The Daily Parker

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 could have to pay over $100 million to the thieves who stole our parking meters in what continues to be the stupidest, and possibly most corrupt, municipal contract in the city's history.

Finally, a pilot ferried a Cessna 172 from Merced, Calif., to Honolulu in 17½ hours last Tuesday, a feat that I would categorize as "stupid risky" rather than "brave." I have a policy never to fly beyond gliding range in a plane with one engine, which means even around Chicago I don't fly more than a few kilometers off shore. Sure, a Cessna 172 can easily get from Chicago to Grand Rapids on a standard load of fuel, but why on earth would you risk ditching even 10 km offshore. This guy flew over 2,000 km from the nearest shore. And it wasn't his first time.

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 nearest Metra station—made the culinary news Thursday when the state fined them for their latest infusion:

The state has fined a suburban brewery an undisclosed amount after they served a special infusion of Jeppson’s Malört with cicadas, celebrating the insects’ 2024 emergence. Noon Whistle Brewing Co. in Lombard made headlines in May for combining Chicago’s infamous liquor with bugs foraged from a neighboring park.

The Illinois Liquor Control Commission’s March report includes a blurb that does not mention Noon Whistle, but it refers to a licensee selling an infusion containing cicadas: “The licensee was cited for the violation and was provided education on the issue.” A message to an ILCC rep wasn’t immediately returned. Noon Whistle’s co-founder Mike Condon confirmed the fine over email and wrote he preferred not to share more info.

Chicago went through a phase, in the late 2010s, when bartenders were gleefully infusing spirits, like bourbon, with pork. There weren’t reported fines. However, presumably, they weren’t hunting pigs and curing their own bacon. They weren’t hunting wild pigs, they were buying a product from a store or butcher. There’s no such facility to procure food-grade cicadas.

Cassie, for her part, enjoys the occasional cicada. She snapped one up just this morning on our first walk. It was still buzzing when she swallowed it, so I can only guess how it felt going down. I'm sure Malört would not have made it better.

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 Park
Train line: Rock Island District, Tinley Park
Time 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 Thursday evening.) Maybe it was the contrast with the exurban nightmare I visited just an hour earlier, maybe it was the perfect summer evening, maybe it was the delicious croquette I ate, but this place just shot into the Top 10 with one visit.

They really did an excellent job with the renovation. I wish I'd seen inside the house in the 1860s when Karl Vogt went bankrupt building it. Or in 1912 when it had four small apartments, or in the early 1950s before Tinley Park disappeared into Suburbistan.

They still have the huge beer garden to the east, and a huge fire pit on the north. Since it wasn't busy Thursday evening, I had my 2024 Trolley Beer (APA, 5.25) and by Clouding the Issue (DDHNEIPA, 7%) on the porch, watching the sunset and the occasional freight train. After, I walked three minutes to the platform, hopped on the Rock Island, and made the connection to the UP-N to home with minutes to spare.

The Rock Island has the most frequent service of any line except for the BNSF, with stops close to six other really good breweries. I may make a day of it again this summer.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Welcome to stop #115 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Arrowhead Ales, 2101 Calistoga Dr., New Lenox
Train line: Southwest Service, Laraway Road
Time from Chicago: 62 minutes, Zone 4
Distance 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 commuter rail line in Chicago, here we go.

You can get a sense of the walk from the nearest Metra station by reading my previous post on why I didn't walk anywhere from the huge strip-mall containing this brewery. The train platform extends almost all the way to Laraway Road, but then you have to cross six traffic lanes (fortunately with a big median between them) and traipse through grass for about a hundred meters until you get to an asphalt strip. Then you have a huge vacant lot (it's for sale!) on one side and the road on the other. When you get to the entrance to the strip mall, you have another 200 meters of parking lot to cover before getting to a brewery/restaurant that looks like every other suburban restaurant in North America.

Ah but what about the beer? Yeah. I mean, it's brewed on-site, so it's fresh, I'll give it that. The New Lenox Pilsner (4.5%, 21 IBU) was very light, quite malty, and decent, I guess. The Weed Wacker (sic.) American pale (6.2%, 38 IBU) would be better named in the Loop, which actually has a Wacker Drive and not a lot of weed whackers. It had a maltiness that didn't quite fit the APA profile I expected, with a slight astringence and a long finish. (My note: "Nah.") The Galaxy Gator hazy IPA (6.8%, 36 IBU) had more malt than citrus, but wasn't too bad, despite being a bit bitter. I did like the Imperial Coconut Killjoy porter (9.1%, 25 IBU) because I couldn't taste the coconut, but I did get the marshmallow and chocolate. Again, not too bad, but not something I'd search for at Binny's.

The semi-outdoor area wasn't too bad, despite the 4-year-old girl literally running in circles around her parents' table. Obviously no dogs allowed as you have to go through the restaurant to get there.

So, yeah, I left feeling a deep and abiding sense of Meh. The density of the far-south suburbs just won't support much that is unique or interesting, which just adds to the never-ending cycle of mediocrity and uniformity the North American car-based suburban pattern encourages.

But hey, I've now been on all of the Metra lines. Box ticked.

Beer garden? Semi-outdoor space
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? Full but boring menu
Would hang out with a book? No
Would hang out with friends? Under duress
Would go back? No

Yesterday I went out to the exurban village of New Lenox to review one of the most remote breweries on the Brews & Choos list, near the Laraway Road station on the Southwest Service. (Fun fact: After decades of living here, I have now taken every one of Chicago's commuter rail lines at least once.)

