The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Over-zealous PEAs

A few months ago a Chicago Parking Enforcement Agent (PEA) tried to give me a ticket while I was paying for the parking spot online. I kept calm and polite, but I firmly explained that writing a ticket before I'd even finished entering the parking zone in the payment app might not survive the appeal.

Yesterday I got another parking ticket at 9:02pm in a spot that has free parking from 9pm to 9am. The ticket actually said "parking expired and driver not walking back from meter." Note that the parking app won't let you pay for parking beyond 9pm in that spot. Because, again, it's free after 9pm. That didn't stop the PEA, so now I actually will appeal, and I'll win. But it's a real pain.

Again, I thank Mayor Daley for jamming through the worst public financial deal in the history of the United States.

Meanwhile, I didn't have time to read all of these at lunch today:

  • Almost as shocking as the realization that privatizing parking meters games the system in favor of private interests against the general public, it turns out so do traffic impact studies.
  • The Illinois Board of Elections voted unanimously to reject an effort to keep the XPOTUS off the Republican Party primary ballot, citing an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that excludes the Board from constitutional questions.
  • Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R) won't win the Republican nomination for president this year, but she will make the XPOTUS froth at the mouth.
  • Of course, she and others in her party persist in trying to make their own voters froth at the mouth, mostly by lying to them about the state of the economy, cities, and other things that have gone pretty well since 2021.
  • Of course, perhaps the Republican Party lies so much to cover their demonstrable incompetence at governing?
  • Christopher Elmensdorf warns that the clean energy bill winding through the Democratic offices on Capitol Hill will lead to endless NIMBYism—not to mention bad-faith blockage by fossil-fuel companies.
  • For only $120,000 a year, this consultant will get your kid into Harvard.
  • Helmut Jahn's new building at 1000 S. Michigan Ave. looks super cool.

I will now go back to work. Tonight, I will schedule my parking appeal. Updates as conditions warrant.

El Niño plays with the excess energy

We talk about anthropogenic climate change in human-centric terms: the planet is getting warmer very quickly relative to the historical baseline of 1800 CE. But heat just means energy. A plane flying from Taipei to Los Angeles got some kinetic energy from the warmer Pacific waters this week:

China Airlines Flight 5116 rocketed to a speed of 1,329 km/h as it bolted eastward across the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, potentially breaking informal records for passenger travel. The commercial flight, which departed from Taipei, landed more than an hour early in Los Angeles, propelled by exceptionally strong tailwinds.

A roaring Pacific jet stream, supercharged by the El Niño climate pattern and moving at more than 400 km/h, gave the flight a boost.

China Airlines 5116 flew its route of 11,593 km in just 10 hours 18 minutes, which rounds to an average speed of 1,126 km/h! That’s including takeoff, landing and all the slower points in the journey. (Working against the jet stream, an average westbound flight from Los Angeles to Taipei is usually scheduled for 14 hours 40 minutes.)

That wasn't the only record: Washington DC hit 27°C on Friday, the warmest temperature ever observed there in January.

Unfortunately the same hemispheric weather system making planes go fast and giving the East Coast June-like weather has kept most of the central US in thick fog:

Since Tuesday, record amounts of fog have blanketed the Lower 48 states, lowering visibility, disrupting flights, causing vehicle accidents and even delaying schools.

On Thursday morning, dense fog advisories affected nearly a third of the United States population (more than 100 million people) and parts of 27 states. These advisories covered the entirety of Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Indiana and Tennessee and portions of many other states from Texas to New York.

Advection fog is the cause. Unlike radiation fog, which typically forms overnight when skies are clear and winds are calm in the spring and fall, advection fog develops when warm, moist air is transported over a layer of cold air near the ground.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings set records for the number of dense fog advisories nationally, according to Daryl Herzmann, a systems analyst who manages a weather hazard database at Iowa State University. Each day surpassed the record set the day before. The fog advisory database dates back to January 2005.

I can confirm it is still foggy in Chicago:

Update: This is all quite a change from 10 years ago today, when the polar vortex visited Chicago with -31°C wind chills.

You don't need sunscreen in Chicago in January

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st.

Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it.

Elsewhere:

Finally, Minnesota-based wildlife photographer Benjamin Olson discovered that a mouse had moved into his car. So naturally, he set up a photo trap. And naturally, it's totes adorbs.

Busy weekend

I grabbed a friend for a couple of Brews & Choos visits yesterday, and through judicious moderation (8-10 oz of beer per person at each stop), we managed to get the entire West Fulton Corridor cluster done in six hours. So in a few minutes I'll start writing four B&C reviews, which will come out over the next three days.

