The Daily Parker

Yesterday I went out to the exurban village of New Lenox to review one of the most remote breweries on the Brews & Choos list, near the Laraway Road station on the Southwest Service. (Fun fact: After decades of living here, I have now taken every one of Chicago's commuter rail lines at least once.)

I had planned to walk from there to Rock Island train station in the center of town, as the Southwest Service didn't have a return train until 10:30pm. I knew the first 2 kilometers of the walk would have some challenges as I would have to walk along two highways. But the satellite photos did not prepare me for how hostile the walking environment would be on the ground:

I'll walk along a shoulder if needed, and I'll even walk along short grass. But that stuff came up to my knees.

Then, this morning, I woke up to three stories about urban planning failures right here in Chicago that make me want to take every engineer in IDOT on a forced march along the stretch of Laraway Road pictured above:

• Despite multiple bike fatalities, the good people of Lincolnwood have decided to reject $2.5 million in state funds to build bike lanes on a dangerous stretch of stroad.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has announced a $4.9 billion plan to install elevators at all of the El and subway stations that need them—by 2038.
• State and local officials joined residents yesterday at Truman College to protest IDOT's backwards-looking plan to redesign DuSable Lake Shore Drive, as the state plan has no concessions for mass transit and would in fact make traffic worse.

Cars are killing us. (Literally: the US has 40,000 traffic deaths a year, far more than any other country.) And yet state transit departments seem to think their only mandate is to increase the number of cars on the road. 

The problem with having 8 billion people on Earth is that every single one of us has different ideas and opinions. If there's an opinion out there so fringe and so bizarre that only 1/10th of 1% of us share it, that's still about a quarter of the population of Chicago.

I thought of that because of how much news we have. And I imagine that from the ancestral environment thousands of years ago until the last century, we just didn't have all that much. I don't think that's entirely because of light-speed communications since the telegraph informing us of more things than the horse-drawn post could do before the 1840s. I also think we've just got so many more people, with so many more crazy people.

How much has happened in the last 50 years, for example? And by "50 years" I mean exactly that, since this speech on 8 August 1974:

That got me thinking about the relentlessness of news in the telecommunications era, and how we didn't evolve like this. Even Aldous Huxley thought our downfall as a culture would be drugs and sex, simply because in 1932 no one looked at screens all day. (I have always thought that he, and not Orwell, got the overall prediction correct—at least as regards the Anglosphere.)

Anyway, I have to debug a new feature and not worry about the Post.

My plan this evening will take me to Arrowhead Ales in New Lenox, the only Brews & Choos brewery on Metra's Southwest Service. Because the SWS has such an inconvenient schedule, getting home requires me to get to the Rock Island District station 4.3 km away.

Now, I could simply take a Lyft, but given that I'll have almost 2 hours between arriving at Laraway Road and the train departing New Lenox (with another train an hour later), and also given the weather forecast, I plan to walk there.

The only trouble is, the brewery sits in an exurban, 100% car-oriented area, 1,800 meters from the nearest sidewalk:

The intersection of Laraway Road and County Route 4, where I take the right turn towards the village of New Lenox, requires me to Frogger across a total of 11 traffic lanes and 3 high-speed turn lanes:

Then, walking against traffic (always do this!), I have another 1400 meters of 4-lane county highway to follow before I finally reach the village limits. At that point the 4-lane county highway becomes 2-lane Cedar Road, so even in the spots without sidewalks the traffic speed should be much lower.

Wish me luck! And stop funding highway expansion!

The hot, humid weather we've had for the past couple of weeks has finally broken. I'm in the Loop today, and spent a good 20 minutes outside reading, and would have stayed longer, except I got a little chilly. I dressed today more for the 24°C at home and less for the cooler, breezier air this close to the lake.

Elsewhere in the world:

• I was waiting for Russia expert Julia Ioffe to weigh in on last week's hostage release.
• The Chicago White Sox failed to set the all-time record for most consecutive losses in the American League yesterday by winning their first game in the last 23.
• Of the $1.2 trillion Carbon Reduction Program funds allocated to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, $130 billion has been spent so far: but only $26 billion on rail, and $70 billion on highways. 
• Even though Deutsche Bahn has faster, timelier, more convenient, more comfortable, and just more trains than the US, Germans say their national railroad is on the wrong track.
• Deadhorse, Alaska, which lies at 70° north latitude, set an all-time record yesterday with a high temperature just below 32°C.
• After CrowdStrike told Delta Airlines to go pound sand a couple days ago, Microsoft told the carrier off yesterday.
• Be careful taking dogs to fresh-water swimming holes: warmer weather has made blue-green algae blooms more common.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If you don't know what that is, read up. It's probably the most direct cause of most of our military policy since then.

This shit amused me:

• The Chicago White Sox have tied the American League record of 21 consecutive losses, with the MLB all-time record of 23 a distinct and shitty possibility.
• CrowdStrike has taken enough of Delta Airlines' shit, thank you.
• In addition to all the other shit that Hurricane Debby turned up over the weekend, the storm flushed 25 kilos of cocaine onto a Florida beach. Apparently, this happens all the time.

Finally, Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dropping 350 liters of very literal, very stinky shit onto a boatload of sightseers in the Chicago River. "The culprit turned out to be the band’s tour bus driver, then-42-year-old Stefan Wohl, who pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct and discharging contaminates to cause water pollution. He got hit with 18 months on probation, 150 hours of community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine to Friends of the Chicago River."

I mean, what the shit?

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate:

In picking Walz, 60, Harris is elevating a relatively unknown second-term governor from a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president in more than 50 years, passing over swing state contenders such as Arizona U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Harris and Walz will kick off a tour of battleground states Tuesday evening with a rally in Philadelphia.

Initially seen as a second-tier candidate for the job, Walz vaulted to the top of the list of possible prospects after spending weeks defending Harris on the cable news circuit, going viral in the process for his off-the-cuff messaging style. He’s credited with reframing the party’s attack on Republicans from an existential threat to democracy to these “really weird people” for their positions on abortion and book bans.

A national Democratic audience took to Walz’s blunt, fast-talking style and his “Minnesota nice” way of slamming Republicans, gaining supporters for the vice president job in labor unions, current and former members of Congress, progressive leaders and Gen Z activists like Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg.

I thought US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) would have rounded out the ticket well, but after seeing Harris's short list, Walz became my pick. I'm both glad and unsurprised that my governor, JB Pritzker, will stay in Springfield for another two years. (I expect he'll run for President in 2032.)

The election is 14 weeks from today. And though I try not to watch polls this far out, I did notice that as of yesterday, Harris is 3 points up against the XPOTUS, and her favorability is above water for the first time since she took office. Game on.

A combination of a mild winter and the decline of natural predators has led to a rabbit explosion in Chicago:

The abundance of rabbits could be due to the milder winter Chicago experienced this year, said Seth Magle, director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

The brutality of a cold winter and limited food availability during the snowy, frigid months can take their toll on the rabbit population. But if winters are mild, then with spring comes abnormal population growth, Magle said.

And now, with summer produce season in full swing, the overabundance of rabbits can cause headaches for gardeners, whose crops often fall prey to hungry bunnies, Magle said.

“These are species that are very well-adapted to cities. We’re planting stuff all around that they love to eat. Then you add in these mild winters — I think you have a bit of a perfect storm for rabbits,” Magle said.

As Cassie can tell you, they're everywhere in my neighborhood. I'm a bit disappointed in the local coyote population as well, though they may simply have too much food to eat right now.

As you may have seen below, yesterday I went out to Kankakee on a $15 round-trip Amtrak ticket to visit Knack Brewing for the Brews & Choos Project. Not only did the brewery surprise me—I mean, just look at it on Google Street View—but the city had a lot more going on than I anticipated.

I've been through Kankakee a bunch of times, and maybe even pulled off I-57 on some trip to Champaign or St Louis. I've even landed at IKK once, in March 2002, getting checked out in a Piper Warrior. But until yesterday, I never actually walked around the place.

If it's known for anything outside Illinois, Kankakee is probably best known as "the worst place to live in America," at least according to Money magazine in 1999. (This American Life explains.) Settlers and the US government stole the land it sits on from the Pottawatomie tribes in 1832, and platted the town in June 1853. Unlike most Northwest Ordinance cities, however, the good burghers of Bourbonnais (as it was then called) decided to orient the city along the railroad tracks, 8° east of true north.

As this Google Earth view shows, Kankakee suffered serious damage from car-oriented development in the post-WWII era as most of its downtown became parking lots:

Even getting to Kankakee takes you through an historical artifact from the beginning days of Amtrak in 1971. When Amtrak started, it consolidated its Chicago operations at Union Station, which had (and still has) the only passenger track connecting the north and south sides of the region. Dearborn Station closed, and the Illinois Central abandoned what is now Millennium Station. Trains serving Southern Illinois and points south now left from the other side of the Chicago river, which worked well enough until the 18th Street bridge became unusable in the 1980s. Today, that means trains serving Kankakee, Carbondale, and New Orleans have to proceed from Union Station in reverse for about 3 km, then turn around and pass at 8 km/h over the St Charles Airline to the freight tracks parallel to the Metra Electric and South Shore lines that come out of Millennium Station:

Source: High Speed Rail Alliance

To get the 5 km from Union Station to 22nd Street, where the train finally highballs (though only at the US "high" speed of 120 km/h), takes 20 minutes. To get from there the rest of the 90 km to Kankakee takes about 50 minutes. Amtrak needs only $147 million to restore the 18th Street Bridge and add more track to eliminate the reversing nonsense, money it might get any day now. Yeah, any day now.

Back to my adventure. Once in Kankakee, I took the long way (about 2½ km) from the station to the brewery so I could get a sense of the city. Like a lot of places, it definitely has a good side and a bad side. Less than a kilometer from the station I hustled past vacant lots and a couple of houses that had seen better days:

And yet, just over the river and a bit south of there I found a cute example of an 1880s farmhouse next to an early-1900s four-square:

And did you know the city has a wee 800 kw hydroelectric station, first built in 1912?

That's not a lot of power, but it probably provides enough for about 200 homes or businesses—reducing everyone's electricity costs.

And there's some civic pride, too. I missed the annual music festival last week, but I did stumble upon the classic car display outside the pizza joint where I grabbed a slice:

And the train station looks pretty charming at sunset on a summer evening:

I'll head back there at some point, maybe in the fall. Amtrak only has three trains a day, leaving at 8am, 4pm, and 8pm, with returns at 11am, 8pm, and 11pm. So if I take the train, I'll probably once again only get three hours or so to explore. But it only cost me $15 to get there and back yesterday, and I'm seeing tickets for as low as $5 each way, so why not? It's worth the trip.

Welcome to stop #114 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Knack Brewing, 789 S. McMullen Dr., Kankakee, Ill
Train line: Amtrak Illini, Kankakee
Time from Chicago: 70 minutes
Distance from station: 900 m

I have to say, both Kankakee and Knack Brewing surprised me. I'll have more about the city in a subsequent post. For now, I'll say that this little 2-year-old mom-and-pop brewery in a rural city 100 km from my house was worth the trip—especially with the $15 round-trip fare I got from Amtrak.

The taproom doesn't have a lot of space, though it's bigger than a couple of taprooms I've visited. It has a modern vibe with a lot of whimsical touches, including a corkboard in the washroom where you can put up a photo of your dog, since they don't allow dogs inside. The back patio has a view of the river, but the front window faces an abandoned dive bar across a 4-lane stroad that gets maybe 100 cars an hour.

They make lovely beers, too. I started with the Lil' Dhrop hazy IPA (6.2%), a delicious beer with grapefruit and citrus notes and a great finish. The Thrilla Kölsch-style ale (5.2%) combined the lightness and summery drinkability of a Kölsch lager with the depth of an ale. Sure, it wouldn't pass the Reinheitsgebot, but I would have taken a pint outside if the heat index had been a bit lower. The Classic2 American IPA (6.8%) had a subtlety that you wouldn't guess from its higher alcohol content, with a dryness and lightness I really liked. And as much as I liked the Fortillo Tho hazy IPA, its 8.2% ABV took a bit away from its flavor. Since I had another hour after that flight, I went back to the Lil' Dhrop and my book, and relaxation.

They had an art fair and a food truck going in the parking lot right when I arrived, which unfortunately closed just as I got hungry. Next time I visit, I'll plan a longer stay.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? None
Serves food? BYOF
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

One of my co-workers and I got into a good-natured debate about the efficiency of my Prius Prime. In addition to boasting that I used no gasoline at all last month (and only 41.6 L—11 gallons—all year), I pointed out that Illinois gets a majority of its power from nuclear fission, so yes, my car is net-positive on carbon emissions. He challenged me on that, saying that Illinois uses a lot of coal and natural gas, obviating the benefits of my car's electric drive.

Well, the New York Times has a really cool interactive piece today showing how each US state's electricity generation mix has changed this century. And it turns out, I was right:

Nuclear energy has been Illinois’s top source of power generation for much of the last two decades, accounting for about half of the electricity produced in the state during most years. Coal was long the second-largest power source, briefly surpassing nuclear as the top generation fuel in 2004 and again in 2008. But coal’s role in the state power mix has declined significantly in recent years as older coal-fired power plants have retired or been converted to burn natural gas. Both natural gas and wind generation have grown over the past decade, and last year gas surpassed coal as the second-largest source of power in the state.

So, in fact, Illinois gets 68% of its power from renewables and only 15% from coal—and wind power is going up while coal and gas go down. And down at the bottom there, it looks like solar is finally making a debut, at about 2% but going up.

Vermont's graph, though, surprised me. It turns out that all of Vermont's power generation has been renewable for since 2001. But since the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station closed in 2014, the mix went from 76% nuclear/16% hydro/7% biomass to 51% hydro/19% solar/16% biomass/15% wind today.

We really need to start building more nuclear power plants, though: