The Daily Parker

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 Ecclesiea Universalis, etc. Leo XIV, lived in the house until he moved to Saugatuck, Mich., for high school.

So, naturally, the current owners of the house have decided to cash in and cash out:

Pope Leo XIV’s childhood home in south suburban Dolton will be sold to the highest bidder in an online auction next month.

On May 5, the house ... was listed at $219,000 but was quickly taken down after Robert Prevost was elected pope. The Realtor and owner had weighed what to do with Pope Leo’s former home, including restoring it to how the pope may have remembered it in his childhood or turning it into a viewing home or a museum.

Now the Cape Cod-style home has been put up for auction, according to brokers iCandy Realty. The house is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house that has been recently renovated.

The pope’s parents bought the 1,200-square-foot brick house on East 141st Place new in 1949, paying a $42 monthly mortgage.

Ubi est mea indeed. But really, if I discovered that a Very Famous Person had lived in the house I currently own, would I not try to capitalize on that? I mean, hey, I'm from Chicago too!

Update: I forgot to note this other morsel of greed today. Chicago Parking Meters LLC, which has already made back double their investment in their theft lease of Chicago streets, settled for $15.5 million to end their suit over the city taking parking spaces out of circulation during the pandemic. While I begrudgingly admit that they got the right result by the wrong method as far as correctly pricing parking goes, I also think that paying back the entire $1.2 billion from the initial deal will save us money within three years, because math.

Just a couple of eye-rolling stories. First, Charlie Warzel mocks the OAFPOTUS's "tactical burger unit:"

We now inhabit a world beyond parody, where the pixels of reality seem to glitch and flicker. Consider the following report from Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia this week, posted by the foreign-affairs journalist Olga Nesterova: “As part of the red-carpet treatment, Saudi officials arranged for a fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit to accompany President Trump during his stay.” A skeptical news consumer might be inclined to pause for a moment at the phrase fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit, their brain left to conjure what those words could possibly mean.

It’s worth emphasizing that all of this is pretty embarrassing. Multiple news outlets, including Fox News, framed the truck as an act of burger diplomacy; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pandered to a mercurial elderly man, ostensibly to guarantee that a slender beef patty was never far from his lips. As with all things Trump, it’s hard to know exactly what to believe. Is the burger unit a stylized but mostly normal bit of state-visit infrastructure, or is it a bauble meant to please the Fast-Food President? In a world where leaders seem eager to bend the knee to Trump’s every impulse, even the truly ridiculous seems plausible. The mere fact of all of this is unmooring. When strung together, the words fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit overwhelm my synapses; there could be no funnier or dumber phrase to chisel out of the English language.

All hail Meal Team Six!

I also wanted to call out today's Times story about the declining fortunes of ride-share drivers at Los Angeles International Airport:

In the early years of app-based platforms like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, people flocked to sign up as drivers. The idea of making money simply by driving someone around in your own car, on your own schedule, appealed to many, from professional chauffeurs looking for extra work to employees working in the service industry who realized they could break free of the 9-to-5 grind.

And in the early years, wages were high. Drivers would regularly take home thousands of dollars a week, as Uber and Lyft pushed growth over profits, posting quarterly losses in the billions of dollars. Then, when they became public companies, profitability became a focus, and wages gradually shrank.

Now, earnings have fallen behind inflation, and for many drivers have decreased. Last year, Uber drivers made an average of $513 a week in gross earnings, a 3.4 percent decline from the previous year, even as they worked six minutes more a week on average...

This is simply an overabundance of drivers chasing a declining population of travelers. This is the whole reason taxi regulations came into being: to ensure that taxi drivers could make a fair living doing their jobs. It's a pretty glaring display of the tragedy of the commons, too.

I'll have more to say about this soon.

These two things are not connected.

First, O'Hare officially hit 33.3°C (92°F) just after 4pm, breaking the previous record of 32.8°C set in 1962. I will now, reluctantly, turn on my air conditioning, as the temperature at Inner Drive  Technology World HQ is now 28.9°C, the warmest reading since August 27th. Also, closing the windows seems like a good idea with some epic thunderstorms due to hit in a couple of hours.

