The Daily Parker

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle read through a week of newspapers to understand the hot topics of 100 years ago:

First, there is news of the great Washington Naval Conference, which has commanded half of the front page since opening in mid-November. The idea of the conference is for the great powers to jointly reduce their armaments, so everyone can spend the money on better things.

Inside the paper, we may spend some time browsing the ads, perhaps pausing over the homage to the REO Speed Wagon — still a modern commercial vehicle in 1921, rather than an elderly rock band. We find predictions that Russia will soon be forced to abandon communism and embrace capitalism to feed its people.

Once you imagine your descendants peering back in surprise across the centuries, chuckling at the sight of you passionately arguing some historical irrelevancy, it gets easier to relax and stop shouting at each other. Or heck, maybe even put down our phones and attend to the biggest story most of us will ever live through — not what’s happening in the news but in the homes where we read it.

Somehow, though, I think the storming of the US Capitol a year ago, and the likelihood of more political violence this year, might be remembered.

After the whipsaw between 2019 and 2020, I'm happy 2021 came out within a standard deviation of the mean on most measures:

• In 2020, I flew the fewest air miles ever. In 2021, my 11,868 miles and five segments came in 3rd lowest, ahead of only 2020 and 1999.
• I only visited one other country (the UK) and two other states (Wisconsin and California) during 2021. What a change from 2014.
• In 2020, I posted a record 609 times on The Daily Parker; 2021's 537 posts came in about average for the modern era.
• Cassie got almost 422 hours of walks in 2021, a number I don't think I ever achieved with Parker. And given I only had her for 291 days of 2021, that's an average of 1:27 of walks per day. According to my Garmin, she and I covered over 684 km just on walks that I recorded with my watch. A young, high-energy dog plus working from home most of the time will do that, I suppose.
• Speaking of walks, in 2021 I got 4,926,000 steps and walked 3,900 km—about the straight-line distance from New York to Seattle. Those numbers came within 2% of 2020 and 4% of 2019. I also hit new personal records for distance and steps when I walked over 51 km on September 3rd. And I hit my step goal 355 times (cf. 359 times in 2020), though not all in a row.
• I drove 4,242 km in 2021, almost exactly the same amount as in 2020 (4,265 km), but I used a bit more fuel (116 L to 79 L).
• I spent 1365 hours working from home and 521 in the office in 2021, about the same (1327 and 560) as in 2020. I expect about the same in 2022.
• Personal software development took up another 184 hours, almost all on the really cool thing I'm going to soft-launch tomorrow.
• The Apollo Chorus took up 222 hours of my time, including 100 in rehearsals and performances and about the same amount on my duties as president. In 2020, that was 57 and 71 hours respectively, mainly because we didn't have any in-person performances.
• Finally, I started only 28 books in 2021 and finished 23, after dropping a couple that dogged me for a while. That's more than in my worst-ever year, 2017 (18 and 13), but down a bit from the last two years. That said, my average numbers for the past 10 years are 28.2 and 23.3, making 2021...average. I also watched 51 movies and 48 TV shows, which just means I need to get out more.

So, will 2022 return to normal (-ish)? Or will some of the trends that started in March 2020 continue even after the pandemic has long become something we scare children with?

Today is the second anniversary of the first reported Covid-19 case, a fact I had forgotten when I booked my booster shot two weeks ago. Since 2019, about 5.8 million people have died of it, 822,000 of them here in the US. And it has also befuddled peoples' senses of time.

NBC has a quiz to see if you remember when things happened in the last two years. I got 28, which embarrasses me. I really did forget all about Kanye West's divorce and Alex Trebek's death.

Let's hope that next year is 2,022, and not 2020 II.

SARS-Cov-2-omicron continues its march through the world, aided in part by a lack of tests that could detect and mitigate Covid infections early on. The Times reports that a Texas man died of the omicron variant despite his fantastical belief that a previous Covid infection rendered him immune. One would hope this would cure the metastasizing delusions of "herd immunity" incubated within the thick skulls and vulcanized brains of the voluntarily unvaccinated, but no, we live in 'Murica.

Meanwhile, Omicron looks more and more like a mild but super-contagious virus that probably won't send vaccinated people to the hospital. And the Walter Reed Army Research Institute quietly announced yesterday that they have developed a vaccine that targets all SARS viruses, not just Cov-2. So for people who have either the sense or the compassion to get vaccinated (and boosted), Covid-19 looks well on its way to becoming just another coronavirus, like the common cold.

Don't celebrate victory just yet, though. In the war against Covid-19 we may have gotten to December 1944, but Germany hasn't surrendered. The UK announced 100,000 new Covid cases just yesterday, a new record, and here in the US we've passed 51 million cases and 805,000 deaths, on course to hit 2 million deaths by the lockdown's 2-year anniversary in March.

This map does not make me happy:

About that WWII analogy: By December 1944, the Allies knew they would win eventually. But people living through the war had no idea how long it would continue. Even if they had known, at that point war would continue in Europe for six more months and in the Pacific for three more after that, killing millions more people. Imagine living in eastern France that winter, with the Allies fighting Germany for every hectare of land and you between them, starving. That's where we are today.

I think next summer will feel a lot like the summer of 1945. We'll have a lot to clean up, but we won't be dying as much. Then we can get back to eroding our democracy one congressional district at a time.

Update, 14:15 CST: The Atlantic's Yascha Mounk has similar thoughts.

