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I feel a little chagrined today as I expect to release the new version of The Daily Parker this evening, and yesterday I failed to write even a cursory post. I blame meetings and a very long dentist appointment (I'm fine; still no cavities; but the new dentist patient intake took a while). I also didn't have any time to read these: Brian Beutler outlines a workable plan for getting rid of the Schutzstaffel Immigration and Customs Enforcement permanently. Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's threats...

As I type this, Azure DevOps is banging away at the new blog engine's dev-test pipeline so that I can confirm the last few bits of it are correctly configured. The production environment is up and working, except for icons and RECAPTCHA, which explains the rebuild. Google: your dashboards are really confusing. Creating the production environment took 57 minutes this morning, and creating the production release pipeline (which included setting all the Azure roles properly on things like the database and...

At midnight Chicago tied its high-temperature record for January 9th, 15.6°C (60°F), set in 1880. Then from 4am to 5am the temperature dropped 7°C (12°F) and now hovers around 6°C (42°F). This is a weakening La Niña plus human-caused global heating plus Chicago generally having weird weather. In other news: Glenn Kessler warns that the OAFPOTUS's vandalism of our foreign policy is the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships, with similarly grim prospects for the natives. Matt Ford thinks it will "haunt...

Despite the annoyances with the soon-to-be-decommissioned BlogEngine.NET version of the Daily Parker, I actually had some things to say today. Mainly: the OAFPOTUS and his droogs know they're losing everywhere that matters, and they know they only have slightly less than a year before the next Congress effectively shuts them down, so they're going for broke. And the last 36 hours are just the beginning. Top of mind is yesterday's murder of Renee Good, a mother of three shot in the face by a...

Yep, I'm still doing these, because I still have meetings and have to queue stories up: Brian Beutler has another "30 thoughts on the illegal Venezuela war." Heather Cox Richardson picks apart Secretary of State Marco Rubio's appearance on ABC's This Week yesterday. It...did not go well. Because they have no plan. Paul Krugman drags the administration for "seeking cash and an ego boost," i.e., "the real Donroe Doctrine." Of all the horrible aspects of our Venezuelan adventure, Adam Kinzinger was most...

After taking Cassie to the St James Farm Preserve, I did something I had not done in 335 days: I fueled my car. Between February 2nd and yesterday, I drove 3,335 km (2,073 mi) and used 34.4 L (9.1 gal) of gas for an average economy of 1.03 L/100 km (228.2 MPG). This is what happens when you live somewhere with decent public transportation and drive a plug-in hybrid. Sadly, as a plug-in car gets older—I've had mine for just over 7 years now—the battery slowly loses its capacity. In 2019 she got about 51...

Yesterday evening at Spiteful Brewing: I swear that dog would consider leaving me for a taco. But she seemed pretty happy to be home: Then this afternoon we took a walk with her friend Kelsey at the St James Farm Preserve out in Suburbistan: The weather was pretty good for January, and the dogs got at least 40 minutes of off-leash time. They also discovered frozen horse poop, which fortunately they didn't eat a lot of. I do need to talk to Cassie about her breath, though. Tonight we're on the couch, and...

The three best takes I've seen so far on the OAFPOTUS hoping anything is more interesting to the public than his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein start with Josh Marshall: I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezuela for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with...

The events in Venezuela earlier today are a bit more important than the soft launch of a beta blog engine's dev-test environment. Still, if you're curious what I've been working on for (checks Git log) more than five years, here is the Daily Parker's next iteration. A big caveat: It's still in development. I've gotten to the minimal feature set where I feel comfortable letting people play with it, but it still has a ways to go before I can move this blog off BlogEngine.NET. I still need to add search...

The United States invaded Venezuela this morning and captured its president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife: The United States launched a “large scale strike” on Venezuela, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flew them out of the country, President Donald Trump said in a social media post early Saturday. Overnight, explosions shook multiple locations across Caracas, including at key military facilities, and aircraft were seen flying over the Venezuelan capital. Venezuelan Vice President...

Now that I've had a good night's sleep and the sun is out for the first time all year, I have the energy to start reading the news again. On January 2nd, most of the stories are about things that have changed since Wednesday: Chicago had 416 murders in 2025, the lowest number recorded since 1965 when the city had 620,000 (23%) more people. In 2025, the hottest temperature recorded at Inner Drive Technology WHQ was 34.3°C (93.7°F) on June 23rd; the coldest was -20°C (-4°F) January 21st. Officially at...

I remember 2025 like it was yesterday...and in that long-forgotten year: I posted 459 times on The Daily Parker, down 21 from 2024 and 41 from 2023. But the blog had it's 10,000th post sometime in August, which is something. I flew less in 2025 than in the previous three years, with only 7 flight segments totaling 8,371 flight miles. I didn't leave the US in 2025, about which I am sad. And I only visited five states: Tennessee,  Washington, Wisconsin, Texas, and California. Strangely, I didn't even make...