Meanwhile, someone had a really good morning:

I didn't supervise her well enough, however, so she got a bit enthusiastic:

And I had to apologize to her for buying a peanut butter jar with a smaller diameter than her snout.

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 OAFPOTUS has Republicans squirming more and more each day.
• Speaking of dislike, the Qatari airplane bribe is different because "morons understand it." (Morons and MAGA Republicans, Jennifer Rubin clarifies.)
• Oh, and the Republican tax bill will come down particularly hard on the same people, too.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D) complains that he hasn't done enough to convince people he's doing a good job. Perhaps--and let me just suggest something wild here--like actually doing a good job?
• Google has rolled new security features for Android phones, which you should turn on.
• The first bridge linking Michigan Avenue across the Chicago River opened 105 years ago today.

Finally, Ernie Smith, who also had a childhood pastime of reading maps for fun, examines why MapQuest became "the RC Cola" of mapping apps. Tl;dr: corporate mergers are never about product quality.

I had a lot going on today, so I only have a couple of minutes to note these stories:

• Not only is the OAFPOTUS's "new" (actually quite well-used) Qatari Boeing 747-8 a huge bribe, it will cost taxpayers almost as much as one of the (actually) new VC-25B airplanes the Air Force is currently building, as it completely fails to meet any of the requirements for survivability and security. (“You might even ask why Qatar no longer wants the aircraft," former USAF acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter said. "And the answer may be that it’s too expensive for them to maintain.”)
• The Economist analyzes county-level data and finds that Republican areas are outperforming Democratic areas on a couple of measures—for now.
• Rolling Stone criticizes Ezra Klein's Abundance for playing into the oligarchs' plans, though I wonder if I'm reading the same book they did? (I'll have more to say when I finish the book.)
• Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, on the other hand, have some pretty good ideas about how the Democrats can get their mojo back, and "oligarchy" doesn't come up once. (For the record, I think Kamarck and Galston have a better take than Rolling Stone.)
• Times reporter Molly Young went to the "world's happiest country" in February and was not the world's happiest reporter.

Finally, a late-night club in Lincoln Park that the city closed down after shootings and other crime in 2017 will reopen at the end of May as a doggy day spa. Pup Social, at 2200 N. Ashland Ave., will offer off-leash play, a coworking lounge (presumably for humans), and a bar (also presumably for humans). The fees will start at $99 per month.

Cassie and I walked 14 km yesterday, giving her almost 3 hours of walks and 8 hours continuously outside with friends (including Butters). The walk included a stop at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe. (It's possible Cassie got a bit of pizza.)

She's now on the couch, fast asleep. I would also like to be on the couch, fast asleep, but it is a work day.

I also wish some of the people in today's stories were asleep on the couch instead of asleep at the switch:

• The Qatari government has offered the OAFPOTUS a naked bribe of such magnitude that even MAGA allies can't swallow it.
• Both Norman Eisen and Molly White struggle to adequately describe the sheer volume of graft from the OAFPOTUS's cryptocurrency scamming.
• Cranky Flier scoffs at Transportation Secretary and former reality TV star Sean Duffy rolling out a pseudo-plan for—I'm not making this up—a "Brand New Air Traffic Control System."
• US Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) continues to struggle after his 2022 stroke, refusing mental-health treatment and failing to do his work in the Senate.

Finally, the Economist draws attention to all the ways that my generation continues to suffer because of the two much larger generations on either side of us. The Boomers want to use up Social Security and the Millennials want all the resources for child-raising that we didn't take. It's out lot in life.

I have more coding to do now. Though I really, really want a nap.

It's 13.3°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ right now, down from 21°C around 10:15. This graph gives you a sense of what happens when warm southwest wind gets bumped aside by a fast-moving cold front boosted by winds off the lake:

The forecast for tomorrow shows a more gradual rise and decline in temperatures, peaking around 16° between 4pm and 5pm. That bodes well for my plan to take Cassie to the dog park and myself to get a slice of Jimmy's pizza for lunch.

