The Daily Parker

I'm not going complain about how the 33 consecutive days of snow cover makes entering or leaving my house a complete pain in the ass (complete with Parker automatically flopping over when we get back inside so I can wipe off his paws*).

No, I'm going to post today about chicken wings:

[Bill Roenigk, chief economist at the National Chicken Council,] says the magical pairing of humongous athletes and itty-bitty chicken parts got its start with the rise of sports bars a few decades ago. Sports-watching demands cheap munchies, and wings were both convenient and cheap. "Ribs and pizza were the competition," says Roenigk. But ribs cost more money, and pizza — well, pizza tends to lose its charm if it sits on a table for too long.

In an odd twist, the once-cheap wing has become the most desirable and expensive part of the chicken. Per pound, chicken wings are now pricier than bone-in chicken breasts, perhaps inspiring this epic wing heist.

"People say, 'You ought to produce more wings,'" says Roemigk. This year's Wing Report lays out the crucial obstacle: "A chicken has two wings, and chicken companies are not able to produce wings without the rest of the chicken."

This leads to a huge question for me: how long will my remote office continue to have a 50c wing special on Thursdays? (They have the best wings in Chicago, by the way. After some discussion, the staff and I determined that they make them with orphan tears and unicorn sweat.)

As for this coming Sunday, I may in fact be eating wings at the Duke of Perth around game-time. But since they have no televisions there, I might have to wait to see the ads on YouTube later on. Now, if only the Bears, Giants, or 49ers had made it...

* The ritual paw-wiping concludes with a vigorous belly-rubbing, so he seems to enjoy the whole thing.

I've got outside meetings every day this week, and those tend to compress my days. So there might be more link lists like this one coming up:

• When I get some free time again, I can catch up on my HBO shows. Here's the list of what's coming when.
• Does it matter what Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange believe?
• We atheists aren't out to destroy civilization. Really.
• The right wing are never wrong, no matter what evidence you have.

Back to the mines.

The Chicago Forestry Department removed a tree near my house back in October but left the stump. No one could figure out why—until they tried to remove it a few days ago:

I'm not an arbologist, but it seems to me that the tree had bionic parts. Actually, it looks like it grew through a steel grating in the parkway and then absorbed the grating. In any event, I hope no one got hurt when they tried sawing through the stump.

I recently had a routine checkup, and my doctor suggested revisiting the allergy tests I had way back in 1988. Only now, they have a blood test for most allergies, obviating the uncomfortable patch test I had to go through way back when.

Nothing has really changed except my sensitivity to cats, which has gone down. When I was a kid they made me sneeze; now, they just make my eyes water if I forget myself and forget to wash my hands after patting a cat.

That's all a long setup for this bit of doggerel that I came up with when I got the test results. They really tested for nearly all of these things.

Ahem.

I'm not one bit allergic to peanuts,
Nor scallops, nor soybeans, nor clams,
Nor hickory trees, nor cedars, nor bees,
Nor elms, ashes, mushrooms, or yams.
Not cats, not dogs, not milk, not snogs,
Not pigweed, not elder, not thistles,
Not mold fumigatus (of gens aspergillus),
Not elder, not pecan, not whistles.
It's only the poop that's too tiny to scoop
From vermin we know of as dust mites
Making me sneeze and spray lots of Febreeze.
Yes, I'm allergic to gross little mite shites.

Yes, The Daily Parker ever strives to raise literary standards on the Internets.

Andrew Sullivan tops my reading list every day. He and his staff post sometimes 100 items a day on The Daily Dish, and even if I only read a tenth or them, my day is better. He's infuriating, fascinating, informative, conservative, Catholic, gay, mercurial, level. I don't agree with him about a third of the time, but one of his best characteristics is his willingness to listen to arguments and change his mind.

So last February, when he jettisoned a paid gig with The Atlantic to become a professional blogger, I supported him. By "supported" I mean "gave him money." And now I'm up for renewal, about which he says:

What have we created together? Every now and again over the years, I've tried to figure it out. A blog? A magazine? A blogazine? A website? But every year, it changes again, as the new media shift, and as the world turns and as small experiments - like the Window Views or the Reader Threads - become ramparts of the whole thing. Do we, the staffers, write this blog? Sure, we do. But so do you, every day, with emails and testimonies and anecdotes that bring dry news stories to vivid personal life. Do we curate the web? Sure. Every day, we scour the vast Internet for the smart or the funny, the deep and the shallow, the insightful and the abhorrent. But you send us so many links and ideas every day that the creators of the Dish are better understood as a collective of all of us, you and us, correcting, enlightening, harshing and moving each other.

