The delightful late-autumn weather continued this afternoon, giving Cassie one of the best days in her memory. Kelsey's mom decided to come up to the Montose dog beach right before noon, so both she and Cassie got some time in the lake:

This was on top of our—well, my—existing plan to take her to my building's annual Doggy Dip Day. I haven't ever lived in a building with a pool, or with this many dogs, so I knew I would have a good time. Cassie did too, but after experiencing the spa pool for about 10 seconds and not touching the bottom, she did not trust my judgment regarding the big pool. I may have damaged our relationship a bit by dragging her to the pool stairs, but at least I didn't force her to go in. Plus, the few seconds she was actually in the pool got rid of whatever noxious substance she picked up from Lake Michigan. (This is why they do this on the last day of the season.)

Besides, she was more interested in this:

And this:

There were a few dogs in the pool, one of which seemed to have the best time just paddling around and taking treats from her owner. Then there was this guy:

I don't know who that is, but he had the best time running up and down the lip of the pool.

Cassie is now on the couch, fighting to stay awake. I expect she'll stay there until dinnertime.

• About this Blog (v5.0)  2 months
• Brews and Choos project  4 weeks
• Chicago sunrises, 2026  10 months
• Inner Drive Technology's computer history  2 years
• Logical fallacies  7 years
• Other people's writing  6 years
• Parker Braverman, 2006-2020  5 years
• Style sheet  1 year
• The 30-Park Geas  2 months
• Where I get my corn-pone  8 months

Whoo, boy, Canada's time zones are going to be a mess. Now that the western provinces have voted to stay on permanent daylight saving time, it seems Quebec plans to stay on permanent standard time (or maybe permanent DST, we don't know), which will either begin on Sunday or in March. Seriously, we've been through this before, but OK, dumb people gotta FAFO.

In other news:

• The OAFPOTUS really likes meat and men's butts. Not that there's a problem with that, though the Republican Party may want to hurry up and give the man another MOCA.
• I know that a lot of my fellow Democrats are panicking about the OAFPOTUS interfering with elections, but there's a really simple fix for that: beat the Republicans into the ground on Tuesday.
• [Israel's politics] are possibly the most insane in the world right now, and it's all because of religion.
• After losing Brazil's election yesterday, Flávio Bolsonaro and his family have continued a long tradition of deposted dictators by fleeing to the US to avoid the corruption investigation that predates his election campaign.
• Matt Yglesias nails the difference between effective leftists like New York City mayor Zorhan Mamdani, and ineffective leftists like Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson: "I think the fact that the center-left finds itself surprisingly pleased with Mamdani shows that while the divide between moderates and progressives gets a lot of coverage, there’s an under-discussed divide between politicians who have (mostly executive) jobs featuring real accountability for outcomes and the bulk of backbench legislators, who are basically just posting."
• Scott Hanselman has turned his attention to the cost of greed, including an interactive website showing you the difference between median wealth and billionaires.
• Writing in Crain's Chicago Business, journalist Ed Zotti makes a powerful case for overhauling Chicago regional rail, which could get Chicago up to the standard of service and connectivity most medium-sized European cities achieved by the 1990s.

Finally, on Monday Cassie and I came upon workers repainting the lines and other markings on Chicago's Lakefront Trail. Apparently, this is the first time in over a decade they've done a top-to-bottom update. It's about time. And it looks a lot better.

Speaking of Cassie, she got some time at the beach with her friend Kelsey this morning, and in a few minutes we're heading down to my building's pool for the annual Doggy Dip Day event. Why not let the dogs play in the pool right before draining it for the winter? It doesn't hurt that it's sunny and 23°C right now.

I pushed a bug fix to this application yesterday afternoon. The deployment included an update to Blazorise, so if things look weird, just hit <Ctrl>-<F5> to refresh the page.

I have cast my ballot for next week's general election, which took less than two hours including reading up on the candidates I didn't already know, walking to the polling place, and pushing all the buttons. Living in bright blue Chicago, the only really difficult votes were for school board. In my district, my choices were (a) the corporate-backed candidate with kids in private school, which is absolutely disqualifying for public school board in my opinion; (b) the Chicago Teacher's Union candidate who would never under any circumstances close a Chicago school even if it had five assistant principals and a full janitorial staff supporting three students; and (c) Angel Alvarez. Alvarez has one kid at Lane Tech, he attended Chicago Public Schools, and he is not endorsed by either the Chicago Teachers Union or the PAC shilling for CPS itself. Guess who I voted for.

Elsewhere:

• Turnout in Israel's election today is the highest in history. It's going to be a long night over there.
• NIMBYs in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood have forced Amtrak back into environmental review for moving its 14th Street maintenance facility to the abandoned rail yard next to Rate Field. This is why we can't have nice transport.
• US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) and I actually agree on something: that moving to year-round daylight saving time is a really bad idea.
• Let's get big money out of politics, starting with the Clown Prince of X.

Finally, Washington Post columnist Michael Coren went to Mexico to try Chinese electric cars that, for now, aren't allowed in the US. He reports,

Many features were merely fun — heated massage seats, wild acceleration, karaoke mode and spa-like cabin settings. But the bigger difference was the amount of technology bundled into shockingly low prices: fast-charging, powerful batteries, sophisticated software and interior luxuries that sometimes came in Western models only at twice the price.

Much American EV technology can still rival or exceed anything Chinese automakers put on the road. ... But every year, the U.S. falls further behind.

Like I said, it would be so nice if we could have real competition in the "market" economy Republicans like to crow about before putting their thumbs on the scale.

As threatened promised, here are a couple of photos from the weekend. First, sunrise yesterday:

Second, Cassie at Horner Park DFA:

She had a great time. There were more balls on the ground at the dog park than in the entire House Republican caucus. Speaking of those wonderful servants of democracy:

• "Friends don't let friends watch the early vote:" "There’s lots of interesting information in the early vote but not about who is going to win."
• Right-wing candidates in Brazil and Serbia lost elections to the center-left, to the great joy of democrats everywhere.
• Michael Tomasky peers into the rotting Swiss cheese inside the OAFPOTUS's skull and concludes he wants his own party to lose next week's elections for his own personal gain. ("For a president to say 10 days before an election that he doesn’t give a damn that people are paying high prices—which is what he said, no matter how his apologists try to spin it—is, well, unusual.")
• Brian Beutler once again chastises the Democratic Party for downplaying the OAFPOTUS's threat to democracy this close to the election.
• Matt Yglesias chastises the party for really annoying fundraising.
• A federal judge has ordered that Maurene Comey be reinstated as an assistant US attorney following her unlawful firing last year.
• The FAA has certified Boeing's 737-10, an airplane that is finally cost-competitive with Airbus's A321neo.
• Chicago's far north side Rogers Park neighborhood will soon get self-cleaning restrooms in hopes of getting people not to shit on the sidewalk.

Finally, today is the 40th anniversary of Bill Buckner's fielding error in game 6 of the 1986 World Series that allowed the Mets to win and forced a game 7, which Boston wound up losing. Astute baseball fans noticed that Buckner was a former Chicago Cub, playing for the almost-as-cursed Red Sox, so some kind of error was almost inevitable. That said, Buckner didn't lose Game 6; pitcher Calvin Shiraldi gave up two runs in the bottom of the 10th, which relief pitcher Bob Stanley followed up with a wild pitch that put a runner on third.

Buckner played 2,517 games, scored 1,077 runs, stole 183 bases, and had a .991 fielding percentage (only 128 errors in 13,901 chances), which is one of the highest in history (and higher than anyone's in the 2026 season). That's quite a career.

Still, if you were alive and a baseball fan in 1986, you will never forget that error.

Cassie and I recorded 19.73 km (12.3 mi) of walks over 4.67 hours this past weekend (thanks, Garmin!). This was only part of me getting 131,451 steps and 109.9 km (68.3 mi) of my own last week. That's a lot of steps.

I will have photos later today, but at the moment I'm doing all the things I didn't do while spending all that time outside yesterday and Saturday.

I also have a rehearsal in Park Ridge tonight, and two jabs scheduled for this afternoon, so the bug fix deployment will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

The Daily Parker patch release is (probably) ready for deployment to Production, but I'm going to let it stew in the dev/test environment for a few hours. This is mainly because it's 21°C on the last Sunday in October (shout out to everyone else in the world who changed their clocks today!), so Cassie and I want to go to the dog park. The dev/test environment isn't the only thing that's cooking: I have a batch of pasta sauce in the slow cooker.

Before I go, the Chicago Tribune has ranked all 22 Trader Joe's parking lots in the Chicago area on the eve of the new store opening in my building:

A Trader Joe’s parking lot, typically, is crowded. Spots are tight, and there are rarely enough. All vehicles, big or small, get limited room to maneuver — in fact, the tempers of anyone who decides to park here will rise in inverse proportion to the snugness of the lot itself.

Navigating one on a Sunday afternoon is to be thrust into Tetris. One Instagram user compared the experience to solving a Rubik’s Cube, “except you’re colorblind and in a straightjacket.” Ernie Wong, president of Chicago’s Site Design Group, a landscape architecture firm known for its work on the Riverwalk, the Old Chicago Post Office, Pioneer Court at the Tribune Tower, and plenty of Chicago parking lots, told me: “I drive to Trader Joe’s on Roosevelt, and I hate that parking lot. And yet I will do it! I mean, I do do it! I feel I am a patient parker, I wait my turn, but look, it gets stressful, so I wonder: Is there a value to the amount of stress Trader Joe’s parking lots create in me?

The Lakeview store on Lincoln Avenue (No. 16), the first Chicago location, somehow manages to be both welcoming and cramped — weekend standoffs here between motorists vying for the same space have been known to involve crying. ... Rational thought has no home in the Evanston lot (No. 21), which is microscopic, self-contained and only accessed amidst traffic flying down Chicago Avenue. ... Still, absolute hell on Earth, the final boss of Chicago-area Trader Joe’s parking lots, the true pit of despair, is found at Trader Joe’s off Clybourn Avenue in Lincoln Park (No. 22).

I should point out, this is on the eve of a new Trader Joe's opening in my building, possibly within the next two weeks but almost certainly before Thanksgiving. I have seen where the Joes have marked out parking spaces in the former residential lot on the bottom two floors of our 3-story garage, and I am afraid. I have a feeling getting in and out of my own parking space on the third floor will not be fun during opening hours.

Still, it'll be great to do my grocery shopping without going outside this winter...

OK, dog and man are off.

We received a feature request for more Cassie photos. Et voilà:

The bug fix is now churning through the dev/test CI pipeline.

While part of my brain is debugging an annoying new behavior in this software, another part of my brain can't help think about a bit of local news.

It seems a local chicken restaurant known primarily for its Buffalo wings and locally-grown breasts has gone tits-up:

After 35 years, the Hooters restaurant in River North has closed.

The location first opened in 1991 at 660 N. Wells St. The company cited increasing development and neighborhood changes, which a Hooters spokesperson told NBC Chicago led it “to the difficult but considered decision to leave this location.”

Hooters did not comment on the allegations that many of their birds are enhanced with saline injections.

No need to mourn, though. Hooters still has at least 8 locations around the city and suburbs, plus two "hoots" locations if you just want the wings.

The Journal has thrown hundreds of harmless exceptions, almost all of them TaskCanceledException, over the past three days. I'm not entirely sure why. So there might be a patch coming out this weekend.

If you notice anything hinky while visiting the blog, please leave a comment.

(Spoilers for a couple of 30-year-old television shows, and one that's 40 years old. No real Discovery spoilers, though.)

For the past two weeks, I have thought of watching the next episode of Star Trek: Discovery season 4 in my queue, and then said "nah." I believe I've finally figured out why. This is hard for me to admit as a lifetime member of the Democratic Party who has championed progressive causes his whole life, but: it's too damn woke.

