns out, is a perfectly normal response to high heat: It turns out even young, healthy college students are affected by high temperatures. During the hottest days, the students in the un-air-conditioned dorms, where nighttime temperatures averaged [27°C], performed significantly...

I had a dentist appointment up in Hubbard Woods this morning, so I took half a day off and had a relaxing walk through Winnetka. And as on Sunday, I encountered a lot of cicadas. I found one attached to my bag as I boarded the train back to the Loop: She* tried wandering off the bag in various directions, which prompted me to help her out from time to time. She could not get a grip, mentally or physically, on the outer surface of my bag, nor on the vinyl seats or metal frame of the train car. By the...

Cassie and I took two long walks yesterday. We drove up to the Skokie Lagoons before lunchtime and took a 7.25 km stroll along the north loop. The weather cooperated: I wanted to go up there in part because a 100-year-old forest had a higher probability of cicadas than anywhere near my house. We were not disappointed. Cassie and I both had passengers at various points in the walk: And wow, were they loud. I forgot how loud they got during the 2007 outbreak. Even at the points on the walk closest to the...

But only for a moment. I've spent most of today trying to fix things, or at least trying to figure out what problems need fixing. One of the problems has generated a comment thread on a vendor website, now at 44 comments, and I think after all that work I found the problem in an interaction between my code and Microsoft Azure Functions. If I'm right, the confirmation will come around 3pm. Naturally, I haven't had time to read any of these: Jamie Boule points out that the myth of the convicted-felon...

Despite a high, thin broken cloud layer, it's 23°C with a light breeze and comfortable humidity at Inner Drive Technology World HQ. Cassie and I had a half-hour walk at a nice pace (we covered just over 3 km), and I've just finished my turkey sandwich. And yet, there's something else that has me feeling OK, if only for a little while... Perhaps it's this? Maybe this? How about this? Or maybe it's Alexandra Petri? In other news: President Biden just announced that Israel has proposed a three-phase peace...

After a week of rehearsals capped by two performances of some really challenging works by French and Swiss composers, I finally got a full 8½ hours of sleep last night. What a difference. Not just the needed rest, but also having a much smaller inbox (just one task for the chorus left until next week) and less to worry about. Until I open a newspaper, of course: The head of the political arm of Hamas, the terrorist group and de jure governing party in Gaza which has called for the annihilation of all...

Cassie and I got over 2 hours of walks yesterday, and spent most of the day outside. By the time we got to Spiteful, Cassie needed a nap: Her day ended pretty well, on the couch getting lots of scritches, but between our 10 km of walks, the dog park, and meeting new friends along the way, she got a bath. Instead of struggling and trying to escape, though, she mournfully stepped into the tub and awaited her fate. Such a good girl! Later today, the Apollo Chorus will conclude its season at St Michael...

I'm mostly exhausted from this week of performing and rehearsing, and I still have another concert tomorrow afternoon. Plus, a certain gray fuzzball and I have a deep need to take advantage of the 22°C sunny afternoon to visit a certain dog park. (I also want to have a certain pizza slice near the certain dog park, but that's not certain.) Joking aside, today is the 54th anniversary of the Ohio National Guard killing 4 innocent kids at Kent State University. As one of the projects on my way to getting a...

Yesterday saw some really unusual temperatures at IDTWHQ: You don't often see the day's low temperature at 14:16 followed by the day's high at 17:09. That was just weird.  A similar thing happened at Chicago's official weather station, O'Hare, except the temperature bottomed out around 11am and peaked around 5pm. Today it's just gray and seasonably cool. It's a lot easier to pick clothes when the temperature curve is flatter, and goes the way you'd expect.

The Chicago Dept of Transportation this morning removed and (they claim) preserved the "Chicago Rat Hole" on the 1900 West block of Roscoe St. in the North Center neighborhood. I admit, I never saw the Rat Hole in the flesh (so to speak), but I feel its absence all the same. Moving on: Three Republican Arizona state representatives voted with all 29 Democrats to repeal the state's 1864 abortion ban; the repeal now goes to the Arizona Senate. Monica Hesse reminds people who say it's sexist to advocate...

It's a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Chicago. So why am I inside? Right. Work. I'll eventually take Cassie out again today, and I may even have a chance to read all of these: A Florida man set himself on fire across the street from where the XPOTUS was sitting through jury selection, apparently to protest the lack of mental health care in the US. Josh Kovensky draws a straight line from the XPOTUS's narcissistic need to cast everyone who disagrees with him as an enemy to be defeated to his lawyers trying...

We're once again basking in 21°C sun, prompting me to take Cassie on a 47-minute walk at lunchtime. Unfortunately, with a board meeting and rehearsal this evening, that leaves less time for doing my actual work, so I have to go back to that now. Like I said yesterday, the next couple of weeks will be a bit busy.

I'm almost done with the new feature I mentioned yesterday (day job, unfortunately, so I can't describe it further), so while the build is running, I'm queuing these up: Philip Bump analyzes the New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's dismissal of the XPOTUS's bogus immunity claim. Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) told reporters he's done everything he promised to do when he took office a year ago, at which point the reporters no doubt collectively cocked their eyebrows. Molly White doesn't think...

Getting ready for a work trip on Monday plus (probably) having to do a demo while on the work trip means I spent most of the day getting ready for the demo. In a bit of geography fun, because the participants in the demo will be in six different time zones from UTC-7 (me) to UTC+10 (the client), I got the short straw, and will (probably) attend the demo at 3:30 am PDT. I say "probably" because the partners on the call may take mercy on me and let me brief them instead of monitoring the technology in the...

Welcome to stop #100 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Illuminated Brew Works, 6186 N. Northwest Hwy., ChicagoTrain line: Union Pacific Northwest, Norwood Park (Zone 2) Time from Chicago: 22 minutesDistance from station: 400 m It only took four years and a pandemic to get to the 100th Brews & Choos stop. When I stopped at Macushla in Glenview almost exactly four years ago, I thought I'd knock out all 90 or so breweries and distilleries in about 18 months. We all know what happened a month...

What do you get when you combine a 2°C air temperature, a 2°C dew point, frozen ground with snow patches, and nearly-calm winds? Visibility under 100 meters on my commute to the office: They say we may not see the sun until Wednesday. But they also say it'll be 7°C that day. March came early this year, it seems.

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st. Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it....

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming...

Welp. My 10:00 flight has become a 3:00 flight: But at least when I get on board the plane, I'll have a good seat: Obviously if they had predicted the delay more accurately, I'd have slept longer, left later, and probably not dropped Cassie off with my friends until this morning. She seems to be settling in just fine, though: Hooray for air travel in January. My guess is that if the original crew had flown on to Seattle, they'd have timed out. So they probably moved my plane's crew to a shorter flight...

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today: Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign. The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ. The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023. The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will...

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning: Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.) Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane...

The El Niño part of the ENSO typically gives Chicago warm, dry winters (relatively—it still gets cold and snowy here, just not as cold and snowy as usual). Exhibit 1, a map of temperature anomalies in the Continental US for the first 12 days of December: I'm about to leave the office to go home, where it's 8°C, after hitting 11°C at O'Hare a couple of hours ago. Tomorrow it might get warmer. And that's OK by me.

I complained yesterday that Chicago hadn't seen sunlight in almost a week. Ever the fount of helpful weather statistics, WGN pointed out that it made it the cloudiest start to a December since 1952. This streak had nothing on my winter break in 1991-92, when Chicago went 12 days without sunlight, or spring 2022, which had only 1 day of sunshine from March 21st through May 2nd. So the sun on my face this morning was delightful. In other gloominess: Julia Ioffe reports that Hamas has refused to release...

I'm setting this to post overnight so I can read these things tomorrow morning: President Biden published an op-ed in Saturday's Washington Post, laying out the necessary steps for ending the Gaza war, with the nuance, sensitivity, and command of the facts we should expect from any President. Robert Wright lays out the history of Hamas, with particular emphasis on how American and Israeli meddling shaped it into the awful group of people it has become. Josh Marshall points out that "the day after" the...

Despite the XPOTUS publicly declaring himself a fascist (again), the world has other things going on: Josh Marshall plots out how House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) knows he has to pass a budget that Democrats can stomach, but because he still has to placate the extreme right wing of his party, he's pretending he can pass something else. And the clown show continues. The US Supreme Court has published their new ethics rules, which look a lot like a subset of the rules the rest of the Federal courts have...

I actually had a lot to do today at my real job, so I pushed these stories to later: Sure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is a crazy Christianist who has fantasies about Israel, but not exactly the fantasies you'd expect from his kind. Speaking of Christianist loonies, Josh Marshall doesn't think they've learned anything at all from yesterday's blowout in Ohio. Julia Ioffe takes a look at the "horror in the Holy Land" while Eric Levitz examines the fraught language around the war. Molly White...

Just a couple to mention: A jury convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of committing the largest fraud in US history. He faces up to 110 years in prison. House Republicans passed a bill that would provide $14 billion in funding for Israel's war with Hamas by taking it from IRS tax evasion enforcement, a move so cynical that Paul Krugman likens it to "the Big Lie." ("Starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national...

I'm still thinking about propaganda in the Gaza war, but I'm not done thinking yet. Or, at least, not at a stopping point where a Daily Parker post would make sense. That said, Julia Ioffe sent this in the introduction to her semi-weekly column; unfortunately I can't link to it: The absolutely poisonous discourse around this war, though, has taken all of that to a whole other level. The rage, the screaming, and the disinformation, ahistoricity, the anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the propaganda—all of...