Before I start, though, I'm going to read all these stories that have piled up since Friday:

Finally, the Roscoe Rat (really a squirrel) Hole got its own NPR story this morning. And in my social media I saw a photo of someone proposing to her boyfriend at the rat hole. Color me bemused.

Cold snapped

Around 7 this morning, the official Chicago temperature at O'Hare went above -15°C for the first time in 81 hours, the longest such cold snap since February 1996:

In the 1996 stretch, O’Hare recorded highs of -20.6°C on Feb. 2 and 3, and of -16.7°C on Feb. 4, according to NWS meteorologist Casey Sullivan.

Sullivan said the longest stretch of temps below -15°C in the area was a period of five days in the 1880s, according to NWS records, which go back to 1871.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to do that, but it’s unusual, not unheard of,” Sullivan said of the cold streak.

There may be some — albeit slight — relief from the extreme cold on the way in the coming days. High temperatures Wednesday should climb to a high of around -8°C, the NWS said.

Thursday’s high temps could end up near -5°C, and Friday’s high is expected to be near -9°C.

As of 1pm we've gotten up to -9°C, but the sun is out, and we have brisk west-southwest winds, both of which should help. As long as it stays above -10°C I can walk Cassie home from day camp. (I had to drive her yesterday and today.)

The National Climate Prediction Center says the Arctic Vortex will get back to where it once belonged next week:

I sure hope so. And if Cassie understood "future" as a concept, so would she.

Gross weather day

Looking out my 30th-floor office window this afternoon doesn't cheer me. It's gray and snowy, but too warm for accumulation, so it just felt like rain when I sprinted across the street to get my burrito bowl for lunch.

I do have a boring deployment coming up in about an hour, requiring only that I show the business what we've built and then click "Run pipeline" twice. As a reward for getting ahead on development, I have time to read some of these absolutely horrifying news stories:

Finally, Cranky Flier examines American Airlines' European operations and singles out its heavy dependence on Heathrow as a key reason why its fares trans-Atlantic are lower than other US carriers. Since I am using one of those really low fares to visit Germany next month, I'm OK with American keeping their fares low.

Winter may finally arrive

Chicago had its 4th-warmest December in history last month, with temperatures averaging about 4°C above normal. The trend has continued this month as well. That won't completely end tonight, though we may see some snow:

The first “significant” winter storm to impact the Chicago region is scheduled to start Monday night, with meteorologists predicting two to five inches of snow accumulation and wind gusts up to 30 miles per hour across portions of central and northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana.

A winter weather advisory goes into effect at 8 p.m. until noon Tuesday in the Chicago metro area as well as parts of DuPage, Will and Lake counties.

The storm will likely be split into two rounds, according to the NWS. The first will arrive this evening starting around 8 p.m., with much of the snow accumulating in a brief window from 1 to 5 a.m., just before the early morning commute.

Lovely. But a few centimeters of snow won't bother either Cassie or me tomorrow morning, especially if the temperature stays freezing, as forecast.

Next weekend, though, looks like it might feel more like Real Chicago Winter, with temperatures dropping to -13°C overnight Saturday. I, however, will be in the Pacific Northwest, where...dammit. Temperatures will drop to -6°C overnight Saturday. (I thought Seattle was supposed to be warmer than Chicago?)

Sigh:

I have to remember that the normal temperature curve for Chicago bottoms out from January 17th to 23rd. So it will get colder this winter. I'll take the win for December and just remind myself that our winters build character.

Mid-week mid-day

Though my "to-be-read" bookshelf has over 100 volumes on it, at least two of which I've meant to read since the 1980s, the first book I started in 2024 turned out to be Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause, which I bought because of the author's post on John Scalzi's blog back in November.

That is not what I'm reading today at lunch, though. No, I'm reading a selection of things the mainstream media published in the last day:

Finally, for $1.7 million you can live inside a literal brick oven. The fifth-floor penthouse in the former Uneeda Biscuit building on Chicago's Near West Side includes several rooms with brick ceilings that were, decades ago, the ovens that cooked the biscuits. Cool. (Or, you know, hot.)

Any news? No, not one single new

Wouldn't that be nice? Alas, people keep making them:

Speaking of excoriation, David Mamet has a new memoir about his 40 years in the LA film industry, Everywhere an Oink Oink. (Expect to find that on next year's media roundup.) And I still have to read Linda Obst's Hello, He Lied, which I keep forgetting to liberate from my dad's bookshelf.