The Daily Parker

The Martin Theater at Ravinia Park yesterday:

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra sold out both of our Magic Flute performances in the Theater this weekend, but you can still get lawn tickets for 7:30pm tonight or 1pm Sunday. And if you take Metra, you can ride to and from the park for free.

While I fight a slow laptop and its long build cycle (and how every UI change seems to require re-compiling), the first day of the last month of summer brought this to my inbox:

• Who better to prosecute the XPOTUS than a guy who prosecuted other dictators and unsavory characters for the International Criminal Court? (In America, we don't go to The Hague; here, The Hague comes to you!)
• After the evidence mounted that Hungary has issued hundreds of thousands of passports without adequate identity checks, the US has restricted Hungarian passport holders from the full benefits of ESTA that other Schengen-area citizens enjoy.
• The US economy continues to exceed the expectations of people who have predicted a recession any day now. (Of course, every dead pool has a guaranteed winner eventually...)
• After an unprecedented 31 consecutive days enduring temperatures over 43°C, Phoenix finally caught a break yesterday—when the temperature only hit 42°C.
• Jake Meador explores why about 40 million fewer Americans go to church these days than in 1995.
• Remember how we all thought Tesla made cars with amazing battery ranges? Turns out, Elon Musk can't do that right, either.
• American car culture not only gives us unlivable environments, but also discourages the exploration that people in other countries (and I when I go there) do all the time.
• We should all remember (and thank) USSR naval Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who vetoed firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at an American destroyer during the Cuban Missile Crisis 71 years ago.

Finally, Chicago historian John Schmidt tells the story of criminal mastermind Adam Worth, who may have been Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

Would you just look at that:

Metra finally opened the inbound Ravenswood platform on the UP-N line after tearing down the previous permanent structure in July 2011.

For the first time since then, we commuters got a solid surface to walk on, shelter from the elements, and (for me, anyway) a 4-minute-shorter walk from Cassie's day care to the Leland Avenue stairwell at the far south end of the station.

They still haven't completely finished, however. The fully-enclosed waiting area with benches and heaters was locked this morning, and the ramp on the north side of Leland still had a plywood barrier. But boy howdy! We won't get rained/snowed/sunned on anymore!

I still want Bruce Rauner to stand on the "temporary" platform for 12 years so he understands what it felt like. Someday, when I'm running Purgatory...

Not Just Bikes shows the difference between places and non-places in ten short minutes:

Fortunately the part of Chicago where I live has a sense of place that he'd recognize, but you have to cross a stroad (Ashland to the east, Western to the west, Irving Park to the south, Peterson to the north) to get to another place like this.

I also can't help but think that a new culture will arise in a couple of millennia that will look at "the great American roads" as something to emulate. Maybe the Romans had culture critics arguing against expanding the 8-lane highways running through their cities too?

I'm still working on the feature I described in my last post. So some articles have stacked up for me to read:

• The US Senate has the second-highest average age in its 234-year history, with 34 members over 70. The House is the third-oldest, with 72 members over 70.
• Josh Marshall (and The Daily Parker) don't extend that worry to the presidency, however: we're just fine with four more years of President Biden being the oldest president ever.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has cut over the CTA Red and Purple Lines to the brand-spanking-new tracks they laid this year and opened the new (temporary) stations at Argyle and Bryn Mawr, only two years after starting the $2.1 billion project. Meanwhile, the 12-year-long Ravenswood Metra Station saga drags on.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has proposed a surtax on residential real-estate sales over $1 million. I'm for it.
• Where does the term "Chicagoland" come from? WBEZ found out.
• People around the country are finally getting decent examples of cracker-crust, square-cut, tavern-style pizza—the real Chicago-style pie.
• A family that wanted to live "off the grid" in rural Colorado died shortly after discovering that humans built "the grid" to prevent exactly those kinds of deaths.

And while I read these articles and write this code, outside my window the dewpoint has hit 25°C, making the 28°C air feel like it's 41°C. And poor Cassie only has sweat glands between her toes. We're going to delay her dinnertime walk a bit.

I'm just over a week from performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, so as I try to finish a feature that turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought, I'm hearing opera choruses in my head. Between rehearsals and actual work, I might never get to read any of these items:

• Jesse Wegman describes how to tell a political prosecution from a real one, which would be great except the people doing the political ones don't read the Times.
• Meaghan O'Rourke points to Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie as emblematic of the strangeness of modern American girl culture.
• Sci-fi author John Scalzi, who knows a thing or two about fictional aliens, does not think the US government is covering up details about real aliens, if for no other reason than the XPOTUS would have bragged about it by now.
• Via Bruce Schneier, the World of Warcraft sub-reddit embarrassed an AI-driven site by getting the site's AI to write about something that will never exist.
• The Post has an interactive history of changes to the Appalachian Trail.

Finally, New York City (and other urban areas) are experiencing a post-pandemic dog-poop renaissance. Watch where you step!

And now, I will put on "Dank sei dir Osiris" one more time.

I'm having a few people over for a BBQ this evening, several of them under 10 years old, and several of them dogs. I've got about 45 minutes before I have to start cutting vegetables. Tomorrow will be a quiet day, so I'll just queue these stories up for then:

• Not a group to pass up risible hypocrisy, Alabama Republicans have defied the US Supreme Court's order that they create a second majority-Black district in the state, preferring just to shuffle the state's African Americans into a new minority districts. This leaves African Americans with 27% of the population and 14% of the Congressional representation, and the state Republican majority wishing it could just go all the way back to Jim Crow instead of this piecemeal stuff.
• Surprising no one who understood that former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) cared less about governing than about enriching his pals (and himself), the Foxconn semiconductor factory that Wisconsin residents subsidized for $3 billion has not, in fact, created 13,000 jobs yet. Probably because it doesn't exist yet, and may never.
• James Hansen, who first warned in the 1980s that human-caused climate warming had already started and would accelerate if we didn't cut greenhouse gas emissions, thinks "we are damned fools" for needing to experience it to believe it.
• The Chicago city council plans to pass legislation raising the minimum wage for tipped workers to the general minimum wage of $15.80 per hour, up from $9.48 today. This doesn't address how anyone could possibly live on $32,000 per year in Chicago, let alone $19,000 a year at the lower wage.

OK, time for a quick shower and 15 minutes of doing nothing...

On my way downtown to hear Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem with some friends, I saw this notice, hung with a tragicomic level of incompetence, at the Ravenswood Metra station's 12-year-old "temporary" inbound platform:

What? We get our "new" platform that has been almost completed for the past 24 months on August 1st?

There’s only one brief note on the station info page, but otherwise…nothing. No ribbon cutting, no acknowledgement that the platform is opening 6 years late, no recognition that former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner (R) cut funding to the project for four years, no one taking any responsibility for the 10-month delay between finishing almost everything and getting “the tiles” or whatever they were waiting for since last summer.

If they open the thing, I'll post photos on the 2nd. If they don't, I'll post derision.

In any event, the Grant Park Symphony had a wonderful performance of one of my favorite choral works, in perfect weather:

And walking back to the train, I was reminded how cool our architecture was in the 1920s:

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.

I had one of those "why am I working inside today?" moments when I got my lunch a few minutes ago. The obvious answer—Cassie needs dog food—doesn't always work when it's 27°C and sunny. It did get me to re-evaluate my dinner plans, however. Cooking pasta just doesn't appeal when my favorite sushi place has an outdoor patio that allows dogs.

Meanwhile, I'm adding a feature that might take the remainder of this sprint as it completely changes how we store and present 3rd-party calculation results to the end user. Previously we just presented the user's most recent calculation on the results page. But our pesky users seem to want to see their previous calculation results as well. Since we were throwing those away when the user made a new calculation, I have some work to do.

Meanwhile:

• Via Bruce Schneier, the Gandalf AI app lets you socially-engineer an AI to get its password. Schneier himself hasn't gotten past Level 7, so good luck to you.
• Tyler Austin Harper sees an uncomfortable connection between the movies Oppenheimer and Barbie, both of which open this weekend.
• Office furniture brokers have a glut of inventory as post-pandemic return-to-office plans get slower and slower.
• Today is the anniversary of Massachusetts Commodore Dudley Saltonstall's incompetent attack on the British garrison at present-day Penobscot, Maine, in 1779, that should remind all y'all commando wannabes what happens when amateurs attack a vastly superior professional force. (Also a reminder that Benjamin Franklin's diplomacy really won our War of Independence, not George Washington's soldiering.)
• In what can't be politely described, so I'll call it a dick move, Universal Studios denuded a stand of trees along Barham Blvd. in Los Angeles to harass the striking writers and actors who had used the trees for shade in the 32°C heat. And the suits continue to wonder why everyone roots for the talent.
• Of course, the suits broke the business in the first place, so maybe that has more to do with it.

Finally, now that Cassie has had her birthday photo and her sardine dinner, it's time for her bath. Wow, does she need one. And she's going to get one tomorrow morning, traumatizing though it is for her.