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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.)

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather. In other news: Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt...

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

Welcome to stop #136 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Polyanna Brewing, 245 E. Main St., RoselleTrain line: Milwaukee District West, Roselle (Zone 4) Time from Chicago: 49 minutesDistance from station: 800 m She may not look like much, kid, but she's got it where it counts. After 135 Brews & Choos stops in the Chicago area and another 13 in the rest of the world, I finally missed a train. The Milwaukee District West line runs hourly on weekdays. I planned to stay only half an hour at Polyanna...

Welcome to stop #134 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Suncatcher Brewing, 2849 W. Chicago Ave., ChicgaoTrain line: Milwaukee District West, Milwaukee District North, and North Central Service; Western Ave (Zone 1) Time from Chicago: 9 minutesDistance from station: 1.2 km Suncatcher opened just 13 months ago on land and in an unused supply shed rented from a garden supply store. This means they have an amazing outdoor space that I will take Cassie to visit at some point when the sun is out and...

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...

While waiting for Visual Studio to update (it was too early to go to lunch when I started this post), I'm reading these: Someone handed the OAFPOTUS a new crayon, which he used to scrawl his name on a new class of battleship the US Navy wants to build. (Since the Navy won't even lay down the keel of the first ship in the new BBG class until the mid-2030s at the earliest, long after this elderly toddler has shuffled off his office and likely also this mortal coil, there is no actual possibility of any...

My morning commute today had mild temperatures, clear skies, and a nearly-empty platform: My office is nearly empty, too. And I'm leaving early-ish, though my laptop will stay here until Monday. And I have no meetings, so I can fix a lingering bug without anyone interrupting me. So far, today doesn't suck. I shall endeavor to enjoy it.

The Brews & Choos Project will celebrate its 6th anniversary on February 7th. When I started in 2020, I thought I would get most of it done that year. I managed to visit 25 breweries by March 7th (Lunar Brewing in Villa Park was 25th), before pausing in the pandemic panic until breweries with outdoor seating opened up again. It turns out, I only have 9 places to visit within the Chicago city limits, and another 13 in the Metra zone outside Chicago. Short of another pandemic or massive economic...

Well, some of it is interesting, anyway: Adam Kinzinger uses the Great Drone Panic of 2024 to remind us how right-wing media spin people up over nothing. O'Hare may reclaim its title as the World's Busiest Airport if the Federal Aviation Administration confirms flight-tracking company AirNav Radar's statistics next month. Sam Kahn explains "how the New Yorker became irrelevant." Duke evolutionary anthropology PhD student Hannah Salomons conducted a study of how puppies learn that has recently been...

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...

The temperature tried and tried but couldn't get above -6.1°C over here. It should keep going up slowly for the next day. And we might even see the sun tomorrow. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, has been arrested following the stabbing death of his parents. In response to the Reiners' deaths, the OAFPOTUS posted some truly deranged crap on social media, further demonstrating how he's completely lost it. Brian...

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...

"Enjoy:" Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does. In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims. Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of...

A coronal mass ejection late last week caused Kp7-level aurorae last night that people could see as far south as Alabama. Unfortunately, I missed them, though some of my friends did not. Fortunately, NOAA predicts that another mass of charged particles will hit around 6pm tonight, causing even more pronounced aurorae for most of the night. This time, I plan to get to a dark corner of the suburbs to look for them. Meanwhile: ProPublica has an extended report about how the OAFPOTUS uses pardons and...

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...

With the unusually late colors we have this autumn against the much earlier sunsets that started yesterday (before 4:30 pm from November 15th to December 31st, ugh!), things have remained tolerable. It will snow eventually; we'll have a freeze eventually; but for now, I'll just enjoy it. I didn't enjoy these things, though: Humans formed governments in the first place to feed people; the OAFPOTUS and his village of idiots have failed at that basic task. Architects who have looked at the paltry plans and...

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...

I took the dramatic beagle and Cassie to Spiteful* yesterday afternoon. Butters got more pats than Cassie did. Perhaps it's this face? This afternoon we took a half-hour walk through the local park because the weather is absolutely perfect. Whenever I stopped to try to photograph the two dogs, they immediately went in separate directions, so this is the best I could do: The girls are now sunning themselves on my front porch, I'm up in my office coding away, and I've got chicken soup going in the slow...

The OAFPOTUS today destroyed the East Wing of the White House, which he does not own. This reminded long-time observers of the time in 1980 when he destroyed historic frescoes that he promised not to destroy with the grace and maturity of a toddler. He has changed quite a bit since then, but unfortunately only through age-related dementia and probably myriad other cognitive problems we'll find out about 20 years from now. The constant firehose of awful things coming from him and his droogs also now...

Naturally, the press had a lot to say about the largest protest in my lifetime (I was born after the Earth Day 1970 demonstration): As many as 250,000 people turned out for the downtown Chicago event, which included a procession that carried a 23-meter replica of the US Constitution, and resulted in zero arrests or reports of violence. (The video of the procession leaving Grant Park is epic.) David Graham of The Atlantic explains why the protests got under the OAFPOTUS's skin: "Trump’s movement depends...

But today? 10/10 would recommend! Ah, ha ha. Ha. Everything else today has a proportion of funny to not-funny that we should work on a bit more: The administration served up two full helpings of corruption today: indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James as payback for prosecuting the OAFPOTUS, and finalizing a $20 billion gift to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's friends under the guise of propping up the Argentine Peso. US District Judge April Perry (NDIL) has blocked the National Guard from...

So many things passed through my inbox in the last day and a half: The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that an assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was observed over the weekend discussing plans over Signal with an aide to Reichsminister Stephen Miller to send the 82nd Airborne to Portland. Paul Krugman breaks from his usual economics beat to lambast the OAFPOTUS and his Reichskabinett der Nationalen Rettung for the horrifying ICE raid* on a Chicago apartment building last week: "What do we learn...

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.

Tomorrow is, quite unexpectedly, October. Though the official temperature at O'Hare has not hit 32°C since August 16th, our weather has remained stubbornly summer-like. The 16-day forecast suggests the weather will continue as far as the model can predict, and may see 32°C as early as this weekend. That will make my Friday plans a bit more challenging as my Brews & Choos buddy has gotten over Covid and we're all set to walk to Lake Bluff then. For my part, I am experiencing a very rare side effect of...

The stupidest person ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk has made most of the world feel sad for us. Let's check on why: Matthew Yglesias digs into the abject idiocy of the OAFPOTUS's war on Tylenol. Jeff Maurer puts on his OAFPOTUS mask and declaims "Tylenol is why I'm like this." And yet, both Jennifer Rubin and Josh Marshall see the tide turning hard against the administration, though George Packer thinks we now live in an authoritarian state. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called an...

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...

Welcome to stop #132 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Guinness Open Gate Brewery, 901 W Kinzie, ChicagoTrain line: CTA Green Line, Morgan Time from Chicago: 6 minutesDistance from station: 300 m Somehow, I pictured the second US-based Guinness experimental brewery differently, having seen their original brewery in Dublin, Ireland. The building Guinness renovated just north of the Fulton Market District has existed for a century or more, though from as far back as I can remember until last year...

