The Daily Parker

An entertainer, a criminal, and an architect died this week, and we should remember them all.

The most notable person to die was singer Tony Bennet, 96:

His peer Frank Sinatra called him the greatest popular singer in the world. His recordings – most of them made for Columbia Records, which signed him in 1950 – were characterized by ebullience, immense warmth, vocal clarity and emotional openness. A gifted and technically accomplished interpreter of the Great American Songbook, he may be best known for his signature 1962 hit “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

In later years, he memorably dueted on the standard “Body and Soul” with Amy Winehouse, and released a full-length duet album with Diana Krall and a pair of recordings with Lady Gaga. Even after the revelation in early 2021 that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he remained active.

Kevin Mitnick, 59, also died this week, but he won't be quite as missed as Bennet:

Described by The New York Times in 1995 as “the nation’s most wanted computer outlaw,” Mr. Mitnick was a fugitive for more than two years.

He was sought for gaining illegal access to about 20,000 credit card numbers, including some belonging to Silicon Valley moguls; causing millions of dollars in damage to corporate computer operations; and stealing software used for maintaining the privacy of wireless calls and handling billing information.

Ultimately, he was caught and spent five years in prison. Yet no evidence emerged that Mr. Mitnick used the files he had stolen for financial gain. He would later defend his activities as a high stakes but, in the end, harmless form of play.

At the time of Mr. Mitnick’s capture, in February 1995, the computer age was still young; Windows 95 had not yet been released. The Mitnick Affair drove a fretful international conversation not just about hacking, but also about the internet itself.

Today, 20,000 credit card numbers wouldn't even rate a single paragraph in the Times. How things have changed.

Finally, Chicago architect Richard Barancik, 98, left his mark on the world not just by designing iconic bowling alleys, but also as the last of the so-called "monument men" who repatriated art that the Nazis stole in the 1930s and 40s:

He was the last-known surviving member among nearly 350 "Monuments Men" who recovered art looted in Europe during World War II and shot to prominence with a 2014 film directed by George Clooney and starring Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Cate Blanchett. Barancik hadn't talked much about the assignment before the movie, his daughter said, but once it came out, he was inundated by letters from schoolchildren and by autograph seekers and "World War II nuts."

By then, he had retired from an architecture career that paralleled the Gold Coast's post-war residential development, with high-rises sprouting on Lake Shore Drive and farther inland, readying the Near North Side for the yuppie invasion. His projects included 990 and 1212 N. Lake Shore Drive, office buildings 142 and 211 E. Ontario, and the 44-story and 73-townhouse development at Eugenie and Wells streets in Old Town.

Barancik also pursued suburban office complexes like the East-West Tech Park in Naperville and Woodfield Lakes in northwest suburban Schaumburg, and he designed Chicago Public Schools' Willa Cather Elementary School on the West Side, his daughter said. His bathhouses at Adeline Jay Geo-Karis Illinois Beach State Park near Zion feature wavelike undulating roofs.

In media vita morte sumus. Requiescat in pacem.

The first day of a sprint is the best day to consolidate three interfaces with three others, touching every part of the application that uses data. So right now, I am watching most of my unit tests pass and hoping I will figure out why the ones that failed did so before I leave today.

While the unit tests run, I have some stuff to keep me from getting too bored:

• The XPOTUS keeps confirming every theory about his behavior, this time that he only wants to run in 2024 to postpone the consequences of actions.
• Even those of us who support Ukraine in kicking the Russian invaders out of its sovereign territory think they simply can't join NATO right now.
• Julia Ioffe wonders why the fuck several retired government officials met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, less because she thinks they're old white men who have never set foot in Russia, and more because Lavrov hasn't got the power to negotiate a discount at Macy's. (In fairness, she published her post hours before one of them, Richard Haass, went on NPR this morning to hawk his new book.)
• Media strategist Julia Alexander scratches her head about the CBS-ification of Prime Video.
• Meanwhile, the streamers and studios have decided to let the writers go broke before resuming talks with them in the fall, regardless of what the actors do.
• Pro Publica took a second look at the hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and now they're not so sure it's correct.

