The Daily Parker

A weak La Niña has already started affecting the weather in the United States, as this week's cold snap demonstrates. Weak La Niña events typically cause cooler, wetter winters in Chicago. Last night's temperature got down to -12.8°C (9°F), just a few degrees above the coldest December 5th on record. Normal for today would be 4.3°C (39.8°F); this godawful cold is 5°C below the normal low for the coldest day of the year, January 24th.

Fortunately the forecast this weekend calls for more seasonable temperatures near freezing, but it'll come with some more snow. Joy.

As I haven't got a lot going on until Monday, I hope to make more progress on the replacement for BlogEngine.NET I've been working on for a while. Over the last week I got it to the point where it shows blog entries and imports them from this version. Next up: image uploading and resizing. Right now it shows images at full size no matter how wide your screen is. That's sub-optimal, especially on mobile devices.

I'm not ready to release the link for the work-in-progress yet. Let me get a few more features done first. Next week, Monday through Sunday, will include two full Messiah rehearsals and two performances, but after that I should have lots of time through the beginning of January to work on the new project.

Cassie and I have gotten a couple of decent walks today, with a very long walk planned for tomorrow, because this is on the menu for late tomorrow night:

The National Weather Service predicts a 70% chance of us getting 150 mm (6 in) of snow or more. Whee.

Cassie will enjoy it, though.

I'm a bit under the weather but still have to get to rehearsal tonight, so just briefly:

• Michael Tomasky observes that the general public have developed antibodies to the nonstop lies coming from the OAFPOTUS.
• Adam Kinzinger takes on the big piggy in the Oval Office as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) resignation late last week.
• Chris Dalla Riva explains how the US copyright system bears some of the responsibility for the enshitiffication of music and movies.
• Tim Wu thinks the federal judge who dismissed the government's antitrust case against Meta "did so in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, not to mention common sense."

Finally, Robert Wright asks, "is Marc Andreesen just flat-out dumb?" Quite possibly.

Lots of morning meetings, then stuff so far this afternoon, and now...a quick breath. Of course, given that it's still 2025, I'm not exactly breathing sweet summer air:

• The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked the (obviously unlawful) Texas redistricting effort, using logic that would very likely bolster the way California passed theirs.
• Paul Krugman muses that the billions the cryptocurrency industry spent to "buy a president" may not be the winning investment they thought, perhaps because they got high on their own supply. "I don’t know how this ends, but all of a sudden a rapid implosion looks possible," he warns.
• Michelin has not explained why Alinea, Chicago's first 3-star restaurant, lost its third star.
• Baby Boomers piled up $85 trillion in assets while changing policies to make it difficult or impossible for their Millennial and Gen X children to follow them, writes Shannon Najmabadi and Frederica Cocco for the Post.

Finally, Wicker Park's Smoke Daddy, one of my favorite rib joints, will close January 4th after 31 years on Division Street. I admit, I haven't been there since March 2023, but that has more to do with my cholesterol than with my feelings about the place. The restaurant's Wrigleyville location will keep going, and the owners say they'll open something else in that spot sometime in 2026. There are only a few days between now and its closing that I'm able to get there, but I will. Oh yes. I will.

I've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later:

• What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa?
• After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year.
• The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson's tax plan for the second year in a row, principally over his plan to tax every employer in the city with more than 200 100 workers $21 $18 a month per employee.
• Weakness in downtown the real estate market has pushed up property taxes all over the city, on average by 17%. My tax bill came Saturday and had a 12% increase, so I guess I got off lucky?

Finally McSweeney's wonders what it's like to work for an evil company and still consider yourself a good person.

We get pretty sunsets this time of year:

Between meetings and getting into the zone while fixing a bug, I worked straight through lunch and only got Cassie out around 4. So before my next meeting at 8pm, I've got a few minutes to catch up on all...this:

• Josh Marshall reflects on the 8 Democratic Senators (including one of mine, who is also the minority whip) making a deal with the Republicans, and says the next Congress must eliminate the paper filibuster and reform the Supreme Court.
• David Graham takes a more nuanced view. Krugman wants Democrats to hammer the Republicans on their unnecessary cruelty to Americans in need. Rubin says the word "moderate" lets people weasel out of being a "fighter" or a "defeatist."
• Adam Kinzinger is outraged that the OAFPOTUS has openly sold pardons, in contravention of literally everything the founders (and everyone since) stood for.
• Dan Williams lays out a strategy for confronting "highbrow misinformation."
• Calculated Risk, the blog that predicted the 2008 financial meltdown three years ahead of time, is starting to warn about the next financial meltdown from the inevitable cryptocurrency collapse.
• Matt Yglesias takes a break from the news to speculate about what would have happened had Italy joined the Central Powers in 1914.

And yesterday, as most people know, was the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in Lake Superior.

My old Surface decided it didn't trust its own drive this morning when I booted up in my downtown office. Instead of getting a new laptop, I had stumped for the $30 fee to buy another year of security patches for Windows 10. Well, the latest one changed the Bitlocker settings, requiring me to enter the recovery key...which I couldn't get to from my downtown office.

Fortunately I had the key at home and entered it manually without a problem, so the Surface has sprung back to life. I will have to replace it soon, too, if for no other reason than I was worried for most of the day that it was bricked.

It also means I just had to declare bankruptcy on most of my news emails when I finally got home. But that's probably better for my mental health anyway.

Also, final note: the next version of The Daily Parker is up and running in its dev/test environment. We're still weeks away from me publicizing the URL, but I am pretty stoked that it has a functioning UI with some actual blogging features.

I'm a little delayed getting today's Morning Butters Report out for a couple of reasons. First, Butters and Cassie tag-teamed me starting just before 6:30 am. First Cassie poked me, then Butters poked me when Cassie kicked her off the dog bed in my room. Then Cassie came back when Butters used her engineering skills to ensure Cassie couldn't pull that crap again:

Last night, though, Butters showed me how much she cares about me—or how much she wanted another Greenie, it's unclear:

Meanwhile, all the major cloud providers are suffering a massive DNS outage right now, which fortunately hasn't spread to Inner Drive Technology. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and tons of other services have gone down. Updates as conditions warrant.

Even though I have a cute beagle hanging around my office this week, and even though I've had a lot to do at work (including a very exciting deployment today), the world keeps turning:

• The OAFPOTUS pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao for the crime of running a massive money-laundering website, because of course Zhao bribed him.
• Brian Beutler thinks the OAFPOTUS's corruption has gotten too obvious for even his supporters to ignore, leading to "the things Democrats like to talk about and the things I wish they’d talked about [beginning] to converge."
• Speaking of corruption, not to mention things that are so prima facie bad that it takes a special kind of felon to even suggest it, privately funding the US military is an obviously illegal and demonstrably dangerous idea. Just ask the Roman Senate.
• Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to reconvene the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate refuse to waive the filibuster on funding SNAP, which are the two biggest things the Republican majority has chosen to do instead of making sure 40 million Americans don't go hungry next week.
• Michael Tomasky makes a point that I've made to one of my Republican trolls acquaintances: it really doesn't matter to the national Democratic Party if Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday: It's NYC, not Maine.

Finally, if you're looking to pick up a little lakeside real estate, this house in Kenilworth, Ill., is on the market for the first time ever. It's a steal at $7 million.