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Lots of morning meetings, then stuff so far this afternoon, and now...a quick breath. Of course, given that it's still 2025, I'm not exactly breathing sweet summer air: The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked the (obviously unlawful) Texas redistricting effort, using logic that would very likely bolster the way California passed theirs. Paul Krugman muses that the billions the cryptocurrency industry spent to "buy a president" may not be the winning investment they thought, perhaps because they got...

I snapped this on my just-before-sunrise departure from SFO on Sunday: Also, if you have any doubts that the earth is round, see the above. (And why are you reading this blog?) I'll have my usual ranty news-related post after lunch.

Before I get to the best form of public transit available in the US, let's everyone say hello to my sister's dog, Omen: Omen is a whippet. Good. (She's quite devo-ted to him.) Anyway, this is how I got from the BART to the start of my 5.5 kilometer walk on Saturday: If you take the Powell and Hyde line, the best part comes at the corner of Hyde and Lombard, at the top of Russian Hill. Just look at this view, and imagine seeing Alcatraz, Angel Island, and Tiburon directly ahead! (I have seen them from...

After dragging my tired ass to Peet's just as they opened at 6 am (8 am back home), I got the same tired ass to the BART station just down the street and discovered that the Red Line operates as a shuttle between Millbrae and SFO sometimes. This knowledge came to me after I took an unplanned round-trip to the airport, learning this bit of BART lore at the cost of 25 minutes of my life. I did make it to Powell and Market before 8:30 am, which allowed me plenty of time to take the oldest form of public...

I made it to the Bay Area, and I'm about to fall asleep. Tomorrow I've got plans in both San Francisco and San Jose, which, if you care to glimpse a map, are nowhere near each other. (Seriously, they're farther apart than Chicago and Milwaukee.) Fortunately they have trains here. Right, well, I'm off then. Assuming I don't get re-routed involuntarily, I should be home mid-afternoon Sunday, and assuming meteorologists know what they're doing, I will be rewarded for schlepping a heavy coat all over the...

Voters across the US told the OAFPOTUS to pound sand in the clearest electoral rebuke to a major political party since 1984, and the hardest slap to an incumbent president probably since 1868. Democrats won crushing victories in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and even Mississippi. Almost every county in Virginia shifted toward Democrats, and no amount of money could unseat three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania. Plus, Zohran Mamdani beat the OAFPOTUS-endorsed candidates to win the...

The Los Angeles Dodgers won game 7 of the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays last night in one of the best baseball games I've ever seen—though, for obvious reasons, not nearly as exciting as game 7 of the World Series in 2016. The Dodgers looked buried early, falling behind 3-0 when a hobbled Bo Bichette took an exhausted Shohei Ohtani deep in the third inning. They seemed finished until the ninth, clawing back within one but never completely erasing the deficit — until Rojas saved the season...

While on a Brews & Choos mini-adventure yesterday, I learned that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has leaked that she won't seek re-election. This comes just a day after Democrat Catelin Drey flipped Iowa Senate district 1 from +20 OAFPOTUS to +5 Democratic. (Drey's win also breaks the Republican Party's supermajority in the Iowa Senate.) You may also remember Senator Ernst responding to her constituents alarm at HR 1* and its effects on their ability to remain breathing by saying "we're all going to die"...

I just finished 3½ hours of nonstop meetings that people crammed into my calendar because I have this afternoon blocked off as "Summer Hours PTO." Within a few minutes of finishing my last meeting, I rebooted my laptop (so it would get updated), closed the lid, and...looked at a growing pile of news stories that I couldn't avoid: Dan Rather calls tomorrow's planned Soviet-style military parade through DC a charade: "The military’s biggest cheerleader (at least today) didn’t serve in Vietnam because of...

Historian Timothy W Ryback outlines how the Chancellor of Germany used manufactured crises to take over the Bavarian State in 1933. If you hear an echo from the past coming from California this week, that may not be an accident: Adolf Hitler was a master of manufacturing public-security crises to advance his authoritarian agenda. The March 5 Reichstag elections delivered Hitler 44 percent of the electorate and with that a claim on political power at every level of government. The next day, 200,000...

