The Daily Parker

Chicago's official temperature at O'Hare hit 35°C about two hours ago, tying the record high temperature set in 1994. Currently it's pushing 36°C with another hour of warming likely before it finally cools down overnight. After another 32°C day tomorrow, the forecast Friday looks perfect.

While we bake by the lake today, a lot has gone down elsewhere:

• The Federal Reserve raised its target interest rate range 75 basis points to 1.50–1.75%, the largest single-day increase since 1994 and the highest rate target since the pandemic began.
• The Economist looks at the labor-vacancy rate and thinks the Fed is playing it too safe, while it raises the alarm about the ECB's increasing difficulties fighting inflation in parts of Europe.
• Alex Shephard wishes the media could discuss the failed January 2021 coup as clearly as the January 6th committee has done.
• As part of their 175th-anniversary story series, the Chicago Tribune last week published a history of our expressway system, and all the politics that came with it.
• Microsoft has finally, after 27 years, ended support for Internet Explorer. By this time next week, IE6 will have rendered the page.

Finally, apparently John Scalzi and I have the same appreciation for Aimee Mann.

It's not too late to get one of the remaining tickets to Terra Nostra:

Because it's the first day of summer, I'm only posting fun things right now. First, I'd like to thank Uncle Roger for upping my egg fried rice game. Here's my lunch from earlier today. Fuiyoooh!

Around the time I made this delicious and nutritious lunch, a friend who teaches music in a local elementary school sent me a photo of the family of ducks she escorted from one side of the school to the other:

In other good news:

• Believe it or not, today is the 55th anniversary of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember the day in 1987 when it really was "20 years ago today." People born on that day are now old enough to be president. Yeek.
• Chicago's heavy-rail system, Metra, will start offering unlimited system-wide monthly passes for $100 at the end of this month. Unless you live on the Rock Island or Metra Electric lines. Hiyaaah!

And...well, that's it for good news. Check back later when I have regular, horrifying news.

NPR did a segment this morning on the 1978 movie Grease, which correspondent Dori Bell had never seen—since, you know, she's a late Millennial. As I listened to the movie, while slowly waking up and patting Cassie, the timeline of the movie and the play just made me feel...old.

The play, which premiered in 1971, takes place in the fall of 1958. The movie came out in 1978.

So try this out, with the dates changed a bit: The play premiered in 2015 and takes place in 2002.

Oh, it gets better, Gen-Xers and Boomers: Grease the movie is to us today what It Happened One Night was to people in 1978. Because 1978 is 44 years ago, as 1934 was 44 years before 1978.

So, sure, Bell had trouble relating to Grease for the same reasons people just after the Vietnam War would have trouble relating to a movie made in the depths of the Great Depression.

Time for my Geritol...

How did it take until a year into the pandemic for someone to write this song?

Art, software, writing, anything creative. It cost that much because it took me fucking hours.

Even as the East Coast gets bombed by an early-spring cyclone, we have sunny skies and bitter cold. But the -12°C at O'Hare at 6am will likely be the coldest temperature we get in Chicago until 2023. The forecast predicts temperatures above 10°C tomorrow and up to 16°C on Wednesday, with no more below-freezing temperatures predicted as far out as predictions can go.

Meanwhile, I'm about to leave for our first of two Bach Jonannespassion performances this weekend. We still have tickets available for tomorrow's, so come on down!

I've had a lot to do at work the last couple of days, leading to an absolute pile-up of unread press:

• Casey Michael outlines how Russian President Vladimir Putin's aims in Ukraine have little to do with NATO and a lot to do with him wanting to restore the Russian Empire.
• Tom Nichols calls Putin's actions the beginning of "a forever war," and Julia Ioffe calls Putin "a furious and clearly deranged old man, threatening to drag us all into World War III."
• Col. Jerad Harper USA, a professor at the US Army War College, warns that an insurgency in Ukraine could easily bring Russian to blows with NATO directly.
• Max Boot points out just how foolish the XPOTUS's apologists look after his unhinged praise of Putin yesterday.
• John Judis criticizes both the US and Russia for getting us to this point.
• Inae Oh sees Rick Scott's "unhinged, right-wing fever dream" as pretty normal for the GOP.
• Two Manhattan Assistant District Attorneys have resigned amid reports that new DA Alvin Bragg has pulled back from the office's criminal investigation of the XPOTUS.
• John Lee Anderson explains how the Taliban have caught the car they were chasing and don't know how to govern it.
• Illinois State Senator Thomas Cullerton (D-Villa Park) resigned from office as part of a plea deal on charges he drew $275,000 in salary from the Teamsters union despite doing nothing at all for them.
• Paul Krugman wonders whether the Democrats have "a technocrat problem."
• Fourteen restaurants, bars, and chefs in Chicago are James Beard Awards semi-finalists.
• The Chicago Transit Authority plans to have an all-electric bus fleet by 2040. When I'm 70. Yay.
• Professional musicians, particularly the self-taught, find that their playing styles wreak havoc on their bodies, cutting careers short.
• Children brought up in the last few years think the web browser is the computer, and get completely stymied using actual programs.

Finally, on this day in 1940, Woody Guthrie released "This Land is Your Land," a song even more misunderstood than Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."

I mean, this:

It turns out, tenors don't actually spread Covid more readily than the other three sections, despite what you may have heard from the Welsh Government:

The advice appears to have been motivated by a spoof social media news post, created by meme page Quire Memes to appear as if written by us here at Classic FM. A doctored headline claimed that ‘Tenors should sit three metres away from other choir members, COVID study says’.

The post, which is categorically fake news, is captioned: “Tenors found to disperse aerosols the furthest, in this in-depth coronavirus study.”

A government spokesperson denied that the advice was based on a spoof post, but said they “apologise unreservedly for this error and for any confusion it may have caused”.

Professional tenor and choral director Charles MacDougall told The Telegraph it was “preposterous” that the Welsh government appeared to have based their official guidance on a meme.

Believe me, tenors have enough problems without being blamed for spreading this particular disease. Gonorrhea, however...

In no particular order:

• Dale Clevenger played French horn for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1966 to 2013. He was 81.
• Sheldon Silver went to jail for taking bribes while New York Assembly Speaker. He was 77.
• Lisa Goddard made climate predictions that came true, to the horror of everyone who denies anthropogenic climate change. She was 55.

In a tangential story, the New Yorker profiles author Kim Stanley Robinson, who has written several novels about climate change. (Robinson hasn't died, though; don't worry.)