The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Catching up on the news

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 1930s we have right now.
  • Josh Marshall shakes his head at the people in our party who think the electorate is waiting with bated breath to find out which nonessential policies we're going to go with in 2026.
  • Jeff Maurer draws similar parallels, this time between HBO/Max/HBO Max/whatever's branding problems and those of the Democratic Party.
  • Paul Krugman slaps the GOP hard for its "incredibly cruel" budget—which is their point: "Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards."
  • Speaking of cruelty, Jack Goldsmith picks apart Stephen Miller's trolling about habeas corpus, and pleads with journalists to stop falling for this stuff.
  • Michael Tomasky says that Kamala Harris's race and gender weren't the problem with her candidacy—it's that the party stopped all conversation about her fitness for the presidency because of her race and gender.
  • Tyler Austin Harper agrees, saying that the King Lear analogy with President Biden postulated in Jake Tapper's Original Sin doesn't quite work: his core advisers and his wife bear a lot more responsibility for our 2024 loss than they get credit for.
  • Oh, and hey, did anyone in North America notice that the PKK lay down their arms and have ended their 40-year insurgency against Türkiye? It's kind of a big deal.
  • In one bit of good news, the critically-endangered piping plovers nesting at Montrose Beach a few hundred meters to the east of where I'm sitting have laid an egg. Good luck, Imani and Sea Rocket!
  • The UK has asked if the US Federal Aviation Administration might possibly do their jobs a bit better regulating the Clown Prince of X's rockets, which keep blowing up over the UK's Caribbean territories and littering their beaches with debris.

Finally, Scottish writer Dan Richards looks across the Atlantic and sees that the infrastructure choices we've made have driven us to having only two bad options: slow cars or polluting airplanes. Europe made investments throughout the last 30 years that gave them sleek and comfortable overnight trains.

I last took an overnight European train in September 2013, on what may be my best visit to the UK ever. The Caledonian Sleeper leaves London Euston at 22:30 and gets to Edinburgh at 08:00, for about £250 per person. Put that price against a flight and a hotel, or even an daytime express train and a hotel, and it's not a bad deal. Plus you get a wake-up call with hot tea before arriving.

Exploring Edgebrook

I've never walked around the Edgebrook neighborhood in Chicago, and I've kept meaning to. So today, with clear, cool weather and nothing pressing to do, I took Cassie for a 40-minute walk up there.

I expect I'll have more interesting things to say tomorrow. The sun doesn't set for almost four hours, and we'll have twilight past 8:30, so I think I'm going to take Cassie out for another walk.

Cassie got a paw massage yesterday

Before we even set out yesterday, I discovered evidence of a cardinal nest in my back patio. The evidence was this guy and his mate dive-bombing me when I went out to check the Inner Drive Technology weather station:

Later, we took the most direct route to the Horner Park Dog Park, where I met up with a friend and Cassie met a bunch of new friends:

Altogether, Cassie got 3 hours of exercise, and we stayed outside for about 6½ hours total. We won't get anywhere near that today, unfortunately, but yesterday was a lot of fun for everyone except the cardinals outside my back door.

The Chicago way

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.

Record temperature at O'Hare and a happy dog

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.

Things should calm down next week

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:

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.

Adventures in cold fronts

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.

Lakefront temperatures

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.

Shifting gears after a morning of meetings

Just queuing a few things up to read at lunchtime:

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.

Was it the endorsement?

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 to do with Vice President Vance is left as an exercise for the reader.

Meanwhile:

Finally, United Airlines has pledged to buy up to 200 JetZero Z4 airplanes, which employ a blended-wing design that has never been used in civil air transport before. It's really cool-looking, and offers some interesting interior possibilities. I might miss the windows, though. JetZero expects a first flight in 2027.