I've just pushed Weather Now release 5.0.9497, which has a few minor tweaks plus one really obvious one: I switched typefaces. For consistency with the new Daily Parker and the soon-to-be-refreshed Inner Drive Technology corporate site, I decided to switch to the IBM Plex Sans typeface. The app had used Łukasz Dziedzic's Lato typeface, which I like a lot. I think Plex has a cleaner design, no more modern than Lato but just more to my taste. Check out the Weather Now refresh, and let me know what you...

Because I've spent almost all my computer time on my real job and on getting the next version of The Daily Parker ready for its Beta launch, I haven't had many of these link roundups for the last couple of weeks. Another reason: all the end-of-year retrospectives, floofy non-news stories, and all those damned "send us money" emails. I promise you, I will never send you an email begging for money. Of course, if you enjoy either this blog or Weather Now, or find them vaguely useful, please consider...

I've posted the Chicago Sunrises 2026 page a few days before the end of the year in part because I'm still thinking about the way the new blog engine will handle static pages. The fundamental abstraction in the new blog engine is an Event, which is a thing that occurs in time; static pages are, well, static. The solution I'm experimenting with is to have "favorite" or "pinned" posts, which will show up second on the main landing page. First, I have to finish comments, which has led me to re-evaluate...

The US Supreme Court used its infamous shadow docket Monday to tell the OAFPOTUS he can't send the National Guard to Chicago anymore: In its three-page unsigned ruling against the administration, the court refused to grant the president broad discretion to deploy the military in U.S. cities, citing an 1878 law, which bans the use of the military for domestic policing. It represented a rare departure from recent cases, in which the conservative majority has overwhelmingly sided with Mr. Trump in...

So far today, in addition to my usual activities, I've nearly completed the Tags features for the new blog engine. It looks more and more like I'll have something to show the world before the end of the year. Stay tuned!

While waiting for Visual Studio to update (it was too early to go to lunch when I started this post), I'm reading these: Someone handed the OAFPOTUS a new crayon, which he used to scrawl his name on a new class of battleship the US Navy wants to build. (Since the Navy won't even lay down the keel of the first ship in the new BBG class until the mid-2030s at the earliest, long after this elderly toddler has shuffled off his office and likely also this mortal coil, there is no actual possibility of any...

Just so I can keep track, my month so far: Mon Dec 1, Messiah dress rehearsal, Millar Chapel, EvanstonTue Dec 2, chorus fundraiser planning committeeMon Dec 8, Messiah rehearsalThu Dec 11, Messiah tutti rehearsal, Holy Name Cathedral, ChicagoSat Dec 13, Messiah performance, Holy Name CathedralSun Dec 14, Messiah performance, Millar ChapelTue Dec 16, Messiah sing-a-long, EvanstonWed Dec 17, Christmas Eve rehearsal, EvanstonSun Dec 21 (morning), 4th Sunday of Advent service, EvanstonSun Dec 21...

Well, some of it is interesting, anyway: Adam Kinzinger uses the Great Drone Panic of 2024 to remind us how right-wing media spin people up over nothing. O'Hare may reclaim its title as the World's Busiest Airport if the Federal Aviation Administration confirms flight-tracking company AirNav Radar's statistics next month. Sam Kahn explains "how the New Yorker became irrelevant." Duke evolutionary anthropology PhD student Hannah Salomons conducted a study of how puppies learn that has recently been...

Cassie and I went out right at sunrise (7:14—two more weeks before the latest one of the winter on January 3rd) just as the temperature bottomed out at -10.5°C (13.1°F) after yesterday's cold front. Tomorrow will be above freezing, Sunday will be a bit below, and then Monday through the end of the year looks like it'll be above. And the forecast for Christmas Day is 11°C (52°F). Meanwhile, as I sip my second cup of tea, these stories made me want to go back to bed: As much as we want to ignore the...

Cold fronts in Chicago do not mess around: At least it's not raining, and the roads haven't frozen over. Yet. Meanwhile, in the "stopped clock" category, the OAFPOTUS did something I approve of today: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to fast-track the reclassification of cannabis, which would pave the way for the Food and Drug Administration to study its medicinal uses. "It doesn’t legalize marijuana in any way, shape or form or and in no way sanctions its use as a recreational...

It looks like our above-normal temperatures will continue probably through the end of the year, but the next few days look nuts: And yet, the weather isn't nearly as nuts as the OAFPOTUS and his administration: The Times reports that White House Budget Director Russel Vought is pushing to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, because it's the premier climate research center in the world and Vought is a climate-change-denying tool. Francis Fukuyama thinks the OAFPOTUS is losing steam, and...