I've had a lot to do in the office today, so unfortunately this will just be a link fest: I agree with Jeff Maurer that "I hate that when some dickhead sets a car on fire, we have to talk about it for a week." Journalist G. Elliott Morris argues that the Los Angeles protests have a higher probability of hurting the OAFPOTUS than helping him. Paul Krugman sighs that "we finally know what 'American carnage' was about." Russian emigrés Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev have a list of Russian words to help...

Cassie and I took a 7 km walk from sleep-away camp to Ribfest yesterday, which added up to 2½ hours of walkies including the rest of the day. Then we got some relaxing couch time in the evening. We don't get that many gorgeous weekend days in Chicago—perhaps 30 per year—so we had to take advantage of it. Of course, it's Monday now, and all the things I ignored over the weekend still exist: Josh Marshall digs into the OAFPOTUS's attack on the state of California, noting that "all the federalizations [of...

I want to start with a speech on the floor of the French Senate three days ago, in which Claude Malhuret (LIRT-Allier) had this to say about the OAFPOTUS: Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will...

Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile: James Fallows remembers his old boss Jimmy Carter, and puts his presidency in perspective for the younger generations. Paul Krugman reminds the Republican Party that California contributes more to the country's GDP than any other state, so maybe cut the crap threatening to withhold disaster relief? ProPublica goes "inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private...

A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd. It helps that we've had nothing but sun today....

The USGS (and no doubt millions of fish) has detected a 7.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of California. People as far away as San Diego and Hawaii have gotten tsunami warnings. So far no tsunamis have been reported; we'll see when the first possible wave reaches San Francisco in an hour. More info when available. Update, 14:12 CST: NOAA cancelled the tsunami warning for the US and Canadian West Coast about 15 minutes ago.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the trope-namer first appearing in Calvin and Hobbes, making the comic strip self-referential at this point. (It's the ur-noodle incident.) Unfortunately, today's mood rather more reflects The Far Side's famous "Crisis Clinic" comic from the same era: Adam Gray (D) has defeated US Representative John Duarte (R) in California's 13 district, bringing the House of Representatives to its final tally of 210 Democrats and 215 Republicans. An assassin shot and killed...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Off the Rails Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif.Train line: Caltrain, Sunnyvale Time from SF Terminal: 62 minutesTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 300 m Sunnyvale, Calif., has blocked off the north end of Murphy Ave. to traffic, turning the entire block into a pedestrian zone lined with restaurants and a good-enough-for-the-suburbs brewery where you can have good-enough beers. Despite the amazing...

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in...

If South Dakota governor and unapologetic puppy-killer Kristi Noem (R, obviously) becomes the XPOTUS's running mate this year, the GOP will have outdone its own Doctor Evil mindset. And yet, that is not the worst thing happening in the world today: A California judge has ruled a recent state law requiring municipalities to undo discriminatory zoning laws unconstitutional, though it's not clear how long that ruling will stand. Do you own a GM car made in this decade? It may be spying on you, and sharing...

American Airlines says my flight home has a 45-minute delay at the moment (though of course that could get worse). So I just spent 35 minutes walking in a big circle around the southwest corner of downtown San Diego. I don't think I'd ever live here, but I do enjoy the weather. Meanwhile, as if I don't have too many things on my to-be-read shelf already, the New York Times book editor has released a list of the 22 funniest novels since Catch-22. Maybe someday I'll get to a few of them? Anyway, I...

I've got a little time before dinner, just enough to post this: I didn't collect any snake bites, scorpion stings, or exploding cactuses, but I think I did get a nice sunburn. I'll find out tomorrow.

Given the weather and the fact that I'd been stuck in the conference hotel all day, I slipped out for a 4-kilometer walk around downtown San Diego this afternoon. It was perfectly clear and 20°C, but somehow I persevered. I was exercising so I didn't take a lot of photos. But I have never seen a cruise ship up close before, so despite the mouse on the front, this impressed me: That's the Disney Wonder. I will never go on that ship any more than I will get to go on the USS Carl Vinson, which is behind it...

Another sprint has ended. My hope for a boring release has hit two snags: first, it looks like one of the test artifacts in the production environment that our build pipeline depends on has disappeared (easily fixed); and second, my doctor's treatment for this icky bronchitis I've had the past two weeks works great at the (temporary) expense of normal cognition. (Probably the cough syrup.) Plus, Cassie and I have a houseguest: But like my head, the rest of the world keeps spinning: A 3-judge panel on...

Walking Cassie to day camp took a lot longer than usual this morning because the freezing rain and near-freezing temperatures after a long cold snap laid a layer of ice over nearly every sidewalk and street in Chicago. She seemed very concerned about my ability to walk, and very disappointed that we didn't take our usual detour to the bagel place to get me some coffee and her a fresh dog treat. The "wintry mix" has stopped and the temperature has risen all the way to 1.5°C at Inner Drive Technology...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Fox Tale Fermentation Project, 120 E. Santa Clara St., San Jose, Calif.Train line: Caltrain, San Jose DiridonTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 1.5 km I hadn't intended to visit Fox Tale, because a different brewery was closer to my hotel. But that brewery closed abruptly in November, though no one had updated its Google page. I'm glad I went to Fox Tale instead. Owners Felipe Bravo and Wendy Neff don't just...

I don't like getting up before dawn, even if it's 8am as far as my body cares. Except that getting up at 6am Pacific allowed me to get to SFO and through security in less than an hour. That's including showering, checking out of the hotel, catching the BART, and jumping on the airport tram. Cute hotel, too; I'll stay there again if I ever have to fly out of SFO at the ass crack of dawn. Still an hour to boarding, though. I miss the days when I could get to an airport 45 minutes before departure without...

I just got back from a 35-minute walk around downtown San Jose, Calif., including a 1-km stretch of the Guadalupe River trail. My Garmin track gives you hints about how it went, particularly the 300 meters or so along the river under multiple overpasses including the California 87 freeway. And in fairness, it's sunny and 13°C, which doesn't suck for the first day of winter. That said, this is the place where I joined the trail: And this is the 87 underpass: Not shown above, the homeless man launching...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

I have tickets to a late concert downtown, which means a few things, principally that I'm still at the office. But I'm killing it on this sprint, so it works out. Of course this means a link dump: The XPOTUS has a hate-hate relationship with life. After a damning ethics report, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has announced he won't run again, which is too bad because it would have been an easy D pickup. Speaking of Republicans in Congress, why do they behave like adolescent boys all the time? Israel is seeing...

I haven't had the most productive morning ever, but I should get back into coding after I take Cassie on her lunchtime walk. Meanwhile: California governor Gavin Newsom (D) has announced he would appoint Emily's List president Laphonza Butler to serve out the remainder of the late US Senator Dianne Feinstein's term. The XPOTUS has shown up to his fraud trial in New York today, in what Michael Tomasky hopes will utterly ruin the man. In the Post, Michael Lewis examines the last year of Sam...

The senior US Senator from California, a Democratic stalwart, died overnight, according to her family: In recent years, Ms. Feinstein, 90, had suffered from frail health and memory issues that made it difficult for her to function alone and prompted calls for her to step down, which she consistently rejected. Her staff was being informed at 9 a.m. A spokesman for Ms. Feinstein’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNN had her obituary ready to go: Feinstein broke a series of...

Private railroad operator Brightline has started modestly-high-speed service in South Florida, and has agreements in place to start Los Angeles to Las Vegas service by the end of the decade: Launching with no federal help, the modern debut of private passenger rail connecting two major metropolitan areas will come to fruition when Brightline riders arrive in Orlando from downtown Miami. The Federal Railroad Administration expects to sign off within days, triggering a three-week testing period before...

I'm about to take Cassie on her noon peregrination, which will be shorter than usual as we're heading over to North Center Ribfest tonight in perfect weather. Last year's Ribfest disappointed me (but not Cassie). I hope this year's is better than last year's. (Hard to believe I took Parker to our first Ribfest over 15 years ago...) Chicago street festivals are having trouble raising money, however. When a festival takes over a public street, they're not allowed to charge an entry fee, though they can...

As the smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to spread through the American Midwest, I want to mention that the effective use of government regulation of industry has made this week's air quality that much more surprising. Just take a look at Evanston, Ill., yesterday around 7pm: The fact that this looks really weird says a lot about what the government can do when people are behind it. No, really: the air-quality alerts from Minnesota to West Virginia look bizarre right now because we hardly ever see...

She won't, though, despite worrying facts about her 3-month absence that have started to come out: Ms. Feinstein’s frail appearance was a result of several complications after she was hospitalized for shingles in February, some of which she has not publicly disclosed. The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially...

James Fallows contrasts the behavior of octogenarians US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and President Joe Biden: It boils down to this: —Sometimes what helps an individual hurts a larger cause. Things have come to that point for Senator Dianne Feinstein. —Sometimes it works the other way, and an individual’s interests are aligned with a cause. I believe that applies to Joe Biden’s announcement that he is running for a second term. Feinstein staying on, at age 89, increases problems for her party. Biden...

Stuff read while waiting for code to compile: Alex Shephard rolls his eyes at the Republican Party's unhinged response to the XPOTUS's indictment. California's Tulare Lake used to be the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi, until agriculture drained it. Thanks to record rainfall, it has returned. Stanford Law 3L Tess Winston writes that 10% of her class generates 95% of the noise, but the 1L and 2L classes are worse. The head of Chicago-area concert promoter Jam Productions testified to the...

The Apollo Chorus annual fundraiser/cabaret is on April 1st, and tickets are still available. If you can't make it, you can still donate. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: From February, Tommy Craggs writes in New Republic that Lyndon LaRouche's zombie ideas still walk the land. The New York Times has collection of photos from Northern California of the atmospheric river they're getting right now. Annie Lowrey thinks "you should be outraged" about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. But Molly White...

The rain has stopped, and might even abate long enough for me to collect Cassie from day camp without getting soaked on my way home. I've completed a couple of cool sub-features for our sprint review tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to read the day's stories: Matt Ford doesn't think US Representative Marjorie Taylor (R-GA) wants secession so much as uncontested Republican rule, which, you know, is on brand for her and her party. San Francisco native Michael Moritz worries that one-party rule by the...

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response. The New York Times had an online setup that took...

I released 13 stories to production this afternoon, all of them around the app's security and customer onboarding, so all of them things that the non-technical members of the team (read: upper management) can see and understand. That leaves me free to tidy up some of the bits we don't need anymore, which I also enjoy doing. While I'm running multiple rounds of unit and integration tests, I've got all of this to keep me company: US Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who even people who love her wonder if...

Longtime readers will know that I have spent a lot of time in Half Moon Bay, Calif., over the past 15 years. So yesterday's events shocked me: Seven people are dead following two linked shootings in the Northern California city of Half Moon Bay, officials said. The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office tweeted at 3:48 p.m. Monday that they were responding to a shooting “with multiple victims in the area of HWY 92 and the HMB City limits.” The office tweeted roughly an hour later that a suspect was in...

I love this chart from Twitter user Jay Cuda: Location of MLB ballparks in relation to downtown / city center pic.twitter.com/b9vq519NiC — Jay Cuda (@JayCuda) January 19, 2023 If you don't want to click through to Twitter, here's Jay's chart: The chart doesn't tell the whole story, does it? For example, both Chicago teams, both New York teams, Boston, DC, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Oakland are all about the same distance from downtown, but easily accessible by train. (Chicago's are both on the same El...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Black Hammer Brewing, 544 Bryant St., San FranciscoTrain line: Caltrain, San Francisco terminalTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 600 m I spent most of Monday in Palo Alto, Calif., one of the few places in California that has an actual commuter rail station. Caltrain's northern terminus, at 4th and King, is only three blocks from an actual brewery, so naturally I stopped in. My $20 flight started with the Jaded...

I can't remember ever taking an umbrella to California, but I'm packing one today. So instead of the sunny and cold weather I've usually experienced in San Francisco, the forecast calls for wet and cold weather every day I'm there, with the sun coming out right after I leave. Here in Chicago, we've had just 20% of possible sun this month, which WGN points out has completely obscured that we have 15 minutes more daylight than we had at the solstice. On the other hand, so far we've had the 4th-warmest...

For the first week of 2023, Chicago got just 2% of possible sunlight, with no sun at all since last Monday. Normal for January is 40%. On the other hand, so far it's the 4th-warmest January in history, almost 10°F (6°C) above normal, with the 8-to-14 day forecast predicting much above normal temperatures. Note the top 7 are all in the past 31 years. Unfortunately those two things correlate strongly. So we probably won't get a lot of sun until it either cools down or warms up. Such is winter in Chicago....

I have to work tomorrow, but come on, it's the Thursday before a mandatory 4-day weekend, so Cassie might just get extra walks. So it turns out I've already mostly caught up on my reading for the day. Still, a trio of car-related articles got my attention. First, Jersey City, N.J., the next town over from where I lived right before I started this blog, had zero traffic fatalities so far this year: That Vision Zero milestone comes with a caveat — it only reflects the roads that the city maintains....

With only about a week of autumn left officially, we have some great weather today. Cassie is with her pack at day care and I'm inside my downtown office looking at the sun and (relative) warmth outside, but the weather should continue through Friday. What else is going on? A reader who remembers watching The Play live on TV sent a story about the statue the Bears erected to Keven Moen and unveiled last week. A new study ranks Asian and Scandinavian public-transit systems best in the world, with...

I'm just finishing up a very large push to our dev/test environment, with 38 commits (including 2 commits fixing unrelated bugs) going back to last Tuesday. I do not like large pushes like this, because they tend to be exciting. So, to mitigate that, I'm running all 546 unit tests locally before the CI service does the same. This happens when you change the basic architecture of an entire feature set. (And I just marked 6 tests with "Ignore: broken by story X, to be rewritten in story Y." Not the best...

CNBC released a 35-minute documentary earlier this month that fairly discusses the value of cities relative to suburbs and exurbs: A lot of this is old hat to people who follow Strong Towns or other urbanist sources. It's a good backgrounder for people though. In related news, California just passed legislation mandating an end to local parking requirements within walking distance of transit stations. It's a start.

In what one Daily Parker reader describes as "a Twitter fight come to life," the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., voted to keep an abandoned, unusable railway through its downtown because of the possibility that, in some possible future, trains might once again take passengers to Watsonville: On June 7, about 70% of Santa Cruz County voters chose to reject a measure called the Greenway Initiative, which would have supported ripping out a portion of the tracks and replacing them with a bike path and...

Journalist and author Nellie Bowles, a San Francisco native, looks at the defenestration of Chesa Boudin as part of a larger pattern of progressive San Franciscans coming to their senses: San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on...

Yesterday I had a full work day plus a three-hour rehearsal for our performance of Stacy Garrop's Terra Nostra on Monday night. (Tickets still available!) Also, yesterday, the House began its public hearings about the failed insurrection on 6 January 2021. Also, yesterday was Thursday, and I could never get the hang of Thursdays. Walter Shapiro believes the January 6th committee might "have the goods." Slate's Dan Kois describes the efforts of L.A.'s Crosswalk Collective and the UK's Tyre Extinguishers...

San Francisco voters recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin 60%-40% yesterday (but with only 26% turnout), which suggests a growing backlash against progressive crime policies as crime rates inch up from their historic lows: Boudin was an easy scapegoat. Decades of failed housing and mental-health policies have fed a homelessness crisis in a city that was never as liberal as it appeared. The pandemic appeared to fuel deep sociological challenges that no politician or prosecutor had easy answers for....

I popped out to San Francisco this past weekend, then had a ton of things to work on today that precluded posting any of these photos. So, from south to north order, starting with Moss Beach, including a WWII-era anti-aircraft bunker on the left: Just a short way from there is what used to be a scary section of the Pacific Coast Highway, now a bike trail: The Powell end of the Powell & Mason cable car, at Market St: The Ferry Building: Looking up California St. from Sansomme: Transamerica Pyramid: And...

Gray skies, day 45: they say the sun will come out tomorrow. I would not bet my bottom dollar on that. In any event, I'll be in San Francisco for a couple of days, where they've had sun on and off for a while, with sun predicted tomorrow and Sunday. Then, if the predictions hold true, I'll come back here Monday in time to throw open all my windows. We'll see. But I am really sick of the rain and clouds already.

Winter officially has another week and a half to run, but we got a real taste of spring in all its ridiculousness this week: Yesterday the temperature got up to 13°C at O'Hare, up from the -10°C we had Monday morning. It's heading down to -11°C overnight, then up to 7°C on Sunday. (Just wait until I post the graph for the entire week.) Welcome to Chicago in spring. Elsewhere: Republicans in New York and Illinois have a moan about the redistricting processes in those states that will result in...

On this day in 1950, eleven thieves stole $2.7m ($29.8m today) from the Brink's Armored Car depot in Boston. They would have avoided prosecution had they just followed the plan, but the Liddy Rule got them in the end ("three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead"). Flash forward 72 years and we find that theft again dominates the news in Los Angeles, as thieves plunder stopped trains outside the intermodal depot in Lincoln Heights. If your package is delayed, it might have helped...

The pilot of a Cessna 172H that crash-landed near Burbank, Calif., earlier this week survived with non-life-threatening injuries, but he came uncomfortably close to a really bad landing—and they most assuredly cannot use the plane again: LAPD officers pulled an injured pilot from a crashed Cessna 172 moments before it was struck and destroyed by a commuter train. Mark Jenkins, the 70-year-old pilot, was pulled from the wreckage of the aircraft after he crash landed on railroad tracks near Whiteman...

As the last workday in October draws to a close, in all its rainy gloominess, I have once again spent all day working on actually coding stuff and not reading these articles: Andrew Sullivan says the GOP could own clean energy by pushing nuclear power. Brian Merchant says Facebook has decided to change its name because it's boring. The last sane GOP representative, Adam Kinzinger (IL-6), won't run for re-election to the House, both because the new Illinois district map favors Democrats and also because...

I said before lunch I wouldn't post barring catastrophe. This may qualify: Over the weekend in California, a storm system dropped to a barometric pressure of 945.2 mB, making it the strongest storm to affect the Pacific Northwest on record. For perspective, this is equivalent to the central pressure you would see with a strong hurricane. For Sacramento, the stats are even more startling. Sacramento picked up 5.44 inches of rain Sunday, making it their wettest day in history (or any calendar month)....

Oh boy: Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen. A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas. Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would...

As expected (but not as most news organizations made it seem), California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) did not lose his job yesterday: With 100% of precincts reporting at least some results, Gavin Newsom has avoided being recalled by a 63.9% to 36.1% margin. The numbers from the California Secretary of State show a clear divide in the state: coastal counties, the Bay Area and nearly all of Southern California voted to keep Newsom. Central California and most of the rural Northern California counties voted...

I have opened these on my Surface at work, but I'll have to read them at home: The City of Chicago has sued Grubhub and Doordash for deceptive practices. Sue Halpern asks, "Why is Facebook suddenly afraid of the FTC?" Paul Krugman worries that California voters might destroy their own economic success if they remove Governor Gavin Newsom from office next week. Josh Marshall fisks Robert Kagan's opinion piece on the history of the Afghanistan war. Ezra Klein says, "Let's not pretend that the way we...

At the moment, the 10 hottest places in the world are all in the Pacific Coast states and British Columbia. The Dalles, Ore., hit 48°C at 4pm Pacific; Portland hit 46°C, the same as Palm Springs, Calif.; and even Lytton, B.C., reports 46°C right now—the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. All of those figures exceed yesterday's forecast and broke all-time records set just yesterday. It's bonkers. And it won't be the last time this happens. Here in Chicago we have a perfectly reasonable 26°C....

SDCA Senior Judge Roger Benitez, a George W Bush appointee, has ruled that California's assault-weapons ban violates the 2nd Amendment: The state’s definition of illegal military-style rifles unlawfully deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court, the judge wrote. Judge Roger T. Benitez, who has favored pro-gun groups in past rulings, described the AR-15 rifle, used in many of the nation's deadliest mass shootings, as an ideal weapon....

I forgot how quiet San Francisco's financial district is on weekend mornings. And I forgot to factor in California's lagging re-opening in general. Of the places Yelp said would be open for a quick breakfast takeaway this morning, two had ended weekend hours, one was permanently closed (or at least hibernating through the pandemic), and one was delightful. Il Canto Cafe, on Sacramento between Battery and Sansomme, whipped up a lovely egg sandwich and (too-large) coffee in just five minutes. But...