I just started Sprint 52 in my day job, after working right up to the last possible minute yesterday to (unsuccessfully) finish one more story before ending Sprint 51. Then I went to a 3-hour movie that you absolutely must see.

Consequently a few things have backed up over at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters.

Before I get into that, take a look at this:

That 17.1°C reading at IDTWHQ comes in a shade lower than the official reading at O'Hare of 17.8°, which ties the record high maximum set in 1971. The forecast says it'll hang out here for a few hours before gale-force winds drive the temperature down to more seasonal levels overnight. I've even opened a few windows.

So what else is new?

• Carving out exceptions to filibusters in the US Senate? Not new.
• The intractability of the US Senate in general? Not new.
• The size of the US House of Representatives, which we could change at any time? Not new.
• Boris Johnson not believing rules apply to him? Not new.
• Disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's ethics problems? Not new.
• The "metaverse" idea? Not new (says the guy who first imagined it).
• Candidates to run Chicago's tourism board? Not just not new; not any.

So what really is new?

• The Log4j zero-day exploit is pretty new, and pretty serious.
• The rash of tornados, including an EF5 monster that spun for 300 kilometers in Kentucky in December is really new, and even more serious.
• Pittsburgh switching over to dark-sky streetlights over the next 5 years is new, and pretty cool.
• Most of the buildings around Orleans and Kinzie in the River North area of Chicago are new, but not pretty or cool.
• Getting whisky delivered to your house is new-ish in most places and will be new in others pretty soon.

But Sprint 52 at my office, that's incredibly new, and I must go back to it.

Messages for you, sir:

• As of yesterday, officially 800,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.
• Two members of the president's bi-partisan commission looking at ways to fix the Supreme Court say we shouldn't fix it because "Federal judges aren't politicians." Ah, ha ha, how droll.
• Those non-politicians comprising the Republican wing of the Federal judiciary are helping nudge the country to civil war, according to Charles Blow.
• Why isn't the media covering the war on democracy like an actual war? asks Mother Jones.
• The Atlantic takes another look at California's over-zealous regulations strangling sidewalk cafes.
• The Chicago Tribune takes the time to review The Weiners Circle. It's a much better review than the one Everywhereist gave to Bros', too.

I will now go hug my dog, who set a record yesterday for staying home alone (8 hours, 20 minutes) without watering my carpets.

Just two of note. First, on this day 21 years ago, Al Gore conceded the 2000 election to George W Bush. Good thing that made almost no difference at all in world events.

Another anniversary is the one that happens every January 1st to works of art created a certain point in the past. A whole bunch of books, films, and musical compositions pass into the public domain as their copyrights expire, including:

• The Sun Also Rises and Winnie-the-Pooh, both published in 1926;
• The works of Louis Armstrong and Jim Morrison, who died in 1971 (except in the U.S.); and
• All musical recordings made before January 1, 1923.

Have fun adapting!

We're all set to perform Handel's Messiah tomorrow and Sunday, which got noticed by both the local news service and local TV station. Otherwise, the week just keeps getting odder:

• Monkees singer-songwriter Michael Nesmith died today at 78.
• Consumer prices rose at an annualized rate of 6.8% in November, the highest rate in 39 years.
• Catherine Rampell wonders who would ever design a political system like ours.
• Kate Riga explains the dog-whistle Justice Amy Coney Barrett (R) used in last week's oral arguments on the Mississippi abortion ban.
• The UK has imposed an Ultra Low Emissions Zone in most of greater London, imposing an eye-watering £12.50-per-day toll on anyone who brings in a car that fails to meet their emissions standards.
• A jury convicted actor Jussie Smollett of faking his own hate crime for...reasons? Dave Chapelle has the best take on this (from 2019).
• The Writers Guild of America has released their updated list of the 101 best screenplays of the 21st Century (so far).
• The Federal Aviation Administration has issued an Airworthiness Directive on the reliability of radar altimeters near 5G mobile phone transmitters.

And to cap all that off, the National Weather Service has announced a Hazardous Weather Outlook for tonight that includes...tornados? I hope the weather gets better before our performance.

Just a few:

• What is Putin's real game with Ukraine right now? Julia Ioffe thinks it may just be R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
• After Bob Dole's death this week, Paul Krugman bemoans the disappearance of Republican grown-ups.
• A stupid-looking statute of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest finally came down.
• Germany's incoming government claims it wants to protect end-to-end encryption, a move Bruce Schneier likes.
• Bloomberg CityLab asks, why does US infrastructure cost so much?
• A rash of earthquakes shook the Pacific Ocean west of Oregon this morning.

And finally, atheist sci-fi author John Scalzi...bought a church?

I'm looking ahead to two long rehearsals, three performances, and squeezing into my tuxedo, all while the temperature drops over the next six hours to a predicted -9°C. I conclude from these facts that it's the beginning of winter.

I also just spent the last hour trying to get Visual Studio to log into the correct Azure subscription. So instead of reading these things at lunch, I had to let them pile up:

• The UK High Court ruled yesterday that Uber's business model is unlawful, saying ride-hail services do fall under a 1998 law regulating car hires.
• Thieves in Canada have learned how to use Apple AirTags to target high-end cars.
• Michael Tomasky takes issue with Ron DeSantis' push to "freedom us to death."
• Pan-American Airlines ceased operations 30 years ago Saturday.
• Maybe teaching student pilots better safety habits overall would prevent the engine-out forced landings we simulate in training.

And now, back to the mines.