The Daily Parker

That's just one of the absurdities that I encountered over the course of the last 24 hours:

• A prankster put up an official-looking sign declaring Loyola Beach on the north side of Chicago clothing-optional. Unfortunately no one was fooled.
• For the 15th or 20th time since its founding, critics accuse the US Navy of adapting too slowly to emerging risks in order to preserve tradition and Mississippi jobs. (Really, this comes up about every 20 years.)
• Of course, it doesn't help that we currently have no Chief of Naval Operations, Army Chief of Staff, or Marine Commandant, thanks to US Senator Tommy "Never Could Beat Alabama" Tuberville (R-AL).
• A working group that didn't include historians has proposed how sweeping changes to Chicago-area transit can help it become more like 1960s Baltimore more quickly: concentrate on "financial viability" at the expense of fast, frequent service. Because we really have learned nothing in the last 75 years.
• Illinois has become the third-largest home of data center space in part because we have a lot of office parks no one wants anymore.

Finally, Arizona continues to allow residential development as if the state has as much available water as Illinois. Because we really have learned nothing in the last 75 years.

National Geographic feasts on the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet:

People in Greece, Italy, and other Mediterranean countries consume diets that are rich in predominantly plant-based foods. The core foods include whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, and healthy fats such as extra virgin olive oil. Moderate amounts of lean proteins (such as fish, seafood, and poultry) are encouraged, as are eggs, dairy products such as yogurt, and wine (red wine, in particular, with meals). By contrast, red meats and sweets are meant to be consumed less often. Over time, this healthy eating pattern came to be known as the Mediterranean diet.

“Certain nutrients found in these foods, such as antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids, have protective effects on brain cells,” explains Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist and director of the Weill Cornell Medicine Alzheimer’s Prevention Program. “Research suggests that adherence to the Mediterranean diet is associated with greater brain volume and a reduced rate of brain atrophy, which are markers of healthier brain aging.” And recent studies show that by simultaneously targeting multiple mechanisms, the Mediterranean diet can prevent cell death and restore function to damaged neurons.

“It has also been associated with decreased recurrence among cancer survivors,” says Nathan Berger, a professor of medicine, biochemistry, oncology, and genetics, at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. “While it’s never too late to implement a healthy lifestyle, the benefits of the Mediterranean diet have classically been associated with its lifelong practice.”

Now I'm hungry. Naf Naf Grill tomorrow for lunch? Yes, I think.

The temperature has crept up towards 34°C all day after staying at a comfortable 28°C yesterday and 25°C Friday. It's officially 33°C at O'Hare but just a scoshe above 31°C at IDTWHQ. Also, I still feel...uncomfortable in certain places closely associated with walking. All of which explains why I'm jotting down a bunch of news stories to read instead of walking Cassie.

• First, if you have tomorrow off for Labor Day, you can thank Chicago workers. (Of course, if you have May 1st off for Labor Day, you can also thank us on the actual day that they intended.)
• A new study suggests 84% of the general population want to experience an orchestral concert, though it didn't get into how much they want to pay for such a thing. (You can hear Händel's complete Messiah on December 9th at Holy Name Cathedral or December 10th at Millar Chapel for just $50!)
• An FBI whistleblower claims Russian intelligence co-opted Rudy Giuliani in the run-up to the 2020 election—not as a Russian agent, mind you, just as a "useful idiot."
• Rapper Eminem has told Republican presidential (*cough*) candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—who Michelle Goldberg calls "very annoying"—to stop using his music in his political campaign.
• The government of Chile has promised to investigate the 3000 or so disappearances that happened under dictator Agosto Pinochet, though they acknowledge that it might be hard to find the ones thrown out of helicopters into the sea, or dropped down mine shafts. And with most of the murderers already dead of old age, it's about time.
• Julia Ioffe wonders when the next putsch attempt will get close to Moscow, now that Prigozhin seems to be dead.
• About 70,000 people continue to squelch through ankle-deep mud at Black Rock City after torrential rains at Burning Man this weekend. (I can't wait to see the moop map...)
• University of Michigan Law Professor Nicholas Bagley had a cogent explanation of why pharmaceutical companies don't want to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. (Hint: record profits.)
• Switching Chicago's pre-World War II bungalows from gas to electric heating could cut the city's GHG emissions by 14%.
• Molly White's weekly newsletter starts off with some truly clueless and entitled behavior from Sam Bankman-Fried and gets weirder.
• Zoning laws, plus the inability of the Portland, Ore., government to allow variances in any useful fashion, has condemned an entire high school to send its kids an hour away by bus while the building gets repaired, rather than just across the street to the community college many of them attend in the evenings. (Guess what skin color the kids have. Go on, guess.)
• A group of hackers compromised a Portuguese-language "stalkerware" company and deleted all the data the company's spyware had downloaded, as well as the keys to the compromised phones it came from, then posted the company's customer data online. "Because fuck stalkerware," they said.
• Traffic engineers, please don't confuse people by turning their small-town streets into stroads. It causes accidents. Which you, not they, have caused.
• Illinois had a mild and dry summer, ending just before our ferociously hot Labor Day weekend.
• James Fallows talks about college rankings, "which are marginally more encouraging than the current chaos of College Football."