The forecast today looks perfect: 21°C under sunny skies. Perfect for a Brews and Choos trip! And while one of the stops will be to a brewery that could under no circumstances be called "craft," the other stop will take us to a brewery incubator suspiciously close to Wrigley Field. Fitting, then, that Crain's reports today about how craft breweries have had to evolve to stay in business: After a decade of unbridled growth, the industry hit a rough patch in the years following the pandemic. Ten percent...

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...

The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage. Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:" The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end...

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...

Dayrestan, Iran, sits on an island just inside the Strait of Hormuz directly across the Persian Gulf from the UAE. At 9:30 am local time Thursday, the airport weather station reported a temperature of 40°C with a dewpoint of 36°C, which makes a heat index of 83.2°C (181.8°F). AccuWeather says it was likely an instrument error, though the next station over, in Bandar Abbass, reported a temperature of 39°C with a 27°C dewpoint for a heat index of 52.3°C (126.1°F) at the same time—hardly an improvement....

With my PTO cap continuing to force me into Friday afternoons off this summer (the horror!), and the sunny but (smoky 23°C) weather, Cassie and I will head to the Horner Park DFA just as soon as I release a new version of Weather Now in just a few minutes. When Cassie and I come back, I'll spend some time reading all these nuggets of existential dread: The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last 3 months of US jobs data down to basically nil (which Krugman blames on tariffs), prompting the OAFPOTUS to...

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...

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years. In other news: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs. Tom Nichols points out that the...

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've gotten some progress on the feature update, and the build pipeline is running now, so I will take a moment to read all of these things: Radley Balko looks at the creation of what looks a lot like the OAFPOTUS's Waffen-Shutzstaffel and says we've lost the debate on police militarization: "In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it." Linda Greenhouse condemns the...

Starting today's link round-up is a report that Deerfield, Ill.—based Walgreens Boots (the pharmacists/chemists, not footwear) shareholders have voted to sell out to a private-equity firm, which no doubt will destroy the company to extract every morsel of short-term value from it. Oh, well, the local CVS is closer than the local Walgreens. In other fun news: Josh Barro hypothesizes that Democrats will actually have trouble running on the recently-passed Republican tax bill because of the timing and...

Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year. Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security...

I'll get to the ABBA—sorry, OBBBA—reactions after lunch. Right now, with apologies, here is a boring link dump: The Clown Prince of X is in the "finding out" phase, learning what happens to oligarchs who cross autocrats. Adam Kinzinger calls out the bribe that Shari Redstone's Paramount/CBS agreed to pay the OAFPOTUS to settle a bogus libel lawsuit stemming from a 2020 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. After the US and Israeli attacks on Iran temporarily shut down Internet...

Welcome to stop #131 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: GoodTimes Brewery, 3827 N Broadway, ChicagoTrain line: CTA Red Line, Sheridan Time from Chicago: 20 minutesDistance from station: 500 m Metropolitan Brewing closed in November 2023, just a few months after brewmaster Raybird Gonzalez decided to found his own brewery. The Smylie Brothers flame-out freed up a turnkey brewing facility right at the north end of Boystown, which he grabbed. The new owners didn't change the interior dramatically...

Welcome to stop #130 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Goose Island Beer Co. at the Salt Shed, 1221 W. Blackhawk St., ChicagoTrain line: Union Pacific North and Northwest, Clybourn (Zone 1) Time from Chicago: 9 minutesDistance from station: 1.5 km The Salt Shed is a new entertainment complex built inside the former Morton Salt storage facility in the Clybourn Corridor industrial area of Chicago. Goose Island Beer Co. moved there in 2024 after closing its original brewing facility 800 meters...

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...

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...

New York City adopted Ranked-Choice Voting before the 2019 Democratic mayoral primary, and they got Eric Adams—their least-popular mayor in decades—out of it. Since ranked-choice voting was supposed to reduce the likelihood of electing an extremist, this was a surprising result. Fortunately New Yorkers have had a few years to get the hang of ranked-choice, so in this year's Democratic primary, they won't make that mistake again, right? Oh, bother. The extreme leftist won. With incumbent Eric Adams...

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...

I'm flying tomorrow and Sunday, giving me a few uninterrupted hours to read between now and Monday. So I'm just queuing some of these things up: The US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits certain medical interventions for minors who want to transition genders. As the opinion came from Justice Samuel Alito (R) and the dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor (I), I have a feeling both it and the dissent will satisfy no one. The Times characterizes the decision as setting back "the movement" a...

What a weekend. I mean, for the world; for me, yesterday included vacuuming the house and my car, and taking Cassie on 2½ hours of walks plus sitting outside at Begyle to get pats from random strangers. (To be clear, Cassie got random pats; I did not.) We started at Horner Park: And stopped briefly at Burning Bush, where Cassie was under the table even before I got my beer: I had some stuff about the political events over the weekend, but I'll put that off until later.

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest: I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week." Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him. Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about." Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help...

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it. Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist: Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of...

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.

A smattering of stories this morning show how modern life is both better and worse than in the past: A criminologist at Cambridge has spent 15 years working on "murder maps" of London, Oxford, and York, showing just how awful it was to live in the 14th Century: "The deadliest of the cities was Oxford, which he estimated to have a homicide rate of about 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, while London and York hovered at 20 to 25 per 100,000. (In 2023, the most recent year for which data is...

Really, this post is just a list of links, but I'm going to start with Dan Rather's latest Stack: US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) started her 2026 re-election campaign last week by telling constituents not to worry about the proposed $880 billion cuts to Medicaid because "we are all going to die." Writer Andy Craig takes a look at the destruction the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have caused, and tries to find a path back to a constitutional republic. "Whatever eventually replaces this crisis-ridden government...

Welcome to stop #129 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: McHenry Brewing, 3425 Pearl St., McHenryTrain line: Union Pacific Northwest, McHenry (Zone 4) Time from Chicago: 88 minutesDistance from station: 1.3 km It finally happened: I cheated. I couldn't figure any reasonable way to visit McHenry Brewing without taking an expensive and rare Lyft part of the way home, because the UP-NW line only has three daily trains to McHenry in the afternoon with three return trains in the morning. So, not wanting...

I have had no more than 15 consecutive minutes free at any point today. The rest of the week I have 3½-hour blocks on my calendar, but all the other meetings had to go somewhere, so they went to Monday. So just jotting down stories that caught my eye: Ukraine's masterful and crippling strike against the Russian Air Force over the weekend has changed warfare forever, writes Max Boot. Jen Rubin wants to end the creeping normalization of the OAFPOTUS and his droogs because, as she says, they're all nuts....

Welcome to stop #128 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Black Lung Brewing, 115 Nippersink Rd., Fox LakeTrain line: Milwaukee District North, Fox Lake (Zone 4) Time from Chicago: 105 minutesDistance from station: 750 m Fox Lake isn't the farthest station from downtown Chicago on the Metra system. At 110 km, that honor goes to Harvard; Fox Lake is only 80 km out. And yet, as I discovered yesterday, it can take almost 3 hours to get back to Union Station if the aging-but-repainted SD70MACH...

Because I'm about to hit my PTO cap at work, I'm taking the next few Friday afternoons off. Today I've planned a Brews & Choos trip out to the wilds of Lake County. Check back tomorrow for the result! Meanwhile, I have more meetings...

