The USGS (and no doubt millions of fish) has detected a 7.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of California. People as far away as San Diego and Hawaii have gotten tsunami warnings. So far no tsunamis have been reported; we'll see when the first possible wave reaches San Francisco in an hour.
More info when available.
Update, 14:12 CST: NOAA cancelled the tsunami warning for the US and Canadian West Coast about 15 minutes ago.
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:
Let's hope tomorrow's mood is a different Far Side comic...
Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project.
Brewery: Off the Rails Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif.
Train line: Caltrain, Sunnyvale
Time from SF Terminal: 62 minutes
Time from Chicago: about 4½ hours by air
Distance from station: 300 m
Sunnyvale, Calif., has blocked off the north end of Murphy Ave. to traffic, turning the entire block into a pedestrian zone lined with restaurants and a good-enough-for-the-suburbs brewery where you can have good-enough beers. Despite the amazing weather when I visited on Friday—it's hard to beat 23°C and sunny in November—I just couldn't get excited about the place.
I had a flight of 4 120-mL pours that left me feeling "eh." The Kölsch (5%) had a decent, malty flavor, a little sweet for my palate, with banana and apple notes. The Lazy Hazy IPA (7.2%) did not taste like a 7% beer, and also didn't taste like it had a lot of hops, but the banana, apricot, and honey notes were pleasant enough, though again too sweet for me. The YOLO Fruity IPA (6.2%) was actually less fruity than the hazy, though it had a good balance and was drinkable. Again, though, not a memorable beer. But the Otis Imperial Stout (9.2%) was my favorite of the four, with just enough bitterness to match the coffee and chocolate flavors.
Bottom line: Off the Rails has a convenient location right by the Caltrain station in a part of Silicon Valley that doesn't have a lot of Brews & Choos-eligible breweries. So, sure, why not? But I wouldn't make a special trip.
The Thai place next door, though, smelled amazing.
Beer garden? Street pedestrian zone and smaller back patio
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Unavoidable inside
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? Maybe
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 Chicago—with another SF brewery review coming Sunday or Monday.
And I will actually spend time in both places today, taking the just-launched all-electric CalTrain between them.
Tomorrow my flight leaves so early I will have to take a cab to the airport, because the BART doesn't start running until after my plane boards. But as the airport is only 3 km away, I expect that won't cause any problems.
Finally, I'm still cogitating about the election, and getting closer to some coherent thoughts. Harris ran a great campaign with a losing message; we need to think about that. We also need to prepare for at least two years of kakistocracy, perhaps longer. But I'll write more about that when I get back to Chicago.
Today, though, it'll be 22°C and sunny from the Embarcadero to the garlic fields of Gilroy. No time to stay inside a hotel room and blog.
If South Dakota governor and unapologetic puppy-killer Kristi Noem (R, obviously) becomes the XPOTUS's running mate this year, the GOP will have outdone its own Doctor Evil mindset. And yet, that is not the worst thing happening in the world today:
- A California judge has ruled a recent state law requiring municipalities to undo discriminatory zoning laws unconstitutional, though it's not clear how long that ruling will stand.
- Do you own a GM car made in this decade? It may be spying on you, and sharing your driving history with your insurance company without your consent.
- After a non-profit group suggested merging the CTA, Metra, and Pace, the Illinois House has started the legislative process to do just that.
- Ezra Klein takes us through the history of the infamous Noe Valley public toilet in San Francisco, which took years to get through the planning process, increasing its cost at every step.
- Remember: public policy led to the proliferation of trucks masquerading as cars that endanger pedestrians, pollute neighborhoods, and generally look ugly.
Finally, Josh Marshall points out that while he (and I) support the basic aim of student protests against the Gaza war—Israel must stop killing people in Gaza—we do not support the groups organizing those protests at Columbia and other universities, almost all of which call for the destruction of the Jewish state. I'm also somewhat anxious about the normal propensity of young people to demand easy answers to complex questions becoming a democracy-ending problem later this year. I mean, if you think students are always on the right side of history, I need to direct your attention to China in 1966 and one or two other examples. Children don't do nuance.
American Airlines says my flight home has a 45-minute delay at the moment (though of course that could get worse). So I just spent 35 minutes walking in a big circle around the southwest corner of downtown San Diego. I don't think I'd ever live here, but I do enjoy the weather.
