The Daily Parker

My flight is slightly (20 minutes) delayed, so I have just a bit more time on this gorgeous morning to walk around Bryant Park. Here's the view from my hotel's terrace:

Busy week ahead. There's a reason I wrote the A-to-Z posts ahead of time.

When I started the 30-Park Geas in 2008, I didn't expect it would take more than 11 years. Yet here we are. And in that time, both of New York's baseball teams got new stadia, making the 30-Park Geas a 32-Park Geas before I got halfway done.

Well, this season, I'm finishing it. And wow, it's off to an inauspicious start.

Today's game between the Orioles and Yankees at *New* Yankee Stadium didn't start for 3 hours and 15 minutes past its scheduled first pitch because it's March. A cold front pushed through this morning with a nice, gentle monsoon. So the few dozen of us who remained in the park around 3:45 this afternoon let out a whoop of joy when this happened:

The joy lasted through the home team giving up 3 in the top of the first, and continued until they stopped beer sales at 5pm—in the 2nd inning. Apparently people had been there drinking since 10am, and Major League Baseball has a limit on day-drinking of 30 beers per person.

The Yankees eventually lost to the Orioles 7-5. The lost to the Orioles the last time I saw them play at home, too, though that was in *Old* Yankee Stadium. Glad the new digs worked out for them.

I did get to try a local Bronx IPA, for $16, which is a price that effectively limited my own beer consumption to two for the game. That, and I couldn't feel my fingers.

But hey, the Yankees did play baseball, and I did visit the park, and it's a pretty good park:

But the thing about a cold front is, sure, it gets rid of the rain and dampness, but it also sometimes drives the temperature from 17°C to 3°C in just a few hours. So with no more $16 beers for sale, the temperature falling to what I call "Chicago in May," and the home team trailing 4-0 in the second, I decided to cut my losses and return to Manhattan. After a really tasty bowl of ramen, I hopped the 4 train to Brooklyn and walked over the bridge:

Back home tomorrow, then resuming the Geas on Friday April 19th in Arlington, Texas, where I expect the beer quality will keep me sober on the merits but at least I won't freeze my fingers off.

And hey! The A-to-Z Challenge starts tomorrow. I've already got the first 6 posts ready to fire at noon UTC (7am Chicago time) each day. I hope you enjoy it.

When you book through a discounter, you get what you pay for. After my spectacular view Friday, and my meh view yesterday, this is what I got today:

Once the rain stops (in about an hour or so), I'm going to head up to Park #28, restarting the Geas after a two-season hiatus. Photos this evening.

I made it to Long Island without incident, and as every New Yorker has done or someday will do, with a change at Jamaica.

The view today isn't quite like the view yesterday:

Next on the agenda: a nap. Then walking over to my alma mater, to see what the kids have done with the place.

I'm traveling this weekend, starting with a night about a block from my office. Tonight is WhiskyFest Chicago, starting in about 90 minutes (though they let us start gorging on cheese and crackers at 5pm). For easily-understood reasons, I'm staying at the same hotel tonight, then heading to my college radio station's 60th anniversary party tomorrow morning. Not my first choice of timing, but I had no control over either event.

Sunday I head into Manhattan, and coincidentally the Yankees are in town...

The view from my room today fails to suck:

And not a day too soon:

This morning two bad things happened to convicted felon and all-around slimy guy Paul Manafort. First, he got sentenced to another 47 months in jail as a result of his second conviction:

In [Federal] court Wednesday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticized Manafort and his defense attorneys for repeatedly blaming his hard fall from power on his decision to work for Trump, which attracted the attention of the special counsel investigating Russian interference in that campaign.

“This defendant is not public enemy number one, but he’s also not a victim either,” Jackson said. “There’s no question this defendant knew better, and he knew exactly what he was doing.”

The question of whether anyone in Donald Trump’s campaign “conspired or colluded with” the Russian government “was not presented in this case,” she said, so for Manafort’s attorneys to emphasize that no such collusion was proved, she said, is “a non-sequitur.”

Just minutes later, a state grand jury in New York indicted Manafort on 16 felony counts that could keep him in prison for the rest of his life:

The new state charges against Mr. Manafort are contained in a 16-count indictment that alleges a yearlong scheme in which he falsified business records to obtain millions of dollars in loans, [Manhattan district attorney Cyrus] Vance said in a news release after the federal sentencing.

“No one is beyond the law in New York,” he said, adding that the investigation by the prosecutors in his office had “yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable.”

The indictment grew out of an investigation that began in 2017, when the Manhattan prosecutors began examining loans Mr. Manafort received from two banks.

Remember, whatever clemency Manafort could get under the President's pardon power, that power does not extend to state crimes. The same goes with related state-level investigations into the Trump Organization and the president himself that appear to have started within multiple New York law-enforcement agencies.

Josh Marshall has written often that the Trump Organization's business "would never survive first contact with law enforcement." As anyone who has followed Donald Trump's career over the year knows, this is axiom. And it is happening.

First, today is the bicentennial of Illinois becoming a state, which involved a deal to steal Chicago from Wisconsin:

If Illinoisans had played by the rules to get statehood, Chicagoans would be cheeseheads. By all rights, the Wisconsin border should have been set at the southern tip of Lake Michigan when Illinois was admitted into the union, 200 years ago Monday.

That would have made a 60-mile strip of what’s now northern Illinois a part of southern Wisconsin. Stripped of the smokestacks of Chicago’s factories, Illinois’ landscape would have been dominated by grain elevators and dairy barns. But that didn’t happen.

The fix was in, even as the state of Illinois was conceived.

It's a good story. Today is also the 75th anniversary of Pizzeria Uno opening in Chicago, which introduced deep-dish pizza to the masses:

Pizza had been around the city’s Italian cafes for decades.  It was served in tiny wedges, and mainly used as an appetizer.  Even on a full pie the crust was wafer-thin.

The pizza at Pizzeria Uno was going to be different—cooked in a deep dish, with a thick crust and heaps of cheese.  Who came up with this innovative style?  Riccardo?  Sewell?  Their chef, Rudy Malnati?  The debate goes on.

So on a wartime Friday evening in December, Pizzeria Uno opened with little fanfare.  Business was slow at first.  Gradually, Chicago-style pizza caught on.  By 1955, people were lining up outside in the cold, waiting to get in.

Longtime readers know that despite my Chicagoan heritage, I prefer New York-style big slices that you have to drain before eating. Preferrably bought from a window on 3rd Avenue around 4am.

Yesterday, the Cubs and Mets played to a 1-1 draw at Wrigley when the game got suspended in the 10th due to torrential rain. (They resume in about 20 minutes.) My department bought us rooftop tickets, so we got to see most of the game between the waves of thunderstorms that preceded and interrupted it:

I got supremely lucky: the first wave of thunderstorms hit just as I was getting on the bus to go to the park, finished its deluge just as I got off the bus, and the second wave hit while I was on the bus going back home. So I caught the tail end of the second wave, but only a few drops between the bus and my house.

I'll update this post with the final score whenever they have one.

Update: The Cubs won, 2-1 in the 11th.

The New York City subway, with its passive air exchange system and tunnels too small for active ventilation or air conditioning, have gotten excessively hot this summer:

On Thursday, temperatures inside at least one of the busiest stations reached 40°C—nearly 11°C warmer than the high in Central Park.

The Regional Plan Association, an urban planning think tank for the greater metropolitan area, took a thermometer around the system’s 16 busiest stations, plus a few more for good measure, and shared the data with CityLab. A platform at Union Square Station had the 40°C reading at 1 p.m., which was the hottest they found, although Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Columbus Circle weren’t far off at 39°C and 38½°C, at around 10 and 11 a.m., respectively. Twelve out of the 16 busiest stops boiled at or over the 32°C mark in the late morning and early afternoon.

One might think that subway stations would offer crisp respite to sweaty New Yorkers, being underground and all. But you’d be wrong. Heat doesn’t only “rise”—it just diffuses to cooler areas, which can include below-ground spaces. Plus, only a few of the city’s 472 stations are equipped with air conditioning; most rely on a passive ventilation system better known for their Marilyn Monroe moments above ground. This system was built in the days before AC, and the MTA says it’s not possible to squeeze the station-cooling machinery that other metro systems have inside New York’s narrow tunnels. Meanwhile, the units that cool passengers inside cars actually shed heat into the stations as trains pass through.

That onboard air-conditioning can fail, too. The MTA has also seen a rising number of complaints about overheated cars in recent years. In today’s issue of Signal Problems, his indispensable newsletter focused on subway accountability, the journalist Aaron Gordon reports that “about two percent of all subway cars in service on any given day might not have working A/C,” according to the MTA. That means at least 100 cars are roasting passengers on any given day this summer.

This problem also bedevils the London Underground.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago, we're having our 73rd day this year above 27°C, just 10 short of the record. Given the normal number of temperatures that warm between now and October, I think we'll probably set a new one.

And the sunlight here looks eerily orange and hazy today, because of climate change-driven wildfires out west.

Welcome to the future.