The temperature tried and tried but couldn't get above -6.1°C over here. It should keep going up slowly for the next day. And we might even see the sun tomorrow. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, has been arrested following the stabbing death of his parents. In response to the Reiners' deaths, the OAFPOTUS posted some truly deranged crap on social media, further demonstrating how he's completely lost it. Brian...

The bitter cold we expected has arrived. This morning the temperature fell to -16.6°C (2°F) at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and -18.9°C (-2°F) at Chicago's official reporting station at O'Hare. It hasn't been this cold since the wee hours of January 22nd. Unlike that frigid week when we got 5 days in a row below -10°C, this time around things will change quickly. Just look at the latest CPC forecast for Christmas week: The CPC hasn't revised their January and February forecasts since mid-November, before...

The north magnetic pole has wobbled around Canada and the Arctic very quickly for the past few years, and no one knows why. A consequence of its traversal of the Arctic has been to create an unprecedented geographic situation in the UK for the past three years, which alas is ending today: ‘True north’ is the direction to the geographic north pole; ‘grid north’ is where the vertical blue lines shown on Ordnance Survey (OS) maps converge, and ‘magnetic north’ is the direction that a compass needle points...

Ah, December, when the easy cadence of weekly rehearsals becomes a frenzy of performances and, yes, more rehearsals. This is Messiah week, so I've already spent 8 hours of it in rehearsals or helping to set up for them. Tonight I've got the first of 4 Messiah performances over the next two weeks, plus yet another rehearsal, a church service, and a Christmas Eve service. Then, after Christmas, a bunch of us will be singing at the 50th anniversary party for a couple who have sung with us for longer than...

On this day 100 years ago, Arthur and Alfred Heineman opened the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo, Calif., filling a need for lodging that Americans didn't even realize they had: At the time, motorists had limited options. Their dust-covered clothes hardly suited the highbrow standards of most hotels, and parking in cities could be challenging. So many drivers stayed in autocamps, roadside resting places that sometimes offered basics like firewood and communal bathrooms, pitching tents off their...

Sometimes, you just need a chuckle. In Mediaite, Colby Hall put the OAFPOTUS's Tuesday night rant through the three major LLMs to see if they could diagnose him. They did not disappoint: Former Republican congressman Justin Amash cut through the noise on X, writing “If anyone else wrote something like this, it would be universally acknowledged that the person is mentally unstable.” To test that hypothesis, I asked three leading AI models — ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude — to analyze the text as psychological...

Of note: Jeff Maurer wants every Democratic candidate in the next election cycle to hammer the OAFPOTUS for selling pardons (and all his other corruption). Former Republican US Representative Adam Kinzinger takes his party to task for rejecting its own history by attacking the civil service. (By the way, Netflix has a great four-part miniseries about Presidents Garfield and Arthur called "Death by Lightning" that you can watch now.) Paul Krugman frets that we have become a "digital narco-state." Amanda...

A weak La Niña has already started affecting the weather in the United States, as this week's cold snap demonstrates. Weak La Niña events typically cause cooler, wetter winters in Chicago. Last night's temperature got down to -12.8°C (9°F), just a few degrees above the coldest December 5th on record. Normal for today would be 4.3°C (39.8°F); this godawful cold is 5°C below the normal low for the coldest day of the year, January 24th. Fortunately the forecast this weekend calls for more seasonable...

The Post has woken up to the lack of success Federal incentives have had in promoting Vision Zero, an international strategy "to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all." Despite the success of Vision Zero in Europe (especially in the Netherlands), it isn't doing particularly well over here, which the Post blames on drivers: Vision Zero’s failures in more than two dozen cities fit a predictable pattern, according to the Post...

As forecast, the temperature dropped steadily from 3:30 pm Monday until finally bottoming out at -5.6°C (22°F) just after sunset yesterday. It's crept up slowly since then, up to -2.5°C (27.5°F) a few minutes ago. C'mon, you can do it! Just a little farther to reach freezing! Because the forecast for tomorrow morning (-13°C/9°F) does not look great. At least we'll see the sun for a few hours. You know what else is cold? My feelings toward the OAFPOTUS. I'm not alone: Peter Hamby looks back on the...

As happens every December 1st, winter has begun. It's the first of 63 days with a 7am sunrise or later. And yet that's not as depressing as some of these stories: Jennifer Rubin argues (as do most lawyers with military backgrounds) that any order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to kill survivors of a boat the US Navy attacked would violate US law, international law, the law of war, and the US Law of War Manual, not to mention being morally abhorrent. An appeals court has ruled that Alina Habba's...