Finally, I'll just leave this Tweet from former labor secretary Robert Reich as its own little monument to the New Gilded Age we now inhabit:

Three multibillionaires now own more wealth than the bottom 90% of America – 291 million Americans. This is what oligarchy looks like.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) September 3, 2023

I tried something different yesterday after watching Uncle Roger's stab at adobo:

Ng's basic outline worked really well, and I got close to what I had hoped on the first attempt. Next time I'll use less liquid, a bit more sugar, a bit less vinegar, and a bit more time simmering. Still, dinner last night was pretty tasty.

Much of the news today, however, is not:

• US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set the XPOTUS's Federal criminal trial for next March 4th, two years earlier than he wanted it.
• Writing for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan blasts Republican presidential wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy as "a demagogue in waiting," and a distressing preview of Millennial politicians.
• The MiG pilot who ejected during an airshow on August 13th blamed the non-flying observer in the back seat for pulling the ejection cord on his own.
• Chicago has struggled for 15 or more years to get critical repairs to our international dock on the South Side.
• Elizabeth Spiers has a pretty good idea why Michael Oher, subject of Michael Lewis's 2006 book The Blind Side and the 2009 film of the same name, is pissed off at the white family that didn't actually adopt him.

Finally, via Bruce Schneier, a couple of kids with $30 worth of radio equipment managed to stop 20 trains in Poland by exploiting a mind-boggling weakness in Polish train dispatching equipment. Despite some media sources calling this a "cyber attack," it was nothing of the sort. The instructions for how to do this have existed for decades.

Welcome to stop #85 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Liquid Love Brewing, 1310 Busch Pkwy., Buffalo Grove
Train line: North Central Service, Buffalo Grove
Time from Chicago: 55 minutes
Distance from station: 1.3 km

Before I review Liquid Love, I need to apologize for having a couple of breweries on this list that meet the criteria but really don't belong here. If Hailstorm in Tinley Park didn't have it's great beer and vibe, I would not recommend it, for the same reason that I can't recommend Liquid Love. Alter Brewing in Downers Grove got a "maybe go back" only because you only have to slog 800 meters through an unwalkable industrial park.

No such luck here. From the moment you get off the Metra at Buffalo Grove, you have almost a mile of stroads and sidewalk- and shade-free light industrial park hellscape to traverse before you get to this little taproom next to the ironically-named "MiR Tactical" paintball supply shop in the same strip mall. ("Mir" is Russian for "peace.")

Their beer was not too bad, though I found their palate a bit malty for my taste. I tried the Monarch Pale Ale (5.6%), which had a nice balance and was quite drinkable. The Oktoberfest (5.8%) tasted like a very sweet Märzen, with a lot of malt, apple, and honey notes. And the Monarch ESB (4.5%) was a decent example of the style, but still too malty for me.

If you paid attention to my review of Tighthead yesterday, you know that I used the one and only southbound afternoon NCS train to get from Mundelein to Buffalo Grove. Getting to my friends at Sketchbook Skokie required a Lyft to Deerfield, the MD-N to Morton Grove, then another Lyft to Sketchbook. Yet another reason not to trek out to an industrial park 1,300 meters from the one train home that had just OK beer. (Of course, there's an hourly bus. Whee.)

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? No
Would hang out with a book? No
Would hang out with friends? No
Would go back? No

Welcome to stop #84 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Tighthead Brewing, 161 N. Archer Ave., Mundelein
Train line: North Central Service, Mundelein
Time from Chicago: 59 minutes
Distance from station: 200 m

Planning to visit the handful of breweries along the North Central Service line presents certain challenges. Metra runs a total of 7 trains in each direction during the work week, but only one in the reverse-commute direction. And until they restored train 105 last December, there was literally no way to get back to Chicago by train.