I woke up this morning feeling like I'm fighting a cold, which usually means I'm fighting a cold. One negative Covid test later, I'm still debating whether to go to rehearsal tonight. Perhaps after a nap. And wearing an N-95. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Kenyan runner Kelvin Kiptum ran the world's fastest marathon yesterday in Chicago, finishing the race in 2:00:35, 36 seconds faster than Eliud Kipchoge's 2:01:09 set last year in Berlin. David Ignatius reflects on the massive intelligence...

Not Just Bikes celebrates 5 years living in the Netherlands by raving about how the Netherlands' anti-car development patterns make just about every city in the country nicer to live than just about anywhere in North America: I'm about 3/4 the way through Nicholas Dagen Bloom's The Great American Transit Disaster, having just finished the chapter on how Detroit's combination of racism, suburban/urban hostility, lack of vision, and massive subsidies for car infrastructure while starving public transit...

Welcome to stop #84 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Tighthead Brewing, 161 N. Archer Ave., MundeleinTrain line: North Central Service, MundeleinTime from Chicago: 59 minutesDistance from station: 200 m Planning to visit the handful of breweries along the North Central Service line presents certain challenges. Metra runs a total of 7 trains in each direction during the work week, but only one in the reverse-commute direction. And until they restored train 105 last December, there was literally...

Spot the cold front: I took Cassie for her final walk at 10pm, during the steepest part of that second cliff. The temperature dropped 0.5°C during the 7 minutes it took us to walk around the block. The dewpoint eased off as well, making it actually tolerable for the first time in two days. In a post this morning, the National Weather Service explained how bad we had it for those two days: 8/23 saw the first 80°F dew point observed in Chicago since 7/30/1999 and only the 7th calendar day on record where...

The National Weather Service reported earlier today that we did, in fact, have some historic weather: [11:34am CDT 8/23/2023] #Chicago-O'Hare is currently 93° with a dew point temperature of 80° for a heat index of 112°. The last time the heat index was higher than 112° in Chicago was on July 30, 1999, when the heat index reached as high as 114°. #ILwx (1/3) — NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) August 23, 2023 Here at IDTWHQ, things have cooled off in the last hour...but not by much: Fortunately the AQI is only...

This is why I won't get 10,000 steps today: I'm still at 84,000 steps over the past 7 days, though. Still, even though it's cool enough to have all the windows open, and none of the rain seems to be blowing in, I'd still rather have gotten all my steps today. Cassie, for her part, got over 4 hours of walks this past weekend, so she seems fine with it. She doesn't like the rain any more than I do. Maybe tomorrow.

The Martin Theater at Ravinia Park yesterday: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra sold out both of our Magic Flute performances in the Theater this weekend, but you can still get lawn tickets for 7:30pm tonight or 1pm Sunday. And if you take Metra, you can ride to and from the park for free.

Not Just Bikes shows the difference between places and non-places in ten short minutes: Fortunately the part of Chicago where I live has a sense of place that he'd recognize, but you have to cross a stroad (Ashland to the east, Western to the west, Irving Park to the south, Peterson to the north) to get to another place like this. I also can't help but think that a new culture will arise in a couple of millennia that will look at "the great American roads" as something to emulate. Maybe the Romans had...

The Federal Infrastructure Bill that President Biden signed into law in 2021 allocated $66 billion to Amtrak, which they plan to use to bring US rail service up to European standards (albeit in the mid-2000s): Amtrak’s expansion plan, dubbed Amtrak Connects US, proposes service improvements to 25 existing routes and the addition of 39 entirely new routes. If the vision were to be fully realized, it would bring passenger rail to almost every major city in the US in 15 years. (Right now, only 27 out of...

Because of yesterday's rain, poor Cassie only got 23 minutes of walkies yesterday—almost all of it in drenching rain. I went through two towels drying her off after each of her walks. And of course, because she was (a) being rained on and (b) couldn't smell anything, it took her way more time than I preferred to find where to do her job. For my part, I really got a close shave on my step count: Today we have blue skies, sun, and a forecast high of 23°C: perfection. (The AQI is down to 47, too.) I have...

Just a few stories I came across at lunchtime: In an act that looks a lot like the USSR's scorched-earth retreat in 1941, Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, which could have distressing follow-on effects over the next few months. A former Chicago cop faces multiple counts of perjury and forgery after, among other things, claiming his girlfriend stole his car to get out of 44 separate speeding tickets. James Fallows explains what probably happened to the Citation...

Cassie got about 4 hours of walks yesterday, plus about 9 additional hours of outdoor time. I got sunburned. So I didn't have any time to post, but I did have time to get side-eye from this girl: That's Butters, a beagle whose every look is side-eye. It's quite a talent. "If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live."—Lin Yutang

Today they got through about half of our flat roof which doubles as an upstairs patio. Imagine how much noise all this made: Note that all the crap on the roof off to my left was at the other end of the balcony while they laid down the material directly under me. They timed it so they had the power saw going exactly when I had a Teams meeting for work. But they did got a lot of it done, and they should reconnect my A/C units just in time for next week's heat wave.

On this day in 2000, during that more-innocent time, Beverly Hills 90210 came to an end. (And not a day too soon.) As I contemplate the void in American culture its departure left, I will read these articles: Anna Nemtsova rubs her hands in glee along with Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelinsky in watching the Kremlin's worst fears about Ukraine come true. Henry Grabar blames the killing of Jordan Neely on conservatives' willful failure to address homelessness and mental illness for the last 50 years....

While we in Ravenswood continue to wait for tile deliveries or whatever so Metra and the UPRR can finish replacing the platform they tore down in 2011, the a priori Peterson/Ridge station that broke ground 18 months ago is almost done: Work on the station is slated to wrap up this fall, when the long-awaited station will open to the public, project managers said at the community meeting. Announced in 2012, the Peterson-Ridge station has been the victim of the state’s years-long budget impasse and then...

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML. A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years: Old Man...

Life is skittles and life is beer! Seriously, just check out this forecast: Today Sunny, with a high near 7. East northeast wind 15 to 20 km/h. Tonight Mostly clear, with a low around 3. Northeast wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming southeast after midnight. Saturday Sunny, with a high near 12. South southeast wind 15 to 20 km/h becoming east northeast in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 30 km/h. Saturday Night Mostly clear, with a low around 4. East wind 10 to 15 km/h. Sunday Sunny, with a high near...

The City of Lights has done a mitzvah for its citroyens, essentially banning cars from the city center in part by providing real alternatives: French planners got a later start than their American counterparts. Before Paris could be carved up by expressways, resistance mounted over the familiar objections that also characterized highway revolts in the United States: destruction, displacement, pollution, the oil crisis. These protests were nested in a trio of nascent trends: the rise of environmentalism...

I've had a bunch of tasks and a mid-afternoon meeting, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these yet: Fifty years ago today, United States combat troops left South Vietnam. The DC foreign policy elite have grown impatient for President Biden to articulate a clearer policy on Ukraine. The Post has a fascinating story of a Russian spy who posed as a Brazilian student to get into Johns Hopkins, but got arrested when he tried to take a new job at the International Criminal Court using his fake identity....

Welcome to stop #82 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Art History Brewing, 649 W. State St., GenevaTrain line: Union Pacific West, GenevaTime from Chicago: 72 minutes (Zone H)Distance from station: 1.0 km Art History Brewing opened in the summer of 2020, a few months after their planned March 15th opening (oops). They got through the pandemic in part by brewing for Hopleaf, the excellent Belgian-inspired restaurant less than a kilometer from my house. But for whatever reason, none of their beers...

Welcome to stop #81 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Obscurity Brewing, 113 W. North St., ElburnTrain line: Union Pacific West, ElburnTime from Chicago: 85 minutes (Zone I)Distance from station: 1.2 km Elburn, Ill., is the end of the line for the Union Pacific West line. The station opened in 2006, extending the line past Geneva for the first time since the Chicago & North Western ceased intercity train service in 1971. In fact, when the last C&NW train pulled into Elburn 51 years ago, it...

Chicago mayoral candidate and Fraternal Order of Police endorsee Paul Vallas blames "hackers" for his own choices to use a weak password and not to use multi-factor authentication on his Twitter account: Mayoral candidate Paul Vallas on Friday blamed unnamed hackers for his Twitter account liking offensive tweets over the past several years as he faced criticism from rival candidates over the social media posts. The comments came after a Tribune review this week found that Vallas’ Twitter account...

Cassie does not like staying inside because of the rain:

I see a connection between all of these. First, the city has accepted six proposals to convert office buildings on LaSalle Street to apartments. I used to work in one of them, so that should be interesting. These will go through community review, and will cost over $1 billion, but could bring almost 2,000 apartments to the Loop. Second, Zurich Re and Motorola have separately sued the Chicago suburb Schaumburg, Ill., one of the most dismal suburban hellscapes I've ever seen, to get the $100 million in...

Here we have a typical mid-March temperature profile for Chicago: Of course, that's not from mid-March, that's today. It got up to 9.1°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, without a cloud in the sky, and it looks likely to do the same tomorrow. Cassie got a 5 km walk earlier today and I plan to do 7 km tomorrow. Consequently I won't spend a lot of time banging away at my keyboard this afternoon. Probably not much tomorrow, either.

Just in time for spring, the City of Chicago has just announced the winning names for seven of our beloved snowplows: Da Plow Holy Plow! Jean Baptiste Point du Shovel Mrs O'Leary's Plow Salter Payton Sears Plower Sleet Home Chicago From the Chicago Tribune: Nearly 7,000 potential names were submitted in 17,000 suggestions from Chicago residents. Initially, the city planned to name six snowplows — one for each snow district — in its fleet of almost 300 baby-blue “Snow Fighting Trucks.” (During a major...

