Last year continued the trend of getting back to normal after 2020, and with one nice exception came a lot closer to long-term bog standard normal than 2022.
- I posted 500 times on The Daily Parker, 13 more than in 2022 and only 6 below the long-term median. January, May, and August had the most posts (45) and February, as usual, the least (37). The mean of 41.67 was actually slightly higher than the long-term mean (41.23), with a standard deviation of 2.54, which may be the lowest (i.e., most consistent posting schedule) since I started the blog in 1998.
- Flights went up slightly, to 12 segments and 20,541 flight miles (up from 10 and 16,138), the most of either since 2018:
- I visited 5 countries (the UK, Czechia, Austria, Slovakia, and Germany) and 5 US states (California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Indiana, and Michigan). Total time traveling: 156 hours (up from 107).
- Cassie had more fun last year than 2022 as my team went from 2 to 3 days in-office (meaning more time at day camp). She got 372 hours of walks (up from 369) and at least that many hours of couch time.
- Total steps for 2023: 4,619,407 steps and 3,948 km (average: 12,655 per day), up from 4.54m steps and 3,693 km in 2022. I hit my step goal 341 times (327 in 2022), which wasn't bad at all. I also did my longest walk ever on September 1st, 44.45 km.
- Driving? I did several trips to Michigan in the summer, but still only drove 5,009 km (down from 5,925) on 87 L of gasoline (down from 144), averaging 1.7 L/100 km (136 MPG). That's the best fuel economy I've ever gotten with any car for a full year. I last filled up July 30th, and could conceivably go through January on what I've got left in the tank, but it's always best to keep your tank full in super-cold weather.
- Total time at work: 1,905 hours at my real job (up from 1,894) and 73 hours on consulting and side projects, including 640 hours in the office (up from 580), but not including the 91 hours I spent commuting (down from 103). How did I add 60 hours in the office while cutting 12 hours off my commute, I hear you ask? Simple: I live closer to the Metra than I used to, and the 6-10 minutes a day adds up.
- The Apollo Chorus consumed 247 hours in 2023, with 166 hours rehearsing and performing (cf. 220 hours just on the music in 2022). We had fewer performances and an easier fall season, which made a huge difference.
- As for media consumption, I'll leave that to its own post tomorrow.
In all, not a bad year. I hope the trends continue for 2024, though I do expect a few more blog posts this autumn...
Welcome to stop #92 on the Brews and Choos project.
Distillery: Take Flight Spirits, 8038 Lincoln Ave., Skokie
Train line: CTA Yellow Line, Oakton-Skokie
Time from Chicago: 46 minutes
Distance from station: 700 m
This charming single-pot distillery in the only charming part of Skokie began distilling in March 2020 and opened its tasting room in the summer of 2022. A couple of friends and I were visiting a mutual friend a few blocks away, so we decided to traipse down the bike path that parallels the Yellow Line and visit Take Flight, passing Sketchbook along the way.
We all liked the vibe, and got to meet the distillers, Carrie and Andrew Cole, who gave us a little context. Most importantly, they don't distill grain-neutral spirits (AKA vodka), preferring to make their gin from their rum instead. They also have a really lovely barrel-aged rum, and they make a malt whiskey and a Bourbon. Right now they also have a gin distilled from a batch of Sketchbook Insufficient Clearance that went wrong. (I tasted that batch. It was horrible. The brewery recalled all of it, including the 4-pack I bought from them, and explained they messed up the hop load.)
I got a flight with their basic gin (hits a bit hard; cardamom, lavender, grapefruit, lots of juniper; the rum base gives it a nice depth), the aged rum (nice balance, not too sweet, long finish), and the bourbon (easy nose, almost a lighter taste than expected, very young, might make an OK old fashioned but IMO not ready yet). My friends let me try the malt whiskey (sweet nose, nice smoke, good finish) and their cocktails. The aged rum made a wonderful old fashioned. At $55 a bottle, though, I'd rather sip it than load it up with bitters and syrup.