Back in 2020, some of you may recall, I wrote a long essay about how Discovery's third season irked me. My principal objection was that a warship popping 900 years into the future would be so disorienting to the crew and to the world it found itself in that the way the series glossed over it undermined the stories the series was trying to tell. I know that this comes close to the Dune joke going around about how fans accept magical space worms and superhero desert warriors but they find a main character named "Duncan Idaho" beyond the pale. It's actually not that far off, though: the way everyone in the 32nd century just blithely accepts the arrival of an ancient ship crewed by uncouth and incomprehensible people took me out of the storytelling.

I got through Season 3 anyway, and it was fine. Not great, but it entertained me while working from home during the pandemic.

Six years later, I realized I never started season 4. The show wrapped for good in May 2024 after season 5, so at least I wasn't falling farther behind, but I still thought I should catch up.

First, I had forgotten a lot about season 3, so I had to review Wikipedia to remember what I'd seen five years earlier. I also pushed aside my objections to the 900-years-in-the-future story and just went with it. But almost immediately in the first episode, season 4 started bothering me even more than season 3 did, for an entirely different and even more perniciously ahistorical reason.

Not only does season 4 continue to ignore the 900-year problem, but it plants itself so squarely in the politics of 2021 America that its politics get in the way of its storytelling. That's bad in any genre, but egregiously bad in sci-fi.

If you've read almost anything I've ever written here, you know that I have absolutely no objection to people or fictional characters on the basis of their demographic characteristics. What I have objected to is when people or fictional characters are solely and entirely concerned with their culture or background to the exclusion of anything else. And I think the contrast between the original Star Trek and this spinoff series illustrate the problems pretty well.

The original Star Trek was one of the most progressive series on television when it ran from 1966 to 1969. It shocked audiences in September 1966 to see a Black woman, a green-blooded alien, and (from season 2) a Russian all serving as bridge officers on the Enterprise. But here's what Gene Roddenberry did that made it work: nothing. Lt Uhura was African, and in-universe, no one cared. That was Roddenberry's point. Of course the future military would have officers from all over the Federation, and of course the other characters wouldn't even notice any more than the US Navy in 1966 would have noticed its officers' eye colors.

Showing that race, sex, and even planet of origin were beneath notice in the future demonstrated a progressive vision that made Star Trek such an enduring franchise. McCoy calling Spock "green-blooded [and] inhuman" in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was funny because it was an over-the-top insult in-universe. It would be like me calling a friend a queer Roundhead villain ("yes, I have a same-sex partner, support the Parliament over the King, and was born in a farming community; and?").

Don't get me wrong: the original Star Trek had some howlers of politicking, like "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" whose ham-handed message made eyes roll in 1969 as much as it does today. And like a lot of men of his generation (I'm looking at you, Isaac Asimov), Roddenberry's progressive vision somehow didn't fully include women. The Star Trek franchise didn't really address that problem until after he died, when Voyager finally gave us a female captain as a lead character.

Let's contrast that with how Discovery handles the issues of the day. The protagonist of the series is a Black, female officer who becomes captain of the ship in season 3. Cool. No one in-universe cares about her demographics, as it should be. Her story arc is compelling, the character is strong and respected by all, and Sonequa Martin-Green is fun to watch. There are some choices about how the character is portrayed that one could see as drawing attention to her being, well, Black and female, but none of it distracts from the story.

Unfortunately, there are four characters whose identities completely overshadow their characters, in really ennervating ways: the doubly-trans Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio) and their deceased um-friend (?) Gray Tal (Ian Alexander); and the gay male couple Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz). Both relationships hammer the orientations and identities of the participants and distract from the storytelling to a point where I don't even want to deal with them anymore.

Let's take the first pair: Adira and Gray. Both characters are of a symbiotic species (the Trill) in which a worm-like symbiont that lives for centuries rides around in an otherwise normal humanoid body for a few decades until the host dies of old age. The symbiont, being a worm, is just as comfortable in a female humanoid body as a male one. This was understood when the species was introduced in 1993 as an expy for gay and trans people. Deep Space Nine made lots of references to the fact that the Dax symbiont inhabiting the very attractive Jadzia (played by a very attractive 28-year-old Terry Farrell) had previously inhabited an elderly male body named Curzon. But no one cared, with the main character (Ben Sisko, played by Avery Brooks) often warmly addressing Jadzia as "old man."