Finally, the 2023 Emmy nominations came out this morning. I need to watch The White Lotus and Succession before HBO hides them.

Update: 2 out of 430 tests have failed (so far) because of authentication timeouts with Microsoft Key Vault. That happens on my slow-as-molasses laptop more often than I like.

Ah, ha ha. I'm kidding. Absolutely no one on Earth found anything surprising in the two decisions the Court just announced, except perhaps that Gorsuch and not Alito delivered the First Amendment one. Both were 6-3 decisions with the Republicans on one side and the non-partisan justices on the other. Both removed protections for disadvantaged groups in favor of established groups. And both lend weight to the argument that the Court has gone so far to the right that they continue to cause instability in the law as no one knows how long these precedents will last.

Let's start with 303 Creative v Elenis, in which the Court ruled that a Colorado web designer did not have to create websites for gay weddings, on the philosophy that religiously-motivated anti-gay bigotry is protected under the First Amendment:

The decision also appeared to suggest that the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people, including to same-sex marriage, are on more vulnerable legal footing, particularly when they are at odds with claims of religious freedom. At the same time, the ruling limited the ability of the governments to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The designer, Lorie Smith, said her Christian faith requires her to turn away customers seeking wedding-related services to celebrate same-sex unions. She added that she intends to post a message saying the company’s policy is a product of her religious convictions.

A Colorado law forbids discrimination against gay people by businesses open to the public as well as statements announcing such discrimination. Ms. Smith, who has not begun the wedding business or posted the proposed statement for fear of running afoul of the law, sued to challenge it, saying it violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

I actually might agree with the very narrow outcome of this specific case: I don't think someone should be forced to create something they morally oppose. That said, I fear, as do many others, that people will see this as license to scale back anti-discrimination measures against all marginalized groups. And this is why I think the case is going to be a problem for a generation. I'll read Gorsuch's opinion over the weekend, hoping that he resisted the urge to fill it with Federalist Society-approved obiter dicta. But I expect to see more litigation on anti-discrimination statutes as a result of the ruling. It's part of the Republican strategy to erode hard-won rights by creating fear and doubt in marginalized groups, and it's working.

The other ruling (Biden v Nebraska), also pitting the Republicans against everyone else in the free world, killed the President's program to waive about $405 billion in student debt that hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income borrowers owed to the Federal Government. The Court found the thinnest of pretexts to allow the State of Missouri just enough standing to keep the case from evaporating entirely, and then rug-pulled all those people for whom $10,000 might be the difference between poverty and continued daily meals by saying the President exceeded authority granted him by Congress to "waive or modify" the loans:

The court has rejected the administration’s expansive arguments in the past. The court lifted a pandemic-era moratorium on rental evictions put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It threw out a coronavirus vaccination-or-testing mandate imposed on large businesses by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And in a ruling unrelated to the pandemic, it cited the “major questions” doctrine to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for combating climate change.

The legal battles have left millions of student loan borrowers in limbo. More than half of eligible people had applied for the forgiveness program before it was halted by the courts, with the Education Department approving some 16 million applications.

Biden’s debt relief program has been a divisive issue on Capitol Hill. On June 7, Biden vetoed a Republican-led resolution to strike down the controversial program and restart loan payments for tens of millions of borrowers. The measure passed the Senate with the backing of Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). Despite Biden’s veto, the resolution shows the likely difficulty of getting any future debt relief plan through Congress.

This, like yesterday's affirmative action decision, shows the Republican majority gleefully rolling back all the things they have hated ever since Lyndon Johnson had the gall to give those people civil rights in 1964. They firmly believe in the ability of everyone born on second base to get a home run even if it means everyone else strikes out, because (and I'm really not making this up, if you dig into what these people have written) they deserve it. (Best Tweet of the day, from the ever-scathing New York Times Pitchbot: "Opinion | Without the burden of affirmative action, Harvard can finally become a true meritocracy—by Jared Kushner and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.")