I had planned to walk from there to Rock Island train station in the center of town, as the Southwest Service didn't have a return train until 10:30pm. I knew the first 2 kilometers of the walk would have some challenges as I would have to walk along two highways. But the satellite photos did not prepare me for how hostile the walking environment would be on the ground:

I'll walk along a shoulder if needed, and I'll even walk along short grass. But that stuff came up to my knees.

Then, this morning, I woke up to three stories about urban planning failures right here in Chicago that make me want to take every engineer in IDOT on a forced march along the stretch of Laraway Road pictured above:

• Despite multiple bike fatalities, the good people of Lincolnwood have decided to reject $2.5 million in state funds to build bike lanes on a dangerous stretch of stroad.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has announced a $4.9 billion plan to install elevators at all of the El and subway stations that need them—by 2038.
• State and local officials joined residents yesterday at Truman College to protest IDOT's backwards-looking plan to redesign DuSable Lake Shore Drive, as the state plan has no concessions for mass transit and would in fact make traffic worse.

Cars are killing us. (Literally: the US has 40,000 traffic deaths a year, far more than any other country.) And yet state transit departments seem to think their only mandate is to increase the number of cars on the road. 

The problem with having 8 billion people on Earth is that every single one of us has different ideas and opinions. If there's an opinion out there so fringe and so bizarre that only 1/10th of 1% of us share it, that's still about a quarter of the population of Chicago.

I thought of that because of how much news we have. And I imagine that from the ancestral environment thousands of years ago until the last century, we just didn't have all that much. I don't think that's entirely because of light-speed communications since the telegraph informing us of more things than the horse-drawn post could do before the 1840s. I also think we've just got so many more people, with so many more crazy people.

How much has happened in the last 50 years, for example? And by "50 years" I mean exactly that, since this speech on 8 August 1974:

That got me thinking about the relentlessness of news in the telecommunications era, and how we didn't evolve like this. Even Aldous Huxley thought our downfall as a culture would be drugs and sex, simply because in 1932 no one looked at screens all day. (I have always thought that he, and not Orwell, got the overall prediction correct—at least as regards the Anglosphere.)

Anyway, I have to debug a new feature and not worry about the Post.

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 trouble is, the brewery sits in an exurban, 100% car-oriented area, 1,800 meters from the nearest sidewalk:

The intersection of Laraway Road and County Route 4, where I take the right turn towards the village of New Lenox, requires me to Frogger across a total of 11 traffic lanes and 3 high-speed turn lanes:

Then, walking against traffic (always do this!), I have another 1400 meters of 4-lane county highway to follow before I finally reach the village limits. At that point the 4-lane county highway becomes 2-lane Cedar Road, so even in the spots without sidewalks the traffic speed should be much lower.

Wish me luck! And stop funding highway expansion!

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 losses in the American League yesterday by winning their first game in the last 23.
• Of the $1.2 trillion Carbon Reduction Program funds allocated to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, $130 billion has been spent so far: but only $26 billion on rail, and $70 billion on highways. 
• Even though Deutsche Bahn has faster, timelier, more convenient, more comfortable, and just more trains than the US, Germans say their national railroad is on the wrong track.
• Deadhorse, Alaska, which lies at 70° north latitude, set an all-time record yesterday with a high temperature just below 32°C.
• After CrowdStrike told Delta Airlines to go pound sand a couple days ago, Microsoft told the carrier off yesterday.
• Be careful taking dogs to fresh-water swimming holes: warmer weather has made blue-green algae blooms more common.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If you don't know what that is, read up. It's probably the most direct cause of most of our military policy since then.

This shit amused me:

• The Chicago White Sox have tied the American League record of 21 consecutive losses, with the MLB all-time record of 23 a distinct and shitty possibility.
• CrowdStrike has taken enough of Delta Airlines' shit, thank you.
• In addition to all the other shit that Hurricane Debby turned up over the weekend, the storm flushed 25 kilos of cocaine onto a Florida beach. Apparently, this happens all the time.

Finally, Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dropping 350 liters of very literal, very stinky shit onto a boatload of sightseers in the Chicago River. "The culprit turned out to be the band’s tour bus driver, then-42-year-old Stefan Wohl, who pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct and discharging contaminates to cause water pollution. He got hit with 18 months on probation, 150 hours of community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine to Friends of the Chicago River."

I mean, what the shit?

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate:

In picking Walz, 60, Harris is elevating a relatively unknown second-term governor from a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president in more than 50 years, passing over swing state contenders such as Arizona U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Harris and Walz will kick off a tour of battleground states Tuesday evening with a rally in Philadelphia.

Initially seen as a second-tier candidate for the job, Walz vaulted to the top of the list of possible prospects after spending weeks defending Harris on the cable news circuit, going viral in the process for his off-the-cuff messaging style. He’s credited with reframing the party’s attack on Republicans from an existential threat to democracy to these “really weird people” for their positions on abortion and book bans.

A national Democratic audience took to Walz’s blunt, fast-talking style and his “Minnesota nice” way of slamming Republicans, gaining supporters for the vice president job in labor unions, current and former members of Congress, progressive leaders and Gen Z activists like Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg.

I thought US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) would have rounded out the ticket well, but after seeing Harris's short list, Walz became my pick. I'm both glad and unsurprised that my governor, JB Pritzker, will stay in Springfield for another two years. (I expect he'll run for President in 2032.)

The election is 14 weeks from today. And though I try not to watch polls this far out, I did notice that as of yesterday, Harris is 3 points up against the XPOTUS, and her favorability is above water for the first time since she took office. Game on.