The Daily Parker

Let's start with combat-actor Jill Bearup explaining how the Netflix-ITV-BBC ban on corsets solves entirely the wrong problems:

Meanwhile, in the modern world:

• The National Transportation Safety Board reported that an axle on the 23rd car of the train that derailed in East Palesine, Ohio, had a bearing temperature 140°C over normal—which is 30°C over "critical." The crew were trying to stop the train when the bearing failed. Perhaps if the train had fewer cars, or more crew, or the proper braking system...if only.
• New York Magazine reports on the 20-something scammers who brought down Three Arrows Capital, and the people who should have known better before loaning them over $3 billion.
• Twitter has decided to shut off SMS-based multifactor authentication for most accounts, and most people don't understand that this is exactly the right thing to do. Use an authenticator app, people!
• I completely agree with Helen Lewis that the entire point of Roald Dahl's novels is his nastiness.
• Food manufacturers, including Kraft and Heinz, have started to squawk that the proposed (and I sincerely hope soon-halted) Kroger-Albertsons merger will lower their margins, which is what happens when monopolies are permitted. (Never mind what it will do to consumer prices.)
• I might have to miss the craft beer festival taking place less than 2 km from my house this weekend. Dang.

Finally, I missed an anniversary yesterday. On 22 February 2003, Saturday Night Live aired this bit of Tina Fey's genius:

I spent the morning going over an API for standards and style, which will result in an uncomfortably large commit before I leave the office today. I prefer smaller, more focused commits, but this kind of polishing task makes small code changes all over the place, and touches lots of files.

So while I have my (late) lunch, I'm taking a break to read some news:

• Chicago's El got color-coded route designations 30 years ago today. No more Howard-Dan Ryan line; now it's the Red Line.
• Web hosting service GoDaddy disclosed a years-long compromise that included attackers adding malicious code to their source repositories.
• Via Bruce Schneier, The Intercept explains that photos you crop in Microsoft Office (and other applications) aren't so much cropped as windowed, with tremendous security implications.
• Why are today's college students struggling so much?
• The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Norfolk Southern Railroad to bear the costs of cleaning up East Palestine, Ohio.
• Archaeologists discovered the remains of a Roman amphitheater in what is now Guildhall, London.

Finally, the Securities and Exchange Commission has fined the Mormon Church $5m for failing to disclose its holdings as required by law. As the Church has some $32 billion in holdings worldwide, that $5m fine will sure sting.

Christopher Hitchens may have pissed off a lot of people, but I can't dispute the wisdom of that quote. And today, we have a story out of (where else?) Florida, where a fundamentalist Christianist college woke up and discovered that one of the King's Singers "openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture:"

The King’s Singers, a Grammy Award-winning British a capella vocal ensemble, announced Monday that their planned concert at Pensacola Christian College was abruptly canceled two hours before the show due to “lifestyle” concerns.

In a statement posted on their website, the group stated that the Feb. 11 concert was due to “concerns related to the sexuality of members of our group.”

“We have performed at Pensacola Christian College before and we entered into the engagement in the knowledge that this is a fundamentalist Christian Institution. Our belief is that our music can build a common language that allows people with different views and perspectives to come together.”

Pensacola Christian College provided a more in-depth justification for the cancelation in a social media post on Monday, stating that the college cannot “knowingly” endorse anything that violates Scripture.

I sincerely hope none of the faculty members there wears garments weaved from two different threads.

Because this sort of thing pisses me off, here's a photo of Cassie from Sunday night, after we walked hither and yon all day:

She has the right idea.

I made a note to myself a while ago that as of today I've had a fitness tracker for 3,000 days. Sadly, my past self got it wrong: I got my first FitBit 3,029 days ago. Oopsi.

But it did give me a moment to check my lifetime stats. They don't suck. As of yesterday:

• Total days: 3,028
• Total steps: 40,490, 400
• Total distance: 34,076.1 km
• Goal hit (10,000 steps): 2,771
• Minimum hit (5,000 steps): 3,025
• Mean daily steps & distance: 13,372, 11.3 km
• Median daily steps: 12,770, 10.6 km
• Best 7-day period: 171,122 (7-13 July 2018)
• Best 30-day period: 537,798 (2-31 July 2018)

Not bad. And I'm still getting about 12,000 a day on average, even into my decrepitude.

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories:

• James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well.
• Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things.
• Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League has turned itself into the very thing its fans feared.

And closer to home—like, less than a kilometer away—the City of Chicago has made some recommendations to improve a stretch of Clark Street that could be a model for other streets in the city.

Just in time for spring, the City of Chicago has just announced the winning names for seven of our beloved snowplows:

• Da Plow
• Holy Plow!
• Jean Baptiste Point du Shovel
• Mrs O'Leary's Plow
• Salter Payton
• Sears Plower
• Sleet Home Chicago

From the Chicago Tribune:

Nearly 7,000 potential names were submitted in 17,000 suggestions from Chicago residents. Initially, the city planned to name six snowplows — one for each snow district — in its fleet of almost 300 baby-blue “Snow Fighting Trucks.” (During a major snowfall in Chicago, a pool of up to 675 motor-truck drivers can be dispatched.) Another was added due to a close vote.

Each of the snowplows will be trackable in real-time on the city’s plow tracker — and the name will be added to the vehicles too.

Since we've gotten less than half of our normal snowfall this year, we haven't seen the plows much. The Climate Prediction Center mid-term forecast doesn't look good for snow, either:

Not that anyone's complaining!

Next year, though, I'll watch out for Da Plow.

Update: Mount Washington, N.H., had some weather last night, too. The weather station there may have recorded the lowest wind chill temperature in US history shortly before 11pm. With sustained 167 km/h winds gusting to 189 km/h and an ambient air temperature of -43°C, the weather station had a wind chill of -76.6°C (-106°F)—colder than the surface of Mars. At this writing the station has a much more moderate wind chill of -61.4°C (-78.6°F). Bundle up.

I finished a couple of big stories for my day job today that let us throw away a whole bunch of code from early 2020. I also spent 40 minutes writing a bug report for the third time because not everyone diligently reads attachments. (That sentence went through several drafts, just so you know.)

While waiting for several builds to complete today, I happened upon these stories:

• The former co-CEO of @Properties bought 2240 N. Burling St., one of the only remaining pre-Fire houses in Lincoln Park, so naturally the asshole wants to tear it down.
• Robert Wright thinks former CIA Director William Burns' 2008 analysis of Russian President Vladimir Putin demonstrates how leaders should use cognitive empathy to understand people.
• Radley Balko debunks the right-wing idea that affirmative action had anything to do with Tyre Nichols' murder.
• Transport for London is expanding the Ultra Low Emission Zone to include all London boroughs as of August 29th. Cars that don't meet the standard will cost £12.50 to operate in the zone—or you can get money to scrap them.
• Apple watches keep calling 911 when their owners go skiing. Oops.
• Maybe parking garages will finally go away?
• WaPo has a map of all the snow we've gotten (or not gotten) this year.
• The new 4K restoration of Casablanca just went into my Amazon shopping cart.

Finally, a school district food service director ordered more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings worth $1.5m over the last three years, which the State's Attorney says never got to the kids.

And now, since the temperature has risen from this morning's -17°C all the way up to...uh...-11.4°C, I will now walk the adorable creature who keeps nosing me in the arm as I type this.

Welcome to stop #79 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Bungalow by Middle Brow., 2840 W. Armitage Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Blue Line, California
Time from Chicago: 14 minutes
Distance from station: 600 m

I had plans to meet a friend who lives in Logan Square last Thursday, so why not combine it with the Brews and Choos Project? The friend loves Bungalow by Middle Brow, and I understand why. It's really cool.

I tried a sip of my friend's Cottage Mexican Lager (4%), and put it in the category of "really well-made beer that didn't work for me." I just had a Little Crush IPA (4.5%), which fell into exactly that category for my friend, but which I liked a lot.

We also had an appetizer of fresh, warm bread with nduja butter, and we shared a pepperoni pizza. We cleaned our plates.

I will head back there when the weather gets warmer. It will be a good place to start when I visit the many other breweries within 1 kilometer of California and Armitage.

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

Time is funny. On this day, 90 years ago, radio station WXYZ in Detroit began a serial called "The Lone Ranger," written by Fran Striker, who had probably never seen Texas or a Native American person in his life.

When I read that this morning, it struck me that the radio audience in Detroit had living memory of the closest historical analogue to the entirely-fictional Lone Ranger character. Deputy US Marshall Bass Reeves served from 1875 to 1907, retiring just 26 years before the radio show started. So to the radio audience, the period depicted in the show was only as far back as 1997 is to us. The Lone Ranger show, in other words, was as historical to the audience as Life On Mars was to its viewers in 2007, or NYPD Blue is to us today.

I remember growing up in the 1970s and thinking that the 1960s were this weird, long-forgotten time before my world existed. Kind of like my friends' kids think the 2000s were the same.

One other thing. In one of life's weird coincidences, 30 January 1933 also saw the appointment of a new German Chancellor who nearly destroyed Europe. The guy appointing him to the spot thought the grown-ups in the room could contain him. Glad we learned from that mistake.

Welcome to stop #78 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Goose Island Beer Co., 1800 N. Clybourn Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Brown Line, Armitage
Time from Chicago: 12 minutes
Distance from station: 600 m

I put this one off for a long time because, in the years since I last visited, Chicago has had an explosion of craft breweries. Also because InBev bought them 12 years ago. The combination has taken Chicago's first and, for a long time, only local brewery taproom and made it kind of mediocre.

So why now? First, because later this year they plan to move to the Salt Shed, so there wasn't much time left; and second, because I saw M3GAN at the Arc 14 theater three blocks away, so it was convenient.

Since I used to drink a lot of Honkers Ale and the basic IPA, on Saturday I tried three beers I hadn't actually had before: the Phantom Limb pale ale (5.3%), the Flyway West Coast IPA (7.3%), and the Hazy Beer Hug IPA (6.8%). They were all fine, and I would have them again, but (a) I didn't take notes because I was out with a friend and (b) I wouldn't have had a lot to say anyway.

Goose Island used to be the only game in town, but they were revelatory. But a lot more breweries have opened up since 1987, with a lot better beers. InBev goes for volume over quality. 

I'll still stop into their Fulton Avenue taproom at some point. And the new brewpub at the Salt Shed, when it opens. But really, stopping into their aging Clybourn brewpub was just to complete the B&C list.

Beer garden? Sidewalk patio
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? Yes, avoidable
Serves food? Yes, full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? Maybe