I spent a few minutes working this out on Friday, however, and managed to visit two of them, starting with Liquid Love in Mundelein. It helped that the brewery is only 200 meters across the parking lot from the train station.

For just $20 I tried six of their brews, though one of them was a free sip of IRIE IPA (7.8%, >100 IBU, pronounced "aye-ree" like they say in the Islands). I mean, my word, 100+ IBUs. OK, I've now had that experience.

For the real tasting, I started with the Comfortably Blonde (4.8%, 20 IBU), a lovely malty beer (bottom right, above) with slight banana and honey notes. Next (top left) was the Chilly Water Pale (4.8%, 40 IBU), a clean, crisp, long-finishing, not-too-hoppy pale. The Bear's Choice APA (6.5%, 75 IBU, top right) brought me back to the higher-hops IPAs of yore, but wasn't over the top. It had a complex, malty body and an clean finish that lingered just the right amount. I finished the official flight with a Boxcar Porter (6%, 40 IBU, bottom left) that had nice, complex chocolate and coffee flavors, and a crisper finish than I expected. I had a few minutes for the train so I finished up with a taster-size Casked Oktoberfest (5.5%, 27 IBU, not pictured), which had a lovely balance and a smooth, malty flavor.

I also met a few happy dogs outside. The brewery has a sprawling outdoor area with tons of trees that would make you forget about being in Middle Suburbistan and easily stranded if you miss your train were it not for the sprawling parking lot surrounding it.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? No, but food trucks come by
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Since today is the last Friday of the summer, I'm leaving the office a little early to tackle one of the more logistically challenging itineraries on the Brews & Choos Project. So I'm queueing up a few things to read over the weekend:

• The XPOTUS finally won his "long hard battle" to finally get a mugshot, which the Internet immediately (a) put on swag you can buy and (b) compared with the Kubrick Stare. But where did the Fulton County Jail get his height and weight?
• US intelligence sources believe the airplane purportedly carrying mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin suffered an "internal explosion" consistent with a bomb before crashing with 10 people on board.
• The Russian Government dismissed as "all lies" that it had anything to do with Prigozhin's apparent assassination, meaning it absolutely blew up the plane and wants you to know it.
• Robert Wright interviews exiled Russian journalist Nikita Petrov about Prigozhin's disappearance, while Julia Ioffe explains how this fits with Putin's philosophy of poniyate, "understandings." ("Oh, Yevgeny, won't see him no more.")
• Lydia Polgreen "glimpsed our brutal future" when she observed our "ally" Saudi Arabia slaughter thousands of Ethiopian refugees at their border with Yemen.
• Matt Ford says the Supreme Court got its stopped-clock moment when it unanimously decided NCAA v Alston (141 S.Ct. 2141, 2021) in favor of student athletes who generate billions in revenue for their schools but see none of it.
• Crime has fallen and punctuality has risen on the CTA, and even Crain's irascible political columnist Greg Hinz has a cheer for them.

Finally, via Bruce Schneier, a report on Mexican food labeling laws, how manufacturers have gone to absurd lengths to skirt them, and how these fights are probably coming the US soon.

Risky Business came out 40 years ago this month:

“Risky Business,” then and now, is an indictment of privilege, and of somehow keeping the uglier world at bay long enough to buy your way into a kind of imperviousness. Except — and here’s what I think I responded to — it’s funny and confident and cool and all of its points about the spoils of capitalism get disguised inside a dream of opulence. It appears to affirm the early Reagan years as ripe for opportunity while, with a much deeper subtlety, undercuts places like the North Shore as chilly incubators of inequality.

Not that everyone saw this criticism of the Reagan Years in Year 2 of the Reagan Years. David Denby wrote in a New York Magazine review that “Risky Business” played as “openly corrupt.” Dave Kehr, closer to the truth as the film critic of the Chicago Reader (then later the Chicago Tribune), would likely have agreed with Denby, for different reasons: He wrote that the movie was “one of the finest film explorations of the end of innocence,” ending with a “complete corruption” of Cruise’s character and “one of the most bitter and plangent sequences allowed to pass in an American movie.” And that’s about the ending that played in theaters; Brickman’s original ending gets far darker.

My guess, if you haven’t seen “Risky Business” in years, little of this sounds right.

Now I gotta watch it tonight...