It got practically tropical this afternoon, at least compared with yesterday: Cassie and I took advantage of the no-longer-deadly temperatures right at the top point of that curve to take a 40-minute, 4.3 km walk. Tomorrow should stay as warm, at least until the next cold front comes in and pushes temperatures down to -18°C for a few hours Thursday night. I'm heading off to pub quiz in a few minutes, so I'll read these stories tomorrow morning: London plans to build an elevated rails-to-trails park...

It's official. Last month had the lowest percentage of possible sunshine (18%) of any January in history and the second-lowest percentage of any month in history. The month also had more overcast days (18) than all but two of the 1,791 months in the historical record. Only January 1998 (20) and November 1985 (19) had more. (Records go back to October 1871.) One interesting tidbit: 3 of the 5 least-sunny Januarys happened in the last 6 years. But as I write this, there isn't a cloud in the sky. (It's...

I have no idea. But today I managed to get a lot of work done, so I'll have to read these later: A whopping 78% of voters in Rep. "George Santos" (R-NY) district think he should resign. Who should I vote for in the upcoming Chicago Mayoral election? National Geographic explains the science behind seasonal depression. Via Bruce Schneier, it looks like ransomware payments have declined 40% since 2021. Writing for Strong Towns, Michel Durand-Wood compares urban planning to...pizza. James Fallows describes...

The sun finally came out around 3:30 this afternoon, as a high overcast layer slid slowly southeast. Of course, the temperature has fallen to -11°C and will keep sliding to -18°C overnight, but at least the gloom has receded! January will still end as the gloomiest ever, however, with around 18% of possible sunshine all month, plus whatever we get tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want to come back to these articles later: Radley Balko points out that giving hyper-aggressive cops less oversight and a...

I've barely finished my coffee so I'm still processing this amazing news: Monday Sunny, with a high near 2. West southwest wind 10 to 15 km/h increasing to 20 to 25 km/h in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 35 km/h. "Sunny." I hope...I hope...I hope... Of course, temperatures will fall below normal for the first time all year by Thursday, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts believes Chicago has a 31% chance of getting 100 mm of snow by Thursday with most of it falling...

I can't remember ever taking an umbrella to California, but I'm packing one today. So instead of the sunny and cold weather I've usually experienced in San Francisco, the forecast calls for wet and cold weather every day I'm there, with the sun coming out right after I leave. Here in Chicago, we've had just 20% of possible sun this month, which WGN points out has completely obscured that we have 15 minutes more daylight than we had at the solstice. On the other hand, so far we've had the 4th-warmest...

Here's the (semi?-)annual Chicago sunrise chart. As always, you can get sunrise data for your own location at https://www.wx-now.com/SunriseChart. Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2023 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 29th 07:19 16:32 9:13 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:09 17:00 9:51 5 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:11 20 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:40 17:30 10:50 27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:39 11:09 11 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 16th Earliest sunset until Oct 27th 06:10 17:53 11:43 12 Mar Daylight saving...

As I look out my office window at the blowing snow accumulating on downtown Chicago streets, I think back to days gone by when we had sunlight. Eight straight days of gray tend to wear on a person. It looks like we'll have sun on Sunday, just before the arctic blast comes through and drives temperatures down to -14°C by Wednesday. This also comes just after Cassie got a perfect bill of health at the vet yesterday—except that she's now 15% overweight. Guess who's getting raw green beans for dinner for...

Both of our Messiah performances went well. We had too few rehearsals and too many new members this year to sing the 11 movements from memory that we have done in the past, which meant that all us veterans sang stuff we'd memorized with our scores open. So like many people in the chorus, I felt better about this year than I have since I started. We got a decent review, too. Also, we passed a milestone yesterday: 1,000 days since my company closed our Chicago office because of the pandemic, on 16 March...

Between my actual full-time job and the full-time job I've got this week preparing for King Roger, Cassie hasn't gotten nearly the time outdoors that she wants. The snow, rain, and 2°C we have today didn't help. (She doesn't mind the weather as much as I do.) Words cannot describe how less disappointed I am that I will have to miss the XPOTUS announcing his third attempt to grift the American People, coming as it does just a few hours after US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) announced his bid for Senate...

I have only two rooms left to pack before my move on Monday: the master bedroom (which will take me about 30 minutes and the movers about the same), and the kitchen (which will take me most of today). I also had to reserve some time later this afternoon to grab a pint with a friend at Empirical Brewery, because (a) the weather could not look better and (b) they close permanently tomorrow night. Let's move on from the demise of the second brewery three blocks from my new house in the period between me...

A first-year undergraduate twerp with obvious narcissistic tendencies went through a homeless encampment handing out fake eviction notices earlier this week: The one-page notices titled “Maria Hadden’s Five Day Notice To Vacate” were stuffed into belongings and posted on signs in and around Touhy Park, 7348 N. Paulina St., residents said. They were dated Sept. 27 and listed the name of Hadden, the 49th Ward alderperson, in bold blue type over a line reading “landlord/agent.” The notice says Touhy Park...

We're performing with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra tonight, which means we need to get our butts to Peoria this morning. Which means I woke up way too early. Normal posting resumes tomorrow, assuming I recover by then.

I do love traveling Saturday mid-days, because it's the quietest time at O'Hare. There was no line at the Pre-Check security gate, and I only have a backpack, so it took less than 3 minutes to clear TSA. Wonderful. Unfortunately, every single economy parking space has a car in it. (I would have taken public transit but I had a meeting run until 12:30, with a 3pm flight. Couldn't risk the 90 minutes or so.) In any event, my plane is here, it appears to be on time, and the latest weather is VFR the whole...

Cassie got almost 2 hours of walkies before 9am with a return trip to the Montrose  Beach Dog Friendly Area: She also got a bath, because even though Lake Michigan supplies millions of people with fresh water, we don't drink it right out of the lake for very good reasons. Also, I did not take 540 photos like last time. Maybe tomorrow...? And if you're listening to "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" on NPR this morning (and tomorrow morning in some markets), I was there Thursday night:

Even though I feel like I have a moderate cold (stuffy, sneezy, and an occasional cough), I recognize that Covid-19 poses a real danger to people who haven't gotten vaccinations or who have other comorbidities. So I'm staying home today except to walk Cassie. It's 18°C and perfectly sunny, so Cassie might get a lot of walks. Meanwhile, I have a couple of things to occupy my time: Arthur Rizer draws a straight line from the militarization of police to them becoming "LARPing half-trained, half-formed kids...

Even though it seems the entire world has paused to honor HRH The Queen on the 70th anniversary of her accession, the world in fact kept spinning: Blogger Moxie Marlinspike wrote about their first impressions of web3 back in January. I just got around to reading it, and you should too. On the same topic, a group of 25 security professionals, including Grady Booch, Bruce Schneier, and Molly White, wrote an open letter to Congress advocating for serious regulation of cryptocurrencies. What's Russian...

Tonight our chorus has its (sold out!) fundraiser. This will be the first year since I joined the chorus that I won't be performing, and the second where I'm not running the event. I finally get to just enjoy the night. Except one of the co-chairs has Covid. And the reason I'm not performing is that one of the ensemble I put together also has Covid, and another got called up for his Army Reserve weekend unexpectedly. But, hey, it's going to be fun...and did I mention we sold out? We did find a couple...

At 7am Monday, it was 12°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters. By 6pm the temperature had gone up to 26.5°C, then 29.8°C at 2pm Tuesday, then 29.1°C at 3:15pm yesterday, before a cold front finally ploughed through and got us down to lovely sleeping weather right before I turned in: The slow rise in my indoor temperature from 7am to 5pm was just my normal A/C program, as was the decline when the A/C turned on at 5. Then at 6, I discovered that the cold front had gone through, so I opened the...

Just a few: Jerusalem Davis bemoans how community input has become “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Max Boot says we shouldn't fear Putin. An Air France B777 captain and first officer both tried to fly the airplane at the same time on short final into DeGualle, but fortunately only one of them succeeded. The City of Chicago plans to plant 75,000 trees in the next five years. Finally, James Fallows rolls his eyes at the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner, but praises Trevor Noah's...

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts. Meanwhile, in reality: A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven...

Actually, it's 5pm here. And I have a few stories queued up: Oklahoma has a new law making abortion a felony, because the 1950s were great for the white Christian men who wrote that law. Monika Bauerlein explains why authoritarians hate a free press. Not that we didn't already know. Jonathan Haidt explains "why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid." ("It's not just a phase.") Inflation in the US hit a 40-year high at 8.5% year over year, but Paul Krugman believes it will drop...

Two stories this morning seemed oddly juxtaposed. In good news, the City of Chicago announced plans to spend $15 million on 77 km of new bike and pedestrian trails over the next couple of years: Several of the projects, including plans to convert an old railroad into a trail in Englewood, are still in the planning and design phases. Others, like Sterling Bay’s planned extension of the 606 Bloomingdale Trail into Lincoln Yards, are set to come to fruition through private partnerships.  The news release...

Even as the East Coast gets bombed by an early-spring cyclone, we have sunny skies and bitter cold. But the -12°C at O'Hare at 6am will likely be the coldest temperature we get in Chicago until 2023. The forecast predicts temperatures above 10°C tomorrow and up to 16°C on Wednesday, with no more below-freezing temperatures predicted as far out as predictions can go. Meanwhile, I'm about to leave for our first of two Bach Jonannespassion performances this weekend. We still have tickets available for...