Chicago has microclimates. If you get within about 2 km of Lake Michigan on a hot day, you can feel it even if the wind is calm. Add a lake breeze and the cool zone can extend 10–15 km easily.

It turns out, Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters and its Netatmo weather station sit just over 2 km from the lake (it's 2,170 meters to Foster Beach). O'Hare, Chicago's official weather station, is 21.5 km from the lakefront (in Winnetka, because Geometry!).

I've seen days with stiff east winds (usually convective lake breezes) where O'Hare was 15°C warmer than my own weather station. But I haven't had any visibility into how much colder it was at the lakefront than here.

Fortunately, one of my friends just got their own Netatmo weather station, and they live only 580 meters from the lake.

After tweaking some adapter code, Weather Now now has their weather station data to go along with mine! So we'll both be able to see how much the lake influences the weather even over such short distances. At the moment, their station shows 10.4°C and mine shows 11.2°C, while O'Hare is reporting 19°C. Not surprisingly, the winds at O'Hare are out of the east—but only 10 km/h, a gentle breeze.

I'm sure I'll have other comparative reports throughout the summer, especially when I take Cassie to the dog beach.

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime:

• From tavern-style communion pizza and Malört to the horrific discovery that the Pope is a White Sox fan, Chicagoans have gone nuts for Leo XIV. Catholics everywhere are finally safe from ketchup with their Eucharist.
• Former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter has died, aged 85. He "pulled a Brennan" by drifting left during his term on the court, much to the annoyance of the Republicans who elevated him.
• Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Zilbatt warn that a descent into competitive authoritarianism—the ruling style of autocrats like India's Modi and Türkiye's Erdoğan—shows up most clearly as an increasing cost of opposing the government.
• Josh Marshall reports on how the OAFPOTUS's droogs are cutting off medical research grant payments without explicitly (if illegally) cancelling the grants, hoping they won't get caught until it's too late.
• Molly White and Paul Krugman provide their regular reminders that crypto is a scam, now with added corruption.
• James Fallows, who usually tries to get people to calm down about aviation mishaps, wants the press to be more alarmed about the air traffic control blackouts in Newark. (Another one happened just this morning, in fact.)
• Yascha Mounk looks at the Democratic Party and shrugs that, for good or ill, "the resistance is gonna be woke," even if it costs us the next two elections.
• ProPublica's David Armstrong dug into why his cancer drugs cost more than an iPhone for each dose.
• Charles Marohn points out the lie in a recent Times op-ed by reminding anyone who can do math that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme, not a solution to our housing problem.

Finally, Chicago's ubiquitous summer street fairs have found it much more difficult to sustain their funding in the years since the pandemic. The city prohibits charging an entry fee for walking down a street, so the fairs have to rely on gate donations. But even with increasing expenses, people attending festivals have stopped donating at the gate, putting the fairs in jeopardy.

When I go to Ribfest in four weeks, I will pay the donation every day, because I want my ribs. This will be the festival's 25th year. I will do my part to get them another 25.

As a devout atheist, I'm not especially concerned with the election this afternoon of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, though I am tickled he's a South Sider from Chicago. (Next up: Malort for communion!)

I'm less tickled that about the "deal" that the US and UK have reached on trade as it appears to be nothing more than "concepts of a plan" that leaves in place a 10% tax on UK goods. As Krugman explains,

Nobody knows what will eventually come out of it, but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t lead to any significant opening of the British market to U.S. goods. Why? Because that market was already wide open before Trump stomped in.

So should we celebrate the trade deal that will be announced today? No. It won’t solve any of the problems Trump has created. It will, if anything, offer Trump the temporary illusion of success, encouraging him to create even more problems.

For all that we know now about President Biden's decline in the last two years of his term, shouldn't we be more alarmed by the OAFPOTUS's divorce from reality?