Events

Ezra Klein eviscerates the GOP: On Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan became the latest Republicans to call for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to step down because of the Affordable Care Act's troubled launch. "I do believe people should be held accountable," he said. Okay then. How about House Republicans who refused to appropriate the money the Department of Health and Human Services said it needed to properly implement Obamacare? The GOP's strategy hasn't just tried to win elections and repeal Obamacare....

WBEZ explains: The 22-minute film was a bid to show the benefits of living in cities, using Chicago as an example. There are shots of Chicago's early midcentury skyline, a parade down State Street (Streets and San's space-age float at the 5:53 mark is worthy of pausing and replaying) and good footage of old buildings being demolished. But the documentary's framers are also pushing for a more humane and inclusive city. "The promise of the city is not always fulfilled," narrator George Ralph intones....

Through the magic of Facebook I learned who created one of yesterday's WRHU spots: Jim Vazeos wrote and produced "Uh-Uh Contraceptives" and voiced the last third of it. Christin Goff voiced the bulk of it, including the "I said NO" at the end. He didn't confirm the date (1984), but that's consistent with other information he provided. Thanks for your input, Jim, and thanks to the other WRHU alumni who chimed in.

This is my 4,000th blog post. Of course, that's counting from the first braverman.org entry from May 1998, which disappeared entirely for ten years and predated the concept of a "blog" by an interval. The first Daily Parker post was on 8 November 2005. Which points out, the total doesn't include two non-public entries. The first public entry was 13 November 2005. So, really, this is only the 3,803rd Daily Parker posting—but only the 3,801st visible one. Yeah, this wasn't the highlight of your day...

Cranky Flier explains: Dallas is an increasingly large hub of business, and it sees no flights to Hong Kong today. It can also provide connections to a lot of places around the Midwest and South that don’t have single stop connections today. Look no further than joint venture-partner Qantas to see how that works. Qantas abandoned San Francisco and decided to run a flight to Dallas instead. It’s such a long flight that a stop in Brisbane is required on the westbound trip, but it’s apparently worth it....

I found another batch of tapes including a mix tape I made in the WRHU two-track studio in May 1990. Yes, two-track: we recorded two audio tracks onto 1/4-inch tape at 7.5 inches per second (or 15 ips if we needed to do some music editing). We then cut the tapes with razor blades and spliced them together with splicing tape. Eventually I graduated to the misnamed 4-track studio, which by then not only had a 4-track quarter inch deck but also a 1-inch, 16-track system that only the General Manager was...

I am agog at a bald impossibility in the New York Times' article today about the ACA exchange: According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size. There were three reporters in the byline, they have the entire Times infrastructure at their disposal, and still they have an unattributed "expert" opinion that the healthcare.gov codebase is 33 times larger than Linux. 500 MLOC? Why...

On Thursday afternoon, Amazon delivered a USB cassette player. Yesterday I dug out an aircheck—a recording made in the radio station's master control room of what actually went over the air—from my broadcast on WRHU-FM exactly 23 years earlier. Here is the 9pm newscast. Trippy. (And scarily similar to the newscast you might have heard last night.)

Nate Cohn draws the map of these 61 United States: What would happen if all of them succeeded? Each new state would get two senators and its share of electoral college votes. We ran the numbers and recalculated the 2012 presidential race. In this bizarro United States, the GOP would have a structural advantage in the expanded Senate, and Barack Obama would have had a tighter fight against Mitt Romney in the electoral college (which he won, in reality, 332–206). Of course, Cohn assumes that once the...

Northbrook, Ill., has always been a suburb. Until the end of the last century, no one had developed large hunks of the village, because two entities controlled several square kilometers of land around it. One entity, the U.S. Navy, operated an air station until 1994; the other, the Catholic Church, had a smallish farm, a convent, and a dairy barn well into the 1990s, and still owns Techny Towers, a religious retreat. A conversation with a friend this week turned to a discussion of the Whole Foods Market...