But with the Adira and Gray storyline, the fact that both del Barrio and Alexander are non-binary is the point. Their scenes lean into this so hard that they often fall over. Like much of the far-left poltics of the 2020s, there is no subtext; it's all text, boldfaced and underlined. And their entire storyline feels to me like a Very Special Episode from a 1980s sitcom.¹ The Paul/Hugh storyline at least has some good stuff about how Hugh was dead for a while, and how that affected their marriage; but there are still way too many beats where I imagine someone running a chyron with "They're gay! And married! Look how progressive we are!"

Attention Alex Kutzman et al.: Babylon 5 had two explicitly gay relationships² back in 1997, both of which flowed directly from the characters and the story rather than the other way around, and in which the homosexuality was completely irrelevant to the story and to the other characters.

The problem, of course, is that Discovery takes these stories from the politics rather than from the characters. It reduces the characters to their contemporary identities, which science fiction has always tried to avoid. And it's just bad storytelling.

Science fiction's greatest strength has always been to frame a contemporary concern in a fantastic way to get at the essence of the issue. In 1966, the Civil Rights Act had just passed, but Black people were still treated as second class in much of the United States, and women of any skin color couldn't open a bank account without their husband's consent. In that context, having a Black female bridge officer on a spaceship, and having no one on that spaceship even notice she's Black or female³, was a groundbreaking statement. In 1996, during "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the earliest stirrings of the gay marriage movement, having two women fall in love on a space station, and having no one on that space station even bat an eye over it (at least until Talia's true nature came out, but that had nothing to do with her sex!), was a groundbreaking statement.

In 2021, having a non-binary character fall in love with another non-binary character is about as groundbreaking as one of Cassie's turds.

Kutzman and company clearly did not understand those lessons when plotting out seasons 3 and 4 of Star Trek: Discovery. I'd love to find out that it was really executive meddling, but even still, I'd hope the Discovery writer's room could have found better ways of handling it. Because, after a few episodes of season 4, it just seemed like pandering to a contemporary activist group at the expense of what could have been a much more entertaining series.

Someone please tell me: does it get better? Should I watch the last 15 episodes of Discovery? Or should I just call it a day and return to grown-up sci-fi like The Expanse?

Yesterday's long walk felt great at the time, but I did not recover well overnight, so I'm taking it easy today. I've got two meetings this afternoon, a rehearsal this evening, and I sincerely hope a nap before all of that. Plus, despite the horrible things my quads and glutes are saying about the state of the world right now, I do have to take Cassie outside a couple more times.

Speaking of the deplorable state of the world:

• We all knew Ohio Republican gubenatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was a vile lump of dingo feces, but it now seems we didn't know just how putrid he is.
• Alberta spent C$125 m holding a referendum on leaving the federation, which, fortunately, failed. Meaning the OAFPOTUS failed. Again.
• Brian Beutler argues that the Democrats need to play the same expectations game as the Republicans: "They’re on track to win, and they should act like it. But whatever the outcome, they will achieve it against concerted efforts by Donald Trump and his tech-media allies to cheat."
• Part of the OAFPOTUS's lowest-ever approval numbers might have something to do with how he's destroying Americans' health care.
• After FiftyPlusOne investigated hinky polling numbers, they discovered that the "pollster" Wedgewood made up all their polls, possibly as a way to bolster Republican chances in two weeks by nudging Democrats to unpopular far-left positions.
• A new proposal by Chicago area heavy-rail authority Metra would boost rail service throughout the area and take a fully-regional approach to train scheduling. It's at least a decade away from being realized, but it suggests that maybe, just maybe, I will live long enough to see Northern Illinois rail service that's almost as good as 1990s London or even 1970s Tokyo. A guy can dream.

Finally, the guys who bring us The Daily WTF have made a video dramatizing a sequence of hilarious status messages sent out by a software tool company after Amazon Web Services accidentally shut down their entire product line for four days. It's worth 7 minutes of your time:

I did my annual marathon walk today, covering exactly 42.23 km in 6:34:32, which is probably good enough to do Chicago next year (weather permitting). We had a perfect day here in Chicago, with temperatures barely getting to 21°C towards the end of it.

This year we finished at Steep Ravine Brewing owing to the unfortunate demise of Lake Bluff Brewing last month. This allowed my Brews Buddy and me to redo the route from scratch. We agreed we wanted to walk along the Evanston lakefront and Northwestern University lakefill (their artificial lagoon and peninsula), and we wanted to spend some time on the part of the North Branch Trail, which now connects all the way to Ravinia Park and the Lake County McClory Trail, which only took a century, but hey.

I believe I will sleep well tonight. And since Cassie was at day camp for 8 hours, I expect she will as well.

More tomorrow. Right now: I need to lie down.

It was sunny and not too cool yesterday, so Cassie and I spent almost the entire time outside. We walked 13.4 km (8.3 mi), not including the illegal off-leash time I gave her in a North Center park, and spent our breaks at two of my favorite breweries. Unfortunately, Burning Bush was out of Marz crack-and-cheese-covered popcorn so we had to make do with Goldfish crackers.

I also wound up sharing half a beer with a very drunk wasp:

(You can tell it's a wasp because it's not wearing a yarmulke.)

Today is also sunny and cool, so we're about to do our lunchtime walk. And tomorrow, my Brews Buddy and I plan to do our annual marathon walk, though not to Lake Bluff Brewing, because they have ceased operations. Instead, we plan to take a winding path through the North Shore that ends at Steep Ravine Brewing, where we will consume many tacos and get back to Ravenswood in time to ransom both dogs from day care. Updates as conditions warrant.

Driving home from Janesville, Wis., yesterday, I got caught in some light single-cloud rain right before sunset. That's exactly the phenomena required to create this delightful optical effect:

The rainbow "followed" me for about 15 minutes until the cloud drifted south of me. It's unfortunate that a photograph can't capture exactly what I saw, but I had to try.

No main post today as I'll be in the car for 5 hours today, with a memorial service in the middle. Regular posting should resume tomorrow.

Dear DB Vertrieb GmbH Fahrpreisnacherhebung:

I received your letter of 24th September yesterday. In the letter, you claimed that I have not paid the 60 € penalty fare for taking the wrong train from Bruxelles Midi to Liège on 7th September, demanded that I do so immediately, and you assessed a 7 € "reminder fee" to boot. Thank you for providing your international banking information in case I wanted to spend the $50 or so necessary to wire you the money. Regrettably, I cannot comply with your request, as your correspondence had several deficiencies that make it impossible to do so:

1. I have already paid the 60 € penalty fare, directly to the conductor of the train in question on 7th September. I am happy to provide a copy or photo of the receipt. That your systems didn't connect that payment with the data the conductor collected on me is unfortunate, but not a problem that I can solve or take responsibility for.
2. The United States Postal Service made a heroic effort to deliver the letter, correctly determining that the city of "VI IL CHICAGO CHICAGO" was not, in fact, in the unincorporated territory of the "Amerikanische_Jungferninseln" (the U.S. Virgin Islands), but was rather in the State of Illinois. Unfortunately it took three weeks for them to do that, so I was unable to respond within 10 days as you requested. (I am glad I don't live in one of the 91 poluplated places in the US called Springfield or it might have taken even longer.) You may want to remind your conductors (who in general have excellent English skills) that "VS" is the correct German abbreviation for my country.
3. The letter does not list a phone number or email address to which I can direct my response. Given the delivery timeline and difficulties already mentioned, I am loath to respond by post. I hope someone in your Frankfurt am Main office reads The Daily Parker.

Your ICE trains are excellent, and I do look forward to taking another one through Germany someday soon. I just hope we have all moved on from this misunderstanding by then.

Sincerely,
/s/ The Daily Parker