Meanwhile, as if I don't have too many things on my to-be-read shelf already, the New York Times book editor has released a list of the 22 funniest novels since Catch-22. Maybe someday I'll get to a few of them?
Anyway, I should be home with Cassie in about 11 hours. If she understood English and had any concept of "future," she'd be excited too.
I've got a little time before dinner, just enough to post this:
I didn't collect any snake bites, scorpion stings, or exploding cactuses, but I think I did get a nice sunburn. I'll find out tomorrow.
Given the weather and the fact that I'd been stuck in the conference hotel all day, I slipped out for a 4-kilometer walk around downtown San Diego this afternoon. It was perfectly clear and 20°C, but somehow I persevered.
I was exercising so I didn't take a lot of photos. But I have never seen a cruise ship up close before, so despite the mouse on the front, this impressed me:
That's the Disney Wonder. I will never go on that ship any more than I will get to go on the USS Carl Vinson, which is behind it to the left, and frankly even more impressive.
Then there was this sign, which shows that Little Italy will, in fact, take your shit:
And now, I have to demonstrate the product we've been working on for four years to a lot of other developers.
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 the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that presidents do not have blanket immunity from prosecution, which the XPOTUS has vowed to appeal en banc and then to his hand-picked Supreme Court.
- The Republican Party got the border deal they asked for, but they refuse to pass it because the XPOTUS needs border chaos for his re-election campaign. Greg Sargent has even more about their own-goal.
- Los Angeles experienced record rainfall yesterday, with a whopping 104 mm of rain recorded downtown, smashing the old record of 65 mm set in 1927.
- Here in Chicago, we expect above-average temperatures to hang out for the rest of winter, possibly even hitting 16°C later this week.
- That means we won't get to see the winners of this year's snowplow-naming contest: Skilling It, CTRL-SALT-DELETE, Casimir Plowaski, Ernie Snowbanks, Mies van der Snow, and Bad, Bad Leroy Plow.
- Speaking of roads, the Sun-Times ran an essay today outlining the history of Chicago expressways (motorways), and what we lost when we built them.
And now, my production test pipeline has concluded successfully, so I will indeed have a boring release.
Walking Cassie to day camp took a lot longer than usual this morning because the freezing rain and near-freezing temperatures after a long cold snap laid a layer of ice over nearly every sidewalk and street in Chicago. She seemed very concerned about my ability to walk, and very disappointed that we didn't take our usual detour to the bagel place to get me some coffee and her a fresh dog treat.
The "wintry mix" has stopped and the temperature has risen all the way to 1.5°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, so the walk home may not suck as much as the walk there.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:
- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has announced the nominees for 2023 Oscars, with Oppenheimer leading the pack and both Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie apparently snubbed for their work in Barbie.
- Politico takes a deep dive into the psyche of a New Hampshire primary voter who supports the XPOTUS, and finds that he's angry about everything, but he has no clear idea what he's angry about.
- The New York Times Political Memo lays out how the adolescent, schoolyard behavior of the XPOTUS towards Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R).
- Walter Shapiro bemoans the misleading and pointless political reporting covering the Republican presidential nomination.
- Ruth Marcus asks the same question I've been asking (in shocking agreement with some of my Republican friends): What the hell was Fani Willis thinking?
- David Zipper has "spent a lot of time thinking about American traffic safety messaging," and has decided that the new Federal recommendations against funny highway signs make sense.
- The city of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., a charming little town on the Monterey Peninsula where people have to go to the post office to get their mail, may soon get street addresses.
- Strong Towns describes in detail how the Texas Dept of Transportation prevents people from providing input into road projects, despite claiming to welcome it.
- Chicago-based United Airlines has started grumbling openly about Chicago-based Boeing's airplanes, stopping just short of suggesting they might buy an Airbus or two.
- Crain's has a look at how much the proposed Chicago real-estate transfer tax reform will save (or cost) home buyers in different price ranges. TL;dr: It will save money for transactions under $1 million.
- Do sleep aids work? Maybe, some of them, perhaps.
Finally, we might have gotten to Peak Rat Hole. Residents of the 1900 block of West Roscoe have gotten fed up with all the people coming to see the 30-year-old dead squirrel impression on their sidewalk. Perhaps the wedding took things too far?