It's 21°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 22°C at O'Hare right now. In addition to being the normal high temperature for May 20th, that reading at O'Hare is the warmest since 11pm on October 30th. The forecast for O'Hare predicts a high near 26°C, which is normal for June 10th.
Which is all a long way of saying: I'm about to change into a polo shirt, take Cassie for a walk, and open every window in my house—not necessarily in that order.
By the way, the eclipse last night was really cool. I only wish I could have fallen back asleep more quickly after getting up to view it.
After our gorgeous weather Sunday and Monday, yesterday's cool-down disappointed me a bit. But we have clear-ish skies and lots of sun, which apparently will persist until Friday night. I'm also pleased to report that we will probably have a good view of tomorrow night's eclipse, which should be spectacular. I'll even plan to get up at 1:30 to see totality.
Elsewhere in the world, the OAFPOTUS continues to explore the outer limits of stupidity (or is it frontotemporal dementia?):
- No one has any idea what the OAFPOTUS's economic plan is, though Republicans seem loath to admit that's because he hasn't got one.
- Canada and the EU, our closest friends in the world since the 1940s, have gotten a bit angry with us lately. Can't think why.
- Paul Krugman frets that while he "always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity... But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality."
- On the same theme, Bret Stephens laments that "Democracy dies in dumbness."
- ProPublica describes a horrifying recording of Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek's meeting with senior SSA officials last week in which he demonstrated why the OAFPOTUS pulled him from a terminal job as "the ultimate faceless bureaucrat" to head the agency. (Some people have greatness thrust upon 'em?)
- Molly White sees "no public good" for a "strategic bitcoin reserve," but is too polite to call the idea a load of thieving horseshit.
- Author John Scalzi threads the needle on boycotting billionaires.
- Writing for StreetsBlog Chicago, Steven Vance argues that since the city has granted parking relief to almost every new development in the past few years, why not just get rid of parking minimums altogether?
Finally, in a recent interview with Monica Lewinsky, Molly Ringwald said that John Hughes got the idea for Pretty in Pink while out with her and her Sixteen Candles co-stars at Chicago's fabled Kingston Mines. Cool.
The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ just hit 17.5°C, which it hasn't hit since 5:54pm on November 5th. That's almost 125 days, quite a while to go without wearing a jacket outside.
Unfortunately, spring weather isn't the only thing in the news today:
Finally, Metra is seeking public input on a plan to rename the heavy-rail lines around Chicago. Right now, each line has an historic name and a different color. The favored proposal would be to give each line a letter signifying the direction from downtown, plus a number. For example, the Union Pacific North line that goes by my house would be renamed N1. And all the lines departing from a single downtown station would get the same color (green in the case of the three UP lines). I think this is a good proposal, and would bring Chicago in line with international cities like Berlin and Paris.
It's 13°C and sunny, so despite having added a couple of really useful features to Weather Now (still in the dev/test environment; sorry), I'm going to take Cassie on a 45-minute walk and then have a beer.
Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery.
Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my Brews & Choos buddy at a relatively new place in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. We managed to visit five South Side breweries, and—here's the science part—consumed no more than 3 pints of beer over 5 hours. It was a marathon, not a sprint, after all.
In any event, I've got a lot of photos to go through and a lot of reviews to write, so look for them to come out over the next few days.
And hey, if you want to see more Brews & Choos reviews, contribute to The Daily Parker! Your $5 contribution keeps the site running for a day—or buys a tasing-size beer.
Another reason to contribute: I've started re-developing The Daily Parker's code from scratch. I changed direction slightly on an existing project to make it a blog on steroids, and I think it'll be super-cool when complete. So how about throwing in another $5 a month to support that, too?
I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS:
Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.
I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.
Malheureusement, il a bien raison. And his speech is worth reading (or hearing, si vous parlez français bien).
But that isn't all that happened in the last day or so. No, every day brings new revelations of stupidity and corruption in the new administration:
And now I will take a half-day of PTO and explore four new breweries in Bridgeport and Pilsen. If only the weather had cooperated.
As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more.
