The Daily Parker

Both United and American want approval for non-stop flights from Chicago to Havana:

Initially, the customer pool for Chicago-to-Havana trips would be limited, given the ongoing trade embargo. The Department of the Treasury only permits travelers to fly to Cuba for a dozen reasons, including family visits, official governmental trips and humanitarian missions.

But carriers are eager to establish a beachhead in the island nation, which might eventually prove a robust destination for leisure and business travelers as well.

“It's been an untapped market for 50 years,” said John Weber, director for the Americas at British consultancy Aviation Analytics. “The interest of carriers is to get in and get established from the very beginning.”

Both airlines proposed a weekly 737-800 flight leaving Saturday morning and returning Saturday night. As soon as I can, I'll be happy to spend a week in Cuba and get full frequent-flyer miles for the trip.

While I'm going through a boring cycle of NuGet updates, unit tests, and inexplicable app-publishing failures related to the above, I'm piling up a crapload of articles to read on my flight tomorrow:

• Lifehacker explains how to see everything on your home network. (It's not that hard.)
• The Chicago Tribune takes you inside Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook, Ill., where my grandfather worked for 30 years.
• A group of physicists and mathematicians has listed the 15 most-complex subway maps in the world. (We're #12! We're #12!)
• Illinois got a metric shit-ton (i.e., a shite-tonne) of snow yesterday, but not as much as Indiana.
• The French Academy got rid of the circonflexe 20 years ago, but the French people are just now outraged that textbooks are starting to reflect the change.
• The infamous Lincoln Park Pirates (officially known as Lincoln Towing) could be shut down after decades of violating state law. They're across the street from a cemetery, so dancing on their grave will not be difficult.

Back to work. At least my build is succeeding now.

There's a blizzard outside, which has alarmed Parker to no end (the wind scares him), and my computer is dragging because it's running a virus scan. And I'm having yet another version conflict installing a NuGet package, which is annoying since NuGet is supposed to stop that from happening.

Otherwise, just an ordinary Wednesday...

Last Friday, Chicago got up to 17°C, not a record but certainly not what we expect on February 19th. Today it's a more-seasonable 3°C.

Tomorrow afternoon we're going up to the same temperature, but with a covering of wet snow, gusty winds, and general unpleasantness.

Saturday's forecast? 10°C and sunny.

Ah, Spring.

A medium-length list this time:

• A Megabus exploded outside Chicago yesterday, but that shouldn't scare you away from intercity buses.
• Let's not forget that Antonin Scalia tried to take the country backwards, and was an intellectual phony on top of it.
• BBC Radio 4 has just released a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, featuring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer.
• While Flint, Mich., has bad things in its municipal water supply, Chicago's isn't much better.
• California tax offices have had to adapt to taking in large amounts of (herbal-scented) cash, because Federal banking regulations make it nearly impossible for marijuana sellers to open bank accounts.
• Paul Krugman is not shilling for Hilary Clinton, so stop accusing him of corruption. We Democrats are better than that.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has floated a plan to buy $2-3 billion in new rail cars, but there's a little more to the deal than meets the eye.
• Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee made Jewish humor mainstream.

And this brings me to lunch.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a light breeze:

It's so windy that the Randolph Street Bridge is closed. Cromidas saw this too. Officials told her they were worried debris from a nearby construction site (the same one where a wall collapse a few months ago) would be blown into traffic. Fire officials tweeted that building occupants at 150, 180 and 191 N. Wacker Drive were all evacuated because of debris falling from the construction site at 150 N. Riverside.

It's so windy that a woman almost blew away trying to get into a cab. NBC caught her ordeal on tape.

O'Hare's 4pm reading had winds down to 55 km/h with gusts of only 83 km/h. So conditions are improving a bit... Plus, it's still 11°C outside.

Parker is freaking out because wind makes a lot of scary noise (to a dog, anyway), and he's now stress-farting, so we're going for a walk. I'm a little disappointed that temperatures will return to seasonal chills by Monday, too. So make hay while the wind blows at 52 knots, right?

The official temperature at O'Hare got up to 15°C this afternoon, which you'd expect in early April and not in mid-February. That's the good news. The bad news is the warm air mass is being driven by converging jet streams more or less directly over Chicago, giving us 67 km/h winds gusting to—I am not making this up—100 km/h. Buildings in the Loop are being evacuated because windows are popping out. Also, people are giving cranes wide berths.

Have I mentioned that anthropogenic climate change will (a) be pretty good for Chicago, for a few decades anyway, and (b) pump more energy into the atmosphere causing these kinds of wind events?

Crain's lists five Chicago-area distilleries, including Few (my favorite), that have run out of room:

• The West Loop's CH Distillery plans to build a 20,000-square-foot distillery in Pilsen on the site of the old bottling building of the long-defunct Schoenhofen Brewery. It aims to boost capacity to more than 100,000 9-liter cases per year, up from about 8,000 in its current distillery and tasting room. The two-and-a-half-year-old distillery, whose top products are vodka, rum and two types of gin, produced 5,000 cases last year, up from 2,900 in 2014.
• Few Spirits in Evanston is seeking its fourth expansion in five years to meet demand for its barrel-aged products. The company doubled the size of its warehouse two years ago and is again running out of space. With production doubling last year, led by sales of gin and whiskey, Few is looking to expand again.

Local booze-makers are riding a boom in sales of craft spirits, which jumped 35 percent in 2015 to about 2.4 million 9-liter cases from 1.7 million in 2014, according to the American Distilling Institute's annual survey. That's after 42 percent sales growth in 2014 and a 50 percent spurt in 2013.

While figures aren't available for Illinois, the breakneck growth of CH Distillery, which distributes only in-state and has no immediate plans to do otherwise, offers a clear indication that the local market is just as robust.

I love Few's barrel-aged gin, which is as much a sipping spirit as a good Scotch or Bourbon. CH doesn't make all of their own stuff yet, so them opening their own distillery is good news.

Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg put the Rauner administration in context in a column a couple of weeks ago:

Not only did Rauner fail to make tangible progress, but he didn’t even tread water properly. The normal operation of the state, such as passing an annual budget, failed to occur, sacrificed on the altar of the governor’s hunger for term limits, union enfeeblement and other unrelated pet causes. He’s like an office manager getting himself hired by promising to expand a business who then promptly fails to pay the electric bill, as a point of principle against the electric company monopoly, so they turn the lights off. Now we’re sitting in the dark, listening to him explain.

But give credit where due: Rauner has accomplished something real, something that I would have thought impossible:

He makes Rod Blagojevich look good.

In 2014, Rauner won every county in Illinois except Cook, beating Pat Quinn by about 150,000 votes out of 3.6 million cast. That's not a huge mandate. But it has turned into a huge disaster. ("A yuge disaster?" Hm.)

I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading:

• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves.
• Christopher Dickey, Our Man In Charleston.
• Gene Kim, et al., The Phoenix Project.

On deck:

• Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars.

Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting:

• Deeply Trivial dissects the bogus claim that six coin tosses going the same way (a) decided the Iowa caucuses and (b) is improbable.
• Speaking of statistics, meteorologist Tom Skilling simultaneously describes our very mild winter and the coming Arctic blast next week, noting that the cold weather will be caused by significantly warmer-than-normal weather in Western North America.
• Bruce Schneier calls attention to the growing planet-sized robot we're creating. (No kidding; it's not even a little bit sci-fi.)
• The Chicago Public Schools have just borrowed $875 million at a penalty interest rate 75 bps over what they expected and something like 700 bps over prime, meaning the loan might be worse than not borrowing the money.
• Illinois State Senator Daniel Bliss (D-Evanston) points out that the dispute between Gov. Rauner and the State Legislature is philosophical, and the governor is flat wrong.
• Chicago has mixed politics with snow removal basically forever.
• L.A.'s iconic Sixth St. Viaduct is going away, as is the concrete river under it.
• Ted Cruz might have gone farther if he weren't such an asshole.
• Microsoft Azure Stack is a thing I need to learn about.
• So is ReSharper 10.1.

Time to read.

Meanwhile, I seem to have a cold. Yuck.