The Daily Parker

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ bottomed out this morning, hitting -4.8°C at 10:41 am, and it may even end the day above freezing. So this mercifully-short cold snap won't keep us out of the record books, just as predicted. It's still the warmest winter in Chicago history. (Let's hope we don't set the same record for spring or summer.)

Meanwhile, the record continues to clog up with all kinds of fun stories elsewhere:

• Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has led his party in the Senate since the Cretaceous, announced he will step down from leadership in November, handing some other schmuck clean-up duties after the electoral disaster likely to befall the party on the 5th of that month.
• After the unhinged ruling on embryo "personhood" the Alabama Supreme Court handed down last week, Republicans across the country have fallen over themselves saying they want to protect IVF treatment while they vote against protecting IVF treatment. Jamelle Bouie runs down some of the dumbass things Republicans have said on the ruling, with a cameo from the dumb-as-rocks junior US Senator from Alabama, who sounded more like Nigel Tufnel than usual.
• Aaron Blake pointedly contradicts the usual "bad for Biden" story line by putting President Biden's Michigan-primary win last night in perspective.
• Bruce Schneier looks at the difficulties insuring against cyber crime, one of the problems we're also solving at my day job.
• New York prosecutors said the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited "willful blindness" in 1966 when it acquired art looted by the Nazis, an accusation the museum denies.
• Harry Windsor, the Duke of Sussex, lost his case against the UK Home Office, in which he sued to keep his publicly-funded security detail the same size as it was when he actually did his job as the Royal Spare. The high court (the rough equivalent of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in this case) ruled that the relevant agency had made a perfectly rational decision as the Duke now lives in California, doesn't do bugger-all for the UK, and is a whiny prat to boot.

Finally, Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter took a—gasp!—CTA train to a city council hearing, at which he promised the CTA could be the best transit system in the world if only the State of Illinois would give it more funding. The very last thing I did in Munich on Sunday was to take the S-Bahn to the airport at 7am, so I can assure you money isn't the CTA's only impediment to achieving that lofty goal.

(Also, I just realized that This Is Spinal Tap turns 40 on Saturday. Wow.)

The cold front we expected passed over my house around 8:15 last night. I wouldn't call it subtle, either:

Even that doesn't get to the truly unsubtle aspects of this frontal passage. The radar image might, though:

Not shown: the 60 km/h winds, lashing rain, brilliant lightning show, 5-10 mm hailstones, tornadoes to the northwest and southeast, and a mildly alarmed dog getting pats on the couch.

And it keeps getting better this morning. Right now I'm in a Loop high rise gently swaying in the 45 km/h winds, with the temperature continuing to drop outside:

June to January in 12 hours! Whee!

And what's the forecast for spring's first weekend? Sunny and 17°C. In fact, the weather for this week could best be summed up thus: June on Monday and Tuesday; January today; early March tomorrow followed by late March on the first day of spring; then late May/early June through the weekend with a chance of April by Tuesday.

Lunch today will be from the Chipotle across the street. Lunch yesterday involved a 30-minute break outside. Welcome to Chicago in the last days of an El Niño winter.

(Or maybe this is happening because today is Tom Skilling's last day at WGN?)

It's official: with two days left, this is the warmest winter in Chicago history, with the average temperature since December 1st fully 3.5°C (6.3°F) above normal. We've had only 10 days this winter when the temperature stayed below freezing, 8 of them in one week in February. This should remain the case when spring officially begins on Friday, even though today's near-record 23°C (so far) is forecast to fall to -6°C by 6am. And that's not even to discuss the raging thunderstorms and possible tornadoes we might get as an energetic cold front slices through tonight. By "energetic," I mean that the NWS predicts a drop by as much as 16°C (30°F) in one hour around 10pm.

Not to worry: it'll be 17°C by Sunday. (The normal high temperatures are 4.7°C for February 27th and 5.4°C for March 3rd; the records are 23.9°C and 26.7°C, respectively.)

Meanwhile, I don't have time to read all of these before I pack up my laptop tonight:

• While the XPOTUS has barely gotten the support of 60% of his own party in the last three primary elections this cycle, despite literally everyone knowing he'll be the nominee, Josh Marshall expects a week of Biden In Trouble™ articles if Biden fails to win by 95% in tonight's Michigan primary.
• Right-wing nutjob lawyer Ken Cheesbro has a not-so-secret-anymore Twitter account in which he made certain admissions that will very likely result in a perjury charge or two.
• Republican 11th Circuit judge Kevin Newsom criticized the "traditionalists" on the US Supreme Court for straying far from originalism in remarks last week at Harvard.
• Jennifer Rubin adores New York Attorney General Letitia Jones's "fire in the belly."
• Claire Potter reviews Matthew Lassiter's history of the War on Drugs and finds "the suburbs made the War on Drugs in their own image."
• Asia Mieleszko reminds the haters that Dallas used to have a walkable downtown, until they paved it over.
• Biologist David Gruber imagines what first contact with an alien civilization might look like, when the civilization in question is that of terrestrial sperm whales.

And now, back to getting ready for the Sprint 103 release. That's a lot of sprints.

As fun as my trip last week was, having this last night was awesome:

I've also got my windows open, because we just set a new record high temperature for February 26th of 19.4°C. Of course, it may snow tomorrow night, because it's still winter until Friday.

OK, back to work...

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.

As planned, I took a day trip to Nürnberg, which required a 70-minute high-speed train that cost more than I'd planned. In fact, if I'd planned which trains to take, and bought the tickets last week, I could have saved about $50. Of course I had no way to predict today's amazing weather.

First, about that train. In Europe, a 244 km/h train is bog-standard:

From Munich to Ingolstadt it tools along at a leisurely 160 km/h, but after Ingolstadt, they put the hammer down, as you can see in the GPS readout in the upper-left corner.

And I am glad I took the trip, because Nürnberg is gorgeous:

It's also where Johannes Pachelbel committed his musical atrocities just over 400 years ago:

True story: at my wedding many eons ago, I hired a string quartet, and told them they would not get paid if they played anything by that guy. They stuck with Mozart, Haydn, and some Satie at one point, if memory serves.

The sky looks different this morning:

I'm about to head to Nuremberg, depending on the price of train tickets. They seem to vary quite a bit every time I check online. But on a day like this, I'm sure I can find something fun to do nearby.

Throughout history, right-wing politicians have promised order in exchange for power. Every time, this has been a lie.

The National Rifle Association has kept to that model for decades: "We'll fight for the most unhinged interpretation of the Second Amendment possible, so our members can make billions selling guns to the people most likely to use them." You just have to remember that the NRA's members are the gun manufacturers, not the gun owners, for it all to make sense.

Except, the US courts sometimes work correctly, shutting down bullshit in favor of plain language. Even better when a jury has had enough:

Wayne LaPierre diverted millions of dollars away from the National Rifle Association to live luxuriously, while the gun rights group failed to properly manage its finances, a jury found Friday.

The case against the NRA was brought on by a lawsuit filed in 2020 by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who accused LaPierre and other current and former executives of flouting state laws and internal policies to enrich themselves.

They said LaPierre caused $5.4 million in monetary harm to the NRA but that he has already repaid at least $1 million of that. The 74-year-old appeared stoic as the verdict was read.

How surprising, if you know anything about humans: the head of an organization dedicated to shooting everyone in America turns out to have used his position for personal enrichment. It's so strange how organizations dedicated to changing the world turn out to be less corrupt than organizations dedicated to keeping everything the same, innit?

The US is at a turning point. We can throw all our power to private interests, in exchange for a completely unfounded belief that "those people" won't do whatever it is you're afraid of, or we can say "fuck all this" and start building for the future.

I have a suspicion that the latter is actually happening. At least in Illinois. Maybe someday this will be the norm.

Meanwhile, I'm in Germany, where people find the entire discussion horrifying. It turns out that getting shot for no reason is a bad thing, according to everyone in the world except for the NRA. If only there were a way to send a message to the right-wing nutters that we're all done with their bullshit...

Finally recovered from jet lag, our hero takes a 6-kilometer walk along the Isar and through Glockenbachviertel:

As the sun set, it found a gap in the clouds which I hope means tomorrow it'll come out for a while. You can see a little bit of it here on the Paulaner Brewery:

(I didn't stop in; any Brews & Choos stops on this trip will come tomorrow, in Nuremburg.)

The Theresien-Gymnasium:

And back at Marienplatz just as twilight became night:

Now, off to find a beer.

Since I learned how to drive a car, I've wanted to pick up a BMW in Munich. The European Delivery program allowed Americans to buy a made-to-order car at their local dealer, pick it up in Munich, drive it around Europe for up to 6 months, drop it off at an Atlantic port (Antwerp, I think), and drive it home from your local dealer about 12 weeks after that. Because of tax incentives from the German government and other factors, the purchase price of the car and delivery to your local dealer cost almost exactly what it would cost without picking it up here.

Sadly, it appears that program has ended, in part because of the pandemic, but also because BMW now builds most of its North American cars in North America. You can always go to Spartanburg, S.C., I suppose, but that isn't quite the same thing.

If I ever get a huge bonus or win the lottery, I'd buy a BMW anyway; specifically, the 330eX, their 4-wheel-drive plug-in hybrid. I'm sure my Prius Prime gets much better efficiency (and costs about half what the 330eX would), but having owned two BMWs before, I can assure you a BMW is much more fun to drive.

So with no way to buy a BMW this weekend, I at least got to the source:

And continuing a theme of this weekend, I got there on a fast, quiet, modern subway train:

Unrelated to anything transportation-related, I have an update on Cassie and her friend Butters from the latter's humans. Both girls like food:

And they both like naps:

Now that I've had a quick lunch of Schweinswurst, Käse, Oliven, und ein Shoko-croissant, I am going to take a walk through the Isarvorstadt neighborhood just to my southwest.

Updates, on dogs, trains, and walks, as conditions warrant.