Not having an adolescent dog who wants her breakfast at 6am to contend with this morning meant I actually got to sleep in. (Yes, 7:15 is "sleeping in" when I'm in California, because that's 9:15 back home.) The friends looking after Cassie reported last night: "Cassie's a bit confused...she said something about not signing up for the overnight package." This morning: "Very barky at noises. But she settled down. We're heading to the dog park after Meet the Press!" (Cassie will not be on the news program...

Almost 16 months since I last flew anywhere, I have returned to O'Hare: Despite traveling on Saturday afternoon, which historically has meant few delays and a quiet airport, the traffic coming up here was so bad my car's adaptive cruise control gave up. But she got a treat once we got to economy parking: I don't think I have ever parked that close to the elevators in 48 years of flying. Good thing, too, because the closest non-LEV space was in the next county. Once I got into the terminal, it took less...

A 25-meter section of the Pacific Coast Highway slid into the Pacific about 30 km south of Big Sur this week: Caltrans spokesperson Jim Shivers said the damage to the highway is called a slip out. "It's where we lose a part of the highway and now we're facing a project to clean and repair that stretch," Shivers said. "This is the only location we're aware of where this happened in the storm. Our maintenance team is patrolling the highway now to look for other damage." The closure is in Rat Creek between...

I plan to live-blog off and on tomorrow evening, understanding the likelihood that we won't know the results of many of the races until later in the week. I'm watching these races most closely (all times CST, UTC-6): 6pm Polls close in Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Virginia. Of these, I mainly want to know the results in Georgia's two US Senate races, plus the US Senate race in South Carolina and the Georgia presidential totals. In Kentucky, Amy McGrath has less than a 1 in 20 chance of...

Smoke from the wildfires out west reached Chicago yesterday: It’s not unusual for smoke from various regions to reach northern Illinois, especially from larger fires, according to Mark Ratzer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Chicago-area office. Smoke from fires hundreds of miles away can billow high into the atmosphere and get carried to other regions by jet streams and winds aloft, causing cloudier skies and slightly cooler temperatures. Mid- and upper-level winds were carrying...

Here we go: A wildfire currently burning north of Sacramento has become the largest in California history. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci doesn't expect us to get back to normal until "well into 2021." Law professor Rosa Brooks reviews Bob Woodward's Rage and finds nothing surprising. The Kissimmee Star Motel outside Orlando, Florida, is a case study in the state's abrogation of its basic duties to its citizens, or the apotheosis of the Calvinist ethics...

This is the view from Half Moon Bay, Calif., not far from the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, at 9am this morning: Update: The same reader sent this photo from noon PDT: Fires continue to burn all over the state despite some modest cooling from this weekend's record temperatures. The California Air Resources Board notes that the increased frequency and severity of these fires, like the increased frequency and severity of other weather-related incidents, comes directly from climate change. The image seems...

Yesterday, Woodland Hills, Calf., a neighborhood in Los Angeles, recorded its hottest temperature ever: As a historic heat wave left Southern California broiling, Woodland Hills on Sunday recorded an all-time high of 49.4°C, which the National Weather Service said was the hottest temperature recorded at an official weather station in Los Angeles County. It broke the old record of 48.3°C set in July of 2006 and was one of several records to fall on Sunday. The NWS said Riverside hit its highest...

It got a little warm in Death Valley, Calif., yesterday: In the midst of a historic heat wave in the West, the mercury in Death Valley, Calif., surged to a searing 54.4°C on Sunday afternoon, possibly setting a world record for the highest temperature ever observed during the month of August. If the temperature is valid, it would also rank among the top-three highest temperatures ever measured on the planet at any time and may, in fact, be the highest. Death Valley famously holds the record for the...

Freelance writer Alexandra Marvar took the Southwest Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles: I boarded the 2:50 p.m. Southwest Chief out of Chicago’s Union Station on a Friday. By mid-morning Sunday, we’ll arrive at another Union Station: Los Angeles. I could have flown between the two cities in roughly four hours. But as a frequent flyer all too familiar with the rush and stress of air travel, I was drawn to the idea of a long, slow journey across America by rail. Now, 15 hours into my inaugural long-haul...