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...

On some days, I have more meetings than others. Today was a more extreme example, with meetings for 6 of the 8½ hours I put in. Somehow I also managed to read some documentation and get some other things accomplished. I also can't say that any of the meetings was a waste of time, either. Welcome back to management. Unfortunately, that meant I could only put these stories in a queue so I can read them now: William Finnegan wonders if he or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi "Dead Puppies" Noem is...

Like yesterday, today I took Cassie somewhere she'd never been before, giving her an amazing array of new smells and rodents to chase. We went up to the Green Bay Trail in Winnetka, covering just under 5 km, and passing a somewhat-recognizable house along the way: We'll spend more time outside today, though it really hasn't warmed up yet (current temperature: 15°C). She doesn't mind.

First, there is no update on Cassie. She had a quick consult today, but they didn't schedule the actual diagnostics that she needs, so we'll go back first thing Tuesday. She does have a small mast cell tumor on her head, but the location makes her oncologist optimistic for treatment. I'll post again next week after the results come back from her spleen and lymph node aspirations. Meanwhile, in the real world, things lurch forward and backward as the OAFPOTUS's political trajectory slides by millimeters...

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...

We've had a run of dreary, unseasonably cold weather that more closely resembles the end of March than the middle of May. I've been looking at this gloom all day: We may have some sun tomorrow afternoon through the weekend, but the forecast calls for continuous north winds and highs around 16°C—the normal high for April 23rd, not May 23rd. Summer officially starts in 10 days. It sure doesn't feel like it. Speaking of the gloomy and the retrograde: Former US judge and George HW Bush appointee J. Michael...

Sunday's Sun-Times included an insert of recommended summer activities that may not have gone through the normal editorial process: The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist. Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading...

I spent a lot of time outside over the weekend until the temperature started to slide into the single digits (Celsius) last night, so I put off reading online stories in favor of reading real books. I also failed to mention that we had an honest-to-goodness haboob in Northern Illinois on Friday, the first significant one since 1934. Because hey, let's bring back the 1930s in all their glory! Adam Kinzinger rolls his eyes at the world's oldest toddler: the OAFPOTUS himself, the biggest champion of the...

Sure, Brian De Palma had a great insight into what he called "the Chicago way," but not being from Chicago, he didn't grasp our true city motto: "Where's Mine?" The owners of 212 E. 141st Place in Dalton, a small house less than 2 kilometers from the Chicago city limits, are living up to the Chicago ideal. It turns out, the house just happens to be where Robert Prevost grew up. Prevost, who recently took the name Episcopus Romanus, Vicarius Iesu Christi, Successor principis apostolorum, Summus Pontifex...

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...

Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval (I) will face Republican Cory Bowman in the November election after the two won 83% and 13%, respectively, of yesterday's primary vote. Bowman is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance, whose endorsement of Bowman appears to have led to Pureval's enormous vote total. When you're the least-popular vice president in history, no one wants your endorsement, dude. Also, today is the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender to the Allies in Reims, France. What that has...

Happy May Day! In both the calendar and crashing-airplane senses! We start with two reports about how the Clown Prince of X has taken control over so much government data that the concepts of "privacy" and "compartmentalization" seem quaint. First, from the Times: Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of...

Well, mixed, really. It turns out Cassie isn't entirely healthy, though at the moment she's fine and will remain so for a few years at least without intervention. (I'll get that sorted in a couple of weeks and explain more about it this weekend.) Also, there's all this crap: David Brooks argues that the OAFPOTUS's single strength—his audacity—can be turned into a weakness: "Lacking any sense of prudence, he does not understand the difference between a risk and a gamble. He does daring and incredibly...

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...

The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health...

Before I go through the stories from the last day about how we live in the stupidest timeline, here's a photo of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station I snapped heading to my return train on Friday: Elsewhere in the stupidest timeline, where maximizing corruption is the defining goal of the Republican Party: James Fallows takes us through Harvard's big "fuck you" to the OAFPOTUS's demands that the university install minders in its HR and academic departments, as does Josh Marshall. Jennifer Rubin reminds...

I'm absolutely bushed, so no Brews & Choos reviews from Milwaukee yet. If I get enough sleep tonight, and if I'm supremely effective in the morning, I'll start posting them tomorrow. There are four, after all, and only one of them is "eh."

With the bare minimum of planning and no time between all my meetings and the train leaving, I am happy to report that my Brews Buddy and I are on the Borealis heading north. For more on our destination, I recommend this lecture from Prof Cooper. Tomorrow I have an all-day Euchre tournament, so reviews from Milwaukee will start Sunday.

We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday. Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while: US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) spent the night haranguing the OAFPOTUS from the Senate floor. Jennifer Rubin is not tired of winning against the OAFPOTUS, who has lost every...

I completed two surveys related to my work conference this week. The first one included the question, "To confirm that you are still reading this, please select 'Disagree.'" The second one assigned point values to the multiple-choice questions, so that the three items I answered "Somewhat OK" instead of "Excellent" brought my grade down to a B-minus. These are the kinds of things that make one wonder how valuable the survey data really is. Meanwhile, I've got a ton of things to do today, including...

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...

Stuff to read: Forgetting (or just plain ignorant) that we have a Coast Guard better suited to the task of guarding our coasts, the OAFPOTUS has ordered the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely to the Texas-Mexico border. The OAFPOTUS and the Clown Prince of X, apparently not seeing the connection between weather forecasters and weather forecasts, have illegally fired 10% of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration staff just as a violent tornado outbreak killed 40 people in the Midwest and...

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...

After our gorgeous weather Sunday and Monday, yesterday's cool-down disappointed me a bit. But we have clear-ish skies and lots of sun, which apparently will persist until Friday night. I'm also pleased to report that we will probably have a good view of tomorrow night's eclipse, which should be spectacular. I'll even plan to get up at 1:30 to see totality. Elsewhere in the world, the OAFPOTUS continues to explore the outer limits of stupidity (or is it frontotemporal dementia?): No one has any idea...

Welcome to stop #123 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Duneyrr Fermenta, 2237 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago 3 (of 5) stars Train line: CTA Green Line, Cermak-McCormick Place Time from Chicago: 10 minutesDistance from station: 600 m After five hours, four kilometers of walking, three pints of beer, two Lyfts, and an invitation to my Brews & Choos buddy's husband to meet us three blocks from his office, we made it to Duneyrr Fermenta in Chicago's historic Motor Row. If only we hadn't had a mound of...

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ just hit 17.5°C, which it hasn't hit since 5:54pm on November 5th. That's almost 125 days, quite a while to go without wearing a jacket outside. Unfortunately, spring weather isn't the only thing in the news today: Philip Bump asks, how low can the OAFPOTUS's approval rating actually go? Paul Krugman decries our current "government by QAnon." Radley Balko lays out three things Democrats can do right now. Ezra Klein uses the example of California's high-speed...

Welcome to stop #121 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Marz Community Brewing, 3630 S. Iron St., Chicago 4 (of 5) stars Train line: CTA Orange Line, Ashland Time from Chicago: 11 minutesDistance from station: 1.7 km Continuing Friday's epic Brews & Choos adventure, my buddy and I decided to Lyft the 2.7 kilometers from Alulu, because (a) McKinley Park and the Lower West Side on either side of the Sanitary and Ship Canal aren't very pretty, and (b) it hadn't completely stopped raining. Even though...

Welcome to stop #120 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Alulu Brewery & Pub, 2011 S. Laflin St., Chicago 4 (of 5) starsTrain line: CTA Pink Line, 18th St Time from Chicago: 16 minutesDistance from station: 500 m I visited Alulu once before, during the pandemic winter four years ago, and sat outside in a heated yurt. I didn't think reviewing the place under those conditions would be fair. It took until last Friday to get back there, despite the gross weather, as part of a Southwest Side tour that...

Welcome to stop #119 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Monochrome Brewing, 2101 S. Carpenter St., Chicago 4 (of 5) stars Train line: CTA Orange Line, Halsted Time from Chicago: 10 minutesDistance from station: 900 m I'm sorry I never got to Lo Rez Brewing, which closed just a year ago. But I am glad my Brews & Choos buddy and I got to the space yesterday. Despite its industrial-belt location in the Lower West Side a long walk from the Pilsen Historic District, it felt comfortable and inviting...

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery. Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my...

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS: Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will...

The Weather Now gazetteer import has gotten to the Ps (Pakistan) with 11,445,567 places imported and 10,890,186 indexed. (The indexer runs every three hours.) I'll have a bunch of statistics about the database when the import finishes, probably later tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest. I'm especially pleased with the import software I wrote, and with Azure Cosmos DB. They're churning through batches of about 30 files at a time and importing places at around 10,000 per minute. Meanwhile, in the...

Time got away from me this afternoon. I might read all this tomorrow morning: Nicholas Kristof says the Musk/OAFPOTUS administration prostrating to Russia will make the world more dangerous. So does Alex Shepard. Jennifer Rubin says that the Musk/OAFPOTUS administration will break the government, and therefore own it. Anne Applebaum decries Vice President JD Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced his retirement, now that he got...

The US meeting with Russia and not Ukraine to discuss the fate of Ukraine seems unmistakably similar to the Molotov-Ribbentrop discussions in August 1939 that divvied up Poland between the Nazis and Stalin's Russia. The meeting in Riyadh between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seems more focused on a colonial-style mineral extraction concession for the US than on Ukrainian sovereignty. This comes just days after Vice President JD Vance channeled UK Prime...

Winter ends two weeks from tomorrow, but climate science and meteorology can only study nature, not command it. That explains why, despite ample sunshine, the temperature at IDTWHQ has stayed around -7°C since it leveled out this morning, and promises to shed another 8-10 degrees tonight. Then we're in for a few blasts of cold interspersed with warm days and some snow here and there for about a week before it consistently warms up. Elsewhere in the cold, cold world: The Senate confirmed the unqualified...

I'm just noting a few things and moving on with my day: Pilot Project Brewing has announced plans for a second brewery/taproom in Wrigleyville, just 500 meters from the Addison Red Line station. Google Maps turned 20 four days ago, and The Guardian has a history of how it began. Microsoft will be retiring the (11-year-old) database APIs that this build of The Daily Parker uses, so watch this space for news about a brand new Daily Parker experience this fall! I'm planning to wrap up a new release of...

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement: The UK Home Office has demanded that Apple create a back door into its cloud storage system to allow the UK government to snoop on everyone's content worldwide, which, if I correctly understand Apple's ADP architecture, is technically impossible. ProPublica has compiled a list of the people Elon Musk has enlisted to capture the government of the United States. Paul Krugman calls Musk's efforts an...

Topping the link round-up this afternoon, my go-to brewery Spiteful fears for its business if it has to pay a 25% tariff on imported aluminum cans. If the OAFPOTUS drives Spiteful out of business for no fucking reason I will be quite put out. In other news: Timothy Noah reads Jean Piaget to learn more about the OAFPOTUS's "infantile incapacity to grasp the mechanics of cause and effect," suggesting that his reasoning is more transductive, like a 3-year old's ("taking a nap causes the afternoon" ~=~ "DEI...

First: the good. My friend Kat Kruse has a new book of her short stories coming out. She let me read a couple of them, and I couldn't wait to pre-order the entire collection. I should get it on February 17th. Still on the good things—or at least the things that don't seem so bad, considering: The Guardian has a reflection on Seoul removing the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in 2005 to expose the historic stream that the highway previously covered. Margaret Renkl praises the coyotes that live with us in our...

It got a lot warmer in Chicago today: That's the normal high for February 25th, one month from now. O'Hare got up to 5°C, the normal high for March 1st. We also have 62 km/h wind gusts, so it really does feel a lot like the beginning of spring. We're supposed to get up to 7°C on Monday (March 10th), which is practically tropical for this time of year. We'll take it!

Just four, plus a bonus: Paul Krugman explains to Columbia Journalism Review why he left the New York Times, and that the OAFPOTUS "wants you to die." David Brooks predicts "how [the OAFPOTUS] will fail." Four little shits were charged with shooting a coyote with a bow and then stomping it to death on the South Side of Chicago. Finally, in a column from just before the world ended, author Adam-Troy Castro explains, "Why do liberals think all Trump supporters are stupid?": The serious answer: Here’s what...

So much to read...tomorrow morning, when I wake up: Fallows and the Post have solid takes on President Biden's farewell address. Kim Lane Scheppelle shakes her head at how authoritarians use playground taunts keep their opponents off balance. John Scalzi does not expect much from the incoming administration. The Daily Overview has an amazing post today on the Los Angeles fires, and other fires in the recent past. Arwa Mahdawi calls out United HealthCare for going "villain mode." Heather Souvaine Horn...

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile: James Fallows remembers his old boss Jimmy Carter, and puts his presidency in perspective for the younger generations. Paul Krugman reminds the Republican Party that California contributes more to the country's GDP than any other state, so maybe cut the crap threatening to withhold disaster relief? ProPublica goes "inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private...

We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday. Elsewhere: Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th. George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of...

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd. It helps that we've had nothing but sun today....

In case you weren't frustrated enough: Paul Krugman outlines all the ways Republicans are trying to enrich themselves at your expense by privatizing everything. Jeff Atwood worries that we may lose sight of the American Dream. Author Paul Theroux warns that expatriation has its own set of challenges. Charles Marohn believes that flooding the market with cheap homes in every neighborhood can end homelessness and reduce housing costs for everyone else. And finally, a new report says that Chicago has the...

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.

I had planned to go to Milwaukee for a quick day trip yesterday to further the Brews & Choos Project. Two friends were going to meet me at the Public Market, then go to two breweries and a distillery in the five hours between trains. Alas, after everyone had boarded the 1:05 Hiawatha, Amtrak got all of us off the train and cancelled it because of—no kidding—a flat wheel. We could have gone on the (now-overcrowded) 3:05, but we just decided to forget it and meet one of the friends up in Highwood. So I'll...

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development has proposed changing the zoning rules along a stretch of Broadway between Montrose and Devon to increase its density while simultaneously reducing its car-oriented ugliness: The move could jumpstart housing construction, support local businesses and create a streamlined and consistent process for development in a part of town that has seen increased developer attention, city officials have said. A driving factor in the rezoning is the CTA’s Red Line...

