The Daily Parker

Saw this about two hours ago in my neighborhood. Can anyone identify the species?

She was about 70 mm across, with a 25 mm body. Not something I'd want to discover in my kitchen.

I meant to post this a couple of days ago, but time got away from me:

Long flights give me a chance to catch up on reading. In between disposing of all the back issues of whatever magazines I haven't opened in weeks, and Kindling the novels I've had queued up for months, I also get to read through the emails I've cached for days in anticipation of the downtime.

This morning's cache included the daily Crain's Chicago Business update, whose first article is about how my cost of living is going up. It turns out, the city owes retired municipal employees so much money that the mayor has proposed raising property taxes by $500 million next year. Without getting into too much detail, let me say only that this will cost me about $1,000 if it goes through.

Long-time readers of this blog know I'm not exactly an Ayn-Rand-quoting, anti-tax spewing, adolescent-thinking nut-job. I like democracy and all that. So while I'm not happy about the additional taxes, I accept them, even though I recognize the uncomfortable levels of corruption in the Greatest City in North America. Here's why.

Successive city governments for the last 20 or 30 years made promises to municipal employees that we, as a city, would pay handsome retirement benefits if they would agree to put out fires and arrest criminals. We (through our sort-of-elected representatives) made these promises when no one really wanted to fight crime or fires in Chicago. But the pension guarantees helped make being a city employee in the 1980s and 1990s one of the best gigs around.

In exchange, we got a great fire department, decent policing (despite unrepentant sociopaths like Jon Burge), and overall a much cleaner, hipper city than anyone living here in 1975 could ever have hoped. And we kept taxes low, so that people would move back to the city from their white-flight suburbs, spend money, and demand clean, safe, not-on-fire streets.

Well, now we have to pay up on those promises. And that's OK. (I'm not naive, though. I really want another Shakman suit to claw back all the corruption, but that's a different blog post.)

All these increased property taxes are, essentially, a loan coming due. Chicago in 1985 borrowed money from Chicago in 2015, in order that Chicago in 2015 would be an enviable place to live. Whatever I think of Mayors Daley fils or Emanuel, I believe both have the city's best interests in mind right after their own. (In Chicago, this is considered a noble philosophy.) And while I resent Daley's transparent zipper-lowering on parking meters and a couple of other privatization deals, I believe he really wanted to make the city a better place to live.

That's not how most people see it, I grant. Most people care only about how much they have to pay right now. Thus has it been throughout history, which explains every right-wing government ever*.

It's hard for people to see how everyone really is "in this together." The ideal—I admit, almost never seen in nature—is that a city comprises a group of people who agree to share some responsibilities (police, fire, roads) in exchange for some pro rata contribution. It's not communism; it's civics. I don't want to spend my time building a road to get to the market and neither do you. So let's band together, pool our resources, set up rules to limit cheating as much as we can (without denying the humanity of people who really can't contribute directly), and muddle through.

And if the most effective way to do that is to promise extravagant retirement packages to the people who kept the city clean and safe during one of its worst eras, well, that's OK.

* The basic electoral argument of the political right is simple: taxes take your money and give it to them. It's no coincidence that the right also want to stop you from getting a liberal education, because then you'd learn that (a) them means you to the people selling this line, and (b) no matter how much better your life is under a right-leaning government, it's a hundred times better for right-leaning politicians and their friends. We're all in this together; let's act like it.

Today is the Summer Bank Holiday in the UK, which has the same cultural resonance to the British that Labor Day has to us. It marks the psychological end of summer over. August 31st also marks the end of meteorological summer in the northern hemisphere. Over the next month in Chicago we'll see days shrink by almost two hours and temperatures fall by almost 6°C.

I hope, also, that by the beginning of winter, The Daily Parker will have a new home and infrastructure, and the ENSO will have pushed the storm track north of us to ensure a warmer-than-average winter.

Chicago has five of the 20 most-congested roads in the U.S.:

Drivers in the northeastern Illinois-northwest Indiana region suffered the misery of 61 extra hours behind the wheel on average in 2014 — equivalent to a week and a half of work — because of delays caused by gridlock, construction zones and collisions that tied up traffic, according to the Urban Mobility Scorecard released late Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

The Los Angeles area took the top three spots on the congestion scorecard last year. Locally, different stretches of the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways (Interstate 90/94) gave motorists the biggest headaches, accounting for three spots in the top 20. Two areas on the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) also were among the 20 most congested.

Coming in at No. 4 nationally was I-90/94 westbound from 35th Street to the Edens junction. The report noted that 4 p.m. on Fridays tended to be the worst time to be driving on the 13-mile section of road where average speeds were as slow as 16 mph. The eastbound stretch from Montrose Avenue to Ruble Street, just south of Roosevelt Road, ranked seventh nationally.

Chicago also ranks #3 in total travel delay (302.6 million hours) and cost of truck congestion ($1.5 bn). But the 1.6 million CTA rides and 300,000 Metra (heavy rail) rides every weekday probably prevent Chicago from becoming a true dystopia, like Dallas.

I am not a food writer, so I don't have the vocabulary to describe dinner the other night at 42 Grams. Let me just reproduce a few items from our meticulously-presented, precisely-timed courses:

• Carabinero: finger lime, phytoplankton, kelp, and lacto-fermented vegetables
• Sweet pea custard: bacon, whey, brown butter, herbs & lettuce
• Summer corn: corn silk, roasted corn broth, polenta
• Organic Irish salmon: tea smoked with fallen pine, muhroom dashi, spent grain toast, nastrurtium
• Lamb neck: smoked yogurt, tamarind, fennel
• Veal sweetbread: foie gras, ash-baked eggplant, golden berry

Plus five more courses. And we brought wine that we'd obtained in Como.

I said, "Even if I could afford it, I couldn't eat like this every day."

My dinner companion said, "Why not?"

She has a point.

Oh, look: they have a last-minute reservation available for 6pm tonight...

Via DNAInfo, this is awesome:

Another consequence to a four-hour drive and lots of household chores yesterday was my first Fitbit goal miss since June 6th. I only got 8,000 steps yesterday, after exceeding 10,000 steps for the last 71 days straight. It was also the fewest steps I've gotten since May 29th. I traveled on all three days, which explains the correlation: lots of sitting in vehicles and not a lot of opportunity to move.

It didn't help that the temperature has hovered around 32°C for the past few days, forecast to cool off tomorrow or Wednesday.

Still, I hate missing goals, even arbitrary ones like this. Fortunately, since June 6th, I've averaged around 14,000 steps per day, so one day under 10,000 won't defeat my fitness plan.

It's so depressing sometimes, living in the Greatest City in North America and realizing that we have the worst pension system in the country:

The city of Chicago is the local government most burdened by unfunded retirement plans in the nation, with a pension debt that's more than eight times annual revenues, according to a new study by Moody's Investors Service.

The city's unfunded pension obligations total $29.80 billion, based on a three-year average calculated by Moody's. That is 15.9 percent of its property tax base, making it the highest in the nation by that measure as well, according to the report, which tracks the 50 largest local governments based on outstanding debt.

On the other hand, climate change is making Chicago a little more pleasant, even without the record El Niño forming in the Pacific right now. Crime is down, green space is up, and the lake is clean. It's really a great time to live here.

We are going to have to pay those pensions, though.

No matter what it's called, or how it's ranked, it's still the tallest building around: