The Daily Parker

Welcome to stop #25 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Lunar Brewing Co., 54 E. St. Charles Rd., Villa Park
Train line: Union Pacific West, Villa Park
Time from Chicago: 36 minutes (Zone D)
Distance from station: 900 m

Sometimes you find good beer in unexpected places. Lunar Brewing in Villa Park appears as any other dive bar off a suburban stroad, but they have brewed their own beer since 1996.

I didn't have a lot of time so I tried only one of the six house beers on draft, the Scottish Ale:

I liked it. It had good malty caramel flavors, with a smooth, sweet finish.

I asked about food and dogs. No to dogs, because the village only allows them outside. They have a BYOF policy but, if you want something cheap and quick, "the best frozen pizzas you can buy," according to a longtime patron who was rolling his own cigarettes with a small rolling machine at one of the tables.

I appreciate a good dive bar, but I'm not sure I'd hike out to Villa Park to visit this one again.

On my way out, I got a good shot of the local Metra station:

Beer garden? No
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? 2, unavoidable
Serves food? BYO, or frozen pizza
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? No

The governor ordered everyone to stay at home only a few days ago, and yet it seems like much longer. I started working from home three weeks ago, initially because my entire team were traveling, and then for safety. My company turned off all our badges yesterday so I couldn't go back even if I wanted to. And I find myself planning meals a week out because I find it nearly impossible to cook small amounts of food. (Sample entries: Monday dinner, shrimp in garlic, butter, and wine sauce with wild rice; Tuesday lunch, leftover grilled chicken with wild rice. The shrimp were delicious, by the way.)

It doesn't help that the President and Senate Republicans are trying to turn this whole thing into a corporate giveaway. Some other lowlights:

• About 50 people had a birthday party in Westport, Conn., on March 5th, and then spread COVID-19 all over the world.
• The International Olympic Committee and Japan have postponed the 2020 Tokyo games for a year.
• India has ordered its 1.3 billion residents to stay home.
• Michelle Goldberg says "death panels" are coming for real this time.
• David Remnick thinks the virus has "shattered Trump's serene confidence."
• Do we need another article about how "Trump doesn't care about you?" TNR and Matt Ford think so.
• Data aggregator UnaCast has a "social distancing scoreboard" showing county-level information from mobile phone data about who's keeping socially distant and who's not.

But in one bit of good news, China announced an end to the two-month lockdown of Hubei province a few hours from now. Could we also start getting back to normal mid-May?

And finally, enjoy some scampi:

There's enough going on in COVID-19 news today that I will have a regular post on the subject later on. But why don't we start the day with yesterday's National Puppy Day photos in The Atlantic? Would that be good?

The New York Times' chief classical music critic, Anthony Tomassini, gives credit to the person who was Germany's greatest composer, until Bach:

[B]orn in 1585, exactly 100 years before Bach, he is considered the greatest German composer of the 17th century. I hardly knew his music, however, and neither does much of the concert-going public today.

One day, that professor put on a recording of Schütz’s “Die Sieben Worte Jesu am Kreuz,” a setting of Jesus’s final words from the cross, framed by two stanzas of a hymn text. From the start of the poignant Introitus to this austerely beautiful piece, I was hooked.

What grabbed me was the importance Schütz gave to making the German text clear. In faithfully rendering the clipped rhythms and natural cadences of the language, the music taps into the deeper meaning of the words. Schütz drives home the emotions through deliberate repetitions of overlapping phrases. As a devotee of musical theater, I was struck by how Schütz seemed to anticipate the word-setting techniques of Broadway songsmiths.

Later in life, Schütz — who died in 1672, at 87 years old — composed three passions that anticipated those of Bach. These works are affectingly austere. The elegant, supple, quasi-melodious recitatives for the Evangelist and Jesus are unaccompanied; the lucid choral writing is dramatic, but understated. The tenor Peter Schreier, who died last year, recorded all three of the Evangelist roles with the Dresdner Kreuzchor choir, singing with radiant sound and aching sensitivity. I especially love the “St. Matthew Passion.”

I don’t think Bach would mind if, now and then, a performance of his own “St. Matthew Passion” were replaced with Schütz’s. I’d be there.

If you find yourself with extra time on your hands, check out some of Schütz’s works. 

Welcome to stop #24 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: More Brewing, 126 S. Villa Ave., Villa Park
Train line: Union Pacific West, Villa Park
Time from Chicago: 36 minutes (Zone D)
Distance from station: 1.5 km

In the suburbs, sometimes "concepts" take precedence over everything else. This bustling, family-friendly brewpub "concept" fits perfectly with the suburban ethos. They opened during peak brewpub in August 2017, and they seem to be doing well.

Still, they brew their own beer, and they're within 1500 meters of a Metra stop, so to Villa Park I went. At least the walk there involved a rails-to-trails project that worked:

I tried three beers, all of them a bit hazy, as is my recollection of them.

First was the K.I.S.S. IPA (6.5%), a hazy hoppy citrusy clean beer, more like a NEIPA. The Mozie IPA (7%) was fruity, juicy, and tastes lighter than the ABV implies. And the Hush of the Night Milk Stout (7.5%) had definite coffee, toffee, and chocolate flavors, as a milk stout should—especially one made with Dark Matter coffee.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Yes, in the beer garden
Televisions? Unavoidable
Serves food? Full restaurant
Would hang out with a book? No
Would hang out with friends? No
Would go back? No

I'm trying to get my mind around a Conservative government announcing this a few minutes ago:

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has announced the government will pay the wages of British workers to keep them in jobs as the coronavirus outbreak escalates.