We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too: The German government collapsed today after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag. People think the OAFPOTUS transition team are doing a great job for the simple reason that most people don't follow this kind of thing. Josh Marshall points out that it...

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....

Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context: Elsewhere, Josh Marshall implores people, one more time, stop giving the OAFPOTUS head space when he says dumb shit. Fareed Zakaria marvels at how weak Russia has become. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) continues the long tradition of high-ego, low-skill politicians completely failing at their...

My, we've had a busy day: President Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 Federal inmates in the largest single-day clemency in American history. Two of them stole millions in massive frauds against Illinois citizens. Josh Marshall doesn't see much clemency. Charles Sykes worries that neither major US political party has a clue how to fix our education systems (plural). Legalized sports betting has shifted billions from small punters to large corporations, which is why it was illegal for so long....

Two stories I mentioned previously have updates today: After a Federal judge in Oregon and a state judge in Washington rejected the Albertsons-Kroger merger, Albertsons has filed suit against Kroger for breach of contract in the failed deal. A Federal bankruptcy judge in Houston has rejected the Onion's acquisition of Infowars in the estate dissolution of Alex Jones, citing a lack of transparency in the process. As long as I've got five minutes before my next meeting, I also want to spike these two for...

Grocery giant Kroger has long drooled over acquiring Albertsons, for the simple reason that competition drives prices towards equilibrium and away from rent-seeking. When Kroger published the list of (Albertsons-owned) Jewel-Osco and (Kroger-owned) Mariano's stores that would remain open in Chicago, magically most of the Mariano's stores didn't make the cut—including the big one just 400 meters from my house. Today, US District Court Judge Adrienne Nelson (I-OR) blocked the merger, probably killing it...

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...

I was just there this past weekend, and I really think they could have mentioned something: Ravinia Brewing Company — now Steep Ravine Brewing Company — will host a farewell party Dec. 14 at its Logan Square taproom, 2601 W. Diversey Ave., though it will still use the space to brew beer, according to a press release. Steep Ravine Brewing Company will retain the brewery’s signature “Tree Guy” mascot and award-winning beer portfolio, the company said in the release. The Logan Square taproom closing party...

The temperature in my neighborhood fell below freezing around 4am and kept dropping, bottoming out just a few minutes ago at -1.7°C, the coldest it's been since March 18th. So despite valiantly holding onto their leaves later in the year than I can remember, the gingko and maple trees around my house finally surrendered to the inevitable: All those leaves fell in the last couple of hours. In fact I tried to get a photo of them just pouring off the tree, but that's hard to capture in a still photo....

Welcome to stop #117 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Pilot Project Brewing, 2140 N Milwaukee Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, California Time from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 500 m Pilot Project has an unusual business model. They partner with fledgling breweries, work with them on their beer recipes and styles, help them with marketing and distribution, then gently fling them from the nest once they're established and can fly on their own. And they're pretty good at it....

My Brews & Choos buddy and I trudged 15 kilometers yesterday to visit two previously-unreviewed breweries and two old favorites. Correction: I visited two old favorites and two new ones, she visited one old favorite and three she hadn't visited before. My Garmin device doesn't have a resume-later feature, but hers does, so she captured the entire route (in miles): We had bog-normal November weather for Chicago: cloudy and 5°C. We also had a slice of Jimmy's Pizza and a modest amount of good beer....

The weather doesn't seem that great for a planned 15-kilometer walk through Logan Square and Avondale to visit a couple of stragglers on the Brews & Choos Project. We've got 4°C under a low overcast, but only light winds and no precipitation forecast until Monday night. My Brews & Choos buddy drew up a route starting from the east end of the 606 Trail and winding up (possibly) at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. Also, I've joined BlueSky, because it's like Xitter without the xit. The Times explains how you, too, can...

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...

This morning, Winnemac Park, Chicago: I'm still getting through everything I ignored for the past three days. Stay tuned for a couple of Brews & Choos reviews from San Francisco, and on Tuesday, some thoughts on the election.

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...

Revolution Brewpub, which opened its Logan Square brewpub in 2010 and featured in the (really bad) film Drinking Buddies, announced it will close on December 14th: Almost 15 years ago, we threw open the doors of our Milwaukee Avenue brewpub and launched Revolution Brewing to the world. The brewpub is where the first Revolution beers were served and where we first brewed beers like Anti-Hero IPA which would change the shape of craft beer in Chicagoland. Today that chapter of our story starts to wind down...

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...

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...

"It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on his not understanding it."—Upton Sinclair. We lead our news roundup today with the biggest Chicago transit story of the year, with the major players acting just as Sinclair would predict: Chicago's three transit-agency chiefs don't see their complete lack of coordination on top of impressive administrative bloat as any reason to consolidate into one metropolitan agency. (So why doesn't Chicago have a Clipper Card yet, then?)...

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...

It took me a little bit this morning to get back into things, but once I figured out what my notes meant I managed to finish two whole features today. And I still had time to check these out: Marine biologists think they've figured out why octopus punch fish in the face. Amtrak will start Chicago to Miami service on November 10th, in part to reduce congestion on the Northeast Corridor during a construction project. The Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) is for some reason opposed to changing the standard...

Welcome to stop #116 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Crust Brewing, 5500 Park Pl., RosemontTrain line: CTA Blue Line, Rosemont Time from Chicago: 45 minutesDistance from station: 1.4 km (shuttle bus from El station—don't even try to walk it) Have you ever heard Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album? It's exactly what it says on the tin. And it's not their best work. (I mean, it's got a few laughs, especially on the first cut, but the boys made it clear they were flipping two fingers to...

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...

In about 23 hours I should be taking off from O'Hare on my favorite flight, American Airlines 90, the best flight I've found to snap into a European time zone in just one night. People tend to prefer the evening flights that get to Heathrow the next morning so they "don't lose a day," but I've found that even when flying business or first class (and thus getting actual sleep for a couple of hours) I lose the first day in Europe anyway. Sleeping on planes just sucks. American 90, on the other hand, takes...

The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week. I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things: Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina)...

A few weeks ago I planned a PTO day to take a 25 km walk tomorrow along the North Branch Trail with pizza at the end. (I'll do my annual marathon walk in October.) Sadly, the weather forecast bodes against it, with scattered thunderstorms and dewpoints over 22°C. But, since I've already got tomorrow off, and I have a solid PTO bank right now, I'll still take the day away from the office. And autumn begins Sunday. Good thing, too, because the articles piled up this morning, and I haven't had time to...

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...

I mentioned that the weather today is amazing, but yesterday's was also pretty good (if a bit humid). Cassie and I walked about 18 km throughout the day and spent most of the rest of the day outside. But Cassie's day started pretty well even before we set out: Sadly, neither of us could get to the last little bit of peanut butter at the bottom of the jar. (I labeled it "dog" because no one wants to get her peanut butter confused with the jar for people.) We trundled off to the Horner Park DFA early in...

The Democratic National Convention opened today here in Chicago, so naturally that's the main topic in today's lunchtime roundup: I can barely wait until Thursday when I get to see the sparkling-clean O'Hare CTA station, freshened up for the convention. The DNC projected fun messages onto the XPOTUS's eponymous Tower from their hotel across the river. (No comment from the XPOTUS.) Vice President Kamala Harris continues to climb in the polls as people come to realize that she's the real deal and the...