A Delta 777 en route from LAX to Shanghai declared an emergency and had to dump thousands of kilograms of fuel to land under the safe landing weight. Planes, particularly heavy transport-class aircraft, do this so they don't destroy their landing gear and the runway itself when landing in an emergency situation. Now, if you know LAX, you know that generally planes take off over the ocean. In those rare cases when they have emergencies and need to circle back, they dump fuel over the ocean. Not this guy...

I mentioned earlier today Aaron Gordon's evisceration of Uber's and Lyft's business model. It's worth a deeper look: The Uber and Lyft pretzel logic is as follows: Drivers are their customers and also independent contractors but cannot negotiate prices or any terms of their contract. Uber and Lyft are platforms, not transportation companies. Drivers unionizing would be price-fixing, but Uber and Lyft can price-fix all they want. Riders pay the driver for their transportation, not the platforms, even...

I want Wayne LaPierre to apologize, in person, to Alberto Romero: The shooting left three people dead — including a 6-year-old boy — and 12 injured, local officials said. Authorities initially reported that 15 people had been hurt but amended the count early Monday morning. One gunman was killed by officers at the scene, Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said. In an interview with NBC Bay Area, Alberto Romero confirmed that his 6-year-old son, Stephen, had died. The boy’s mother and grandmother were also...

In their ongoing battle with large Hollywood agencies, the members of the Writers Guild of America fired all their agents. Subsequently, they went through the usual May cycle of getting new jobs with hardly any difficulty. And this week, the Guild released an online platform to connect writers with jobs. In a note to the membership, the Guild explained the platform: Today the WGA is launching our Staffing & Development Platform, which provides valuable new tools to help connect writers with job...

Queued up a few articles to read after work today: The Tribune has a short guide to Chicago's brewpubs aimed at the perplexed. Marvel has announced a bunch more superhero movies, coming on the heels of Avengers: Endgame becoming the highest-grossing film ever. Cranky Flier looks at Tijuana's new terminal—on the American side of the border. Nathan Heller asks, "Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?" Greg Sargent cautions the press not to buy into Attorney General William Barr's framing of former FBI...

I thought the weekend of Canada Day and the weekend before Independence Day wouldn't have much a lot of news. I was wrong: Ontario Premier Doug Ford (the brother of Rob Ford) cancelled Canada Day celebrations in Toronto*. (Imagine the Governor of Virginia or the Mayor of DC canceling the 4th of July and you've about got it.) Fortunately for the city, the Ontario legislature reinstated them. You know how I write about how urban planning can make people happier, healthier, and friendlier? Yah, this city...

A large number of articles bubbled up in my inbox (and RSS feeds) this morning. Some were just open tabs from the weekend. From the Post: Reporters, tired of catching White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders in bald-faced lies, try to figure out what to do about it. Jennifer Rubin says former White House counsel Don McGahn's testimony "should rock Trumpland." Aaron Blake concurs. In an Op-Ed, Hillary Clinton advises Americans how to respond to the Mueller Report. Student reporters at Bear Creek High...

Writing for Medium, Scott Lucas paints a dismal picture of Tinseltown after 50 more years of climate change: “With the exception of the highest elevations and a narrow swath very near the coast, where the increases are confined to a few days, land locations see 60–90 additional extremely hot days per year by the end of century,” one study concluded. Downtown Los Angeles could experience up to 54 days measuring 95 degrees or higher by 2100, a ninefold jump. By then, temperatures in Riverside could reach...

A couple of news stories have dogged me this week. First, the TSA has determined that travelers—particularly children—find floppy-eared dogs less threatening than pointy-eared dogs: TSA Administrator David Pekoske said the agency is also making at least one new change to reduce traveler stress: deploying more floppy-ear dogs, rather than pointy-ear dogs, to sniff out explosives in public areas. During a recent tour of Washington Dulles International Airport, Pekoske told the Washington Examiner that his...

...not everywabone would look like these guys, getting in a few waves just past 9 in the morning today: These are just some quick edits on my Surface. When I get home I'll spend some more time with the few hundred photos I've taken today and yesterday.

Two from last night, near the Hermosa Beach Pier: