The Daily Parker

Here's the Tribune's weather infographic for today:

The warmer-than-normal temperature formerly over Alaska has now swung around into the arctic, dragged by a persistent high pressure over the pole. That's pushing cold air down into the Prairie Provinces and the upper Midwest. Meanwhile, warmer-than-normal temperatures over the south-eastern U.S. and Caribbean is dragging moisture right over the lower Midwest.

Consequence: it's -12°C here right now, and in 36 hours we'll have 250 mm of snow.

We're getting a real winter this year. W00t. :/

Two popular Evanston restaurants, Pine Yard and Taco Diablo, burned to the ground this morning:

Fire crews from several neighboring communities -- including Morton Grove, Wilmette and Skokie -- were called to the scene to assist Evanston firefighters in battling the blaze.

The fire apparently broke out sometime before 3 a.m. and fire crews were still fully engaged in battling the blaze nearly three hours later.

The bike shop next door suffered water and smoke damage. Twelve pets at the Bramer Animal Hospital (where Parker went to the vet for his first year and a half) got evacuated.

Pine Yard was Evanston's go-to Chinese restaurant. Taco Diablo also had a large following.

I'm a few minutes from leaving my folks' house, looking at the weather forecast for Chicago. We may set a new record:

The unseasonable late-season 10°C “warmth” which greets Chicagoans Saturday has swept into the area from southern Missouri over the past 24 hours. It’s stay is to be one of limited duration.

A bitter southward plunge of frigid arctic air begins a downward temp spiral here Sunday which is to culminate in colder-than- -18°C Monday morning lows and single digits daytime highs—the coldest readings to occur here in the nearly five years since January 16, 2009 when the high temp rose no higher than -15°C

A temperature drop of that magnitude would become the 2nd greatest three-day late December temp dive on the books over the past 143 years. The only 3-day temperature drop more significant than this is the 34°C drop—from 15°C to -19°C back in January of 2009.

This is why I've just booked a trip to somewhere warm for February.

Check these out:

• Calculated Risk posits the 10 most important questions about the U.S. economy in 2014.
• Chicago History maps out some fun bits of street trivia, including this: One street crosses under the same El line four times. Name the street and the El line.
• The Dictionary of American Regional English is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's fun.
• Not sure you want to go on that trip but want to lock in the airfare for up to a week? Buy a call option on the fare.
• McDonald's may have had a big-tobacco moment recently when it shut down an internal employee wellness site because it labeled a McDonald's cheeseburger meal an "unhealthy choice."

More later, including, I expect, more photos of the ocean. Why? Because ocean.

Update: Speaking of the ocean, via George Takei's Facebook feed comes this gem. Just read the product reviews.

Back in October, Chicago O'Hare International Airport opened its fourth east-west runway and promptly switched most operations to east-west from the diagonal pattern they'd used before. Chicago Tribune transportation writer Jon Hilkevich, a private pilot, explains the implications:

Today taxi times to the gate are generally longer than they were several months ago because of a longer route that takes arrivals an extra mile or more around the airfield. The purpose is to have the planes taxi behind other planes waiting to take off so as to reduce the possibility of collisions, airline and FAA air traffic officials said. The taxiing time and distance vary, based on the runway and the gate involved.

Any time saved in the air can be canceled out by the additional time spent on the ground.

"It is a longer taxi route, designed to keep you from taxiing across active runways," said Halli Mulei, a Chicago-based first officer who has flown for United Airlines for 17 years. "But we are flying a shorter final (approach) into O'Hare, saving fuel and about 10 minutes."

From the Oct. 17 opening through Dec. 11, O'Hare has been able to accommodate 112 or more landings per hour on average on 68 percent of the days, according to the FAA. That compares to a rate of 112 or more arrivals per hour only 20 percent of days in November 2012, FAA data show.

The airlines, in other words, love this new configuration, because fuel use while airborne is quite a lot more than fuel use on the ground. Of course, if there are stiff crosswinds, it's a different story:

During winter, when winds often howl out of the north, wet or icy runways are another condition pilots confront.

"The combination of an icy runway and high wind gusts is where we can have a problem," said Mulei, the United first officer and also a spokeswoman for the United chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association. "If braking action is poor, my crosswind limit on a Boeing 767 could go down to 17 knots" from a norm of up to a 40-knot crosswind on a dry runway, she said.

Astronomical winter officially begins tomorrow at 11:11 CST. But as anyone in the Midwest can tell you, meteorological winter began three weeks ago.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice, clear graphic today showing the problem:

The late, strong Alaska block this year is almost certainly hanging around because of anthropogenic climate change. Usually by this point the North Pacific has cooled enough not to drag the mid-latitude jet stream all the way up to the Arctic.

Welcome to the new climate.

