The Daily Parker

Stuff to read later:

• New Republic asks, if so many people hate Hillary Clinton, why is she getting more votes than any other candidate running in either party?
• Paul Krugman expands on the thought that the Republican Party made Trump possible.
• New York Magazine wonders why we're not talking about the GOP disasters in Louisiana and Kansas, when their national candidates are still running on those failed platforms.
• The Chicago River is getting cleaner. You still never want to fall in, though...
• Cranky Flier explains why TSA Pre-Check isn't the solution people had hoped it would be. (Hint: The Republican-led Congress.)
• Turns out, people in Roman times weren't usually nailed to crosses; they were tied up.
• Millennials are now finding out what it's like to try managing millennials. Pass the popcorn.
• Josh Malina is starting a weekly West Wing podcast. I'll have to listen.

OK, conference call is ending. Time to perambulate the pooch.

This weekend I've had a lot going on, resulting in yet another blog miss on Saturday.

Friday was C2E2; Friday night was Whiskyfest; yesterday was a pair of rehearsals for Apollo After Hours.

Today? Errands, mainly. And catching up on stuff—like the news.

Sometimes my life is just this exciting.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won their respective Illinois primary elections yesterday. And in other news:

• Turns out, a strong social safety net leads to lower mortality, and because poor, mostly-white areas in the U.S. voted theirs down to minuscule levels, poor, white people are not doing well.
• When you vote against your own party in a hot battle with the opposition governor, and the governor wins that battle, that's a career-limiting move. Illinois representative Ken Dunkin (D-Chicago) got spanked hard for doing that last night. Good.
• A guy got charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly jamming cell phones on the CTA Red Line.
• President Obama nominated an old white guy to the Supreme Court this morning, flummoxing Senate Republicans who want to stonewall the process.
• For no reason anyone can determine, the city seems to be waging a war against valet parking companies. Businesses are annoyed.
• The Daily WTF thought President Obama sounded like an idiot boss on the subject of cell-phone encryption. Even John Oliver thought so.
• London is using pigeons with tiny backpacks to measure air pollution. No, really.
• Marco Rubio's friends say he's a lazy, devious little twerp—on the record. He's also dropped out of the 2016 race, and will probably be out of politics for a couple elections.
• Donald Trump's butler probably thought he was helping his boss by giving an interview to the Times, but...well...
• The Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) is this weekend. Here's what to see.

Time to write some documentation. Whee.

I drove to a vendor site today because Google Maps told me it would take 18 minutes. (It took 21.) Then I drove around in expanding circles for almost 45 minutes trying to find a parking space, which I finally did almost a kilometer away.

I really hate finding out after the fact that the slower form of transportation would have been faster.

Oh, you crazy kids. This is a short list of what happened Saturday afternoon and evening in the area around Wrigley Field:

1:26PM — Dust off the ambulance. We have a female unconscious outside of Sluggers World Class Sports Bar, 3540 N Clark.

2:16PM — Callers at Addison and Halsted report seeing a man with a gun in his pocket. He is the first of many persons who will be described as wearing green clothing.

11:26PM — Recommendation: Don’t drink on the public way. Especially in front of the police station. Citation issued. 850 W Addison.

1:50AM — Hey! Remember that car that the police were impounding at Addison and Sheffield? Yeah, well, two women got into it and drove away. They've been caught and arrested at Belmont and Sheffield.

For all that, this year arrests and ambulance calls were way down from years past. Come on, Millennials, you're slacking.

I'm leaving Harold Washington in a few minutes, now that I've caught up on some reading:

• Clancy Martin attempted to explain the martyr-like appeal of Ted Cruz.
• Deeply Trivial, who writes survey questions as part of her job, explained why she doesn't take surveys.
• Via Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the University of Arizona outlined some new data linking sunspots, shipwrecks, tree trunks, and hurricanes.
• Suzy Khimm described the return of the pillory—via Internet, of course—as a tactic of some public prosecutors, most notably in the 2013 "Flush the Johns" operation in Nassau County, New York.
• Cranky Flier got interested in a robot that cleans airplanes. It's pretty cool.
• NPR media critic Adam Frank said I should watch SyFy's new series, "The Expanse."
• Engineer John Hayes wondered if we'll ever see a space elevator of the sort depicted in Neal Stephenson's Seveneves or Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
• Spanish writer Cristina Pop thought living in London was the worst three years of her life. (It sounds like her experiences don't exactly line up with mine, starting with her not speaking a word of English when she got there.)

I also watched a time-lapse video of the Chicago River turning green last year. If you want to see this odd Chicago tradition, go downtown tomorrow at 9.

I have a couple hours to kill in the Loop after having lunch with a friend. I don't really want caffeine or alcohol right now, which rules out the two classes of places to where I would most likely go. Then I remembered: there's a great big library here.

And yep, it looks like a library on the inside: shelves full of books, people reading, literary quotes on the walls, free WiFi. OK, that last bit isn't something I remember from the 1980s, but everything else is. They even have a shelf full of phone books.

OK, I've been here before, but still, I'm laughing at myself for not considering hanging out here before.

The Chicago Transit Authority has concluded a deal worth up to $1.4 bn for 850 new rail cars:

The CTA’s board Wednesday approved the largest single purchase of rapid transit cars in Chicago history, giving the contract to a Chinese rail manufacturer that has promised to build a final assembly plant on the city’s Far South Side.

CTA officials said riders will see several major improvements when the prototype 7000-series cars arrive in late 2019. There will be full-width on-board LED screens capable of giving both of automated time and stop information, and real-time transit information in the event of delays or reroutes.

When the 7000-series cars are delivered in 2024, CTA will have the newest fleet of rapid transit cars in the nation, according to Bonds. He said the average age of a CTA ‘L’ car will be 13 years. By comparison, Boston has an average fleet age of 27 years, Washington, D.C. averages 25 years, New York averages 22 years and San Francisco averages 18 years.

The first prototypes should roll onto CTA tracks in October 2019.

Yesterday's temperature at O'Hare got up to 21°C, which we last hit on November 5th, and is the normal temperature for May 15th. It was quite a lovely day, in fact. Tom Skilling pointed out that this was the earliest 21°C day in 16 years, and was 3 weeks earlier than the average date of its first occurrence based on 145 years of data.

I tried, I really tried, to hit 30,000 steps, but...well:

Crap. I missed 30,000 by 225 steps, and missed my record by only 721:

Note that on September 5th I also missed a goal by almost the same amount. Quite irritating. Still, yesterday's step count was fully 4.86 standard deviations above my mean daily count of 12,660, so it was a pretty good effort. (At this point today I'm already up to 9,534, so the week is looking pretty good.)

And Parker got over 90 minutes of walkies.

Yesterday's 17.2°C temperature at O'Hare was the warmest since it was 17.8°C on November 15th. It might not get warmer than that, but who cares, because it that's plenty warm for early March. 17.8°C is Chicago's normal temperature for April 29th; the normal for March 8th is 6.1°C.

That's the good news. The better news is that working from home means Parker is working napping from home as well. And we just got back from an 80-minute, 8.1-km walk, his longest in (no surprise) even more months.

Now the bad news. We were walking from the car dealership where they are figuring out how much I'm to pay them later this week. My car has a couple of "minor" symptoms including a damaged tire (thanks, Chicago!), but it's a 7-year-old BMW. So anything that would cost $100 to fix on a Corolla will cost me $200. Can't wait for the call...

I do have some work to do today—more on that this afternoon. But I'm already at 11,000 steps, with a goal of 30,000 for the day. I've only hit that number once, last April 26th. There's a lot of day ahead of me, and it's 9,000 steps back to the car dealership. Stay tuned.

Update, 11:26: The 11am temperature at O'Hare was 19°C, the highest reading since November 5th. If we hit 23°C we'll have the warmest day since October 21st.