In an unprecedented step, Sunak said the state would pay grants covering up to 80% of the salary of workers kept on by companies, up to a total of £2,500 per month, just above the median income.

“We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” he said. “It’s on all of us.”

Sunak said there would be no limit on the funding available to pay people’s wages.

The government is also deferring the next quarter of VAT payments, which is the equivalent of injecting another £30bn into the economy and is designed to help companies stay afloat.

(Another thing that I just learned: Sterling has dropped 12% against the dollar in the past week, hitting £1 = $1.1641 a few minutes ago.)

Closer to home:

• Governor JB Pritzker is about to announce a "shelter-in-place" order for Illinois starting tomorrow. California announced a similar measure yesterday.
• The President snapped at a reporter when asked to say something to give Americans hope. (Well, it was an answer, anyway.)
• James Fallows says the man should just stop showing up to press conferences and let the experts talk.
• NPR explains the differences between SARS-CoV-2 and influenza.
• Bruce Schneier looks at ramped-up surveillance in the time of pandemic, and how to balance civil safety and civil rights.
• CityLab looks at what the pandemic has done to public transit.
• The Washington Post asked five writers, including John Scalzi, to speculate on what will change after the pandemic.

And finally, Mother Jones asks "How do you know if you're living through the death of an empire?"

Welcome to stop #23 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Stockholm's, 306 W State St., Geneva
Train line: Union Pacific West, Geneva
Time from Chicago: 67 minutes (Zone H)
Distance from station: 800 m

Penrose may have been the first pure-play brewery in Geneva, but Stockholm's, which opened on 5th July 2002, was the first place to brew beer there since prohibition. According to Mike Olesen, the owner, back in 2002 "it was hard to get people to try the beer," so he opened a restaurant instead of a tasting room.

He does flights of five for $9 and pints of some beers for $4. Plus they have excellent food. I munched on a French dip sandwich and fries while trying a cross-section of the current offerings.

Clockwise from the far left is the Pils (light, earthy nose, lots more flavor than I expect in a Pilsener), the Aegir's Ale (hint of sour from the cask conditioning with lots of malt—a proper English real ale), the Geneva Pale (really interesting, with caramel and malty flavors), the Brown Ale (intense, not too sweet, complex, lingering finish), and the Porter (subtle flavors, clean finishing, lighter than most porters I've had).

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? Two, unavoidable
Serves food? Full restaurant
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

I have tons of experience working from home, but historically I've balanced that by going out in the evenings. The pandemic has obviously cut that practice down to zero. Moreover, the village of Oak Park will start shelter-in-place measures tomorrow, so I expect Chicago to do the same in the next couple of days. The Oak Park order seems reasonable: stay home except for essentials like food and medicine, stay two meters away from other people, it's OK to walk your dog, and so on. Since I'm already doing all of those things, a Chicago order would only affect my friends who, for example, own book shops and can't work remotely for other reasons.

In other pandemic news:

• As of yesterday a record 41,000 Illinois residents filed for unemployment benefits in a 48-hour period.
• Two luxury hotels have closed in Chicago with others expected to follow.
• Bruce Schneier calls attention to a work-from-home security awareness kit and worries about how the pandemic will increase overall infosec vulnerability because people don't actually know how to secure their home offices.
• Josh Marshall worries we're flying totally blind, because we haven't collected vital data about the pandemic's spread.
• The pub where citizens took refuge in the Zombie apocalypse comedy Sean of the Dead has shut because of the pandemic. “We stayed open during a zombie plague, ISIS attacks on London, an alien invasion and the news that Genesis were reforming, but we’ve had to take expert advice and close our doors this time”, said landlord Simon Williams.
• Republican US Senator Richard Burr briefed "a small group of well-connected constituents" about COVID-19 three weeks ago, according to a secret recording obtained by NPR. Another Republican asshat, US Representative Don Young (R-AK), joked about the "beer virus" and suggested people continue going out as normal. (Even if I hadn't specified the party affiliations of these tools, you'd know which party, wouldn't you?)
• Former US Senator Al Franken calls Trump's response "the last straw."
• Peter Nicholas writes in the Atlantic that "this is how Donald Trump will be remembered."

Also, today is the 92nd anniversary of the debut of "Amos 'n' Andy" on Chicago's WMAQ radio.

Apollo Chorus assistant director Cody Michael Bradley has put out a series of "Quarantunes" to keep us musical through the social distancing phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today's installment was the old Joe Dassin song "Les Champs-Élysées."

New lyrics immediately sprang to mind. Voilà:

Je m'baladais sur l'avenue, le coeur ouvert à l'inconnu
J'avais envie de dire bonjour à n'importe qui
Mais tous les gens, et tous les autres les interdits d'aller dehors
Donc on peut pas dire quelques mots pour deux semaines plus

Today's news:

President Trump claims he knew COVID-19 was a pandemic all along, even though he had a strangely ineffective way of showing it.

• COVID-19 has caused a food security crisis as entire industries lay off vulnerable workers.
• The University of Illinois has cancelled graduation, devastating thousands of seniors.
• The World Health Organisation recommends avoiding Ibuprofen to treat COVID-19 symptoms; use paracetamol instead.
• Bob Cesca in Slate asks, "Why do we keep electing Republicans? They're no good at this."
• China has expelled 13 journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, in retaliation for the US expelling Chinese reporters earlier.
• Most of the Spring Gala Season in Chicago has been cancelled. (The Apollo Chorus moved its fundraiser to July 17th, crossing our fingers that the worst will be over by then.)
• Joe Biden won the most delegates in three big states (including Illinois) yesterday, making him all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Finally, and not related even a little to COVID-19, Olga Khazan writes in the Atlantic about "the perks of being a weirdo."