Cassie and I hauled out to Far Suburbistan and met friends (one dog, one human) for a 4.7-km walk around the St James Farm Forest Preserve: Because I wanted to get groceries ahead of tomorrow's snowfall, poor Cassie had to suffer in the car for about 3 hours. Don't feel bad: my friend had tons of leftovers from yesterday, so Cassie got enough turkey to last her until dinner next Thursday. She's now plotzed on the couch. She doesn't know it yet, but we're about to go for another walk. My 77-day streak of...

Cassie and I have gotten a couple of decent walks today, with a very long walk planned for tomorrow, because this is on the menu for late tomorrow night: The National Weather Service predicts a 70% chance of us getting 150 mm (6 in) of snow or more. Whee. Cassie will enjoy it, though.

Russia expert (and emigrée) Julia Ioffe picks apart the OAFPOTUS's clownish attempts to end the war in Ukraine one more time: Stop me if you’ve heard this one. President Donald Trump, eager to get another peace deal under his belt, sends everyone in Washington, Kyiv, Moscow, and Brussels scrambling as he announces that an agreement to end the Ukraine war is imminent. The proposal, on even the most cursory examination, is revealed to echo the Russian position, at which point Volodymyr Zelensky and the...

So in case I don't have a chance to read all of these tonight: Did the White House staff put up tacky, gold-colored, signage outside the Oval Office because the OAFPOTUS is a classless tool, or because he's well along the dementia highway? Dan Rather puts the blame for declining educational outcomes in the US squarely on the party who has attacked public education for 40 or 50 years now. DOGE has officially ended, having accomplished absolutely nothing good, and of course it'll be up to my party to...

I'm a bit under the weather but still have to get to rehearsal tonight, so just briefly: Michael Tomasky observes that the general public have developed antibodies to the nonstop lies coming from the OAFPOTUS. Adam Kinzinger takes on the big piggy in the Oval Office as well as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) resignation late last week. Chris Dalla Riva explains how the US copyright system bears some of the responsibility for the enshitiffication of music and movies. Tim Wu thinks the federal judge...

First, just a reminder: anthropogenic climate change (aka global warming) will not wipe out humanity; but it will lead to millions of deaths, plus immense costs and disruptions, which the next few generations will bear. And we could have prevented it. Another reminder: despite what this map shows, as soon as the first real cold of the 2025-26 winter hits after Thanksgiving, lots of people will say "this disproves global warming." No, climate theory predicts weather extremes with the average temperature...

Jeff Maurer warns us not to get our hopes up that the Epstein scandal will be the undoing of the OAFPOTUS, as he has a long record of trying and failing to cover stuff up that wouldn't really matter if he'd just been transparent: It’s not possible for Trump to act more guilty than he’s acting about the Epstein files. His behavior makes the sweating guy from the Key & Peele “browser history” sketch look cool and composed. The logical deduction when someone acts like they have something to hide is that...

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've been heads-down debugging, except for going to the meetings already on my calendar, and just realized I've got to leave for rehearsal soon. I'll have to come back to these fun little nuggets later: What is this bullshit the OAFPOTUS is pushing about "white genocide" in South Africa? After some consideration, James Fallows has come around to believing that the way Senate Democrats ended the government shutdown will actually help us next year. The Chicago City Council finance committee rejected Mayor...

Cassie and I took a stroll through the local park. The maples are holding onto their leaves like winter will never come—though they seem to have given up on the chlorophyll for now: Mid-November light is about the equivalent of the end of January, peaking around 29½° above the southern horizon at noon. That gives us hours of low, warm light on days like today. Also, after walking about 32 km in total yesterday, I had no aching desire to walk at my usual pace, and Cassie didn't either.  

My Brews & Choos buddy and I repeated our walk from 2023 along the North Branch Trail to Barnaby's of Northbook because they have really great pizza. This time we skipped all detours and went straight up from the trail to the restaurant, thereby saving over an hour of walking and, therefore, getting pizza sooner. It helped that Chicago tied the record high temperature yesterday, hitting 21.7°C (71°F) between 2 and 3 pm. We started with cool and gloomy weather that got progressively better throughout the...

As many of the founders feared, the OAFPOTUS's worst offenses against the rule of law have come from his abuse of the pardon power. David French takes us through the history of how it got into our Constitution: As our newsroom reported this week, at least eight people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime. In addition, “Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also...

We get pretty sunsets this time of year:

"Enjoy:" Charles Marohn rips apart the OAFPOTUS's half-baked proposal to allow 50-year mortgages, which would transfer even more rents to bankers than the current housing situation does. In a spectacular own-goal that will, I hope, be rolled back very soon, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has decided the city will no longer buy US treasury bonds, which are still the safest investments in the world and do not "support the regime" as she daftly claims. Jennifer Rubin cheers the millions of...