We only got about 50 mm of snow overnight, but the second wave came in the morning and hasn't stopped. And yet, not everyone cares about the natural disaster unfolding around us: She followed up on her romp this morning by eating my earmuffs. Sigh.

Josh Marshall lays out the evidence that the Omicron Covid variant hit hard and fast, but as in South Africa, appears to have a short life-span: New York City was one of the first parts of the United States hit by the Omicron variant. The trajectory of the city’s surge now appears remarkably similar to the pattern we saw earlier in South Africa and other countries. Data out of South Africa showed a roughly four week interval between the start of the Omicron surge and its peak. “Peak in four weeks and...

We almost made it to December 31st without measurable snowfall, which would have broken the record of 290 days. Alas, at day #288... I snapped that photo with the wind at my back and quarter-sized flakes melting on my coat. It was 1.7°C then, but by the time I sloshed home with the wind in my face and rain soaking through my coat, it was getting just enough warmer to really make the weather really suck dingo balls. At least I now have my Covid booster. Hurrah. And I now want to take a nap...

While running errands this morning I had the same thought I've had for the past three or so weeks: the trees look great this autumn. Whatever combination of heat, precipitation, and the gradual cooling we've had since the beginning of October, the trees refuse to give up their leaves yet, giving us cathedrals of yellow, orange, and red over our streets. And then I come home to a bunch of news stories that also remind me everything changes: Like most sentient humans, Adam Serwer feels no surprise (but...

I've spent today alternately upgrading my code base for my real job to .NET 6.0, and preparing for the Apollo Chorus performances of Händel's Messiah on December 11th and 12th. Cassie, for her part, enjoys when I work from home, even if we haven't spent a lot of time outside today because (a) I've had a lot to do and (b) it rained from 11am to just about now. So, as I wait for the .NET 6 update to build and deploy on our dev/test CI/CD instance (I think I set the new environments on our app services...

Just a couple of eye-roll-worthy lunchtime links today: Chicago police union head John Catanzara, who I referred to on Facebook yesterday as a "whiny, belligerent infant," has quit the CPD and announced a run for mayor. My previous comments stand. Sears closed its last remaining store in its home state of Illinois on Sunday. I still hate Eddie Lampert for it. Michelle Goldberg takes the "social justice industry" to task for policing words instead of accomplishing real change. Ordinarily-idyllic coastal...

Welcome to stop #61 on the Brews and Choos project. Distillery: Chicago Distilling Co., 2359 N. Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, California Time from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 300 m It's dangerous to have such a great distillery two doors down from a great brewpub. It's also convenient, when you're out with friends and want to have a cocktail after having a pile of pub food. Chicago Distilling makes really good spirits, full stop. And they've recently launched a line of...

Revolution announced on 1 November 2024 the brewpub will close on December 14th. Welcome to stop #60 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Revolution Brewpub., 2323 N. Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, California Time from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 200 m I've enjoyed Revolution beers for such a long time I can't really review them like I do the ones I've just met. When I met some friends for dinner at their brewpub (cf. the Revolution Taproom on Kedzie), I did try a...

The software release yesterday that I thought might be exciting turned out to be fairly boring, which was a relief. Today I'm looking through an ancient data set of emails sent to and from some white-collar criminals, which is annoying only because there are millions and I have to write some parsing tools for them. So while I'm decompressing the data set, I'll amuse myself with these articles, from least to most frightening: The Chicago Tribune lists six breweries they think you should take out-of-town...

Oh boy: Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen. A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas. Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would...

Chicago Loop, Monday morning:

Some of these will actually have to wait until tomorrow morning: Adam Serwer thanks Justice Samuel Alito (R) for confirming Serwer's complaints about the Court. A trove of XPOTUS-branded gifts meant for foreign heads of state representing "significant" monetary value disappeared at some point. Can't imagine how. The BBC Reality Check column suggests that reports in some journals about Invermectin may have painted an incomplete picture, putting it mildly. Cranky Flier explains that Southwest Airlines'...

Chicago's Navy Pier organization wants to cut down the trees and put 'em in a tree museum: Navy Pier’s Crystal Gardens could be removed and replaced with what’s billed as “the next generation in immersive entertainment” — but a petition to save it has racked up more than 15,000 signatures. Crystal Gardens is a 1-acre indoor garden that is free and accessible to the public. It’s often used as a venue for events or for people to stop by and escape chilly weather. But a new attraction is set to take its...

Actually, I'm ecstatic that a cold front blew in off the lake yesterday afternoon, dropping the temperature from 30°C to 20°C in about two hours. We went from teh warmest September 27th in 34 years to...autumn. Finally, some decent sleepin' weather! Meanwhile: The former head of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, a vocal anti-vaxxer, has wound up in the ICU with Covid. (This is the current union leader, who has been suspended without pay for insubordination.) Murders in the entire US...

Just a couple today, but they seem interesting: Metra may build a combined Milwaukee District / Union Pacific station in the Fulton Market district that could make commuting into the West Loop a lot easier. Greg Bensinger reminds us that maps have inherent, and sometimes deliberate, inaccuracies. Finding stolen cryptocurrency is easier than most people think. And wow, did the Chicago Bears have a bad game yesterday.

Yes, that Guinness. They've found a derelict railway building in the Fulton Market area and plan to open a new stop on the Brews & Choos Project: Chicago developer Fred Latsko has struck a deal with Irish beer brand Guinness to open a brewery and beer hall in a long-vacant Fulton Market District building while he lines up plans to build what could be one of the former meatpacking neighborhood's tallest office buildings next door. Guinness is poised to open the venue as part of a revival of the...

I once again walked from Uptown to Lake Bluff, as planned. And I broke all kinds of personal records. Unfortunately, I discovered a usability bug in Garmin's Venu software that led to me accidentally deleting the first 9.47 km of the walk. I re-started the trace after covering another 530 meters, so the official record starts at 10.0 km: Add 10 km and 1:27:02 to that data and you get 43.55 km in 6:30:08. My marathon time (42.2 km) was 6:16:55, a 2½-minute improvement over last year. But my...

Jonathan Chait points out that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions might want to reconsider their threats to resign en masse if the cities enforce mask and vaccine mandates on them: Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has mandated vaccination for all city employees, and Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara is not taking it well. “This has literally lit a bomb underneath the membership,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re in America, goddamn it. We don’t want to be...

A few examples of idiocy, bad intent, or general ineptness crossed my desk this morning: Apparently Illinois has an "Israeli Boycott Restrictions Committee" of our investment policy board. Despite the (very Jewish) founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream explaining one more time that criticism of Israel's government is not anti-Semitic, the Committee wants to divest from Unilever to protest the ice cream manufacturer's divestment from the occupied West Bank. Now, why would anyone think Simone Biles doesn't...

Just a couple of articles that caught my interest this morning: Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann warns us "the signal of climate change has emerged from the noise." The BBC examines the cost of hosting the Olympics, as The Economist wonders whether cities should bother hosting them. New Republic reviews a book by John Tresch about Edgar Allan Poe's—how does one say?—farcical and tragic misunderstanding of science. Eugene Williams finally got a monument yesterday, at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue...

In another implicit rebuke to the lump of clay that occupied the Governor's Mansion for four years, Illinois finally got a bump in its credit rating after Governor Pritzker started paying our bills again: In upgrading Illinois’ credit by one step — to two notches above junk bond status instead of one — Wall Street ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service noted that the $42 billion spending plan for the year starting July 1 “increases pension contributions, repays emergency Federal Reserve borrowings and...

I had some difficulty falling asleep before midnight last night because a major thunderstorm hit around 11. We had heavy rain, which we needed, and heavy winds, which we didn't. In the western suburbs, they had a lot of wind: [A] tornado first hit Naperville around 11:10 p.m., in the area just south of 75th Street and Ranchview Drive, and at least five people were injured, one of them critically, and they were being treated at Edward-Elmhurst Hospital, according to Kate Schultz, a spokeswoman for the...

The Lake Michigan-Huron system's water level has fallen for 12 straight months. But not a lot: So even though water levels have fallen 50 cm or so, they're still 40 cm higher than the long-term average. With much of the lake basin in serious drought, the water should keep draining out the Detroit River for a while longer.

After taking Cassie on a 45-minute walk before the heat hits us, I've spent the morning debugging, watching these news stories pile up for lunchtime reading: The US Supreme Court once again upheld Obamacare, with only Alito and Gorsuch dissenting. The Illinois legislature passed a common-sense gun control law, supported by the State Police, that largely brings us back in line with the rules we had in the 1990s. Illinois Deputy Governor Dan Hynes has resigned (ahem) ahead of the 2022 election. The BBC...

So far today, Cassie and I have taken 2½ hours of walks, and she's taken about twice that in naps while I read in the sunroom with a nice breeze blowing over me. In other words, nothing to blog about today.

After 448 days, the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago have lifted all capacity limits and most other intrusive Covid-19 mitigation factors. We haven't gone completely back to normal, but it feels a lot more so than it did even a month ago. The Tribune has a round-up of what rules remain in place and what has lifted. Mainly we still need masks on public transit and in places where owners or managers require them, and some "Covid theater" will continue where people demand it. But restaurants...

I spent the morning unsuccessfully trying to get a .NET 5 Blazor WebAssembly app to behave with an Azure App Registration, and part of the afternoon doing a friend's taxes. Yes, I preferred doing the taxes, because I got my friend a pile of good news without having to read sixty contradictory pages of documentation. I also became aware of the following: The FBI and Australian police completely pwned hundreds of criminals through a black-market "encrypted" cell phone app that they wrote and monitored, in...

I didn't have as much time to edit photos yesterday as I expected, so I only have two more for today: And I want to give a big shout out to this little guy, named Bear, who forded the 5-meter-wide tidal pool all by himself:

The northern hemisphere started meteorological summer at midnight local time today. Chicago's weather today couldn't have turned out better. Unfortunately, I go into the office on the first and last days of each week, so I only know about this from reading weather reports. At my real job, we have a release tomorrow onto a completely new Azure subscription, so for only the second time in 37 sprints (I hope) I don't expect a boring deployment. Which kind of fits with all the decidedly-not-boring news that...

Remember the deer in the cemetery? He's getting bolder: He (I think it's a male fawn) let me get pretty close, and held still when I took photos through the fence: A local artist named him "Spooky Boi," which fits, I think. It's pretty spooky when megafauna stares at you through a cemetery fence at 7am as you pass by with a dog.

We have an odd debate in Chicago about the name of our most iconic road. A group of aldermen want to change the name of Lake Shore Drive to Jean Baptiste Point du Sable Drive, in honor of the first non-native permanent settler, who was also Black. The (Black) mayor and a contingent of other aldermen of varying races disagree: The proposal’s sponsors faced opposition from some colleagues and the mayor’s office over fears that renaming the iconic road would lead to a nightmare at the post office and for...

Happy 51st Earth Day! In honor of that, today's first story has nothing to do with Earth: The MOXIE experiment on NASA's Perseverance rover produced 5.4 grams of oxygen in an hour on Mars, not enough to sustain human life but a major milestone in our efforts to visit the planet. Back on earth, the Nature Conservancy has released a report predicting significant climate changes for Illinois, including a potential 5°C temperature rise by 2100. Microsoft has teamed up with the UK Meteorological Office (AKA...

Some stories in the news this week: The Muldrow Glacier in Denali National Park began to surge a few months ago and has accelerated to almost 30 meters per day. Chicago-area transit agencies believe that about 20% of former transit riders won't come back after Covid, leading them to re-think their long-range planning. The IRS will begin sending parents a monthly payment that replaces the annual child tax credit starting in the beginning of July. Guess what? Whether intentionally or not, the XPOTUS's...

I've been coding most of the day because it has rained since 1pm. I'm getting very close to a series of posts on what I've been working on the past few months, so stay tuned.

Even though my life for the past week has revolved around a happy, energetic ball of fur, the rest of the world has continued as if Cassie doesn't matter: US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has taken the lead in spewing right-wing conspiracy bullshit in the Senate. Retired US Army Lt Colonel Alexander Vindman joins Garry Kasparov in an op-ed that says it's not about the individual politicians; Russia's future is about authoritarianism against democracy. Deep waters 150 meters under the surface of Lake...

Welcome to stop #41 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Blue Island Beer Company, 13357 Old Western Ave., Blue IslandTrain line: Rock Island, Blue Island-Vermont (also Metra Electric, Blue Island)Time from Chicago: 20 minutes (Zone D)Distance from station: 800 m This entry might run a bit long, as Blue Island Beer Co.'s owner Alan Cromwell sat down with me for about an hour when I mentioned the Brews and Choos Project to him. And while we were talking, Jim Richert, president of the soon-to-open...

The CDC just released guidance on how vaccinated people should behave. It doesn't seem too surprising, but it also doesn't suggest we will all go back to the world of 2019 any time soon. In other news: Washington Post global opinions editor Karen Attah likens living in Texas right now to "an exercise in survival." The New York Times looks at where US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) came from, without explicitly telling him to go back there. Crain's Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz outlines what Chicago...

The expansion of unemployment benefits combined with sensible precautions against transmission of Covid-19 have made criminals' lives much easier: From March through the end of November, there have been more than 2 million initial claims filed for regular state unemployment benefits, according to the agency. That figure excludes people filing claims under five federal pandemic jobless aid programs the state implemented last year. The agency has said the rise in unemployment fraud is likely due to large...

Where to begin. Yesterday, and for the first time in the history of the country, an armed mob attacked the US Capitol building, disrupting the ceremonial counting of Electoral Votes and, oh by the way, threatening the safety of the first four people in the presidential line of succession. I'm still thinking about all of this. Mainly I'm angry and disgusted. And I'm relieved things didn't wind up worse. But wow. Here are just some of the reactions to yesterday's events: American late-night hosts Seth...

The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday. Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard Nixon in the White House. More odd things of note: Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel attorney Erica Newland has some regrets. Congress finally passed a $900 million stimulus bill that has no real hope of stimulating anyone who's unemployed or about to lose his home. Nice work, Mitch. Canada...

The city's plan would vaccinate every adult who lives or works in Chicago in 2021: Initial vaccine doses will be sent to all 34 hospitals in Chicago, city officials said. Health care workers who treat COVID-19 patients or are at high risk for coronavirus spread will be first to receive it, city officials said. After health care workers, vaccines will be prioritized for a broad group of people including residents and staff at long-term care facilities, individuals at high risk due to underlying medical...

To thoroughly depress you, SMBC starts the week by showing you appropriate wine pairings for your anxiety. In similar news: Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) seeks a 19th term as Speaker, but new Federal indictments and that people voted against Democrats statewide because they don't want him around anymore have made his bid unlikely. Vermont and South Dakota have similar demographics and both have Republican governors, so how did Vermont keep Covid-19 infections low while South Dakota...

The first polls close in the US next Tuesday in Indiana at 6 pm EST (5 pm Chicago time, 22:00 UTC) and the last ones in Hawaii and Alaska at 7pm HST and 8pm AKST respectively (11 pm in Chicago, 05:00 UTC). You can count on all your pocket change that I'll be live-blogging for most of that time. I do plan actually to sleep next Tuesday, so I can't guarantee we'll know anything for certain before I pass out, but I'll give it the college try. Meanwhile: The US Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the...

Let's start with the good news: Julie Nolke has a new video. OK, ready for everything else? The president called Kamala Harris "this monster" in an interview Thursday, because of course he did. The New England Journal of Medicine came a millimeter from endorsing Joe Biden in an editorial published yesterday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have introduced legislation to create a commission on presidential capacity, without naming the person who inspired the bill....

Here we go: A wildfire currently burning north of Sacramento has become the largest in California history. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci doesn't expect us to get back to normal until "well into 2021." Law professor Rosa Brooks reviews Bob Woodward's Rage and finds nothing surprising. The Kissimmee Star Motel outside Orlando, Florida, is a case study in the state's abrogation of its basic duties to its citizens, or the apotheosis of the Calvinist ethics...

As of Saturday, it looked like we might break the record for hottest summer ever (average daily temperature 24.7°C) in Chicago, set way back in 1955. If the today's forecast holds, however, we will merely tie the record. This is actually a good-news, bad-news thing. The good news is: (a) we came just a bit short of breaking the record (36.7°C) for August 26th, and (b) a cold front will push through tomorrow evening, dropping temperatures into the high 20s for the weekend. You know? I'm OK with not...

Chicago's key Covid-19 metric, the 7-day rolling average positivity rate, ticked above 5% yesterday, as it's been near the 5% threshold for a couple of weeks. It rose from 4% to 5% between July 19th and 30th, suggesting that relaxed discipline has led to more infections. Today Governor JB Pritzker announced stricter policies requiring masks to protect restaurant workers: [The] new statewide restaurant and bar policy requiring all patrons to wear a mask while interacting with waitstaff and other...

I just spent 90 minutes driving to and from two different Drivers Services facilities because I wanted to renew my drivers license with a Real ID version. At both places the lines stretched into the next time zone. Since I can renew online, and I have another Real ID available, I'm just not going to bother. I'm surprised—not very, but still—that Drivers Services still doesn't understand queuing theory. Or they just don't care. Illinois used to handle this much better, but after four years of Bruce...

Welcome to stop #29 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Sketchbook Brewing Co. Skokie Taproom, 4901 Main St., SkokieTrain line: CTA Yellow Line, Dempster-SkokieTime from Chicago: 48 minutesDistance from station: 900 m I have gone to Sketchbook Brewing in Evanston for years, so naturally I made a special trip to their Skokie Taproom for its grand opening last Friday. We had perfect weather, social distancing, hand sanitizer, and good beer. The brewery occupies the front part of a 1950s-era...

Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races: Jeff Sessions lost the Republican US Senate primary in Alabama. What the hell was the president talking about yesterday? George Will explains the differences, such as they are, between  Illinois governor JB Pritzker announced a tightening of the state's re-opening rules, while Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot warned we're dangerously close to shutting down again. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt tested positive for Covid-19. Author John M. Barry, who wrote about...

Welcome to stop #27 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Oak Park Brewing Co., 155 S. Oak Park Ave., Oak ParkTrain line: Union Pacific West, Oak ParkTime from Chicago: 16 minutes (Zone B)Distance from station: 700 m Oak Park Brewing Co. is the first brewpub in Oak Park since 1872, when the village went dry. Yesterday evening an old friend and I donned masks and sat outside in the perfect weather to have pub food and, in my case anyway, beer. From left to right, I sampled: the Leprechaun Zombie...

Welp, it's July now, so we've completed half of 2020. (You can insert your own adverb there; I'll go with "only.") A couple of things magically changed or got recorded at midnight, though. Among them: The Lake Michigan-Huron system finished its 6th consecutive month of record high water levels, with June 2020 levels a full meter over the long-term average. Illinois' minimum wage went up to $10 per hour, and Chicago's to $14. Both minima will increase by $1 per year until they reach $15. China has...

Vox has called the US Senate Democratic Party primary in Kentucky for Amy McGrath, but the main national outlets don't have it yet. [Note: I have contributed financially to Amy McGrath's campaign.] So while I wait for confirmation from the Washington Post (or, you know, the Kentucky State Board of Elections), here's other fun stuff: As threatened, the European Union has barred travelers from the United States from entering, because of our shit response to Covid-19. The shit response includes record...

My inbox does not respect the fact that I had meetings between my debugging sessions all day. So this all piled up: Josh Marshall calls our Covid-19 response an "abject failure" compared to, say, Europe's. Paul Krugman says it shows we've "failed the marshmallow test." Former CIA acting director Michael Morell says President Biden will inherit "a world of trouble." ("Arguably, only Abraham Lincoln, with Southern secession waiting, faced a tougher challenge when taking office than would Biden.") Illinois...

This sort of thing keeps happening, and explains why the police hate the public's ubiquitous video recording: When CTA supervisor Martesa Lee attempted to lodge a complaint against a Chicago police officer in February, she was given a choice: Drop her grievance against the officer she accused of pushing her out of an unmarked crime scene on a Red Line platform or face possible arrest. “Is it worth it to you?” Chicago police Sgt. William Spyker asked her. It was. Authorities arrested Lee in front of her...

A peaceful protest in downtown Chicago that began at 2pm yesterday devolved into violence by 8pm, leading to Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposing a 9pm to 6am curfew city-wide: “I want to express my disappointment and, really, my total disgust at the number of others who came to today’s protests armed for all-out battle.” Lightfoot singled out “the people who came armed with weapons,’’ calling them “criminals.“ “We can have zero tolerance for people who came prepared for a fight and tried to initiate and...

I rode the El yesterday for the first time since March 15th, because I had to take my car in for service. (It's 100% fine.) This divided up my day so I had to scramble in the afternoon to finish a work task, while all these news stories piled up: Josh Marshall unmasks the PPE debate. Matthew Sitman explains "why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals [sic] mad." Michigan's Attorney General called the president "a petulant child," called Lake Huron "a big lake," and called the Upper Peninsula...

Briefly: Illinois surpassed 100,000 cases of Covid-19 as of today, but all four regions of the state remain on target to move into phase 3 (think: outdoor restaurant seating) a week from Friday. Josh Marshall says "wear your damn mask." Jessica Goldstein wonders when we'll mourn the dead? Another unit test is taking forever. I turned on "long running tests" so I knew it wouldn't be quick.

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows. It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news: Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.) Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start...

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced this afternoon a five-phase, evidence-based plan to reopen the state: The five phases for each health region are as follows: Phase 1 – Rapid Spread: The rate of infection among those tested and the number of patients admitted to the hospital is high or rapidly increasing. Strict stay at home and social distancing guidelines are put in place and only essential businesses remain open. Every region has experienced this phase once already, and could return to it...

Starting tomorrow at 5pm, through April 7th, Illinois will be on a "stay-at-home" order: Residents can still go to the grocery stores, put gas in their cars, take walks outside and make pharmacy runs, the governor said at a Friday afternoon news conference. All local roads, including the interstate highways and tollways, will remain open to traffic, as well. “For the vast majority of you already taking precautions, your lives will not change very much,” Pritzker said. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said “now is...

I'm trying to get my mind around a Conservative government announcing this a few minutes ago: The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced the government will pay the wages of British workers to keep them in jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates. In an unprecedented step, Sunak said the state would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers kept on by companies, up to a total of £2,500 per month, just above the median income. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” he...

Actually, things seem to have quieted down. Bars and restaurants in Illinois closed last night at 9pm, and my company has moved to mandatory work-from-home, so things could not be quieter for me. I'm also an introvert with a dog and gigabit Internet, meaning I have a need to leave my house several times a day and something to do inside. (I'm also working, and in fact cracked a difficult nut yesterday that made today very productive.) Outside of my house: New Republic's Nick Martin asks, why should we...

Some dingleberry from Tennessee thought he'd make easy money by stocking up on hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. Now he's got a garage full of things Amazon won't let him sell. And he's whining about it to the New York Times: On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home...

Welcome to stop #13 on the Brews and Choos project. Distillery: Rhine Hall Distillery, 2010 W. Fulton St., ChicagoTrain lines: Milwaukee District North and West, Western Ave. (Also CTA Green line, Ashland) Time from Chicago: 9 minutes (Zone A)Distance from station: 1.3 km (1.1 km from CTA) I found visiting Rhine Hall on a weeknight in February odd for two reasons. First, I didn't realize that they distill from fruit, rather than grain, so I didn't prepare myself for the flavors of their spirits well....

Note: Kings & Convicts closed their Highwood taproom on 1 April 2024. Welcome to stop #6 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Kings & Convicts Brewing Co., 523 Banks Ln., Highwood, Ill.Train line: Metra Union Pacific North, Highwood station.Time from Chicago (Ogilvie): 52 minutes, zone EDistance from station: 300 m A Brit and an Aussie walked into a bar and decided to open a brewery. Then a couple of years later they acquired a distressed but well-respected brand, which they will soon add to their...

I love trains. I love beer. I don't love driving when I'm having beer. So how to reconcile all of those things, I wonder? My solution: identify breweries in and around Chicago close to rail lines and visit them. Starting in February 2020, I identified 98 locations ranging from one as close as 400 m from a downtown Chicago train station to four that require a 100-minute train ride to a neighboring state. Even better, the densest stop on any train line turned out to be the one closest to my house: there...

Climate change has caused water levels in the Lake Michigan-Huron system to swell in only six years, creating havoc in communities that depend on them: In 2013, Lake Huron bottomed out, hitting its lowest mark in more than a century, as did Lake Michigan, which shares the same water levels, according to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Around that time, the lake withdrew so far from the shore around Engle’s resort — then a collection of...

Not that anyone was surprised, though many I'm sure were disappointed: A handful of marijuana dispensaries around Illinois halted recreational weed sales over the weekend and plan to remain closed to the public for part of the week as they deal with product shortages. Legal weed sales kicked off in Illinois on Wednesday, and customers spent almost $3.2 million at dispensaries that first day. It marked one of the strongest showings of any state in the history of pot legalization. Second day sales reached...

Today in Chicago we have seen more sun than in the past several weeks, and yet here I toil in my cube. But a lot is going on outside it: Josh Marshall has come around to agreement that the House should move forward with impeaching the president, as in fact they plan to do before Christmas. Esquire calls the Republican defense of the president a "Catch-22 of stupid." In Israel, a 29-year-old former Haredi woman had never heard of television or the Internet until a non-profit sprung her from her...

Chicago Classical Review attended our performance of Everest and Aleko this weekend: There are a myriad of reasons why an operatic adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air should not work. And yet it does. Composer [Joby] Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer have crafted a compelling 70-minute opera adapted form Krakauer’s nonfiction book about the disastrous 1996 Everest expedition in which eight people died. Scheer wisely narrows the scope to three mountaineers, alternating their increasingly desperate...

That's American for the English idiom "penny in the air." And what a penny. More like a whole roll of them. Right now, the House of Commons are wrapping up debate on the Government's bill to prorogue Parliament (for real this time) and have elections the second week of December. The second reading of the bill just passed by voice vote (the "noes" being only a few recalcitrant MPs), so the debate continues. The bill is expected to pass—assuming MPs can agree on whether to have the election on the 9th...

Last night, Chicago set an all-time record for the warmest low temperature in October: 23°C, which feels more like mid-July than early-October, following the high yesterday of 30°C. Not to fear, though. A cold front came through just after midnight, bringing the temperature down to 14°C by 8am. With drizzly rain. Gotta love Chicago.

October began today for some of the world, but here in Chicago the 29°C weather (at Midway and downtwon; it's 23°C at O'Hare) would be more appropriate for July. October should start tomorrow for us, according to forecasts. This week has a lot going on: rehearsal yesterday for Apollo's support of Chicago Opera Theater in their upcoming performances of Everest and Aleko; rehearsal tonight for our collaboration Saturday with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony of Carmina Burana; and, right, a full-time job....

A few good reads today: Bruce Schneier compares genetic engineering with software engineering, and its security implications. The Atlantic has goes deep into the Palace of Westminster, and its upcoming £3.5 bn renovation. NOAA's chief scientist publicly released a letter to staff discussing the "complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of [Hurricane Dorian]." Illinois has pulled back some regulations on distilleries, giving them an easier time competing with bars and restaurants....

Of note or interest: The BBC's political editor asks if the Brexit deadline is even possible now. The New York Times has a good recap of yesterday's marathon Commons sitting. So does the Washington Post. The president fired National Security Adviser John Bolton, which was the right thing to do for all the wrong reasons. Peter Wehner reminds us that the president is "not well." What's with Jerry Falwell and pool boys, anyway? Matti Friedman explains how memories of "the situation" will inform next...

If you haven't checked out the Apollo Chorus of Chicago's season this year, now's the time. Our first concert, on November 3rd at St Michael's Church in Old Town, is totally free and will showcase our entire season. Right now I'm entering all of our just-accepted new members into the official member database. Looks like we have some really good singers joining tomorrow.

But I will take the time as soon as I get it: Conor Friedersdorf thinks Tucker Carlson "has failed to assimilate." (So do I.) Daniel Drezner says we have "the worst of all possible Iran policies." (So do I.) Author TJ Martinson won't teach at a downstate religious college this coming year because, apparently, someone got around to reading his new novel. (I just put it on my "to be read" list.) Architect Greg Tamborino won an affordable-housing contest with a bungalow that can easily convert into a...

This is kind of cool, and could really help the city: Skender, an established, family-owned builder in Chicago, is making a serious play in a sector associated with young startups: modular construction. The company is building steel-structured three-flats, a quintessential Chicago housing type that consists of three apartments stacked on top of each other in the footprint of a large house. It believes it can deliver them faster and at lower cost at its new factory than by using standard methods of...

If only it weren't another beautiful early-summer day in Chicago, I might spend some time indoors reading these articles: On the 40th anniversary of the Flight 191 disaster in Chicago, Ask the Pilot draws comparisons between the troubles of the DC-10 and the 737-MAX. Does ride-sharing increase traffic congestion? Uh, yeah. Duh. Yesterday was the Chicago El's 127th birthday. Scott Hanselman remarks on "clever little C# features" that make him happy. A 68-year old survey, the Public Policy Mood estimate...

I'm participating tomorrow in a concert at St John Cantius church in the River West neighborhood. The concert, sponsored by the French consulate, will raise money for the repairs to Notre Dame de Paris. Our local NBC affiliate ran a story about it Wednesday. The concert starts at 8pm, and will feature the music of Vierne, Fauré, and other French composers.

Yesterday evening, I needed to wear earmuffs and gloves when walking Parker because of the 7°C weather. Yes, it's the middle of May, but we've had a really screwy spring this year. Today I don't need gloves. Our official temperature bloomed from 8°C to 26°C in the past six hours. Even close to the lake, where I live, it's already warmer outside than inside—and I had the heat on briefly this morning! Today the forecast looks hot and humid, before temperatures plunge again Sunday night. Then hot again...

Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz vented his frustration about outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel in a letter to incoming mayor Lori Lightfoot earlier this week. Today, Emanuel responded: When you own something, you pay the costs and you reap the benefits. Welcome to capitalism and the private sector, Rocky. Look, I get it. For those who have become accustomed to the rules of the road of crony capitalism, and have had sweetheart deals and special arrangements no one else receives, it is tough when you are...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago's annual fundraiser has consumed my weekend and will continue to munch away at my week.  Tickets are still available. Come out and hear us! It's wicked fun. And somehow, I'll write the next six A-to-Z posts on time...

Just a few things I'm reading that you also might want to read: Responding to yesterday's post about the Democratic Party's flirtation with anti-Semitism, reader DH sends an article from today's Guardian explaining why the left is doing this worldwide. Atlas Obscura describes the middle-ages privacy measure called letterlocking. Illinois officially had its coldest temperature ever when Mt Carroll hit -39°C on January 31st. The Tribune digs into why the Jane Byrne Interchange remodeling will got almost a...

...and it has always been due to human error. Today, I don't mean the HAL-9000. Amtrak: Amtrak said “human error” is to blame for the disrupted service yesterday at Union Station. A worker fell on a circuit board, which turned off computers and led to the service interruption, according to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin. The delay lasted more than 12 hours and caused significant overcrowding at Union Station. The error affected more than 60,000 Amtrak and Metra passengers taking trains from Union to the suburbs...

Chicago produces a...technically non-toxic liquid called Jeppson's Malört. If you don't know what this is, The Ringer explains: The first thing you should know about Malört is that, well, it’s bad. A Google search for it will direct you to the term “Malört face,” a query that will lead to a close-up montage of poor souls reacting to their first taste of the amber liquor: eyes closed, noses scrunched, jaws clenched, veins swelling out of foreheads, perhaps a tear trickling down a cheek in horror or...

I told you the Chicago mayoral election would be difficult. I had no idea that my preferred candidate would come out in first place, setting up an April 2nd election that will elect Chicago's first African-American woman mayor: It’s only the second time Chicago has had a runoff campaign for mayor, which occurs when no candidate collects more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. Unofficial results showed Lightfoot with 17.5 percent of the vote, Preckwinkle with 16 percent and Bill Daley with...

I've had a lot going on this week, including seeing an excellent production of Elektra at Lyric Opera of Chicago last night, so I haven't had time to read all of these articles: A 12-year-old journalist in southern Arizona stands up to the local marshal and wins. The US Dollar is still the world's reserve currency—and in fact foreigners are buying more than ever. The Jussie Smollett case was the least important of a number of stories in the news this week. The North Carolina 9th shows us an "important...

A week ago at this hour, it was -17°C outside and we had 230 mm of snow on the ground. Then the Polar Vortex hit, followed quickly by the biggest warm-up in Chicago history: From 17:37 CST Tuesday the 29th until 23:51 Thursday the 31st, the temperature hung out below 0°F. But it had already started rising, from the near-record-low -30.6°C Wednesday morning until yesterday afternoon's near-record-high 10.6°C—a record-smashing total rise of Δ41°C. This was the view from my office Friday evening, when the...

The official temperature at O'Hare got down to -31°C before 7am. Here at IDTWHQ it's -28.4°C. We didn't hit the all-time record (-32.8C) set in 1985, but wait! We will likely hit the low-maximum temperature record today. WGN reports that temperatures under -29°C have occurred only 15 times since records began 54,020 days ago. And the Wiccan coven next door has just received a shipment of battery-heated, thermal-insulated sports bras. So, I'll be working from the IDTWHQ today. And tomorrow.

We've had some snow, and we've had some cold, but this week we will have both. A lot of both: TonightSnow, mainly after midnight. The snow could be heavy at times. Patchy blowing snow after 11pm. Temperature rising to around -3°C by 5am. Wind chill values as low as -19°C. Breezy, with a south southeast wind 15 to 25 km/h increasing to 30 to 40 km/h. Winds could gust as high as 50 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 80 to 120 mm possible. MondayDrizzle and snow, possibly mixed...

I missed posting two days in a row because I've just been swamped. I'll have more details later. For now, here's my new office view: One of my smartass friends, who lives in Los Angeles, asked what that white stuff was. It's character, kid. It's character.

The semi-annual Chicago Sunrise Chart is up. Enjoy.

Yesterday was my [redacted] high school reunion. We started with a tour of the building, which has become a modern office park since we graduated: The glass atrium there is new, as of 2008. The structure back to the left is the Center for the Performing Arts, which featured proudly in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I didn't get a picture of the Michelin-starred student food court, but this, this I had to snap: So, at some point I'll post about Illinois school-funding policies and why one of the richest...

I'm about to go home to take Parker to the vet (he's getting two stitches out after she removed a fatty cyst from his eyelid), and then to resume panicking packing. I might have time to read these three articles: Lelslie Stahl interviewed President Trump for last night's 60 Minutes broadcast, with predictable results. The Smithsonian explains how Chicago grew from 350 people in 1833 to 1.7 million 70 years later. The Nielsen-Norman Group lays out how people develop technology myths, like how one study...

I'm just starting the process of moving, today, by signing a ton of papers in an office somewhere in Chicago. I get to do this two more times before the end of September. But mid-October, Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters will have a new home. Parker has no idea how disrupted his life is about to become.

The New York City subway, with its passive air exchange system and tunnels too small for active ventilation or air conditioning, have gotten excessively hot this summer: On Thursday, temperatures inside at least one of the busiest stations reached 40°C—nearly 11°C warmer than the high in Central Park. The Regional Plan Association, an urban planning think tank for the greater metropolitan area, took a thermometer around the system’s 16 busiest stations, plus a few more for good measure, and shared the...

This past weekend included the Chicago Gay Pride Parade and helping a friend prepare for hosing a brunch beforehand. Blogging fell a bit on the priority list. Meanwhile, here are some of the things I'm reading today: From last week, the Times discusses whether Earth's 23.4° axis tilt was actually a necessary precursor to life. New Republic's Josephine Huetlin asks, "Why do populists get away with corruption?" One of Chicago's last remaining over-the-tollway oases is slated for demolition. Josh Marshall...

Ah, Ribfest. The bane of my diet. This year I went back to a couple of old favorites and tried a couple of new ones: Chicago BBQ: Smoky, a little tug off the bone, tangy sauce. 3½ stars. Mrs. Murphy's Irish Bistro: Like last year, they glooped on a lot of (delicious) sauce. But the meat tasted better this year, and I got a bit of a lagniappe. 3 stars. Old Crow Smokehouse: I haven't tried them before. They were decent. Good smoke taste, but a little fatty and not a lot of sauce. 3 stars. Fireside...

Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel has a report: Based on preliminary data, the statewide average temperature for May in Illinois was 21.4°C, 4.4°C above normal and the warmest May on record. The old record was 20.8°C set back in 1962. A brief examination of daily records indicates that Springfield, Champaign, Quincy, and Carbondale all had daily mean temperatures at or above normal for each day of the month. On the other hand, Chicago, Rockford, and Peoria had a few dips into the below-normal...

Not all of this is as depressing as yesterday's batch: Dana Milbank raises the question, once again, whether President Trump is just a liar or really mentally ill. McCay Coppins describes how professional troll Stephen Miller got and kept his job. Illinois is getting an anti-carjacking bill that doesn't go as far as Chicago's police superintendent wanted. Josh Marshall wonders why Missouri Governor Eric Greitens resigned so abruptly yesterday. Via Bruce Schneier, an explanation of numbers stations....

The Apollo Chorus is joining Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music this weekend in two performances of Rachmaninov's The Bells. Thus, no real blog post today. But if you're in Chicago, swing by the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park at 6:30pm for our free concert.

A little Tuesday morning randomness for you: Millions of people who voted for President Trump have discovered that his policies are horrible for them. As only one example, MSNBC looks at the devastation immigration changes have caused to the crab industry in Hoopers Island, Md. Microsoft's Raymond Chen explains why the technology for compressing Windows folders hasn't changed since 2000. An artist has put up a Divvy-style "Chicago Gun Share Program" exhibit in Daley Plaza. (I'll try to get a photo this...