The good news—in the most general sense as the 6-3 split will continue to be very bad news in specific for years—is that this kind of reactionary behavior by the right wing tends to flame out in a generation or so. It's the desperate clawing back of gains made by the lower orders to hold onto inherited privilege for just a little longer that happens when the old guard know they're on their way out. We've seen it in the US before, and in the UK, and in lots of other times and places.

Unfortunately, undoing the damage the revanchists cause hurts like hell. The next 10-15 years are going to suck for a lot of people.

I had a lot going on this morning, so I'm only now snarfing down a Chipotle bowl. Also, I'm going to have to read these things tomorrow:

• Over 100 candidates, including a dog, will stand for election in Toronto's mayoral election on the 26th.
• Writing for Mother Jones, Ali Breland thinks the content-creator rebellion at Reddit won't stop what Corey Doctorow calls "the enshittification" of online platforms.
• Similarly, private-equity debt has killed yet another good company making good products, Insta-Pot.
• After what insiders call a deliberate campaign by New York mayor Eric Adams to strip her of power, New York City's police commissioner Keechant Sewell abruptly resigned Monday.
• Despite yesterday's rain around Chicago, the drought in Illinois has gotten worse.
• Save the firefiles!
• Tinley Park, Ill., has launched a brewery trolley that technically puts 2 new breweries on the Brews & Choos list. (I had plans to return to Banging Gavel later this summer anyway, as they're about to open the Vogt House to the public.)
• The list of people excited about the NASCAR race in downtown Chicago keeps getting shorter.

Finally, today is the 35th anniversary of the best baseball movie of all time, Bull Durham. If I had time I'd watch it tonight.

During the weeks around our Spring Concert, like during the first couple of weeks of December, I have almost no free time. The Beethoven performance also took away an entire day. Yesterday I had hoped to finish a bit of code linking my home weather station to Weather Now, but alas, I studied German instead.

Plus, with the aforementioned Spring Concerts on Friday and today, I felt that Cassie needed some couch time. (We both sit on the couch while I read or watch TV and she gets non-stop pats. It's good for both of us.) She'll get more couch time tonight, don't worry. But she'll also be home alone for about 7 hours today.

I don't have rehearsal tomorrow, and in fact I have no responsibilities beyond my normal day job until next Saturday, so I should finish the coding soon. (I also have a task for an old client that will take me a dozen or so hours, and I really need to start that before my trip.)

In the hour I have before Cassie's next walk and me driving out to Oak Park, I need to study more German and some Czech. In the former we're now discussing how the bear and the mouse need to an apartment („Der Bär und die Maus brauchen eine Wohnung”, for what purpose I can only imagine), and in the latter, whether I eat salt („Jíš sůl?”) and that they have good coffee („Kávu mají dobrou”). Clearly I have more work to do in Czech.

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading:

• Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift, considering he had so many legal ways to scam his constituents thanks to the Roberts Court.
• In a desperate bid to win over Fox News viewers, CNN attempted a Town Hall with the sexual predator XPOTUS yesterday, which went about as you'd expect.
• Julia Ioffe looks at how much Russia and China are enjoying our own-goal-producing debt ceiling crisis even as neither has any chance of supplanting our currency dominance in the near future.
• Chicago-based Groupon, the Internet darling of 2009, has started its final death rattle after issuing a "going concern" warning to investors yesterday.
• A pop-up bar in Chicago will raffle off Taylor Swift tickets that one hopes they didn't buy on Ticketmaster.
• Bruce Schneier sees a tremendous market for trustworthy AI, but large corporations won't build it because of the inherent conflict of interest.

Finally, today marks the 30th anniversary of Aimee Mann releasing one of my favorite albums, her solo debut Whatever. She perfectly summed up the early-'90s ennui that followed the insanity of the '80s as we Gen-Xers came of age. It still sounds as fresh to me today as it did then.

If you look at the history of Weather Now, you can see that development tends to happen in bursts. Apparently I'm in one now. Yesterday I fixed a nagging irritation with the UI layout, and today I'm working on connecting to a new data source I've been meaning to add for years.

Stay tuned.

I just released a couple of minor fixes to Weather Now. Build 8126 has slightly tidier top and nav bars, and I can configure the front page "latest weather" list on the fly. Previously the list lived in a static application config file that I could only change by redeploying the app.

Enjoy.

At the end of the month, I'm taking the first real vacation I've had since 2017, to Central Europe. After connecting through Heathrow, I land in Prague, Czechia; then by train on to Vienna, Austria; then Salzburg, Austria; then a flight back to Gatwick and a night in London. And because of Vienna's and Salzburg's proximity to Austria's borders, I will probably also visit Slovakia, Hungary, and Germany—at least for a few minutes.

To prepare for this trip, about a month ago I downloaded Duolingo, and started the Czech program. I also jumped into the German program at unit 5, as I've studied German before.

I've had mixed results.

First, I want to make it clear that I love Duolingo. I have learned some basic Czech and I've gotten my German back to tourist-level fluency. When I get back to the US, I'm planning to load up French and Spanish, with the goal of getting both back to conversational levels. Just practicing languages every day keeps me learning them, so I believe I'll eventually finish the French and Spanish programs with some pretty good skills in both.

As for my upcoming trip, I've decided to change my approach. Thus far, I've spent about 20 minutes a day on Czech and 10 on German. And yet I'm going through the German lessons much faster, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I first learned German in high school and I first learned Czech 37 days ago.

In the German program, I'm breezing through things like „wie ist das Wetter in Wien?” and „entschuldigung, wo ist der Geldautomat”, both of which which I actually want to know, and I'm acing (almost) all the speech and listening exercises. (Im and in gave me a bit of a bother for a hot minute.) I've gone from my start in section 1, unit 5 to section 2, unit 4, and the app says I've learned about 300 new German words.

In the Czech program, by contrast, 37 days have gotten me to...section 1, unit 5. And that's only because I gave up on the optional grammar drills after unit 4. I can say things like „jsem David” (I'm David) and „jsou to zvláštní zvířata” ("those are strange animals"), but not every time, and with no guarantee of grammatical accuracy. You see, Czech is a declined language, where all the grammar lives at the ends of words. I just can't seem to get the correct word endings 6 times out of 10. It's supremely frustrating.

So starting today, I'm going to change my approach.

First, I'm going to flip my priorities and spend 2/3 or more of my time on German. That's closer to my trip plan, anyway: from wheels down at Václav Havel Airport to my train crossing the Austrian border, I'll spend at most 48 hours of the 7-day trip in Czechia.

Second, I'm going to concentrate on Czech vocabulary, not mastery. For example, I'm going to skip the grammar drills at the end of each Czech unit and concentrate on just getting enough sentences right to move on to the next unit.

I'll continue to do the German drills, though. This will be my 5th trip to German-speaking countries, and will not be my last, but I have no idea if I'll ever get back to Czechia after this month. I'm singing Bruckner next year and probably Bach in 2025, but I have never to my knowledge sung in Czech. And I'm far more likely to remember the difference between „wo ist der Bahnhof” and „wo ist die U-Bahnstation” than I am to recall (or even say) „Jsem velký kluk” vs. „Jsme velcí kluci”.

I only hope „jsi hezká” comes in handy at least once...

I'm chasing down a bug that caused what we in the biz call "unexpected results" and the end-users call "wrong." I've fixed it in both our API and our UI, but in order to test it, I need the API built in our dev/test environment. That takes about 18 minutes. Plenty of time to read all of this:

• Ruth Marcus wants you to really think about Jean Carroll's testimony in her defamation suit against the XPOTUS.
• Tom Nichols sees narcissism, not "misguided patriotism," as the root of the classified intelligence leaks endangering the US.
• Jamelle Boule reminds the Chief Justice of the United States that when Congress calls, he needs to answer.
• Alex Shephard tells us what we can all see: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) sucks at his job.
• Tim Murphy can't wait for Twitter to die so news stories no longer quote "another Twitter user" ever again.
• ProPublica exposes the dangers children face when trains park across their route to school, forcing them to crawl over (or under!) them.

Finally, the Times explains how last year's 257 traffic fatalities in New York City undermine the claims that "Vision Zero" is working. But Strong Towns already told you that.

OK, build succeeded, fix is now in Dev/Test...on with the show!