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...

I have painters painting and I'm coding code today, so I'm just noting a couple of interesting stories for later: The New York Times explains how the warming climate could send seven systems over the tipping point into unrecoverable damage. Bloomberg CityLab climbs through the $80 million effort to make Chicago's Merchandise Mart last another 90 years. National governments trying to protect their own railroads have derailed private cross-EU night-train service, hurting passengers. The City of Chicago...

Yesterday, Cassie and I walked 16.4 km (just over 10 miles), including a 10 km walk that I'd planned only to be a bit less than 7 km. I wanted to stop by Ravinia Brewing's Logan Square taproom, but alas, when we got there, the patio was closed. So we went to Burning Bush instead. In all, we spent most of the day outside in the perfect weather. We'll do more of the same today, just not quite as much walking. Another brewery that didn't make the cut for the Brews & Choos Project—it's too far from the...

Welcome to a second visit to stop #77 on the Brews and Choos project, previously reviewed in August 2022. Brewery: Banging Gavel Brews, 6811 Hickory St., Tinley ParkTrain line: Rock Island District, Tinley ParkTime from Chicago: 35 minutes (Zone 3)Distance from station: 100 m I'm re-reviewing Banging Gavel Brews after only two years because they didn't have an indoor space until December. And just look at that beautiful building! (Yes, I say while blowing on my fingernails, that is in fact my photo from...

Welcome to stop #115 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Arrowhead Ales, 2101 Calistoga Dr., New LenoxTrain line: Southwest Service, Laraway Road Time from Chicago: 62 minutes, Zone 4Distance from station: 400 m For all you urbanists reading the Brews & Choos Project posts because you want to get fresh beer without driving...you won't like Arrowhead Ales. But I did promise to go to every brewery I could reach, so for the sense of completeness, and to celebrate the fact that I've now been on every...

My plan this evening will take me to Arrowhead Ales in New Lenox, the only Brews & Choos brewery on Metra's Southwest Service. Because the SWS has such an inconvenient schedule, getting home requires me to get to the Rock Island District station 4.3 km away. Now, I could simply take a Lyft, but given that I'll have almost 2 hours between arriving at Laraway Road and the train departing New Lenox (with another train an hour later), and also given the weather forecast, I plan to walk there. The only...

The hot, humid weather we've had for the past couple of weeks has finally broken. I'm in the Loop today, and spent a good 20 minutes outside reading, and would have stayed longer, except I got a little chilly. I dressed today more for the 24°C at home and less for the cooler, breezier air this close to the lake. Elsewhere in the world: I was waiting for Russia expert Julia Ioffe to weigh in on last week's hostage release. The Chicago White Sox failed to set the all-time record for most consecutive...

As you may have seen below, yesterday I went out to Kankakee on a $15 round-trip Amtrak ticket to visit Knack Brewing for the Brews & Choos Project. Not only did the brewery surprise me—I mean, just look at it on Google Street View—but the city had a lot more going on than I anticipated. I've been through Kankakee a bunch of times, and maybe even pulled off I-57 on some trip to Champaign or St Louis. I've even landed at IKK once, in March 2002, getting checked out in a Piper Warrior. But until...

Welcome to stop #114 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Knack Brewing, 789 S. McMullen Dr., Kankakee, IllTrain line: Amtrak Illini, Kankakee Time from Chicago: 70 minutesDistance from station: 900 m I have to say, both Kankakee and Knack Brewing surprised me. I'll have more about the city in a subsequent post. For now, I'll say that this little 2-year-old mom-and-pop brewery in a rural city 100 km from my house was worth the trip—especially with the $15 round-trip fare I got from Amtrak. The...

The Climate Prediction Center's 6-10 day temperature outlook has generally good news for the upper Midwest, including Chicago: I wouldn't want to be in New Orleans next week, but that's true most weeks of the year even without this forecast. While we weather the summer, the news just keeps coming: The XPOTUS lied about what caused the one-hour delay before he took the stage at Wednesday's National Association of Black Journalists conference, as one would guess, because the truth was he didn't want to be...

The XPOTUS's handlers cut short his appearance this afternoon at the National Association of Black Journalists convention just 2 km from where I'm sitting. The XPOTUS began by insulting the hosts and the panelists. Then, when one of the panelists had just brought up Project 2025 (the Republican Party's blueprint for rolling the country back to the 1850s), the moderator suddenly interrupted and said the campaign had told her to wrap it up. The 37 minutes of Harris Campaign footage the XPOTUS had already...

Welcome to stop #113 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Is/Was Brewing, 5121 N. Ravenswood Ave., ChicagoTrain line: Union Pacific North, Ravenswood (Also CTA Brown Line, Damen) Time from Chicago: 16 minutes (Zone 2)Distance from station: 600 m (1.6 km from CTA) If this façade seems familiar, it's because this storefront has a long history of making adult beverages. Until September 2022, Urban Brew Labs lived here; before they moved in, Koval Spirits called it home. And last week, Is/Was opened...

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...

Welcome to stop #111 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Zorn Brew Works, 605 E. 9th St., Michigan City, Ind.Train line: South Shore Line, 11th St/Michigan City Time from Chicago: 84 minutesDistance from station: 800 m Zorn Brew Works provided a nice contrast to Shoreline Brewery, as tourists seemed to make up 90% of Shoreline's clientele and about 25% of Zorn's. It makes sense, as Zorn is in a more residential/transitional area, and Shoreline is about ten steps from the beach. It does help that...

If he were even a tiny bit better as a human being, I might have some empathy for the old man clearly suffering from some kind of dementia who spoke in Doral, Fla., yesterday. But he's not, so I don't. I mean...just read the highlights. In other news: Tom Friedman thinks this year's election could only have been dreamed up by the Devil himself. (Lucifer Morningstar could not be reached for comment.) Tom Nichols wants you to remember why NATO matters on its 75th birthday. If you're looking for a house to...

Note: Tonality closed permanently in April 2025. Welcome to stop #108 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Tonality Brewing, 169 N. Seymore Ave., MundeleinTrain line: North-Central Service, Mundelein Time from Chicago: 68 minutesDistance from station: 400 m One of Chicagoland's newest breweries, Tonality opened in November in the shadow of Mundelein's water tower, ensuring they will always have enough of their principal ingredient to keep making great beers. They also have really good food, which...

Welcome to stop #106 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Industry Ales, 230 S. Wabash Ave., ChicagoTrain line: All of them Time from Chicago: not applicableDistance from station: 100 m from Adams/Wabash, 1.6 km from Ogilvie Transportation Center Chicago's newest brewery opened in April in what used to be Kramer's Health Foods next to the 125-year-old Central Camera store in the Loop. I am impressed. My Brews & Choos buddy and I went there Wednesday directly after visiting Chicago's oldest...

Welcome to stop #105 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Adams Street Brewery, 17 W. Adams St., ChicagoTrain line: All of them Time from Chicago: not applicableDistance from station: 100 m from Adams/Wabash, 1.3 km from Ogilvie Transportation Center The Adams Street Brewery traces its history back to 1887, and has existed in the same location in the Chicago Loop since 1898. It stopped brewing during Prohibition, but the Berghoff Restaurant above the brew works remained open throughout. I doubt much...

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...

Apparently everyone else got over Covid yesterday, too. Or they're just trying to make deadline before the holiday: Peter Hamby pulls the fire alarm after reading a leaked polling report showing President Biden's support slipping in key states after last week's debate catastrophe. Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe fumes that yesterday's decision on presidential immunity "reveals the rot in the system." Ruth Marcus simply calls the Republican majority on the Court "dishonorable." In her dissent in...

Cassie and I have gone on two walks today, the first for 3.2 km and the second for 4.25 km, despite the really uncomfortable 26°C dewpoint. I mean, it's really gross out there. Fortunately because of the way dogs get rid of excess heat, it didn't bother her as much as it bothered me—the air is only 28°C, after all. But we both felt a lot better when we got back to my air-conditioned house. (Fun fact: my thermostat is set for 25°C, but the dewpoint inside is closer to 15°C which makes all the...

Lunchtime link roundup: Dr Daniela J Lamas of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston evaluates how age has affected President Biden and the convicted-felon XPOTUS, given that whoever wins in November has a high probability of being the oldest serving US President in history. Israel's highest court ruled that the IDF can, in fact, draft all the religious nutters who have avoided doing anything for the benefit of society since the country was founded. Perhaps this will help the country's crushing...

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...

Dignitaries and Metra executives celebrated the opening of the Peterson-Ridge station on the UP-North line this past Sunday: Hopefully West Ridge, Edgewater, and Lincoln Square residents remembered that patience is a virtue, as they waited for more than ten years for Metra's new Peterson/Ridge station, 1780 W. Peterson Ave., to serve their communities. The commuter railroad, elected officials, and neighbors rejoiced over the completion of the Union Pacific North line stop, which opened on May 20, with...

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...

I started my day with overlapping meetings, a visit from the housekeeping service, more meetings, a visit from an electrician, and just now discovered that a "new" bug report actually relates a bug we introduced on June 20th last year, but only now got reported. Oh, also: it's 25°C and sunny. At least it's Friday. And I guess I can read some of these tomorrow morning: Tara Palmeri examines the Beltway reactions to the convicted-felon XPOTUS's 34-count felony conviction. (But Josh Marshall says of this...

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...

The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable weather, and today it's hot and sticky with thunderstorms on the way. At least Cassie and I got to spend most of yesterday outside. In other news: David French argues that Justice Sonia Sotomayor's (I) recent opinion defending the National Rifle Association "reinforced the constitutional wall of protection...

Oh, so many things: Ankush Khardori lays out how "the Alito scandal is worse than it seems." US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former constitutional law professor, has a plan for how to get Justices Alito (R) and Thomas (R) to recuse themselves in any January 6th case. The non-disclosure agreement The Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt signed to work on the show recently expired, and wouldn't you know, he has tapes. Pass the popcorn. Matthew Yglesias describes his drift from left to center-left....

I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month off... This time of year has other features, many of which popped up in my various RSS feeds this morning: For the first time in his life, the XPOTUS finds himself waiting for a jury to decide whether he's a felon. In closing arguments yesterday, his attorney nearly got himself sanctioned on the spot for a...

Just doing a quick review of the Brews & Choos-eligible establishments within 2 km of the Milwaukee Amtrak station this morning, I discovered that seven breweries and a distillery have opened since the project started. Accounting for the demise of Milwaukee Ale House, that brings the total to 11 breweries and 2 distilleries. I'll have to make two trips. Now all I have to do is find a weekend...or two...or three...

Now that Cassie's poop no longer has Giardia cysts in it, she went back to day camp today, so that I could go to my downtown office for the first time in nearly two weeks. To celebrate, it looks like I'll get to walk home from her day care in a thunderstorm. Before that happens, though: Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar warns that our 2024 election looks eerily like the 1996 Russian election that eventually led to Vladimir Putin becoming dictator. New Republic's Thom Hartman lays out how the "mud-sill...

I first went to the Duke of Perth in June 1993, about four years after it opened. Today will be the pub's last day at their 35-year-old location on Clark St., after the property owner* doubled the rent. A bunch of us regulars and bartenders from the old days got together yesterday for one last whisky: The place really hasn't changed much since 1989, which is how it maintained its charm. That, and the patio, where I had more than a few first dates: When I lived in the neighborhood, I did so much...

I took Cassie out at 11am instead of her usual 12:30pm because of this: The storm front passed quickly, but it hit right at 12:30 and continued for half an hour with some intensity. It'll keep raining on and off all day, too. Other things rained down in the past day or so: Robert Wright points out the obvious, warning that the XPOTUS was (and would be again if re-elected) way, way worse than President Biden on Gaza. Jennifer Rubin points out the obvious, echoing the warnings of Republican...

Today my real job wraps up Sprint 109, an unexciting milestone that I hope has an unexciting deployment. I think in 109 sprints we've only had 3 or 4 exciting deployments, not counting the first production deployment, which always terrifies the dev team and always reminds them of what they left out of the Runbook. The staging pipelines have already started churning, and if they uncover anything, the Dev pipelines might also run, so I've lined up a collection of stories from the last 24 hours to keep me...

Welcome to stop #104 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Demo Brewing, 1763 W. Berteau Ave., ChicagoTrain line: Union Pacific North, Ravenswood. (Also CTA Brown Line, Irving Park) Time from Chicago: 16 minutes (zone 2)Distance from station: 1.1 km (400 m from CTA) The newest brewery on Malt Row opened March 29th just 2 km from Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters and less than 500 meters from the CTA. I had a lot going on in April so I didn't get to check it out until last weekend. Cassie came...

Welcome to stop #103 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: MobCraft Brewing, 101 N. Johnson St., WoodstockTrain line: Union Pacific Northwest, Woodstock Time from Chicago: 91 minutes (zone 4)Distance from station: 200 m Between the perfect weather, the really good beer, and the view of the Woodstock Town Square, my Brews buddy and I really enjoyed our visit to MobCraft last weekend. I mean, doesn't this just make you want to sing "The Pennsylvania Polka?": But back to the beer. We tried two flights...

The Ohio Feeder runs about 2 kilometers from Chicago's River North nightlife area to the Kennedy Expressway (I-90/94). As former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist told Streetsblog on Friday, just like San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway and Seoul's Cheonggyecheon, we need to remove the Ohio Feeder: Swapping the expressway extension for a surface-level boulevard would be an obvious choice to make this part of town safer, more efficient, more environmentally friendly, more vibrant – and more profitable....

Cassie and I just got back from her vet, with a good 2 km walk in each direction and treats at both ends. The semi-annual wellness check was only $88, and pronounced Cassie in perfect health. Even her weight (25 kg) is exactly what it should be, so I can start adding a little kibble to her meals if we walk a lot. Of course, the heartworm pills were $230 and the fecal test was $107, so not everything about the checkup was great. Le sigh. Also, it's warm today: 27°C for both walks, which is more like June...