The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer, those days might be behind me—even though the weather never stops.
So, hey, buy me a coffee. I'll put your name in lights!
Take today's temperatures, for example:
Fortunately, Cassie got a half-hour walk at 7am and a 25-minute walk at noon, just before the cold front came through. And the next couple of days will be...more Spring:
This Afternoon
Snow. Steady temperature around 1. Breezy, with a northwest wind around 45 km/h, with gusts as high as 70 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than one centimeter possible.
Tonight
Snow showers likely before midnight, then isolated flurries between midnight and 4am. Cloudy, then gradually becoming partly cloudy, with a low around -3. Windy, with a northwest wind 45 to 50 km/h decreasing to 35 to 40 km/h after midnight. Winds could gust as high as 75 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of less than a half centimeter possible.
Thursday
Sunny, with a high near 4. Breezy, with a west wind 30 to 35 km/h decreasing to 20 to 25 km/h in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 55 km/h.
Thursday Night
A slight chance of rain before 1am, then a slight chance of snow between 1am and 3am, then a slight chance of rain and snow after 3am. Increasing clouds, with a low around 1. West wind 10 to 15 km/h, with gusts as high as 25 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 20%.
Friday
Snow likely. Cloudy, with a high near 2. West southwest wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming northeast in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
But...it'll be 14° on Monday, 17°C on Tuesday, and 16°C on Wednesday, which will feel a lot more like spring. And Cassie will get more walks.
Weather Now v5.0.9194 just hit the hardware, with a new feature that allows you to browse the Gazetteer by finding all the places near a point. (Registration required.) I also added a couple of admin features that I will propagate to every other app I have in production, and made a few minor bug fixes.
Only one minor hiccup: I forgot to add a spatial index to the Gazetteer, which caused searches around a point to take minutes instead of seconds in production. I added the index to the database definition, and after about an hour it had indexed all 15 million locations in the database. So the Nearby Places feature should work perfectly now.
This is one of those things you don't notice in a dev-test environment. The dev-test database only has about 200,000 records in it, so even without the index it only took a moment to find all the places around a point. Nothing like testing in production to find a huge performance miss!
James Fallows highlights how the OAFPOTUS and Clown Prince of X have put their own enrichment ahead of public safety in ways that will be hard to miss:
In aviation, almost everything about safety is tied to the weather. Likely turbulence, which has caused some recent fatalities. Locations and likelihood of “airframe icing,” which was a cause of the Colgan crash in Buffalo back in 2009. Gusty crosswinds and wind-shear, very low cloud layers, and so many more factors that affect when and where planes can safely fly.
The readings and data for these assessments ultimately come from the National Weather Service, which is publicly funded and is part of the Commerce Department and NOAA. Its offerings are stupendous.
Last week, hundreds of forecasters at NWS and NOAA were laid off by the Doge team. Reportedly this could be as much as 10% of the work force. Just today the American Meteorological Society put out a public statement saying that these and related cutbacks are “likely to cause irreparable harm and have far-reaching consequences for public safety, economic well-being, and the United States' global leadership.”
Why will NOAA, NWS, and the public have to go through all this?
-One reason is personal grievance. By several reports, Donald Trump bears a lasting grudge against the National Weather Service because of “Sharpiegate.” That is when Trump sketched out the future path of Hurricane Dorian with one of his Sharpies, only to be ridiculed when NWS forecasters said, “Well, actually…” These things matter with Trump.
-Another is political zealotry. The Project 2025 manifesto said that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” because it had become “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
-Another is commercial interest, specifically the goal of privatizing weather information. There is a long history of private companies, notably AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, wanting to limit NWS’s or NOAA’s ability to present its data directly to the public. The whole business model for these companies is taking data produced at public expense, and then selling it with their shows or apps or proprietary forecasts. You can read more here.
(Emphasis mine.)
The only thing we have to hope for right now is that enough pissed-off voters in Republican districts will give their representatives enough grief to get them to stop the bloodshed. Unfortunately, as has happened throughout history, sometimes people need to find out before they learn not to fuck around.