I'm looking forward to going back, maybe to one of their evening events. As of this post, the Yellow Line still hasn't resumed service after their accident in November, adding maybe 10 minutes to the already-lengthy 46 minute ride from downtown Chicago. But I foresee a day in the spring where a few of us get together for a cocktail at Take Flight followed by a pint at Sketchbook.
Beer garden? No
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? None
Serves food? Snacks only; "BYOF" (bring your own food) policy
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes
I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today:
- Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign.
- The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ.
- The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023.
- The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will no longer bar marriage licenses for out-of-state same-sex couples whose home jurisdiction prohibits same-sex marriages.
- The CTA plans to build out 10 blocks (2 km) of "community space" under the new Red/Purple Line trestle under construction in Uptown and Edgewater.
Finally, two restaurants in Chicago—well, one restaurant and one infamous hot-dog stand—have joined forces to create the Chicago Croissant, which "features a char-dog rolled into a pastry lined with mustard, relish and onions. Definitely no ketchup. It’s topped with poppy seeds and celery salt and garnished with a tomato, pepper and pickle." This, they claim, is a breakfast food.
One of my friends got this little clock for me:
It's an Author Clock. Instead of just the time, it shows a literary quote containing the time. They have well over 1,440 quotes in there (they claim 13,000), and they update frequently, so you may never see the same quote twice.
I had it in my home office for about an hour and got no work done. Because it's that cool.
I'm just monkeying with code today, not waiting six years for the perfect alignment on a clear evening to take one photo. Seriously, Monday's NASA Astronomy Photo of the Day blew my mind.
As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning:
Finally, the CBC has an extended 3-episode miniseries version of the movie BlackBerry available online. I may have to watch that this week.
May your solstice be more luminous than these stories would have it:
- Chicago politician Ed Burke, who ruled the city's Finance Committee from his 14th-Ward office for 50 years, got convicted of bribery and corruption this afternoon. This has to do with all the bribes he accepted and the corruption he embodied from 1969 through May of this year.
- New Republic's Tori Otten agrees with me that US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is the dumbest schmuck in the Senate. (She didn't use the word "schmuck," but it fits.)
- Texas has started flying migrants to Chicago, illegally, in an ongoing effort to troll Democratic jurisdictions over immigration. This came shortly after they passed a manifestly unconstitutional immigration law of their own.
- Millennial journalist Max Read, a kid who took over the Internet that my generation (X) built from the ground up, whinges about "the kids today" who have taken it over from his generation. (He thinks a gopher is just a rodent, I'd bet.)
- Hard to believe, speaking of millennials, that today is the 35th anniversary of Libya blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Finally, a court in California has ordered one "Demeterious Polychron" to destroy all extant copies of what I can imagine to be a horrific example of JRR Tolkien fanfic that the court found infringes on the Tolkien estate's copyrights. Note that Polychron (a) put his self-published fanfic for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, (b) after sending it to them with a letter call it "the obvious pitch-perfect sequel" to The Lord of the Rings, and then (c) suing them when they allowed Amazon to produce its own prequel, Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. Note to budding novelists: if you're writing fanfic, don't sue the underlying material's copyright owner for infringement.
Frustrated with point-of-sale systems suggesting you tip the self-checkout machine 25%? You're not alone:
[T]raditional tipping patterns are being disrupted in unpredictable ways, raising workers’ expectations and making consumers grumpy. The feeling even has a name: “tipping fatigue.” A June survey by the financial services company Bankrate found that 66 percent of adults held a negative view of tipping. Forty-one percent said businesses should just pay workers better, and 32 percent said they don’t like being presented with those Goldilocks-like tablet screens suggesting three possible tips. Thirty percent said tipping culture was out of control, but only half as many (16 percent) said they’d be willing to pay higher prices to make tipping go away.
[N]either Amy Vanderbilt (1908–1974) nor Letitia Baldridge (1926–2012) ever knew today’s world, where you’re invited to tip at a retail checkout counter where the only service is to ring up a charge and perhaps bag a few items, or at a self-checkout machine where no service is provided at all. Tipping is in effect a new form of “junk fee,” with the only difference that paying or not paying is left to the customer’s tortured conscience. Even when you’re promised the proceeds will go to employees, the boss is clearly shifting some labor costs onto the customer, which is infuriating.