Eventually, average temperatures will likely increase the Gulf of Mexico's persistent high pressure area such that the mid-latitude jet stream doesn't get as far south as Chicago during the winter. At that point our winters will likely be wetter and warmer, more like North Carolina's. Meanwhile, though, we're likely to have a frickin' cold winter, one hopes followed by a cooler summer due to a cooler lake.

The Chicago Transit Authority cleaned out its attic recently and put a bunch of artifacts up for auction. The auction just ended, and I'm sorry to say I did not win anything.

I bid on a couple of 1990s-era station signs, one from Main and one from Davis. I didn't want to risk getting both so I dropped off the Davis auction once it hit $50. Because, rusty 30 x 45 cm sign with the paint chipping? Yeah, $50 sounds right.

But I kept going on the Main St. sign, using the ancient eBay technique of waiting until the last few seconds to make my last bid.

So, the first day of bidding, I put in $25. Auto-bids pushed right past me. Then I waited. Just now, with the bidding at $95, I put in what I thought was a ridiculous (but still acceptable) number: $130. Bam! Bidder #37522 auto-bid right past me!

Now, I'm thinking, as attractive an artifact as the sign might be, is it really worth $150? Oh, the pain, the pain...yes. All right. It's a unique part of history, part of my history in fact, so it's worth $150 to me. Bid.

D'oh! Bidder #37522 thinks it's worth more than $150, and his auto-bid won.

Well, I'm glad the sign is going to a good home. I hope Bidder #37522 finds a nice place on his wall for it.

But I have no idea what Bidder #37961 is going to do with the rail car he bought for $13,150...

(Fun fact: the CTA Gift Store sells signs.)

Update: Looking through the closed lots, I discovered that someone bought two sticks of rail for $50. Let's do the math here. The sticks are each 11.8 m long, and the description says they're 115-lb rail. That means the rail weighs 115 lbs per foot, so the two sticks together contain 4,068 kg of steel. I don't know scrap prices, but it seems to me that 4 tons of steel scrap might be worth more than $50. So assuming the costs of removing the rails aren't too high, someone may have just made a tidy profit on the auction.

Update: It turns out, scrap steel goes for about $350 a ton. So that $50 investment could bring the buyer a tidy $1300 profit. But then one has to ask, why didn't the CTA just sell the surplus rail for scrap in the first place?

Yes. And snowy:

Snowfall’s been quite relentless here. Flurries (or more) have fluttered to earth 8 of the past 9 days. And, with just under 250 mm on the books to date, the 2013-14 season has been accumulating snow at nearly twice the normal pace and ranks 33rd snowiest of the past 128 years. That places it among the top quarter of all Chicago snow seasons since records began here in 1884-85.

There’s been only one day with a temperature even briefly above freezing in the past 12. An eight day string of above freezing readings came to an end after a November 28 through December 5th run.

This coming week will see some warming, and possibly a few days above freezing starting tomorrow afternoon. Then Monday we'll see more frigid weather coming in behind either a snowstorm (according to European models) or a dusting (according to American models).

You know, I don't mind a few weeks of this every year, particularly if we don't see it until January, like last year. But this? Snow and sub-freezing temperatures for most of December? I'm not looking forward to three months of this crap.

At least the lake will be cooler come June, which should moderate our summer. Still: before Chicago's climate gets consistently warmer in a few decades, we'll keep having crushingly cold winters alternating with warm ones. I can't be sure this is an improvement.

Apparently, Chicago's Divvy is really popular with tourists—and tourists have trouble returning the bikes on time:

Chicago's Divvy bicycle-sharing program took in up to $2.5 million during its first five months, a figure driven by tourists and others who bought daily passes and racked up the majority of overtime fees, according to a trove of preliminary customer data provided by city transportation officials.

As much as $703,500 came from late charges, which kick in when bicycles aren't returned within 30 minutes. Just a sliver of that money was generated from Divvy's clock-conscious annual members, who checked out bikes for short trips instead of hopping into taxis or riding public transit, city officials concluded.

It's not clear whether the Divvy public-private partnership, supported by $25 million in federal funding and $6.25 million in local matches, is turning a profit.

The article goes on to suggest that tourists have trouble understanding the point of the 30-minute time limit. It's not to prevent you from riding Divvy bikes; it's to keep Divvy bikes moving. If the program didn't have a 30-minute window, people would ride to their destinations, park the bikes, and ride back, possibly tying up a bike all day.

So the problem seems to be user education.

Still, I'm glad the program is making revenue. I really hope it's profitable.

After a string of days when the temperature was so low even Parker didn't want to go outside, this morning's -4°C felt downright balmy.

Of course, it's warming up ahead of the 15 cm of snow forecast for tonight.

Looks like we're getting a real winter this year.