It's journalism, in its original meaning. It's a conversation. It's how I start to get information—but only how I start, because he always posts multiple viewpoints even while making it clear what he believes. And I'm proud to give him money to keep writing.

(By the way, if you want to give me money, just let me know.)

I've gone to my remote office to do some work. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me sit in the beer garden:

Fortunately, I found an acceptable seat inside:

My real office is closed tomorrow because no one wants to commute on the coldest day since 1995. I hope something is open. Or at least, I hope someone delivers.

Welcome to your new year.

Last year I totted up a bunch of numbers from 2012; here's the update. In 2013:

• I took only 9 trips, visiting 4½ countries (Canada, England, Scotland, South Korea, and North Korea—the last one for only 4 minutes) and 4 states (New York, California, Washington, and Texas). I probably visited Indiana and Wisconsin in there too, but only incidentally.
• I flew 77,610 km and drove only about 3,000 km. This is why I love living in a city.
• As I mentioned yesterday, I wrote 537 Daily Parker posts, only 2 more than in 2012, keeping up the average of 1.48 per day for the second straight year.
• I changed timekeeping systems in August, moving from Fogbugz to JIRA, so it's too much of a bother to calculate how much time I spent doing what. I can say, however, that I had 2,197 chargeable* hours at work, but I can't say (in public) how many were billable.
• I took more photos than last year: 4,197. This was still fewer than 2011, 2010, or 2009.
• For some reason, I only started 28 books in 2013, but I finished 30.
• The really sad number, though, is that I only went to movie theaters 3 times, once to see a TV show (Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special) and once to see a movie I'd already seen (High Fidelity). So, really, I only saw one movie in a theater. On the other hand, I went to 13 baseball games and 5 concerts, and I did manage to watch 50 movies at home. Still, I need to go to more theater, clearly.

A mixed review, then. In 2014, travel will probably go up; so will seeing movies in theaters; so will reading books and taking photos. I'm looking forward to finding out.

* All time doing anything for my employer, not including vacation, PTO, or holidays.

My evening is kicking off soon. It will be relatively low-key: GMT New Year at O'Shaughnessey's (mostly because I'm curious about the neighborhood), back home for a quick bite, thence my remote office where all us regulars will talk quietly until about 12:30 when Eddie calls last orders. We might even notice when it's midnight. (We missed it in 2011 and 2013, and awkwardly made festive noises when someone called out, "Hey, it's 12:05 already!")

This is the 537th Daily Parker post of 2013, the 3,907th since its launch in November 2005, and the 4,104th since the proto-www.thedailyparker.com kicked off in May 1998. Sometime in 2014 I'll post for the 4,000th time in this iteration; move to a different part of Chicago; watch my nephews turn 2 and my dad turn redacted; visit five or six states and three or four countries (including Canada); and maybe rewrite the UI for Weather Now and finish the 30-Park Geas.

For the next 16 hours, though, I'll be offline.

Happy new year, З Новим Роком, bonne année, cheers, 謹賀新年, and नया साल मुबारक हो, y'all.

WFM Lincoln Park Store Team Leader Rich Howley responded to my complaint right away:

We are really sorry for the inconvenience in our garage this afternoon, we realized immediately that we were over-whelmed and brought in additional security, they unfortunately had not yet arrived.

They are doing exactly what you had suggested.

I walked the entire area around the store, and what exacerbated the situation was traffic on North Ave was bumper to bumper in both directions, and this gridlocked traffic trying to get from Kingsbury/Sheffield Sts onto North, which in turn backed up the traffic directly in front of the store, in clogged up people trying to get out of the lot.

We are terribly sorry that you got hung up in our garage.

My response:

Thank you for your prompt reply. I have to disagree with you about the timing, however. There was a traffic jam on North Avenue around 12:30, true; but I didn't leave the store until almost 1:15. By that time the traffic on Sheffield going north and Kingsbury south of the store had thinned out to a still-heavy but more-common level for holidays.

However, by 1:30, when I finally got out of the parking structure, there was no traffic on Kingsbury south of Blackhawk. Had your team directed third-floor exiting traffic out the southeast exit and then south on Kingsbury, cars would have fanned out along Blackhawk, Fremont, and Eastman, reducing pressure on the Sheffield/Weed/Kingsbury intersection. Anyone observing the situation at the southeast exit would have seen this; but your security team didn't have anyone standing there, didn't have anyone on the third floor, and didn't appear to have radios.