In D.C., many restaurants are introducing a 20 percent service charge, the equivalent of the French “servis compris”; European restaurateurs figured out long before their American counterparts that tipping culture is retrograde. But it’s still advisable to check with your waiter to make sure the money goes to staff and isn’t offsetting previous wages or benefits; D.C. law requires that restaurants disclose how such fees are spent, but there have been abuses.If the financial arrangement isn’t clear, then my own etiquette guide says you’re still stuck paying a 20 percent tip.
You still don't have to tip the self-checkout machine, though. It gets paid enough.
Scott Simon explains Malört, which you have to try to understand Chicago:
Malört is a digestif distilled from the wormwood plant that tastes of pencil shavings, old battery rust, citrus zest, and ear wax.
It's a version of Swedish bitters introduced to Chicagoans in the 1920s by Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant. He convinced officials of the Prohibition era that his 70-proof liquor tasted so odiously medicinal, it was obviously a treatment for stomach worms, and not an alcoholic drink anyone would quaff for sinful purposes.
You may wonder: why is a spirit that tastes like cigar ash, singed eyebrows, and Liquid Plumr still brewed? It's a tradition, darn it, so Chicagoans can tell visiting New Yorkers, "You think you're tough? Take a swig of this, Gothamite!"
This year, the CH Distillery, which now brews Malört, produced a candy cane infused version — as festive as a mouthful of Christmas lighter fluid!
But the people who run the Nisei Lounge, a sticky-floored bar which has sat just south of Wrigley Field for 67 years, felt the distillery's Candy Cane Malört amounts to rotgut plagiarism.
Nisei Lounge is its own kind of Chicago tradition, too. Like your obligatory shot of Malört, once you've had Nisei Lounge, you don't have to have it again. This controversy could only happen in this city.
Welcome to stop #91 on the Brews and Choos project.
Brewery: Howard Street Brewing Co., 1617 W. Howard St., Chicago
Train line: CTA Red and Purple Lines, Howard
Time from Chicago: 25 minutes (Purple Line)/45 minutes (Red Line)
Distance from station: 100 m
Sadly, the brewery will close on Sunday. But I had the opportunity to visit last night, so the Daily Parker can preserve its memory.
I'm sorry I didn't go before. It's a cute place, and the beers I tried were quite good. I had a pint of the Better Late than Never Pilsner (5.4%), and tastes of the Dark Link Stout (6.5%) and the Sex Panther Kolsch (5.5%). All were quite serviceable and I would have them again.
So what happened? According to Block Club Chicago:
The tight space and business regulations made it hard for Howard Street Brewing to meet consumer demand while adapting to shifts in the craft beer industry, [Owner Chuck] Patella said.
Howard Street Brewing didn’t have space to produce nitro beers or hard seltzers, two popular products. There also wasn’t space for a kitchen, and its license prevents it from offering cocktails or wine, Patella said.
The closure is another loss for Howard Street, which has struggled to retain businesses and has seen violence in recent years.
Sol Cafe, which briefly expanded its hours to offer food service for the neighboring Howard Street Brewing, closed in July after 10 years. Its owner cited floods in the building and nearby shootings as reasons for the closure.
Howard Street Brewing is at least the fourth craft brewer to close in Chicago recently.
Metropolitan Brewery in Avondale will close Sunday after 15 years in business. Lo Rez Brewing closed in Pilsen this summer after seven years, and Rock Bottom Brewery left River North in January after more than 20 years in business. Empirical Brewery closed its Ravenswood facility late last year after being evicted over unpaid rent.
Yes, Howard east of the El has struggled with violence and poverty for, oh, 60 years or so. I admire Patella for trying to change that, but even I didn't visit for almost its entire 18-month run. The area around the Howard Street El just isn't great.
I'm still going to give it a "would go back" rating, but on the map it'll show as "closed." Patella said he's going to try opening in a different spot later on. I hope he does.
Beer garden? No
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? None
Serves food? No, BYOF
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes