The Daily Parker

This time of year Chicago residents can easily forget the planet orbits an actual star that gives off actual heat and light. This month hasn't helped a bit:

If you're susceptible to SAD---Season Affective Disorder---a form of depression brought on by winter's short days and lack of sunlight, the past 9 days (since Tuesday, January 11) have no doubt been especially rough. The period has logged only 10 percent of its possible sunshine, we're told by veteran National Weather Service observer Frank Wachowski---a total of just 7.9 hours.

Under the best circumstances, a typical January is not one of Chicago's sunnier months. But this month's abysmal 10 percent tally falls far short January's average of 43 percent of its possible sun. That means Chicago area residents have seen less than a quarter of January's typical sunshine.

But good news! We'll have a couple of sunny days later this week. Yes, once that cold front passes and that pile of cold, dry air pushes on through, we'll have plenty of sun—and -16°C temperatures.

Sigh.

Update, 13:56 CT: Look! Up in the sky! It's...it's...the sun!

Via Sullivan (of course), a phone conversation between LBJ and his tailor, bringing class and decorum from Texas to the Oval Office. The animator explains:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson needed pants, so he called the Haggar clothing company and asked for some. The call was recorded (like all White House calls at the time), and has since become the stuff of legend. Johnson’s anatomically specific directions to Mr. Haggar are some of the most intimate words we’ve ever heard from the mouth of a President.

We at Put This On took the historic original audio and gave it to animator Tawd Dorenfeld, who created this majestic fantasia of bungholiana.

Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.

I meant to post this yesterday. Sullivan rounds up an entertaining collection of posts about post-punctuation spacing in the era of computerized typesetting:

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period.

The Daily Parker has adhered to the one-space rule since the beginning of time. In fact, even when I used a mechanical typewriter as a kid, I never got into the habit of adding supernumerary spaces after punctuation. I feel for those poor lost souls who do.

According to the Duke University registrar, I am a Master of Business Administration:

Who knew a screenshot of the registrar's computer system could feel so good?

Parque Eduardo VII, Lisbon's equivalent of Central Park, sits on a slope with a clear view down Avenida da Liberdade to the Tejo. Visitors to Lisbon are required to take at least one photo from the top of the park looking down, like this:

(Notice the fog and overcast, which hasn't changed except in density since I arrived. When I get back to Chicago I'll post a photo from 2000 that shows what this view looks like on a good day.)

As I stood there taking photos, I began to notice roosters crowing. One doesn't often hear roosters crowing in Chicago unless one visits the Lincoln Park Zoo, so one got curious and wandered over to the noise. Here's one of the principal offenders:

At the northwest corner of the park there is an enclosure with chickens, roosters, turkeys, ducks, geese, and peacocks. I have no explanation for this. It's not a zoo, and there seems to be some kind of construction work covering the north end of the area. Any ideas?

Yesterday I walked around east of Avenida da Liberdade; today I went west of it, into Bairro Alto. Lisbon has a mix of old and new that I think comes from lack of investment rather than any particular plan (as in the UK). The Bairro Alto neighborhood has an especially rough time of it:

It looks really cool, though. Same area, reverse shot:

By "Alto" they do mean "Upper." Parts of the neighborhood are linked by funiculars, like the Acensor da Bica:

The neighborhood also has Lisbon's best little restaurants. I ate here last night, Baralto, a tiny place with 26 chairs and one server that had delicious fresh bread and a tasty Madeira beef dish:

Finally, one that didn't make it onto the blog yesterday. The Castelo de São Jorge overlooks the city, and if the fog had lifted I'd have much better photos. (When I get back to Chicago I'll post one from 2001.) Still, I think this shot worked fine:

The civil weather forecast calls for sunny skies tomorrow, but the aviation forecast says more fog until about 16:00. As I'll be en route to London then I may not get some of the photos I had hoped to get here. Ah well. Maybe I'll come back in another 10 years.

Four-hour walk around the city, in 10°C fog:

Praca do Comercio:

The Sé:

Alfama:

Lisbon's unique paving stones:

If I'm able, I'm going to bring one home.

Here's a brain-teaser: take one part Heathrow, one part Iberia Airlines, and a sixty-five minute connection at Madrid Barajas. I'll give you a moment to work your sums.

If you got "no, really, a 2-hour connection," you're correct!

Instead of walking at a normal pace between two gates (that, it turns out, are 600 m apart) inside one terminal to make a fairly routine domestic connection, I walked at a normal pace off my flight from Heathrow right to the nearest Iberia service desk. We all shrugged. "Es Londres, es normal" we had to agree. Up to the lounge[1] I go, to check my email and write a blog entry.

Ah, but, this is no ordinary Western European capital airport. This is Madríd. The lounge has delicious Spanish wines, fresh olives, tasty sausages and cheeses, and no freaking WiFi. The conversation at check-in went something like this:

— ¿Como se puede conectar por el WiFi?

— Ah, desculpe, no tenemos el WiFi; es de pago.

— ¿Verdad? ¿De pago? No free WiFi?

— Sí, ¿es curioso, no?

— Sí, es curioso. Gracias.

So, here I sit, snacking on olives, brie, toast, sausages, a fruity Ribera del Duero number ("Condado de Haza Crianza, 2007: La Recomendación del Sumiller"), and probably in a moment those dates I see over there, composing a blog entry in flipping Notepad.

But let me review, just to keep things in perspective. Yesterday morning I woke up to a healthy snowfall in Chicago and tonight I'm going to bed in Lisbon, having spent the better part of the day in London. The total cost of this trip will come in somewhere around one month of housing (just housing, not groceries or electricity or anything else). And unlike the situation that existed even in my lifetime, getting a visa to anywhere in Western Europe requires presenting my passport to the bored guy at the arrival gate and getting a stamp.

Late update, in Lisbon: It seems the free Internet we take for granted in the U.S. and Northern Europe does not extend to Southern Europe. My hotel has free WiFi—in the bar and lobby. In the room it costs €22 per day.

[1] As a happy consequence of (or sorry consolation prize for) flying all those miles last year, I get access to all oneworld business-class lounges worldwide. I would like to note again, just because it really annoys me at the moment, that a principal benefit of every other business-class lounge that I've ever visited is free bloody WiFi. Dear Spain: ¿WTF?

(Insert witty one-liner here.)

But, really, the Airbus 380...I mean, yikes:

How can you not be impressed?

I got a couple of things right and a couple of things wrong since I left home Tuesday morning, and I finally got a hint of what my friends who've lived in London moan about it.

• Taking the 9am flight to London did, in fact, prevent jet lag, as I felt fine when I arrived at Heathrow in what my body thought was early evening. Usually I have two hours of fitful sleep and arrive at what my body thinks is the middle of sleep-deprived hell. Yesterday, however, I felt perfectly wide awake when I got to my hotel.
• On the other hand, the two inches of snow that fell on O'Hare between the time I checked in and the time we finally left the gate caused a 75-minute delay. This in turn led to arriving, not at 22:45 as scheduled, but at midnight. It's important to note at this point that the last tube is at 23:30, and the last Heathrow Express is at 23:45.
• On the other hand, I got on the N9 night less than 30 minutes after we landed (!) and, for only £1.30 on my Oyster card, whisked me to Hyde Park Gate in less than an hour.
• On the other hand, I had to get near Paddington, about two miles from Hyde Park Gate, which I considered while standing on a streetcorner at 1:30 in the morning.
• On the other hand, this is London, a major international capital, so a black cab stopped to pick me up in less than a minute.
• On the other hand, this is London, so the black cab cost £10 for the ten-minute ride.
• On the other hand, the hotel took no time at all to check me in and send me to my reasonably-comfortable and inexpensive (£69) room.
• On the other hand, they put me in the room directly across from the lift next to the security door that people started banging through around 6am—which, you may realize, my body thought was midnight.
• On the other hand, I managed some sleep, checked out with plenty of time to find coffee, and happily walked around my second-favorite city in the world for two hours.
• On the other hand, my first attempt at getting coffee failed miserably when the table collapsed, spilling hot latte all over the floor and my jeans.
• On the other hand, there's plenty of latte in this big, bad city, so I got caffeinated just fine.

Aren't you glad I'm not an economist? What would Harry Truman say...

I'm now back at Heathrow for the second leg of my trip, going to a country I haven't seen in ten years. More later.