People might have been annoyed had they wanted to go north on Sheffield, but at least they'd be moving. And--more to the point--people would have *seen your guys keeping traffic moving*. Instead of 30-40 seconds per car getting onto Kingsbury, you could have gotten maybe 3-4 seconds per car, and cleared the upper deck within five minutes.

Ask any airline: keeping customers informed, and keeping up the appearance of trying to solve the problem (even if it's truly insoluble), makes people less likely to fire off notes to Customer Service--or worse.

Sorry if this seems like a rant; I'm trying to help. I've seen the store handle huge surges of traffic before, so today's failure was really surprising. I think you need to have a serious talk with your security team about it.

Kudos to Howley for responding so quickly. And he's mostly right. But someone on his security team screwed the pooch on this one, whether by not thinking or by not acting, and a lot of people were inconvenienced.

I go to Whole Foods Market twice a week or more, almost always the Lincoln Park, Chicago store. Even when they have lots of customers, they have plenty of space and plenty of parking, so I didn't worry about ducking out of my house this afternoon to pick up lunch and dog food.

Here's the result. Don't let the international units confuse you; that's an hour and 13 minutes to go about 4 miles:

Here's the situation when I arrived, which looked remarkably like the situation when I left:

Here's the store layout from Google Earth; the red arrow points to the south exit ramp (click for full size):

Now that you have the visuals, here's the note I just dashed off to Whole Foods Customer Service:

Your response to a traffic surge this afternoon made a bad situation worse, and created a safety hazard even as it inconvenienced dozens of customers.

In short, dozens of cars were trapped on the third floor of your parking structure for more than an hour because your security team were unable or unwilling to take the simple, necessary actions to alleviate the problem.

I arrived at the store around 12:40 this afternoon. Because it appeared busy on the second floor parking area, I headed straight up to the third. Even before going up the ramp, however, I noticed cars having difficulty coming down the ramp because of snow. It was difficult for cars coming down the ramp to negotiate the tight turn, and they were slipping into the other lane. That, while dangerous and creating unknown liability for the store, wasn't the worst part, as I discovered when I finally got to the third floor and got stuck in a total gridlock.

No one could leave the third floor parking area. It took me twenty minutes to get into a parking space because of this. But that's still not the worst part. No, twenty minutes later, when I tried to leave, cars were still unable to leave the third floor, even though the parking area was nearly empty, and even though a CSR had told me that you had actually stopped people coming up the ramp.

When I finally got onto the ramp and arrived at the second floor, I discovered three security guards directing one car at a time up, down, or across. This was actually no help as drivers are perfectly capable of zippering together as long as the cars are moving. No, it wasn't until I got to the Kingsbury exit that it became obvious how the situation had become so grim. With no one directing traffic out of the parking structure at Kingsbury, cars could only exit singly and about every 30-40 seconds.

It's irrelevant that you may have needed Chicago Police permission to direct traffic onto Kingsbury. Given the traffic load and safety hazard it posed, you would have had no trouble getting permission--if it were even required. Regardless, anyone who observed and thought about the traffic situation would have seen this obvious bottleneck.

Here are a number of concrete suggestions to prevent this kind of unsafe and inconvenient situation from recurring in times of high traffic load:

1. Station a security guard at the south exit onto Kingsbury to halt southbound traffic on Kingsbury while directing exiting traffic south on the same street. This will avoid the bottlenecks at Weed and North, alleviate pressure on the exit ramp, and give the security team better visibility of the entire traffic situation.
2. Station a security guard at the top of the third floor ramp to keep all traffic on the third floor moving only clockwise. Cars should move only along the outside (south and east) walls before splitting into two streams by the third-floor main entrance near the air conditioning units. Cars that can't find parking moving south in the second and third rows can go around the outside again. But the security guard will have visibility into the parking situation and can let others know when the third floor is full.
3. Station a security guard at the second-floor junction of the third-floor ramp to keep cars moving clockwise on that level, too. When the Kingsbury guard allows a stream of traffic to leave, the second-floor guard should halt all traffic except those cars spiraling down to Kingsbury from the third floor.

This is not rocket science. It just requires that someone observe, coordinate, and above all _think_ about the problem. The security team today completely failed, costing me and dozens of other customers more than an hour of time.

I will post any response they send.