British Airways has started daily service between Chicago and London on the Airbus A380: Last year, British Airways said it would begin using the A380 on one of two daily flights between Chicago and London. The aircraft seats up to 469 passengers in four cabins, including 14 first-class suites, 97 lie-flat business-class seats and 55 premium economy seats, with the remaining 303 in coach, British Airways said. It’s only within the past couple of years that O’Hare has had facilities to accommodate the...

Sterling Bay, the company developing the Finkl site in Lincoln Park, has reached a deal with the Chicago Terminal Railroad to extend the 606 Trail across the Chicago River: Sterling Bay, which plans a big development on the former Finkl steel plant site and neighboring parcels, has resolved its dispute with a rail company that owns train tracks that run across riverside land and on to Goose Island. The rail company, Chicago-based Iowa Pacific Holdings, infuriated Sterling Bay and Goose Island...

Edward McClelland essays on the decline of the white blue-collar Midwest, as expressed linguistically: The “classic Chicago” accent, with its elongated vowels and its tendency to substitute “dese, dem, and dose” for “these, them, and those,” or “chree” for “three,” was the voice of the city’s white working class. “Dese, Dem, and Dose Guy,” in fact, is a term for a certain type of down-to-earth Chicagoan, usually from a white South Side neighborhood or an inner-ring suburb. The classic accent was most...

Which explains why it's just above freezing and pissing with rain. Yesterday the temperature dropped from 15°C to 5°C in about 90 minutes as a cold front swept in from the north. Today we're living with the result. Oddly, though, the current temperature (3°C) isn't that far from the normal March 1st temperature (4°C). So perhaps we shouldn't complain. But that taste of spring we got earlier this week made us all anxious for the real thing. It's Chicago. The weather will change in a day or two.

Finally! It's a clear, sunny, above-freezing day in Chicago with no snow left on the ground. So far I've gotten over 20,000 steps, and if I keep walking around various neighborhoods, I'll clear 25,000. (I've done that only 13 times since October 2014. I've hit 20,000 on 66 days, or about 5% of the time.) Of course, that means not a lot of blog posting this weekend. Sorry.

While we hope it will not repeat early February 2011, we expect to get up to 300 mm of snow overnight and into tomorrow here in Chicago: The Chicago area is under a winter storm warning from Thursday evening through Friday night, with the National Weather Service warning that "travel will be very difficult to impossible at times, including during the morning commute." Much of the area should see 6 to 10 inches of snow between 6 p.m. Thursday and 9 p.m. Friday, though some areas to the north of the city...

As part of my current project's non-technical requirements, I've just completed 5 hours of anti-terrorism and security training. Biggest takeaway: bullets ricochet down, grenade shrapnel goes up. Also, don't put random CDs in your computer. Oh, and I have to repeat about 3 hours of it a year from now. Today is actually a company holiday but I've got a lot of work to do, including this training. Also we've gotten about 60 mm of snow today with more coming down. So steps go down, heating bill goes up.

Today is the last work day of 2017, and also the last day of my team's current sprint. So I'm trying to chase down requirements and draft stories before I lose everyone for the weekend. These articles will just have to wait: The New York Times interviewed President Trump; Josh Marshall has some thoughts about it. The Times also describes how a small section of the 2nd Avenue Subway is the most expensive mile of subway track on earth. Mother Jones has a video tribute to Trump Administration staffers who...

For my entire school life, from Kindergarten to 12th grade, I had daily gym class. In 1957, Illinois became the first state to require all kids to have daily PE. This was the case until this school year: The law cuts daily PE to a minimum of three days per week and, starting in seventh grade, students involved in interscholastic or extracurricular athletic programs could skip PE. Those moves and more were touted as a way to save money, but some fear the changes will push PE to the back burner of the...

Yesterday I spent almost the whole day cooking and eating, while outside the temperature barely got above -10°C. So despite averaging better than 15,000 steps for the entire week preceding, I only managed 7,292 steps yesterday, my 3rd poorest showing of 2017. The problem is, when I'm working from home, I get most of my steps by taking Parker on long walks. Below about -10°C, even his two thick fur coats aren't enough to keep him warm for more than 10-15 minutes, tops. And below -18°C, forget it; even...

Lots of stuff going on, so I haven't written a lot this past week. So I just have some links this morning in lieu of anything more interesting: Dana Milbank thinks our new awareness of sexual harassment won't end well, thanks to the lack of leadership from the White House. Fifty nine years ago this week, Chicago got its first helicopter traffic report. The Trump administration appointed a new Census deputy director who looks likely to sabotage the census. I thought I had more. Hm.

I'm about to fly to San Antonio for another round of researching how the military tracks recruits from the time they get to the processing center to the time they leave for boot camp (officially "Military Basic Training" or MBT). I have some stuff to read on the plane: WPA, which is probably securing your WiFi, has been hacked after 14 years. Great. At least SSL is still secure. The New Republic claims that Republicans are ignoring the will of the people by tossing out ballot initiatives. (This is not...

With only a very small group to insure, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois is leaving the Obamacare exchange for small businesses: Calling all small businesses with a Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois plan through the Obamacare public health insurance exchange: Look out for an email this week informing you that the state's largest insurer is officially leaving the online marketplace. That leaves small employers looking for an exchange plan for 2018 with one option: downstate Health Alliance....

Articles I haven't got time to read until later: Tropical storm (and former hurricane) Harvey has dumped more rain on Houston than the city has ever seen, and it's still coming down. The Chicago Tribune recaps last night's Game of Throne finale. (I've already read the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.) Greg Sargent says President "Trump is dragging us towards a full-blown crisis" which leaves open the question what the ongoing crisis actually was already. On the same topic, James Fallows...

Chicago-based Boeing tested new engines on a 787-8 Wednesday, and chose an imaginative flight path: Quartz has the story: Without context, this seems like a publicity stunt. The distance covered in the flight is estimated to be about 25,400 km (15,800 miles). By one estimate, the 787-8 dumped more than 300,000 kg of carbon dioxide in the process. The endeavor was not a complete waste. A Boeing spokesperson told Quartz that today’s flight was to test the endurance of new engines and it was required by...

While I'm trying to figure out how to transfer one database to another, I'm putting these aside for later reading: Chicago Magazine thinks global warming could be worse for Illinois than previously thought. (But we're still going to do better than Florida.) Citylab reviews Sarah Williams Goldhagen's new book on the science behind appreciating architecture. Conservative (!) columnist Jennifer Rubin believes her party can no longer defend our national interests or our Constitution. Krugman once again...

By boasting, it turns out. And writing in the New York Times, Mayor Rahm Emanuel carries on the tradition of thumbing New York's eye: On Thursday, in the wake of a subway derailment and an epidemic of train delays, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York declared a state of emergency for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the busiest mass transit system in America. That same day, the nation’s third-busiest system — the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority — handed out coupons for free coffee to...

I'll have a write-up of Ribfest 2017 and some photos tomorrow. Meanwhile, enjoy the really hot lazy early-summer weekend.

The Chicago Tribune today published the first in a three-part series showing how Illinois property tax assessments contribute to rising inequality while failing to fund schools: The valuations are a crucial factor when it comes to determining property tax bills, a burden that for many determines whether they can afford to stay in their homes. Done well, these estimates should be fair, transparent and stand up to scrutiny. But that’s not how it works in Cook County, where Assessor Joseph Berrios has...

The U.S. Census Bureau yesterday released new estimates showing that Chicago's population declined slightly last year. The deeper numbers are more troubling: According to Alden Loury, director of research and evaluation at the Metropolitan Planning Council, while the degree of black flight from the city has slowed some this decade, it's still averaging about 12,000 a year, based on data from the American Community Survey, also issued by the Census Bureau. Blacks leaving Cook County tended to move either...

A little busy today, so I'm putting these down for later consumption: Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA has released its state climate summaries for the country. Brian Beutler worries about President Trump's ego driving life-or-death decisions. Hollywood Reporter has some new photos from Game of Thrones' upcoming 7th season. Space junk and thousands of tiny, new satellites might make low orbit inaccessible in 50 years. Why are Germany's nude beaches (and parks and lawns and basically every part...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago held its annual benefit on April 7th, with me as benefit chair. We raised more money than at any previous benefit, as far as we know. I've got some photos to post; here's the first, of soprano Meaghan Stainback and alto Molly Mikos:

The United Airlines debacle at O'Hare last week underscored how much people really hate airlines: The severity of the situation really dawned on me last Thursday as I sat in an interview with a local Fox reporter. We started talking about the Chicago Aviation Police, and that’s when it hit me. Over the last few years, police violence has been a hot-button issue. It has spawned the Black Lives Matter movement, and it has polarized people around the country. And here was a textbook example of what people...

The snow continues to fall: The Chicago area remained under a lake-effect snow warning as the Tuesday morning rush slowed to an icy crawl on expressways and some Metra train lines. The warning covers Cook, Lake and DuPage counties until 4 p.m.  In Lake County, Ind., the warning has been extended to 1 a.m. Wednesday. The dense snow was being carried by winds from the north to northeast over Lake Michigan.  The snow bands were expected to slowly shift into northwest Indiana later in the morning and...

The windows at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters are all open—yes, on February 17th—because it's 18°C outside. This is the normal high temperature for May 1st. Parker's having a bath, too, so the weather is great for him to walk home from the doggy daycare place.