Slow-ish afternoon

I've sent some test results off to a partner in Sydney, so I have to wait until Monday morning before I officially mark that feature as "done." I'm also writing a presentation I'll give on March 16th. So while the larger part of my brain noodles on Microsoft Azure CosmosDB NoSQL databases (the subject of my presentation), the lesser part has this to read:

• Remember all the fuss Republicans made over Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016? Yeah, neither do they.
• Even as the president warns that Russia could invade Ukraine any day now, Michael Cohen (the writer, not the criminal) thinks he was right to ignore the siren-song of "doing something."
• Former half-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin did not do well as a witness in her libel case against the New York Times.
• Ontario Premier Doug Ford has declared a state of emergency and threatened to jail the right-wing extremists who continue to disrupt border crossings with the US.
• A new bill in the Illinois legislature would crack down on commercial vacancy fraud.

Finally, software developer Ben Tupper has created a Myst-like game surrounding the mysterious door at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. I walked past that door every day for almost two years, and even got a peek inside once. It's not really a townhouse, after all.

Apropos 58 Joralemon Street, there is something similar in London: numbers 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, in the fashionable Bayswater district, are a facade with no actual houses behind. The houses were demolished when the Metropolitan line was being built in the 1860s, and there is an open section of the line behind the facade. It's clearly visible in the Google Maps satellite view.

I think there's also something like that in Earls Court where the Piccadilly, Circle, and District lines run behind some "houses" just east of the Earls Court tube stop.