My home office sits at the top of my house as a loft over the floor below. I think it could not have a more effective design for trapping hot air. (Fortunately I can let a lot of that out through this blog.) This afternoon the temperature outside Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters didn't quite make 25°C, and it's back down to 23°C with a nice breeze coming through the window. Wednesday and Thursday, though, the forecast predicts 36°C with heat indices up to 43°C. Whee. (It gets a lot better Saturday.)

Meanwhile, in the more comfortable parts of the world:

• Jamie Bouie reminds everyone what I've said repeatedly: Rudy Giuliani has always been an unhinged and reprehensible character. Thanks for finally noticing.
• Speaking of authoritarians who hate the press, law professor Gregory Magarian digs into the Marion, Kansas, newspaper raid, which the Post says came about because the paper committed journalism on a corrupt police chief.
• Rolling Stone helpfully catalogues malignant narcissist Elon Musk's biggest lies.
• One of his lies, or at least one of his latest manifestations of abject incompetence at running a tech company, came earlier this week when he mused about ending the "block" feature on the app formerly known as Twitter, despite that move probably getting it kicked off the iPhone and Android platforms.
• A judge sentenced an Ohio teenager to concurrent 15-to-life terms for killing her boyfriend and one of his friends by driving her car into a brick wall at 160 km/h.
• American Airlines has sued Skiplagged, claiming the company tricks people into violating American's terms of service—and worse, doesn't actually save their customers any money.

Finally, a change to zoning laws in Auckland, N.Z., appears to have done what its proponents predicted: increasing housing and slowing rent increases. It's almost like single-family zoning was designed to keep those people out. Next thing, they'll start discover that zoning combined with redlining kept millions of credit-worthy people from ever building wealth for their families and led the US to an unsustainable pattern of urban development that will cost us trillions to fix. Crazy.

Cassie got almost 4¼ hours of walkies yesterday, going to the Horner Park DFA, Ribfest, and elsewhere around the neighborhood. Then, just when she thought she could relax at home, I dragged her fuzzy butt into the bathtub. I did warn her, when she rolled in whatever that was at the dog park, that her day would end in a bath, but she didn't believe me.

The highlight for me, of course, was Ribfest. And I can now present my After Rib Report for 2023.

This year I got to try 9—count 'em, 9—samplers (total: 28 bones) from 8 rib vendors, a tremendous improvement on last year. Plus, the ribs were better all around. In the order that I tried them:

• Aussom Aussie: tug-off-the-bone, smoky, meaty ribs, with a good sauce. Winner of 2nd Place in both the Critics Choice and Audience cagegories. 3 stars.
• Mrs Murphy's Irish Bistro: This year's People's Choice winner for the 9th year running, which makes me think the fix is in. My ribs were over-boiled and kind of disintegrated, but they didn't have a lot of flavor. I like their sauce, though. 2½ stars.
• Ogre Eats: The 3-bone sampler I got Friday might have been the most perfect ribs I had at any Ribfest. They came right off the grill onto my plate, with great caramelization and just the right smoke and tug. (Cassie did not like standing next to the smoker while we waited in line, though.) But then on Sunday they gave me 2 bones for the same price, which were really good but not nearly as epic as Friday's. I wish I could give them the 4 stars they earned on Friday but I can only give them 3 stars overall.

• Big Joe's: The Critics Choice winner this year, beating Aussom Aussie by one point. They had super-meaty ribs with an amazing sauce. I want more! 4 stars.
• Chicago BBQ: Good as always. Meaty, smoky ribs, a nice char, and two tasty sauces to choose. 3½ stars.
• Armadillo's: Huge meaty bones with great flavor. Not greasy at all; nice sauce. And they gave me an extra bone! 3½ stars.
• Blazin' Bronco: Excellent, smoky, meaty bones. 4 stars.
• Robinson's: Another lagniappe! And huge, huge bones with unfortunately too much sauce. 3 stars.

A couple of things to note. First, every one of the vendors, except for Robinson's, is itinerant or a catering company. Once again, Ribfest failed to attract Chicago Q, Smoque, The Smoke Daddy, or any of the other ribberies here in Chicago that have amazing BBQ. It's a shame, because I would love to get a full slab from Blazin' Bronco or Big Joe's sometime.

Second, they all charged different prices for samplers, which I didn't factor into my ratings but probably should have. The $8 sampler from Mrs Murphy's was probably worth it, but the $14 sampler from one of the vendors I didn't try probably wasn't.

I'm glad Ribfest found its footing again, though. And the weather cooperated: temperatures kept in the mid-20s with not a drop of precipitation, though dewpoints hovered around 20°C making everything a bit sticky. Can't wait for next year!