Welcome to stop #102 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Holzlager Brewing, 150F S. Eastwood Dr., WoodstockTrain line: Union Pacific Northwest, Woodstock Time from Chicago: 91 minutes (zone 4)Distance from station: 1 km Woodstock isn't the farthest Metra station from downtown Chicago; that honor goes to Harvard, which is almost 20 minutes farther out. But getting to Woodstock by train on a weekend takes about 2 hours when you have to change trains at Clybourn. And no small irony, the train taking...

My frequent Brews buddy and I trekked out to Woodstock, Ill., yesterday, and visited the two breweries in town, then took Cassie to the newest brewery in my own neighborhood. I'll be going through notes and photos later today, so expect the reviews up tomorrow through Wednesday. Meanwhile, for some reason, Minnesota unfurled a new state flag yesterday: Minnesota's new flag went into official use Saturday, which has many wondering why the state adopted a new flag. The controversial replacement of the old...

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'll lead off today with real-estate notices about two houses just hitting the market. In Kenilworth, the house featured at the end of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles can be yours for about $2.6 million. If you'd prefer something with a bit more mystique, the Webster Ave. building where Henry Darger lived for 40 years, now a single-family house, will also soon hit the market for $2.6 million. (That house is less than 300 meters from where my chorus rehearses.) In other news: Tina Nguyen warns about the...

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 satirical newspaper The Onion just got bought by a newly-formed LLC called, yes, Global Tetrahedron. Longtime Onion readers will probably recognize the name; I had to remind myself. Other events in the past day or so: Among the labor-rights wins on Tuesday was a tweak to wage and hour laws that will qualify millions more Americans for overtime pay. Despite having earned the title "Useful Idiot of the Year" a couple of times already, we haven't heard the last of US Representative Marjorie Taylor...

Except for the sun blinding me around 5:30 pm every day due to a quirk in my house's architecture (I will eventually fix it with window treatments), I love sunny spring days. Cassie and I have already spent almost an hour outside and we'll spend another 45 minutes or so when I get back from an odd music gig that I'll describe tomorrow or Monday. I wanted to highlight just one story from earlier this week, by New Republic's Kate Aronoff, with the accurate and delightful headline "Anything Elon Musk can...

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...

A cold front passed this morning right after I got to the office, sparing me the 60 km/h winds and pouring rain that made the 9am arrivals miserable. The rain has passed, but the temperature has slowly descended to 17°C after hanging out around 19°C all night. I might have to close my windows tonight. I also completed a mini-project for work a few minutes ago, so I now have time to read a couple of stories: The voir dire in the XPOTUS's porn-star-payoff criminal trial forced him to listen to a lot of...

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 heading off to a Euchre tournament in a bit. I haven't played cards with actual, live people in quite some time, so I just hope to end up in the middle of the pack. Or one perfect lay-down loner... A guy can dream. When I get home, I might have the time and attention span to read these: John Grinspan looks at the similarities and crucial differences between the upcoming election and the election of 1892. Andy Borowitz jokes about the latest of Robert F Kennedy's conspiracy theories: that his own...

The older I get, the less human beings surprise me. Oh, individual people surprise me all the time, mainly because I have smart and creative friends. But groups of people? They're going to be unsurprising and kind of dumb almost always. Cases in point: The Arizona Supreme Court's decision allowing enforcement of a pre-statehood, Civil War-era abortion law looks even worse when you learn what else is in the 1864 Howell Code. Chicago's Loop neighborhood has 6,000 unsold luxury condos, with no more new...

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...

We have a truly delightful mix of light rain and snow flurries right now that convinced me to shorten Cassie's lunchtime walk from 30 minutes to 15 minutes to just 9 minutes each time I came to a street corner. I don't even think I'll make 10,000 steps today, because neither of us really wants to go outside in this crap. I'm also working on a feature improvement that requires fixing some code I've never liked, which I haven't ever fixed because it's very tricky. I know why I made those choices, but they...

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman (D, maybe?–CT) and Al Gore's running mate in 2000 has died: Joseph I. Lieberman, the doggedly independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, becoming the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died March 27 in New York City. He was 82. The cause was complications from a fall, his family said in a statement. Mr. Lieberman viewed himself as a centrist Democrat, solidly in his party’s...

Almost always, during the last few days before a performance, a huge chunk of my working memory contains the music I'm about to perform. I have two concerts this weekend, so right now, my brain has a lot of Bruckner in it. I feel completely prepared, in fact. Unfortunately, I still have a day job, and I need a large chunk of my brain to work on re-architecting a section of our app. Instead of loading data from Microsoft Excel files, which the app needs to read entirely into memory because of the way...

For Reasons, we have the dress rehearsal for our Saturday performance on Saturday. That means poor Cassie will likely go ten hours crossing her paws between the time I have to leave and when I'm likely to get back. Fortunately, she should be exhausted by then. Tonight's dress rehearsal for our Sunday performance won't put her out as much, thanks to Dog Delivery from my doggy day care. Still, I'd rather have a quiet evening at home than a 3-hour rehearsal and an hour-long car trip home... Meanwhile, in...

My flight from Munich landed at Charlotte about 40 minutes early, and I got through customs and back through TSA in 34 minutes. Sweet! And now I'm watching the plane that will take me to Chicago pull into my gate. Sweet! Really, I just want to hug my dog and get 10 hours of sleep tonight. I have a feeling one of those things will happen and the other won't.

Before I even took off from Chicago on Wednesday morning, I snarked a bit on the widening gulf between US and European technology, particularly in public transport. I don't think Chicago's regional heavy-rail agency, Metra, heard me specifically, but it seems they have committed to introducing electric trains on one currently-Diesel route before the end of the decade: Metra plans to buy battery-powered trains that could hit the rails as early as 2027 on the Rock Island line, potentially fast-tracking a...

My local park around 7am: For work reasons, I have to get up progressively earlier every day this week. I'm comforting myself with the knowledge that my 6am meeting Wednesday would actually be a 1pm meeting if I were already on Munich time. Sadly, I won't be on Munich time until about 19 hours later. But I'm a lot more likely to sleep on the flight if I keep waking up before sunrise this week.

With the news this morning that Ukraine has disabled yet another Russian ship, incapacitating fully one-third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, it has become apparent that Ukraine is better at making Russian submarines than the Murmansk shipyards. Russia could, of course, stop their own massive military losses—so far they've lost 90% of their army as well—simply by pulling back to the pre-2014 border, but we all know they won't do that. In other news of small-minded people continuing to do wastefully...

After posting this morning about all the injured and lame e-Divvy bikes around Chicago, a Daily Parker reader just sent me this story from last November, reporting that Divvy planned to (and presumably did) switch its maintenance subcontractor on February 1st of this year: Periodically we do a [Request for Proposals]," the Lyft staffer said. "We want the best operations and service delivery for our city partners and customers. Motivate's contract was running out on February 1, so we held a competitive...

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.) Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest: But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning: A 3-judge panel on...

Welcome to stop #101 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Eris Brewery & Cider House, 4240 W. Irving Park Rd., ChicagoTrain line: Union Pacific Northwest, Irving Park (Zone 2) (also CTA Blue Line, Irving Park) Time from Chicago: 13 minutesDistance from station: 300 m Built out of a former Masonic temple in the Old Irving neighborhood, Eris has really good food and really good cider. At this writing, though, they're still working on their beer game. On top of some of the best cheese curds and French...

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...